Fat Guy

It was the Craftbar space. I'm not sure it was ever a private dining room, nor am I sure that's what the New York Times piece says.

I don't have any special insight on this. I talk to Colicchio very occasionally, and we haven't discussed the endgame for Tuesday Dinner. I have some theories, but they're very much subject to revision. I assume they're paying rent on that space, which is a space the size of a small restaurant. When I walked in, that was the first thing I thought: wow, this is not some little annex, this is a whole small restaurant, and they're paying rent on it, yet they're only using it two days a month -- how does that work? I guess they're also maybe using the space for the Damon Frugal Fridays thing, and perhaps if you pony up enough dough you can have a private function in that space, and maybe they got a great deal on the rent. Even so, it's a lot of space to be sitting empty most of the time. So my assumption is that there's more to it than just Tom wanting to get his hands dirty a little more often. If that's all he wants to do, he can just work the line at any of his restaurants any day he wants (he probably does that occasionally anyway). I have to think it's about eventually developing a book or television concept, or even if it's not about that I have to think it's going to turn into that. I could absolutely see a beautiful book of Tom's Tuesday Dinner recipes and photos -- the photos are already being taken, presumably at some expense. And I could also see a "Tom Tuesday Dinner" show on Bravo, though I'm not exactly sure how it would work. Or maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's some completely different motivation. We'll learn eventually, either as history unfolds or maybe I'll be able to get some information out of Colicchio directly. With respect to four stars from the Times, or three stars from Michelin, I just don't think Colicchio is interested in operating that sort of restaurant. I don't think any sane person would question that he has the talent to do a Per Se-like restaurant. But that's just not what he's into.

I’m not cool, but there are a lot of things I’ve liked since before they were cool. Tom Colicchio is one of them. Long before “Top Chef” or even “Think Like a Chef,” I was an unabashed Colicchio fan. Back when I was a lawyer not a writer, Gramercy Tavern was one of my two or three favorite restaurants and I went there all the time. (For those of you who came late to the game, Colicchio was the original chef at Gramercy Tavern.) I didn’t have a relationship of any kind with Colicchio, though, until I started publishing restaurant criticism online more than 10 years ago, before there was much of that going on and before the word “blog” had really entered the lexicon. At a birthday dinner, a clever captain who had been reading my stuff online figured out who I was and told Colicchio, who had also read some of my work at some point (for all I know it was in the five minutes before he came to my table). Colicchio introduced himself and – you could easily see him saying this as a judge today in Top Chef Kitchen -- said something along the lines of “Your writing is good but you don’t know the first thing about what happens in a restaurant kitchen.” This led to an invitation to trail in the Gramercy Tavern kitchen for a week, during which time I did indeed learn a lot about what happens in a restaurant kitchen. I also learned that there was much to admire about Colicchio beyond just his ability to turn out great food. He’s smart, deeply principled and a brilliant leader and manager. None of his successes – I believe he now has nine full-service restaurants plus the ‘wichcraft sandwich places, not to mention his role on Top Chef and probably a bunch of stuff I know nothing about – have been the slightest bit surprising to me. Today the restaurants in the Craft pantheon all hold great appeal for me. Craftbar in Manhattan, though I liked the original physical space much better, is in many ways my ideal restaurant, serving affordable food at a very high level of technical and aesthetic accomplishment. Craft itself is of course a great restaurant, though my visits are infrequent because whenever I go I spend too much money. I recently had a terrific meal at Craftsteak Las Vegas (where Matt Seeber, whom I befriended that week in the Gramercy Tavern kitchen a decade ago, is now executive chef). All those restaurants function perfectly well without Colicchio in any given kitchen more than a few days a month. But there’s always a nostalgic hankering, when I go to a Colicchio restaurant, for the days when I could go to Gramercy Tavern most any night of the week, ask Colicchio to do a menu for us and chat with him afterwards. Now it is again possible to have that experience, every other Tuesday. It’s not exactly that the food at Tom Tuesday Dinner is better than at any of his other restaurants. If it is better than Craft, it’s only by a hair. No, the reason Tom Tuesday Dinner is so great is because of the whole package. Dining there is like being a regular at Gramercy Tavern a decade ago, except Colicchio has continued to grow as a chef and is now at the height of his considerable powers. The Tuesday dinners take place in a small restaurant space next door to Craft. It’s not a chef’s table or private dining room. It’s a small restaurant. The kitchen is open and set up so that while Colicchio works at the range he is facing the dining room. He has a couple of assistants helping, but he appears to be handling the bulk of the order-fire-pickup sequence for each dish. The service team (and wine list) are from Craft so it’s not like you get untrained people who only wait tables on alternate Tuesdays. The whole service experience is pretty seamless. The restaurant’s small size, large service team and attention to detail are very much like what you see at Michelin two- and three-star restaurants in France, though presumably Tuesday Dinner wouldn’t be eligible for such a rating due to its infrequent services. All the menus are recorded on the Tuesday Dinner website, along with excellent photographs – much better than I could take! – of each dish. This is the page for the dinner I enjoyed a few weeks ago. All this documentation leads me to suspect that Colicchio is hoping to build the Tuesday Dinner concept into a book or TV program, but I haven’t actually asked him about it. The menu the night I was there was a great demonstration of Colicchio’s range and his development as a chef. For example, the “spice-roasted lobster cassoulet.” Back in the day, there was a spice-roasted lobster dish on the menu at Gramercy Tavern. But what I saw at Tuesday Dinner was the spice-roasted lobster all grown up, more subtly seasoned than I remember, and served in a cast-iron mini cocotte rather than just on a big white plate. The pancetta-wrapped monkfish was superb and demonstrated once again that Colicchio is the only working chef who should be licensed to prepare monkfish, but as good as it was it was the braised red cabbage (and black truffle) underneath that stole the show, reminding me of Colicchio's facility with vegetables. The crab and sea urchin fondue, pretty much unchanged from the old days, is a dish that had already reached its ultimate expression at Gramercy Tavern -- I'm glad there was the presence of mind and restraint not to alter it. I won’t enumerate every dish – Colicchio’s team has already done that for us – but overall it’s not only a great meal but a fair deal. For $150 there are seven savory courses, a plated cheese-based transitional course, a pre-dessert and a main dessert. You aren’t going to find a package on that level for less money, unless you want to forego service in a Momofuku Ko-like format. So, if you have been wondering whether it’s worth the effort and money to get to Tom Tuesday Dinner, my feeling is that it is well worth it.

