Fat Guy

I imagine the reason, like many other decisions made in the Momofuku empire, just comes down to, "We really don't feel like dealing with this, and our restaurant is always full anyway so we really don't care if customers don't like it."

That would likely be a 7pm game, which would have you out around 9:30pm. Allowing for a possible longer game and other delays, you'd probably be looking at a 10:15pm reservation somewhere. The latest reservation they'll take on a Sunday night at Gramercy Tavern is 10pm or possibly a little earlier. Your best option at Gramercy Tavern might be to do a walk-in at the Tavern up front, which is open until 11pm on Sunday nights. In fact you might be best off at a variety of excellent walk-in places, such as Upstairs at Bouley or Momofuku Ssam Bar. The trouble with most of the restaurants that take reservations, especially on a Sunday night, is that even if they'll give you a 10 or 10:15 reservation you'll be the last table of the night and you'll feel the time pressure. The most generously extended hours of any top, formal, sit-down restaurant, if that's what you're after, can be found at Bouley. I've had meals at Bouley that went well past 1am and the restaurant was still quite active.

There is no US ban on raw-milk cheeses. Unpasteurized cheese is legal in the US if it has been aged 60 days under refrigeration. And while I think the regulation is overbroad, the fact of the matter is that the FDA used evidence-based cost-benefit analysis in determining those regulations. I think if you went before the WTO and tried to argue that the 60-day rule is not supported by any scientific analysis, they'd probably laugh you out of the room. There are arguments against the 60-day rule for cheese, but it's based on a defensible scientific premise. The issue with the EU ban on hormone-treated beef is that when the WTO heard the case the EU didn't even try to submit any scientific evidence. Even a decade later, there just isn't a good study to put forward. People yell and scream and get very emotional about hormones, but when it comes to evidence there is little or none, especially with respect to the endogenous hormones that are in meat anyway.

Mechanically speaking, if you want to make tough meat tender, you can grind it, slice it thin across the grain, dice it small or pound it thin. So if you have a tough piece of strip loin, which is not going to do well with braising (another approach for tenderizing tough meat), you should probably do something that utilizes one of the mechanical approaches. (You can also use a tenderizing marinade, but I've had limited luck with marinades as tenderizers.) Or, if you have a lot of product, try each approach. Me, I'd probably slice it thin and stir fry it. That's what I did last time I had tough beef in the freezer. Plus, if it's already frozen, you can defrost it only part way before slicing. For those of us with mediocre knife skills and mediocre knives, semi-frozen meat is much easier to slice very thin.

I've had mixed experiences at Le Bernardin, where the service tends to be very professional but perhaps not necessarily all that warm. In addition, a while back my mother-in-law wrote a letter of complaint after a mediocre lunch and got such a condescending letter back from Eric Ripert that I was tempted to publish it. This leads me to think that at the top levels there are some miscues being delivered to the service culture at Le Bernardin. In any event, I think if you pick any highly regarded restaurant you will find at least some accounts of great service and some accounts of awful service. A restaurant is a complex machine and, for whatever reason, it can grind to a halt on any given night. I have had disappointing service experiences at Taillevent, and at Gramercy Tavern. It happens. And it's unfortunate, because if I'd had my bad service experience at Gramercy Tavern on my first visit I'd be irreparably convinced that the service there is weak. However, with the perspective of dozens of great meals over a period of many years, I was able to say, oh well, they had a bad night, life goes on. In addition, even at restaurants where the service is overall weak, a great server -- or a great server-customer rapport -- can generate a positive service experience even in the midst of mediocrity. Given that service is such a complex, organic creature, it all comes down to the system that's in place. You can't guarantee perfection every time. What you can do is put in place a system that produces as much perfection as possible as often as possible. That's where I think Danny Meyer is so brilliant as a restaurateur: he attacks the service issue on all fronts by hiring the best people at every level, insisting on the most rigorous training programs and generally fostering an ethos of enlightened, hospitable customer service. The system he has in place at all the restaurants he oversees is one that is highly adaptable. Even when there's a breakdown, there are multiple layers of redundancy in place and the team is always poised to "write a great last chapter." (I think I'm still getting emails about my one mediocre service experience at Gramercy a hundred years ago.) Contrast that with an operation like the Bastianich/Batali group of restaurants. On a good day, you can have a great service experience at Babbo. Indeed, when Babbo first opened it poached several of Gramercy Tavern's best servers including the late, great James Danos. And on a good day, if you dined at Babbo and you had Simone and James working your table, and they were in a good mood, you could have an exceptional time. But Babbo, unlike Gramercy Tavern, does not have a strong system in place. So as a percentage, you will hear about many, many more negative service experiences at Babbo than at Gramercy Tavern. And the recovery from those incidents will be inferior. I mean, if you have a service problem at a Bastianich/Batali restaurant, and you try to address it with a manager, it's like trying to penetrate some Kafkaesque bureaucracy where the first instinct is to close ranks not fix problems. It just doesn't feel like anybody at the top is transmitting the "customer is king" mantra down the chain of command.

