Fat Guy

I believe the variety in question was Striped German. Though all grown on different farms, there is probably a reason why I preferred those three. Perhaps it's because I have a varietal preference, but I rather doubt that's it. I think that particular type may just be coming really well at this moment. I don't think I've got a nostalgia-skewed palate when it comes to tomatoes. The benchmark tomatoes from my father-in-law's garden in Connecticut have been with me every year for as long as I've been buying heirlooms. So it's not like one of these foods where I had crap and then something good came along so seemed better than it was. I don't think there was a time when you got 10 out of 10 great tomatoes. Rather, I think the quality range was typically like the Stokes quality range I experienced last week: they ranged from excellent to very good to imperfect. Prices are up. Then again, nobody had the discipline of Stokes back then, with the neatly categorized and labeled tomatoes. But never, ever back in the day did I get a single crap tomato like the ones from Berried Treasure that I got the other day. Not a single one like that in years. And I guess that's to be expected with expansion of the market.

I think my vanilla extract is ready for prime time. But now I'm not exactly sure what to do with it. Should I pour some off into a smaller secondary jar, then top off the primary jar with more spirits? Can I just continue on like that for years? Or what?

Last Wednesday I was heading to the Village for morning errands and a lunch date, so I decided to swing by the Greenmarket and get a broad sample of tomatoes. Armed with my trusty Laguiole folding knife, a small Zip-Loc bag of coarse salt, a few paper towels and a bottle of water I tried to buy tomatoes from every vendor that had a significant selection of heirlooms. There were five vendors that met the criteria, as well as several others that had a few heirlooms. Just for kicks, I included one of them as well. At each stand, I tried to find the best tomatoes I could. I originally thought maybe I'd try to find a type in common among all the places, but that was pretty much impossible. So I just asked for guidance at each place, asking what were the favorites and stressing that I planned to eat them that day. I emerged from the subway on 15th Street on the east side of the market, so I started at Stokes Farm. I had probably only bought heirlooms from them once before (I have the most experience with Eckerton Hill Farm, the one I've heard recommended the most often by chefs), but Stokes has a good reputation. Stokes also has the most compelling display of heirlooms, neatly categorized and labeled by type. They're also the most expensive, $4.75 a pound. I was hoping to buy 3 tomatoes from each vendor, but after spending almost $10 just on 3 tomatoes at Stokes I scaled back. Next I hit Paffenroth Garden for unrelated reasons. I didn't think they even had heirlooms, but there was a bin of them, all of the same unspecified type. Weirdly, they were priced at $1 per pound. I decided to grab one just as an experiment. Next was Berried (get it?) Treasure Farm, where I've had some good strawberries in the past. Berried Treasure had a compelling display of heirlooms and was proactively offering tastes. This seemed to me to indicate confidence in the product. Next was Cherry Lane Farm, which had a big selection. Next, Oak Grove Farm. Finally, Eckerton Hill Farm, which is Tim Stark's farm and is utilized as the tomato supplier by several of the best restaurants. Eckerton's tomatoes are sometimes named as such on menus. Eckerton's selection was surprisingly small quantity-wise (it was diverse, though). Then again it's a small booth, so I suppose that's not surprising. As I mentioned, there were some other places selling heirlooms on the side, but these seemed to be the ones that were doing it seriously. I'm sure on other market days there are some other vendors. This wasn't a comprehensive experiment, just a quick reality check. In terms of flavor, I was looking for sweetness, complexity and good texture -- when I say a tomato is excellent, I mean it's sweet, has complex flavors, and has a soft fruit texture. I wasn't going beyond that to consider specific varietal attributes and such -- I don't have than level of knowledge. Okay, so, armed with my gear and my tomatoes, I secured a picnic table at the southwest corner of the market and got to work. Several onlookers seemed puzzled. Here are the little beauties all in a row. From top left to bottom right there are 1- three tomatoes from Stokes, 2- one from Oak Grove, 3- two from Berried Treasure, 4- two from Cherry Lane, 5- one from Paffenroth, and 6- one from Eckerton. So that's: 1- Stokes 2- Oak Grove and 3- Berried Treasure 4- Cherry Lane 5- Paffenroth and 6- Eckerton As a size benchmark, I'll note that the Eckerton tomato was exactly 1.00 pounds. So, I started tasting tomatoes. First the three tomatoes from Stokes. Here I had mixed results, which surprised me. I thought Stokes would be flawless. Actually, one tomato was in the incredible-awesome-mindblowing category, one was very good but certainly not revelatory, and one was mealy-chalky-unsweet -- not a worthwhile tomato at all. The best one: The next best one: The worst one (it's sort of possible to see the mealiness at the center of this one): Then I tried the tomato from Oak Grove, which was excellent. Not as good as the best Stokes tomato, but better than the second best. Next, and now I'm out of order but I couldn't wait to try this one, I sampled Paffenroth's $1-per-pound tomato. Now this is kind of interesting: it was the best tomato I'd tasted. It was better than the best one from Stokes. It was a tomato I wanted to capture the essence of for all time. Just incredible flavor structure, very sweet, and good texture. Bizarre. It didn't even look all that great. Until the moment I tasted it, I thought it was going to be disappointing. The tomatoes from Berried Treasure were totally awful. This was somewhat surprising because Berried Treasure was so good about offering tastes. But the ones they actually sold me sucked. Worse than hydroponic supermarket tomatoes. Cherry lane. Very good tomatoes. The green one needed another day of ripening, but was clearly on the cusp of excellence. The red one was very good, like on the level of the second one from Stokes. Finally, the one-pound Eckerton tomato. This was one of the three best tomatoes of the mini-tasting, in the category of the best Stokes tomato and the from-left-field Paffenroth tomato. I'm not sure what any of this means. I just thought it would be interesting. Certainly, there are heirloom tomatoes at the Greenmarket these days that suck. That didn't used to be the case, in my experience. There are also great ones. I'm not sure greatness can be ensured by sticking with one reputable vendor -- Stokes sold me a disappointing tomato, in past visits I've have a couple of bad examples from Eckerton, and most of all if you stick with one vendor you won't make cool discoveries like the $1-per-pound Paffenroth tomato.