That's certainly how I see things.

I'm also not a tax advisor or representative of the IRS, but I do know that it is completely routine for restaurant reviewers, food writers and the publications that hire them to deduct the full cost of meals as business expenses. I have been audited and that particular deduction was not questioned. You never know whether your auditor will deny the deduction, and if he or she does then it's probably not worth the expense of a lawsuit to fight it, but certainly you can take the full deduction in good faith. It's your business. That's a business expense. You're not a lawyer taking clients out on expense account. Your profession actually requires these meal expenditures.

Restaurants tend to have narrow profit margins, and the fancier they are the narrower their margins. A quick-service place might see 7% on average. Full-service restaurants average more like 4%. Fancy restaurants can be more like 2%, though of course some do better and worse than that. And that 2% can be on a higher gross. A restaurant like Daniel, with a lot of covers each night paying a lot of money each, can have a good revenue stream even on a small percentage of gross. Steakhouses too -- they have very high operating costs but they gross very high. Ko is on a different business model, though: unusually low operating costs (especially for labor) and probably low gross too. Although, I doubt any of this has anything to do with Ko's refusal to allow takeout. As I mentioned before, this is simply the sort of thing Ko says no to. If the demand for reservations there ever eases up, they may get more into the "customer is king" mindset. Not for now, though.

I think a lot of people don't conceive of Chinese takeout (or McDonald's) as "eating out," though. These have long been staples of the below-the-poverty-line diet. Yes, it's cheaper to cook at home, but that doesn't seem to register with a lot of people even when their economic circumstances are quite dire. In some cases it's because the working poor have little time to prepare meals, in some cases it's due to lack of education, and I suppose there are a variety of other explanations. But in the best economy if you look at who's eating a ton of McDonald's and Chinese takeout it's a demographic whose numbers are, at present, rising.

What he says in the voiceover is:

It's intriguing to me that the Asian-restaurant owners you spoke to are getting stung so badly. Asian restaurants, the inexpensive ones at least, should at least in theory be poised to pick up business during an economic downturn. I've lost count of the number of articles I've read saying that McDonald's is prospering right now because it's picking up a lot of business that more expensive restaurants are losing. Inexpensive Asian restaurants should be positioned to reap similar benefits. In a lot of towns, the fast-food chains and the Chinese restaurants are direct, within-category competitors.

The opening monologue explains that the theme of the episode is "unfinished business" -- places Bourdain has not been. Perhaps he had already been to Alinea? I suppose it's also possible that he just thought Alinea had received enough attention already and that L2O and Moto were therefore more unique coverage-wise.

In our palatial apartment, the walk from the North wing to the South wing takes about 11 minutes. On the days when the servants are off, that means each extra round trip to the kitchen takes 22 minutes. So it's just much more efficient to use a tray, especially given that my time is worth about $3,000 an hour. Okay, but even though I'm only walking about ten feet from my kitchen to the "dining room" (which is also the living room and my office), each 10-foot round trip is 20 feet of walking. If you do that, unnecessarily, several times per meal it adds up. For me at least, a lot of decisions in the kitchen have to do with eliminating little efficiencies of these sorts. If you're someone who doesn't care about this sort of thing, fine. But if you're someone who brings the garbage pail close to the cutting board, or uses a "garbage bowl" ala Rachael Ray, then the tray solution for reducing the number of trips you make to the table is exactly that sort of improvement in efficiency.

