Fat Guy

That has been my experience as well: freezing ruins the texture of soft cheese; it doesn't particularly affect the flavor. So the only way I'd freeze soft cheese would be if I planned to use it for melting later on.

Here's what Stew's says about its milk (this is from a press release earlier this year, when they opened the Newington store): A few other interesting tidbits from the marketing literature:

I can't remember the last time we bought Stew Leonard's milk, however Stew's house label is my preferred for a few other dairy products: cream (a quart of cream at Stew's cost about as much as an 8-ounce container in Manhattan), butter for baking (incredibly cheap if you catch it on special) and yogurt (better than any of the upscale brands like Stonyfield). Stew's has also recently been introducing various "natural" foods under the code name "naked," as in "Cage Free Naked Eggs" and "Naked Beef."

I picked up a liter (33.8oz) of the Frantoia on Sunday for $15.99 at Fairway in New York City. It's excellent.

Unfussy

I haven't read the Barber article, but nobody has said the critic is recognized 100% of the time. It's more like 75% if we take the Asimov figure to be correct. I agree that we'll most likely see a replay of the Bruni and Grimes scenarios: someone from another department of the Times (either overseas or domestic) who knows little about the dining scene. I doubt we'll see another Ruth Reichl scenario, though. I'm not sure in the current environment a former chef/owner of a restaurant -- someone with so many industry ties -- would be considered, and I'm not sure the Times actually wants another Ruth Reichl because a company man is easier to control. Plus I think she was a special case: today there are no equivalent candidates I can think of except Michael Bauer, and I believe he already passed up the opportunity.

Since all the discussions happen in secret, we can only speculate, but I think we've seen the end of food writers as Times dining critics. I imagine the anonymity issue was a major concern with Jay McInerney and Bill Buford -- that picking one of these writers would expose the charade. And I think you're way off base with respect to public perception of Times critic anonymity. I talk to people all the time about this. Pretty much whenever I meet a new person and say what I do -- even though I just say I write about food -- they ask me if I wear disguises. It's the one thing everybody "knows" about restaurant reviewing: that critics are always working hard to be anonymous.

While they do understand that the critic gets recognized, that's secondary to the obsession with continuing the anonymity charade in the eyes of the public.

Yes, Bruni will be just fine. Former New York Times restaurant reviewers have no trouble finding gainful employment afterwards. Bruni I believe already has a major book deal, and he should be able to write his own ticket. Grimes essentially gets to write whatever he wants. Ruth Reichl is editor-in-chief of Gourmet. What I wonder about is how the Times will ever be able to find Bruni's replacement. It's clear to me that the Times has painted itself into a corner. By insisting on the charade of anonymity, the Times has ruled out most modern-era top food writers. Essentially, it seems the Times is going to be forced to use in-house reporters -- company men -- for this job, because no accomplished outsider in today's multimedia world is going to be obscure and unknown enough to do the job. So that means Bruni's replacement will likely know as little about New York restaurants as Bruni did when he started three years ago, and we'll all have to endure a years-long learning curve with unpredictable results. It's amazing that, just as food writing has been coming into its own as a recognized, serious discipline, the Times has created a situation where it won't hire a food writer to be its restaurant reviewer.

At least three of the dishes were nearly the exact same dishes I've had at the Modern on normal nights. From the Modern's regular menu: - "Chorizo-Crusted Chatham Cod with White Coco Bean Purée and Harissa Oil" - "Warm Watermelon Layered with Tomato Confit and Pistachio, Aged Balsamic Vinegar" - And the "Modern Chocolate Torte" was similar to a few typical desserts I've had at the Modern. I think the menu was about 1/3 Kreuther, 1/3 Marx and 1/3 collaborative -- that's just a guesstimate. In any event, I don't think the food we had was particularly better than what you'd get on any given night at the Modern. Kreuther is in my opinion one of the top chefs of his generation, fully on par with a chef like Marx. What made this particular dinner special was the combination of wine, food, uniqueness and exclusivity, not to mention the sheer quantity of everything. But the Modern is in my opinion a terribly underrated restaurant.

Outside. They need a couple of days but I'll report back on flavor when I taste one.

