Fat Guy

At least one blog has reported that Esnault is no longer with Martha Stewart: http://www.the-feedbag.com/mr-snitch/forme...itten-by-martha

No photos from last night, which was the last night, because we went to Connecticut without the camera. We brought dinner with us: Arthur Avenue ravioli, tomato sauce, cream of doorstop tomato soup (I have some left and will photograph it when I can) and a cake that we needed to cheat on with borrowed eggs -- I have photos of that, which I'll post soon. Anyway, now that our month is over, we're doing some pantry cleaning. We threw out a bunch of spices and condiments from 2002 when we took a cross-continent road trip and acquired a bunch of stuff we never used. And we discovered a huge inventory of honey. Any ideas on what to cook with, like, six pounds of honey?

I am really enjoying Roadfoodie's Pork Tour, now in its 4th entry. Brigit Binns is a cookbook author I know through my wife, Ellen, who has worked with her on a book project. The pork tour goes from Marfa to Upstate New York and, for those who love the other white meat, is an inspiring journey to say the least . . .

I was thinking along similar lines this evening when I took a casual month-end inventory of my refrigerator, freezer and pantry. I think I keep far too many packages of pasta, beans, split peas, lentils and tomato products around. My thinking is that if I have so much that in a month without shopping I still have tons of this stuff then I'm keeping too much around. It's great to have a box of pasta in the cabinet. It's great to have three, five or more, especially so you can have different types available. It's probably not necessary to have 20. Stockpiling products that are on sale turns out, in retrospect, to be a money-losing proposition if you don't use the products. I've always thought, hey, big sale on kidney beans, I'll buy six pounds, surely I'll use them. Well, probably. But if you're not going to use them within, say, a year then two issues arise. First, even these super-long-shelf-life items like dried beans eventually deteriorate. They aren't ruined, but they're better when you buy them than they are a year later. Second, at some point the time value of money kicks in. If you're carrying $500 worth of unused product inventory in your cabinets for a year, you could instead be investing that $500 in bank stocks. Okay, not a great example but you get the idea. At the same time there are products that I actually should be buying more of. For example I think I need to start purchasing flour in larger bags. The standard five-pound bag of flour is a massive ripoff when compared to the bulk sacks, and that's a product we use so much of that I'd have no doubts about being able to go through 25 pounds in six months. Storage is of course an issue, but when I stop buying all the other stuff I don't need so much of it will at least in theory fill up space for the stuff I do need. I've also learned that I just don't need many of the "just-in-case" foods I've bought over the years. I buy things like mac-and-cheese in a box "just in case" I don't feel like cooking anything more elaborate. But here I am at the end of my month and I didn't open a single damn box of the stuff. It's still sitting there on the shelf, mocking me. And really, is preparing mac-and-cheese from a box any less labor-intensive than cooking pasta and tossing it with a couple of things like olive oil, peas, parmesan, whatever? I think that's actually easier than mixing the stupid envelope of powder with milk and all that.

Here in Manhattan, most folks don't have washers and dryers in their apartments. They have laundry rooms in their buildings. Our laundry room is in the basement. For the past couple of years I have been walking past this but not noticing it: That's the door at the bottom of the stairs to the basement laundry room, propped open with a #10 can of tomatoes. This tomato-can doorstop encapsulates, for me, everything I've come to realize in the past month about the way I've been buying, eating and thinking about food my entire adult life. That every resident of my building has been ignoring this can for years indicates, to me, that something has gone terribly wrong. The can is now safely in my apartment, having been replaced by a brick. As my last act of my month without shopping, on Saturday night I'm going to cook something with it.

