Fat Guy

Another thing I did when I focus grouped this idea was some kitchen inspections. There were a few objections that I really needed to test. Now, I have no doubt that everyone here is completely in touch with his or her kitchen. But here were some things I observed in the cases of two friends. "We have no protein other than what we buy fresh for immediate use." When I looked around these people's kitchen last week I found: about ten cans of tuna, almost two dozen eggs, several pounds of beans, a little cheese, a pack of bacon and some frozen Hebrew National pigs in blankets -- certainly enough protein to allow a couple with one small child to have an overdose of protein for a week. And I'm sure digging deeper would have yielded more discoveries. "We live in the Bay Area and have great access to the farmer's markets, so we just don't keep much around in our kitchen. No canned food, no frozen food, no packaged food other than pasta." Late last night (my time, that is), I asked these friends to photograph their freezer, refrigerator and cabinets and email me the photos. Their claims turned out to be dramatically false. The produce in the refrigerator, if rationed, would easily yield small but sufficient portions of fresh produce for two people every day for a week no problem. They have a WALK-IN PANTRY full of food, including lots of stuff in jars (that to me qualifies as "canned food"). And, get this, THERE WERE STEAKS IN THE FREEZER. Grass-fed, no doubt. I'm not saying anybody in the world can do this. If you live in a tiny apartment you may really have no inventory. But before deciding you can't, take a good look around. Do you have a pantry? A cabinet that's like a pantry? Even one overhead cabinet full of food (as I do)? What's really in the freezer? Do you also have a second freezer? What about the refrigerator? Think about everything that's in there. A basket of root vegetables? A braid of garlic? A basket of fruit? Bear in mind, I live in a New York City apartment that is not at all huge. I have a Whirlpool refrigerator-freezer that any suburbanite would consider puny. My root cellar is a plastic bin on top of said refrigerator. I have one overhead cabinet (two doors) that is my pantry, and two other cabinets that hold things like olive oil, condiments, pretzels and crackers. No walk-in pantry. No second freezer. Nothing like that. I am probably in a fairly low percentile of square footage per person for the US. And I am going to have no problem surviving without shopping. The only challenge for me will be to see how just how well I can eat.

Milk, in my limited experience, freezes very well.

I was thinking that if I had milk slated to expire next week I could put some in the freezer on Sunday and dole it out. Then I realized that I have two cartons of ultrapasteurized Organic Valley milk, purchased two Sundays ago, dated March 5. And in the cabinet I have . . . powdered milk. I guess back when I went through my yogurt-making phase I bought two big boxes of the stuff. I hope we don't get to the powdered-milk stage but if we do I doubt our son will mind for a couple of days. I think I may have some Parmalat milk-in-a-box too, though I don't actually see it anywhere.

I figured somebody, or a million people, must have thought of this first. At least there's no shame in being scooped by Pete Wells. Just please don't tell me that Guy Fieri dude has done anything on this.

