Fat Guy

There are competitors that use identical ingredients and taste similar, e.g., the Balocco brand. They're cheaper but don't come in the cool red tin.

There was a last-minute cancellation for the kitchen counter Thursday night dinner tomorrow, 4 seats. If you're interested, you have about a minute to grab it: call Melissa at 212 332 0504.

This is the basic cover design. There are still some changes coming, like an endorsement quote across the top, but this is close:

The individual pit concessions have soft drinks. There's always a ton of Snapple around everywhere; Snapple is the named sponsor of the event. In the park there's a beer and wine concession with a good selection, though I believe you're supposed to consume alcoholic beverages within the boundaries of that concession area. Also most of the pit concessions have garbage pails full of iced beverages for their workers.

Can you give an estimate of cooking time at 500 degrees in an indoor oven?

Ray, on Saturday morning I bought a pack of flour tortillas (sans sugar -- not so easy to find) and have now tried twice to make pizza on them. I haven't been pleased with the results. The first time I tried it at 500 degrees. By the time the cheese melted the tortilla had taken on the texture of cardboard or stale matzah. So the next time I tried it on 350, hoping this would give a different texture, but it came out almost exactly the same -- it just took longer. What am I doing wrong? Please advise in detail on the proper method. Thanks!

I had lunch again today at the Burger Bar -- that's what they call the kitchen counter on weekdays from noon until 2:30pm -- and was very pleased with the experience for a few reasons. First, the hamburgers are excellent. Made from Niman Ranch beef, they're beautifully presented (sorry, I didn't have my camera) cut in half on superior bread and, at least in my case, cooked exactly as ordered. The fries are quite good as are the garnishes: pickles, onions, house-made ketchup, tomato, lettuce. The burgers get an excellent exterior char from the grill and the meat is moist and beefy but not greasy. Second, Waldy is in Japan on vacation and Mike wasn't in the open kitchen because it was after the lunch rush (we came at 2:15pm) so nobody recognized us. I was glad to see that we still had an excellent service experience. A manager I didn't know came over to talk to us and told us all about Thursday nights at the kitchen counter. We did see Mike later but it was only after all significant food and service interactions had occurred. Third, we brought our 2.5-year-old son because we were all coming from a doctor's office that's also on West 56th Street. We did this with some trepidation. Beacon didn't seem like exactly the kid-friendly kind of restaurant. It didn't seem kid-unfriendly -- big and loud is always a plus -- but it's a Midtown business place and that usually means a grownup crowd. How wrong we were. The second we walked in the door and the hostess saw our son she said a big hello to him and was totally accommodating. She set us up at the counter with a booster seat, crayons and a coloring book, as well as a kids' menu -- yes, they have one. Within about 60 seconds of sitting down our server was over with a couple of little slices of pizza, a small plate of fries and a plastic sippy-cup of water. And get this: kids under 4 eat free. That's right, you can order anything from the kids' menu or just ask for anything within the abilities of the kitchen and they'll make it for your kid, serve it in a significant portion, and not charge you a penny. If your kid is older it's $9.95. I chatted later about this with Mike, expressing surprise at how on top of the kid situation Beacon is, and he said it's very important to Waldy to treat families well -- that he insists on knowing as soon as a kid comes into the restaurant, that they try to get some sort of food in front of the kid as soon as possible, and that they even have a cotton candy machine in the kitchen (we declined cotton candy). Lunch for the two of us (two burgers) plus the free kid (a burger about 2/3 the size of the adult burgers, presented in a more kid-friendly arrangement) was under $30, though we didn't drink any alcohol.

I'm with Alcuin in that I don't think it's necessary to get too caught up in labels. I definitely see aspects of formalism (as used in the art context) in the challenges to and emphasis on form that molecular gastronomy presents in so many dishes, though I don't see that as the full extent of molecular gastronomy's reach (or, rather, I think a restaurant like Alinea does much more than just molecular cooking). At the same time, when I speak of a creative revolution in gastronomy I see molecular gastronomy (or whatever we're allowed to call it) as only one facet of that revolution. I think that revolution includes everything from nouvelle cuisine to fusion to whatever it is that David Chang is doing. So I think it's broader than formalism, both at the level of Alinea and at the level of the whole phenomenon.

