Fat Guy

Occam's razor says that, since there's already a Momofuku.com website, they'll just add a page there.

My feeling is that you can already get "Momofuku style korean influenced haute cuisine of four star level," at Momofuku Ssam Bar. That is precisely the Momofuku miracle. But hey, maybe the food is even better at Ko. We'll see. I'll stay away from new-paradigm discussion on this topic since we have a topic dedicated to that.

Those all seem like pretty minor variants on the counter-dining permutations currently available in New York (Degustation, Atelier, etc.) and elsewhere (e.g., Minibar in Washington, DC).

Yes, it's the chapter "Going Whole Hog" in the Man Who Ate Everything collection.

Now you're asking the hard questions. Let me see if I can track it down.

Jeffrey Steingarten discussed this in a piece he did way back when. He judged a barbecue competition. There was a film that explained to the judges how to evaluate the meat, etc. I recall that Steingarten implied that not all the judges actually watched the film or took the standards seriously.

My jingoistic side was particularly gratified by Cosentino's comment that he prefers the lamb necks he sourced locally here to the ones he gets from Sonoma.

That's not the conclusion I reached looking at the photos. Those dishes all looked entirely within the capabilities of the Ssam Bar kitchen (indeed, as noted above, variants of several of these dishes have been served at Ssam Bar over the past few months). Maybe the portions in the Ko photos are smaller and the plate compositions slightly more precise, but that's about it. I'm looking forward to trying the food at Ko one of these days, but the concept to me seems devolutionary. The brilliance of Ssam Bar is that it is a category-defining restaurant that merges haute and rustic in such an shamelessly postmodern manner that several of us feel strongly that it has created a paradigm shift in the restaurant universe. I've been as enthusiastic about the food at Ssam Bar and Noodle Bar as just about anybody, and have made the case that Ssam Bar is the best restaurant in New York right now, so I'm not saying that it would be a bad thing for the Chang team not to be able to cook food any better than what they're serving at Ssam Bar. It's already fantastic. But it won't get better by virtue of being put on smaller plates with dollops of caviar. And the main problem is that when you take Ssam Bar's food and you put it in this highly choreographed degustation format you've put the food back into a familiar context (you can get the whole restaurant-as-sushi-bar experience lots of places now) that I fear could ultimately be out of context to the Momofuku experience. Unless there's something unique about Ko that hasn't yet been explained, it seems to me that Chang has gone from innovator to imitator here.

