Fat Guy

I don't remember what they were exactly because everything came so fast and furious, but both were sweet-ish items from the "dessert" phase of the progression. The first one was so hot (temperature) I almost had to be rushed to the burn unit. The stem-like thing on the pear-shaped pastry is a piece of Chinese sausage I believe.

Is this thread connected with Le Creuset's current US promotion of their Doufeu's "75th anniversary" ??? http://www.lecreuset.com/en-us/Promotions/...th-Anniversary/ ← I've wondered about the doufeu on occasion over the years but was reminded of it by an ad in this month's Saveur magazine. That ad was part of the 75th anniversary campaign. The reason the doufeu is appealing to me is that it has all-metal handles integrated into the casting of the piece. It doesn't have those phenolic resin handles that break. It doesn't have a metal handle that screws on and can become loose. Those handles on the doufeu look like they're going to last as long as the pot aka forever. They're also pretty cool looking.

A small linguistic point: the cuisine encompassing sweet-and-sour pork, sesame chicken, etc., is not really "Chinese-American." Calling something Chinese-American implies that it's something Chinese-American people eat, just as Italian-American cuisine is the cuisine of the Italian-American immigrant community. But Chinese-Americans do not eat the Americanized food that is served at the average Chinese restaurant in America. That food is an adaptation designed for mainstream American palates. It is, I believe, more properly called "American Chinese" cuisine.

That certainly seems to make sense, though I don't see anything directly on point on the website. The website simply contains a bunch of marketing claptrap: it will mean the difference between "good" and "spectacular"; the entrée taste and tenderness will leave them in awe. What-ever. Even on the stovetop, how long could it take the ice to melt. Do you have to pull the lid off every half hour, dump the water, put in new ice and repeat? Or what?

Le Creuset makes this very cool looking piece of cookware called a doufeu. You put ice on the top. What's up with that? Is there really anything to it, or is it just a pretty pot?

My understanding is that the proper way to use a chef's knife, in order to preserve the edge, is to slice -- in other words to use a lateral motion while cutting, rather than just pushing down. Me, I'm more of a just-push-down person. How about you? And is there anything to the claim that just pushing down is bad for a knife?

I confess I usually just pour it down the drain and run hot water for a while until I'm confident it's all out of the system.

For those of you who are David Chang fans, he'll be appearing at the 92nd Street Y tonight (Sunday 11 January) on a panel with Jennifer 8. Lee and me. Here's all the info: http://www.92y.org/shop/event_detail.asp?productid=T-LC5CA06

For those of you who are in New York and interested -- or more likely if you are fans of David Chang -- there's an event tonight (Sunday 11 January) at the 92nd Street Y that will cover topics in my book as well as Asian dining in general. Here's all the info: http://www.92y.org/shop/event_detail.asp?productid=T-LC5CA06

Last night they had a party in Saveur's offices to celebrate the 2009 Saveur 100. I was amazed at how many of the people there were eGullet Society members. It was a pleasure to see all of you.

In my experience 4 is the most common number of har gow, shu mai, etc., that one sees in a dim sum mini steamer. I just looked through some old photos and found this one from Evergreen Cafe in New York, where I had dim sum last year:

Oh, just a cup of coffee.

You got me. Lou Mitchell's is the other best breakfast I've ever had.

I just took a look at the weird website for the restaurants, of which there seem to be just two: one in San Diego, and one in Las Vegas. Which is odd given that it's an Indiana-themed menu. I can't explain the place. I can only say that within its category (economical, huge portions, rustic American) it's the best breakfast place I've ever been.

I just made lentil soup, using what started as the recipe from my favorite out-of-print/totally-dated soup cookbook -- "Soup, Beautiful Soup," by Felipe Rojas-Lombardi (a book I should really start a whole topic on) -- and has over the years become a completely different recipe that is pretty flexible. This time I started with finely chopped onions, celery, carrots and garlic, sauteed them in olive oil (adding the garlic later on in the process), then added a bag of cheap supermarket lentils that had been languishing in the cabinet, lots of salt and pepper and good dried oregano early on in the process, plus more salt and pepper later, a ton of fresh basil towards the end of cooking, used water as the liquid, and pureed about half the lentils with the immersion blender once the lentils were cooked through. For service, we like to stir in a teaspoon or so of mediocre fake balsamic vinegar or, for comp'ny, good Sherry vinegar in each bowl. The acidity and sweetness of these vinegars really brighten the soup.

