Fat Guy

I think it's unfortunate that he thinks the restaurant failed because it didn't open with a liquor license. While that may have been part of the problem, BarFry was flawed on many levels.

Just to be clear, are you saying you want a restaurant between 50th and 100th Streets on the East Side?

If you're concerned about the culinary aspect of things, you just need to monitor flavor and color. If you're not noticing any changes, there's nothing to worry about. If you're concerned about health, well, you're not going to get easy agreement about the dangers of aluminum. One thing I'll say, though, is that if you're concerned about the health impacts of unfinished aluminum pans you should probably stop eating in restaurants altogether. Restaurant kitchens -- especially in the non-fancy restaurants where they can't afford expensive Bourgeat-type stuff -- are full of unfinished aluminum. Walk past any restaurant-supply shop in your city's industrial area and see what all the commercial stuff is really made of. So, if you're going to dine out, it's probably not worth worrying about a little exposed aluminum on your home cookware.

I bet folks would be interested in hearing about some of the more unusual items you had.

I found it at a Food Lion supermarket in a small town in North Carolina. They had 73/27, 80/20, 85/15 and 95/5.

I've also seen recipes for "butter burgers," where you form the patty around a pat of cold butter. The butter melts during cooking and internally bastes the meat. The issue for me is that bacon, cheese, butter and other fatty items you can add to a burger are all going to introduce non-beef flavors. Whereas, if you just use fattier ground beef you get moistness while maintaining a focused beef flavor.

The foodie consensus is that rare and medium-rare are the best ways to enjoy hamburgers. Maybe that's right. But some people, for whatever reason, prefer a burger cooked all the way through. To me, the main problem with most well-done hamburgers is that they get dried out. So, in my experience, the best way to make a well-done burger taste good is to start with ground beef that has a high fat content. This allows the meat to self-baste as it cooks, keeping it nice and moist. Indeed, I think the dryness problem is typically a result of trying to make rare and well-done burgers from the same ground beef. Today, for example, I bought two packets of ground beef at the supermarket: the first was labeled 85/15 and the second was labeled 73/27. The 85/15 made excellent medium-rare hamburgers, while the 73/27 kept its moistness well into the well-done zone. I ate a hamburger each way and found both to be worthy. I also made a small medium-rare burger out of the 73/27, just as an experiment. I thought it wasn't as good as the medium-rare burger made with less fatty meat, probably because the internal temperature never got high enough for the fat to develop its flavor -- instead it just tasted fatty. There are actually some things about a cooked-through hamburger that I like better, especially the fact that it has more time to develop a great exterior crust. (In this scenario, I was grilling, but the same is true in a skillet.) Also, when you're using supermarket pre-pack ground beef, rare and medium-rare burgers have off flavors (you learn this immediately if you grind your own beef and do a comparison), whereas when you cook them through the ones from pre-pack ground beef taste about the same as the ones you make from fresh ground.

Because bread is cheaper than labor. If you serve bread by the piece, you need an employee to walk around the dining room and offer bread repeatedly to every table. Depending on the size of the restaurant, it could be a full-time job. You have to waste a lot of bread before it costs as much as hiring an additional person.

Well, Chang recently did tell the New Yorker: "Just because we're not Per Se, just because we're not Daniel, just because we're not a four-star restaurant, why can't we have the same fucking standards?"

Ko doesn't have 20 cooks but Ko doesn't do 100 covers, doesn't have private dining rooms, doesn't bake bread, doesn't serve a half-dozen elaborate dessert courses, doesn't have as many dishes available, etc. When you break it down, there's quite a lot of labor -- even compared to Per Se -- reflected in each plate that goes out at Ko.

Sushi bars are a relevant comparison, and I think Ko shows weakly there as well. As I mentioned above, compared to great sushi chefs the chefs at Ko are profoundly unengaging. Comparing the service at Ko to the service at any great restaurant -- whether it's a sushi bar or Per Se -- is like comparing community theater to Broadway. It's just not in the same league, no matter how much we enjoy a particular, perhaps charming, community theater production. The only thing that's world-class about Ko -- the only thing that's even first-class by local standards -- is the food.