My battle plan for the week is starting to take shape, though it's not possible to have a set-in-stone plan given the unpredictability of my schedule. There will surely be some meals out of the house, some unanticipated preferences by the wife and three-year-old son I cook for, etc. Plus I still have three more eating days before my non-shopping day, thought tonight we'll be out for dinner. As an overall strategy I'm focusing on dinner. That's the main meal of the day around here, when we all sit together at the table on most nights and have a real meal. I think creating the centerpiece dish for each of those meals will be relatively straightforward, as long as I get the timeline organized. I see in my freezer a piece of brisket that is begging to be made into chili, some chicken breasts that can have something done to them, a whole lasagna that we'll serve to guests on Sunday night, some hot dogs, some frozen ravioli, a ton of bread products, some frozen peas, corn and broccoli, and plenty of reduced beef and chicken stock. There are also some things toward the back of the freezer that I can't even see, so maybe there will be a discovery or three. In the cabinet I have an embarrassment of beans, lentils, rice and pasta. Lots of tomato products. Above the refrigerator, plenty of onions and potatoes, and maybe enough garlic. I have to coordinate all that into seven main dinner dishes, then flesh it out with starches and whatever fresh vegetables are still in the refrigerator and will survive the longest. Breakfasts and lunches are a simpler proposition. Most days breakfast is something like yogurt or an egg, and there's plenty of that around. I can see lentil soup taking shape from the pantry ingredients, so that should cover some lunches. On three days this coming week I'll have to pack a portable breakfast, lunch or both for my son -- that's usually sandwich-type stuff. For lunches at home I anticipate plenty of dinner leftovers. I'm thinking there are enough of the relevant ingredients around to make some cookies or something along those lines, but I'm not the baker in the household so I'll need to get a second opinion there. I'm already starting to see where we're going to have problems: 40+ weeks of the year I have enough eggs and butter in the fridge to carry over for at least a week or three, but right now those supplies are kind of thin. I'm going to need to think about how to allocate those. Monday I'm going to need to prepare dinner for the family but I'm not going to be here -- I have to go to Philadelphia for the afternoon to judge the Philly Cooks! event. So I'll be fed there but my family responsibilities will remain. At this point I have no other meals away from home planned for the week, but you never know what will happen. If I only have one meal out that will be a lot less than in a normal week. The travel day so early in the week, and the company on Sunday night, introduce a little weirdness into my cycle here, but the way we did this was that in order to keep me honest the Klatsch team sprung this on me yesterday. I proposed it a while back, but they didn't want to give me too much warning lest I stockpile. It so happens they caught me at a challenging moment. Which is good, because the last time I skipped a week of shopping it was too easy. This will be more of a challenge.

Excellent, people! I won't be skipping my shopping trip until Sunday so I too won't be chiming in much until the weekend. Please everybody feel free to join the cycle whenever your schedule presents the opportunity. I want to emphasize that the idea here is to have fun and eat delicious food, while saving a bunch of money. When I focus grouped this idea, I heard various reactions ranging from "great idea!" to "why would I want to eat canned and frozen food for a week when I live in California and everything is in season all year round?" Let me say emphatically that this is not about eating canned and frozen food for a week. Or, if it is, it's about eating really good frozen food like that extra lasagna my wife made a few months ago that has been taking up 20% of the cubic volume of our freezer. (If what you want is privation, Eater.com reports that this blogger is trying to eat for free for a week in New York City. Namaste.) This should be an interesting week for me because right up front on Sunday, the day I normally shop, we have guests coming for dinner. I think this week's salad ingredients will hold, though, and I think we'll be having lasagna. What I hope to show the world, once we all start posting our photos and descriptions of our pantry meals, is that for a lot of people there's not any privation involved in this experiment. It's more of a fun challenge to our kitchen skills. More to come.

All these questions and more will be answered in a forthcoming guidelines document. Soon. As a side note, there's talk of this on the New York Times "Diner's Journal" blog and on Eater.com. I hope as many of you as possible will participate.

I haven't sampled so much of the menu. I went in once with one of the reviewers (who gave it a kinder review than I would have!), so I got a pretty good selection then, and another time for a smaller selection. There's a lot on the menu I haven't tried, but I can't imagine it changing my judgment short of a radically different experience that to me seems so unlikely as to be a non-consideration. In terms of the whole recession theory, is that something he's been quoted on? I don't get the impression that recessionary thinking guided this project. It could have been a long-enough time in the making that the concept wasn't particularly influenced by today's economy.

I don't have all the testimony that would be needed in order to make that determination, but I did chat with him briefly at the restaurant. I got the impression that Shang is his dream restaurant. That this dated notion of fusion is actually what he has been wanting to do for the longest time. It made me sad, uncomfortably so, because I really like and admire the guy. When we ate at Susur in Toronto in 2002 it was a real eye opener, and he was very hospitable. He's obviously sincere in his efforts to make Shang conform to some notion of greatness that he's holding on to. But it's not great. The end result is just an unsatisfying jumble of dishes.

