Fat Guy

Veal is beef. The differences are primarily in the way veal is raised (restricted movement) and its age (younger). My original point, which is now being demonstrated by members' posts, was that veal can be a difficult-to-find, expensive specialty item, whereas beef is easily and widely available at supermarkets everywhere Ruhlman's book is being read. And, I argued, and still assure everybody, that the difference between veal and beef stock for the overwhelming majority of home-cooking applications is insignificant. Sure, if your goal is to make a sauce for fish, you might have a situation where you want total eradication of the beef flavor (which you can still pretty much achieve if you use only bones), but for mushrooms? For any kind of red meat? Not significant. If the point is to encourage cooks who have never made and used stock to start using it -- and that's how I understood the section -- it strikes me as a mistake to insist on veal stock the way Elements does. If you've never made and used stock in the home kitchen, and you don't live in a place where veal is cheap and plentiful, then just start with beef stock. Don't hesitate for an instant. The ingredients are cheap and easy to get, you can just follow the Elements recipe as written, and you'll be very happy with the results.

There were three grape boycotts. The original one -- the one that made a name for Chavez -- was 1965-1970. The Gallo-and-lettuce boycott was 1973-1977. There was also one in the 1980s.

That would be César Chávez. . . . ← And that would be the late 1960s. I know because when my mother was pregnant with me, in 1968-1969, she had intense grape cravings but the grape boycott was on -- an impossible situation for a pregnant Upper West Side Jewish intellectual craving grapes in the 1960s. The boycott ended in 1970. At $250k, you'd think Burger King would be non-stupid enough to do this just for the PR benefit, never mind the humanitarian aspects.

Joan I really think that if you divert to beef stock or even poultry stock, using readily available supermarket ingredients and the exact same formula and directions from Ruhlman's book, you'll still achieve the key texture and flavor benefits of veal stock. Certainly, with that mushroom preparation described in the book, beef stock will be a home run.

