Fat Guy

Lunch is a single sitting with more courses and more luxury ingredients, at least this was the plan last time I had dinner there.

Any other coarse salt, I imagine. It's odd that the name "kosher salt" has gained widespread use in the United States. Pretty much all salt is kosher unless it comes in contact with pork or something. Kosher salt gets its name because coarse salt is used in the koshering process to salt meat and therefore draw out the blood. Any coarse salt should do as a substitute.

My operating assumptions, which are partly backed up by the one piece of researched reporting I've seen (a Steingarten article): 1 - if you're using salt as an ingredient (aka dissolved in cooked food) it doesn't matter what kind you use -- it all tastes the same. Some people claim to be able to detect the iodine taste, so they prefer non-iodized salt, but I can't taste that difference. Many cooks find coarse salt easier to work with (grab), though. 2 - if you're sprinkling salt on finished food, the main difference in salts is crystal size (and therefore texture). 3 - in some other applications (e.g., brining, pickling, curing), the chemical composition and crystal size/shape of salt matters more.

Noodle Bar is open for 11-12 hours a day and demand has to be measured over the whole time. Ssam Bar is "always busy" but has on occasion had to limit or suspend late-night food service.

Maybe they're just using Labor Day weekend to implement a new menu, and taking care not to waste inventory at a time when business will be slow. The abbreviated menu is a time-honored Momofuku technique for keeping a restaurant open when demand is limited.

Lunch reservations are live now.

I know that the chef, Meg Grace, is an alumna of the Union Square Hospitality Group's operations at MOMA and was well regarded within the organization. I wandered in to Redhead awhile back, before the dinner service was in place, but haven't dined there yet. I'd like to.

Willis emailed me today to say he has resigned from Country. I believe it was also reported on Eater.

The times I've been recently they've only asked for IDs from people who didn't present a printout of a reservation confirmation -- an imperfect system. It makes sense to change it.

To me the interesting question is why Japanese people in Japan find the video so funny. My guess is that it must be because so many people in Japan find sushi bars intimidating. In the West, we have the misimpression that everyone in Japan eats at sushi bars all the time. But my understanding is that the overwhelming majority of people in Japan rarely if ever eat in sushi bars. They get their sushi from conveyer-belt places, supermarkets, fast-food sushi chains, etc. So the video is about a subject that, even from a Japanese perspective, is esoteric and shrouded in mystery.

I'm not a big watcher of the show but from the snapshots I've seen I agree with that. The trend also tracks what I think has been an evolution in Mr. Bourdain's approach to and position within the culinary community. In short, he has evolved from a gadfly within the culinary-professional community to an elder statesman representing that community. I like him better in his current incarnation.

I've been enjoying the GigaChef website ever since Gita (a publicist I've dealt with on many clients back to when she was working on the Ducasse account at her old job) invited me to preview it a while back. I just downloaded the culinary add-on spelling dictionary for Microsoft Word. I haven't road tested it much yet, but it seems to have a lot of words in it -- and it's free. The website requires registration but there's no charge for anything. The home-page blog -- "The Pass" -- also has some entertaining entries (you have to register to read that too).

I find valet parking creepy, but once I sign on for that I don't feel that putting stuff in the car constitutes any additional increment of creepiness.

When I first started meeting other food writers I was surprised to see that so many of the women in the business are so lithe. When I see Melissa Clark (or Amanda Hesser, or Dana Cowin, or I could go on and on) standing around at an event looking slender and gorgeous, I become even more convinced that metabolism as determined largely by genetics is the only secret involved here.

(There have been two comments indicating a preference for Redhead, but we have no topic on Redhead. Maybe someone who has dined there can make the case for Redhead on a new topic. I haven't been there.)

I haven't seen the pieces everybody got, but the piece of fish I got was basically a cube from a very thick part of he fillet. So it was only a couple of inches on a side but because it was a cube it probably amounted to quite a bit.