That will happen just as soon as Gray Kunz opens the equivalent of Lespinasse.

Thank you, dear Klatsch team, for that kind introduction. Hello people. Like many, or perhaps most, people in Western industrialized nations I shop for groceries once a week. Sure, I supplement with trips to smaller stores, greenmarkets and the like on an as-needed basis, but I do my main shop at a supermarket. In my case, that supermarket is Fairway on Broadway between 74th and 75th Streets in Manhattan. My family has been shopping there since I was a little kid, and ever since I moved back to New York City after graduating from college in Vermont in 1991 I have been going to Fairway most every Sunday morning to shop with my mother. Sometimes things come up. I may be out of town, or back when I had a real job I often got too busy to shop. But for the past 18 years I have gone most Sunday mornings to Fairway with my mother, and for the past 10 years we have rarely missed a Sunday. The drill is that I get myself over to Fairway either by bus, on foot or by taxi. (I live on the Upper East Side; Fairway is across town on the Upper West Side; my mother lives just a few blocks from Fairway.) I meet my mother there, we shop (independently, for the most part), then we load all our stuff into a taxi. I drop my mother at her place, and then I take my stuff home in the taxi. The taxi costs about $12, but we easily save more than that by shopping at Fairway instead of the supermarkets near where I live -- and we get much better stuff, because Fairway happens to be one of the best supermarkets in the world. In the past three years, my son PJ has become part of this equation. Shopping at Fairway every Sunday morning with grandma is a highlight of his week. But I digress. A few months ago a Sunday came around and we had plans that made shopping impossible. I figured, okay, I'll just go on Monday without the team. But when I went to make dinner on Sunday night, I noticed that my freezer and cabinets were overflowing with edible foodstuffs. Why was I saving all this stuff, when I could be eating it? I resolved just to skip my grocery shopping for that week and eat what was around. We ate quite well that week, though the last couple of dinners reminded me of the 14-day Atlantic-crossing repositioning cruise on the Windstar, where you start off with an abundance of fresh produce but as you progress toward Portugal things like lettuce start disappearing from your meals until you're basically on the Atkins diet for the last few days. (Well, the version of the Atkins diet where you also can eat lots of freshly baked breads.) But it got me thinking . . . Surely I'm not alone in having a freezer and pantry full of food, much of which will get thrown out as it expires over the course of the coming months and years. Indeed, I live in a small apartment. People with houses, basement freezers and walk-in pantries surely have far more of this stuff lying around than I do. Surely I'm not alone in having overbought at the supermarket last week. Surely I'm not alone when I get home from the supermarket and can barely fit the new food in the refrigerator because there's so much of the old stuff. Surely I'm not alone in being able to skip a week of shopping and still eat well. So let's do it again, together. Let's all skip a week of shopping. Let's declare national eat the stuff in our freezers and pantries week. Think about it from an economic standpoint. Times are tough right now. If you spend $100 a week on groceries, this experiment will put $100 back in your pocket quicker than you can say stimulus. If you're home 50 weeks of the year and you perform this experiment once per quarter, you'll reduce your grocery bill by 8%. So this Sunday, I'm not going shopping. And whether you shop on the weekend or on another day, I'm asking you not to shop either. Instead, let's eat all the stuff we already have around. And let's talk about it, compare photos, help one another figure out what to do with that jar of giardiniera or that packet of pilaf. I'll be starting my week-without-shopping diary on Sunday. If your normal shopping day comes sooner, feel free to start ahead of me. The parameters for participation will be posted tomorrow.

Ever since I heard about the forthcoming Shang, I carried around the following question: If you already operate a restaurant that's absolutely world-class, groundbreaking and beloved, what could possibly justify closing it to open a lesser restaurant elsewhere? I hoped against all hope that a visit to Shang would convince me that it made sense to close Susur in Toronto in order to run Shang in New York. But it doesn't make sense. It's closer to insane. Is the food good? Sure, some of it is good. Some of it is excellent, even. Like the turnip cake with steamed eggplant. It's so much better than any dish like it I've ever had, it's amazing. But seriously, am I going to schlep all the way to Shang for a turnip cake? No, nor is there enough support from the rest of the menu to justify return visits. I am just so profoundly disappointed by Shang that all I want to do is turn back the clock and have everything in its place: Susur still serving backward tasting menus in Toronto, available for a return visit if I ever raise the capital, and cheap clothes on Orchard Street instead of high-concept hotel restaurants.

