Fat Guy

That's a really significant portion of ravioli.

If anything, in my opinion Daniel has improved over the years. At the beginning, Daniel Boulud was a good chef but not a good restaurateur. Over the years he has done a better job on the restaurateur side of the equation. But no iteration of Daniel has ever, in my opinion, overcome its factory flaws.

I would, personally, love a version of Daniel without Daniel's factory flaws. I wish the city had a restaurant like that. But Daniel is not that restaurant. It has many of the ingredients, but they don't come together.

Every restaurant has levels of service, but most modern high-end restaurants offer that service within a fairly narrow band. In particular, they all strive mightily to ensure a very respectable baseline for all customers. Unless there is some sort of disaster, the average customer at Per Se gets a phenomenally good service experience. The VIP customer gets various upgrades but not to the extent that the average customer should be upset about it. That's true at most restaurants that operate with contemporary service principles. Daniel does not operate that way. It's restaurants like Daniel and Le Cirque, even though they are outliers, that provide the support for the whole theory of anonymous restaurant reviewing. The range of service experiences I've had at Daniel is inexcusable. It feels to me like a cynical system of service whereby there's a fixed amount of service to go around and, on a busy night, the people at the bottom of the hierarchy don't get enough of it to have great dinner experiences. Were it possible for a reviewer of Bruni's stature to be anonymous at Daniel, that might be a useful tool. Of course, it is not possible, so it's academic.

Another thing that's useful is to get a saucepan with tapered sides and perhaps even a pouring spout. Every little bit helps.

I have decided that I will not be refrigerating my next jar of peanut butter.

← It's the key, yet I find his claim very difficult to swallow.

I've had weak service at various Boulud restaurants, including an incident at the old Daniel where we were inexcusably rushed through out meal. The Boulud restaurants have always been aggressive about table turns, but this particular experience was off the charts. Were I not in the "business" of writing about food, I probably would never have gone back to a Boulud restaurant after that. In any event, in all my meals at Boulud restaurants -- surely in excess of 20, including half a dozen or more at Daniel -- I have never experienced the extreme of a rude maitre d', but at the same time I have never experienced the level of service Bruni describes:

Well, these "best" claims always need to be qualified. Certainly, of all the Thai restaurants I've been to, Lotus served the most elegant, interesting, delicious food. I can't really think of an equivalent haute-rustic Thai restaurant that I've been to. At the same time, you can't really compare it to a place like Sripraphai in New York or the good places in Chicago, which tend towards the pure rustic. Those restaurants are delicious in their own rights, but I think Lotus is doing something beyond that.

It sounds like you're sensitive to torque, in other words the stress of twisting motions. If that is the case, my feeling is that what you want are wide, flat handles. These give a really good grip so that when you have to tilt the pot to pour something out you experience the least possible strain. (You might also want to use two hands for your pouring motions.) Ironically, when it comes to handles, my favorite handle shapes tend to be on some of the cheapest saucepans where, essentially, they just attach a flat piece of metal. For example: http://www.bigtray.com/productdetails.asp?...=sauce+pan&rn=1

On the subject of Bruni again for a moment, it seems to me that today's four-star review of Daniel represents a reversal of the only significant theme running through Bruni's opus. Bruni's reviews have stood, on many occasions, for the proposition that only the food matters. Momofuku Ko, where you sit on stools at a counter and get served by sometimes-grumpy line cooks, gets three stars and would have received four were it not for some inconsistency and missteps in the food. Sripraphai and Szechuan Gourmet get two stars even though they lack any two-star or even one-star trappings. He has argued against form over substance with so many reviews. When he downgraded Alain Ducasse at the Essex House from four stars to three, he cited exactly the problems that he acknowledges at Daniel. From the Ducasse review: "But beneath an unfettered pageant is an uneven performance, a wow that wavers, a spell less binding than a restaurant with this much vanity can possibly wish it to be." From the Daniel review: "it yields fewer transcendent moments than its four-star brethren and falls prey to more inconsistency" and "which make Daniel’s clunker rate — slightly higher than a restaurant as ambitious as this one’s should be — puzzling." I guess Bruni feels that Daniel is a better restaurant than Ducasse was, or at least that it does a better job pretending to be a four-star restaurant.

Maybe the space at Daniel is nicer, or less nice, than at Eleven Madison Park. But that is exactly the sort of form-over-substance distinction that Frank Bruni has devoted his entire oeuvre to rejecting. So it is bizarre for him of all people to all of a sudden say, well, we all know the food at Daniel falls short of the four-star standard but the nice decor and (he is mistaken in this, I think) great service, plus the use of luxury ingredients, holds it in the four-star category. I happen to think there is room for form as a tool in rating restaurants, but Frank Bruni supposedly does not.

If it's okay for a restaurant to do hundreds of covers, have noteworthy inconsistency and a bunch of clunkers on the menu, then, using that standard, I can think of quite a few restaurants where I think the food is hands-down better than at Daniel. A good example of a restaurant in the "factory" genre that I think does a better job than Daniel, both with food and service, is Gramercy Tavern. The only reasons I wouldn't give four stars to Gramercy Tavern are scale and consistency. If we take those factors off the table, I don't see why Mike Anthony's food isn't four-star. Adour, the Modern, even (ironically) Cafe Boulud would easily outrank Daniel on my list. Fundamentally, though, even if one thinks Daniel is better than all three-star restaurants, it is still the best three-star restaurant and not the worst four-star restaurant. You don't get to be a four-star restaurant just because there's a five-restaurant quota and they need to fill the seat. It's not the Supreme Court. You get to be a four-star restaurant by serving four-star food consistently across the range of your menu and over the course of many meals. Daniel quite simply does not do that.

