Fat Guy

Pineapples are through the roof right now. And they're small. That's the thing about pineapples: they're usually sold by the pineapple so quantity is not a pure question of what a pineapple costs. The pineapples on display right now will yield at most 2/3 as much edible product as the ones that were being sold a month or two ago. I got some new Fairway-label olive oil this week: the "biologica" (organic) from Italy. There are always several oils out for tasting, with little pieces of bread, and when you shop early in the morning you can get to the tasting station before a million people have pawed over it. Probably the best oil they had out for tasting was the Puglia oil under the Fairway label, but I have to confess that I avoid the single-origin series of Fairway oils because those particular liter bottles are just a little too tall for the tallest shelf in my cabinet. Isn't that awful of me? Anyway, the biologica was really good too, and it was in a shorter, fatter bottle. $12.99 for a liter. Also in the organic vein I noticed some DeCecco pasta in an organic line, in very 1970s light avocado colored boxes. I picked some up. On the off chance that it tastes any different from regular DeCecco, I'll be sure to report back.

I hardly think we're in some new age of comps. Rather, bloggers and online writers are just learning what it's like to be treated like regular media. The article starts off with a description of a party that a Chicago restaurant, Dine, threw for members of the website Yelp. This is meant to seem scandalous, but the reality is that restaurants spend a lot more than $1,500 for the parties they throw for old media journalists. I get invited to such parties all the time, and when I go I often see writers for the major publications, including the New York Times and all the major glossy food magazines. No, Frank Bruni, the New York Times restaurant reviewer, does not attend. But you could easily see just about any other member of the Times staff, or a contract freelancer, at such an event, eating and drinking for free. Then, after they throw extravagant opening parties for media, a lot of restaurants go into "press previews." That's a euphemism for inviting writers in for free meals. It's not a preview, of course, because the restaurant is already open. But it's a palatable way to phrase the fact that it's a comped meal. And when I go in for the occasional press preview free dinner at a restaurant, I invariably see people from major newspapers and magazines (and television and radio) enjoying their "previews" too. (The difference being that if I post here about a meal I got for free I say so, whereas I almost never see such disclosures in traditional media.)

I think I must be the last person to realize the Grayz/graze play on words.

I haven't been as impressed with Eleven Madison Park as the rest of you, but I do think it's a much-improved, very good restaurant now. The thing is, though, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to someone coming from France for just a very few meals in New York City. Restaurants that serve food that's stylistically similar to Eleven Madison Park's cuisine are pretty easy to find in France. Gramercy Tavern, Tabla and Nobu, less so.

There are a lot more cooking styles in Italy than there are in New Orleans, yet nobody blinks at an Italian menu that includes dishes from various regions. And you can multiply that several times over for India or China. I would have to guesstimate that something like 99% of the restaurants in the world are offering greatest hits menus of one kind or another. If anything, these folks at the Ritz Carlton are just being more thorough about naming their sources. I have no idea what "Vizard's Louisiana Seafood Gumbo" is but is it really some hyper-creative twist on gumbo? Or is it just a version of gumbo? If so, surely there's nothing to prevent a restaurant from serving the exact same dish and calling it "Ritz Carlton Louisiana Seafood Gumbo." That has been standard operating procedure in the restaurant business for ages, so it's kind of nice to see attribution instead of outright copying.

I think Tabla is an excellent choice for a French visitor, exactly because you probably won't find anything like it in the Languedoc. I'm also not convinced that Union Square Cafe and River Cafe are the best choices for someone trying to experience New American cuisine. Union Square Cafe has great service and a great feel, and River Cafe has a great view, but I think there are better New American restaurants, particularly Gramercy Tavern. And the other thing I'd perhaps include on your list is something in the modern Japanese vein, such as Nobu or Morimoto. P.S. Point of nitpicking: rosemary, lavender and thyme are herbs, not spices.

It just seems like a double standard to me. If a chef comes to the United States from Italy and serves a menu of Italian dishes as prepared at restaurants in Italy, nobody is going to accuse that chef of being a culinary cover band. When someone opens a French brasserie, serving the same menu as thousands of other French brasseries everywhere from France to the United States to the United Kingdom to Tokyo, nobody says it's a culinary cover band. When a Japanese restaurant opens . . . etc. So why, if someone opens a restaurant serving the best dishes from around New Orleans, is that all of a sudden a culinary cover band?