Alcuin, I think if we define modernism as "what happened at the turn of the 19th-20th century" then by definition it doesn't include the creative revolution in gastronomy that started in the late 20th century. But if we look at the underlying assumptions of modernism -- the questioning of the way things had always been done, the break with tradition, the emphasis on progress and the search for new and better ways of doing things -- then I think it's fair to say gastronomy came to the modernist table but just a century or so late. I think it's fair to say that for most of the 20th century gastronomy remained anchored in the 19th century in a way that the visual and studio arts did not. Chefs didn't start behaving like artists until very recently. They were more like blacksmiths or other craftsmen, carrying on the handed-down traditions with occasional minor modifications. Once the generation of the chef-artist came on the scene, gastronomy started to catch up and got pushed quickly through the evolutionary phases that the visual and studio arts went through much earlier. Ferran Adria is compared to Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso so often that it's exhausting to read it over and over again. But I think the comparison is apt, except that Adria was born almost 60 years later than Dali and more than 80 years after Picasso.

You don't need a low oven or particularly frequent stirring. You can do 350 degrees and stir every 10 minutes or so. I saw a cook do this for a hotel buffet and was amazed at how well the eggs came out. I believe he did about 100 beaten eggs (with some milk, butter and salt) in a hotel pan and it took about 45 minutes. He stirred maybe 4 times.

Alcuin, I think there are parallels with a lot of art-forms, but that ultimately gastronomy is its own thing. It's a visual, studio and performing art that engages all the senses. A restaurant meal is a complex mixture of experiences not quite like anything else. But I think there are pretty strong likes between today's cutting-edge culinary creativity and the modernist schools in other art-forms. Kouign Aman, I've just finished a book on Asian restaurants, and boy did I have some challenging meals! At some Chinese places it seemed they took a whole animal -- beaks, feathers and all -- and just chopped it up. The Japanese are second to none in "dare" cuisine, not just fugu but also all sorts of stuff that freaks most people out. In a Cambodian restaurant I ate a fetal duck egg. I think all that is very relevant to the notion of what's challenging. Lots of stuff that people in one part of the world eat every day seems challenging to people in other parts of the world.

I think there's actually a fair bit of conceptual art being done with food, some of which doesn't even involve eating it. And, outside of the art-world context, there's a story in today's New York Times about "flavor-tripping parties," titled "A Tiny Fruit That Tricks the Tongue." The abstract is "A small red berry called miracle fruit temporarily rewires the way the palate perceives sour flavors, rendering lemons as sweet as candy." Frank Bruni has echoed some of what has been said here. When he panned Alinea, his formulation was "Food should be artful but has responsibilities art does not. Unlike a Pollock painting or Botero sculpture, it goes into your mouth. Its worth depends on how happy a home it makes there." I've said things like that too, without giving the point much thought. But I'm wondering if this is so obvious. If indeed all tastes (beyond the most simple) are acquired, the Bruni outlook seems limited.

Actually, you can get excellent oven spring from the "cold oven" method. I've tried it and it works. And others have reported the same. There's a very good thread on the cold oven method on Dan Lepard's site: http://www.danlepard.com/forum/viewtopic.p...ff15242e1680f4d ← Very interesting. I guess there's a whole world of cold-oven experimentation to be done. We probably can't rely on professionals to do it, though, because they're nearly always working with ovens that are on all day.

Certainly with bread, the "oven spring" is an important early baking stage. This requires a pre-heated oven. And given that every oven heats at a different rate, starting cold would produce a lot of variation.

There are three things being discussed in relation to this tangent that has nothing to do with the scenario outlined in the topic: - Negotiating the scope of an interview in advance. This is ethically objectionable, but it's common practice in soft media like celebrity-profiling glossies. An agreement as to scope does not mean the article is shown to the subject prior to publication. - Fact checking. This is standard practice. Factual data -- age, spelling, direct quotes -- are confirmed, usually in a phone call with a fact checker. The article is not shown to the subject prior to publication. - Allowing the subject of an article or interview to read it and negotiate changes. Again, I'm not aware of any serious journalistic publication that would tolerate this. And while I've heard several times now that it's common in the Netherlands, I'm not fully convinced given that there seems to be persistent confusion among these three different scenarios. But if it is common practice in the Netherlands or anywhere else, it's all the more reason that readers should not take the offending publications seriously.