Next year Union Square Cafe will be 25 years old. It is routinely number one or number two on the Zagat survey's list of New York's favorite restaurants (periodically trading places with Gramercy Tavern). The Union Square Hospitality Group, which grew out of Danny Meyer's work at Union Square Cafe, now operates enough restaurants that we'd need to have a whole discussion about how to count them (does the Hudson Yards catering company count, how do we count the concessions at MOMA . . .?). There is now a Union Square Tokyo. And here in New York, Union Square Cafe recently appointed Carmen Quagliata as executive chef, with Michael Romano taking on the title of chef-partner. So I was thinking, it might be a good time to check in on Union Square Cafe. But there's one problem. Union Square Cafe has excellent service. So excellent is the service at Union Square Cafe that it's difficult to remain objective about the food. While there are restaurants that offer more service, and restaurants that have more evangelical servers, the servers at Union Square Cafe are the foremost practitioners of casual, effortless, New American hospitality. But I'm tired of all discussions of Union Square Cafe being tied to service. Thus, today I decided to go in and ignore the service, to focus only on the food and to forget the rest. So I will not dwell on how amazingly gracious the service today was. Our party arrived late and in stages. In addition to a record-setting long arrival, we had an amazingly long departure. We lost a coat-check ticket. Our three-year-old son, who arrived in the first wave, had to be maintained through the bitter end. That the staff, under the leadership of general manager Christopher Russell, dealt with all this with the utmost aplomb is not relevant to today's undertaking. That they immediately brought our son potato chips to snack on, that Danny Meyer was there and somehow managed to chat with every table, that the greeting at the door couldn't have been more enthusiastic had I been Barack Obama . . . all beside the point. What is not beside the point is how excellent the food was, even viewed in the coldest possible light I could bring to bear on it. In defining excellence in the context of Union Square Cafe, it's important to remember that this is not Per Se, Le Bernardin or Corton we're talking about. Union Square Cafe does not serve the high cuisine of any culture. Rather, the food at Union Square Cafe is straightforward, upscale American comfort-ish food that reflects some Italian influences and leans heavily on the Union Square Greenmarket, local suppliers and first-rate ingredients in general. It is food that is designed to be liked by people who like to eat good food. There is nothing cerebral about the experience (although there's more complexity to some of the underlying preparations than meets the eye). I think, looking back at the many conversations I've had with people about Union Square Cafe's food, not to mention my own thoughts about it, most of the disagreement comes because some people just aren't into that sort of food. I know I'm not. If I'm eating upscale, I typically spend my limited dining budget at places that offer more on-the-edge creativity. When eating comfort food, I rarely want to spend Union Square Cafe's prices, which are not terribly high but are much higher than I can afford on a casual, frequent basis. Evaluating what we ate today on that basis, everything we had was as good as it could have been. Not a single misstep I could identify, not a single ingredient that I thought could have been better at the price point. One could call much of what we ate prosaic. In particular, the lunch menu has many offerings that could easily find a home, in lesser versions, on a diner menu. I had a tuna-salad sandwich for lunch, for crying out loud. But it was the best tuna-salad sandwich I've had, bar none, and I've had a few. So, you know, if you're a person who says, "I don't care how well made a tuna-salad sandwich is; it's just not interesting to me and I like my meals to be interesting," then Union Square Cafe is not likely to win you over (well, the service will win you over, but not the food). But if you're in the camp that says a great tuna-salad sandwich is something worth talking about, then this is your kind of restaurant. I have never had better potato chips than the warm garlic potato chips at Union Square Cafe. They come from a section at the bottom of the menu labeled "vegetables," but over the years I've come to use this section as a source of appetizers, as do many customers. Although, on this occasion, they just brought a basket of them for our son without prompting. But there I go again with the service nonsense. As for the potato chips themselves, I can say as someone who has tried to make decent potato chips at home and typically wound up with a less-than-impressive product that it is not the easiest thing in the world to make good potato chips. That's why I buy them in bags. Even the few