Fat Guy

As I understand it, the bar/lounge/alcove/whatever has a few booths as well. There are a couple of questions raised by all this, though. First, is bar seating essential, or is lounge seating enough to get you qualified as a wine bar? I have to say when I go to Bar @ Etats-Unis I typically sit at a table. But I consider it a wine bar. Second, is there a size limit? Does a four-seat wine bar with a few booths count? If not, why not? What about a theoretical wine bar with 600 seats? Would that do so much violence to the concept as to be not a wine bar?

Okay here's the info from the Vintage New York website: You can follow that link above for a menu etc.

I thought I heard that Vintage had opened an actual wine bar with food ("WineBar"), maybe next door to the store, a couple of years ago.

There's also Morrell -- they have a pretty swell list and the food was quite good when I went there. I haven't been to Vintage New York WineBar, but it seems like a potentially interesting spot. Bar Room at The Modern -- just noting it as a data point to help with delimiting the category.

I guess to that list I'd add a some uptown places: On the East Side, Bar @ Etats-Unis (which I utilize for casual meetings in the neighborhood) and Taste. On the West Side, Bin 71 and Barcibo. Back in the rest of the city, I've heard some okay comments about 8th Street Winecellar but don't have a feel for the place. Same with Vinovino. There's also Enoteca I Trulli. And that Flute place -- they have a couple of locations. I wonder, does Craftbar qualifty? I've just barely started thinking about criteria.

With recent wine-bar-ish concepts from Daniel Boulud (Bar Boulud) and Alain Ducasse (Adour), a forthcoming venture from Paul Grieco (Terroir), plenty of buzz about Monday Room, and other examples I'm sure, it seems New York City's wine bars are getting not just more plentiful but also more ambitious. I haven't been to any of the new crop (though I plan to go to several of them soon in the course of researching an article), but I think overall it's good that New York City is upping it's game in this regard. I've long envied the wine-bar cultures of European cities, not to mention San Francisco. We've had 'inoteca and a few other good places for awhile, but New York City has felt like a third-tier wine-bar city for too long. Any thoughts on the wine-bar phenomenon? Suggestions for best wine bars? Which ones have food that's worthwhile? I was hoping that, in the process of having this discussion, we could also generate a wine-bar list and perhaps narrow the parameters for what is and isn't a wine bar.

I'm in favor of businesses telling their stories. I'm one of the few people who reads the "history of our restaurant" thing on every menu that has one. And I'd be entirely pleased to read a statement of socially conscious policies on a menu. But I think I'd rather not have it expressed as a surcharge. I'd prefer something like "You may have noticed we charge a dollar or two more than our competitors, and we wanted to explain why: first, we provide our employees with health-care benefits, which are unfortunately not standard in the restaurant industry; second, we pay our back-of-the-house staff a higher-than-average wage . . . ." That's also a good place to talk about sustainability and such.

To answer the original question, yes, it's a new trend. Of course it's great, for a variety of reasons, that some restaurants are helping their employees live better. But I dislike the nickel-and-dime aspect of the practice. Paying a restaurant bill in the United States is already a silly exercise in surcharges, and this new trend adds additional surcharges. In France, you just pay the amount on the menu. If you have a 20 Euro starter, a 40 Euro main and a 10 Euro dessert, you get a bill for 70 Euros that includes all taxes and service charges (in Europe, health-care comes out of taxes, but it's just as simple to account this way if you have a private-insurer system). But more fundamentally, the idea of a service charge is antithetical to the idea of predictable benefits. It keeps the risk burden on the employees. What happens in a slow month when dining-room receipts are low? Do the employees not get health-care that month? In most serious corporations it's the employer's responsibility to manage cashflow and charge sufficient prices such that there's money in the bank to pay benefits during the slow months. There are of course incentive bonuses and such, but the surcharge system in a restaurant is like saying your health-care benefits are like an incentive bonus based on sales. Or, if the benefit is not linked to performance, the surcharge is actually just a marketing device.

Those are Hebrew National. I was trying to use what Alan Richman used so I could contrast based on the dough. Left to my own devices I'd probably use Sabrett. I ate most but not all of them. My wife and son assisted.