I think until about the 1960s we were indeed cooking like it was the 19th century. That was the whole point of cooking. I think the creative revolution begins around then and slowly comes on until exploding in the 1990s. So yes, there's a sense in which the culinary arts are a century behind the times. It's not just a question of cuisine taking an extra 100 years to embrace its modernist period, but also it's only recently that the food-is-art position has become persuasive (outside of academic conferences, which were on top of this issue 20 years ago) thanks to Ferran Adria and a few others. Because now the person who says food isn't art has to be able to say "Ferran Adria is not an artist," and it's hard to take that position because Ferran Adria is so obviously an artist. Of course not all food is art, just as not all painting is art, but the clarity of the possibility of food as art changes everything. This is all in the context of commercially viable restaurants. There is also some much more advanced (and specifically non-pleasurable, at least from a gastronomic standpoint) food art out there thanks to performance artists and others. But it has little bearing on restaurants. It's almost something that happens in a parallel universe. But in that regard food has caught up with other arts -- it just happened along a compressed timeline. Needless to say, I do think the "evolutionary paths" model is legitimate.

Isn't this common practice when U.S. glossies cover celebrities? It's a widespread and unfortunate practice, yes (it's called a "press-coverage contract"). And it's a good example of the distinction between serious and non-serious journalism. There's no news value, opinion value or value of any kind -- other than pure entertainment -- to a standard glossy-magazine celebrity profile. It's on the level of an article on "Ten ways to flatten your belly for the beach this summer" and "What he really thinks of your new hairstyle." It has no real impact on anybody whether the celebrity's handlers negotiate that the question of her relationship with a given quarterback is on or off the table. Magazines do negotiate that sort of stuff, and that's one of many reasons why celebrity profiles are not serious. (I also hasten to add that negotiating scope in advance is not the same as showing drafts of articles to the subjects of those articles and allowing them to have input at that stage. In addition, the scenario under discussion here is not an interview -- it involves an issue of criticism, so refraining from criticizing would be like getting a call from Harrison Ford saying, "Hey, could you please not write anything about the new Indiana Jones movie?" Forget it. Not even the Enquirer would grant such a request.) But if that celebrity actually does anything meaningful -- runs for office, commits a murder -- that's when real journalistic standards kick in. You won't find anybody negotiating then. Bloggers, like all journalists, need to decide which camp they're in: are they celebrity profilers, or are they serious? If they want to be celebrity profilers, fine, there's plenty of room for that. But if they want to be serious critics and represent themselves as tellers of truth, arbiters of taste, and people to be relied upon to inform purchasing decisions, they won't let the subjects of their reporting, criticism, etc., push them around. And I think anybody who cares enough to ask these questions has pretty much already answered them. (Amusing article from Slate on "celebrity journalism.")

But we know food can be challenging. I'm not suggesting that's the debate, because to me that's an obvious statement. The question of whether it's pleasurable, however, is one that offers fertile ground for discussion and debate. Sure, I totally get that in the final analysis if a person says, "Well, it's just not pleasurable to me," there's not much that can be done about that. But that doesn't mean there's no discussion to be had. This whole question of "is it pleasurable?" is wrapped up in questions like "is it beautiful?" "does it taste good?" and "does it have merit?" I guess someone could say "It's beautiful, delicious and has merit but still I take no pleasure in it," but that would be kind of weird. So if you look at this question of "pleasurable" and you ask what people mean when they say pleasurable you can discuss all the components of that. In any art-form, it's possible to have discussion and debate about the artistic merits of a given work or style. Few people would suggest that there's no reasonable grounds for debate about the artistic merit of impressionist works, yet plenty of people are willing to make that claim with regard to food. Which makes no sense.

So if someone says "Impressionism is crap, and if you try to convince me it's worth liking you're arrogant," we should just all fold up our tents and go home because there's nothing left to discuss? I think not. I think someone who thinks impressionism is crap may very well just need to be educated. Is it arrogant to offer art-history classes to students? In many fields -- art, music -- society agrees on the need to teach taste; we don't just throw up our hands and say "In matters of taste there's no dispute." Needless to say, there are probably some highly educated, art-knowledgeable people out there who hate impressionism. That's person B from my example above. At that point, sure, I think it's probably time to agree to disagree with that person. But in my experience a lot of people who dismiss culinary creativity as too "weird" do so as a result of unfamiliarity with the subject matter and not as the result of any sort of informed opinion. I know quite a few people who had dismissive attitudes but were converted by a meal at Alinea or elBulli. And I know a few who weren't.