May we turn for a moment to Moira Hodgson, the reviewer for the New York Observer? I am beginning to suspect that she is the most competent New York restaurant critic left standing (after the loss of the New York Sun and Paul Adams). Which raises a question: does anybody besides me and the people who put together the links at Eater actually read her reviews? I came across, probably on Eater but maybe on one of the other blogs that's the same as Eater, a link to an excerpt from Moira Hodgson's memoir. It's enjoyable reading.

My roast chicken is not a good as the rotisserie chicken from even the lowliest supermarket. Next?

. . . eggs were taboo? Just a few years ago, you couldn't find an egg dish in an American fine-dining restaurant. Now, it seems that no menu is complete without one. Next?

The review spends a lot of time apologizing for giving Daniel four stars. Comments like "it yields fewer transcendent moments than its four-star brethren and falls prey to more inconsistency" and ". . . which make Daniel’s clunker rate — slightly higher than a restaurant as ambitious as this one’s should be — puzzling" are exactly the reasons a restaurant should get three stars instead of four. The rest of the argument Bruni makes, though he takes great pains to make it, is unpersuasive in light of those condemnations (which also reflect my experience in many meals at Daniel over the years).

New York Cake and Baking Distributors 56 West 22nd Street (near 6th Ave.) 212 675 2253 is supposed to be the place, at least that's what a bunch of pastry chefs have told me over the years.

I did a double take when I saw that in the Saveur 100, especially the bit about T-Fal. The text of the T-Fal recommendation says, "Unlike Teflon-coated pans, it has a hard surface, made of a plastic-based resin called PTFE, that is virtually scratchproof and stands up to metal utensils." But my understanding is that Teflon is PTFE. My problem with T-Fal pans is that they're too thin. Perhaps there's a line of them that I haven't seen yet, though. With respect to Anolon, I think it's pretty good stuff. I even like the entry-level Anolon (I bought some for my mother and it's quite similar to Calphalon), but the fancy "ultra clad" Anolon should be functionally similar to All Clad. I wouldn't use it, because it doesn't have all-metal handles and I like to be able to put my cookware under the broiler and in the oven at any temperature without worrying. But it's good enough.

Maybe I'll try adding citric acid to a bowl of soup one day soon.

I've been thinking about acidity lately, and about how so many cooks -- both professional and non-professional -- fail to consider acidity when cooking. If you flip through standard cookbooks, you see very few acid components in the recipes. Yet acidity is a key component of many dishes, if you want them to taste their best. In many cases, acidity can be the difference between a good dish and a great one. The other day, for example, I made some lentils to accompany braised short ribs. The lentils were good, don't get me wrong. They were cooked with the strained, defatted braising liquid from the short ribs, and they had some of the short-rib meat diced up and mixed in with the lentils. But my friend, after tasting from the pot, noted, "It could use a little acidity." A splash of vinegar and it was a substantially better dish. So, I was hoping we could start a discussion of acidity.

I would not be good at recognizing critics. I was in a restaurant a few weeks ago and walked past Kathleen Turner on the way in, on the way to the rest rooms, on the way back from the rest rooms and on the way out. Didn't notice, until someone told me. I lived on the same block as Phoebe Cates for years, saw her many times, chatted, she played with our puppy, and didn't figure out who she was until a doorman at a nearby building pointed it out. And really, if you're in Generation X as I am, you should be able to pick Phoebe Cates out of a crowd easily. The point being, even though all the major critics have been photographed, and even though a lot of restaurateurs, chefs, managers and servers have all the information they need to recognize them, sometimes they just don't.

People know what all the major critics look like. About a year and a half ago, there was a big photo of Jonathan Gold in LA Weekly -- the paper he writes for! You can Google Frank Bruni and find photos of him in a couple of weight classes. In this day and age, it's pretty hard to avoid being photographed. The average person is photographed or filmed, depending on who you ask, somewhere between 15 and 300 times a day, including by restaurant security cameras. In a multimedia world, most journalists that rise to the level of major newspaper critic have left behind a trail of television appearances. Even if you're the head of an international arms-dealing ring, you don't bother to avoid being photographed. If it's really a priority for a given restaurateur, it's possible to focus the staff on identifying the major critics. For some, it is. For others, it isn't. Even with all the photographic collateral a critic like Frank Bruni makes it into a few places without being recognized, especially on a first visit. It was pretty clear from reading the recent Critic's Notebook on chef's tables that Bruni was not recognized at Beacon -- and that's a situation where the chef-owner was serving Bruni face-to-face. There's one critic, Danyelle Freeman, whose photo is published next to her reviews, just like other columnists at that paper. Yet my understanding is that she is not always recognized when she goes out. So you never know. But realistically, despite the over-emphasis placed on anonymity by critics, papers and the public, anonymity is at best one of many tools in the reviewer's toolkit. It is not the be-all-end-all of criticism. It better not be, given how often reviewers are recognized.

I'm sure that string-like thing was edible, but I didn't eat it. It really seemed like a piece of string, though it surely wasn't.

I've developed a real fondness for Meyer lemons (yes, I know I'm several years behind on this culinary trend) and am trying to use them in cocktails. There are some limitations here, though, in that my wife is not a fan of the juniper. So, any ideas? We recently tried, thanks to a suggestion from Dave the Cook, a Meyer lemon-ized version of Gary Regan's "Missing Link" cocktail: Cane New Orleans rum, Cointreau and Meyer lemon. I thought it was excellent. Also on the agenda to try is a Meyer lemon sidecar, which would be essentially the same as above, except with Cognac instead of rum. I'm concerned, however, that this will be too bitter and spirituous for my wife's tastes. Any additional ideas for great Meyer lemon cocktails?