We were back at Gramercy Tavern last night with some friends who were in from Nashville, and as luck would have it we were at a corner table where I didn't feel the use of flash would disturb anyone (especially since the restaurant was pretty raucous already, this being holiday season and all). Not that the flash resulted in good photos, but at least for informational purposes you can see a lot of the dishes I've talked about in my last few posts. There were four of us and we had a split tasting. For one tasting I'd made a request in advance for a pesce-vegetarian tasting with no mollusks, and for the other tasting (the omnivore tasting) we left it to the chef's discretion. These are all dishes from the various Gramercy Tavern menus -- some are from the tasting menus and some are split portions of regular menu items. The only items from this menu that you couldn't get if you walked into Gramercy Tavern today as a stranger to the restaurant would be the two soigne amuse platters, which you kind of have to work up to over multiple visits (though if you asked for them the kitchen would probably be so amused that they'd pull something together). So, about those two amuses. For the omnivores, a Fishers Island oyster with pickled mustard seeds, a slice of foie gras torchon topped with pears, and a slice of duck terrine with onion and pistachio marmalade (the duck terrine is a miniature representation of a regular menu item) : For the pesce-vegetarians, an amuse of Thumbalina carrot with house-made lemon ricotta, beet-and-radish skewers, and cauliflower soup: For the first course, smoked trout with sunchoke puree and pickled onions. I've already raved about this product and preparation, and I was really glad our friend -- who was new to Mike Anthony's cooking -- was very impressed by it. I really think this is one of the best dishes in town right now: And the tuna-and-beet tartare with hazelnuts: Next, Nantucket bay scallops with lentils, pickled mushrooms and salsify. The pickled mushrooms really elevated the dish: Poached lobster with cauliflower puree and ginger-leek sauce: Then, grouper with trumpet royale mushrooms. I thought this was a beautiful preparation, the only problem being that the next dish down (the blackfish) was on the table at the same time and if you tried to migrate from that one to this one it overwhelmed the grouper! The blackfish with spaghetti squash, pumpkin seeds and Sherry sauce, also described in earlier posts: Then a pasta course. Veal cappellacci with cauliflower and sage: And mushroom ravioli with chanterelles and aged balsamico: I've been noticing that Mike Anthony has been putting out a lot of pastas, and his kitchen is very good at it. If you take all the menus together, there are four house-made pastas coming off the line each day (the two above plus a black tagliatelle with calamari, chorizo and mussels; and a pappardelle with beef ragu and scallions), as well as a risotto, plus there's the calamari salad that looks like pasta. I think we're almost at the point where I'm going to go in there one day and try to talk my way into a pasta tasting menu. For the last savory course, we had a second split in the tasting. So the pesce-vegetarians got striped bass with cauliflower, matsutake mushrooms and heirloom beans: And one of us omnivores got caramelized duck breast and leg confit, braised fennel, Swiss chard and parsnip puree: While the other got lamb with cranberry beans and broccoli puree: Cheese service included two types of lightly toasted bread, and two excellent condiments: borage honey (I think that's what they said) and preserved cherries. Dessert amuse of "hot fudge sundaes," aka vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce and cherries: This is the pumpkin cheesecake with spiced cranberries and lime sorbet that I've been raving about. I have the recipe now but it's in kitchen-speak and I need to fool around with it for about a year before I can post a home version: This was my favorite dessert of the evening, a pineapple upside-down cake with yogurt sorbet: A correct chocolate tart with poached pears and pear sorbet, not terribly exciting but tasty: We were divided on this Earl Gray creme caramel with Satsuma oranges, two of us loved it and thought it was wonderfully subtle, two of us thought it was bland. I was one of the favorable votes. Really strong petits-fours including pumpkin marshmallows, lemon pastries and peanut-butter chocolates: The food was outstanding and error-free last night, which was especially an accomplishment given that the restaurant was totally slammed. At the end of the evening (we closed the place) Mike Anthony told us they'd done 210 in the dining room and more than 100 in the Tavern, with a lot of tastings, celebrations, etc., and he was beaming as he described how the kitchen team pulled together. He's been there just about a year now, so that's a very respectable accomplishment. The service team, unfortunately, didn't hold up as well under the pressure. I felt that the service, which is usually rock-solid reliable, was disjointed and that communication was awkward. In terms of wine, we asked our captain to do by-the-glass pairings and he came up with some good choices on a very reasonable budget, but I didn't record all the wines so I can't go into all that much detail on that aspect of the evening -- it was a social occasion and I was already geeking out too much with the camera so I wasn't about to start writing down wines. [Edited to correct some errors in dish descriptions]

I never waste any food, not so much as a grain of salt. I just plan perfectly and everything is used up before its expiration date, with no compromises in terms of the deliciousness of what I prepare. What's wrong with you people?

What about a Zassenhaus hand-cranked mill? They're damn near silent.

Sam, if you like, what I'll do after I've played with the Behmor 1600 for a couple of weeks is I'll hand it off to you, and we can also pass it around to a couple of other New York-area members if they're interested. If it's really great, I get to keep it, though.

For things like the rimmed bowls that restaurants adopted widely (no pun intended) a few years back, it's now possible to get those from Ikea, Fish's Eddy, etc. But for the stuff chickenfriedgourmet is talking about, if I'm not mistaken, you're not going to find circle-in-square rimmed bowls and the like at the consumer-level places yet. Maybe you can find a one-off here or there, and maybe in a couple of years those styles will trickle down, but as far as I know right now you mostly need to go to commercial sources for the current generation designs that the top restaurants are using.

I'm really tempted to take a whole bunch of things and dry fry them, but I'm afraid the results will be crazy-disastrous.

I have a sample Behmor 1600 coming from James at The Coffee Project next week. I'll be sure to give it a thorough road test, compare it to my I-Roast, and report back. MGLloyd, how are you making out with the unit? Any observations or recommended tactics at this point?

Slightly different -- just spinning some thoughts out here -- but bacon is usually cooked in a skillet without the addition of fat.

