Fat Guy

Okay so on the one hand we have Alice Waters quoted saying she's not a chef, and on the other hand we have the author referring to her as a chef. I think it's pretty easy to decide which to believe. But the next person to see Alice Waters, just ask her: are you a chef, or a restaurateur who oversees chefs? She'll say she's not a chef, because she isn't, knows she isn't and says she isn't, and then we can declare an end to this tangent.

The best kind.

I just looked in a few places and got numbers like 200 grams chocolate to 60 ml corn syrup. Of course that doesn't tell the whole story because the chocolate includes sugar as an ingredient. Still, it's probably quite different from the Tootsie Roll ratio.

Tootsie Rolls do have the texture of modeling chocolate, and there's some ingredients overlap (chocolate and corn syrup), but I wouldn't call them synonymous. One thing I noticed looking at the Tootsie Roll ingredients is orange extract. I have to eat one again to see if it tastes orangey to me.

I don't know. Caramel is a pretty specific thing.

Could it be that this quote is taken out of context? ← It couldn't be. She's not a chef. She doesn't consider herself a chef. She's a restaurateur. She knows it and has no hesitation saying it. She's commonly referred to as a chef, but that's not accurate. This review of Waters's biography does a good job with the chef language:

I agree it's closer to taffy than fudge, but I still don't know what it is. The official "chewy, chocolate candy" seems accurate but not particularly catchy.

As far as I know she has never run the kitchen at Chez Panisse. I believe the opening chef was Paul Aratow, followed by Jeremiah Tower. I'm sure some clever Googler could find a timeline of all the chefs. The analogy to Danny Meyer is apt. She's no more a chef than he is. That doesn't take anything away from either of them. They're just not chefs. It's a fact, not a judgment.

There has been a lot of activity today in my Facebook universe. Today I speculated on Twitter (and Facebook): "wondering: is a Tootsie Roll fudge? Taffy? What?" There were quite a few comments: "You are full of contemplation. I'll stay tuned for the verdicts." "It's brown plastic." "As someone who used to visit Atlantic City in her youth and look forward to the salt water taffy, I can say that Tootsie Rolls always reminded me of the taffy, but lacked the smooth, tooth destructive stickiness of taffy. Now fudge is a whole other animal, with its super dense and sugary chocolateness. And as we know, Tootsie Rolls have a much stronger sugar taste than chocolate. Perhaps they are a hybrid, a taffy fudge, or taffudge." "It's like chewing wax." "it's a secret, and you're not supposed to ask." "its a chewy thing! with hints of chocolate and the colour, too..." "It is sui generis. As a lawyer you are supposed to know those things." "also it's a deus ex machina, like Rowan Atkinson in Love Actually." "I recall the plastic lips and tiny bottles infused with syrup that one could purchase at the candy store of yesteryear. And that was like chewing wax. Well, actually it was chewing wax. But Tootsie Rolls have a sugary granularity all their own - with a hint of chocolate. Does anyone recall the product expansion into fruit flavors? Do they still make the fruity Toosie Rolls?" "i LOVED those bottles and those lips....still remember the unique taste and viscosity, density, of the liquid filling. loved the way you could chew and then spit the wax...." "fruity tootsie rolls sound very alluring. were they pastel or bright colours too?" "As I recall, the fruity Tootsie Rolls were brightly colored. They were tasty, like a Starburst, but had that Tootsie Roll consistancy. I liked them." "I remember the fruity tootsie rolls - kind of pastel colors -" "D'oh. That's the problem with first person accounts. Pastel or bright, Mr. Owl? The world may never know," "I believe it is frequently described as a chocolate caramel treat." I checked that last one and found the official Tootsie website, which uses the language "an oblong piece of chewy, chocolate candy" http://www.tootsie.com/ So what do we think?