restaurants that make their own potato chips often don't do better than what comes in a bag -- though the warmth of fresh potato chips can give an inferior specimen an illusory edge. (This is a good time to reveal the best trick for serving potato chips at home: heat them up in the toaster oven; your friends will be amazed.) Union Square Cafe's potato chips are, however, categorically better than anything I've had from a bag or from another restaurant. Another swell item on the vegetable menu, again repurposed as an appetizer today, is the "Creamy Anson Mills Polenta, Walnuts and Gorgonzola." The Anson Mills corn products (grits, cornmeal and polenta in various formulations), from South Carolina, really do seem to be in their own league. Enhanced with walnuts and gorgonzola, it's another dish that rises to the "I can't think of how it could be improved" standard. Finally from the vegetable department, the grilled sweet red onions. Talk about a simple dish: big fat slices of red onion, cooked until they're almost onion candy but still retaining their appearance and structure. Over the years I've had these many times. They're so memorable to me that whenever I touch a red onion in the supermarket or in my kitchen I have a mini episode of that show Medium in my head. You know how when Allison shakes hands with the bad guy all of a sudden she sees images of the crime in her mind? I get that with red onions: I touch one and I see Union Square Cafe's onions. Of the two real appetizers we had to round out our assortment, the most delicious was wild mushroom sformato with roasted garlic crostino and aged balsamic. I had no idea of the existence of the term sformato before today, but it turns out to be something between a souffle and a flan -- sort of a mushroom custard in this particular presentation. This was the most technically ambitious piece of cookery of the day, and it was executed faultlessly. It was also really good. The dinner menu has a little more stuff like this, but for the lunch menu this is the end of the spectrum of complexity. Finally there was what was probably a special (I wasn't there when it was ordered and didn't see it on the menu). Whatever its official designation, I'll call it creamy orzo with chunks of artisanal bacon. Enough said. At this point our group was dropping like flies in terms of stomach capacity and attention span, so there were only three entrees ordered. First, the signature lunch-menu item of Union Square Cafe for as long as I can remember: the tuna burger. I remember reading in the original Union Square Cafe cookbook that they came up with the tuna burger as a way to utilize the trim from their tuna steaks, but that the tuna burger became so popular they quickly found it necessary to buy tuna just to grind for that. The tuna they buy is far better than what you see at almost any American restaurant and as good as what a lot of good Japanese restaurants are using. The difference being, at Union Square Cafe you get a piece that at a Japanese place would be made into a dozen pieces of sushi. Of course there's tuna and there's tuna. Union Square Cafe is not using bluefin o-toro for tuna burgers. But the restaurant is using very fine yellowfin. The tuna burger is glazed with ginger and mustard and topped with pickled ginger. It comes on a wonderful brioche-like bun, and is garnished with the aforementioned grilled red onion and creamy coleslaw. You can't get it at dinnertime. One of the great things about lunch at Union Square Cafe is that you can get actual lunch food as opposed to just smaller portions of dinner food. So few high-end restaurants do a real lunch. It's refreshing to see it done right. We also had a tuna-salad sandwich. The tuna salad is served on Tom Cat's country white bread with slab bacon and lettuce. The warm garlic potato chips make an appearance as a garnish. This is the most elevated tuna-salad sandwich I've had. It may be that there are examples of rare Italian canned tuna that cost $15 per ounce that are better than what Union Square Cafe is using, but there is surely no better $15 tuna-salad sandwich out there. Finally, the sliced steak and arugula salad with mushroom vinaigrette and Parmigiano Reggiano. Again, everything done just right: the salad dressed with an expert hand, the steak impeccable and cooked exactly as ordered. With the attrition continuing, we had two desserts: the warm apple crostata (in the tart/pie family) with applesauce and sour cream ice cream, and Union Square Cafe's signature banana tart with honey-vanilla ice cream and macadamia brittle. There was a lot of disagreement at the table about which was better. I sided with the banana, but respected those who chose apple. The only mistake was ordering both, because they're aesthetically similar. We should have replaced one with something chocolate, probably. I think our server tried to help us reach that conclusion, but we weren't focused enough to benefit from her guidance. Did I mention the service was great?

