Fat Guy

I think it goes beyond that. There's an element of asceticism in the way most vegans I've met have practiced their dietary code. A lot of them are just not comfortable with the hedonistic enjoyment of food. There are certainly vegans out there who are culinary hedonists, but not many. Even the best vegan food out there -- for example the Korean Buddhist vegetarian restaurant Hangawi in New York -- tends to reflect the ascetic aesthetic. A vegan restaurant styled after a Michelin three-star restaurant, while a theoretical possibility, would sort of be missing the point.

Yet another absurd use of the word "authentic."

Let's not forget about ingredients. Only high-quality unbleached flour, water, salt and starter, unless a legitimate preparation also requires some additional items like caraway seeds or whatever.

The Gambero Rosso guide to pizza ("Pizzerie d'Italia del Gambero Rosso") includes sfincione and refers to it as a regional style of pizza. The introduction, explaining the scope of the book, states: Now my Italian sucks, but even I can read that it says sfincione is Siclian pizza. I also think you've misconstrued a few things I said, but the original post is there for people to read so I won't rehash it. In any event, how would you define pizza? It seems to me that the only definition that would say that deep-fried double-crust pizza is "not very far removed at all" from pizza, but that one should be mystified by labeling a thick-crust pie with a lot of tomato sauce and cheese as pizza -- that this could only make sense to an American -- is a closed-loop definition that runs "pizza is whatever is made in Italy and called pizza, and nothing else." Then again, even that definition doesn't really work, given that sources like Gambero Rosso are taking a much more ecumenical view of pizza: Well, I probably wouldn't say Chicago-style pizza is light (I'm not calling it deep dish, because it's not always baked in a pan). But I still maintain that it's an affectation to say "why do you call this pizza" -- that those who take a harder line than Gambero Ross doth protest to much -- and that Italians are not actually mystified by Italian-American pizza variants. Some may not like them, some may want to protect the term pizza in various nationalistic ways, but their brains are advanced human reasoning organs and they can easily see why Americans call these products pizza.

A couple of interesting things about Budacki's: 1- all the employees were Asian, and 2- there was a young couple eating there and photographing their food furiously; they were also looking at me funny, so I have to assume they were members of the online food community. I'm still waiting for a Google Blogs Alert on the incident.

Incidentally, Kampuchea was included in this year's Michelin guide.

Italians call lots of things "pizza" too, and some are less recognizable as pizza than a Chicago-style pizza. For example, it's proper to call calzones "pizza ripieno." There's also Roman-style pizza, called "pizza a taglio." Perhaps the majority of Sicilians wouldn't call sfincione pizza, but plenty would, as would plenty of Italians from elsewhere in Italy. And the classic Neapolitan pizza is, of course, pizza too, but if you're not actually in Naples (and even if you are), it's proper to specify that it's "pizza Napoletana" or any of a few constructions that modify the word pizza with adjectives. That helps distinguish it from "pizza fritta," (deep-fried pizza), which in turn could use a regional adjective since it's not only done in Naples -- there's also a Sicilian version. The reason they use those adjectives is that there are many styles of pizza. It seems a bit arbitrary to say that a calzone is a pizza, and pizza a taglio is pizza, and sfincione is thought of as pizza by some Italians, and deep-fried pizza is pizza, but a Chicago-style pizza isn't pizza. Quite aside from the question of who gets to define the term, it couldn't be all confusing to an Italian to look at New York and Chicago pizza and understand that these are styles of pizza.

I had to laugh when I saw this. an Italian friend of mine upon first trying NY pizza: "This is very good. But why do you call it pizza?" ← We call it pizza because anybody with the ability to see and think can easily recognize it as such. I've heard the "But why do you call it . . ." line many times, applied to many foods. It's an affectation. A lot of folks, especially Europeans, like to talk up narrow, regional definitions of foods, but they're perfectly able to recognize different styles of pizza. Even within Italy, and even if you take "pizza" to mean "Neapolitan pizza," there are many styles, some of which (e.g., sfincione) are less Neapolitan-pizza-like than New York or Chicago pizza (then again, in Italy they argue about whether sfincione is pizza too).

So infernooo, would you say in general that Australians prefer light meat to dark? I wonder, in a chicken, what percentage of the saleable meat is breast, wing, leg and thigh? I assume it's not 50/50 light and dark meat. Then again maybe it is. We would have to know the percentages in order to derive a reliable price break point between light- and dark-meat-preferring nations.

All the tuna in my kitchen cabinets has been aged at least a year.

I spoke to Paul Kahan yesterday and apparently the new place is close to completion. He is now shying away from calling it a gastropub, though, perhaps because he doesn't want to be associated with the sort of food the gastropubs are doing. His concept is more of an upscale beer hall, with a menu split between simple seafood dishes and meaty, porky delights. "It's all about oysters, pork and beer," he said. The centerpiece will be a long communal table.

