Fat Guy

I wonder why they didn't just sign up for the OpenTable service.

I received the following via email from Momofuku just now:

That's even emptier than Fairway at 8am on a Sunday. This week I was out of town on Sunday so I did my shopping today around 1:30pm. Now that was crowded. Not much new to report, except that there seem not to be any Pomi tomatoes at Fairway any more. There were warning signs last weekend: they only had the pureed and not the chopped. This week they had nothing, not a single box of Pomi tomatoes in either of the locations where they usually are (with the canned tomatoes, and in an end-cap display on the pasta aisle). Then again they could be in a new location in the store and it could take me until 2009 to figure our where that is.

Jennifer 8. Lee (the middle initial 8 is on account of that being a lucky number in Chinese culture), a reporter for the New York Times, has got to be one of the most tireless researchers in the history of the Western world. Or the Eastern world. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Lee has just published her first book, "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food," which was just released this past week and is unquestionably a tour-de-force of fact-finding and presentation. I was keenly interested in getting a copy of the book for a few reasons. First, because I've recently finished writing a book on Asian restaurants that has a sizable chapter on Chinese restaurants. Second, because I've enjoyed several of her New York Times pieces, particularly a recent one on the history of the fortune cookie (short version: it's Japanese). And finally, because she reminds me of a number of Asian-American kids I admired in high school: brilliant, articulate, yet driven in a way I just can't compete with. (We didn't go to the same school -- she went to Hunter and I went to Stuyvesant -- but the places have a lot of cultural overlap. She's also maybe six years younger than I am but I count her in my generation.) The book isn't easy to summarize. The scope is quite broad not just factually but also stylistically. The way it's presented, it begins with the story of the Powerball lottery (true story) where the second-place winning numbers matched those on a fortune cookie. As a result, an unprecedented number of people -- who had received that fortune in cookies distributed all over the country and played the numbers -- won the second prize, costing Powerball about $20 million in unanticipated payouts. She uses this framework to launch a journey of discovery. She visits the various restaurants across America where the winning fortune cookies originated. She visits Chinese restaurants and population centers all over the world, and in the process learns not just about fortune cookies, not just about Chinese food and culture, but also about herself. The most remarkable aspect of the book is that, as I mentioned already, the research is breathtakingly deep. She spent three years working on the book, seemingly for 48 hours a day. It's not clear to me how any human being could have done all that research, written this book, and held down a job as a New York Times reporter. To me Lee is at her best when doing one of two things: First, her research and reporting on Chinese immigrant culture -- from tales of human smuggling to nuanced portraits of immigrant families -- is definitive. In that regard, the organizing principle of restaurants is just a way to get into the real subject. Second, when she pauses to reflect and shifts out of the reporting voice, she reveals a great deal of understanding of the immigrant experience and its larger cultural ramifications. She's at her worst when talking about food. For example, in one chapter she goes on a worldwide search for the greatest Chinese restaurant. She covers a lot of ground, visits a list of restaurants that's basically the Chinese equivalent of visiting every Michelin-three-star French restaurant in the world, and has little interesting to say about any of them. Luckily, most of the book isn't really about food. It's about culture, and the food is secondary. There are also some inconsistencies. For example, at one point Lee gives an impassioned speech against the concept of "authenticity." And she's right: the authenticity myth is something that deserves to be debunked whenever possible. (I devoted the last section of my Asian-restaurants book to that.) But throughout the rest of the book, she uncritically tosses about the term "authenticity" in exactly the way she criticizes in that speech. The book is also uneven throughout. Its scope is an asset but also a liability. Lee is a strong writer but not strong enough to pull this work together in a fully satisfactory manner. Like a television series interrupted by the writers' strike, it rushes towards its first concluding chapter then drags towards yet another. And it doesn't help that the organizing principle -- the search for the sources of the Powerball fortune cookies -- is a weak one. She didn't need that gimmick to make the book interesting. She and her research are interesting in and of themselves. Attempts to force the issue take away from that. In the end, "Fortune Cookie Chronicles" is a very good book and one well worth reading. But sometimes less is more.