Right, I think that's important. It's not exactly a straight sautee when you do it at home. In a real sautee you're trying to keep the ingredients in motion pretty much constantly. Whereas, when you do this with mushrooms, you want to let them sit, then shake, sit, then shake. Getting the timing of that alternation down is essential to getting the nice browning at home-range temperatures. On a restaurant stove, at that kind of high heat, you can skip the sitting part.

In a recent discussion of mushrooms, reference was made to an earlier post, by Chufi, about "dry frying" mushrooms. Since discussion of this interesting technique has heretofore been buried as an aside in other topics, I thought I'd elevate it to full-topic status by starting this one. By "dry frying" we mean sauteeing in a skillet, but without any oil. To recap, here's Chufi's description of the method as applied to mushrooms. So, dry frying. Any thoughts? Brilliant innovation? Other applications?

Yeah you can add Dinosaur Barbecue to that list.

At least according to four articles I was able to find in the New York Times archive, the name of the restaurant is or was "Otto Enoteca Pizzeria." So it definitely counts in that regard. Then again, while I can imagine going to Otto and not getting pizza, I'm not sure I've ever done so -- I consider a pizza there to be an important part of any meal there, unless it's just a drop-in for gelato. But I've liked the pizza there much better than the foodie consensus has, since the very beginning. So yeah, I think it counts. Another data point: in 2003, William Grimes's review of Otto was titled "A Pizzeria Where You Can Skip the Pizza." So maybe Otto was the progenitor of the modern trend? Noodle Town: that's an interesting case, because there's a whole Chinese-restaurant naming issue that may govern over the phenomenon we're talking about here. Chinese-restaurant names are often incredibly random. If you look at the menu from "Ollie's Noodle Shop & Grille," it has pretty much the same menu as plenty of normal Chinese restaurants. It may have a few more noodle offerings, and you can get grilled fish, but to call it a "Noodle Shop & Grille" is probably a stretch. If I had a nickel for every Chinese restaurant in America named "Hunan" that doesn't serve Hunan food, "Szechuan" that doesn't serve Sichuan food, etc., I'd have about 10,000 nickels -- it's rarely possible to figure out why those names are in place. Add to that the restaurants named "Peking Duck" this or that where Peking Duck represents about 1% of sales, and you've got even more nickels. I think part of the Chinese-restaurant issue is that the English names often have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual Chinese names of the restaurants. When I've been out with Chinese-literate people, I've been told things like "This restaurant is called Hunan Village but the Chinese name is Grandma Yo's Harvest Moon." That sort of thing.

I think it's a correction that has gone too far. In the 1990s, when I was really becoming familiar with fine dining here and in France, it was obvious when you traveled from New York to Paris just how much saltier the food in Paris was. The food here was undersalted, the food there was salted such that the flavors came out but it wasn't oversalted. I think chefs here have been figuring out, and customers have been accepting, that food tastes better when salted well above 1990s levels. But as with any new-found knowledge, it can be taken too far. I agree that right now a lot of New York chefs are oversalting -- especially these Millennials who came up through kitchens at a time when we were transitioning away from undersalting. They had the message that salt is the most important thing in the universe hammered into them. Now they often use too much of it.

I basically adopted the aggressive-sautee approach based on two things I'd seen. First, awhile back Cook's Illustrated had one of their typical near-miss pieces where they offer insight only if you know what to ignore. In the piece, as I recall, they concluded that cooking supermarket mushrooms under the broiler yielded the best results. Second, when I was in a restaurant kitchen watching a line cook make mushrooms to be added to risotto, I noticed that he was using incredibly high heat. It was scary. A restaurant burner can put out a lot of heat, and this one was cranked up. The pan was so hot that the oil was sizzling, popping and vaporizing the second it hit the pan. When the mushrooms went in they sounded like they were being tortured. He threw in what looked like a fistful of salt but the end product was not salty at all. Flames and sparks were shooting out in every direction as the cook sauteed the mushrooms. And in the end they came out so beautifully. That was when I realized that, for mushrooms, high heat is the way to go. Whether it's the intense radiant heat of a broiler (which can be the hottest heat source in a home kitchen, if you can get the food close up enough to it) or the intense conductive heat of a super-heated skillet, that's what works for mushrooms. It expels the moisture aggressively and rapidly enough that the mushrooms don't steam themselves to limpness, it develops those great roasted, browned flavors on the surface, and you get a little crispness to the exterior with a nice soft, meaty interior on each slice. High heat is not always my preferred approach to cooking. I think aggressive sauteeing is overused, especially in American restaurant kitchens. But for mushrooms -- at least for supermarket mushrooms where the challenge is developing flavor in a product that's pretty bland off the shelf -- it's the way to go.