Chris Cosentino's head-to-tail dinner tonight at Astor Center was of course delicious and fascinating, but more importantly being there felt like being part of something. There was an energy in the room that made normal restaurant experiences feel mundane by comparison. Everybody was there for and keenly interested in the food, which is something you can barely say about a tenth of the people at most restaurants. In particular, the encounter between the chef and the audience, enabled by Michael Ruhlman's hosting and Astor Center's technology, was a real delight. Michael Ruhlman, stationed in the dining room (the "Gallery" in Astor Center's vernacular), played the role of master of ceremonies. Chris Cosentino, working in the kitchen, had a video camera aimed at him all night and his image was projected on a large screen. He and Ruhlman had live audio communication. So the effect was that Ruhlman conducted a real-time interview with Cosentino throughout the evening. This is the basic idea: I thought it was a great use of technology. Typically, when you go to any sort of special dinner event, you sit through the meal and then the chef is trotted out at the end, there's polite applause, maybe one person asks a dumb question, and it's over. Whereas, at this event, the chef was part of the dynamic throughout. Ruhlman and Cosentino had a good, informal, no-nonsense rapport. So the technology didn't have the effect of making the event Food-Network-ish at all. It was just plain good interaction. Artichoke printed the menu and wines in the post preceding this one, but here's how the dishes shaped up on the plate. This is the tendon and sweetbreads. The tendon component of the dish, enhanced by hot chilies, reminded me a lot of the cold tendon appetizer you see in some Sichuan restaurants. Except, this was a much subtler version enhanced by mint and, oh yeah, big delicious fried chunks of sweetbreads. The portion seemed a little large for an appetizer, but hey, I wasn't complaining. The lobster with trotter cakes was an even larger portion: more than half a lobster, plus two massive and dense croquettes of pig-trotter meat. As far as I know -- and I discussed this with several well-positioned observers -- only one person in the whole room was able to finish the entire portion. Not because it wasn't good -- it was delicious -- but because it was so rich and so much. Rumor was the guy who finished the dish was Canadian. It seemed kind of an odd choice to regress to a white with the second course, and the wine didn't support the trotters at all (though it was just right for the lobster component of the dish). I wound up requisitioning some more of the red from the first course, which was much more friendly to the trotters (and vice versa). The venison liver crudo was the most feared dish of the evening -- several folks expressed reservations in advance -- but turned out to be quite approachable. Cosentino described it as "Like the new-style sashimi at Nobu but with venison liver." For those who've not had the pleasure, the idea is that you put the raw slices on the plate and then drizzle boiling-hot olive oil over them. The oil lightly cooks the flesh. I thought the wine choice here was the weakest of the evening. It was reminiscent of a lambrusco: sweet, grapey, a little bit effervescent. I felt it was the wrong wine for the dish. I get that there's some sweetness to the dish but the main flavor was the gamy unctuousness of the liver and that demands a wine with a lot more structure. (I was there on a press comp, however had I paid, and to the extent these things can be meaningfully separated out, I'd have felt it well worthwhile for the cuisine and overall experience but I'd not have been thrilled with the value proposition of the wine component.) The lamb's neck was so hilariously big nobody quite knew what to do with it. My photographic skills, as it were, don't convey it all that well. There was a heck of a lot of meat on the necks, which had been braised at low temperature for six hours. Cosentino instructed us to eat it with two forks: one to steady the neck and the other to pull meat off it. And you know what? That Canadian guy, he again was the only person to finish it. He deserves some sort of commendation. Good wine choice here as well. The candied cockscombs with rice pudding turned out to be quite mild. Texturally they were like -- everybody noted this -- Swedish fish. Flavor-wise they tasted like whatever was around them, in this case a delicious rice pudding. There were some other nice touches, food-wise. For example the butter (or so it seemed) on the table was actually a mixture of lardo, olive oil and butter. It was good (so was the bread). They even found little pig-imprinted wax-paper covers for the butter dishes. For the hors d'oeuvres, there were two dishes with heart (literally): the beef heart tartare noted by Artichoke above, and a pork heart crostini-type thing where the pork heart had been cured into a bottarga-like topping. But the real star of the show was Cosentino and his relentless advocacy for offal. It was easy, in advance of the meal, to get misdirected by the novelty aspect. A lot of the food has, on paper, a "dare" aspect to it. But those are just unfortunate cultural biases. There were a lot of media people at the event, including three video crews, and I got the sense that for most of them the story was "Lookey! Here's this guy who serves all these guts and stuff!" But the reality is that Cosentino cares primarily about flavor and secondarily about not wasting half the animal. He gave a compelling account of his offal awakening, which occurred when he was present for the slaughter of a lamb. As he held and comforted the expiring lamb, he realized that if the animal was going to suffer and die to be food then at least we shouldn't throw half of it in the garbage, especially when that half contains so many tasty parts. I certainly buy that argument, especially since the food was so delicious. Cosentino also talked about sustainability, an argument I found less compelling given that, you know, the guy serves bigger portions than any non-Canadian can eat.

So, what makes it good? Adjusting for previews by assuming it will get a little better, is it going to be better than what I can get at Momofuku Sssam Bar if I order the tasting menu there? Or does Ssam Bar's food already represent the pinnacle of what the Chang organization can create?

As far as I can tell at least three people posting here have dined at Momofuku Ko. So, is the food any good?

