Fat Guy

I went back to Hill Country this evening with a group of seven, so that we could order a lot of meat and do a reality check. Reality checked out. Everything was as good as I remembered from the other day. Needless to say, I'll need to return a few more times to track the evenness of the presentation, but at this point I'm strongly inclined to say Hill Country is the best thing to happen to New York City barbecue in a long time. I even brought a Texan friend, who lived in the Houston area and knows barbecue well, and his summary was that it was "Very high level Texas barbecue at twice the price." Needless to say, the first thing I did when I got home was check whether Hill Country in New York really charges twice as much for barbecue as, say, Kreuz in Lockhart. It does not. Hill Country is, to be sure, more expensive. But only one item I cross-referenced cost twice as much or more. Everything else ranged from a little bit more to not quite twice as much. I was actually a little surprised by some of these calculations. For example the pork spare ribs at Kreuz go for $9.50/lb and at Hill Country they're $11/lb. That's only 15.789% more at Hill Country than at Kreuz. When you consider New York real estate issues, that's an incredible bargain. If you're looking to eat economically at Hill Country, focus on pork ribs. The item that's off the charts is the sausage, where the links cost three times as much at Hill Country than at Kreuz. If you're interested, here are the points of price comparison, based on the Kreuz and Hill Country websites as of today: Pork Spare Ribs Kreuz: $9.50/lb Hill Country: $11/lb Hill Country is 15.789% more than Kreuz Boneless Prime Rib Kreuz: $17.90/lb Hill Country: $29/lb Hill Country is 62.011% more than Kreuz Shoulder Clod Kreuz: $9.90/lb Hill Country: $18/lb Hill Country is 81.818% more than Kreuz Beef Brisket Kreuz: $9.90/lb Hill Country: $16.75 (lean) or $18.50 (moist) Using the moist figure, Hill Country is 86.869% more than Kreuz, whereas for lean it's 69.192% more. Pork Chops Kreuz: $9.50/lb Hill Country: $18/lb Hill Country is 89.474% more than Kreuz Sausage: Kreuz: $1.75/link Hill Country: $5.25/link Hill Country is 200% more than Kreuz Incidentally, what are you all doing about tipping at Hill Country? It's sort of an odd service situation: there are servers, but they don't provide full service -- yet the cost of dining at Hill Country is as high as dining at plenty of full-service restaurants. Is double the tax too much in this situation? What percentage have you guys been tipping? Oh yes, here's a photo of all our meat. Unfortunately the brisket and sausage are under the ribs so you can't really see them: P.S. Blue Bell ice cream is still utterly unremarkable, and they serve it hard as a rock so you have to sit around before it softens to an edible consistency.

My own reactions depend on the bread. Most white breads -- bagels, baguettes, Parker House rolls -- don't give me a belly-ache when eaten warm. Heavier breads based on whole wheat and rye flours, however, do.

They do that at Alinea as well. Not with every course, but at various points throughout the meal you'll be given specific bread products to complement specific courses.

It's particularly silly given that the company is based in Quebec.

Most restaurant bread that's served warm is warmed in a bread warmer. It has been baked and properly cooled -- either on premises or by a vendor -- then warmed for service. This standard procedure (there are some exceptions, but this is the way it's usually done) does not present any of the gastrointestinal issues that undercooked bread presents.

I've recently been battling these little guys here in Manhattan. We've had a bad summer for pests of all kinds. I haven't had a terrible infestation, but the larvae had been showing up persistently in the cabinets for a couple of months. I tried better storage and cleaning, as recommended on this topic, but those steps were insufficient. I then consulted several pest control websites as well as a real-life exterminator and came up with the following two-pronged approach: First, there are special pheromone traps that attract these kinds of pests, called Pantry Patrol traps. There's a trap, and in it you put a little vial of a liquid that attracts the bugs. That kills the ones that are out and about. Then, to kill any eggs and hidden bugs, I've sprayed this toxic stuff called D-Force HPX into the cabinet cracks and corners. The recommendation is to do it every 3 weeks, for 4 repetitions. Not that I love the idea of using insecticides in my food-storage cabinets, but this is what has worked for me and I wasn't prepared to play around with bay leaves and dryer sheets while these things reproduced in my cabinets. I just took all the food out of the cabinets and sprayed in the morning, went out for awhile, and repacked the cabinets later in the day. There's a very precise nozzle attachment that ensures you get the stuff into the cracks and not all over the actual cabinet shelves. I ordered everything from http://www.doyourownpestcontrol.com/

Just saw this book: "Red, White, and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass," by Natalie MacLean of www.natdecants.com.