Inspired by the Alan Richman experience, I decided to make pigs in blankets last night. I have a couple of things to bring to the table when it comes to pigs in blankets: First, I'm a firm believer in dispensing with cocktail-size hot dogs. When you use cocktail franks, you radically limit your choices. If you go to a typical big suburban supermarket you could easily see 30+ varieties of hot dogs (there are 38 at the ShopRite in Connecticut near my mother-in-law's house). Most likely, only 1-2 of those will be cocktail franks. If you buy regular-size hot dogs and cut them up you have more and better options. You can get the higher-quality ones from the deli case, or whatever. Cosmetically, pigs in blankets look just fine to me when made with cut-up hot dogs -- I think the cross-section is actually kind of appetizing. Were I doing them for a party I might trim the ends, but that's about it. Also, cocktail franks cost more per pound than equivalent-quality regular franks (a 12-ounce package of cocktail franks and a 16-ounce package of regular ones tend to cost about the same). Second, I think the ideal dough (despite my failure to demonstrate it on this attempt) must be one that's not particularly rich. To me the buttery/oily doughs are overkill when you combine them with hot dogs. I think this is why I like bagel dogs and pretzel dogs so much: you get some of the pig-in-blanket aesthetic without the gratuitous greasiness. For this particular experiment I decided to try a biscuit dough. I rolled it out and cut it in strips, then wrapped the strips around the hot-dog pieces. In so doing, I screwed up a few things: I overworked the dough so it became tougher than I'd have liked; I used too much dough per piece; and I didn't make a good seal on some of the pieces, so a few of them popped open during cooking. My pigs in blankets were not as good as the Richman pigs in blankets. My dough just wasn't competitive with Pillsbury's dough. Still, they were quite tasty. By the way, Richman's innovation of giving the hot dogs a quick poach before use is excellent. It improves the flavor of the finished product, reduces the amount of liquid that the hot dogs give off, and helps them achieve more of a roasted finish.

Not exactly the same, but I never defrost anything I'm going to braise: brisket, short ribs, etc. They go in frozen and I just add some extra time.

For me I think the issue is that cooking is a meditative activity. I like to lose myself in it and prefer as few unplanned disruptions as possible. If I'm planning to undertake a cooking project with others, I know it's going to involve sharing space and that may even be part of the pleasure of it. But if I'm planning a solitary cooking endeavor and all of a sudden a person appears in my workspace and interrupts my meditation, I find it annoying. I guess I just need to be more Zen about it, but it really irks me. There are 24 hours in a day and I'm only in the kitchen for a tiny slice of that time. Why can't everybody else use the kitchen during the whole rest of the day and night? Sometimes I feel like I'm a kitchen magnet: as soon as I pull out the cutting board everybody gets the idea to come in and start doing stuff.

As much as I respect (some of) those sources, I think when it comes to exposure they're all firmly second tier (Crain's also reviewed Toloache -- same category). It's just amazing to me that, given all the griping about how there were so few interesting openings last year, neither the New York Times or New York Magazine bothered to do a full review of Toloache. It's nutty.