Bowen's Island is the Charleston oyster experience. The fantasy you have about eating barbecue in South Carolina? Bowen's Island is the oyster realization of that fantasy. There is no actual barbecue realization of that fantasy in Charleston proper. http://www.bowensislandrestaurant.com/

Roquefort right now runs about $30-$40 a pound, depending on the Roquefort. I think Papillon at Zabar's is $35 at the moment. However, those prices do not reflect the new duty, which does not go into effect until March. Part of the US strategy is the hope that the threat of the new duties will create the incentive for a negotiated settlement, although that could also backfire.

My quick take on the matter: if you only have the first edition, it's worth upgrading if only because the second edition is so much more comprehensive (especially on account of the addition of pasta sauces) than the first. The third edition is more modern and better laid out than the second, but I wouldn't call it an essential upgrade. Still, if you're a total sauce freak you should have the latest. The language from the publisher is accurate: Whether or not it was good to dispense with the French names is an open question. The new charts are a nice touch. The bibliography and purveyors appendices might be helpful to some. The photography is, in my opinion, nice but inessential.

There are a lot of lists around the web that prioritize organic need, for example this one. Whether they are credible is an open question, especially given that there's little if any evidence that organic products are better for you at all. That being said, I do buy some organic products. I'm probably wasting my money, but I buy organic eggs and milk, and most of the meat I buy is "naturally raised" or some variant. Fruits and vegetables, I don't bother paying double for inferior organic merchandise.

It seems to me it really comes down to a question of process. France claims there are health risks from hormone-treated beef. The US claims these risks are not supported by science. Because both France and the US operate under trade agreements including WTO jurisdiction, the ban would be justified if based on science and not justified if not scientifically based. To take another example, let's say France decided that some US-grown product -- say, Florida oranges -- cannot be imported on the grounds that little spirits living in the oranges might escape in France and frighten children. Would the US be justified in retaliating against that ban? Of course -- every rational person would say it's fair to retaliate in some way, because the ban is clearly not scientifically justified. So who gets to decide? I'm not an expert on trade agreements, but as I understand it these disputes are taken before the WTO. The last time I read anything about this, the WTO had ruled that there is no scientific basis for the ban on hormone-treated beef. Now, of course, if French consumers don't want to buy the beef then that's their choice. But to ban it from entering the country was not considered justifiable by the WTO, as far as I know. In a system governed by reciprocal arrangements, there has to be some standard. Otherwise either party can raise any justification for banning a product, and there will be no way to challenge it. Such a system, absent extreme good faith, will eventually collapse.

"My name is Bill and I'll be your server this evening" is, as I understand it, the cornerstone of the California school of New American service. Just as California cuisine rejects a lot of the formality of European (especially French) cuisine, California service is very egalitarian and casual. It incorporates the notion that servers are not servants. Both the food and service out of California have been very influential in the rest of the US over the past few decades.

Had dinner at my mother's place tonight. Perhaps the greatest benefit of trays that I observed tonight came after the meal, when clearing. It was possible to load up a couple of trays with everything that needed to be cleared from a fairly large dinner for five people, and make one trip (two of us making the trip) to the kitchen.

Service is an incredibly complex issue, so it might make sense to parse the subject a bit. One issue is what I would call quantity of service. There are some things that as a practical matter are difficult if not impossible to accomplish without a certain number of servers per customer and a multi-tiered service hierarchy. Cheese service, any kind of gueridon service, decanting of wine, etc. All other things being equal, the restaurant with the most generous server:customer ratio is going to be the top performer. Then there is style of service. There are a number of schools of service that I think are equally valid. The Danny Meyer/Four Seasons school is probably the most appealing to a broad base of diners, and can offer a strong personal connection that is right for contemporary American tastes. There's a California-ish school of service that is a sibling of this egalitarian, casual-but-professional approach and, indeed, a large number of the better modern American restaurants offer service in this style. The Michelin three-star European school of service is quite different, but equally wonderful when properly implemented. The classically oriented French restaurants in America have their own hybrid of European and New World service that is probably my least favorite approach, but can also be effective when implemented well. But a lot of this comes down to personal preference: I know people who can't stand the informality of Danny Meyer restaurants, and who would much rather be at an Old New York French place. Then there are the various informal service styles of the restaurants with less quantity of service than the three- and four-star average. These styles of service are usually built around a single server per table, with perhaps some support from runners, bussers and a small management team. If that server happens to be superb and not overtaxed, magic can still happen. But as a system it is less reliable than the higher-end team approaches. And of course there's quality of service, loosely defined as how well a given restaurant's service staff lives up to the system that's in place. (The notion of consistency is front and center here.)