As a general observation, ignition unit problems are the most common problems I hear about across all brands. The only hint of a problem I've ever had with my DCS has been an ignition unit on one of the burners that occasionally needs some coaxing. Once they started making gas stoves without pilot lights, this state of affairs was sort of inevitable. I would just plan, whatever cooktop or rangetop you get, on having the ignition unit be your first repair whether it happens after 1, 5 or 10 years.

Although the company has been in business for something like 700 years, I've never actually touched a BlueStar rangetop. I've never heard anybody say anything less than great things about BlueStar, though. Me, I'd be most likely to follow the approach of going to showrooms and buying an end-of-model-year unit, perhaps with a few scratches or dents. That's how we got our current DCS range for about half price. I went shopping with a basic list of approved brands but in the end got what was the best deal. Woks are tricky. Some of the pro-style burners are actually worse for woks than some lower-rated residential burners. A lot has to do with the design of the grate. I know if I put a wok on my DCS it gets held pretty far from the flame because the cast-iron bars are like the infrastructure of a roadway or battleship, whereas we have some friends with a technically inferior KitchenAid cooktop that really gets the flame all over the wok in such a way as to produce some scary-hot temperatures. The best home cook of Chinese food I know gets excellent results from the crap range his landlord provided -- better results than I've seen from any high-end range. The few people I know who have paid for wok rings or wok burners have not been terribly happy. So I don't know. For wok-type cooking on my range I use a Sitram pan that looks sort of like a wok but has a flat bottom-middle part.

One thing that has happened is that "pro-style" cooktops have continued to get more expensive without getting better! Having seen a few more of these things in operation over the years, I remain ever more firmly committed to the rangetop as a superior alternative to the cooktop. There seem to be more good rangetops available now than there were a few years ago. They're not cheap -- they average in close to $3,000 -- but it should be possible to get something heavy duty in stainless for closer to $2,000 by shopping around, getting a floor model, whatever. Basically, if you have a rangetop, you can treat it like the top of a range. It's all metal and ready to be abused. It runs back to front, and it has a metal buffer zone on the left and right. If you have a cooktop you have this border of scratchable, stainable, possibly burnable countertop material all around the thing.

I've been in several good restaurant kitchens over the past decade. 100% of the pastry departments use recipes. For the culinary departments it has been about 50/50. There doesn't seem to be a correlation between quality and use of recipes, however there is a correlation between corporation size and use of recipes. Restaurant corporations that operate several restaurants have little choice but to standardize. I'm not aware of an example of any corporation that runs two or more of the same or similar restaurant that hasn't gone to a recipe system. These recipes may not be all that much like the ones in home cookbooks. They are more along the lines of formulas: lists of ingredients and quantities, and shorthand descriptions of major steps. They may also include plating diagrams or photos. They're not meant to be substitutes for training, tasting and adjusting, but they're an important part of maintaining uniformity across multiple restaurants. If you're a home cook and want to see examples of restaurant-style recipe formulas, have a look at one of the Culinary Institute of America "Pro Chef" books.

A friend and I made dinner for the wives, our son and their daughter. We did surf and turf: tenderloin and shrimp. The good store near them had tenderloin on sale and the large shrimp looked very good. Our wives like tenderloin a lot even though it's not our favorite cut, so we went for it. Started out with a mozzarella and tomato salad, olives, bread and a few other snacks. Then tenderloin (grilled just with salt, pepper and olive oil) and shrimp (sauteed with butter, garlic and parsley), oven-roasted potato wedges, sauteed mushrooms, a green salad with mustard vinaigrette, and a '97 Brunello. Assorted purchased chocolates and pastries for dessert.