Today I went to Providence to butcher a pig. My train to Providence from New York City was at 7am, but with the spring time-change overnight it made my wake-up time feel like 4:30am. But it was worth it. Many photos were taken, much video was captured, and I'm sure those reports will be rolling in soon. I just had a few impressions of the event (the schedule and details of the day are here) that I wanted to share: First, our hosts Matt Gennuso (the chef of Chez Pascal, where the event took place) and Matt Jennings (of Farmstead and La Laiterie) were incredibly giving of their time, information and meat. Not only did they tirelessly instruct us all day long about all things pork, but also they put out an amazing and abundant lunch spread of cooked and cured items. It was like an entire meal of grilled meats, plus an entire meal of charcuterie, but it was one meal that began at lunchtime, sustained us as we returned to the platters and grazed throughout the day, and still supported plenty of leftovers for folks to take home. Chris (Amirault) and Steve (New England) did an excellent job putting the event together. Thanks guys. Second, I came for the pig but I stayed for the knowledge. Really, the venture to Providence (which requires 3.5 hours of train travel each way for me), would have been worth it just for the detailed Gennuso tutorial on how to butcher a pig into a variety of restaurant-appropriate cuts. But that was only the beginning. After that, Jennings led us through the production of pate, we had our epic lunch, we prepared and salted a leg for prosciutto with Gennuso, we made Toscano salami with Jennings, we made sausage with Gennuso and, before all that, there was a presentation about pork, agriculture and all manner of related issues supported by a nifty full-color booklet that our hosts prepared for the event. Third, it was such a pleasure to be part of this group effort to learn and do. I hope the chefs were as into it as we all were. When you go out to eat at a restaurant, and you're a food-obsessed eGullet Society type, you sometimes feel as though you're the only person in the room who cares deeply about the food -- it seems like everyone else is more interested in the atmospherics of dining out. So it's a real treat to be surrounded by a group where each person comes to the table already dialed in at the maximum enthusiasm setting. Looking forward to some of those photos and, eventually, video.

This strategy used to work at a lot of fast-food burger places back when pre-assembled burgers in a chute were the norm, but today most of the chains use a different procedure. They cook the patties and then place them in holding trays. When an order comes in, they take one of the patties -- which may have been in a holding tray for ages -- and assemble a burger. So everything is assembled to order. It's just not cooked to order. The only way to guarantee a freshly cooked burger at most of the chains today is to ask for it straight out, and to be willing to wait. Burger King, by the way, officially accepts this as a "have it your way" special order. The correct way to state it, in Burger-King-ese, is "off the broiler."

For much of my life, I was told I was allergic to mango. I had no basis -- other than my general distrust of everyone and everything -- to doubt it. So I just didn't eat mango. A little while back, I discovered that the mango-allergy claim was false. I'm not allergic to mango. I can eat mango morning, noon and night with no ill effects. But here's the thing: when ordering in a restaurant, I still won't eat mango. And because, at any restaurant above the level of a diner, I'm opposed in principle to asking for alterations to dishes, that means I never order dishes with mango in them. If I get a tasting menu and there's mango in a dish, I pick the mango out. I have no idea why this is the case. I fully understand that mango is harmless to me. I like mango. I'll eat mango if there's mango around the house. But I can't seem to get past my lifelong history of believing I had a mango allergy.

I don't know. There are probably deans (eight of them), instructors and visiting chefs eating at that restaurant all the time. And the kitchen supervisors surely know their job is to teach the students how to cook well not how to fake it for VIPs. They can learn that working at Daniel.

To the best of my recollection, when I was a kid growing up in the 1970s there was no such thing as a chicken finger. Today, chicken fingers are surely one of the most popular foods -- if not the most popular food -- with American kids. How did the chicken finger get introduced? Was it derived from McDonald's Chicken McNuggets, which I believe were introduced sometime in the early 1980s? I think I may have seen chicken fingers emerge soon after that. Does anybody know the deal here?