Momofuku Noodle Bar and Momofuku Ssam Bar are two of my favorite restaurants anywhere, however both fail when evaluated on what they proffer. Momofuku Noodle Bar serves good noodles, but the real action -- the dishes that make it a great restaurant rather than a very good noodle shop -- is elsewhere on the menu. As for the ssam (Korean "wrap") concept at Momofuku Ssam Bar, well, it lags even farther behind the rest of what that restaurant is doing. The Momofukus are not alone in this. When Kampuchea opened it was called Kampuchea Noodle Bar. And the noodles there are terrific. Kampuchea has better soups, I think, than Momofuku Noodle Bar by a healthy margin. But again the real action on the menu -- the dishes that make Kampuchea destination-worthy to an Upper East Sider and worth a chunk of a chapter in my forthcoming book, repeated visits, spending time in the kitchen (and eating lots of free snacks, let's not discount that) -- is all the other stuff. And now I've just been to BarFry. I can't believe it: here we have yet another restaurant ostensibly devoted to a very specific theme -- in this case tempura -- and the best dishes on the menu are the sashimi items. Everybody I've spoken to who has been to BarFry agrees on this point. It's borderline axiomatic. What's going on here? I'm particularly intrigued by the resourcefulness of the young, downtown foodie crowd in sorting all this out. Despite the weird disconnects between what these restaurants offer and what they deliver, the customers have cracked the code and figured out exactly how to put together great meals that are better than the restaurants' claims. I mean, BarFry hasn't been open long at all, yet the bar regulars (two different customers) I was sitting next to came in and ordered meals that included not one piece of fried food. There was also a bit in Alan Richman's profile of David Chang, the chef behind the Momofukus, that I found intriguing: Has anybody else noticed this pattern of restaurant and customer behavior?

I agree with Allura about the Google ads. With 145 visitors a day, or even 10 times that many, it should be possible to do this website so cheaply that cost isn't an issue. Likewise, with that kind of traffic the Google ads revenue can't be enough to matter. I worry that the way the portal is implemented may actually distract people from clicking through to the restaurants' websites. I'd consider having one website, period. In other words, whether someone types www.rarevancouver.com or www.metrodining.ca one still winds up at the same unified place. On that page, very clearly, present the basics about both restaurants front and center, followed by whatever Chef Fowke content you want to present as a presence/loyalty builder. The blogging thing seems very ambitious and perhaps not a great use of a busy chef's time given the limited potential return. There's a reason almost all blogs die: it's a lot of work. And in a corporate context, when you give up on your blog, it's embarrassing and results in a fossil website. So don't bite off more than you can chew. 3-10 updates a day from the kitchen? Probably unsustainable. One update a week, maybe. And that all has to be weighed against the benefits to be derived from using that time to do other kinds of marketing and PR.