The one cautionary note I'd add here Bryan, knowing your tastes, is that the Sunday supper at Beacon is really a comfort-food meal. There are a lot of nice chefly touches on the various dishes, but it's fundamentally comfort food run through Waldy Malouf's system to make it more elegant. I've found, from reading a lot of your posts, that this may not be exactly the sort of thing that toots your horn. But if you go, I'll be interested to hear your reactions.

I was underwhelmed by the French Laundry but think Per Se currently provides the top overall dining experience in New York City. Per Se lacks French Laundry's incredible setting, but in my experience it's better in every other way -- and its view of Columbus Circle isn't half bad either (certainly, it's better than the utterly unremarkable Le Bernardin location on the ground floor of the Equitable building). I think Per Se and the now-shuttered Alain Ducasse at the Essex House provide(d) a level of dining experience fully on par with Michelin three-star restaurants in Europe. Le Bernardin and Jean Georges do not. They are superb restaurants and I love them, but they are in a different category. At least that's how I see it.

Legal education is quite a lot like that: pretty much nothing you learn in law school is directly related to what lawyers do. Rather, law school is focused on teaching students to "think like a lawyer" -- the curriculum helps develop a common set of thinking skills that every practicing lawyer is supposed to share. That common background is just that: a background.

I think, certainly, 2009 will test how elastic the business model is for many restaurants. And it will test the resourcefulness of restaurant owners. Most of a restaurant's costs are elastic in one way or another. Some are automatically elastic, for example if fewer customers come the restaurant orders less product and brings on fewer servers for fewer shifts. Some are conventionally thought of as inelastic -- rent, utilities -- but when times get really tough these things turn out to have some elasticity as well. As Felonius noted, in a major downturn some landlords have no choice but to be negotiable. I've also heard tell of some landlords accepting shares in a business in lieu of some rent. And I know of one place that is offsetting rent by renting some kitchen space to a pastry operation during the hours that space is not used. Improved efficiency and conservation can reduce utility costs, not to mention those costs are falling anyway on account of the huge recent drop in oil prices. Food costs may be slipping a bit too, and it's also possible to be more efficient and clever in use of ingredients -- I hear time and again from chefs about how they saved 20% just by butchering something more efficiently or whatever. The smartest restaurateurs are implementing multi-pronged strategies to cope with the recession. You look at someone like Waldy Malouf at Beacon, and he has been planning for this all year. He added the burger bar, the kitchen counter, the Sunday suppers with reduced wine pricing and BYO, various special events, the $25 coupons, an overall reduction in wine list pricing and probably a bunch of programs I don't know about. And he has made sure the members of his service team are his partners in getting through the recession, so they are all pulling together to accomplish whatever can be accomplished within current constraints. Who knows what will happen to Beacon over the course of a seriously long-haul recession, but certainly whatever happens Beacon will have a lot more longevity than it would were it not so well managed. Another thing worth noting is that people are still dining out. New Yorkers dine out a lot even in the worst of economic circumstances. And tourists are still coming to New York City -- those tourists typically eat 100% of their meals out. It may very well be that the same or a similar number of meals out per week continue to be consumed versus same-month a year or two ago. The bigger issue is what consumers eat for their meals: the restaurants they choose, and what they order at those restaurants. The biggest shifts I hear about anecdotally from industry people are: 1- consumers shifting down a tier in terms of fanciness and cost; and 2- consumers at a given restaurant spending less per cover especially on wine. In addition, who goes out of business and who doesn't can depend more on financing arrangements than anything else. There are some restaurants that are so heavily leveraged that, if their gross drops a few dollars a month, they all of a sudden can't service their loans and a cascade effect kicks in where they're quickly done for. There are other restaurants that have little or no debt, or are able to restructure existing debt. Those restaurants have a much better chance of survival.