Okay, so to wrap up the reporting phase of this topic (we can of course talk about stuff forever), here's a bit of what unfolded during the rest of that evening at the Top 100 awards gala. Here we have Martin Yan with 5 of the Miss Asias. I am working to identify each Miss Asia and match her photo to her name and bio, but so far have not pulled it off. Here I am chatting with Theresa Lin aka the Julia Child of Taiwan. Here I am flanked by, among others, Martin Yan and the Mayor of Las Vegas, Oscar Goodman. And here I am with my idol Robin Leach. The actual ceremony began with a dragon dance, after which there were many presentations that my little camera wasn't powerful enough to photograph legibly. John Curtas did get a shot of the fruit-carving display, though. There was a banquet, with interesting food, though not as good as what I had on my tour of Spring Mountain Road restaurants with John Curtas. Here's the menu. If you can't make it out, I can type up some of the dish descriptions. At one point Betty Xie noticed that the guy from the National Restaurant Association was struggling with the noodles, so she served him (and the rest of us -- I was dropping more noodles than anyone). As I left, I noticed an LG appliance display that I hadn't seen yet: Note: the website they set up for the Top 100 awards event actually has a lot of good information that goes well beyond the scope of my posts here.

We had Chinese food in Oporto. It was bizarrely bad.

Please forgive the attempt at sarcasm. I am still very much a dilemma-free omnivore.

I should clarify something, because I've had several PMs and emails along these lines: I'm not responsible for selecting the restaurants that will be included in the guidebook. The restaurants have all been selected through the Top 100 awards process, with which I am not directly involved. I'm just compiling and editing the information. If a restaurant wants to make it into the book, the process of applying for an award begins here.

Yes, I actually have a solid English-language version of that interview. For those who want to read it in the original Chinese, it should be somewhere on the Chinese Restaurant News website: http://c-r-n.com/ A lot of the source material I've been provided with started in Chinese and then got translated into English -- sometimes not particularly well. So that requires some effort to comprehend, and occasionally I have to call a restaurant up and ask some questions (for that, it would be helpful if I spoke Chinese, but I've done fine in English so far -- after all, the people who run most Chinese restaurants in North America have to deal with English-speaking customers all the time). There's also an online editing interface I use for the database that drives the book, and I'm pretty sure it was designed by a team of Chinese programmers in China. Early on, that led to some confusion that took a week or so to sort out. Luckily, I have access to a team of three Chinese Restaurant News editors in California who have excellent English (and presumably excellent Chinese, since they publish a magazine in Chinese) and they answer my emails comprehensively and quickly. Even if it's 3am, I can usually catch one of them on instant messenger. Not that anybody on the project has treated my as an outsider but, culturally, my outsider status hasn't been a problem. I think it's actually part of the point of bringing me on rather than doing the project in-house with their own bilingual team: they want the English-language voice of the book to be as natural, native and colloquial as possible. When we started the project one of the first things we talked about was making sure there would be no "foreign-sounding English" anywhere. We developed a style sheet to help avoid common Chinese-menu language mistakes like mismatched singulars and plurals, etc. So far the entries we've completed read pretty well to me.

I do think the gradualness of culinary migration tends to be overstated, however we're still talking about a difference of several orders of magnitude when we compare a single product changing in 25 years to new ingredients and techniques being available every 25 minutes.

Just a quick epilogue here: I spent the following day doing non-Asian stuff, hanging out with my friend Matt Seeber (who is now the executive chef at Craftsteak Las Vegas and was for a time an eG Forums host back in the day). We went to Mike Mills's barbecue place where among other things we tried the amazing barbecue nachos (nachos topped with the Mills baked bean recipe and several kinds of barbecued meat, plus the usual stuff), and we had a lengthy and fabulous dinner experience at Craftsteak (if you really want VIP treatment at a restaurant, forget about becoming a food writer; you need to eat there with the chef on his night off). And we had breakfast at a place called Hash House A Go Go, which is a small chain that is Matt's (and now my) favorite place for breakfast. That evening and the following day it was back to Asia for the big Top 100 event (which is chronicled here). I thought I'd mention one thing about John Curtas on this topic, though, in order to keep it in the more relevant spot. John came with me to the Top 100 black-tie gala banquet. Among other things, he tied my bow-tie (I just knew he was going to be good at that sort of thing) and acted as my personal photographer. At one point in the red-carpet arrival-and-photography process, the mayor of Las Vegas, Oscar Goodman, arrived to great fanfare. He looked around the room, walked right over and said, "John Curtas! How the hell are you?" A little while later, Robin Leach arrived, surveyed the crowd, came over and said, "John!" This earned me tremendous street cred, my photographer/valet being buddies with the mayor and Robin Leach. I had to catch the redeye after the awards gala, but John convinced me that if we timed it just right we could have about 90 minutes to spend at Encore, the new companion casino-hotel to the Wynn. We visited just about every one of the new restaurants at Encore (Bottero, Sinatra, Switch, etc.) in, well, it was longer than 90 minutes, an hour of which we spent drinking a bottle of wine at Switch and watching the decor changes that occur every 20 minutes (it's pretty amazing, and it only cost something like $40 million to engineer). We cut the timing so close that I arrived at the airport still in my tux, but I guess that sort of thing is business-as-usual in Vegas.