4520 N Tryon St

Interesting. I've never noticed that. Shows how bad my palate is. Although, the olives I got today, large green ones from California, really do seem to be in olive oil not soybean oil. It tastes like olive oil, and it congeals in the refrigerator. Does soybean oil congeal in the refrigerator? I've never considered the question. Two asides: 1- There are a lot of things about Zabar's that are better than Fairway (appetizing counter, the whole upstairs housewares section, the pastry items), and there are also some areas where both stores are strong but have differing inventory (cheese department). Zabar's also has excellent prices -- it's competitive with Fairway across a number of categories. But, Zabar's is simply not a complete store. You can get everything you need at Fairway -- all your produce, meat, fish, etc. -- whereas if you go to Zabar's you still have to go somewhere to get your produce, meat, fish, etc. And since I'm making a trip to the West Side to do my shopping, it's not really possible for me to visit more than one store on the trip. So, Fairway it is. 2- Although Fairway and Zabar's both have large selections of olives, I don't think either has fabulous olives. The best olives I've found in New York City come from the Greek stores in Astoria. Not as big a selection, but I'll take olives from Titan Foods over olives from Fairway or Zabar's any day. So, anyway, back to keeping tabs on Fairway. Last week, I missed the Fairway shopping trip because there was a scheduling conflict, so this week I did a really big shop and got lots of great stuff. First I spent like ten minutes picking out local apples, only to remember that my wife and son were planning to go apple picking in New Jersey today. So I put them all back. Then I got a couple of really nice "heirloom cantaloupes." Hey, why not? They have a sort of ridged surface. I got my usual Bread Alone organic whole wheat sourdough bread -- they usually get the delivery around 8am I think, and they put it out on the shelves sometime around 8:30. Got some Parmigiano-Reggiano whey-cream butter in the cheese department, which went well on the bread as soon as I got home. I got some low-moisture mozzarella because I was making pizza for dinner. A pineapple. On the suggestion of Sam Kinsey made on this topic I got some Frantoia olive oil at $15.99 a liter. Excellent -- could probably be used in place of an expensive fancy oil for drizzling over cooked fish or whatever. There was a ridiculously low price on cave-aged Emmenthaler so I got some of that. Fairway's price on Sabra hummous is not as low as Costco's price, but Fairway has a better selection of types. We eat a lot of Sabra hummous because in the past couple of years we've been too lazy to make our own and, unless we really put our hearts into it, Sabra hummous is better anyway. I can't remember what else I got, but it was like seven bags of groceries, so we're loaded for bear.

Jon, the potato chips are a regular feature at the Yonkers store. They make two varieties: regular and sweet potato. Turnover is pretty high and there's actually a chance you'll get them still warm if you buy them from the display by the fried chicken counter, so you can run out to the picnic tables and gorge yourself on warm potato chips (whereas if you buy them from the other potato-chip display, by the ice cream section, they'll be cooler). Ijfri, I know they sell several thousand loaves of that all-natural sourdough a week -- I think I saw a sign that said 3,000 or something amazing like that -- however I'm not sure I've ever purchased a loaf. I guess I should.

Actually maybe this one is clearer:

UE: 1. Let me try to do a better job describing that dish. Here's a photo from a slightly different angle, exactly as it's served: The idea is that the centerpiece of the dish is a domino of green cucumber gelee lying flat. On top of that is a thin layer of something along the lines of creme fraiche, and on top of that are two thin cylinder-shaped items: one formed of Osetra caviar and the other a thinly sliced piece of eel rolled up into a tube. Also on the plate are riffs on creme fraiche and toast. 2. The smoke comes from sarments (sarments de vigne), aka vine shoots/clippings. Sarments are, needless to say, plentiful around France, so whereas in America we do pit cooking with hickory, oak, etc., in France they use sarments. I've heard tell of some great parties in the French countryside where meats were roasted over sarments. This dish is an haute twist on that tradition.

I wanted to mention that the next Big Apple Barbecue Block Party has been scheduled for 7 and 8 June of 2008. I was asked, along with John T. Edge, Ed Levine and a few others, to sit on an advisory panel, so I should be able to get the word early on attendance, plans, etc., and will post whatever I learn to the extent it's shareable.

(P.S. for those who have insatiable appetites and deep pockets, there are still a couple of tables left for this evening's dinner -- the last of the series of two. If you go to the Modern's website, on the home page there's a place to click through for all the information.)

Thierry Marx was in New York City this weekend doing a guest chef appearance at the Modern, the restaurant in the Museum of Modern Art. He served several Cordeillan-Bages signature dishes. There's a report of the meal here. I was very, very impressed.

