Fat Guy

Followed a link from Eater to a piece about another restaurant on Gael Greene's blog and noticed, farther down the page (this is the correct link but you need to scroll down a lot to get to "Waldy Smokes at Beacon"), an entry on the Thursday night kitchen counter dinners at Beacon. Also, Bret Thorn from Nations Restaurant News has been in, though his blog entry focuses mostly on the smoked vanilla concept.

Assuming anybody who spells it "flavour profile" is British or at least Canadian, it's definitely part of British writing. Google gives 58,000 examples.

What we have is the perfectly acceptable English "flavour" (aka "flavor" where I live). Quite aside from the awkwardness of the phrase, Occam's razor says the real problem is that it uses two words where one would do just as well. I've pulled the following examples from eG Forums posts where I, guilty as charged, have unthinkingly used the phrase "flavor profile." In every one of these instances, it would have been preferable simply to cut the word "profile." Thus, In addition to its inefficiency, and in addition to the unfortunate mechanization of food that Mr. Hayward describes, I see another problem with the phrase: it's an affectation. It uses a fancy word where a normal word will do. And, as a result, its fanciness encourages laziness, as in "the old New York kosher-style pickle flavor profile involves a few flavors in addition to garlic." The flavor profile includes flavors! Lazy. Worse, "a subtle but complex flavor profile." That's just an excuse for not describing the flavor. Shame on me.

That's correct. It was a press preview hosted by the restaurant.

Jay Rayner, the Observer (London) critic, noticed the Gazette story and this eG Forums topic and discussed them recently in his blog. A few of his comments: Worth having a look at the full piece.

I think that's right. Egg-drop soup (sometimes called egg-flower soup) is made with ingredients that are familiar to Western palates. There are actually parallels to egg-drop soup, like avgolemono, in Western cuisine. There's a French garlic soup, le tourin, that also has similarities. (Incidentally, I rarely see egg-drop soup with water chestnuts, peas or carrots -- it's usually just the broth thickened with egg and corn starch, perhaps garnished with some scallions.) It's also made with ingredients that were readily available in the West at a time when Asian ingredients were hard to come by.

I've been to Markham. I haven't been to Lai Wah Heen. I've had excellent dim sum in Asia, however, and New York now has dim sum on that level. Have you tasted Joe Ng's dim sum? Have you dined in New Jersey? You've said you dine a lot in New York's Chinatown, but to me that's not the relevant point of comparison. I suppose we can go back and forth like this forever and never settle the matter. Suffice it to say for my last word on this tangent that I hear a lot of proclamations about Asian food in New York and they're usually based on mistaken assumptions about where the best examples of Asian food are. Those examples are often not to be found in any of New York's Chinatowns.

I'm pretty sure Mimi Sheraton was the first to wear wigs and all that.

I thought it was indeed Claiborne who pioneered anonymous restaurant reviewing. At least, that's what I've read. For example: http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Is...oid=oid%3A75734 http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa36...i_n9294311/pg_4

Woops. Right. It's $2 for adults, $1 for children. I think it might have been free back in the day but they added the charge in order to keep people from using the bus as free public transportation to Edgewater. In any event, the point is that you need a certain critical mass of demand in order for it to make sense to run 22 shuttle trips a day (on weekends; it's 11 a day on weekdays) from Manhattan to a Japanese supermarket in Edgewater, New Jersey. We have a car so I've never had to master the New Jersey Transit network, but plenty of people manage to get from Manhattan to the key Asian food destinations in Northern New Jersey by bus and train. The couple of times I've needed to get to or from Northern New Jersey on public transportation it has been easy and cheap. It's not quite as user-friendly a trip as going to Jackson Heights on the city subway system, but it's easier than getting to Coney Island (21.2 miles from my house, and requiring a couple of subways and a ton of time).

Just a point of nomenclature: the restaurants you've listed have service charges, not tips or gratuities. You pay a set charge, agreed upon in advance. For example, at Charlie Trotter's it says on the menu, "An 18% Service Charge is Added to Each Dinner Check." At Thomas Keller's restaurants, the service charge is factored into the menu prices. But in neither case is it a tip or gratuity -- those terms imply a voluntary, discretionary amount.