That must have been Q & Y Buffet. There's actually a website for the Top 100 that's pretty comprehensive, if you want to search for winners in your area. I think the Top 100 process makes a lot of sense -- more sense than, say, a pure public-opinion poll like Zagat -- but it has some limitations, for example the mystery diners are going to be dozens of different people and, as much as they try to hew to common standards, that can introduce some variance. It would be far preferable for them to send me to each of the restaurants for a personal, expert, consistent evaluation. Maybe I could get a Top 100 logo painted on our Honda Odyssey, and I could wear the tux to inspections. It was impossible to get anything done on the plane on account of screaming babies, bizarre seatmates and a dying battery. And now today is slipping away so I may not get to type up the last of my notes until much later. One piece of good news, however: while waiting for the plane I ran into one of the world's greatest event-photographers, Lia Chang, and she has promised to email me a few photos including a much better one of me with the Miss Asias. Ever since I became a vegan, the pounds have been shedding.

I'm at the airport about to get on the plane. I'll try to assemble some further notes on the plane with whatever battery and brain power I have left -- not much -- but I wanted to leave you with this photo of me at the black-tie gala on the red carpet with three of the Miss Asias . . .

As I walked down the 1,000 miles of convention-center hallways between my hotel room and the conference room where I was to give my talk, I noticed many things, two of which were these nice washer-drier sets: It seemed odd to me that there would be washers and driers in the hallway of the convention center, but you see a lot of strange stuff in Las Vegas and I was in too big a rush to bother investigating. In addition to the audience for my talk, we had a videographer, photographer, translator, sound engineer, IT team . . . if you have any interest in seeing video of the talk I'm sure that can be arranged. Mostly what I did was explain the dining guide book project to a small group of restaurateurs (I was competing against the healthy-dining panel in the other conference room, which I'm sure was more interesting than my talk -- although I did notice Miss Asia, one of them at least, checking out my talk). Here I am giving my presentation: What I'm showing here are some of the very early mock-ups of pages from the book. I've only done the editorial work on about 20 restaurants thus far because most of the effort has had to be frontloaded in furtherance of developing a system for presenting the information: what graphical icon will we use to represent Sichuan cuisine, how will we say "12:00pm" (we went with "Noon" I'm pleased to say), etc. It so happens that one of the restaurants up on the display here (New Ruan's, in Brooklyn) is owned by two of the people I posed with for photos last night. They seemed nice. Not every restaurant listed in the book gets a whole page like this -- it won't be a 1,000 page book. Every restaurant that has won a Top 100 award gets a short ten-to-a-page listing (not shown here) and has the option of upgrading to a full-page listing. I'm not sure how much that costs, but the idea is that the awards-determination process is impartial but once you've got an award you can buy a bigger entry in the book. This is basically the book's business model (though also they hope to sell copies, of course, and there is the additional hope that the existence of the book will make even more restaurants interested in competing for Top 100 honors in the first place). I'm not involved in the business side of all this -- I'm just editing the book and making a few of the project-management-type decisions. Plus I come to Vegas to give talks about it and such. I noticed a lot of the conventioneers taking photographs of the various pieces of signage -- they were photographing everything -- so I figured I'd at least photograph a sign on which I was mentioned: In the next space over from where I gave my talk was the exhibit hall. A number of companies that provide the Chinese-restaurant industry with products and services were there: a credit-card processor, an environmental consultant, the Lee Kum Kee soy sauce company and many more. Were it not for the rules against transporting liquids on aircraft I could have come home with enough soy sauce to last me until the year 2309, because the quantity of soy sauce in a sample jug intended for restaurant use is approximately equal to the amount of soy sauce I use in three centuries. There was a fruit-carving booth too. That's fruit. Really. There was also a panel discussion chaired by Robert Danhi, a chef, consultant and culinary educator who is absolutely revered in the Asian-restaurant community. Not as revered as Martin Yan, but right up there. The guy knows a lot. This particular panel was on environmental practices and the data he provided were fascinating: there are approximately 1,000,000 restaurants in America, each one uses on average 300,000 gallons of water and produces 50,000 pounds of waste a year. He and the experts on the panel made a compelling case for the financial and societal benefits of cutting those numbers in half, which they say is not terribly hard to do with current technologies and best practices. I was only able to catch a bit of the healthy-dining panel because it overlapped with my talk. The one part of it that I thought was incredibly interesting was one of the early PowerPoint slides captioned "What's 'Healthy' to Americans?" The thing people coming from Chinese backgrounds don't know is, fundamentally, what Americans think constitutes healthy food. Because, from the Chinese perspective, the considerations are completely different. American perceptions of healthfulness are all about calorie counts and steamed foods, whereas the Chinese paradigm is much more oriented towards balance and moderation. I finally found out what the washer and drier thing was about, too. Turns out, the other half of the convention space is being used by Sears for a corporate event of some sort. So there are LG appliances here and there in the convention center hallways, presumably because LG is a big brand with Sears or whatever. The thing that struck me when I saw a bunch of the Sears people line up at their snack buffet was that here we have like a thousand thin Chinese-Americans on one side of the convention center and a thousand fat non-Chinese-Americans on the other side, yet the non-Chinese-Americans think they have a better idea of what constitutes healthy eating. Seigo Katsuragawa limited edition.