Two thoughts: First, my meal was on the second night of a new rotation, so it's certainly possible that they've improved their supervision in order to even out some of the inconsistency. Or we just got lucky. Second, it seems to me one could just ask on the phone whether it's a new crew or an experienced crew on a given night. Or, I'm sure there's some other way to find that out.

This email just in from "momofuku dev server":

I'm certainly hoping they'll honor it but I'll also understand if they don't.

Just for entertainment value, I thought I'd post my (status unknown) reservation confirmation email from earlier today:

Comment #9 at 3:29pm: http://eater.com/archives/2008/03/koboom_1.php

Eater posted the link at 3:29pm. There are still plenty of reservations available. It's a fairly obnoxious system, requiring a credit card number before you're even allowed to log in. Hope the food is good enough to justify it.

Interesting. I had deduced a teams theory as well, but my theory was that they have a less experienced team on the nights that they do the four-course menu and a more experienced team for the five-course menu. But maybe they have several levels of teams. In any event, my meal was at 9:30pm, which was the last sitting. So kudos not only to the students but to the chef-instructors who supervise that kitchen. That's a great accomplishment to turn out a meal like that on night two of a rotation. I don't know of any regular restaurant that could pull that off.

I've eaten about half the baguette so far, my son has eaten about a quarter of it, and my wife has eaten both ends. That kind of puts a crimp in my lunch-baguette-sandwich plans. I guess I'll have the sandwich as a snack right now. The big caveat with my comments on L'Ecole (I'm capitalizing the L because the restaurant does, not because I believe in it) is that I'm reporting on one meal whereas culinary-school restaurants are notoriously inconsistent. Still, I've at least established a baseline that says the place is capable of producing a high-quality, enjoyable, correct meal for forty bucks. I mean, worst case scenario, could it be more inconsistent than Bouley? Probably not. So for forty bucks it's worth checking the place out, right?