I agree with that ranking, save for Salt Lick which I wouldn't include on the short list. Unfortunately, as I understand it, Southside Market has a conflicting commitment this year. That would have been the fourth on my short list. The thing to bear in mind, though, is that most everybody's short list includes Mitchell, Mills and Lilly -- at least to the extent people have bothered to research the matter. That means, usually, those are the three longest lines. So if you want to hit those three in any reasonable amount of time you need to do some preparation: come with a group and split the group so you're covering several lines simultaneously; get there before noon on Saturday to stake out a place on line. Of course, a Fastpass is even better. And, if you don't have the capacity to do the three most popular lines, you can always pursue a contrarian strategy. There's a lot of really good barbecue being served by the New York places (like Hill Country) and the less popular out-of-towners (I'm looking forward to trying Mr. Cecil's), not to mention whatever item Tabla decides to sell out front.

I think part of the reason debates about restaurants like Alinea don't go anywhere is that each person has a different matrix of assumptions that can sometimes be difficult to unpack. One could have various assumption sets along the lines of: A. I completely reject the notion that food can or should be challenging. Alinea is challenging. Therefore it's bad. B. I love challenging food and dining experiences. I embrace the notion of food as experimental, cutting-edge art. As a reference point, I love elBulli, Moto and WD-50. I just happen to think Alinea doesn't do a good job. Both of those people don't like Alinea, but there's a different conversation to be had with each of them. And if you try to have conversation B with person A, it's going to be like talking to a wall.

Absolutely. I'm not aware of anybody who has studied the subject who would dispute, for example, the importance of art critics in spreading the word about impressionism (and in resisting it).

I guess as a reference point I'd ask whether you'd say the same thing about music, painting and other art forms. Assuming you'd say there is such a thing as a challenging opera performance or a challenging painting then I don't think it's such a big leap to the concept of a challenging meal. The chefs at the cutting edge right now are essentially performing artists (as well as creative artists), and a meal in a restaurant like Alinea or elBulli is a performance. To the extent eating that meal involves more effort than, say, eating a bowl of ice cream or eating foods on the familiar spectrum, with familiar utensils, traditional service, etc., it can be challenging. There are plenty of example of challenging food in traditional cuisines, and indeed most acquired tastes are challenging at first. Capsicum pepper, for example. But because these tastes have been acquired at a glacial pace over generations they're only seen as acquired tastes by children, foreigners and the like. Whereas, when you have a challenging meal at the creative forefront of gastronomy, you may be asked to encounter a couple of dozen new flavor, texture and temperature combinations in a single sitting. That can be challenging, yet I find it enjoyable. Now the other way to come at it is to say, no, food shouldn't be art and, moreover, all meals should be and taste basically like other meals we've had -- they shouldn't be challenging. I think that gets back to the whole food-as-art debate, which this discussion can't really happen without.

Are you saying that, if people disagree about something, there's no reason to debate it? That position would tend to undermine the reason for debating anything, ever. And I'm not really sure what you're comparing to what. Maybe some direct quotes would be helpful, demonstrating the similarities you think you see. I think when it comes to dining at the cutting edge, there's a substantial and credible group of food-knowledgeable people who find it thrilling. And, to me, that means it's incumbent upon members of that group to try to explain why they feel that way. Or should those who believed in impressionism, jazz and other cutting-edge movements have just kept their mouths shut and said, oh well, some people like it and some people don't? It depends on the person. So we'll just give up and look at this kind of art or listen to this kind of music, but we won't try to champion it or explain it. The fact of the matter is that we are in the midst of a creative revolution in gastronomy, and as with creative revolutions in all art-forms it needs explanation, elaboration and, most of all, it needs to be defended by those who believe in it. Because it most certainly is under attack.

The original Quaker Steak & Lube in Sharon, PA, is a hoot. http://www.quakersteakandlube.com/default....Location=sharon