Pan, when I was working on an article about ethnic food-shopping in Northern New Jersey, the first thing I did was count license plates in the parking lots of Mitsuwa, Hanahreum (now H-Mart) and Foodmart International. I assure you, plenty of people are reverse-commuting from the city to get to these places. Ask serious Japanese-American cooks in Manhattan where they shop for food and in a healthy percentage of cases you'll hear Mitsuwa. There's even a free shuttle bus from Manhattan to Mitsuwa. Another example, Cecil and his entire waitstaff at China 46 commuted every day from Flushing. I think it's accurate to say that few white people from New York go to Northern New Jersey for Asian food (though plenty go to shop at Ikea), and that even the intrepid-foodie crowd has largely missed the boat on New Jersey, but tons of Asian-Americans do it as a matter of course because they know, for example, that there's no South Indian restaurant in New York that can approach what Moksha in Edison is doing. I personally eat Asian food of all kinds in New Jersey all the time. The driving distance from my block to Mitsuwa is a hair under 10 miles, and it's 10.9 to the China 46 parking lot -- people in Los Angeles wouldn't think twice about driving three times that distance to eat -- and I live on the East Side so my commute is longer than it would be from the Upper West Side. New York City has a lot less of a car culture than LA, but there are approximately 2,000,000 cars owned by New York City residents. Northern New Jersey is New York just as much as Richmond is Vancouver. Any definition you use -- MSA, CSA, UA -- they all include the relevant chunk of Northern New Jersey.

If you have enough money, you can make it happen. You don't need local anything -- you just bring in excellent chefs and FedEx whatever ingredients you need from anywhere. Las Vegas is the prime example of this formula working, and similar things are happening in other gaming destinations as well as in places with petrodollars to burn.

It was a preview for media. They've been doing media previews for the past three or so weeks. I was there for the last preview before they go into real service (remember, this only happens one night a week), so what I saw was probably close to the final draft of the menu, though there certainly may be changes -- we'll know for sure when we hear back from the group going on Thursday. My understanding is that Waldy is planning to follow standard upscale restaurant procedure, changing the menu completely with the seasons and making minor changes week-to-week based on product availability and customer feedback.

Just got word on the production schedule. The book will be on sale in November 2008.

I suggest you take another run at Eleven Madison Park. It's a large restaurant with a number of tables that can be reconfigured to accommodate large parties. See if they have a waiting list, express your desire to dine there, and keep calling back. It's possible -- no guarantees, but possible -- that if you're persistent they'll come through with something eventually. I hope you'll cancel one of those. There are most likely other people looking for tables that night, and you holding two reservations when you know you can only use one does them a disservice.

For the past few weeks I've been buying Ben's butter, sold by the cheese counter in irregular hand-cut blocks. The unit price is only $4.99/lb, and it's excellent sweet butter (and local). I'd love to know more about this product. Is it from Ben's Cheese Shop downtown? Does that place even still exist?

I've eaten around Toronto three times in the past ten years -- not extensively, not enough to be an expert, but enough to have context -- and Vancouver at least five times. I've also had Asian food in nine of Canada's ten provinces. I just finished writing a book on Asian dining in North America. I have a good track record of saying when something in my home town is bad -- I'm not exactly an apologist for New York. I think I have decent perspective on this issue. And I don't disagree with the general assessment of Vancouver and Toronto (with a huge gap between the two). However, I disagree with the general assessment of New York. I know a lot of the so-called experts who make these judgments and I know they're operating on outdated assumptions, haven't been to New Jersey and don't really know the New York Chinese-food scene outside of Chinatown. If people who have been to Chinatown Brasserie, Dim Sum Go Go and a variety of Chinese restaurants in Northern New Jersey want to tell me that Toronto has better dim sum than New York, I'm listening. Otherwise the verdict is as credible as a judgment arrived at by visiting New York's Little Italy, eating at a few red-sauce food factories, and proclaiming New York Italian weak without ever visiting Babbo, A Voce, Alto or Fiamma. Here's Ed Levine on Joe Ng: http://edlevineeats.seriouseats.com/2007/0...n-chinatow.html

I'd say food preparation really surged ahead of service in the 1980s.