We should definitely keep Wu Liang Ye in this discussion. I've been to Wu Liang Ye a lot, and have long held that Wu Liang Ye does some things better than Grand Sichuan even though overall it was always second best. I've have never had the fish-Napa dish, so I can't make a direct comparison there. I've had the dan dan noodles many times at both Wu Liang Ye and Grand Sichuan, though, and if that's the dish you're referring to when you say "the noodles" I'd characterize the Szechuan Gourmet noodles as better than Grand Sichuan, similar in quality to Wu Liang Ye (which always had better dan dan noodles than Grand Sichuan) but more of them for less money (not for nothing, Szechuan Gourmet seems generally to have huge portions and quite low prices -- for example the fish-Napa dish that's $19.95 on Wu Liang Ye's menu is $14.95 at Szechuan Gourmet and I'm betting Szechuan Gourmet's portion is bigger only because the portion seemed bigger than any two Wu Liang Ye dishes I've ever had, not that portion size is a qualitative issue). Other dishes on which I can make on-point or nearly on-point comparisons: the Szechuan Gourmet razor clams are in a different league, in my opinion, than the somewhat equivalent (similar ingredients, different effect) razor clam dish at Wu Liang Ye; the dumplings in hot oil at Szechuan Gourmet, as I mentioned above, are much better than any I've had (at either Wu Liang Ye or Grand Sichuan), and while the tofu dish I had at Szechuan Gourmet is not exactly the same as the tofu dish I've had a few times at Wu Liang Ye (at Wu Liang Ye I've always had the one with minced pork), it's close enough to make a comparison and Szechuan Gourmet's preparation seemed much better to me. Most of my Wu Liang Ye experience is with the East 86th Street branch, because it's my local, so maybe the issue is that 48th Street is better -- though my very limited experience says that's not the case. Overall, though, as much as I like Wu Liang Ye and some of the individual dishes there, Szechuan Gourmet struck me emphatically as a better restaurant overall, just based on this one stellar visit. Edited to add: I'd love to do a side-by-side comparison of the fish dish, however my concern is that science has not yet invented a takeout container that would be able to withstand a Szechuan Gourmet four-peppers-in-the-margin dish.

The closing of Grand Sichuan International Midtown was a devastating blow for me. I had been a champion of the place for ages. In January of 2001, B.E.G. (before eGullet), I wrote: Based on the recommendations here, I visited Szechuan Gourmet today. Folks, I'm here to tell you that, unless my meal today was a complete fluke, Szechuan Gourmet is a better restaurant than Grand Sichuan International Midtown ever was. It is categorically the best Sichuan/Szechuan restaurant I've ever eaten at. The meal I had today was simply incredible. Here is the utterly mundane exterior of Szechuan Gourmet, which is situated on an equally unremarkable Midtown block. The interior is also as generic as they come. The menu at Szechuan Gourmet is a marvel of efficiency. On just 4 pages it lists 156 dishes (well, the copy you can take away does -- the bound menus in the restaurant are laid out a little differently but are still pretty short). Most of the dishes are Szechuan dishes; very few are Chinese-American dishes, though there are enough in there to satisfy those who want that stuff. The first dish listed on the menu seemed interesting and, to my surprise, pretty contemporary: razor clams with Szechuan peppercorn-scallion pesto (dish #1). Did you catch that description? I had to read it a couple of times, and still wasn't sure what the dish would be. So I ordered it. What arrived was a tangle of razor clams in a very pesto-like dressing based on scallions instead of the traditional basil, spiked with Sichuan peppercorns, served room temperature. When my friend and I tasted it, we had one of those "holy crap" moments. I immediately recalibrated my expectations from "too bad this place won't be as good as Grand Sichuan" to "this place could be better than Grand Sichuan." Next, just to get a baseline, the dan dan noodles (dish #21). A very fine specimen. I've not had better. There was also, when we ordered, not the slightest hesitation on the issue of spice. Two white guys usually have to battle for appropriate Sichuan spice levels, but our server just took our order and the food came out spicy as all get out. There are from one to four peppers in the margins next to the spicy dishes, and they're accurate. One pepper is more than most Americans want to deal with, four peppers is competition-level stuff. Final appetizer item, also for a baseline, pork dumplings with roasted chili soy (dish #23). Clearly the best example I've had of this dish. Sichuan dumplings are usually anemic; the sauce is the main draw. But these were plump, delicious, pink porky dumplings -- and the sauce was excellent, the subtle roasted flavors of the chili showing well even through the aggressive spiciness. I must apologize for this photo being even worse than my average bad photo. The problem is that my friend and I are such pigs that we started eating the dish, and only after we had each taken dumplings and started stuffing our faces did I remember to snap a photo. So this is a photo of a pawed-over, incomplete portion, provided purely for informational purposes: I believe this dish was mentioned above. This is shredded beef with spicy Asian green chili leeks (dish #52). A beautiful, complex, moderately spicy dish that was excellent by itself and also a strong player in the ensemble because it had none of the ubiquitous red chili sauce common to the other dishes we ordered. This next dish is perhaps the most bad-ass Sichuan dish I've ever had. It's called braised fish fillets with Napa and roasted chili (dish #57). The menu also contains permutations of this dish with beef, lamb or pork. It has four peppers next to it in the margin. Really, you're going to laugh when you see the quantity of chili in this dish. Yet, despite the insane hotness of the dish, the fish was still totally enjoyable as fish. Somehow, the chefs at Szechaun Gourmet have cracked the code of allowing flavor to shine through even the most outrageous levels of spice. Slightly less spicy, but still hardcore, we have braised crispy tofu with chili and sliced pork (dish #61). Superb. I would have doubled the amount of pork, but that's just my obese American sensibility talking. I realize the pork is more of a garnish than a main ingredient here. Not that we finished this or any other entree on the table. Last, the one dish I wouldn't order again. Not bad, but not on the level of the previous six dishes. I was attracted to the name of the dish: "Madam Song's braised noodles with shrimp and fish fillet" (dish #144) and was a little surprised that it turned out to be a soup, and not a terribly interesting soup at that. Still, six stellar dishes out of seven is a real tour de force, especially at a restaurant where you've never been before and don't know the menu. Seven dishes, $75 and a few cents, including tax, before tip. I didn't see kung pao chicken on the menu, which is just as well. Some memories should be left to rest in peace.