I'm not as conversant with names outside New York, but as mentioned above I'd be sure to include my man Steve Klc in Washington, DC. I haven't tracked the title and naming conventions closely, but I believe his position is Pastry Director of the ThinkFood group, which is the business that operates all of the Jose Andres restaurants.

Morimoto's recipe for clam chowder calls for 60 Manila clams for 4 servings.

Rob, you might want to add Sébastien Rouxel of Per Se in New York; Chris Broberg of Cafe Gray in New York; Bill Yosses, formerly of various New York places, most notably Bouley, and now the White House pastry chef; Karen DeMasco of Craft and Craftbar, New York; Francois Payard of Payard Patisserie and Bistron, New York; Jacques Torres of Jacques Torres Chocolate, New York; and Florian Bellanger of Fauchon, New York. I think those all qualify as top-echelon names. Also I would categorize Johnny Iuzzini primarily as the pastry chef of Jean Georges, though he is also technically the pastry chef at some other restaurants in that group. And I don't think Thomas Keller belongs on the list.

It's weirder still because nobody calls it "quahog chowder." Chowder made from quahogs is called "clam chowder." I was just up in (on?) Cape Cod, however, and I did see a couple of fish markets that called the quahogs "chowder clams." The signs read something like "Chowder Clams (Quahogs)" or "Quahogs (Chowder Clams)" -- that sort of thing. Incidentally, in 1981, a reader wrote in to the New York Times and asked "Can you make a genuine clam chowder with small clams such as littlenecks and cherrystones?" and Craig Claiborne answered thus. (After explaining the taxonomy of hard clams, he answered in the affirmative.)

You can add bread with no salt to that list. Perfection is a rarity in this world. No serious scholar of Mozart or Shakespeare (or Italian cuisine) would argue that every note, every word (or every recipe) is flawless. There's room for improvement, and when people stop acknowledging that, instead believing that everything has already reached its Platonic ideal and can never progress, they stop improving.

When we were there, Hideo-san mentioned that he has been tangling with the DOH for years over the issue of gloves. As I understand it, every serious sushi restaurant is in perpetual violation for "Food worker does not use proper utensil to eliminate bare hand contact with food that will not receive adequate additional heat treatment." But Hideo has been particularly antagonistic about it, appearing at hearings to contest the legitimacy of the regulation and even trying to get the Japanese government to intercede. I wonder if the closing has anything to do with that, or if it's just a bunch of accumulated violation points, or if it's some plumbing or other structural issue that takes time to fix. The relevant inspection results are not online yet.

Adam, I believe my characterization is accurate with respect to the way Italian culinary tourism is promoted to the world. I'm not saying Italy is really like that (though other folks posting here are), but all you have to do is pick up any tourism brochure about Italy and you'll hear the fresh, local, simple, regional, traditional mantra repeated in some form or another.

Most big food cities have a couple of big pastry-chef stars, however when you go down to the next level most cities have no pastry chefs worth talking about. Whereas, in New York City, that second level is populated by people like Bill Corbett of Anthos.

Nation's Restaurant News predicts the following for 2008. This is overall market stuff, as opposed to what's going on at the gourmet end of the spectrum: That "blending of cuisines" one, that's pretty cutting edge, huh?

My take on it is that New York is very much the North American pastry epicenter, for both classic and modern pastry. While there are great pastry chefs spread throughout North America, the sheer density of the pastry chef population in New York is incomparable. I can't think of another city where so many restaurants even have full-time pastry chefs, or where they get the level of respect they get here. William Grimes documented this phenomenon in a 1997 article titled "New York Pastries: They're Pure Theater." He wrote: And New York is more adventurous with desserts than with savory cuisine -- the techniques of molecular gastronomy have been employed by New York pastry chefs for about ten years. Indeed, some of the culinary avant garde has to do with the breaking down of the divisions between pastry and savory techniques and flavors. Also, New York is the gateway to France. Whether it's La Maison du Chocolat or the now-defunct Philippe Conticini experiment at Petrossian, whatever is coming out of France is most likely to hit the beach in New York.

But we're talking about restaurants. This topic opened with the question, "Is there any reason to cook totally traditional dishes, if you want to be a cut above a trattoria? Can a restaurant attain and/or maintain 'stars' cooking completely traditional, regional foods?" So that's very much a question about tourism marketing. I mean, the average person in Spain isn't eating El Bulli food at home. The whole culinary avant garde is utterly irrelevant to the average Spanish mother cooking food for a family. Nonetheless, from the perspective of the restaurant industry in Spain, it's very important. It's Spain's big culinary selling point to the world right now. Whereas, Italy's big selling point is "We cook the same food our grandparents cooked, we hate change, our food is simple and old-fashioned, if you walk ten feet your're in a different region, hooray for Slow Food . . ."