Thanks guys. We headed out to Jackson Heights for a few hours this evening. We parked up on 77th, on the south side of Roosevelt, then walked along Roosevelt to 74th. The first interesting thing we passed, on Roosevelt, was Khan Baba Buffet Restaurant (74-15 Roosevelt Ave., 718.424.8911, http://www.khanbabarestaurant.com/ ). The place is quite large. It actually runs all the way through the block, and you can also (as we discovered when walking back to the car later, when at first we thought we'd found a second branch of the restaurant) enter from 37th Road (not to be confused with 37th Avenue, which is part of the Little India main drag, 37th Road is just a little side street closer to Roosevelt that runs from Broadway to 77th). It's Ramadan right now, and a lot of the restaurants out there were offering special Ramadan dinners. The neighborhood has a substantial Muslim presence and a lot of the restaurants and shops are halal. Anyway, Khan Baba appears to be Pakistani-owned and has both generic Northern Indian food and some halal quasi-Chinese food on the buffet. There were also some special Ramadan items, especially desserts. The buffet for dinner was $10.99. We thought about it, but wanted to try other stuff. It's a large, well-lit, clean place and the folks working there were friendly and happy to let us peruse the buffet without them trying any sort of hard sell. There is also now in Jackson Heights a pretty strong Tibetan and Nepalese presence. Ellen (my wife) has been to Nepal several times as well as to Tibet, and has a number of contacts in those communities here. One friend, in particular (a limo driver), is into the food scene out there and recommended that we check out a Tibetan momo place he likes. I'm a huge fan of Tibetan momos (dumplings), and in fact we named our dog Momo. One of the things I love about Jackson Heights is that many of the stores have stores within stores. Take for example this establishment on 74th Street: Best as I can tell, the jewelry store is not only selling jewelry but also leasing space to the luggage store, the tailor and the AT&T cell-phone store. But that's not all. If you walk into the AT&T cell-phone store there are, in addition to the cell-phone operation, an area where you can buy teapots and the like, and another area where you can select from a large collection of foreign-language videos. And then all the way in the back of the cell-phone store, behind the teapots, behind the cell-phones, behind the videos . . . there's a momo counter. And it was closed. It seems it will be closed for a couple of weeks in order to upgrade the kitchen -- by upgrade I mean there was a telltale yellow Department of Health sign on the counter. Anyway, I'll be sure to swing back by there at some point, as the recommendation comes from an excellent source. Then we checked out Patel Brothers grocery (37-27 74th St., 718.898.3445) and, after turning the corner and walking a block west, Subzi Mandi grocery (72-30 37th Ave., 718-457-1848). Certainly, Patel Brothers was by far the better of the two stores. However, I was not particularly impressed with either. The produce was generally mediocre at both, and dipped at times to awful. There were a lot of interesting Indian ingredients, particularly at Patel, but the quality seemed lower than at various specialty stores in Manhattan's much smaller Little India on Lexington Ave. in the high 20s. And when you compare these Indian markets with what some of the other ethnic groups have come up with, it's not a favorable comparison. I mean, look at Hanahreum (now H-Mart) or Mitsuwa in New Jersey. Those are first-rate, modern stores. Jackson Heights has some serious catching up to do on the grocery front. We made sure to explore the side streets off the main drag (the main drag being the triangle of 74th Street, 37th Avenue, and Broadway). There's some great stuff on the side streets, for example this place on 73rd Street -- a combination restaurant, market and halal butcher -- was bursting at the seams and had a real undiscovered-by-white-people feel: As we were walking on the Broadway part of the triangle, Ellen noticed steps leading down to "Himalaya Connection" at 72-30 Broadsay, and I noticed, below that sign, some signs that said "MOMO." So we went in and found lots of videos, and a travel agency, but no sign of any momos. Upon cross examination, the travel agent revealed that the MOMO signs were for another store, over on 37th Road (the little side street, not 37th Avenue), where we were assured there would be momos aplenty. Upon arrival at the location we were not optimistic. The place appeared to be an internet cafe called Net Gen, at 73-19A 37th Road. However, within the structure that promises to be an internet cafe is actually a place called Cafe K-2. And they had momos. They were quite good, though not the best momos I've ever had. They were a bit too much like Chinese dumplings -- refined rather than rustic as momos are supposed to be. The beef filling was tasty, though, and the cilantro-laced hot sauce was great. It was $5 for 8 momos and that also came with a small bowl of soup. Also within Cafe K-2 there was a woman making bhel puri to order. She had a bunch of containers of the various components of bhel puri (as well as about six other permutations of same, such as sev puri) and a metal mixing bowl. We got Bombay bhel puri, also $5 -- for a huge portion. I can't see any one person wanting to eat that much bhel puri, but it was excellent and between the two of us we ate about half of it. We had taken the edge off our appetites and then some, so at that point a buffet was out of the question. So we figured we'd try Raji's recommendation of Kababish. Actually we went to Kababish II (37-66 74th St., 718.205.3625). I wasn't optimistic. The place was kind of empty and when I tried to order the "assorted barbecue platter" I had to deal with three people before I found someone who would acknowledge that such a platter was on the menu board right above the counter. I ordered one platter for us to share. Then we waited at a table. After a long delay, a salad arrived. A fairly large salad, actually. We figured the idea was to have it with the kebabs, but we got tired of waiting and started snacking on the salad. We finished it. We waited some more. Then, eventually, an incredible, heaping platter of assorted kebab items arrived. Everything on the platter was first rate. The spicing was robust and complex; I don't think I've had better kebabs in New York. And the guy brought another whole salad ("Salad more for you!"). It was a lot of food for $8.99. We had planned also to check out Dosa Diner and a couple of sweets shops but our babysitting time was up and we had to head home.