"I'm not a chef." - Alice Waters & Chez Panisse, authorized biography, page 320

But then you have to ask about the logical implications of that claim. Alan Richman traveled 20,000 miles over a period of 4 months while researching this article, during which time he sampled 386 pizzas at 109 different restaurants. It must have cost GQ tens of thousands of dollars. I hope we can stipulate that this represents the extreme upper limit of what we could ever expect from an individual journalist, asymptotically speaking. So, if that's not enough, what we're saying is that it's not possible for any individual journalist to compile a national best-of list of pizzas, burgers, etc. Individual journalists are barred from that game. The only permissible sources for best-of lists are committee processes (Michelin, etc.) or popularity contests (e.g., Zagat), which have larger sample sizes. That argument will sort of make sense just as soon as one of those sources comes up with a list of pizzerias that isn't a total joke. (Remember 10 years ago when Zagat tried this sort of thing in "Zagats' America's Best Meal Deals"? On its nationwide list of "Top Delis," there was not a single New York deli. They went with d'Bronx Deli in Kansas City, which happens to serve pizza too.)

I'd say she's neither. She's a restaurateur, activist, philanthropist, etc., but not really a chef. By the way, this link to Grub Street leads to some video of the Bourdain-Waters panel discussion.

That's a very thin reed. First of all, it should be pretty obvious that when an article has a byline the opinions expressed therein are the author's. Is anybody under the impression that this is anything other than "Alan Richman's opinion about the best pizzas, based on what he tried and not based on what he didn't try"? Second, when you say "He didn't," you imply that he writes the titles, does the marketing, etc. That's true for a solo blogger, but not for someone writing for a magazine. Titles and the like are the magazine's decision. And yes, they're trying to sell magazines. It's perfectly legitimate to make strong claims for the purpose of making the article more memorable, promotable, etc. Finally, 100% of "best of" rankings like this are going to be based on limited data. Even if you visit every pizzeria 100 times someone can argue that if you didn't go 101 times it's not truly a "best of" list.

Found a much more detailed account on Eat Me Daily.

Adam Kuban of SliceNY seems mostly positive: "It's a refreshing list. I'm a guy who reads far too much about pizza (is that even possible?), and as such, I'm tired of seeing the same old boring Top X-many lists held down by the same old stalwarts in NYC, New Haven, and Chicago. Richman's list has just enough old-school places on it to lend it credibility and ward off any accusations of blatant pot-stirring." http://slice.seriouseats.com/archives/2009...us-america.html

For New York Times-style restaurant reviews, where once a week a single establishment receives a 1200-word review, it makes sense to visit a restaurant a few times. For a pizza roundup involving hundreds of pizzas, it's simply not possible. Were it the case that most top-25 pizza stories in national magazines involve multiple visits, whereas the Richman story is comparatively thin on research, there might me something to the argument that he should have made more visits. But as far as I can tell it's the most thoroughly researched piece of its kind ever. So it's kind of funny that anybody would say he should have done more. (Is anybody actually saying that?) When writing a story like this it's totally reasonable to give each establishment one chance. The burden isn't on the journalist to visit again and again just in case the pizzeria had an off night. It's true, any restaurant can have a bad night, even one with three Michelin stars. That's life. It's also true that every plate of food a restaurant puts out could be the one that gets evaluated in a major publication. That's life too.

I'm pretty sure the answer, in most cases, is once. And I'm not sure what's wrong with that.

Don't try this at home! I need to learn more about the process, but at the FCI I think they use liquid nitrogen, an antigriddle and their own infusing process to create the aquavit and serve it super cold.

When he did the 20 burgers story he bemoaned the fact that he couldn't do a 21, 22, etc. For the pizza story, though, he said that the gap between 25 and 26 was so large that 25 turned out to be the exact right number.