I've been meaning to go into more detail here. I hope I remember everything correctly. The Niles/Milwaukee Avenue ethnic shopping tour, led by Leah and her husband Dick, was to take us to six ethnic markets, though in the end it wound up being five because we ran a bit short of time and had to edit out a stop. The first stop was Uni-Mart One Stop, a Filipino grocery. They gave us a great reception: we got a guided tour, they put out lots of samples of food for us to taste, they sent us away with gift bags, and they even did a press release about how they hosted us (maybe someone has it so we can post it). Anyway, while we were there, Tammy came up with the pain-in-the-ass idea that her amuse course (which I was to assist with) should include an ingredient from each of the ethnic markets we were to visit. At the Uni-Mart One Stop, I argued for calamari (which I volunteered Kris Yamaguchi to fry) but Tammy came up with the idea of buying a bunch of plantains and making plantain chips to act as foundations (which I volunteered Kris Yamaguchi to fry). So we did that. Next, at Schmeisser's, we spied some smoked goose breast and the woman at the counter was nice enough to make very thin slices for us. The plan took shape: we'd do one plantain chip with smoked goose breast and some sort of Asian condiment (at the time I was thinking kimchi or a pickle) and one plantain chip with something from the forthcoming Russian smoked fish place plus a Middle Eastern condiment. But when we tasted the smoked goose breast it was very salty, so the idea of kimchi or a pickle with it seemed a bit much. We were still thinking. The folks at Schmeisser's were super-nice and took us in back to see the sausage-making and smoking operation. At H-Mart, we wound up getting two ingredients: Asian pear, which we intended to use with the goose breast, and quail eggs, which we figured would go with the smoked fish. The welcome we received at H-Mart, by the way, was amazing. Not only were there gift bags but also there was a video presentation about traditional Korean table service. After H-Mart, we took an ice-cream break (Leah and Dick got us assorted Asian-inflected ice creams from the Village Creamery). It was then that Leah and Dick decided, based on time constraints, to ditch the Russian smoked fish place. At our next stop, the Niles Polish Deli, however, they had some mighty nice looking smoked trout. So we bought two of them. Finally, we stopped at a Middle Eastern market that I believe was named Arax. There I (foolishly it turns out) convinced Tammy to get a sheet of apricot paste. I figured it would be like quince paste but with apricot, but instead it was more like an apricot Jolly Rancher. Our prep crew couldn't cut it and when Tammy put it in the Cuisinart with some of the mango nectar from the Uni-Mart One Stop gift bags we almost destroyed the Cuisinart. Heat couldn't break down this substance either so, after trying to cook it in a saucepan for a while, we dumped everything in Edsel's Vita-Mix. That did the trick, and we wound up with a pretty swell tasting mango-apricot creamy puree thing. Meanwhile, Kris painstakingly fried the plantain chips twice. First she fried them, then she sat on the floor and flattened each one with the bottom of a glass, then she fried each one again. She did this for 50+ chips. For the other half of the amuse, at some point Tammy had made the executive decision to use crostini. We also had help from White Lotus and another person (raise your hand please) in making julienne of Asian pear. So, in the end, the amuse was two items. The first was crostini with smoked trout topped with a quail egg and garnished with some chives. The second was a plantain chip with a schmear of apricot-mango stuff, topped with smoked goose breast, julienne Asian pear and a little dill. The trout-and-quail-egg one came out as we imagined it would. The plantain-with-goose, when we did a preliminary taste test, was too sweet and not salty enough. This even though our whole premise had been to minimize the saltiness of the goose. So we wound up asking Kris to salt the plantain chips and we added the dill to the ingredients list. In the end this part of the amuse was not, in my opinion, fabulous but it was pretty good and it met the ethnic challenge. I loved the trout and egg, but there were some little bones in some portions that made it difficult to navigate. Maybe someone can supplement with a photo.

Fresser, wasn't there also a Middle-Eastern market and a Polish deli? We also had, I believe some Asian-inflected ice creams from the Village Creamery. Looking forward to photos.

I thought it was a fine moment when I announced the arrival of the ratatouille and couldn't remember the name of the film in which confit bayaldi had been featured.

I totally remember the Canola song! I think I remember reading that they've bred it down to 7% but I don't know whether that seed is in widespread commercial use.

For the record, I only go to restaurants to take pictures. I couldn't care less about the food.

Jason, I'm wondering if corn oil is different in the UK than it is in the US. There are, I know, two main variants of corn oil: unrefined and refined. Unrefined corn oil (which I only ever see in specialty stores) has a pronounced corn taste and a lower smoke point, but refined corn oil to me tastes relatively neutral. In the US, where corn is so plentiful, cheap, highly refined corn oil is the norm in supermarkets. I wonder what's on the shelves overseas.

Though the olives are missing, this photo best captures my memory of that Nicoise-ish salad. I confess I had low expectations. When I heard Randi was making a "composed salad" along the lines of a Nicoise I thought well, okay, that's a boring dish, but at least there will be some tuna. Then I heard she was using swordfish instead of tuna. I also never saw the prep for this item because I was preoccupied with being useless in various ways elsewhere. So I was totally unprepared for the sublime composition that came out to the tables. The stars of the dish were the potatoes and radishes, though the beans and lettuces provided good support. In addition to being beautiful, everything came together with a restrained application of dressing. And the swordfish, which I believe came from Whole Foods, was juicy and an unexpectedly great complement to all the produce.

The unidentified individual is Bob, spouse of NancyH.

If you're referring to the photos in this post, the EXIF data on the photos indicates they were taken with no flash. I opened up this photo of John's, for example in Photoshop and checked. I learned that it was taken with a Canon 20D camera, without flash, shutter speed 1/100, aperture f/5.6, at ISO 1600. It's not likely that a tripod was used, though that information is not part of the EXIF data.