I'd been wanting to check out the Adour "Wine Library" -- that's the four-seat wine bar with high-tech interactive gizmos -- since the restaurant opened, but with just four seats at the bar I figured the only way to have a shot at a seat without waiting would be to stake out the door and be first in line at 5:15pm when the place opens. Today our schedule finally allowed us to implement that strategy. We snagged two seats at the bar and spent about three hours working through the entire bar menu. I haven't had a meal in the dining room(s) proper yet -- I haven't even looked at that menu -- so my food comments here just pertain to the bar menu (though there may be a little overlap). I do have some overall comments about the restaurant, though, which come perhaps from a slightly different perspective than has been represented here so far. My wife and I started going to Lespinasse when I was still in law school. It was our first restaurant, and for that reason alone would likely be guaranteed a special place in my heart. But it was a happy coincidence that we had that particular restaurant as our first love because by many accounts Lespinasse under Gray Kunz was a unique restaurant moment: a perfect storm of time, place, chef and financial backing. It has been about 15 years since those first meals at Lespinasse and it's still my benchmark for restaurant greatness. My hope was that Ducasse would take over the space and do something along the lines of the Ducasse signature restaurant at the Plaza Athenee in Paris, where I had one of the most impressive meals I've had in France. I've been a Ducasse partisan since he opened in New York in, was it 1999? The St. Regis even feels like a kindred spirit to the Plaza Athenee in terms of the physical possibilities of the dining room. Ducasse at the St. Regis, in the old Lespinasse space: it had all the makings of another perfect storm. So I was a little disappointed when I heard that the plan was for something other than a signature restaurant. Not that this was or has ever been made clear to the world. As the discussion on this topic shows, there has been a lot of guesswork needed to figure out what the Ducasse organization intended here. It's amazing to me just how poorly the Ducasse organization has communicated to New Yorkers about all the Ducasse restaurant ventures here: at the Essex House, at Mix and at Adour. Thankfully, there's now an actual restaurant in existence so we don't have to rely so much on speculation and mixed messages. I've read in various places that, in creating Adour, Ducasse and his team devoted considerable effort to thinking about what would resonate with New York's restaurant customers. I have no idea whether they made the right calculation. The restaurant seemed pretty busy tonight, but it's early -- we don't know what will happen over the next year or two. Despite his gastronomic stature, Ducasse doesn't exactly pursue the foodie audience. Is the term "jet set" still used these days? It certainly describes the Ducasse target audience, as well as the St. Regis hotel's clientele. Ducasse specializes in restaurants for discerning well-to-do people with international exposure and tastes, but conservative ones. The crowd and trappings at Adour certainly seem to share that heritage. Anyway, back to the bar. The bar is exquisite, so much so that I want to scream because it's so damn frustrating that they built it with four (four!) seats instead of twenty-four. There are also a handful of seats at awkwardly placed booths where you can get service from the wine bar, but I can't imagine wanting to sit at one of them. They're nice enough but far inferior to the bar. Worse, the bar does double duty as a staging area for dining-room customers who have shown up in advance of their parties, so it's not even a dedicated wine bar. The other two seats were occupied by various other people during the time we were there and all but the last two of them eventually headed off to tables in the dining room, martinis and glasses of Champagne in tow. If, however, you can get yourself safely ensconced at a bar seat (preferably one of the two seats farther from the entrance, so you're a bit more protected and have a better people-watching perch to boot), you can have perhaps the finest wine-bar experience available anywhere. Or at least, anywhere I've been. It's basically the most haute tapas experience imaginable, at a Momofuku price point. It's cheap. Okay, not cheap as in Gray's Papaya cheap or even 'inoteca cheap. I'm sure my late father-in-law would be saying "$15 for a couple of scallops? In a little bowl? Highway robbery!" But that's with truffle. Not truffle oil. Actual slices and bits of black truffle. And impeccably garnished with vegetables that represent the pinnacle of vegetable cookery, and sauced with a shellfish jus that puts most American sauce-making to shame. In other words, it's a bargain at $15 because it's a fully functioning representation of what Ducasse does best and it's only $15. Indeed, every dish on the bar menu is cheap: they range from $9 to $16. They're small but most of them are superb. If you order all eight savory dishes, and the cheese plate, and all three desserts, it comes to $143. If you go to Ducasse's restaurant in Monaco the scallops with black truffle will cost you 110 Euros (Euros!) for just that one dish. Sure it's several times over the portion size, but you can get the $15 version here and you can also order every other dish on the bar menu and it still comes to less than the cost of that one dish in Monaco. So, to me, that's cheap. The price point for the wines by the glass is also refreshingly gentle. There are several respectable options in the $9-$16 per glass range. My wife had a couple of glasses ($13 each) of