Fat Guy

That "Morning Edition" interview that we taped down at WNYC awhile back finally aired this morning. The audio file, and the accompanying list of restaurants that several of you helped with, is online here. Not my most brilliant performance ever, but amusing enough.

Occam's razor says Bruni simply didn't think the place was Italian. Especially given that the other critics are (incorrectly, I believe, based on what I've read about the food) saying the same thing. What puzzles me is the labeling compulsion that so many people share. To me it represents a rejection of individuality and creativity, and a reductionist notion of what a cuisine is. Based just on the dish descriptions, photos, etc., it seems quite clear that Fiamma is serving Trabocchi's interpretation of Italian cuisine. And let's not forget the Italian influence on both French and New American cuisines. French cuisine has changed a lot in the past few decades, much of it due to both Asian and Italian influences. In 1994, Molly O'Neill wrote and article in the New York Times titled "Quel Shock! The Italianization Of French Cuisine." She went on at length about how chefs like Bocuse, Verge and Ducasse were being influenced by the Italian aesthetic of elegant simplicity. It's possible to point to Nice (which was part of Italy) for Mediterranean influences, but that's an excuse: the world owes the Mediterranean influence on several cuisines primary to Italy. New American cuisine takes it a step further, and it's no coincidence that some of the top New American chefs have names like Portale, Colicchio and Anthony. As a result, many Americans accustomed to eating modern French and New American cuisine, in a city where the Italian cuisine has long been primitive by comparison, have defined many Italian contributions as French and New American, rather than observing that contemporary French cuisine is often French-Italian-Japanese and that New American cuisine is basically Italian-French-Japanese. So when a French chef cooks French-Italian-Japanese the restaurant is "Modern French with international influences" but when an Italian chef cooks Italian-French-Japanese the restaurant is decried as "French."

My preference is aggressive sauteeing with olive oil and salt. You get the pan very, very hot, add a little olive oil, add sliced mushrooms, sprinkle with salt, and cook over the highest heat a home burner can produce, tossing repeatedly to avoid burning. Water comes out, the flavors concentrate and the mushrooms brown up in such a way as to enhance their flavor with desirable roasted qualities, yet they maintain a nice, non-overcooked texture.

This has been a common theme in the recent reviews of Fiamma. Today in the New York Times, Frank Bruni gave the restaurant three stars but called it French: Alan Richman's review, for Bloomberg, is titled "Fiamma's Kobe Tartare Doesn't Say 'Italian' to Me."

Those of you active on this topic might also be interested in the "Best restaurant reviewer you never heard of" topic. My contention there is that Paul Adams of the New York Sun is the best restaurant reviewer working today, not just in New York but in America.

Mark, I disagree with your argument in a couple of places. First, as John has noted a few times, there's no mutual exclusivity here. Where each has merit and an audience, traditional and contemporary can, should and usually will coexist. Second, global influences don't necessarily equal homogenization. I've had very different takes on the raw-fish idea that were contemporary yet maintained clear stylistic ties to a cuisine. To cite some New York examples, I think comparing what Dave Pasternack does with crudo at Esca to what Michael Psilakis does with raw meze at Anthos to what Nobu does with new style sashimi to what Todd Mitgang does at Crave is the opposite of boring.