I finally made it in with the family for Sunday supper at Beacon. Six of us had a terrifically enjoyable meal. I'm starting to feel a little bit like Vince Offer -- the guy from the ShamWow commercial -- in my enthusiasm for the special offerings at Beacon. But anyway, here's my pitch. Sunday supper at Beacon is not only a great meal but also an incredible bargain. Here's how it works: You start out with a series of four appetizers. Not one choice from a list of four. You get all four. First in the appetizer progression they bring everybody a small cup of soup. Today it was a warming pumpkin-apple soup with cinnamon croutons. Then they bring family-style platters of Beacon's signature wood-oven-roasted oysters with shallots, verjus and herbs. And Waldy's wild-mushroom pizza. And arugula salad with shaved Parmesan and two preparations of potatoes (fingerling potato chips, and slices of steamed fingerling potatoes). The appetizers (other than the soup) are placed in the middle of the table and you share. The wild-mushroom pizza and the oysters are constant, while the specifics of the soup and salad can change somewhat from week to week. BUT THAT'S NOT ALL: You can have more of anything you like. You want more pizza? More oysters? No problem. Just ask and they bring more. Enthusiastically. For free. You also get a very nice selection of bread and olives. I'm not sure if it's new, or I just never noticed, or if I've been eating at the burger bar so much that I forgot, but Beacon actually has quite a nice bread service, with three choices of sliced bread, all very good. I didn't ask where it was from. I'd slice it thicker, but that's just me: They also give little bowls of olives. Every week they have a "skillet special" entree as the centerpiece of the meal. This week it was stout-braised short ribs with Parmesan polenta and onion rings. It's sort of a family-style service, in that the food is placed in the middle of the table. But if four people get the skillet special, they put four skillets in the middle of the table, not one big skillet. So I guess it's family style for a family that doesn't share well. The short rib portions are huge. They basically braise whole short ribs -- not the short ones you get in the supermarket -- then remove the meat, trim away the fat and sinew, and give you a whole massive chunk of short-rib meat. The bone they put in the serving dish is just a decorative piece of the larger original bone. In the bottom of the bowl is Parmesan polenta with and a reduction of the braising liquid. It's all delicious and very satisfying. Not that the portion size really matters, given that YOU CAN HAVE SECONDS FOR FREE. Nobody at our table had seconds, but our server reported that the occasional person of tremendous appetites requests seconds and doesn't finish. Now, the skillet specials are nice and all, but what, you ask, do you do if one person in your party doesn't like them? NO PROBLEM. Anybody who doesn't want the special can choose from six other entrees: salmon, chicken, risotto, hamburger, tuna burger, or steak (the steak carries a supplement). One in our group had salmon: For dessert they bring big deconstructed ice-cream sundaes sized to share. There's house-made vanilla ice cream, wood-oven-roasted balsamic-glazed strawberries, cookies, brownies and whipped cream. I imagine they'll bring you more of that too, if you like, but the issue never came up. Of course this would not be a great deal were everything not delicious. Everything was delicious. The short-rib dish was one of the best dishes I've had at Beacon, and all the appetizers and sides were great too. It was hard to believe all that costs only $44 per person. BUT WAIT. THAT'S NOT ALL. If you act now, through the end of February, Beacon is continuing its Restaurant Week dinner pricing. So the Sunday supper is only $35 per person. And as always at Beacon kids under four eat free. That's right, we fed 5 adults and one three-year-old all the food described above for $175 (rather, that would have been the pre-tax/tip price had we not also ordered various beverages -- the real check was a bit higher than that). And, as an added incentive, Beacon is allowing BYO wine with no corkage during Sunday supper. So if you have a special bottle, bring it. On top of that, they've assembled a list of 30 wines under $30, specially priced for Sunday. We had beer, though. It just seemed right for today's special. In addition to being delicious and a great bargain, the Beacon Sunday supper experience is also enjoyable for its relaxed, casual, family atmosphere. So that you can plan your next few months of eating, here's the schedule of Sunday supper specials through May. I'm thinking March 8, March 29 and May 3, maybe. There's a little more info on the Beacon website http://beaconnyc.com/ if you navigate to menus --> a la carte and choose Sunday.

A 9" boule is not a sphere. It's usually only 3"-4" high. So depending on one's cutting technique it's no problem to cut it in such a way as to make it work with a 6" blade. I prefer a longer blade, though. Totally agree, but then again I'm the guy who doesn't use a serrated knife for bread.

If I had 4 kids I'd probably not survive the week, but with 1 kid the snack strategy here has been to bag the individual portions as part of the weekly grocery unpacking procedure. If we buy a bag of pretzel minis, we open it and bag like a dozen individual portions and then close up the rest of the bag with a clip. So our snack cabinet is just as full of portable, grabbable portions of snacks as it was before we implemented the new rules. It's just that we now create those portions ourselves. Perhaps our expenditures on mini zipper bags have gone up a couple of dollars a month but the overall long-term savings are appreciable.

