Fat Guy

Neither does flash.

There are some things coming up that seem attractive. First, there's an event with Grant Achatz for the release of the Alinea book. Tickets are very limited, and will go on sale this Wednesday morning for $225 each. The link, when the page goes live, will be: http://www.astorcenternyc.com/class-the-alinea-experience.ac Admission includes a tasting of five signature Alinea bites, a signed copy of the new book, an open bar of Laurent-Perrier's premiere Grand Siècle Champagne and of course Achatz will be there. Also, they're launching a brown-bag-lunch career series next month. These are inexpensive industry-focused daytime panels. The first four panels will be mixologists, sommeliers/beverage directors, chefs' personal assistants, and TV/radio careers. You can start here: http://www.astorcenternyc.com/class-starch...yond-the-bar.ac

Was there some proto bar where all three of them worked, or are those three separate roots?

From the Yasuda website: "Yasuda is renowned as a tuna specialist—he typically offers seven or eight options for tuna" http://sushiyasuda.com/restaurant.html

I've never been to or heard of Oishi 2 so I have no frame of reference there, but last time I did a tuna tasting at Yasuda he had two subcategories of otoro: shimofuri and dandara. He also had chu-toro. He didn't have anything called just "toro." He also had non-toro tuna from various places on the tuna's body. I believe in all there were seven tuna selections.

Depending how you define easy walking distance, I think the best restaurant within it may be Anthos. In the do-able-at-$50-for-dinner category, though, Esca is the one place where that might arguably be possible with very careful ordering. Here's an Esca menu: http://www.esca-nyc.com/ In addition to Nathan's point, I'd say that Esca is nothing like the normal expectation of Italian. It's really a minimalist seafood restaurant. While I agree with the claims above that NYC Mexican is generally weak, I think Toloache is superb. Especially for someone coming from a city that's not in Texas or California or the Southwest, I think it's more than worthwhile.

There are as many ways to screw up a .pdf as there are to screw up anything else. But in the end a .pdf menu based on a letter- or legal-size printed menu should look good on a wide range of screens or just require a little vertical scrolling on smaller screens. If the physical menu is some weird shape, it may require both vertical and horizontal scrolling when viewed at full size. In that case it would probably make the most sense to do a separate online version but that may not be in most restaurants' budgets. I'd hardly call the Le Bec Fin presentation stylish. I think it's clumsy. I'd much prefer a .pdf. The Alinea site is very nice, but design is a major priority at Alinea -- most restaurants don't have a team like Alinea does, so they just put their menu .pdfs online and I think that's a good thing. Even on the Alinea site, if you compare the graphical menus to the .pdf menus the .pdf menus are far nicer. So if I had to choose one, it would be the .pdf. I almost never have that problem and certainly have no more problems with .pdf than with most other types of current-generation web technology. Unless we want every website's design to be permanently frozen in the 1990s, we need to embrace new technologies. The .pdf format isn't even new, but I think it's right for our time.

The advantage of .pdf menus -- and of .pdf documents in general -- is that they preserve the original design. So a .pdf menu can look the same as the menu you'd be given in the restaurant. This is important because a menu is not just about the text it bears but also the aesthetic it projects. Given all the different browsers and platforms out there, .pdf is the best way to ensure consistency in this regard. (Flash is also viable but more difficult to implement -- it requires a whole second set of designs, whereas with .pdf you design the menu once and use it both in the restaurant and online -- and on balance Flash is probably no less annoying.) Restaurants are hardly the only businesses to use .pdf for sharing core documents online. Go to most any corporate website and look for the annual report; it will typically be in .pdf format.

Sabra hummus really raised the bar for packaged hummus in the US, bringing it to near-Mideast levels. Three thoughts on Sabra: 1 - Like Shel, I have reservations about the ingredients. I wish they'd make a less junked-up variant -- I'd pay an extra dollar. 2 - If you take it out, let it come up to room temp, spread on a plate, and garnish with olive oil and paprika, it tastes even better than straight from the container. 3 - The only flavor reason to make your own now is if you're planning to eat it warm. Sabra still can't beat warm homemade hummus. But once you refrigerate your homemade hummus, it's not going to be as good as Sabra.