How many vendors have you purchased heirloom tomatoes from this summer, Sam? Have you gone exclusively to Stokes, or have you bought them all over? In previous summers? Mitch, how about you?

Kent, all I can say is that the meal I had at Hill Country yesterday was fully as good, meat-wise, as what I had in Lockhart -- perhaps even more consistently good overall -- and the sides were superior to pretty much anything I've had anywhere across barbecue country. Maybe tomorrow I'll go back and Hill Country will be lousy. I don't know. But this one meal was fantastic, spot-on, etc.

And a good chance of bringing mediocre or outright bad ones home too.

Well, I think it has smoke flavor but it's subtle smoke flavor. That's basically the point with Lockhart-style barbecue, as I understand it: the emphasis is on the meat, whereas the smoke, seasonings and sauces are minor enhancements not the main event as they are in, say, Memphis. In my notes from the trip I took to Lockhart a few years back I noted (at Smitty's) hardly any of the strong smoke flavor characteristic of a lot of the best barbecue in the other states where I'd just been. (Of course with the sausages it's a totally different situation -- they're quite smoky.) I didn't try the sauce on the table. I couldn't bear the thought of adulterating the meat.

I have three words for you: Foie gras tacos. And the address: Toloache 251 W. 50th St. (Broadway & Eighth Ave.) 212.581.1818 http://www.toloachenyc.com Okay I guess I should say a bit more. Toloache ("toh‐lo‐AH‐tchay," a flowering plant used as a love potion in Mexico, according to the PR materials) opened a couple of weeks ago (23 August I believe) on West 50th Street, across the street from Worldwide Plaza. The restaurant has been inviting media in for press dinners, and I accepted an invitation for tonight. This was not a press party but, rather, just my wife and I having dinner like regular people and ordering off the menu, with the added benefit of the meal being free. I almost overlooked the invitation -- I ignore far more such invitations than I have time to accept -- but tonight was to be rescheduled babysitting night and a few days ago Ellen was like, "What can we do Tuesday night?" and I remembered the invitation. Having not read the press kit in advance, I had little notion of what to expect. The sad reality is that the Mexican food scene in New York City is weak. At the low end, other than a couple of good midtown taquerias, there's just not much going on that can compare to dime-a-dozen places in the West and Southwest. At the upmarket level, however, there have for some time been a few chefs who have done a very good job. One of the best -- perhaps the best -- is Richard Sandoval of Maya. Richard Sandoval has nothing to do with Toloache. However, the chef of Toloache, Julian Medina, was basically Richard Sandoval's protege. Medina is, like Sandoval, from Mexico City. He worked at various upscale hotel restaurants (both Mexican and French) and was discovered by Sandoval in 1996. Medina became the opening chef de cuisine of Maya. While there, he took the unusual (for a working chef de cuisine) step of enrolling at the French Culinary Institute by day and cooking by night (he graduated in 1999). He then became executive chef of SushiSamba in New York and opened SushiSamba in Miami. He went back to work for Sandoval in 2003 as corporate chef for all the restaurants (Maya New York, Maya San Francisco, and Tamayo in Denver), and then opened Pampano. Most recently, he was executive chef at Zocalo. Toloache is small. It's an 80‐seat, two‐story restaurant. There's combination of table and bar seating (at a guacamole and ceviche bar), a wood‐burning oven dominates the open kitchen, and there are more than 100 tequilas on the list (I don't even want to think about what percentage of them I sampled). The overall feel is very upbeat. They were doing good business. I've crossed paths with Medina by dining at most of the restaurants where he has worked, when he worked there, but I was never aware of him until today. Based on this meal, however, I'm now a fan of Julian Medina. The guy is good. His diverse training has given him an interesting perspective on Mexican food, and the menu combines classical Mexican technique with Nuevo Latino and global stylistic influences. We started with the guacamole trio. There are three species of guacamole available on the menu, or you can get smaller portions of all three as a sampler: the "tradicional" has avocado, tomato, onion, cilantro and serrano and is mild; the "frutas" has avocado, sweet onion, mango, apple, peach, habanero and Thai basil and is medium spicy; and the "rojo" has avocado, tomato, red onion, chipotle and is sprinkled with queso fresco (cheese) -- it's the spiciest of the three. They're all great, but the real fun of the sampler is getting to shift among the three. It's also a good demonstration of the fact that there are great guacamole possibilities beyond the standard recipe. Then we sampled some ceviches. Again, you can get individual ceviches or a platter of three (or a bigger platter of five). We tried Acapulco-style vuelve a la vida, which had shrimp, octopus, hamachi, oysters, spicy tomato salsa and avocado and was not particularly enjoyable (it was the one dish of the night that I thought was sub-par); a really excellent ceviche with chunks of tuna, key lime, sweet onion, radish and watermelon; and a meat-based ceviche riff, with seared rare ribeye slices (from grass-fed beef), chipotle mustard and cactus salad -- this was my favorite. There are five quesadillas, baked in the brick oven, available on the menu, but we went with today's special: a hamachi quesadilla. I ordered it because I didn't think the hamachi could possibly stand up to cheese and peppers, but I was wrong. The rare slices of hamachi were robust enough to show through the rest of the ingredients. There's also a section of tacos on the menu. These are very small tacos and they come two to an order. The soft corn tortillas are handmade. We tried four types: veal cheek, beef brisket, foie gras (with roasted red onion-chipotle salsa) and crispy grasshopper. The grasshoppers were not bad but the legs kept sticking us in the roofs of our mouths. The other three were terrific, especially the foie. There's a section of small plates as well. One of the nice things about the restaurant is that there's a ton of flexibility in terms of how you order. You can come in and get a couple of small plates for $8-$10 each, or you can do ceviche and cocktails, or you can have a full-blown multi-course meal. The whole menu is available everywhere. Can you believe the menu fits on one page and doesn't seem crowded? There's a lot of stuff, but the language is used sparingly. From the small plates section we had what was probably the dish of the evening: "sopes de requeson." These are little corn cakes topped with ricotta, chorizo and a fried quail egg. They're as good as they sound. We had entrees too. We tried the "atun con chile," a nice piece of tuna rubbed with seven types of chile (though I could only taste six . . . just kidding) and served with sauteed big fat kernels of choclo corn, chorizo and tequila-chipotle glaze. And, the camarones Toloache: roasted garlic shrimp (big ones) served on a crispy tortilla with black beans, shredded chayote squash and cascabel salsa. We were pretty stuffed at this point, but were inspired to finish the tuna (if not the shrimp). The two desserts we tried -- flan and tres leches -- were good but not revolutionary. The cocktail program is ambitious. There are more than 100 kinds of tequila available, as well as a number of interesting specialty cocktails that utilize spice to balance sweetness. For example the margarita de la calle is made with Siembra Azul Blanco tequila, muddled cucumber, jicama, basil, chile piquin and lime. The Toloache margarita has muddled blueberry and hibiscus, and today's special margarita had watermelon and chilies. The normal margaritas are very well made. I had one made with Don Julio tequila, straight up with salt, and it was one of the better margaritas I've had. Our server was quite knowledgeable about the tequilas, and the maitre d', a guy named Giovanni (he's from Costa Rica) seems to be the beverage director and steered us towards some good wines by the glass to have with our entrees.