I could probably save a lot of money just by eating half as much food! I've personally been in a recession for about a decade, so my spending habits have changed less than those of people who've had recent changes of circumstances. Still, I'm doing some things to cut back. One expense we were able to do away with easily and painlessly was individual packages of anything. We were buying a lot of those boxes of individual packs of pretzels, crackers, etc., for snacks for our son. Those are a total ripoff. You can get gigantic bags of the same stuff and create the individual bags yourself for so much less money. For example, Pepperidge Farm Goldfish in 100 calorie packs cost $2.99 for a box containing 5 individual packs. The total weight of the goldfish in the 5 bags together is 3.6oz. Meanwhile, a 7.2 ounce bag of goldfish costs $2.19. Considerably less than half price. I'm also doing more in terms of letting the sales guide me. In other words I'm giving up on the idea of getting what I wanted to get when I left the house, and getting used to the idea of eating what's on sale, within reason. With respect to eating out, we still spend a ridiculous percentage of our minuscule disposable income on dining out. What we've been trying to do, though, is shift to a more economical mix. We are also quite knowledgeable now about which restaurants in the city let kids eat free, and which ones have shareable food so you don't actually have to order anything extra for the kid, or have portion sizes that allow for a second meal from leftovers. The nice thing about being in the food press, though, is that a few times a month I get a really great meal for free, on account of special events, media previews, wine dinners and such. Whenever I have a meal like that I think, I may be poor but today I'm eating like a billionaire. I have not been totally disciplined about this but I am trying to give up on the notion of eating first-tier proteins so often. I'm trying instead to make a family protein schedule/rotation, where in a given week we have one day of something relatively luxurious (e.g. fresh fish, steak), then move down through the hierarchy of expense to cheaper cuts, poultry, hot dogs, canned tuna, vegetarian proteins, etc.

In my extremely limited experience with fresh water chestnuts, they've been useful in all the same dishes as canned -- they're just better. Omelette with water chestnuts and scallions. Water chestnuts wrapped in bacon and roasted. Water chestnuts added to curry chicken salad.

It's an amazing book, and I think it's their best work yet. I just wish they'd package it as an iPhone app so it would be possible to take it to the market for shopping. You get to the farmer's market, they have ramps, you key ramps into the machine and you get ten top chefs' ideas about what flavors work with ramps. Back when we had the eGullet Society Heartland Gathering this past summer, I had just received the unbound page proof for the Flavor Bible. I was thinking how great it would be to bring it with me to Chicago in order to have it during the collective marketing effort. But it was too damn big to put in my carry-on bag (unbound, it's even bigger). So that's my one knock against the Flavor Bible: it's such a fantastic book, I want to take it everywhere with me, and I can't.