I figured "old dough" was more poetic than "aged dough" and more politically correct than "retarded dough," but what I'm talking about is dough that has been held at refrigerator temperatures (aka retarded) for a time before final forming and baking. I had an old-dough experience tonight that I thought I'd share with you good people. A little background. For the past several months, I've been baking pizza about twice a week. The primary motivation is that our two-year-old son, PJ, loves pizza. I've also found it to be a fun and rewarding project. I'm not doing anything at a particularly high level here: no pizza stone, no unusual ingredients -- I'm just making easy home pizza as best I can. I've been getting results that are by no means embarrassing by using the following procedure: dough (sometimes homemade, sometimes store-bought) stretched to the size of an aluminum half-sheet pan, using cornmeal as a way to avoid sticking; a light coating of Pomi strained tomatoes; mozzarella; parmesan; 11 minutes at 500 degrees in a thoroughly pre-heated convection oven. This is what it looks like: Anyway, these past couple of weeks have involved a lot of holiday plans and related travel, plus I've been working on an article that required mini-reviews of ten restaurants, so my pizza-making got thrown off schedule. Last Sunday morning (as in, nine days ago), I put some dough in the refrigerator thinking I'd make pizza that night. We wound up doing something else instead, the days passed, Thanksgiving happened, then the Friday Thanksgiving repeat with the inlaws, then the Saturday Thanksgiving re-repeat with a friend. All of a sudden, it was today and I had nine-day-old dough in a plastic bag in the refrigerator. I smelled it and it smelled fine, there wasn't anything growing on it and the only visible issue was that it had some bubbles/pits in the surface. I consulted with a couple of reliable sources who happened to be on Meebo at the time and they said go for it. The first thing I noticed was that the dough was a lot easier to work with than usual. It stretched relatively effortlessly and evenly -- at no time did it seem that there was a risk of tearing it. Then I applied the toppings and baked the pizza. It was categorically the best pizza I've ever made. I used the identical process that I've used a dozen times in a row, but the crust was absolutely superior. It was actually pretty good. It had a sourdough-ish flavor and was airy and crispy-crunchy. Old dough rules.

Heaven help us.

Used to be, my first instinct upon seeing an advertorial cookbook -- in other words a cookbook sponsored by a food company or companies and designed to sell product -- was to distrust it. But lately I've been questioning that reaction. Just as many good recipes can be found on food-company websites and on the backs of boxes and sides of cans, good recipes can be published in these blatantly commercial cookbooks. Advertorial cookbooks, when done well, can be valuable sources of information. It wouldn't surprise me if the resources behind them, in terms of research and recipe testing, are superior to those invested in a standard cookbook. The journalistic value of objectivity doesn't seem particularly important when it comes to recipes. I'm fine with them as long as they make sense. And when such a book is free, what is there to complain about? Over the weekend, on the way out of Costco, I was handed this year's edition of "Favorite Recipes the Costco Way." Each recipe uses a brand-name product or products sold at Costco. It's a pretty nice book: 280 recipes and a lot of tips, many of them by big-name chefs like Mario Batali and Rocco DiSpirito, with full-color photos throughout. I found more recipes in the Costco book that gave me ideas for things I'd actually cook in real life than I have in the last couple of dozen "real" cookbooks to come across my desk. Any one of those ideas would be worth, well, more than the price of the book.

Well, Mitsuwa is Japanese, so living in Chinatown doesn't really cover it. And I'd say those travel-time estimates are nearly double the amount of time similar trips have taken me. From the Lower East Side, F or V to West 4th. For PATH you get out and walk 3 blocks to the 9th Street PATH station. For Port Authority you change to the A, C or E to get right into Port Authority. I can't imagine a 3- or 4-hour round-trip scenario absent a blizzard plus every possible missed connection both ways. That's assuming public transportation. Someone on the Lower East Side with a car should be able to get to Hoboken in a ridiculously short amount of time, especially on a weekend when the Holland Tunnel is wide open. Should take about as much time as driving to Sripraphai.

John, aren't you already on record saying Cucharamama may be compelling enough to warrant a special trip, like so many other people who have claimed, "Well, there's one place worth going"? That would seem to contradict absolute -- one might say extreme -- claims of New Jersey never, ever being a compelling culinary destination unless one happens to be in the area already. But of course, if you live in Manhattan, you are in the area of New Jersey already. Look at a map! We've gone over this ground time and again: quick, frequent, $2 buses to Mitsuwa; PATH to Hoboken and Newark; bus to Fort Lee. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss all those places as not compelling enough to warrant a trip on the PATH train.

It's Slate. They don't need to fill pages; they're online. They had a full load of other Thanksgiving articles: "Turkey Shoot," by Regina Schrambling; "The Greenest Bird," by Brendan I. Koerner; "Wherefore Turkey?" by Michelle Tsai; "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving," by Troy Patterson; "A Thanksgiving Contest," by Geoffrey Andersen. It's inconceivable to me that she'd write such a piece for any reason other than that she thought it was a good idea. And it doesn't read like fluff to me at all. It's thoroughly researched and, to me, quite readable. I wouldn't have started this topic if I didn't think it was worth reading and discussing.