The Beefsteak price now includes tax and tip, and the donation to Green Chimneys Childrens' Services has been raised to $40. I believe Waldy raised the donation amount because the event is now always sold out, so he figured he could get a little more for charity out of it. The Beacon Burger is sold at, I believe, four different prices based on time and location. At lunch at the Burger Bar it's $12.95. At a table in the dining room it's $19. At dinnertime it goes up a couple of dollars in each location. It's the same burger at all four prices, with minor aesthetic plating differences that don't matter. The prices reflect supply and demand as well as the desire to keep the burger price in line with the rest of the menu prices. If you put a $12.95 burger on a dinner menu next to a $43 steak you're going to undercut your steak sales. This kind of pricing variation is pretty routine in the restaurant business.

There's some professional back-of-the-house photography of the event on the Feedbag blog.

I've definitely noticed that Beacon has an unusually deep talent pool. I have an annoying habit of showing up for lunch at 2:29pm when the restaurant is empty and just about to go into between-meals dormancy. Because it's an open kitchen you always know who's there. I've come in and the only person in the kitchen has been whatever line cook is handling the end-of-shift orders. And I've never noticed variation in quality based on who's cooking or expediting.

Last night, as I was heading into Tabla for the restaurant's tenth anniversary dinner, I thought back to the fifth anniversary dinner. I hate to sound like an old-timer, but I can't believe five years have gone by. During those five years, and during the five years before them (Tabla opened just around the time I was starting to write about food as a full-time proposition) I've been watching the progress of what used to be called "fusion" and the related movement that Tabla has been calling "New Indian Cuisine." To me, fusion was the self-conscious attempt to shoehorn Asian ingredients (I include Indian as part of the Asian category) into a Western culinary model. New Indian Cuisine was, conversely, Indian cuisine informed by Western ingredients and technique, if I may oversimplify it for the sake of clarity. The New Indian cuisine movement always seemed more genuine to me than the fusion movement, but they were related. Today I think if you eat at restaurants like the Momofukus and the other places on the leading edge of contemporary cuisine, what you find is not so much fusion but what I've been calling a cuisine of "convergence." It's not that a chef like David Chang is incorporating Asian ingredients into Western dishes. It's that, in his kitchens, the entire notion of an East/West bifurcation has collapsed. Many of today's most forward-thinking chefs are simply choosing from a global palette of ingredients and techniques and creating whatever they think will be delicious without regard for the old categories. Nowhere has this evolution been more evident to me than it was last night at Tabla's tenth anniversary "New Indian" dinner. They're still calling it "New Indian" but it's not. It's post-Indian, post-fusion and category-defying. It represents exactly the convergence that is one of the most important culinary developments of the past half decade. And it's always a pleasure to see Tabla operating as a nexus for chef collaboration on the leading edge. I eat at Tabla -- particularly Bread Bar -- a lot and kind of take the place for granted on a day-to-day basis, so it's nice to be reminded that Tabla is more than just a good restaurant, it's an important one. If you wanted to create a wish list of New York-area chefs representing some of the best thinking about cuisine today, you'd be hard pressed to come up with a better list than the one Floyd Cardoz created last year when he was planning this dinner. His wish list was David Chang, Dan Barber, Marcus Samuelsson and Michael Romano. He reached and, miraculously, every one of the chefs agreed to do the dinner. Each in his own way embodies the changes that have happened in the past half decade. Five years ago there was no Momofuku. There was no Blue Hill at Stone Barns. (Both opened later in 2004.) Marcus Samuelsson had just started to flex his global muscles at Riingo. And Michael Romano wasn't operating an outpost of Union Square Cafe in Japan, soaking up the Asian culinary culture and bringing it home (the idea for Tabla a decade ago, by the way, was Michael Romano's). When you look at the covers of food magazines today, and you