a delightfully fruity Alsatian pinot gris from Jean Ginglinger, and I had a super-crisp white from Santorini (Domaine Sigalas, $11) followed by a Spanish wine -- I didn't catch the name -- that wasn't on the list but was being hand-sold by the glass to a lot of customers. The two most stellar savory dishes were the pork belly and the scallops. The pork belly is glazed and comes in four cubes. Each cube is speared on a fancy toothpick with a slice of the Ducasse/Esnault take on boudin noir (blood sausage) and an apple-cranberry garnish. Small though the portion may be, it is mighty. Ditto the diver scallops with salsify, spinach, black truffle and shellfish jus. Also excellent were the hamachi and the cod. The hamachi dish is described as "cucumber marinated hamachi/geoduck, radish, green apple mustard." On the plate it seems much simpler: slices of raw hamachi with little pieces of the other ingredients decorating each slice. The cod is poached in olive oil and served with a "bell pepper-white onion 'piperade'." The piperade-in-quotes refers I suppose to the Basque dish, but here it's more of a delicate sauce with slices of crispy proscuitto. It works, very well. I enjoyed every dish, but I'd say those four are the standouts. We also tried the jambon on country toast with fennel and nicoise olives, which was more of a bar snack than an haute experience -- a good bar snack but a bar snack. The ricotta gnocchi with lettuce, prosciutto and Sherry vinegar provoked mixed reactions from my team: my wife felt it bordered on greatness and I thought the gnocchi themselves needed more oomph. The lobster thermidor is a lobster claw with the meat removed and mixed up with mustard, tarragon, cognac and what seemed like the concentrated essence of ten pounds of butter, then the mixture is replaced in the claw and, presumably, broiled until a crispy crust forms. Finally, the lamb "lollipops," four nice boneless pieces of lamb on fancy toothpicks with piquillos, apricot and lemon confit. I wouldn't steer you away from any of these dishes -- if you're in a position to order all eight, you should -- but I'd prioritize the first four I described. The $11 cheese plate is a winner. You get four nice-size pieces of cheese, four slices of excellent bread and four garnishes that are as good or better than any garnishes for cheese I've ever had. The service, on three separate platters, is remarkable: you can't believe you get all that serviceware with an $11 dish. The best of the garnishes is acacia honey with preserved grapes, but there's also a great date spread, a red pepper jelly and a walnut garnish that works brilliantly with the Fourme d'Ambert (blue cheese). We had one dessert from the bar menu: the pear clafoutis. This to me was a resounding demonstration of the superiority of Ducasse's pastry program. It's a subtle modern-classic dessert that gets to the essence of pear, with a combination of pear julienne, a caramel "croustillant" and honey ice cream. I believe the bartender said this dish is also on the regular dining-room dessert menu. The bartender also steered us towards a dessert that wasn't on the bar menu (I'm pretty sure they'll serve you anything at the bar if you ask -- the people next to us at the end got the sweetbreads dish from the dining room served to them at the bar -- but I'm not entirely clear on the policy and neglected to ask because at the end we had to rush to get home), which was called "sorbet" but was more like a gigantic bowl of chocolate in different textures and temperatures, with hot chocolate sauce poured tableside such that it breaks a hole in the surface of the chocolate in the bowl, and then garnished with little brioche crouton cubes. We spent most of our time without interacting with or being noticed by anybody I knew, and found the bar service to be charming and super-attentive. (That's the advantage of having only four seats: the four people at the bar have a dedicated server.) Later on, however, a manager (Yannis) who had been at Ducasse's restaurant at the Essex House saw me and that led to an avalanche of petits-fours and mignardises that I'm pretty sure aren't normally served at the bar. Also later a favorite server (Guthrie) who had been at the old Lespinasse emerged from the kitchen and noticed us. He told us that there are actually four servers from the old Lespinasse who had been reactivated for Adour. The wine bar itself has a feature that makes a pretty spectacular first impression but then grows a bit tiresome. The subsurface of the bar is made of some sort of high-tech material that is lit from projectors discreetly hidden in the ceiling. This has the effect of making the entire surface of the bar into an interactive video screen. It's not touch sensitive as such; rather, you hover your finger above your selections. This, I guess, interrupts the beams of light from the ceiling in such a way that the system figures out what you're pointing at. In this way, you use your finger as a cross between a computer mouse, a laser pointer, a magic wand and the control wheel on an iPod. It takes some getting used to but once you get the hang of it you can navigate through the wine list and bar menu and pull up lots of interesting information. It's visually stunning -- everybody who saw it for the first time was awed by it. There are also four spots on the bar where the projectors beam down a stream of clean white light so you can evaluate the color of your wine. I give them credit for doing something original and interesting. As the meal goes on, though, various flaws in the system reveal themselves. For example if you position your plate in certain spots it activates the system and it can be pretty hard to get the damn thing to shut off and stop shining words on your food.