I was enthusiastic about Toloache after my first, early meal there. Tonight I returned with a group of five and ordered extensively, and I'm upgrading my position from enthusiastic to "best restaurant of the past year that you never heard of." Toloache has managed to fly below the foodie radar. It got the "Dining Briefs" brushoff from the New York Times and one paragraph in New York Magazine. It doesn't seem to have many online champions. Yet, Toloache is serving some of the best Mexican food I've eaten in New York City. Toloache may in part be a victim of its casual, festive, flexible approach. It would be easy enough to pass through, have a couple of margaritas and do some snacking, and not experience a Mexican-food epiphany. At the same time, there's a serious kitchen back there. It's a sign of the times: there are now quite a few restaurants around New York City where you can have a range of experiences, from innocuous snacks to multi-course tasting extravaganzas. Those who take Toloache seriously will be rewarded with serious food. We started off with a variety of margaritas, with the most special being "Chef Medina's Favorite." This is an expensive margarita -- it's $22, whereas all the others are $10-$13 -- but it's made with the phenomenal Don Julio 1942 limited-edition tequila mixed with Agavero tequila liqueur and, of course, fresh lime juice. If you're into tequila this is a cocktail worth trying at least once. If not, the Oro Blanco margarita is terrific and costs $10 less. With our (first round of) margaritas we had the guacamole trio, described above. Even with the element of surprise removed -- I'd had it before -- the guacamole trio delivered. As fendi_pilot noted above, it's hard to justify ordering one guacamole for $11 when you can have three for $20. It's not simply a question of better value, but also of the synergy of eating the three together and arguing with your friends about which you think is best. It really elevates the guacamole experience above the now-tired tableside-guac ritual at fancy Mexican restaurants around town. We then had several ceviches, including repeats of the ones I had the first time around, and I made some new friends. I think the best ceviche on the table was the hamachi, which I'd not tried before. It's tossed with Meyer lemon, cucumber, red onion and Huichol salsa. Next, we had three items from the "small plates" and "brick oven" sections of the menu, all of which were remarkably good. I commented above on the sopes de requeson -- corn cakes with ricotta, chorizo and a fried quail egg -- and strongly recommend those as the can't miss dish of the restaurant. But the two other dishes in this flight held their own. We had a quesadilla, cooked in the brick oven, with huitlacoche and manchego cheese, pumped up by black-truffle flavor (presumably from some sort of preserved/infused truffle product -- there weren't evident slices of black truffle or anything like that). This sounds like it could be a heavy dish but it's made with restraint, like good pizza, with just enough of each ingredient to give great flavor without weighing things down. Also a very well executed tamale with mole verde, queso fresco and crispy shredded pork. We followed that with an assortment of tacos. The foie gras tacos held up on reexamination -- another must-try item -- and the grasshoppers remained interesting the second time around as well. My two favorites of the new crop we tried were one (two, actually -- they come in pairs) made with chunks of venison and an excellent rendition of al pastor made with organic pork and grilled pineapple. I've mentioned these items to some people and heard reactions indicating that these tacos seem pretentious, effete or, heaven forbid, inauthentic, but they taste totally legitimate and delicious to me. The thing about Julian Medina's cooking is that, while he takes a lot of dishes in an haute direction, he still maintains desirable bold Mexican flavors across the whole menu. It felt gratuitous to have entrees at this point (and absurd to have desserts later) but we pressed on and, to the kitchen's credit, ate almost every bite. Two of us had the brick-oven-roasted suckling pig, which was elevated by nice crispy bits of chicharron throughout. The tuna was as good as the first time, not least because it was a very nice piece of fish. I ordered the special, tilapia steamed in a banana leaf, which isn't the type of thing I normally order but nobody else ordered it so I felt obliged to. It was the kind of spa cuisine I can get behind: infused with fruity essences from the steaming/baking process and just the thing to have after the large quantity of appetizers we'd been through. The best entree, though -- even better than the pork, which is saying something -- was something I wouldn't have predicted as the winner: pomegranate-braised beef short ribs. There was universal agreement that it was the best entree, though. The pomegranate doesn't make the dish cloying -- that was my fear. There are six desserts -- three made with Mexican chocolate and three non-chocolate choices -- and the pastry kitchen has improved since my first visit. The four desserts I tasted tonight were all strong performers. I hadn't thought much of the tres leches the first time around, but tonight it was well balanced and the Meyer lemon flavor showed much better than before. The churros were well executed. My top pick, though, has to be the crepas con cajeta. Many layers of crepes with caramelized goat's milk and almonds, served with banana ice cream. It actually reminded me of something one might have found on the pastry cart of a great old French restaurant. Also, though a bit dated, the molten-center Mexican-chocolate cake would have been hard to improve upon. In addition to the margaritas we had a bottle of Flor de Guadalupe zinfandel, from Baja California. Not a blockbuster zinfandel, but a demonstration of Mexico's ability to make good, reasonably priced wines that go well with food.

I plead guilty to not giving it a fair shake. I understand the whole market schtick, but when it comes down to the actual food being served I have to wonder: what does BLT Market offer that isn't duplicative of or similar to what's served at the other BLTs in the chain? That's the question that would determine whether a full review is warranted. What's the answer?

That's framing the question from a foodie perspective, but we don't live in a nation of foodies. Most people are totally happy with the pizza they get delivered. They don't care that other foods travel better, because they don't recognize the existence of a problem in the first place.

I have a few educated guesses to make here, and maybe folks with better education can comment: 1. "Consistency" and "quality," used in the context of uni, are code words for the Japanese preference for uniform size and color. Flavor, however, may not be as unpredictable as size and color. For example, when Hawksworth and I cut open 240 urchins, there wasn't a lot of variation in flavor. The variation was in size and color. So this may be a conscious tradeoff and, in my opinion, a bad one. 2. The massive differential in labor, shipping costs, etc., can't be underestimated here. When I hear of such a huge differential, my first assumption is that every other explanation is an excuse meant to misdirect the consumer. Given the amount of uni served at a busy sushi bar in an evening, it would probably require an additional employee to prep it all. Not to mention, there would be a lot of waste, because sometimes you open one up and there's not much usable stuff in there. 3. This all becomes self-fulfilling. Because consumers have been conditioned to think uniform size and color are indications of quality (as with supermarket fruit), and because the chemical taste and unnaturally firm texture of processed uni are now part of the expected experience, they could actually be dissatisfied with the irregularity of superior uni from live urchins.