I got an email from Tabla's PR people on Monday night about a new special Tabla is offering upstairs on Wednesday nights in celebration of Tabla’s 10th anniversary. It's a new menu called "Tabla’s 10." Every dish is under $10, some as low as $4. I chatted with Floyd about it and he thought a person could eat very well indeed on three or four of the small plates. You have to make a reservation. This is in the upstairs room, not down at Bread Bar. Wednesday nights only, starting tonight. The menu will change every week. This is the menu for tonight: +++ “Tabla’s 10” Satur Farms turnips chaat masala lime and pepper 6 “Kerari aloo” Street style crispy wedges seasoned with & lime juice and popin spice 8 Mung Bean Sprout “Bhel Puri” green mango, cucumber, tamarind and mint chutneys 7 Spinach “Pakoras” 7 Steamed rice 4 “Masala Saag,” spicy creamed spinach 7 Indian water pickles (mango, carrot and diakon) 4 “Aloo Kulcha,” sourdough naan stuffed with spiced potato, Kalonji seeds, cayenne 9 “Bhori Egg Curry,” yogurt and caramelized onion curry 7 “Dal fry,” pink lentils with mustard seeds and dry chillies 6 Tandoori King Oyster Mushroom (per piece) 3 “Tandoori Jinga kali Mirch,” (per piece) shrimp marinated in coriander and black pepper 4 “Nishte che Kodi,“ Goan striped bass collars in coconut tamarind curry 9 Goankar Tile Fish “fry” with coconut and ginger 10 Chicken “Kelaji masala” ginger, caramelized onions, mint & cilantro 7 Chicken Bharta, Ground chicken cooked “street style with cilantro and chillies” 9 Tandoori chicken wings 8 “Choris Pau” Goan pork sausage sandwich, Brioche Bun 10 Beef “Chapli Kebabs” egg coated and pan fried ground beef 9 Boodies Beef Pot Roast, ginger, turmeric and chillies 10 BB chutney Sampler 7 Apple Walnut Raita 4 Pear Chutney 4 Spicy Tomato Chutney 4 Makai ki Roti Mustard seed‐garlic corn bread 4 Rosemary Naan 4 Garlic Naan 4 Laccha Parantha 4 Sourdough Naan Ghee and sea salt 4 +++ Tabla 11 Madison Avenue, NYC Reservations: (212) 889‐0667 www.tablany.com

My apologies for going a few days without posting with much detail. We were recently contacted by one of the TV networks about doing a story on this challenge, and I've been working with them to do some taping. I haven't been able to do my own photography on account of the logistics, but if the video package comes out well (which I imagine it will) then it will be a lot better than anything I could have done with my little camera. It will be about a week before the story is produced and I'll provide details when things start to gel. Tonight we cooked for ourselves, Ellen's cousin (the one who came over at the end of week one) and a camera/audio/production crew of three. I was surprised, as I've been throughout this experiment, at just how much crap I was able to pull out of the larder. It was an eclectic meal to say the least, but it was a feast. I made biscuit dogs, which were particularly well received, as well as chicken fried rice, the last of the chili from the freezer, and ravioli with tomato sauce. Ellen and PJ made oatmeal-raisin cookies for dessert. On top of all that, I made four quarts of yogurt -- those should be ready in the morning if I didn't screw them up. I burned through a lot of what I was planning to cook for the rest of the week, but I'm actually still going strong. As the video footage I hope you'll all someday see demonstrates, the refrigerator is finally getting down to mostly condiments, chocolate and raisins (we refrigerate those things), but the freezer is still completely packed and the pantry cabinets look like nobody has eaten anything here for the past month. While I will not be pushing this experiment past Sunday, I have no doubt that with a little strategic purchasing of fresh ingredients on about a $20-per-week budges, I could continue this for two or three more months. I have definitely learned a lot so far. I started this out mostly as a fun challenge. But now I'm realizing some fundamental problems with the way I buy, cook and eat food. I mean, more fundamental than just that I eat way too much of it. The main thing is that I have a serious utilization problem. I am not buying, cooking and eating $150 worth of groceries a week. I'm buying $150 worth, but utilizing much less. There's no way I'm going to let the budget climb back to anywhere near $150 when this is over. I've totally broken out of the paradigm that says I have to buy a bunch of unnecessary stuff. I am firmly resolved to get the budget down under $100 a week, and maybe even $75. If I could cut the grocery budget in half, that would be a big savings: somewhere in the $3-$4k neighborhood in our case. But even without that, we've saved more than $500 on groceries this past month.

I am not attacking his ethics. I am questioning his independence. There is nothing unethical about being the sport and toy of publicists. ← What you're describing is unethical conduct. It's like saying a doctor is the sport and toy of the pharmaceutical industry, or a politician is the sport and toy of big tobacco. But even with these continuing claims, which are sweeping regardless of their ethical content, we are hearing little in the way of specifics. Again, I very carefully reviewed the last few dozen stories on the Feedbag and couldn't find a hint of a problem. But it's hard to prove a negative. Which entries are you specifically concerned might be driven by ulterior motives, agendas, etc.?

I think when attacking someone's ethics, good taste requires being specific. Now we've heard a lot of grand claims about how there's all this bias, now let's see some actual examples. I just went to the Feedbag, as I have each time these wild and in my opinion nonsensical claims have been made, and reviewed all the stories on the lead page. So, what's wrong with a single one of them from a bias perspective? Where is there a hint of anything untoward? The worst thing I can say, and the worst thing I've ever had to say about Josh's work, is that I don't personally agree with every single thing he says and, in some cases, I don't particularly care about the subject matter. So what?

I found it an excellent resource when working on "Asian Dining Rules" and, indeed, thanked its creator in the acknowledgments!