To be clear, Jill Hunter Pellettieri is not a food writer desperate for ideas. She's the managing editor of Slate. She mostly edits other people's work (she handled my piece on the Jessica Seinfeld book), and she writes just a few articles a year on whatever she wants to write about: gay marriage, the Zamboni, poodle haircuts, etc., and food when she feels like it. So you can be sure that if she took on the issue of Thanksgiving leftovers it's because she wanted to, not because some editor was hovering over her demanding an idea. Indeed, rather than being a claim that applies to her in any way, the statement "It must be difficult to be a food writer and always under pressure to come up with something new and different to say" pretty much sums up her thesis.

They're always at my mother's Thanksgiving table, and were at my grandmother's table before that. My uncle is now custodian of the recipe and usually brings them. He's very particular about having the exact right type of onion, though I can't remember what type he said that was.

I don't see the wasabi-and-soy thing as a question of etiquette, at least not in the formalistic sense. The sources I've cited above emphasis that dunking sushi in a wasabi-and-soy mixture ruins the sushi. That's the problem, not some notion of propriety. I also think there's a related element of disresepct, though: it's entirely possible that a sushi chef will feel insulted by the practice, because it's like dousing your food in salt and ketchup. In terms of real wasabi, it's not all or nothing. Needless to say, a lot of real wasabi is grown in Japan (and some is grown elsewhere), so somebody is using it. There are several sushi places in New York, for example, where they have it but don't spontaneously offer it up. They figure that if you ask for it, you know enough to tell the difference. So they might have one piece of real wasabi behind the sushi bar, and if you ask for it they take out a sharkskin grater and use it. Otherwise, you get a paste. Those prepared pastes and powders, however, can contain anywhere from 0 to 100 percent real wasabi. Your average cheap sushi place uses an entirely fake product, whereas a lot of upmarket places use a paste that has some real wasabi in it. Real wasabi loses much of its complexity when packaged in this way, though. Does it taste different? Yes, it does. Real wasabi has more flavor and complexity but less outright burn. Which is not to say the fake stuff isn't enjoyable. It's just not in the same league as the real stuff. Real wasabi isn't green, by the way. There might be a greenish tint to parts of it, but overall it's more of a cream color.

I disagree. Mass-market cookbooks are intentionally dumbed down to meet the perceived needs of home cooks. The books you're talking about are, most likely, not relevant: professional books, advanced chef books, niche books, etc. You're not going to find this sort of information in Joy of Cooking or anything like it. Andy, you write for a variety of magazines and surely deal with the occasional cookbook editor. You therefore must have experienced the code of silence many times. Haven't you ever tried to submit a real recipe only to have it dumbed down based on paternalistic notions of what the readers are ready for? Haven't you ever had a maddening discussion with a cookbook editor about stock, volume measures or anything like that? If not, then perhaps things in the UK are farther along than here in the US.

Not only do those books not contain anything near the collection of information Elements provides -- perhaps bits and pieces, but nothing approaching it -- but also they are categorically different from Elements. That's why Ruhlman wrote Elements instead of saying "See my other books." I think both Elements set out to do something similar. The difference is that Strunk and White implement the concept brilliantly, and they therefore created a book for the ages. It is as comprehensive as a little volume can be, and it truly can catapult a beginning writer forward (and has done so for many). Every time I look at Strunk and White, I'm amazed at how much essential information is packed in there. It really is the one book you want to give to someone looking to advance. It really does replace books many times its size by separating the wheat from the chaff and focusing on the key essentials. Ruhlman's implementation of the concept is weak by comparison. It promises more than Strunk and White, and delivers far, far less. I can't see why anybody would think it's unfair to point that out. Rather, I think it's a disservice not to point it out. Ruhlman took a brilliant concept and implemented it in a not-so-brilliant way. I'm glad he invented and wrote this book, but wish he had done a better job. If you enjoy Rulman's writing, you'll enjoy this book. If you want to read some interesting albeit scattered insights on classical cooking technique, you'll get something out of Elements. If you want to see a few myths busted, I think that's the strongest element of Elements. But if you want a book that does what Elements says it's going to do, you'll find that Elements fails to deliver. Simple as that.