My new best friend Alan Richman invited me to speak to his "Craft of Food Writing" class tonight at the French Culinary Institute. As consideration for my services, Dean Richman (he is one of the FCI's deans, whatever that means) promised dinner at L'Ecole, the school's student-run restaurant. Had there not been a L'Ecole dinner invitation involved, I'd have agreed to speak to Dean Richman's class without hesitation. But with the threat of dinner hanging over me, I hesitated for at least three or four minutes before emailing my consent. As much as I find the idea of culinary-school restaurants charming and admirable, I take great pains to avoid eating at them. It's a no-win proposition: the meals I've had at such restaurants have ranged from mediocre to awful. If the food is mediocre, decency requires that you rave about it. If the food is awful, what are you going to do? Complain? Go online and post about how awful the student-run restaurant at some culinary school is? Pitch a story to Pete Wells at the New York Times? It was thus that I found myself at the FCI tonight speaking to Dean Richman's class. My instructions were to "tell your story" and then answer questions. My story isn't all that interesting and, worse, Dean Richman positioned me as a "successful" food writer. I'd like to have seen him argue that case to my wife yesterday when the nursery-school acceptance letters came, first delighting us and then throwing us into a panic over how to pay for our son's education. If ever there was a time to reconsider the decision to turn eGullet into a nonprofit instead of selling it to AOL, it was yesterday. But I told my story and answered some questions. Then it was time for my reward. I considered coming down with a case of fibromyalgia, but there's a student in the class who commutes every week all the way from Phoenix in order to learn at the feet of the master, and she was going to be the guest of honor at the dinner, so I felt it was my responsibility to attend. To be sure, I didn't do it for Dean Richman. I also toughed it out for a pedagogical reason. The students in Dean Richman's class are studying the craft of restaurant criticism this week. They were given the perverse assignment of reading reviews by Frank Bruni. When Frank Bruni's restaurant reviews become required reading in actual classes that people pay money to take then surely the end of days is near. The dollar can't be worth that little yet. So I figured I'd do a quick diary entry on the evening, as a shout out to the boys and girls in Dean Richman's class, if only to give them something a little less tortured to read this week. I would not, however, have accepted the invitation had I known in advance how long the current brigade had been in the kitchen at L'Ecole (which, for those who have French as bad as mine and were wondering, means "school"). The way these culinary-school restaurants work is that they're usually part of the final term's coursework. Every once in a while, depending on how long the practical unit is, a whole new kitchen crew comes in. At the beginning of that rotation, you want to stay the heck away from the restaurant. At the end of the rotation, you can at least hope for a modicum of professionalism. Tonight was the second night of the new rotation. If restaurants were rated by how much they exceed expectations, our meal at L'Ecole tonight would need to be awarded however many Michelin stars Alain Ducasse has. In absolute terms, the food was on par with what one would expect at a New York Times two-star restaurant in the Bryan Miller era, when two stars meant a really solid classic French restaurant. I was pleasantly surprised by just about every element of the meal. The company was good too. Even Dean Richman was fairly well behaved. Dinner at L'Ecole, I should also note, only costs $39.95. That's for a generous four- or five-course (depending on the night) prix-fixe dinner -- limited choices -- in an attractive restaurant with attentive and enthusiastic service. We were in on a five-course night. The wine list is quite reasonable as well, with plenty of solid choices in the $30-$50 range. The choices for the first course were "open seafood ravioli" (in other words mixed seafood covered in a pasta sheet) and an audaciously retro dish you don't see much these days: consomme. It took me a minute to click in to classic-French-cuisine evaluation mode. I'm probably not quite up to the task, because there are so few bases for comparison these days. It used to be that you could go to a different French restaurant every night of the week and have consomme at every one of them. If you do that, your ability to evaluate consomme really gets honed. Me, I hadn't tasted a classic consomme in who knows how long. Years? I can't believe what I've been missing. A well-made classic consomme -- and to the best of my knowledge this was such a specimen (I'll even go out on a limb and suggest that it was a double consomme) -- trumps the standard contemporary appetizer offerings of tuna tartare or seared Hudson Valley foie gras with out-of-season fruit any day. But of course few of today's chefs (and their customers) have the patience or dedication to make a dish that's so seemingly simple yet requires so many inputs in terms of both skills and finances. The open seafood ravioli (actually a single open seafood raviole) was a fine example as well, the various mollusks and crustaceans cooked just through, in a saffron- and cream-enhanced broth (maybe it was mascarpone; I didn't take a menu with me) that I mopped up with many slices of the school's excellent baguette. I'm glad I didn't stop for a baguette at Balthazar as I walked from the Spring Street subway station to the FCI, because the FCI's student-baked baguettes are superior to Balthazar's baguettes -- and they gave me one to take home. I have a series of plans for it tomorrow. Next we had a choice of barramundi or bass. All three of us ordered barramundi on our server's recommendation, but I strong-armed Dean Richman (which is not an easy thing to do) into changing to the bass so we could taste it. So impressed was our server by my ability to get Dean Richman to change his order, he brought us an extra portion of the bass. It turned out that the bass was the superior dish. Not only was the bass the better piece of fish -- the barramundi lacked the firmness and whiteness of the best specimens of that fish, whereas the bass was a nice piece of fish -- but also the bass came in an elegant broth meant to evoke a Mediterranean fisherman's stew (including a garnish of a long, thin crouton with rouille). The barramundi's garnishes -- well-made potato puree, al dente roasted Brussels sprouts, diced bacon of impeccable quality and a white-wine sauce spiked with mustard -- deserve honorable mention, though. For the meat course the choice was between lamb and duck. Again Dean Richman had to be manipulated into ordering the odd dish out, so he got the lamb. Both dishes were credible. The duck presentation consisted of slices of seared breast and a single braised thigh with a textbook red-wine sauce (regular restaurants could learn a thing or two about proper sauce-making from L'Ecole) and a couple of afterthought slices of roasted apple. The lamb chops came with Merguez sausage. Both the lamb and the duck were good products, tender (including the seared duck breast) and cooked medium rare. The next course was a slightly overdressed salad. L'Ecole should probably skip this course. Consomme = good anachronism. Overdressed salad before dessert = bad anachronism. We also opted for a selection of cheeses, which if you're a paying customer carries a disproportionate $9 supplement. There were about a dozen choices and we went for Garrotxa, Ossau Iraty and Epoisses. All were well-cared-for examples, and the Epoisses tasted illegal. Maybe it was just the Berthaut product that skirts the legal limits for aging by an hour, but it tasted better than the Berthaut Epoisses I get at Fairway. I was surprised, given that the FCI has a professional pastry arts program, at the lack of ambition on the dessert menu but a little searching revealed that the pastry arts students may not participate in the restaurant. If so, the desserts are pretty good by the standards of desserts prepared by non-pastry chefs. Were it full-time pastry students preparing those desserts, that would be a different story. The dessert choices were Linzer torte, creme brulee and molten-center-type chocolate cake. Looking back, I wish we'd tried the creme brulee because that was the most classic dessert and might have demonstrated something. The Linzer torte, for its part, wasn't what I'd call a Linzer torte but it was a tasty dessert of jammy filling between layers of pastry. The oozing chocolate cake was straightforward and properly timed, which is more than I can say for the last three of four of those things I've had in restaurants where the entrees cost as much as the entire dinner at L'Ecole.