I don't think BF&D is serving all copied recipes. I think a lot of the dishes incorporate a component from a noteworthy local producer but the dish itself is designed by the chef. More importantly, though, how many restaurants in the world have created a cuisine? Most restaurants are serving dishes invented somewhere else by someone else.

Because it centers around a Portland, Oregon, story, we didn't introduce the discussion on this topic, however followers of this subject may be interested to read about the ethics challenge that Kevin Allman, a Portland-based writer and blogger, has introduced with respect to Eric Asimov's recent Portland restaurant story.

How about non-restaurant shops and markets?

Right, for example with the dollar down right now one can expect that in the US the imported Italian products will be relatively expensive. Everything from olive oil to Parmigiano-Reggiano seems to be a couple of dollars more per unit than it was a few years ago. It's probably a good time to take a closer look at California olive oils.

It's worth noting that, while extra virgin olive oil imparts its own flavor to food, there are also plenty of olive oils that are filtered, refined, and relatively colorless and neutral tasting. In the US they tend to be labeled "light" or "extra light." For a long time I was using grapeseed oil as my neutral oil of choice, because a lot of restaurant chefs seem to use it, but I never particularly liked its consistency -- it seems sticky to me. For the past couple of years, corn oil has been my neutral oil of choice. Coconut oil has been developing more of a following lately. Back in the day a lot of health-conscious people didn't use it because it's high in saturated fat. But the latest thinking is that it's low in transfats, so it's actually a healthful oil.

Excellent. I'm going to pursue one or both of them. I'll report back with anything I learn.

What would you all recommend as an itinerary for a Jackson Heights Indian-themed walking tour? What route would you take, what shops would you go into, where would you have snacks and a meal?

I've had that experience and a related one. Fattiness, saltiness, sweetness, etc., are all to some extent relative measures. When I go to France, for the first few days I'm there all the restaurant food tastes incredibly salty to me. After a half-dozen or so meals, however, my palate recalibrates and the food starts to taste normal. Then I come home to the US and everything tastes undersalted for a few days. For me, the issue with fat is that I've grown less able to tolerate large amounts of it in a single sitting. It has become gastrointestinally unpleasant, it makes me tired, etc. I've actually started dispensing my cooking olive oil from one of those Spanish cruets rather than pouring it directly from the bottle. My purchasing habits, however, have not really caught up with this change, which has been occurring slowly for about three or four years (it started right around when I turned 35). I think I must be using half or a third as much oil now, so I probably wouldn't be spending any more money on oil annually if I switched to an oil that was two or three times as expensive. Interestingly, my butter consumption has increased in the same time period, I think because less of it provides me with more pleasure than more olive oil -- not that they're directly equivalent.

Found the receipt. $20.99. I guess those price signs refer to whatever is on the shelf above -- the standard arrangement. Seems I was thrown off by the way the Frantoia sign is basically attached to the wrong price sign.

Then the stuff is a total ripoff! I can't say I actually looked at the receipt, so maybe I got misdirected, but this is a gorgeous cell-phone photo of what I saw on the shelf and this is the oil I bought.

Dan, I'd say that would be exactly right for a restaurant reviewer or journalist whose job is to cover restaurants. For the past few years, however, Eric Asimov has not been covering the restaurant beat. He has been the chief wine writer. His photo is now published routinely, and he interacts with members of the restaurant business just like any non-restaurant reporter might. So what he shouldn't be doing is giving talks at wineries. Here I think perhaps the trouble arose because Asimov is living a new life with new standards, yet he doubled back did a one-off restaurant-travel story, so he found himself in the wrong combination of positions and didn't think it through. Moreover, I think this is the sort of thing that could have been cured by disclosure ("Full disclosure: I was recently the guest speaker at a wine dinner at the restaurant, and I'm known to the family that owns it") combined with a discussion with an editor ("Do you think it's okay to include the restaurant, or should we leave it out?"). At that point if the editor says, "Hey, it's a well-known great restaurant and you've disclosed your relationship, so I think it's fine to include it," then I'd see no problem at all with that.