I was at the Gage for an event on Monday night, and we got to try about a dozen items, some of which are from the regular menu and others that seemed to be specifically for the private event. To the extent "gastropub" implies "better than average food for a bar" I guess I agree. I don't think anything was extraordinary. The Scotch egg was quite good, the shrimp with aioli were not of particularly high quality, they did some nice vindaloo hot pockets -- very spicy, and great with beer (excellent selection of bottles). It seems that the basic argument for the place is that it's better than what was in the neighborhood before. Maybe so. I would not make it a destination, though.

I had an excellent lunch at Blackbird yesterday. It was upstairs in the event room, a lunch for 30 people, so there were limited choices, but the choices were delicious. Particularly impressive was the vegetarian option, "crispy buckwheat crepes with hazelnut 'cassoulet', fresh ricotta, pickled baby carrots and grilled abalone mushrooms," which appears on the normal lunch menu as well. I also tried a beautiful piece of halibut (I'm working on getting the recipe for the sauce), and a faultless green salad. I can see why Blackbird has such a following: rarely do I encounter a restaurant that treats ingredients with such respect yet is also able to inject substantial creativity into the dishes.

I definitely prefer grilled/griddled/charred hot dogs to steamed, but steamed seems to be the Chicago preference so I usually go with it. That said, I'm pretty sure that at the Wieners Circle I had charred.

The people working the counter at the Wieners Circle were perfectly nice to me, it's just that they were fighting with one another the whole time! I wonder, is there a bun supplier that dominates the market the way Vienna Beef does? Presumably nobody is baking buns on premises, so they have to come from somewhere. The last time I was in Chicago (the visit between the Wieners Circle visit and the Budacki's visit -- yes, I name my visits by hot dog places), I also had a really full schedule, with meals at Alinea and Moto plus a bunch of corporate events I had to attend. There was no time even to get more than a few blocks away from my hotel. However, about three blocks behind the Ritz-Carlton, on N. Rush, there was a place called Downtown Dogs. It felt wrong to get a hot dog there, because how could a hot dog near the Ritz-Carlton be legitimate, but the choice was between Downtown Dogs and not having a hot dog at all on that visit. And you know what? It was good. Really good. Even a good bun. The place I've found a lot of variation is in the non-hot-dog items, especially fries. Not that I've had really good fries at any Chicago hot dog place, but there has nonetheless been a huge range of quality or lack thereof.

At the grocery stores near me, here in the New York metropolitan area, white (aka light) meat chicken costs almost exactly twice as much as dark meat chicken. That is to say, if you buy whole chicken breasts with bones, the per-pound price is double that of the per-pound price for thigh-leg quarters. There are also sales that come along, where they practically give the dark meat away for free. This pricing pattern seems to hold true everywhere I've been in the United States. Yet, just about every foodie type I know agrees that dark meat is superior to white. It has more flavor, it's moister, it's better. Apparently, in Japan, the pricing scheme reflects just such a preference: I have it on good authority that in Japanese supermarkets dark meat chicken costs about twice as much as white. In addition to being curious about all of your thoughts on this matter, I'm also interested to know what the pricing ratio is in your nation. Is dark or light more expensive in France, Australia, Madagascar . . . ?

I had my first Chicago hot dog in 1986, when I was a senior in high school. I participated in a debate tournament at Glenbrook North high school in Northbrook, and some of the local folks took us to a place called Little Louie's. Apparently, it's still there and has been since 1967. I ordered a "hot dog" and was amazed to see what I was served: a fat Vienna Beef dog peeking out from beneath fluorescent green relish, bright yellow mustard, big slices of tomato, an entire pickle spear, and then some, all on a poppyseed bun. I don't think I'll ever recapture the experience of that first Chicago hot dog, but every time I've been back I've made sure to have at least one Chicago hot dog, someplace, before leaving town. I was just in Chicago for a speaking engagement (which is kind of like being on the debate team, except you get paid) and had a very full schedule, with all my meals accounted for. My last night in town, I had dinner with friends at Spoon Thai on N. Western, which if I understand Chicago geography correctly is "Uptown." It was a Bacchanal of Thai cuisine and BYO beer, and at the end I was pretty stuffed. I decided to take a little bit of a stroll to aid in digestion and contemplation. I also wanted to check out the neighborhood, such as it is. I wandered north to W. Lawrence, where there seemed to be a lot of taxis running east-west, and figured that would be a good place to turn right. As I strolled, most of the blocks were pretty quiet and deserted, but occasionally I'd pass something tempting, especially Pizza D.O.C., about which I'd seen some posts. "Huh, it's right here," I thought, but I knew I couldn't possibly eat a pizza. All in all, I walked about a mile, and then decided to start looking for a cab at the next intersection, N. Damen. When I reached the corner of W. Lawrence and N. Damen, just as I was about to hail a cab, a glorious structure came into my field of vision. (Sorry about the cell-phone photos. The KRZR was my only photographic resource.) I couldn't resist the siren song of Budacki's Drive-In. It felt like destiny -- maybe Michael Caine would be inside to alter the direction of my life. I had walked a bit. Surely there was room for a hot dog, or perhaps a sausage. It was great. I don't think I've ever had a bad hot dog or sausage in Chicago. It seems to me that if you go to any given run-down establishment that uses Vienna Beef, you're going to get something within a pretty narrow band of quality. Maybe there are subtle differences I can't identify with my out-of-town palate and long lags between tastings, but I like them all. One other from the cell-phone archive, two trips ago, October 2005: I have to say, I think "The Wieners Circle" is one of the great restaurant names of all time. The hot dog was great too.