I confess when I first learned of the skoal project I thought it was a waste of time. "Skoal!" is a Swedish toast, their equivalent of "cheers!" or "salut!" I guess. Two of the chefs at the French Culinary Institute in New York City, Nils Noren and Dave Arnold, are utterly obsessed with a series of three photographs that appeared in one of the Time Life "Foods of the World" books from 1968 (The Cooking of Scandinavia, pages 130-131). This photo series depicts Swedish actor Max von Sydow, then a dashing and dapper young blond gentleman, drinking a cordial glass full of aquavit. In the first photo, he holds the glass chest high and stares at the camera. In the second photo, he tips his head way back and drinks. In the third photo, he brings the empty glass back to chest height and stares back at the camera. This ritual is known as skoaling. Nils and Dave are not only obsessed with this photo series, but also have made it their collective mission in life to photograph every A-, B-, C- and D-list culinary personality in the world skoaling. In Dave's office at the French Culinary Institute, aka "Dave's Hole," they have set up elaborate lighting equipment and a backdrop. Day and night, they bring people through and photograph them skoaling. The walls of the office are covered with these photos, such that when you enter Dave's Hole you feel like homicide detectives who've just stumbled upon the lair of a serial killer. They also, as most serial killers have done since about 2005, post the photos on their blog. Worse, Nils and Dave recently escalated the skoal project to the level of an event. This past Sunday night, scores of chefs and friends of the French Culinary Institute (which is one of the entities that, along with the Italian Culinary Academy, comprise the International Culinary Center, where I teach a class) filled the fourth-floor dining room adjacent to the nicest of the school's kitchens ("the Italian Kitchen"). A professional photographer was on call to photograph each attendee skoaling. Swedish food was served. But let me go back a bit. I imagine many of you are thinking, as I was for a long time, "This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. They're photographing people taking shots of aquavit? Not particularly funny, and certainly not funny enough to support this level of sustained effort." But then you start peeling back the layers, and it gets more interesting. Like an inside joke that, when you first hear it, is cringe-inducing but, upon repetition, becomes funnier and funnier until it has the power to make you laugh even on your deathbed. It starts by reading the actual text of the Time Life book from 1968. When the photo series is illuminated in this way, it becomes an impossibly fine example of late 1960s kitsch. "Learning to skoal is easy, and it is well worth learning," begins narrator Dale Brown. He continues, "it adds considerable charm to dining in the Scandinavian manner and assures that an evening will be a success by bringing the guests into visual and verbal contact with each other right off." This is written with the same tone of utmost seriousness that pervades the series. "The ritual varies somewhat in the different parts of Scandinavia." Interesting. "In Sweden, for example, it is a bit more formal, because Swedes follow the custom established by military officers who began the toast by holding their glasses at precisely the level of the third uniform button," which is about heart high, I have learned. And, "basically it proceeds along simple lines. All that is required is a drink in the hand and a cooperative partner." To elaborate, "The proposer of the toast engages the eye of the person being toasted, and 'skoal' is said. A slight bow of the head, and a twinkle of the eye—and the aquavit is drained in one gulp (if the drink is wine, a sip is taken). Just before the glass is put back on the table, the eyes meet again and there is another friendly nod." The photo captions are even better. Photo 1 in the series "HOW TO SKOAL WITH STYLE": "Swedish film star Max von Sydow engages his drinking partner's gaze." Photo 2: "Tipping his glass backward, von Sydow drains the chilled aquavit in one deceptively cool gulp." And Photo 3: "Lowering the glass to the level from which he raised it, von Sydow again meets his companion's eyes." The kitsch factor is greatly enhanced if you look at the actual photos, which can be found on the skoal page of Nils and Dave's Cooking Issues blog. There you will also find photos of such luminaries as Jeffrey Steingarten, Wylie Dufresne and Harold McGee. As well, you'll find photos of me. The pivotal moment in my appreciation of the skoal project was when I witnessed Alan Richman's photo shoot. Here's a typical hallway conversation between Dave and me: "Steven! Check this out! We just figured out how to make oysters taste like carrot juice by feeding them carrot juice while they're still alive!" (Dave Arnold is the FCI's resident food-and-technology genius, affectionately named The Food Avant-Garde's Enabler by Pete Wells in Food & Wine magazine.) (Tastes.) "Yes, they taste like carrot juice." "Are you teaching tonight? What's happening in class?" "Alan Richman is coming as a guest speaker." "Alan Richman! He hasn't skoaled yet!" And so it goes. An accurate account of the Alan Richman photo shoot can be found on one of my student's blogs. Mindy Nguyen, whose role in the FCI is unclear to me, took the photo and had this to say about photo number 3: "He came down fast, snapping his head down like an axe, and leaning forward slightly to better reach out and kill the camera with the intensity of his glare. Literally, the power of that 3rd stare was like setting off a hydrogen bomb in that little lab. I’m lucky I managed to press the button on the camera before everyone standing in that doorway, myself included, literally arched backwards and flew backward out of the room. ”Oh my God!” someone yelled. People were bent over, gasping for air. I ran back to the camera, making sure that it hadn’t been my imagination, that I actually got the picture. And there it was…" The full account is here. It's all true. (And yes we are working with Mindy on her adverb problem.) As for the party, it was great fun. Nils's team cooked Swedish food (Nils was for a decade the chef responsible for the day-to-day operations of the kitchen at Aquavit) and he was only mildly annoying in his incessant advocacy for Swedish cuisine. (This is an issue with every Swede in the culinary profession I meet: as soon as you let it happen, he or she goes on and on about how superior and misunderstood Swedish cuisine is, how it's so much better than French, in fact the Swedes taught the French how to cook, invented pizza and pasta, the world's best Chinese food is in Stockholm, etc.) Dave's team demonstrated several techniques of molecular mixology, including martini-infused cucumbers made in the Cryovac machine. So you eat the cucumber wedge but it's like drinking a martini. There were also some high-tech components to the food, such as vinegar-infused french fries and those carrot-juice-gorged oysters. The best thing on the buffet was the trough of low-temperature-cooked Swedish meatballs, though. Take that, Ikea. There were also a lot of pretty girls at the party, but I didn't know who they were and none of them spoke to me. I don't know when the photos from the party will be online. While we're waiting, though, here are my three cell-phone photos of David Chang being photographed for his skoal series:

I think the claim of "lofty goals" has to be tested against the logic of widespread implementation of said lofty goals. If widespread implementation of those goals would actually make the world a much worse place, they are hardly lofty.

Yes this is most likely Burt's Place: "At a pizzeria (I do not recommend) in Chicago, I was informed when I called that I had to order ahead of time, although there is no menu on the restaurant Web site and the lady on the telephone refused to tell me what pies were available." And this certainly could be Franny's: "Pizzerias now inhabit a space once occupied by snooty French restaurants, and they are smug, too. One pizzeria in Brooklyn (I do not recommend) lets you know that its pork is sustainable, its beef grass-fed, its eggs organic, and its grease converted into biofuel. (If only as much attention had been given to crusts.)" However, one thing to note about Richman is that he doesn't hold the service and approach issues against places. If he loves the pizza he'll put it in his top 25 no matter how much he hates everything else about the place. For example, he ranks Sally's Apizza in New Haven in 6th place, even though he can't stand the place and his writeup is just brutal ("Sally’s should be renamed Sartre’s Apizza, home of absurdity and despair") on every point other than the pizza itself ("Out of this agonizing ambience appeared a pie of incredible finesse, a tour de force...").

He was committed to not saying anything overtly bad on the record about any of the places he didn't include. But it sounded like he visited Mozza on what he described as "not their best day," and Di Fara he didn't seem to think was anywhere near in the running. The article, which I've finally had the opportunity to read carefully, is divided into two parts: a main narrative full of general observations about pizza, and 25 capsule reviews of his top 25 picks. The main narrative is great stuff, vintage Richman, funny, smart and I agree with pretty much all of it. It stands alone as an excellent treatise. The capsule reviews are interesting but a little random. I mean, yes, he traveled a villion miles and tried half a villion pizzas, but it's still too big a subject to cover effectively this way. Ultimately what he's really ranking are the 25 best pies he had on his recent four-month-long (though not uninterrupted) pizza journey. An eclectic series of snapshots. Lucali, for example, was excellent -- especially the pie with artichoke and garlic -- but I'm not sure I can see calling it the best pizzeria in New York. I personally like Patsy's East Harlem better, but it's a different style, so when you get into different styles you get apples-and-oranges comparisons. Lucali probably competes more directly with the new-school places like Co. But I'm so far out of the pizza loop I haven't been to the half dozen relatively new places that are doing pizza in sort of this style.

Main feature: http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_9178

Top 10 pizza cities (extra content from the GQ blog): http://men.style.com/gq/blogs/alanrichman