Eat: When a Meatloaf Is a Work of Art

I ate many great dishes when I was restaurant critic for The New York Times, and many awful ones too. The plates of the dreadful — dumplings that tasted of soap, stuffed squid the texture of rubber, rancid chicken, frozen tomatoes — I can hardly differentiate in my mind. They left me dismayed in the moment, occasionally angry, sometimes laughing right there at the table as I called for a check. (Sometimes I can laugh even still: That really was a cigarette butt in the salad!)

The great ones, though, could sear themselves into my memory, become lodestars of delight. I can call up some of their scents, their flavors and beauty and revisit my astonishment at their perfection even now, years after I stopped eating out six nights a week for money and started to cook instead.

A few of those dishes I made for myself at home, cooking not from a recipe so much as from my recollection of the night itself, of what the dish tasted like and how it made me feel. I have a particular, joyful memory of a pressed duck I ate at Daniel in Manhattan once, of the perfect mineral taste of the blood-enriched sauce that cloaked the bird’s flesh, so red above the starched white tablecloth. My attempts to cook it, though, even with fine Madeira and Cognac to amplify the butter, even with a nicely set table and candles winking, were failures every time. The duck was never better than pretty good. The kitchen looked like the set of a horror film. Alchemy’s a myth. (Also, I don’t have a duck press.)

Sometimes, though, my lead can turn gold. Such was the case with the meatloaf I devoured in the dining room of M. Wells in Queens, a stainless-steel diner in Long Island City that was then occupied by the chef Hugue Dufour and his wife, Sarah Obraitis. Today Dufour and Obraitis run a successful steakhouse in a renovated auto-body shop in the same neighborhood, and a cafe in nearby MoMA PS1 as well. Then they were just starting out, and M. Wells had the antic, adrenalized feel of punk rock or experimental theater. The food nodded at France and Canada and, yes, American diners, also at excess and excess squared. There was a lot of foie gras.

We’d had some already that night, as well as a platter of snails served in the trenches of beef bones sawed in two, beneath pats of marrow. We’d had another of oysters with coffee sabayon and a third of Caesar salad made with smoked herring, beneath a snowdrift of grated Parmesan. It was already an astonishing meal.

But then there was this meatloaf. It was made, the waiter said, of aged ground beef baked in a cake mold, with Stroganoff sauce and foie gras. It took a while for us to get it because there was a fire that night in a ceiling vent, and we had to spend part of the meal standing on a rainy sidewalk across the street from the diner watching Dufour scramble around on the roof putting it out, but it seemed in the end to be a perfectly acceptable delay. The beef was soft with crisp edges, with a funkiness to it that matched the sweet, unctuous quality of the sauce. We marveled at it the way people marvel at the ballet, at paintings that haunt.

I dreamed of that meatloaf, dream of it still, and I’ve made versions of it with beef and lamb and pork, cooked stovetop Stroganoffs made with mushrooms both wild and supermarket-bland. I’ve spooned canned foie gras into my meatloaf mixture to mimic the original, and I’ve dotted it into the finished sauce as well. That last maneuver was in truth more successful, providing pops of richness against the silkiness of the cream, but I’ve also omitted the foie entirely and no one has been the poorer. You can make like Dufour and deglaze your mushrooms with strong tea — a Canadian technique that underscores Quebec’s independence from French wine — but I prefer using plain stock, as I do the use of finely chopped parsley on the finished dish. Dufour opts for dill, rarely used on meats.

The adaptations hardly matter, really. Make a good and juicy meatloaf with the best meat you can find, and cover it with mushrooms and cream. You’ve got a meal to suggest magic, particularly this time of year.

“I don’t know where it came from,” Dufour said when I called him to talk about the dish. “I mean, I like Stroganoff. And I had all these aged meat scraps I bought from Pat LaFrieda,” the well-known restaurant-industry butcher. He put the two together, a rich meatloaf and then a richer sauce atop it. He thought it was an example of the generosity of spirit he learned as a young chef in Montreal, working at Au Pied de Cochon, a restaurant of pigs’ heads and the fattened livers of birds, blood sausages and maple syrup. “It’s about giving more than expected,” Dufour said. “Not just a meatloaf but a meatloaf with more.”