Earlier on we were treated to the declaration: At first it seemed maybe there was an actual claim here. But it turns out that this is just a variant of the conspiracy theory that says all media are tools of the military industrial complex and not to be trusted. In other words, it's not a claim about the blog scene at all. I do think there are some problems with the species of dining blogs this topic was started to discuss. They tend to be redundant with one another (with the exception of Serious Eats New York, which seems to row in its own content stream), the signal-to-noise ratio is not great, and they are micro-obsessive to an extent that even a very obsessive restaurantgoer like me starts to think, okay, enough already people. But those are statements about the blogs themselves, not a superfluous condemnation of all media dressed up as a statement about blogs. Maybe at some point we can discuss the real problems with these blogs, rather than the imagined ones. With respect to Mr. Cutlets, let me just say that it was utterly shocking to me that, of all the professional bloggers out there, he was the one folks went after here. I just don't get that. I've known Cutlets since before he was Cutlets. Not intimately, thank goodness, but we've crossed paths many times over the past decade. There's little question that the guy is brilliant and talented. He has written a history of the hamburger for Yale University Press. He is a tireless researcher, incredibly prolific and talented writer and champion of excellence. I disagree with lots of stuff he says, just as I disagree with most people in the field on many issues, but I have never thought him anything less than a principled, serious food journalist. I will say, long ago, I did Cutlets a big favor. I helped get him one of his earliest food-writing gigs. We have also been good to him here in eG Forums -- we gave him a nice bit of PR for his book, Meat Me in Manhattan, which was under-publicized to say the least. I say in a good way that all this never got me the slightest bit of payback when I was doing PR for my books. I had to fight harder to get Cutlets to do something on Asian Dining Rules for The Feedbag than I did with any other media outlet that covered the book. He did not lower his standards just because he owed me one. And I'm glad he didn't. Well, maybe I wish he had. But the important thing is that he didn't, and I think that's generally the kind of guy he is. You can schmooze him all you want, you can do him favors, whatever, but he is ultimately going to make the call on content as he sees it. He's a straight shooter. If he says something you disagree with, it's a simple disagreement and not the result of some ulterior motive on his part. If you want to pick on someone at least go pick on one of the other bloggers.

But that's a complaint -- valid or not -- that you'd have to make equally about the music press, technology press, automotive press, music press, etc. -- pretty much everybody except a few Frank Bruni-like journalists operating under strict cloaks of secrecy. It's certainly not a complaint unique to professional food bloggers.

The straw man behind all this obsession with motive is the hypothetical restaurant that treats its average customer like dirt but cynically cultivates a select few customers to report great experiences. I'm not sure there are any existing restaurants like that, or if there are they are really old-school insider-ish places on their last legs which are not really discussed much anyway. The reality of most restaurants, especially those that get serious attention from food-savvy people, is that they try to deliver a good baseline experience and they go the extra mile for regulars, VIPs, industry people, etc. So yeah, when you read a report from a regular you're seeing the at-its-best version, but it's not some night-and-day thing where everything other than best is awful. And for those who are considering going to a restaurant more than once, knowing what a restaurant is able to do for regulars is relevant information. Moreover, anybody who is experienced at writing about the dining scene can pretty quickly recognize the variance between the baseline experience and the VIP experience, to the extent that is worth knowing. I can also understand how, to someone who gets only the occasional comp or bit of special treatment, it can feel pretty special. It's like a normal person's relationship to Wagyu beef: it's damn special and memorable when you get a little. An anecdote on this point . . . The other night, at an event at Beacon hosted by DeBragga & Spitler (an awesome coincidence that two companies I routinely shill for held an event together), I sat next to some nice folks who own a company called Imperial Beef. They produce American Wagyu out of Lincoln, Nebraska, and their product is excellent. What interested me most, though, was that the wife told me their home freezer is always overflowing with Wagyu. They make their chili, their fajitas, their hamburgers from beef the rest of us pay for by the ounce. Trying to bribe someone like Mr. Cutlets with a free plate of food would be about as effective as trying to bribe the owners of Imperial Beef with a bowl of Wagyu chili. Mr. Cutlets (and Ben Leventhal, and Dan Maurer, etc.) is awash in free food. He also has a generous budget from Citysearch and could probably maintain his body weight only eating on that budget. He's invited to so many special events he can't accept all the invitations and sometimes has more than one in a night. Other journalists take him out to meals. You simply can't buy him with free food.