Well, for small parties where you're not putting the dishes through heavy use -- washing several times a day, banging them around a lot, etc. -- you can do fine with non-commercial dinnerware. The commercial stuff tends to be an investment. So it kind of depends on just how professional you want to appear, and how much you're willing to pay to look like you're operating at the level of a top-tier fine-dining restaurant. I know people who achieve admirable results with some pretty darn cheap dinnerware, but of course they don't have access to the same variety of circle-in-square designs and such.

I was just out shopping for dinnerware with the staff of a restaurant here in New York, and we went to several of the showrooms down on 25th and Madison. It was an interesting experience because most of the products in those showrooms just don't show up in regular stores. Most of the major manufacturers make a consumer line and a commercial/institutional line and don't mix the two. In terms of the pieces you're looking for, things have changed a lot in just a few years. It used to be that your choice was Bernardaud or Bernardaud, but now there are literally a dozen or more companies making plates in the kinds of styles you're talking about. One catalog I'd start with is Oneida Global Foodservice. Again, you're looking for the commercial lines not the consumer ones, so for a company like Oneida, which makes both, you need to navigate the websites and get to the institutional pages. The catalogs are really dense -- you have to pore over them methodically to find what you want. If you just skim, you'll say, nope, not there, but if you go slowly you unearth all kinds of interesting treasures. A few other brands you might want to look into are Steelite USA, Royal Doulton USA, Rosenthal, and World Tableware. Most have websites where you can browse the restaurant collections. One warning: the whites that all look the same in the catalogs can look very different when you have the real plates in front of you under normal lighting conditions. It can look kind of weird to have a grayish-white plate sitting on an ivory-white plate. So a lot of restaurants just pick one brand and pattern and stick with it even if it means they can't get every single desired shape. Otherwise the shade and weight won't necessarily match. Something to think about.

Well, I trust that those who have taken the "his bar, his rules" position will never complain about an eG Forums rule again! (Not that eG Forums is my bar or even a bar, and not that its rules are my rules.) But of course, the two situations are not really comparable. Our rules are clearly posted, so there should be no surprises about what those rules are; the restaurant's rules are, as far as I can tell, not written anywhere. (I don't think we'd be having the same discussion if there had been a sign outside the restaurant saying "No laptop computer use.") We're a membership organization, similar to the private club analogies that were drawn above; the restaurant is a place of public accommodation. And we encourage laptop computer use.