The Momofukus are, as you and I (and Bruni) believe, a challenge to the old paradigm. They're serving haute cuisine on bar stools, among other things. It's very hard to reconcile the formalistic implications of the star system with what the Momofukus are doing on the culinary side. But restaurants like Sripraphai are in no way a challenge to the old paradigm. They are category-leading places that deserve praise but not necessarily stars. I think it's hard for people today to view McDonald's from the perspective of the early 1970s, when it was seen as innovative and interesting -- not to mention much, much better cuisine-wise than it is today. I think a star was a mistake -- just as a star today for Shake Shack or City Burger would be a mistake -- but I can relate to why McDonald's got one for sheer forward-thinking inventiveness. If you go way back there are all sorts of star awards that seem weird in retrospect, but usually in the moment there were relatively defensible reasons for them.

It's more efficient in that way too! I definitely drop more stuff my way than my mother drops her way, but that may be an apples-and-oranges comparison. I do find, however, that without a tray I try to carry too much stuff, which is the root of the dropping problem in my home (which is separate from the inefficiency problem). Yet as much as I carry it's not as efficient as even a half-full tray.

Counting you as half-stupid, Chris.

When my mother brings stuff out from the kitchen, she brings it on plastic cafeteria trays. These trays allow her to bring out a great quantity of food, beverage and tableware in a single trip. Me, I was just preparing lunch and made a separate trip with each two glasses of water etc. I'm an idiot. Do you use trays? In other words, are you smart like my mother or stupid like me?

Right, Ruth Reichl gave two stars to New York Noodle Town, so the star system's coherence has been falling apart for a while. Bruni is simply accelerating its pace with another round of self-conscious populism. By trappings I mean everything from the presentation of food on the plate, to beverage programs, to service, to decor, to ambiance. The star system makes the most sense as a shorthand system for communication when even a one-star restaurant has a certain minimum level of those trappings. If it doesn't, it's nothing against the restaurant, but it should be evaluated differently. It's what $25 and Under is for (as well as Dining Briefs).

The thing is, there are 20,000 restaurants (so Zagat says) in New York City, with just 50 or so opportunities per year for one restaurant to receive even one star. Even assuming stars have a 10-year shelf life, that leaves 19,500 restaurants without stars. In other words, about 98% of restaurants in New York City do not have stars. When you have such a system, a single star doesn't just mean "good." It means your restaurant is part of the very cream of the crop, and within that is in the lower layer of the cream of the crop (sort of like me at Stuyvesant High School). It's somewhat (though not entirely) similar to being listed in the Michelin guide. Just being listed, even with zero stars, is a vote of confidence. The Times is a little different because some reviews are set aside for slapdowns and others are given with the "poor" or another sucky rating -- but rarely. In other words, there was a time when neither Sripraphai nor Szechuan Gourmet would have been likely to be reviewed at all. Instead, they would have been treated in the $25 and Under column, which was specifically designed for inexpensive but excellent restaurants with great food but not necessarily much else. Bruni has steadily encroached on $25 and Under territory, and now gives stars to a few restaurants each year that wouldn't have even been reviewed in the past.

The recent opening of Lansky's deli on Columbus Avenue has not received a whole lot of play, but it's noteworthy as a possible marker of a reversal in a trend. The decline of the Jewish deli occurred unchecked for most of the latter part of the 20th Century. But in the past few years there seems to have been a small countervailing trend. In the past year we've seen the new Second Avenue Deli and a total newcomer: Lansky's. Artie's Deli on Broadway and Pastrami Queen may also have been early indicators of a small shift back in the deli's favor. I'm particularly fond of Lansky's, and not just because it's so convenient to my mother's apartment (and not just because it's such a relief to see the talented but unfortunate David Ruggerio involved in something worthwhile). It is a faithful, very good Jewish deli -- not kosher, but mostly kosher-style-ish. The menu is broad-ranging and everything I've tried has conformed to a high standard. For a restaurant like this to spring up out of nowhere is a great thing for lovers of deli.

I think the rating would have been different were it not for several factors, the inertia of the existing four-star rating being just one of them. The looming presence of Daniel Boulud is probably an even bigger factor. On top of that, there's the quota mentality and the overcompensation for not actually being fond of fine dining.