Went very early this morning, on account of the impending NYC Marathon, so as to be able to get back across the park before the city shut down. It's so nice to be there at 7am, when the store is virtually empty. The only problem is that some of the items on the produce shelves don't get stocked until closer to 8am (or later), but such is life. This is one of my favorite times of year, because the good local apples overlap with the first of the Florida grapefruits. I'm going to eat a lot of fruit this week. The bad behavior of Fairway customers knows no bounds. Today, there was a weird guy outside pawing through the tower of limes. As he riffled, limes rained down the lime pyramid onto the sidewalk and rolled into the gutter. We're not talking about just a couple of limes; we're talking about 20 or 30. The gutter was positively full of them. The guy finally found the one lime he wanted and just walked away with it, down the middle of Broadway's downtown traffic lane, holding it like it was the Jewel of the Nile. Two bored produce-department workers held a mumbling discussion in Spanish about whether it was worth going after him and decided against it. They put the gutter limes in a cardboard box and sent them away, presumably (at least, we can hope) to the lime equivalent of the glue factory. I forgot to buy crackers, because I didn't put them on my list. Last night I thought, oh, I'll remember, I don't need to get up and put them on my list. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I'm not aware of any restaurant in Toronto that's serving dim sum at the level of Chinatown Brasserie in New York. Hong-Kong chef Joe Ng is arguably the best dim-sum chef in North America right now. Guy Lieu from Dim Sum Go Go (also from Hong Kong) is also doing some impressive stuff in the lighter, modern style. Several years ago I had the best dim sum of my life in Singapore, at the Golden Peony, and thought I'd never have anything that good in New York -- but the best places in New York are now operating at that level. When I ate at Joe Ng's earlier place, in Brooklyn, a few years ago I knew the times were changing. Dim Sum Dynasty in New Jersey also operates at a high level. Sure, there are plenty of heavy, old-school, steam-cart dim sum places in Manhattan's Chinatown. And New York doesn't have the depth of excellent dim sum that Vancouver has -- that's inevitable given the population. But the best places in New York are as good as what I've had in Vancouver and better than anything I know of in Toronto. I may not be totally up to date on Toronto, but unless there have been some phenomenal new openings in the past few years then I can't see the argument for Toronto having superior dim sum.

Finally made it back to Naruto Ramen on the Upper East Side to try the third and last species of ramen: curry ramen. It was my least favorite of the three, which isn't surprising since I rarely enjoy Japanese (or Korean) curry sauces either. I think by the time curry-type seasoning blends migrated from India through Southeast Asia and up to Japan and Korea they lost a lot of their interest. I think the miso ramen is going to be my favorite, followed by the regular ramen. They're serving beer now.

I tend to judge chefs by their work, and the two meals I've had at Lumiere have been quite impressive. I've also met Rob Feenie and I think it's safe to say that his ego is not appreciably larger than that of many other successful chefs. I can't say I'd want to be his BFF -- he probably wouldn't want to be mine either -- but that's also the case with a lot of chefs. More important is that he obviously cares deeply about food, and is able to put great food on the plate.

I'm not sure the Hong Kong-style restaurants in Vancouver have anything to do with Chinese-American/Canadian cuisine at all. They're Chinese restaurants, just like you'd find in Hong Kong. It's very different from the old days, when such a thing was impossible -- when the most you could hope to do was include a few replica dishes, based on a very small ingredient basket, on a menu that was dominated by adapted dishes (either ingredient adaptations or palate adaptations), when the locally grown population (the people with the money) wouldn't eat the replica dishes anyway. Today you can get the same ingredients and make the same dishes for the same customers as back home, who have plenty of money to support expensive restaurants with little need for other customers, plus there are a lot of local customers who will support the effort anyway. Where Hong Kong immigration and money (which, by the way, have very much affected the food scenes in New York and other cities as well) have had an affect on Chinese-American cuisine is, I think, in the up-and-coming dishes category. If you look at the dishes on the list I gave above, you'll see that a bunch of them derive from the Hong Kong food culture. The fact that Chinese buffets in Texas are now serving siu mai and har gow -- that's how the Hong Kong wave has affected Chinese-American cuisine.

One also has to bear in mind the cultural disruption caused by Maoism. For much of the 20th Century, Chinese cuisine was preserved and advanced in the diaspora.