Put another way, using the criteria for service, decor and ambience that are generally understood as the underlying assumptions of consumers who dine at a variety of top-tier restaurants, Per Se is a superior restaurant to Ko by several orders of magnitude in every regard (except the food). Its of course possible for an individual to prefer a given experience -- plenty of people prefer the Ssam Bar experience to the Per Se experience too, or the brasserie experience to the Michelin-three-star experience -- just as it's possible for an individual to prefer just about any experience to any other.

The experience at Per Se is superior to the experience at Momofuku Ko by several orders of magnitude. But the food at Momofuku Ko is as good as any food anywhere. Execution is not quite up to Per Se standards yet but, in Ko's favor, the food at Ko is a lot more interesting than the food at Per Se.

This raises an interesting question, best discussed on the reviewing topic not here. The question is: what's a review? If a mediocre writer like Platt writes a first-impressions piece about Ko, does it magically become a review by virtue of being in New York Magazine (or on its website)? What about Ruth Reichl's piece on the Gourmet blog? What about all the detailed, heavily photographed reports on various websites (this one included)? What makes something a review or not a review?

(Ko is closed on Tuesdays.)

Standards at New York Magazine? I think we should all just be glad the review was in English. But it sort of is the norm. The restaurant's business plan, as far as I can tell, is designed to discourage repeat visits. In addition, it's a set menu that changes only a bit from week to week. So what would be the point in going back the following week, except perhaps to gauge consistency? In any event, Platt is up front about the review being based on one visit -- he's not hiding the ball on that. People can discount his review as much as they want, based on that piece of information. Platt, Bruni (have you seen his blog on this issue?) and others are, I agree, being a bit overly dramatic about how hard it is to get in. I'm sure all the major critics have had multiple offers of reservations from readers. We know it's possible to reserve multiple times with a little diligence. I've made four reservations (one wasn't honored, one time I went, and two times I had to cancel due to travel). But sure, it's possible. So if there's a flaw in the review it's that on the issue of reservations it dramatizes the situation to make a point. Not unusual.

His argument seems to be that had Platt tried harder and waited he could have gone a second time. Yes, and again . . . so what? Somebody please explain to me what's wrong with the actual review. Does anybody disagree that it's a well-done review?

He wanted to be the first major-media critic to review the place. So what? The only objection I'd have to that would have been if the review suffered for it. It didn't. It's a well-done review, much better than Platt's average for sure.

Restaurants' costs are increasing. I'll assume everybody agrees with that statement. So the question is, how should restaurants deal with the situation? There are several options, and most restaurants will need to use a combination of strategies. The simplest option is to keep all variables the same except for menu prices. But that translates into what may be surprisingly large menu-price increases -- perhaps more than a restaurant's customers will tolerate. Thus, people in the restaurant business are exploring various ways to keep menu prices the same, or to raise them less than the true cost increases would require. Converting included items (like bread) into paid items is one of many such tactics. Reduced portion sizes, reduced staffing, cheaper ingredients (either lower quality or just less expensive -- like using less expensive species of fish), increased add-on sales (dessert, coffee), better efficiency (less wasted food, etc.) . . . there are a lot of ways to go. I wouldn't rush to say one set of answers is right for every restaurant. Indeed, the style of a restaurant may dictate a particular approach. Even in countries where bread charges are customary, those charges are typical only at casual restaurants. At the fine-dining end of the spectrum, I'm not aware of bread charges being the norm anywhere. Indeed, I'm not sure I know of any Michelin-type restaurant anywhere that charges for bread. Which is probably, in part, why high-end restaurants have raised their prices so much more in recent years (at least in the US) than casual restaurants have: the high-end restaurants mostly can't cut anything out, they can only raise prices to reflect costs. Inflation isn't the only issue here, though. The paying-for-bread trend in the US started before the current spike in costs. It was already occurring in smaller, contemporary restaurants, especially those serving styles of cuisine that don't specifically demand bread. Momofuku Ssam Bar, for example. If you want bread, you pay for it. You pay a lot. But it's really good, as is the accompanying butter. Of course all these factors -- inflation, style of food -- are real, but they can also become excuses. Restaurants (businesses in general) often take advantage of such excuses to raise prices more than the underlying causes warrant. Remember when France switched to the Euro? So, I think people should be understanding about the current round of price increases -- whether they're expressed as increases in menu prices or decreases in what you get for the same money -- but we shouldn't be overly forgiving. We all need to earn a living too.