I don't like the readback. It's a waste of my time and only establishes that the server hasn't forgotten anything YET. And if the server is trying to save time by not writing things down, the readback defeats that purpose. I'm telling you, handheld POS is the solution to this problem and all order-accuracy problems. In New York City, Ryuichi Munekata, who owns Yakitori Totto and several other Japanese restaurants, has been using handheld POS since 2004. The servers have Palm Pilots that seem very capable, and I doubt they make many mistakes. These are by no means tacky chain restaurants. They're more like the restaurants of the future. The most recent place where I've seen handleld POS in use has been, of all things, an upscale pizzeria. The servers there had gray ruggedized units that also printed checks and could accept credit card swipes tableside. Once people become accustomed, as they are in Europe and Asia, to having credit cards swiped at the table they will never be willing to go back to a system where the credit card is taken out of view to have lord-knows-what done to it. The whole ordering system in most restaurants now is computerized almost end-to-end. The one place where there's a gap in that system is getting the order from the customer's mouth into a computer where it can't get messed up. Servers today, whether they rely on memory or handwriting, are the weak link in the chain of ordering custody. If we even have servers in the future, they will use handheld POS or some other technology to avoid ordering errors. (If we don't have servers we'll just have POS at the table, like in some kaiten-zushi places in Japan.) Customers will get used to it just as people get used to other new and eventually pervasive technologies in other contexts (radio, television, computer, cell phone, etc.). Maybe there will be some 1990s theme restaurants where you pay extra to have them write orders on paper or memorize them, and every dish has mango sauce. Maybe very fancy restaurants will still kick it old school. But everybody else will and should use labor-saving, error-reducing technology so orders don't get screwed up either from bad memory or bad handwriting.

Landmarc in the Time Warner Center is open until something like 2am, I believe. It's not Picholine-level food but it's quite good for what it is, I think. On Friday and Saturday nights Bar Boulud goes until midnight for the full menu and 1am for an abbreviated menu that includes the charcuterie -- which is why I'd be there anyway.

I'd be interested to see a study -- perhaps published in the Journal of Totally Useless Studies -- comparing the accuracy of written-down orders to that of memorized orders.

Last night, chili for dinner. Tonight, the rest of that container of chili, which was 1/2 of the remaining chili.

Handheld wireless POS technology is already established and implemented at a range of restaurants. I've seen it at big American chain places, and at small Japanese places, in all sorts of formats. It just hasn't jumped to common acceptance. http://rmpos.com/wireless_handheld.html http://www.digitaldining.com/POS/PrdHandBody.html

The memory trick, as I understand it, goes back to the days when servers submitted the actual written order tickets to kitchens. Memorizing the order allowed the server to step away from the table and write the whole order neatly, something that takes time to do live when people are telling you their orders. What happens in most restaurants these days when a server takes your order, whether or not it gets written down, is that the server goes over to a POS touch-screen terminal and enters the order with the position numbers, M/F designations, special requests ("SOS"), etc. The ticket then comes out on a little printer in the kitchen. It's amazing to me that restaurants haven't adopted wireless handheld POS devices more widely.

Caught about 5 minutes of it while setting up the DVR for something else. Found it unwatchable.

If a newspaper reporter finds a good story he or she may be encouraged by the editors to write follow-up stories on the same subject. Cutlets is just championing excellence as he sees it. His outlet is a blog that allows for a lot of follow up and pursuit of multiple narratives. It's not like he's posting about La Freida ten times a day. La Freida is one of dozens of story-lines he follows. It's also not clear to me that anybody but La Freida has a similar burger-meat program. If someone else does, I'm sure Cutlets would be thrilled to look into it.

Which ones and how so? I have officially lost my appetite.

Yes, many forms of journalism include critical components and criticism can include a lot of reporting. That doesn't mean every journalist has to be Frank Bruni. Although, I imagine that when Josh does those mini reviews he follows the standard Citysearch protocols of paying, not taking comps, etc. At least that's what I had to do six or seven years ago when I wrote some reviews for Citysearch.

When was the last time you picked up a food magazine?

I did say that Josh is shilling for Pat LaFreida, in the sense of being so deeply intertwined that what he says is no longer believable. ← Same reductionism as before. You're casting everybody in the role of the critic, and defining believability in terms of criticism. But Josh is not out to be a critic. He is offering exactly the sort of insider access that critics don't have. In order to do that he needs to go behind the scenes. So yes, there's not an ivory-tower situation. But that doesn't introduce, for me, any concerns that Josh is a shill in any way. Again, I find it pretty easy to disagree with him without resort to questioning his motives. I think he genuinely is enthusiastic about La Freida. Big deal. He's not taking bribes, he's not getting sex, La Freda isn't helping his career. He's just hanging out in the meat locker with the subject of a story, and developing the kinds of professional ties that earn exclusives, access and information. Take it for what it's worth. I don't have to tell you that. It's already what you do. (ETA: Taking it for what it's worth, that is.)