If you like pasta, Becco is a great deal. Szechuan Gourmet has had a lot of good buzz in these parts. Esca is at or beyond the outer limit of that budget but is excellent.

For what it's worth, I think Yasuda's tuna is awesome. One of my favorite gastronomic experiences in the city is to start a meal at Yasuda by sampling the full range of his tuna and yellowtail offerings as sashimi. He usually has 6 or 7 gradations of tuna and 4 or so of yellowtail. All have been excellent when I've had them.

I moved my dining-room table four inches to the left over the weekend. Maybe I can get a cryptic, uninformative blurb in "Off the Menu" too.

Right, the only way you'll come near a griddle omelet is if you do 2 eggs in a 12" skillet. Otherwise you're making a different sort of omelet. You can do a French omelet with near-constant motion and limited or no fillings. Or if you do, say, 3 eggs and lots of fillings in a 10" skillet, the depth becomes such that you're making more of a borderline frittata -- frittomelet, as it were. A lot of hotel restaurants do them this way.

How many eggs (of what size) are you using and how much stuff are you adding?

I like most of Melissa Clark's pieces, especially when she does restaurant coverage. Outside of the pages of the Times, she's also a talented book-author. I guess I don't quite follow the basis of the complaint. The pieces in the dining section I can't stand are the "Feed Me" essays by Alex Witchel. They're self-indulgent and often wrong-headed. They have no place in a serious newspaper (they're not even funny).

For a while now they've had two teams. The lunch brings it up to ten services total so each team can have a five-shift week. Either Peter Serpico or Sam Gelman (or in the case of our lunch both plus Chang) is, I believe, always there. I've not noticed any variation, and I've been a few times when Serpico wasn't there but Gelman was running the show.

Once you're seated, it would be insulting to ask for a change. However, when reserving you can certainly request sushi chef number 1. Even if the place doesn't really take reservations, calling ahead to request a spot with sushi chef number 1 is the way to go. This assumes you know the chef's name so you can say, for example, "Two at the sushi bar with Hideo-san, please." Otherwise, go at a slow time and request the chef (usually the one nearest the entrance is the most senior) before you're seated.

Here's a variant of the question, which is more relevant to what I'd actually write in a mainstream magazine or newspaper: What's the short list of places (5 is a rough guide, but 6 or 7 could be acceptable -- bearing in mind that, in the world of print, the more places one writes about the fewer words can be devoted to each) that you'd send someone to assuming that person is totally unaware of the current cocktail renaissance and has never heard the words "cocktailian" or "mixologist"? Milk & Honey, for example, might not be on that list. From a journalistic perspective, the whole private number thing makes it hard to list. But it's also -- to me -- an uncomfortably rule-oriented establishment and I'd hate to send someone there only to have that person scolded for ordering a vodka drink (meanwhile, recently at Death & Co. I saw vodka martini orders handled with aplomb) or violating the code of conduct. So while I can readily accept Milk & Honey as top 5, I'm not sure I'd feature it in a general-interest article.

How come Dale DeGroff no longer gets much play? Like Sneakeater, I remember going to Blackbird and I marveled at cocktails made with, for example, fresh raspberries. He seems to be an elder of the movement, and he's still working, but do any of the places he works with now have good programs? Where does Dale fit into the larger picture?

Okay I get it now.

So nobody thinks Eleven Madison Park has a worthy cocktail program? Or the Modern for that matter?

What are you trying to accomplish with this tasting? Different purposes call for different tasting structures. It's like when you have a wine tasting. Maybe you just want to have fun with friends, in which case you serve cheese and salume and stuff that professional wine reviewers would never have at a tasting. With salt, if the goal is simply enjoyment, that's one thing. If the goal is to establish some sort of empirical data set, you'll want to do the tasting blind, in lots of variants (dissolved, undissolved, sweet, savory), etc.

Would you make the same claim about every place on your short list?

I wonder if 8-10 is the peak of the trend or the beginning.

It's not about lists. I'm not sure I've ever written an article containing a list as such. And it's not just about what I want to write. I think the question of top five makes sense and is interesting for a variety of reasons, not least that it's a doable number for someone who wants to devote a weekend to the project of getting up to speed on cocktail culture.