I had a superb lunch experience at Hill Country today. It far exceeded my expectations, and was the single best barbecue meal I've had in New York City. The meat was on par with what I've had in Lockhart, Texas, and the sides were -- as is the case with several NYC barbecue restaurants -- better than anything I've had in barbecue country. The place was not crowded at all, in part because of crummy weather today. We just walked up to the counter and got our food. It took about 20 minutes to acquire all the food, but that was because we interacted a lot with the guys at the counter. We then selected a table downstairs -- we were the only people sitting downstairs -- and hung out for a couple of hours. I can't say what the experience would have been like had the place been crowded -- I imagine not as pleasant. But the food is the food. We had the moist brisket, the pork ribs, the beef ribs and the jalapeno sausage. For sides we had baked beans, beer-braised pinto beans, white shoepeg corn pudding, and greenbean casserole with extra fried onions on top. I thought every single item was first rate. The moist brisket was like brisket custard, the pork ribs were well seasoned and quite tender but still with some structure, the beef ribs had an amazing sweet lacquered peppery crust, and the sausage was definitive. The corn pudding was the best of the sides, but all were great. This is minimalist meat, seasoned with salt, pepper and cayenne. I loved this style of barbecue when I had it in Texas, and I was pleasantly surprised that Hill Country really pulled it off today. It's only one visit, but if the experience is replicable then this will be a new favorite. It's overpriced, but I think it's possible to manage the order so as not to spend a ridiculous amount of money. Blue Bell ice cream -- what's the big deal? The banana pudding was good, though.

But this was not a one-off. This was just the most carefully documented outing I've made, which I wanted to do as a reality check with photos and a more methodical approach than just gathering general impressions -- not that the approach was all that methodical. But what I've been saying is that I've generally been hitting more mediocre heirlooms on Greenmarket visits in recent years (quite aside from the overall marketplace issue, which is the real train wreck). I think I actually did better on this trip than on any other in recent memory, because this is such a good time to buy heirlooms. You guys who go to the Greenmarket a lot, why don't you run some of these theories by the vendors you chat up all the time? Ask if they think there has been dilution/dumbing down/whatever of heirlooms. I'd be interested to hear their opinions.