It struck me as an accurate, measured review.

There's a class coming up on Sunday that looks especially interesting. It's a four-hour pizza-making seminar with Mark Bello. It's a hands-on class, limited to 12 students. Mark Bello runs an operation called Pizza a Casa, and has been teaching similar classes for several years at Murray's (the Murray's class for this year is already sold out, but there's still space in the Astor Center class -- and the facilities at Astor are superior). The class is oriented towards teaching how to make good pizza in a home oven. Details here I'm planning to go, most likely. If you use the discount code EGPIZZA you'll get 15% off, which brings the cost down a bit.

As far as I know -- and you'd have to ask someone who actually works at the New York Times to be sure about this -- there is no such position as "fact checker." Rather, every article in the New York Times is reviewed by at least two and often three or four layers of editorial staff. Fact checking occurs at every phase: the reporter is supposed to do it, the first editor is supposed to do it, the copy editor does it, maybe another editor sees the piece, etc. In terms of who's assigned to what section -- again, this is something a real New York Times employee could speak to better than I -- I believe each section has an editorial team, however I believe the copy editors and various additional editorial staff are assigned to pieces on an as-needed basis. But yes, in short, I think a food-section piece would be more carefully checked for food definitions than a piece elsewhere in the paper. Not because there's nobody checking, but simply because the food-section people have more knowledge and experience in the subject area. So, for example, someone without a food background might not even question that "cured" means "smoked" -- the average literate person could easily assume those are interchangeable terms. Whereas the dining-section editors wouldn't.

If anything, the Jayson Blair situation made the Times far more careful about fact checking. However, it's also a different scenario: there you had a reporter lying about first-person claims, which are a gray area for fact checking and sometimes can't be checked at all. I have not only written for the Times but also know many reporters and editors there, as well as at most of the other major papers in New York, such as the Wall Street Journal (where my sister is an editor). Based on a large number of data points I'm saying that the New York Times is very attentive to fact checking. That doesn't mean nothing ever slips through -- clearly, today a minor error with no impact on the news value of the story was missed by the various levels of editors -- but you'll find that the standard of accuracy at the New York Times is incredibly high and reflects a massive, continuous fact-checking effort that is second to none (except maybe the Wall Street Journal and some non-daily publications like the major news magazines).

Depending on the publication, fact checking can be far more thorough than that -- and often is. Having written for the New York Times on a few occasions, I can tell you that every factual claim I've made has had to be substantiated by references provided to my editor. Definitions of culinary terms are exactly the sort of thing the New York Times fact checks rigorously, so my guess is that this one just slipped through the cracks -- perhaps because the story didn't get edited by the dining-section team (it seems to have come from the Rome bureau as a news story). ← correct. but they don't normally check your references. unless it's a very high-profile story. the basic problem is logistical. way too much content in the Times every day...you'd have to have hundreds of people doing the checking. ← The New York Times does have hundreds of people doing the checking. The editorial staff is huge, and even routine stories go through levels of editing and checking. They have always checked my references, and have often come back to me to argue about what those references do and don't support.

[Moderator's note: this discussion was moved from a topic about this New York Times article.] I'd say the answer is absolutely not. The article demonstrates this as an empirical matter, simply by giving examples of non-Italian-born chefs who are at the top of the field. Top restaurant kitchens the world over -- not just in New York -- are staffed by immigrants. As a theoretical matter, it strikes me as absurd (that's the nicest word I can think of) to suggest that you have to be from a country to cook that country's cuisine. Yet, such views are certainly widespread, especially with respect to old-world cuisines.