think about who has influenced and is revered by the newest generation of chefs, it's hard to believe that five years ago some of these guys were just starting to find their voices. Unlike the fifth anniversary dinner, where all the chefs were Indian, here there was no identifiable ethnic or stylistic connection between all these chefs, yet they produced a remarkably coherent and integrated meal. Every dish last night was memorably excellent -- something that rarely happens at these multi-chef, banquet-format meals but that, when it does happen, can lead to some of the most special meals. The first dish up was Marcus Samuelsson's foie gras ganache with pomegranate vinaigrette. Think molten-center chocolate cake, but with foie gras. I've had excellent meals at Marcus Samuelsson's restaurants, but never anything as great as this dish. If I'd just come in last night and had that dish, having never tasted Samuelsson's food, I'd have concluded that he's one of the top handful of chefs in the world. Samuelsson, by the way, gave co-author credit on the menu to Jimmy Lappalainen, who is I believe the chef at Riingo. Then an iteration of a dish Floyd Cardoz has been making, refining and improving for more than a decade: rice-flaked halibut with cauliflower puree and maple-tamarind glaze. The roots of this dish can be traced all the way to Floyd Cardoz's tenure as Gray Kunz's top sous chef at Lespinasse in the mid-1990s. The fish was different, the exact crust formula was different, it was all different but the soul of the dish has endured. This was the most elegant version yet, and was a lot less fusion-y than it used to be, swimming in a bowl of Asian stuff that didn't do as much as last night's minimalist treatment. An excellent demonstration of the less-is-more philosophy expertly applied. Dan Barber delivered a poached egg with curried lentils, lettuce broth and dried winter vegetables. This to me was the most interesting dish of the evening because I wasn't sure how Dan Barber's locally oriented style would square with this global dinner concept. But there was no tension at all, which again shows how the effortlessness of convergence is pushing the heavy-handedness of fusion aside. I think a dish like this also shows how far Dan Barber has come since the early days at Blue Hill. Here he has captured that same early stylistic penchant for soft, subtle compositions but with much brighter flavors that really focus the dish without undermining the subtlety. Michael Romano's dish is one I need to learn a little more about, because it was such an eye opener for me. He made tonarelli (a pasta shape that appears like spaghetti but with a square cross section) from scratch, tossed it with spiced shrimp, and created a sauce based on coconut that was a little bit carbonara-esque, a littl bit Alfredo-esque, but it was coconut. I'm guessing he used a combination of coconut flakes and reduced coconut milk, but I have to check. It was great, although the wine pairing with this course, a Cabernet Franc from Chesler, was a strange choice. But I guess that's what you deal with when you're getting wine donated for a fundraiser (the non-media paying customers were ponying up something like $300 in support of literacy projects in India, so the event had a number of sponsors). This was the only dish of the evening that felt "fusion-y" but it was so natural and right that it didn't fall victim to the fusion mentality. David Chang's superstar status is clear in so many ways, but certainly another demonstration is his positioning in the slot for the final savory course on the menu, not to mention the palpable anticipation all evening for the David Chang dish. It was pork, of course. Braised pork belly with daikon and pickled mustard seeds. Fantastic. Dessert, prepared by Tabla's pastry chef Melissa Walnock, was on the level of the rest of the tough-act-to-follow meal. Pain perdu, creamed coconut brulee, mango chutney and yuzu sauce. Here's the menu: My little camera was no match for the distance and lighting conditions but here's the cast of characters. Marcus Samuelsson and Jimmy Lappalainen: Floyd Cardoz and Michael Romano: David Chang and Dan Barber:

Maybe after Mark left they changed the policy.

Quick amendment, based on an email I got: the policy for Sunday dinner is that seconds are encouraged. It is not, however, all you can eat. They may cut you off if you try to have thirds. I never ran up against this issue because we stopped at seconds and didn't even get that far on the entrees.

Right you are: http://www.craftrestaurant.com/craft_private_dining.html