I tried it a few different ways and that approach, which was the first I tried, just wasn't working for me. Drop biscuit dough is pretty unwieldy -- it's hard to get a really small pinch of it to cohere nicely -- so I found that if I tried the bottom-then-top method I wound up with too much dough and actually still needed to do just as much shaping. I found that the most workable system was to put the dough on the baking sheet, plop the hot dog on top, and bring some of the dough up the sides and around the top. Not pretty but it worked.

Tonight I took another crack at proving my pig-in-biscuit theory. This time I went with a drop-biscuit dough (I used the standard Bisquick drop-biscuit formula) instead of a rolled-biscuit dough. The results were superb. Using drop-biscuit dough minimized handling and yielded delicious biscuit dogs. Flavor-wise, this approach is a winner. The main drawback is that it doesn't produce particularly attractive specimens. It's not possible to shape drop-biscuit dough in any meaningful way, and you need to make fairly large units in order to surround the hot dog with biscuit dough. These are also not all that workable as finger food -- you really need to eat them off a plate or you'll be standing in a pile of crumbs. Still, amazing flavor. They taste like they look: the goodness of hot dogs and the goodness of crumbly drop biscuits in the same bite.

What about Hill Country, or the Bread Bar at Tabla? Those are places where you do lots of sharing, so with a $100 budget you can get a bunch of different stuff and eat well.

There's a new dish on the specials menu (the one-sheet they distribute alongside the regular menu) that's quite good. It's a yellow curry with bone-in pieces of chicken, plus potatoes and onions.

I've been in many households where breaking spaghetti (or linguine, etc.) in half is standard operating procedure. I suppose the theory is that it makes it easier to eat? Or maybe it's because the pot is too small? In any event, I can't imagine that there's any actual harm in breaking the pasta. It's not like the insides of the pasta ooze out when you break it, or some aromas escape or the friendly pasta spirits take flight. I assume the anti-breakage position is more of an aesthetic one. I can certainly understand cutting spaghetti up for a child, but grownups should just learn how to eat the stuff. Not to mention, if you need to break pasta to fit it in the pot then you're surely using too small of a pot.

So what's it all about? Any amateur or professional psychoanalysts have any theories?

I was shopping with my mother the other day and, on the way home, she said, "Oh, I forgot to buy eggs." "No problem," said I. "I bought two dozen. You can have one of them." She replied, "But I don't like the brown ones." No amount of evidence was going to convince her that white- and brown-shelled eggs taste exactly the same. I knew not to bother. She'd rather make a whole 'nother trip to the store than eat a brown egg. I'm sure we've all encountered maddening food neuroses like this. Please do share.