(Note: a few hundred words in the middle of this piece are reprinted from my book, “Turning the Tables.” The rest are stories that have never been told, until now.) Diners and The Men Who Love Them Part I: My Frenemy, My Ally Long before the term “frenemy” entered the popular lexicon, I had a frenemy. His name was George. Of the 180 days in the New York City school year, I probably only attended school 100 days. But I ate at the Ambrosia Restaurant, the diner on First Avenue between 15th and 16th Streets, right around the corner from Stuyvesant High School, on all 100 of those days -- at least once, sometimes twice, and occasionally three times. I even went all the way downtown to eat there on many days when I skipped school. I was an underachiever when it came to academics, but not when it came to eating. George was a waiter at the Ambrosia Restaurant. I never understood why George was so hostile towards me. I was polite. I tipped appropriately. My girlfriend, Emily, always had a smile for him. But every day, it seemed that George got up out of bed ready to do battle. With me. When I would walk into the Ambrosia Restaurant, George would greet me with a disappointed grimace, a shake of the head and a sighing proclamation of “You again.” When he came to take my order, it was always “What you want?” After I gave my order he would say, “Yeah, yeah,” turn his back to me and march off. There was not a hint of irony in any of these gestures, as there might be in the studied faux gruffness of the waiters at Peter Luger or Katz's Deli. George was gruff for real. Plates were dropped at the table with percussive force. George never made a mistake with an order, and neither did the chef at Ambrosia, but I can only imagine what would have happened if I’d ever tried to send something back. After paying my check I’d always say “Thank you very much, George,” and he would say, “Yeah, yeah. Go now. Stay away.” “Why does George hate Steven so much?” was the occasional topic of conversation among my peer group. It’s not that he was loving and tender with everybody else. George was abrasive to the core, no two ways about it. But he seemed to reserve a particular, higher level of scorn for me. And yet, it was undeniable that I had a special relationship with George. He resented me but at the same time he made occasional, brief gestures that showed he cared. If I missed a day of school, he noticed and upon my return would ask, “You okay?” Once he ascertained that I had been in no danger, he would scold: “You skip school, you wind up like this!” He would spread his arms, bend at his elbows and point inward to his mustard-colored vest as if to say, “If you continue to disappoint me you will be doomed to wear a mustard-colored vest and clip-on bowtie for all eternity, serving turkey clubs to overprivileged students.” Many of the teachers and administrators from the school would dine at Ambrosia, so George always had an ear to the ground. Once in a while he would give me inside information, then promptly revert to hating me: “You getting new dean. What you want?” In my senior year of high school, with several hundred Ambrosia meals under my belt, I was out of school for six weeks with a nasty illness. My friends would bring me my homework, which I wouldn’t do. Mostly I rented video cassettes from the place on the corner – I must have watched five movies a day, and even now I remain frighteningly conversant with all movies released in 1986. One day Emily arrived bearing a card, addressed to “You” with a return address of “George.” Inside, the card said “Stay away.” Part II: A Diner for All Seasons Each major period of my life features a diner. I would never argue that the food at any of these places was objectively great. It’s not about that. The diner is a surrogate for the home, and I’ve built a home in many a diner. The Cherry Restaurant was on Columbus Avenue, a few blocks uptown from our apartment. My father and I went there every weekend morning, even though there were three diners closer to our home, because we loved to observe the breakfast griddle at the local diner. We spent countless hours over a period of years watching the griddle man, and all the while my father delivered a ceaseless stream of commentary: “You see, son,” he would say, “he does the home fries the right way: starting with baked potatoes. Now, pay attention while he does that big table’s order. He’s got to have all six dishes ready at the same time. Only the best cooks can do that every time. This man was a plasma physicist back in Russia, you know.” Those memories of dining with my father at diners set the tone for my whole attitude toward and passion for restaurants. My father taught me, by example, that dining isn’t only about food – it’s about people, about ideas, and especially about building an inventory of inside jokes. Once, a little old lady came into the Cherry Restaurant and asked for liver and onions. “Cut it up in little pieces,” she demanded. “Cut it up in little pieces,” the Russian physicist/griddle man replied, with a bow. “Cut it up in little pieces,” added my father, gratuitously, from the other end of the counter. “Cut it up in little pieces,” became an inside joke for us that lasted twenty years. Even as my father lay exhausted on his deathbed, in the final round of his decade-long fight against heart disease, I was able to elicit a smile from him by whispering, “Cut it up in little pieces.” As he did with respect to all areas of human endeavor, my father had more than his fair share of theories about restaurants. “You can’t get good service in an empty restaurant,” he used to say, since vitality is crucial to a restaurant’s performance. A literature professor, he analyzed menus with the same intellectual rigor he applied to the great books and, through such analysis, was unfailing in his ability to select the best dishes. He was fond of saying, “I’d rather have the Stage Deli name a sandwich after me than win the Nobel Prize.” Even when eating a hamburger at midnight at the American Restaurant on the corner (now the Westside Restaurant), an indulgence he permitted himself once a month, my father could be overheard quoting Shakespeare and Melville in his conversation with the fry cook. Waiters at the neighborhood diners called him “The Professor.” They would seek his advice on marital problems and ask him questions about the nature of being. My father treated the lowliest bathroom-mopper as an intellectual equal. I used to stare at him incredulously when he would try to explain Dostoyevsky to the Greek ex-con dishwasher at the American Restaurant. “This man,” my father would patiently explain to me, “may very well be a descendant of Aristotle (or Confucius, or Leonardo da Vinci). Can you and I claim such honorable ancestry?” (My father often spoke like he was reading from a book.) At holiday time, he and I would walk around the neighborhood and, with great ceremony, he would present a crisp twenty-dollar bill to his favorite waiters at each of his regular haunts. The waiters would grasp the bills as though they were the crown jewels. It wasn’t the money they were reacting to – it was the thought, the fanfare, the connection to a different era and attitude. He always called waiters by name and he always asked a million questions about their homes, their families, and their heritage. And he remembered every answer, because every answer was important to him. My father never managed to get a sandwich named after him at the Stage Deli, and he never won the Nobel Prize. Years after his death, however, a diner on Columbus Avenue still offers “The Professor Salad,” and you can still order “Professor’s Special Lobster Cantonese” at a local Chinese restaurant. And I like to think that, somewhere out there, the Russian grill man is teaching physics at a prestigious university but still remembers how to make “Eggs Professor.” Part III: The Fourth Guy The most recent diner in my life has been the Three Guys diner on 96th Street and Madison Avenue, right near Mount Sinai Hospital. I stopped in at Three Guys for breakfast once in a while, but I lived in the neighborhood for 14 years without developing a relationship with the Three Guys. It took childbirth to change all that. After giving birth to our son, PJ, my wife was hungry. But Ellen also had narrowly focused appetites. She only wanted to eat poached eggs. So I walked over to Three Guys and ordered three poached eggs, no toast, no potatoes, no nothing. They packed the eggs in a blue-and-white paper coffee cup decorated with a Parthenon motif. Three poached eggs in a cup became my standing order at Three Guys several times a day for the five days Ellen and PJ were in the hospital. I had merely to set foot in the door before the guy at the counter -- I always referred to him as "Guy Number Three" -- would say, "Three poached eggs in a cup?" During labor, Ellen had spiked a fever, so after the delivery both she and PJ had to be placed on intravenous