Moderator's Note: This topic is a continuation of the Noodle Bar 2004 - 2009 topic, which may be found by clicking here. I've now been to Noodle Bar twice since the late-summer back-kitchen hiatus. Just to catch up on what happened, as best as I can piece things together, David Chang was not satisfied with the operation of the back kitchen at Noodle Bar -- that's the part of the kitchen from which most of the specials and more elaborate plated dishes emanate, as opposed to the buns, wings and such -- so he shut it down in order to revamp, retrain, etc. Over the past few months the back kitchen has been increasing its load, first with the new blackboard concept and now with a $45 prix-fixe menu (three courses plus dessert). There have also been some other changes, such as the switch to jars of pickles. I wish I could say I was happy with the changes. I'm not. Noodle Bar remains a terrific restaurant, and perhaps over the course of many visits I'll be convinced that the new system provides for more even performance, but there's pretty much nothing about the new system that I prefer to the old. The pickles in a jar are a major step down from the plated presentation. I can understand the efficiency of serving jars of mixed pickles rather than going to all that trouble to plate several different kinds of pickles over and over again throughout the service. But that's the whole point of the garde manger in a restaurant: to plate cold food to order. The pickles in a jar are less vibrant, the flavors less (nay, barely) distinct, and the texture not sufficiently crunchy. The food on the tasting menu is excellent -- it is the Noodle Bar version of Ssam Bar food -- but several of the best dishes in the house are available only in the $45 tasting menu format. So if you want the hamachi or the oxtail you have no choice but to order the $45 menu, which includes three savory courses plus ice cream. To me, locking customers into that format is exactly the antithesis of the Momofuku style. I suppose there's some way in which it makes prep, inventory and expediting easier, but I don't care. From a consumer perspective, it's far preferable to be able to order the best dishes a la carte. And when you look at the menu minus the tasting menu, the offerings are sparse. For its part, the blackboard just seems silly. The times I've done the comparison, it has simply been a restatement of the printed menu. If that is the case, then it's nothing more than a gimmick. This all makes me sad because I felt there was a moment, basically for the middle quarters of 2008, when Noodle Bar was outperforming Ssam Bar on both the food and service sides. Noodle Bar is still excellent, but it has lost a bit of its appeal for me. The center of gravity of my Momofuku preferences has for the time being shifted back to Ssam Bar.

Last night we were eating lentil soup and, given my heightened awareness of acidity these days, I put three vinegars out on the table. Our three-year-old son started asking questions so I let him taste all three straight. He then asked if we had any more vinegars, so I pulled a few more out of the cabinet. At some point, I thought it might be an interesting exercise for me to taste them as well. The six I tried in series were: - Red wine vinegar - Upper-middle-tier balsamic-style vinegar - Japanese seasoned rice vinegar (aka sushi vinegar) - Apple cider vinegar - Chinese black vinegar - Lower-tier balsamic-style vinegar I regret not adding Sherry vinegar, real balsamico or plain white vinegar to the tasting. I'm out of Sherry vinegar and didn't think to go into the other cabinet where I now also see some Riesling vinegar. But anyway, what I learned is that, from an acidity standpoint, the red-wine vinegar tasted the most acidic, followed closely by the apple-cider vinegar. That was my perception at least. The two balsamics were much less acidic, with the cheaper one tasting far more acidic than the fancier one. The Chinese vinegar seemed about on par with the cheap balsamic. The Japanese vinegar, because it's intended for sushi rice, probably shouldn't have been in the tasting at all and, taken straight, was difficult to evaluate on account of all the seasoning. Trying them in soup, what seemed to work best in terms of bringing flavor out was a little red-wine vinegar plus a little cheap balsamic. One contributed mostly acidity, the other that musty sweetness.

The trouble is that Daniel the restaurant has never been the realization of Daniel the chef's talents. There's little question that Daniel Boulud is one of the most talented French chefs in the world. Anybody in that small club will tell you that Daniel Boulud is a core member. If you've ever been lucky enough to be the focus of the kitchen's quota of excellence for a given evening, you know there's great potential there. But the chef has not overall, in my experience, been able to bring the restaurant up to his level of talent -- not for the average customer on a busy night, at least. It's very hit-or-miss depending on a lot of factors, not least of which is just plain randomness. There are four-star dishes at Daniel, and the restaurant has the ability to serve four-star meals, but it doesn't ultimately operate as a four-star restaurant.

That's all I would have had room for if I undertook that eating binge! Musta been one helluva great cuppa joe. ← I just realized I neglected to circle back around to this query. One of the signature items at Hash House A Go Go is what they call a "scramble." I like it because it avoids the problem of an American-style diner omelette, namely that when you make a huge omelette stuffed with lots of stuff you wind up overcooking the heck out of the eggs. With a scramble they take all the fillings that would normally go into an omelette and they just fold them into scrambled eggs. It's great. We tried a couple of them but by far the best one consisted of eggs, thick-cut crispy chunks of bacon, avocado, onion and Swiss cheese. The scrambles also come with a choice of excellent mashed potatoes or home fries, plus a pretty good biscuit.