Kevin Allman, a writer in Portland, Oregon, recently levied an ethics challenge against Eric Asimov, the New York Times wine writer and former "$25 and Under" critic. The particulars are as follows: - Asimov recently published a story in the Times about Portland, Oregon's, food scene. In it he discussed, among other places, a restaurant called Paley's Place. He said: - It turns out that Asimov has various connections to the Paley family. Specifically, Allman notes: and Allman then detailed several provisions of the New York Times ethics policy that Asimov's conduct arguably violated, such as "Where friends and neighbors are also newsmakers, journalists must guard against giving them extra access or a more sympathetic ear. When practical, the best solution is to have someone else deal with them," and "No journalist may report for us about any travel service or product offered by a family member or close friend." You can read Allman's complete blog entry here. The full Times ethics policy is here. Allman ran the story a few days ago, without comment from Eric Asimov (which I felt was a questionable move). After the blog entry was published, Asimov wrote a terse reply stating: This story is starting to spread. Willamette Week just picked it up, and I've heard from a few journalist acquaintances that they're working on stories. I have a few preliminary thoughts about this unfortunate incident, and of course we'll be watching as the story develops to see if more facts emerge. First, nobody is questioning the accuracy of what Asimov wrote about Paley's Place. It is a renowned restaurant and many, many journalists have praised the place to high heaven. Second, I think Asimov is certainly correct when he says that "The fact that Vitaly Paley's mother is my younger son's piano teacher is irrelevant to the story." Third, I don't put much stock in a comment in a press release that says "Vitaly and Kimberly Paley welcome their good friend Eric Asimov, chief wine critic for The New York Times as their guest for the July 25th Wine Wednesday informal wine tasting." (The press release is here.) I have been introduced at speaking engagements as "my good friend, Steven Shaw!" by people I barely know. Indeed, I have been to dinner with Eric Asimov on at least three occasions, we've exchanged many email messages over the past nine years, he has been an eG Spotlight guest right here, and I like the guy, but I wouldn't call him a "good friend" or even really a "friend." He's more of a charming, entertaining, smart, funny acquaintance I enjoy seeing once every couple of years and whose body of work I respect a lot. But I could certainly see a superficial person (not to mention said superficial person's publicist) with the exact same relationship I have with Asimov calling him a "good friend." Again, the statement is meaningless. I would need to know a lot more about the relationship between Asimov and the Paleys before assuming that the "good friend" comment means much. Needless to say, if they really are good friends, that should have been disclosed. Fourth, being the guest of honor at a wine dinner at the restaurant, especially when it was not disclosed in the subsequent story in which the restaurant was praised, seems to run afoul of several provisions of the Times ethics policy. That almost certainly requires a clarification in the paper. Asimov has already noted that in retrospect he thinks he shouldn't have participated in the dinner, however I think that misses the point that, once he participated in the dinner, it should have been disclosed. I do not think Asimov's conduct was actually unethical -- again, nobody is challenging the veracity of what he wrote -- but I do think the lack of disclosure was a lapse in judgment. More to come, I'm sure.

I'm not sure I agree with the basic categorization here. Salt Tasting Room is a wine bar. Plenty of wine bars serve mostly cheese, sausages and other simple items that don't require a full kitchen with all the attendant cost, ventilation, fire suppression and staffing. Borough Food & Drink is an actual restaurant. It does bring in some prepared items from noteworthy local establishments, but plenty of restaurants do that. For example, at BF&D you can get "Russ & Daughters smoked salmon sandwich," but pretty much any restaurant that serves smoked salmon is acquiring that product, prepared, from somewhere else. If you go to Daniel and get smoked salmon it's from Browne Trading, etc. Also, at BF&D there's a real kitchen there cooking real food. Most of the menu items are not just putting someone else's prepared food on a plate. They're mostly things where there are noteworthy local ingredients incorporated into a dish, such as "Queen Anne's lasagne: eggplant, tomato, DiPalo's ricotta, raisins, pine nuts," and "grilled ny sausage plate: Forest Pork Store sausages, buttered spaetzle, braised red cabbage & currant jelly."

Yes, I think if I had a salad and wanted to dress it in such a way as to show off a very expensive olive oil, I'd probably do something like just olive oil and a little lemon juice, plus salt.

Miniature potato latkes on toothpicks use all cheap ingredients but aren't perceived as cheap the way, say, potato salad is. It sounds like you're going to be doing this when citrus is abundant. You should be able to get a sack of grapefruits at Costco for cheap then. That's a good basis for a high-perceived-value dessert. How are your molecular gastronomy skills? Sodium alginate noodles can be made from just about anything. Just had some great ones made from beets, coiled up in individual spoons . . . it doesn't get much cheaper than beets.

Havarti with caraway seeds is nice.

Well, again, I have to agree that most examples of cheese-with-stuff are bad, and that the function of the stuff is to hide the fact that the cheese is flavorless junk.