antibiotics for several days while tests were run to determine the cause of the fever. In the end, nobody ever figured it out. It may have just been dehydration. But for those days there was a lot of stress, as anybody who has had a baby incarcerated in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit can testify. We made it through this difficult time thanks to the amazing NICU nurses and, in large part, thanks to an father-and-son team of pediatricians, incredible in their assurances. The son (though, curiously, not the assimilated father) was an observant Jew sporting a beard and a yarmulke. A couple of times each day, one or the other of them would visit us in Ellen’s room, deliver a briefing and patiently answer all our questions – then offer to answer more questions. The last day Ellen was in the hospital I brought her the usual poached eggs and, for myself, a Swiss cheese and bacon omelette with home fries, buttered toast and, in addition to the bacon in the omelette, a double side order of extra-crispy bacon. I had barely eaten in days and desperately needed an infusion of salty, fatty goodness. Not on account of inherent greatness, but due to the circumstances leading up to its consumption, that breakfast was one of the most satisfying meals I’ve ever eaten. The bacon aroma was pervasive. By the time I was four bites into my feast, the entire hospital room had filled with the scent of bacon. An orderly popped his head in: "What you got in there? It smells good!" It was at that moment that our Orthodox Jewish doctor walked in for the morning briefing. He did a double take as he ran into the aromatic wall of bacon, but tried valiantly to pretend he didn't notice. I awkwardly repositioned the paper lid to recover the round foil take-out container that held my omelette. The doctor made that day's presentation in the distracted manner of a person answering questions while trying to watch the Superbowl. It's not that he was offended; he didn't strike me as a sheltered type. But the redolence in that room that day would have been challenging even for a card-carrying Bacon of the Month Club member. Perhaps it had nothing to do with the bacon, but at the end of our talk he announced that he was discharging us a day early. After a couple of weeks at home with our newborn son, never straying farther than the stoop out front of our building, we were getting stir-crazy. So we started talking about where we might go out for a meal. It was three blocks to Three Guys, and just getting off the block seemed a nearly insurmountable obstacle. But we went, with my mother, her boyfriend and several tote bags full of baby gear in tow. Guy Number Three, behind the counter, saw Ellen and the infant PJ walk in with me, put it all together in his mind, gestured wildly at Ellen and proclaimed, "Three poached eggs in a cup!" Though he didn't eat any of the food and wasn't awake (he would later spend approximately three consecutive years awake, but at this point we were still enjoying nature's grace period and he slept a lot), it was PJ's first meal in a restaurant. Every member of the restaurant's staff came by the table to pay respects. We saved the check for PJ's scrapbook. On the way out, Guy Number Three at the counter asked, "What his name?" "PJ," we answered. He walked over to the stroller and gazed down. "PJ," he said, "We make you honorary fourth guy!” Part IV: They Don’t Call it The Cosmic Coffee Shop for Nothing Nobody is entirely clear on how I got into law school. I was reminded of this state of affairs just this past year, when I signed on to teach a writing course at the International Culinary Center (the entity that comprises the French Culinary Institute and Italian Culinary Academy). In order to teach, I needed to get licensed by the New York State Education Department Bureau of Proprietary School Supervision Licensing Unit. In New York State, you can’t just get up and teach a class. You have to go through a process that includes documenting that you’re a high-school graduate. I may or may not have graduated from high school. In addition to my poor overall attendance, I had a conflicted relationship to gym class, failing it seven times -- a record for my school and perhaps the world. In my last semester of high school, I needed to take three hours a day of gym in order to get caught up – a requirement I fulfilled by working in the gym office. They all loved me because I was the only person in the office smart enough to execute, without errors, each day’s lunch order from the local deli. It remains unclear whether or not I earned enough credits to graduate, but the University of Vermont wasn’t all that thorough about checking. So I went to college. I remained an underachiever in college, but a clever underachiever can game the college system pretty well, especially when that college allows “individually designed majors” composed entirely of classes with sympathetic professors. And I was always a whiz at standardized tests like the LSAT. So, absurdly, I wound up at Fordham Law School in New York City. Much to the surprise of everybody who had known me my entire life, I did pretty well there. I reached deep within myself and found the motivation to achieve for one year, my first year of law school, the only year that matters. But am I a high-school graduate? When the licensing procedure came up I asked my mother if she had a copy of my high-school diploma. In roughly sixty seconds she located a file of my high-school-era documents, which included report cards and forged absence notes for gym, but there was no diploma. Given that Stuyvesant High School relocated a while back, I can’t imagine ever getting to the bottom of this. My solution to the licensing puzzle was to submit my law school transcript, because even if I didn’t graduate from law school, I have a document that says I did. So I’m sticking to the argument “If I graduated from law school, I must have graduated from high school.” So far the New York State Education Department Bureau of Proprietary School Supervision Licensing Unit has gone along with it. Around the corner from Fordham Law School was a diner, the Cosmic Coffee Shop, but I didn’t frequent the place. I lived on the East Side and my round trips to Fordham, combined with my new-found work ethic, didn’t leave time for hanging out at the diner. So it was not until late in my third year of law school, when I’d already secured a job at a firm and was a firmly retrenched attendance underachiever, that my friend Larry and I decided one day to get a late lunch at the Cosmic Coffee Shop. We sat in a black-vinyl-covered booth and perused the menus. I was arriving at the decision to order a cheeseburger when a shadow fell across the table. An exasperated voice announced, “You again.” I looked up. It was George. “What you want?” I ordered a cheeseburger. Larry ordered a roast-beef sandwich. “Yeah, yeah,” said George as he stormed off to place our order. “Why does that guy hate you so much?” Larry wondered aloud. George occasionally refilled our water or cleared a plate, all without comment. At the end of the meal, when presenting our check, George asked, “Where you been?” I explained to George that I had gone to college and was now about to graduate from law school. For the first and last time, I saw a hint of a smile on George’s face. George brought our change and I commented to him that it was an interesting coincidence that I had gone to Fordham and he had taken a job at the coffee shop around the corner. “Yeah, yeah,” said George. “Go now. Stay away.” I returned to the Cosmic Coffee Shop the next day, prepared to do battle with George. He wasn’t there. I asked the manager if George was there, and his response was “George who? Nobody named George works here.” I never saw George again. Larry has no memory of the incident, nor does he remember the Cosmic Coffee Shop. From Larry when I emailed to confirm my memories: "I don't remember. Sorry. (Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry)." Keara, another close friend from law school, thinks the diner was called the Olympic, or the Flame, or maybe the Olympic Flame. There are two theories. Theory number one: George was not George’s real name. He had an unpronounceable, probably Albanian, name and George was just a nickname. At his new place of employment, he went by a different nickname. In addition, I dined at the restaurant, the name of which I've remembered incorrectly, on George’s last day of work. Theory number two: George was a guardian angel of sorts. All his studied gruffness, his apparent hatred, had really been unconditional love tempered with profound disappointment. He was always looking out for me, willing me with every fiber of his being to succeed. And once he ascertained that I was on the path towards law-school graduation, he knew his work at the Cosmic Coffee Shop was done so he dematerialized, along with the Cosmic Coffee Shop, and moved on to his next assignment. Take your pick.