I take it the crust is a percentage cornmeal, rather than all cornmeal.

It's not a question of whether "Atlanta" wants that kind of food. I'm sure "Chicago" couldn't care less about Alinea. The question is whether there are enough people to support the restaurant. A restaurant that does 100 covers a night 365 days a year (just as an example) needs to fill only 36,500 seats. If the average person in the room has been to the restaurant twice, that's only 18,250 actual people needed to fill those 36,500 seats. Then you have tourists, where any ambitious restaurant is likely to get a big chunk of its business -- call it half. Are there 9,125 people in Atlanta who want to go to our hypothetical restaurant on average twice a year? There may be.

An article in today's New York Times about a new Native American-produced bison treat got me thinking about the bison and its kin. It has been a long time now that farmers, restaurants and others have been trying to establish bison as a mainstream food product. Certainly, they've had modest success -- there are bison products being served here and there. But it has been a long hard road, and bison may be the exception that proves the rule: it's nearly impossible to introduce a new meat into the food supply, especially the American food supply. Beef, pork and lamb totally dominate the mammalian sector, with a little bit of venison, bison, maybe goat. So, the question is, are we just unimaginative eaters? Or are the standard meats really better? Or what?

Rough month for the New Paradigm. Element in Atlanta, schwa in Chicago . . .

Don't forget that wine freezes well. Any time you have unused excess you can pour it into a deli container or zipper bag and have it on hand for future use.

I was just reading this topic the other day in preparation for a trip to Chicago, but I had concluded that there wasn't time in my schedule for a pizza stop. I noticed today, however, when walking over from my hotel to dinner number one, that there was a Giordano's right behind the hotel. So on my way back from dinner number one I couldn't resist stopping in and ordering a pie. When they say it takes half an hour to prepare your pizza, they mean it. I suppose if you have drinks and salads or appetizers, and you're with people, the half hour goes by easily enough. When you're alone, and you're just having pizza and water, and you didn't bring a book, you have to do a lot of texting on your cell phone to pass the time. Anyway, I thought the pizza -- a stuffed pie with sausage -- was delicious. I can't believe I'm using these adjectives in connection with Chicago-style pizza, but I thought it was restrained, subtle even. Yes, it's a heavy item. But the proportions made sense and the pie was tremendously enjoyable. I really liked the crust, which had no greasiness to it. The sauce on top of the pie was applied conservatively, so it didn't overwhelm the pie (from the photos I thought it would be much saucier). One thing I think is interesting about Chicago pizza is that it seems to be highly reproducible in the small, local chain format. That's not the case with, for example, New York pizza, which doesn't seem to reproduce well beyond a single establishment.

I was down at Kampuchea (which has dropped the "Noodle Bar" appellation) doing a follow-up interview for my book, and a fringe benefit was that Ratha gifted me lots and lots of snacks while we talked. I was able to try several new menu items, all of which I thought were excellent. The restaurant seems to be thriving: it was well populated during the peak lunch hour today, and Ratha said they did almost 300 covers last night. Quail egg salad. Halves of hard-boiled quail eggs arranged around a salad of tiny crispy dried anchovies (dried in house), watercress, green mango, shredded carrots and a chili-lime dressing. A great palate-awakener. Lemongrass smoked duck breast, smoked in a contraption of Ratha's own design, seared rare and served in a bowl of butternut squash puree with a green mango and herb salad. It's under the cold plates heading on the menu but it's a warm (not hot, though) dish. Pork meatballs. The meatballs themselves are ground Berkshire pork with rice and a little hoisin sauce. They're served in a sauce of stewed tomatoes, with shaved salted egg on top (which looks like parmesan). A strong comfort-food dish (the previous two dishes were more in the foodie-unusual category). Not new, but I was glad to have it, was the ginger-rubbed catfish sandwich with honey, shallots and peppercorns. This is served on Kampuchea's very good toasted sandwich baguette with pickled carrots, cucumber, cilantro and chili mayonnaise. This alone would make a nice lunch. I also tried a bowl of the chicken curry noodle soup. They actually fabricate the curry base to order with each bowl of soup. It's apparent in the end product, which has really vibrant spicing. The soup is packed full of stuff but it integrates well. In the intense curry-lemongrass-chicken broth are thin noodles (wheat not rice), chunks of sweet potato and Chinese eggplant, green beans, sprouts and various herbs. That's all topped with several spicy chicken wings. Sunday late lunch is the time to be at Kampuchea. You get the daylight, and the atmosphere is relaxed. If you go around 2-3pm (earlier is busier, as I noted above) you can spread out and hang for a couple of hours. They only serve lunch Friday through Sunday, same menu as dinner.

How is the latter a solution to the former? Presumably, the chef still kissed your ass. Methinks you're equating the issue of comps with the issue of anonymity. But paying doesn't make you anonymous.