I attended an extraordinary dinner at the Modern last night. It was a collaboration between the Modern's chef Gabriel Kreuther and visiting chef Thierry Marx of Cordeillan-Bages. The Michelin-starred Cordeillan-Bages is owned by the Cazes family, which owns Chateau Lynch-Bages (as well as several other wine properties, most notably Chateau Les Ormes de Pez). Chef Thierry Marx, who like Gabriel Kreuther hails from Alsace, was named Named Chef of the Year for 2006 by France’s Gault Millau guide. The dinner featured ten courses (depending on how you count them) paired with Lynch-Bages and other Cazes family wines dating back to 1975. I was lucky to be a guest of the chief operating officer, however the retail price of the dinner was $675 per person all inclusive. There was a single sitting -- arrivals from 7-9. We took a 7pm table and left around midnight. The Lynch-Bages wines were shipped directly from the chateau's cellar, and the older wines were in large format bottles: magnums, double magnums and imperials, the bottles getting bigger as the wines got older. The young Jean-Charles Cazes (he is in his early 30s), who now directs Lynch-Bages, was on hand to chat and answer questions. He's the son of Jean-Michel Cazes, and the Cazes family has owned the chateau for three quarters of a century (since 1933). I apologize in advance for the awful quality of these photos. It was a low-light situation, our table was particularly dark, and it wouldn't have been appropriate to use flash. Also, I took the photos, which is already a problem. We started with an amuse of trout roe beggar's purses, miniature quiches, and figs wrapped in thin sheets of something crunchy like daikon. This was served with a white Bordeaux wine I'd never tasted or heard of, Chateau Villa Bel-Air Blanc 2004, from the Cazes family's vineyard in the Southern Graves (Saint-Morillon). This was certainly not intended to be the blockbuster wine of the evening -- I'm told you can pick up a bottle for about US$25 if you can find it -- but five hours later, after tasting some of the great red wines of the past 40 years, I was still thinking about Villa Bel-Air Blanc. I rarely think of white Boreaux, but this wine had the crispness of an in-season apple and lots of nice citrus notes, plus great acidity. We stuck with Villa Bel-Air through the next few courses. Next we had English cucumber paste topped with Osetra caviar and smoked eel. The black line on this blurry photo is the caviar, the pinkish line next to it is the eel. Underneath that is the cucumber piece. We were advised to eat it like a loaf of bread, slicing pieces off in order to get eel, caviar and cucumber together, but that would only have worked in a Ginsu knife commercial. There was no way to cut the eel that precisely with a regular table knife without smashing the whole composition. So I ate bits and pieces in various combinations -- all superb. Next was a signature of chef Marx, soy sprout risotto with black truffle and oysters. I'm confident that this is the best soybean sprout dish being served on planet Earth. The baby soy sprouts, cut to the size of grains of rice, have a crunchiness that's like al dente rice to the third power. One of the best dishes of the evening. Next was warm watermelon layered with tomato confit and Sicilian pistachios, with balsamico, accompanied by a radish with vinaigrette on the leaves. A wonderfully sweet, crisp palate cleanser. Next, an "uncooked" hot souffle with a sea water crisp and an oyster. (The menu description is "Souffle Chaud sans Cuisson, Croustillant d'Eau de Mer"). This dish was small but awfully rich, especially the creamy sauce poured tableside. As soon as I tasted the sea water crisp I was reminded of a dish Paul Liebrandt had done at Atlas back in the day, and as Ellen and I were reminiscing about Atlas, Paul Liebrandt walked in -- he had one of the later reservations. The next two wines we had were, relatively, the low points of the progression, which is not to say they were bad -- they just paled by comparison to the rest. With the souffle, we had the Blanc de Lynch-Bages from 2006. Too young, too harsh, not particularly to my liking. Next was chorizo-crusted Chatham cod with white coco bean puree and Sherry vinegar jus. A boldly spiced dish (especially coming from a French chef) that was not particularly flattered by the 1990 Chateau Les Ormes de Pez, which was bitter, astringent and just not a good food wine in my opinion. Maybe in a technical tasting it would have scored well enough, but I'd not pick it as a wine for enjoyment with dinner. And I don't think it's going to improve much with time, though I'm hardly a skilled evaluator of these things. At this point, the evening took a much more serious turn both in terms of wine and food. Everything up until this point had been throat clearing. The next dish, another Marx signature, was one of the most dramatic I've had in a restaurant. A gueridon arrived at the table bearing two plates, each with a couple of sculpted fingerling potatoes and a pattern