Today my wife and 2.5-year-old son were on the way home from the American Museum of Natural History and phoned in a lunch order. He had requested steamed white rice with duck sauce. No problem, I thought. I have leftover rice and can just heat it up in the microwave (add a couple of tablespoons of water and cover loosely; it steams up really well). And we always save those little plastic packets of duck sauce from when we get Chinese-food delivery. Every time, they give us a dozen of them and we use maybe one. Right in the cheese drawer there should be a villion of them. Woops. It seems that, just this past week, we cleaned out the refrigerator and discarded all the duck sauce. No duck sauce in the house. Of course I could have just said, sorry kid, no duck sauce today. But he's had a cold (probably a couple of colds) for almost two weeks and I wanted to indulge him. I also could have run out to a nearby Chinese restaurant and asked for a few packets. I had 20 minutes. I could have done it. Instead, I decided to make duck sauce. How hard could it be? After all, I'm supposed to be an authority on Asian restaurants. I should be able to make the most basic condiment in the Chinese-American repertoire. I vaguely knew that duck sauce is based on apricot, or was it plum, or peach? I had a jar of apricot jelly in the refrigerator, so I knew I'd be able to do produce something with at least the right color. I did some Googling and found quite a few recipes for duck sauce, none of which sounded like they'd produce anything remotely like the orange stuff in the Chinese-restaurant packets. And it's not relevant to me whether those recipes are better than the packet stuff, because I'm trying to reproduce what's in the packet -- that's what has been requested. So I searched for the ingredients in commercial duck sauce. On Wikipedia, I found a photograph of a packet of duck sauce from the Yi Pin Food Products Corporation in Brooklyn, New York, which I believe is the duck sauce that's typically included in Chinese-food takeout orders in these parts. I was able to make out the ingredients list: water, sugar, corn syrup, starch, peach, apricot, salt, vinegar, guar gum, and a bunch of colorings and preservatives. I took a small empty jelly jar and added a couple of tablespoons of apricot jelly, a tablespoon of hot tap water, a splash of vinegar and a pinch of salt. I shook vigorously and tasted. It wasn't exactly what I was after but it was quite close. Still, it wasn't duck sauce yet. I played around with the ratios a bit and eventually realized that what it needed was a little bit of bitterness. So I added about a teaspoon of orange marmalade. That really did the trick. All of a sudden, I had duck sauce. At least, it was close enough to fool a 2.5-year-old kid. Has anybody else attempted to make duck sauce at home?

I agree, and it seems to me like the most interesting event on the calendar for the near term. I spoke to Lesley Townsend, Astor Center's director, about it and she offered a 15% discount to any eG Forums participant or reader who wants to attend. If you go to the registration page and enter the promotional code EG030408 when you check out, you'll get the discount. On a $250 dinner, I think that comes out to $37.50 off, which is not inconsequential. That offer is of course only available as long as seats are available. Chris Cosentino has been a favorite chef of our in-the-know California-based members for quite some time, and in 2006 there was an eGullet Society dinner at Incanto that sounded terrific. You can see the reports here. Needless to say, Michael Ruhlman, who will be hosting the evening, also has a lot of admirers in the eGullet Society community. I'll almost definitely be attending the dinner and hope to see some of you there. If there are enough of us, maybe we can stake out an eGullet Society table (please contact me by PM, don't post here, if you want to organize something). (P.S. Those who want to meet Cosentino without shelling out for the big dinner can also opt for the $45 Sunday afternoon discussion session, which was recently added to the schedule.)

There was just a mention in Food Arts of a woman who does something related to this in France. Her name is Wendy Whitehurst, and she runs basically a private food-oriented concierge service. In New York City there are quite a few options in this regard.

The best stromboli and calzone I've had are at a place in Hackensack, New Jersey. It's called Brooklyn's Brick Oven Pizza and is operated by the nephews of Patsy Grimaldi of Grimaldi's (Brooklyn) fame. At this place in New Jersey, they use the same dough for pizza, stromboli and calzone. The differences are mostly stylistic: for pizza the dough is stretched into a disc and the toppings go on top; for calzone the dough is also stretched into a disc but the fillings go on half and then the disc is folded into a half-moon shape; for stromboli the dough is stretched into a rectangle, which is rolled around the fillings. Calzone fillings tend to be ricotta and mozzarella cheeses plus whatever meats and vegetables are requested; stromboli fillings tend to be just mozzarella cheese plus various meats and red bell peppers. P.S. If you've ever had Hot Pockets you've had something akin to stromboli.

In addition, the delivery person may make multiple stops.

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, and I say it to everybody who's planning to go to Bouley: Bouley is a pathologically inconsistent restaurant. There is no better restaurant than Bouley on a good night. But on other nights Bouley can be profoundly unimpressive. The restaurant is like a wonderful, gorgeous, brilliant lover who just happens to have a horrible mental illness like dissociative identity disorder. It's horrible because you can go for periods of time when everything is great, but then you show up one night and not only does the restaurant not know who you are (even though you've been in a decades-long relationship) but also the restaurant doesn't know who it is. But when Bouley is on, it's amazing. I would take a good night at Bouley over Eleven Madison Park every time. But, since there's no reliable way to ensure a good night at Bouley, it pretty much always makes sense to go to a different restaurant.