I am in awe at the ability of H-Mart, and the major ethnic markets in general, to develop supply lines that see utterly beyond the reach of mainstream grocers. I don't know how they do it. I've picked up bits and pieces of information while researching books and talking to people in the food business. There's an issue of volume; there's a customer base that won't accept crap. But in the end I don't have a coherent theory of how all this is possible. Not only do they get dozens of fruits and vegetables in superior condition and quantity, but they sell them for cheap. A little while back I did an unscientific comparison between a large suburban supermarket and H-Mart. I estimated about a 40% savings, with superior produce obtained in the bargain. I'd like to repeat that experiment with more rigor, but in a head-to-head competition it's not even going to be close. All we'd learn is, more precisely, how superior H-Mart is.

On the cafe side, Chock full o'Nuts went into dormancy for a time and of late has returned in a reformulated kiosk incarnation that is pretty lame. There's one right now in Herald Square near Macy's, and there are a bunch in suburban malls and such. It's not really anything like the Chock full o'Nuts cafes of old, though they do still offer the signature sandwich. On the one hand, speaking from the point of view of nostalgia, I'm glad Chock full o'Nuts was resurrected. On the other hand, I sometimes wish they'd just let some of these brands die rather than let their memories be degraded by lame attempts to squeeze a few more dollars out of brand names.

A clean slice would not be desirable for an English muffin, and I know some people who never slice bread with a knife at all -- they rip with the hands, and they only eat baguettes and breads of that kind that can be ripped with the hands, kind of like how some people will only rip lettuce by hand. I don't feel strongly on the subject and most of the time I don't care, though with a sandwich -- especially one that is to be wrapped and taken with -- a smoother cut seems to help keep the bread from getting soggy. There may be parallels with Paul's examples of cutting herbs with Japanese knives so they stay fresh for six years or whatever. For me, the key issue with clean cuts has little to do with the bread itself, though. I just like that, with clean cuts, there is less mess. A rough cut creates a lot of crumbs.