of sauce lines. Then the beef tenderloin, from the "blonde d'Aquitaine" breed of cattle, arrived wrapped in a plastic tent. Inside the tent were smoking embers of sarments (vine shoots) in a little dish, which in the closed environment of the plastic tent were able to permeate the beef with smoky flavor. When our captain untied and opened the plastic tent, the most bracing aroma of smoke and beef emerged. The beef pieces were plated with the potatoes and drizzled with a little jus. Not only was the dish wonderful -- not least because of the excellent quality of the tenderloin -- but also the drama repeated itself throughout the evening at other people's tables, periodically taking us back to that dish as the aromas wafted over. It was a great shared experience for all the guests. This dish was accompanied by an excellent wine match (and an excellent wine), the Lynch-Bages 1990, a wine that was both technically superb and hedonistically enjoyable as a food wine with beef. More terrible photos: Things kept getting better. The next dish was slices of young squab breast in a black truffle and dark cocoa fumet with a truffle pea puree. Each slice sat on its own pile of the pea puree and was topped with a little cocoa crisp. This was paired with 1985 Lynch-Bages, another blockbuster wine that married well with its companion dish. The final meat course was a baby lamb "charlotte" described as "lacquered in three steps." That's the round thing on the left of the plate. It alone would have made a nice lunch. Next to it, a small chop, and a vegetable puree contained by a crisp. And the dish was significantly enhanced by Lynch-Bages 1982. The cheese course was St. Maure (a raw goat's milk cheese) with turnip confit (the slices on top and bottom of the little cheese "sandwich" in the photo below) and an herb salad. I assume Marx brought the cheese over with him, and it was a flashback to great cheese courses I've had in France. With this we were served the wine that had been the big question mark hanging over the evening: Lynch-Bages 1975. Everything I'd read, everything I'd heard, indicated that the 1975 was going to be a disappointment. In general, the 1970s were not kind to Lynch-Bages. In addition, the 1975 should have been dead by now -- it wasn't supposed to be a wine suited for 30+ years of aging. Stephane Colling, the sommelier, was clearly nervous about serving it. Yet, it was the wine of the night. I think two factors helped: first, storage at the chateau for the wine's entire lifetime; second, it was an imperial, and large-format bottles simply age better. The wine was in great shape, and it was a totally different animal from the 1980s-and-after Lynch-Bages. This was wine made by farmers, not oenologists. Real old-school Bordeaux, rustic and incredibly pleasurable to drink. I wonder if I'll ever taste a wine like it again -- if there will ever be a wine like it again. In a bold, provocative move the tasting jumped forward to the 2000 Lynch-Bages for the dessert phase. This wine couldn't have been more unlike the 1975. The 2000 was a technically fantastic wine, with tons of fruit, tannin, structure and everything else desirable about a wine. In 30 years, though, it's not going to taste remotely like the 1975 tastes now. No way. Maybe in some ways it will be a better wine, but it won't have the personality. The first dessert was a red beet confit. Why isn't everybody doing beet desserts? Of all the weird desserts I've had in the past few years, this one made the most intuitive sense: beets are really sweet, and much of the world's sugar supply is extracted from them. So why aren't they used in desserts more often? Not to mention, they pair beautifully with wine. First, the server presented a spoon filled with "beet pasta," which we ate out of hand (the only reason it's on the table is that I had to put it there to photograph. Then, the main plate came with the beet confit topped with meringue and a beet-chocolate band. The main dessert: Modern Guanaja chocolate mille feuille with honey locust farm raspberries. We were also served some excellent petits fours, including the Modern's macaroons, which I maintain are the best I've had anywhere. There were no dessert wines. The 2000 Lynch-Bages carried through the end of the evening, and the servers also offered to top off any of the other vintages for comparison and contemplation. How could I say no? I call this the wall of shame -- these are all the reds at the end of the evening. As we left we were presented with gift bags containing, among other things, bottles of the Cazes family's olive oil from L'Ostal Cazes, a vineyard and olive grove in the Languedoc. This olive oil had been poured earlier, with the bread service. It was a wonderful meal and evening, and it reminded me of dining in France. I was very impressed with chef Marx, and also with Gabriel Kreuther whose contributions to the meal were many. To me, the Modern remains a chronically underrated restaurant. Last night, though, I'm sure the restaurant made some new friends.