Some restaurants do get live uni, though. FedEx is the modern miracle that makes it possible. For the David Hawksworth dish mentioned above, several cartons of uni came from Vancouver Island overnight via FedEx. They were in foam coolers with gel packs, seaweed and paper. They were in great shape when we got them. At Nobu they have the uni right on the raw bar and they seem to do fine for a day. Pretty sure they come from Maine. Interestingly, Nobu is the only Japanese restaurant where I've seen live uni -- I'm sure there are others, but I haven't seen it anywhere else -- whereas I've seen live uni in many Western restaurant kitchens in both North America and Europe. I wonder if there's a food-safety issue, real or imagined. In the Western restaurants, the uni are almost always served as part of a cooked dish, not raw as they are at sushi bars.

I've started a separate topic for discussion of live versus processed uni. It would be great if those who have staked out positions here could summarize them there. Thanks.

A discussion of the sushi restaurant Ushi Wakamaru in New York City went on a tangent about the issue of live versus processed uni (urchin). My contention, which I didn't even think was a contention, was that live is better. A surprising (to me) number of people, however, offered arguments that processed uni is just as good, and has the benefit of being more consistent. So I think the subject deserves its own topic. I have some experience with live uni. A couple of years ago, a chef friend from Vancouver, David Hawksworth, came to New York and I helped him dispatch 240 live urchins for a dish he was serving at an event at the Rainbow Room. We snacked on a lot of uni that day. I also got to mess around with live uni, though not as extensively, during some cooking classes I took in Burgundy with Jean-Michel Lorain. And I've eaten a fair amount live uni, particularly at Nobu where they often have it on the raw bar. Certainly, in talking to David Hawksworth, Jean-Michel Lorain and (Nobu chef) Shin Tsujimura, you wouldn't think there was any question that live uni is superior. And in my experience, every example of live uni I've had has been superior to any example of processed uni. Processed uni (as in the uni most sushi places use, which comes in those little wooden trays), no matter its quality, to me does not taste as fresh and also has a distinct chemical flavor. I haven't done a blind taste test, but those have been my observations over the years. I'll let the defenders of processed uni speak to their position.

I think there tends to be an inverse relationship between pizza quality and deliverability. For pizza to deliver well you pretty much have to design it for that sort of stability, and that means sacrificing many of pizza's desirable traits. Most of the best pizzerias around here don't deliver, and when you find the occasional good pizzeria that does deliver you get a badly degraded pizza showing up at your home. There are some exceptions, for example Chicago-style deep-dish pizza can be both delicious and durable. Or, if you happen to live so close to a good pizzeria that bringing the pizza to your home is about the same as bringing it to a table in the pizzeria, that can work.

Yes. The current-generation ebook readers available to retail consumers (Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, HanLin eBook, etc.) use the E Ink Vizplex technology, which is remarkably paper-like. It's not quite there, but it's pretty impressive. At least, I don't know anybody who has picked one up and not been impressed.

There is no need for an artificial light source of any kind. If you read an EPD on the hammock, the sun illuminates the electronic ink and electronic paper just as it would illuminate regular ink and regular paper. It is not at all like reading a book on a laptop computer's LCD screen. It's an entirely different technology.

Just a minor point there: electronic paper displays (EPDs) are not artificially lit. Electronic ink is reflective, just like regular ink. Unlike an LCD, it requires no backlighting and can be read under all the same conditions as regular ink. From the E Ink website: My feeling is that from a cookbook perspective, the main problems with current-generation ebook readers are: 1. The displays are not in color, a limitation that renders them sort of useless for illustrated cookbooks. So addressing that is going to require a step forward in the technology. 2. The displays are fairly small, on the order of a page of a paperback novel. Cookbooks tend to use a much larger format. I remember when my non-cookbook food book, Turning the Tables, was released in paperback. It had roughly the trim size of a regular nonfiction paperback. I'd go to bookstores and it would typically be shelved with the cookbooks, and it looked minuscule next to them. Especially when you're talking about spreading out a cookbook on the counter so you're viewing two pages of a recipe at once, that could be several times the surface area of an ebook reader. It seems inevitable, though, that these issues will be addressed as ebook technology develops. Already there are prototypes of color and rollable/flexible epaper. It's more a question of when than whether.

It's official. The book will be titled ASIAN DINING RULES: Essential Strategies for Eating Out at Japanese, Chinese, Southeast Asian, Korean, and Indian Restaurants. It will be on sale in November. I just got the first pass galley proofs and the first draft of the cover and they look great.