Since 2004, Paul Adams has quietly been writing restaurant reviews for the New York Sun newspaper. At first, he barely registered on my radar, and he is still a rather obscure figure, but over the years I've come to regard him as not only the best restaurant reviewer in New York but also the best restaurant reviewer working in America today. I don't know anything about Paul Adams other than what he says in his reviews, have never met him and don't read the New York Sun for anything other than the restaurant reviews and the occasional other arts piece. (The New York Sun is known, like the Wall Street Journal, for a politically conservative editorial slant and, some say, a news slant as well. However, also like the Wall Street Journal, the paper's arts coverage does not reflect any agenda as far as I can tell.) Purely by virtue of what he writes, he has won me over. All of Paul Adams's restaurant reviews can be found in an archive on the New York Sun website. There are about 200 reviews in the archive, however there are a few that aren't by Paul Adams. Another writer named Paul, Paul Lukas, occasionally substitutes. But most are by Adams. Why do I think Paul Adams is the best restaurant reviewer working in America today? For three reasons: he writes well, he knows a lot and he puts food first. It's a simple formula, but most restaurant reviewers working today struggle to get one of the three right -- and most of the elite reviewers fail on at least one of those three points. There are plenty of reviewers at, for example, the small alternative newsweeklies around America, who write quite well but don't know very much. There are plenty of reviewers who have decent knowledge of their local markets but can't write. And in the major markets the reviewers have for the most part lost sight of the food -- they're operating in a pseudo-celebrity culture where form triumphs over substance and personal digressions are more important than the subject matter. In an era when restaurant reviewing has become a form of non-serious, self-referential, commercialized entertainment, Paul Adams goes against the grain: he puts his head down and, week in week out, writes about restaurants without distraction. His reviews don't even award stars or scores of any kind. He just writes. Adams is forthright about his preconceptions, and is open to having them challenged. In his recent review of Crave Ceviche Bar, he writes: He has broad knowledge and even gives cocktails their due. In his review of Tailor, he notes: I find his descriptions of food to be consistently more useful than those of most any other reviewer. From his review of A Voce: In one recent review, Adams was confronted with fried grasshoppers at the new Mexican restaurant Toloache. Here, he allows himself a bit of fun, but he keeps his eye on the ball and gives a solid description of the dish: So, now you've heard of Paul Adams, my favorite restaurant reviewer.

Common practice isn't the issue, though. Correct practice is. It's not Americans that decided for other Americans that mixing soy and wasabi was bad practice. It's what Japanese sushi chefs tell us. It's possible to cite plenty of sources from Japan and the US recommending that diners mix wasabi into soy sauce to make a dip. But is that correct? Despite common practice, the sushi chefs I've asked about this has been unequivocal on the point: don't mix wasabi and soy for sushi (though it's arguably acceptable for sashimi). For example, in Morimoto's new book, "Morimoto: The New Art of Japanese Cooking" (and this is one of many examples), he states:

Thanksgiving at my mother's place, as is almost always the case. We start out with individually plated mozzarella-and-out-of-season-tomato salads. Nobody is sure how this tradition arose. It's probably a nod to my mother's 1/2 Italian-American heritage. We usually have two real Italians (old friends of the family from Venice, who make their annual pilgrimage to New York each November) at Thanksgiving, and they must find the dish amusing. Not that they've ever said anything. This year we also had a Japanese exchange student over for her first American Thanksgiving, so now I'm sure she thinks the mozzarella-and-tomato thing is standard (20 years from now, in Japan, it may be). Luckily, due to the invention of the grape tomato and the excellence of Fairway's bocconcini, the dish these days is not bad at all. Then all the other food comes at once, family style. There's the overcooked turkey, which is overcooked not due to lack of skill but, rather, to neurotic premeditation: a deep and abiding fear of undercooked meat that rejects meat with the slightest bit of residual moisture. There are always at least two and sometimes three stuffing/dressing options: "in-the-bird" and "out-of-the-bird" traditional bread stuffing (in part because there's never enough in-the-bird, and in part because there are usually a couple of hyphenated vegetarians in attendance), and sometimes cornbread-and-sausage stuffing made by our friend from Texas. He also usually brings creamed corn made with John Cope's incredible dried corn. As far as I know, the latter is not a Texan dish at all, he just like it -- and it's great. Standard American flour-thickened gravy, mashed sweet potatoes with little marshmallows on top, peas-and-carrots, steamed winter vegetables (a mixture of Brussels sprouts, parsnips, squash, etc.), noodle kugel (this is the 3/4 Jewish influence finding a way in), creamed miniature onions (my uncle's savory contribution, based on my grandmother's recipe), cranberry dressing (made from whole cranberries), banana bread, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. All of it is excellent except for the turkey, however it's possible to eat well by taking only thigh meat, which holds up quite well against the extra 15-20 degrees of doneness. The quantities are absurd, probably 3-4 times what is needed. We go home with two very heavy shopping bags full of leftovers, and that doesn't put a dent in it. Desserts: cheesecake (by my uncle), brownies, lemon bars, ice cream, coffee. I should add that before dinner, as hors d'oeuvres, we always have chopped liver, bread and a huge fresh fruit platter. People gorge themselves on this for about an hour before the meal, so it's not like anybody is actually hungry by the time we sit down to dinner. The one major deviation from the routine this year was that, for the first time, the job of carving the turkey fell to me. I'll post separately about that.

Every few years, the Times publishes "The New York Times Guide to New York City Restaurants." This is a guidebook that includes the main dining reviews, the $25 and Under reviews and various other tidbits. The cover claim is "The Most Authoritative Guide to Eating Well in New York." The latest edition was dated 2004 (link). I imagine they'll prepare another edition soon, now that Bruni has been on the job for long enough to write a significant number of reviews. Or they won't, because sales of the book were never particularly good. Nonetheless, the Times has long made these sorts of comprehensive, guidebook-ish claims. I have an older edition of the book, for example, from the Bryan Miller era (the 1992 edition), and there's a Ruth Reichl one as well (the 2000 edition). I believe there have been five editions altogether. In addition, it's pretty clear to me that the Times has structured and presented its website as a restaurant database akin to CitySearch. Once you put up a "FIND NYC RESTAURANTS" tool, where you can search "By Restaurant Name," "By Type/Location/Price," restrict to "Top Picks," etc., and once you have specially formatted guidebook-like results pages, you've stepped outside the role of newspaper reviewing restaurants and into the role of cityguide-type website.

Does this sound familiar: You serve an elaborate meal to a group of guests. Everything goes well. You clean up. While cleaning, you remember YOU FORGOT TO SERVE THE POTATOES! Or some other dish. It's just sitting there in the now-cold oven, or on the windowsill or in the refrigerator. Somehow, despite all the lists you made, all the planning you did, there's one dish that never made it to the table. Is this something that just happens to me, or is it more along the lines of a law of nature?

It's more a question of paternalism mixed with pandering. The US publishing industry has decided, for example, that home cooks can't handle measuring dry ingredients by weight, so nearly all non-professional cookbooks published here contain less accurate volume measures. Countless times, I've heard editors and authors say things like, "Oh, home cooks will never make stock," and "Oh, home cooks will never weigh ingredients." As a result, mainstream cookbooks don't actually give you the tools you need. Ruhlman's book tries, with mixed success, to give everybody those tools.

Pro Chef 6 has a slightly different title, "The New Professional Chef," so it might show up in a different search. In terms of differences, I can cite three specific issues that led me to stick with Pro Chef 6 when Pro Chef 7 came out: 1- I was up at the CIA for a class and one of the instructors told me he liked Pro Chef 6 better, 2- Pro Chef 6 is about 20% bigger than Pro Chef 7, and 3- for a couple of the recipes I use, the Pro Chef 6 formulas are more easily divisible on the fly than the Pro Chef 7 formulas. As for Pro Chef 8, I've just been too lazy to examine it, because I'm so used to Pro Chef 6. Pro Chef 8 is bigger than Pro Chef 7, though, for what it's worth.

P.S. as to the original question, unless there's a new edition of the LCB book that I haven't seen, I think there's really no comparison between the CIA and LCB books. The CIA book is something like three times as extensive as the LCB book. While the LCB book has nice pictures, it's just not the same category of reference.