The point isn't that old recipes didn't require creativity to create. The point is that it doesn't require creativity to make them now. They can be made flawlessly by a person with zero creativity. Or, they can be tweaked by a creative person, but that person's species of creativity is the species common to the performing artist. That chef is not free to create a new composition. So you effectively have, in a traditionalist culinary monoculture, no composers. You create a situation where there can be no new operas, no new symphonies -- it's all just people studying the ways to play the old ones better. It's great to have people doing that, and they can be brilliant artists in their own rights, but they're not composers.

Let's not forget about storytelling value and general acquisition of knowledge. If you don't eat Chinese food in Oporto, you're never going to be able to tell the story of the worst Chinese restaurant you ever ate at. If you've never been to a McDonald's in Europe, you lack basic McDonald's cultural literacy. Pizza Hut in Cairo is an experience you simply don't want to miss. If I ever go to Beijing, of course I'm going to check out KFC there. Of course.

So I was thinking about this discussion tonight over an amazing dinner at The Modern (the restaurant in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City), and it occurred to me that we're speaking, fundamentally, about two different visions of the role of the chef: the performer and the composer. A chef who cooks traditional recipes is like a performer who plays from the repertoire. Great performers like Pavarotti are, in their own rights, great artists. Specifically, they're great performing artists. They enhance whatever work they perform by their performance talent. They may tweak the compositions they perform, they may have their own styles, but they are not creating new works. A chef who cooks creatively is like a composer (a performer too, of course). I don't need to waste any words explaining what that's so. The point being, if we rule out creative cooking we rule out the possibility of chefs being anything but performers. They can't be composers. And to me, that's sad. It's not that composers are better than performers. The best of both types can be equally brilliant. But we need both.

There have been mentions of the Asian Corner Mall in Charlotte in eG Forums discussions over the years (by the way, "Asian Corner Mall" is, according to a photo I took of the entrance, the correct name of the place -- not "Asian Corners" or "Asia Corners"), however I don't think there has ever been a topic devoted to exploring this wonderful place. So, I thought I'd start one. I also have a secondary agenda, with is that I'm including a short piece on the Asian Corner Mall in my forthcoming book, "Turning the Tables on Asian Restaurants" and was hoping some of you who are local to the place might have some opinions, insights and factual tidbits. My not-particularly-thorough research indicates that the mall opened in 1967 as the Tryon Mall, anchored by a Woolco and a Peoples department store, located in the middle of a thriving middle-class neighborhood. I believe the Tryon Mall flourished throughout the 1970s, but fell victim to urban blight in the 1980s. The anchor tenants left and were replaced by the likes of a furniture liquidator, which in turn went out of business. The once-proud Tryon Mall, with its two red pagoda-like entrances, was either abandoned or nearly abandoned. The parking lot filled with potholes and the place belonged to dealers and gangs. As I understand it, in 1999 two Asian-American sisters bought the old Tryon Mall and reincarnated it as the Asian Corner Mall. Aside from its now-active parking lot and people, mostly Asian-Americans, streaming in and out of the entrances, the Asian Corner Mall still looks a bit like an abandoned mall. Little has been done to repair the parking lot or spruce up the interior. But where before there were abandoned stores, now there are Asian restaurants, supermarkets (two of them) and shops. Current tenants range from the Dragon Court Restaurant and Hong Kong BBQ to International Supermarket and New Century Market. It seems that there's a large Vietnamese clientele. I've heard that Tet is a real scene at the Asian Corner Mall, and there's a terrific banh mi shop inside where you can also get sugarcane juice and interesting dried fruits (an acquired taste I haven't acquired). I don't recall the name of the shop. My visit was brief -- I didn't eat at any of the restaurants, and just briefly surveyed the two supermarkets -- but I hope to get back there. Let the topic start.

I just consider replacing my dried herbs and spices every couple of years to be a cost of doing business. I almost never actually finish a jar. I think in the past two years the only jars I've finished have been dried oregano. Everything else, there comes a point when I'm noticing a lot of deterioration across products. So I make a shopping list as I'm throwing each jar out, and then I go spend fifty bucks on new ones. I suppose if I kept thirty or forty different dried herbs and spices around I'd want to consider a different strategy, but I only use maybe a dozen regularly.