I had read your posts as saying it is okay, but now that you've explained otherwise I agree with you. Happy to discuss this issue of sous-vide nomenclature further on another topic.

Still having trouble imagining it, Mayur? The "misheard as sous vide" theory seems valid, however even if that's what happened we still have people saying that egg was cooked sous vide even though it wasn't! Look, low-temperature cooking does not necessarily equal sous vide. It's as simple as that. There are hundreds of articles, books, classes and papers out there that make the distinction clear, and also plenty that get it wrong. But just because a lot of people get it wrong doesn't make it right, and Ruth Reichl's job is to be in the group that gets it right. Sam, I'm surprised you'd argue it the other way around given what a stickler you are for accuracy. It's hard to reconcile that approach with, for example, all your posts correcting people's use of the term "saute," your oeuvre of posts on cookware design and materials, etc.

The first quote specifically says it's not sous vide, and the second one doesn't say it is. Because it isn't.

Not on my home planet.

Nobody is going to restaurants looking for new paradigms. How would one do that? With one of those metal detectors people use to look for coins on the beach? We're talking about the fact that Momofuku Ssam Bar shattered the old restaurant paradigm. It simply happened, but some folks are slow to realize it. I'd be happy to explain, again, why the doubters are wrong. On the new-paradigm topic. Not here.

I'm not necessarily pinning it on Chang. It could just be what Reichl wrote. I mean, look at the fourth photo in post #19 above. That to me looks like an egg coddled in its shell at 63 degrees Celsius for 45 minutes (or whatever) in a low-temperature water bath, not an egg cooked in a vacuum pouch. I will, however, say that at least one cook at Noodle Bar has called the eggs there, which are coddled in their shells and not cooked in sealed pouches, "sous-vide eggs."

A couple of quibbles with Reichl's writeup, which is here First, I love all these protestations about egalitarianism while at the same time Ruth Reichl, Ed Levine, etc., are being taken through the restaurant for previews. It will be amusing to watch for further cracks in that system. Second, Reichl refers to "An egg (cooked sous vide)." So was the egg placed in a vacuum pouch ("sous vide" = "under gas") or was it really just slow-cooked in a water bath? The "sous-vide egg" misnomer probably shouldn't be perpetuated by a source at the level of Gourmet.