Le Pain Quotidien's baguettes are my favorites in the New York market as well. Alain Coumont is, in my opinion, one of the world's greatest bakers, and those baguettes are a standard item on our table. I don't care that it's a chain -- there aren't any standalone bakeries anywhere near me making a competitive product. I agree with your other assessments save for the whole wheat sourdough boule. It may be that your sample wasn't up to standard, however I've found this loaf to be one of the great examples of the sourdough art. Try living with a whole loaf for several days, starting by eating it fresh and then moving on to toast, then croutons, then breadcrumbs. The flavors are remarkable, and my friends who are more serious about bread than I am report that the technical aspects of the bread (crumb, etc.) are first rate.

This is very sad news indeed. The blog entry from Second Helpings states: It says Cecil has no set plan for another place, but that he's considering Bergen County.

My experience has been that there are plenty of restaurants in France with two sittings. Not places with three Michelin stars, but nonetheless restaurants with ambitious food and serious clientele. Indeed, just a few days ago there was a story in the Times (London) bemoaning this trend among the in-demand upscale bistros that have become so popular in Paris: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_...icle2394086.ece

I think another issue is that, for a variety of reasons, the food of yesteryear isn't necessarily the most appropriate food for today. This seems to be a notion well incorporated into, say, French cuisine, where the regime of heavy sauces (talk about a cliche of a given era) was overthrown in the 1970s. That kind of heaviness and richness was desirable in another era. Among other things, heavy food was useful for fueling a population mostly dedicated to physical labor, and rich sauces were helpful (in part) to combat the lack of refrigeration and other factors that often made ingredients less than ideal. Today, that kind of heaviness is passe in France, and in many other countries. Is it passe in Italy? It seems Italy has clung to some of the old heaviness more stubbornly than most. Perhaps this is in part because traditional, local, regional cuisine is a major marketing proposition for Italian tourism. Or perhaps it's because people just like the food that way. Or maybe it's a lack of imagination. Or maybe it's that there are many Italian dishes that at some point reached their Platonic ideals and can never be improved upon, like the best works of Mozart, Rembrandt or Shakespeare. Or maybe if you actually compared dishes now and 50 years ago you'd find that there has been more lightening than a lot of folks assume.

Yeah, there have been many great products I've loved and lost over the years at Fairway. Shelf space at Fairway is extremely valuable, so unfortunately if a product doesn't move -- and move well -- it gets yanked. It's not like at a normal supermarket where they can say, "Well, we don't sell much of it, but a few people buy it so let's just keep it on some low, out-of-the-way shelf in the back." Even the most obscure condiments on the bottom shelf need to turn over enough to keep their places.

So anyway, I'll start with some thoughts on butter. One of the curiosities of Fairway (when I say Fairway, unless otherwise specified, I mean Fairway on Broadway between 74th and 75th Streets -- but feel free to use this topic for comments Fairway's other locations) is that, even if you think you know where a particular species of product is located, there may be multiple additional homes for that product. For example, butter. The main butter display is located at the end of a small aisle perpendicular to the main dairy case, near the fruit section of the store. In that location, there are several butter choices, ranging from standard supermarket brands to gourmet brands like Plugra to interesting imports like KerryGold Irish butter. However, if you pick one of these butters and check out, assuming you've seen the full range of Fairway's butters, you'll be missing another butter display: the one upstairs. Up in the natural foods section, there's a whole 'nother set of butters -- organic ones. Again, there are many options. But that's not all. While the beginner-level Fairway shopper knows to look for the butter by the dairy case, and the intermediate-level Fairway shopper knows to look upstairs for additional, organic butters, the advanced-level Fairway shopper knows where the real action is: the real butter action is in the cheese department. In the cheese department, nestled among various actual cheese products, is a selection of unusual butters from the New York region (like Ben's butter), from across the country (such as Sierra Nevada vat-cultured butter from California), and from around the world (such as Parmigiano-Reggiano butter from Italy, and several butters from France). The availability of so many butters from all over probably indicates that I'm not the only person shopping at Fairway who has a bit of a butter obsession, or perhaps more of an affectation: I like to buy butters from around the world. Fundamentally, this is kind of stupid. I mean, it's 2007, and we all know you're supposed to buy stuff from within 100 miles when you can. It seems especially ridiculous to ship dairy all over the place, especially when the local butter from places like Ben's and Ronnybrook is so good anyway. Nonetheless, for usually around $5, it's a cheap way to indulge my taste for the exotic. This past Sunday (as in, yesterday morning) I picked up a 250-gram block of Pamplie AOC-designated Charentes-Poitou butter, for $3.99. This seems to be one of the few imported butters that comes unsalted, which is why I decided to try it. I also liked the cool black packaging. Anyway, I'm afraid I've already eaten about 100 grams of it, spread on slices of an olive boule I picked up on the same trip, sprinkled with fleur-de-sel. It's really good.

I've been going to Fairway on Broadway between 74th and 75th Streets pretty much all my life. I used to go there with my mother every week when I was a kid, and in the past few years I've gone there once just about every week to do my primary weekly shop -- also with my mother. We meet there on Sunday mornings, we do our separate shopping, and I help her home with her bags. Even with interruptions for college out of town, the time I spent working 24/7 at a law firm, and various other happenings and phases, my guess is that I've been shopping at Fairway at least 500 times. So, you know, I have a lot of experience shopping at Fairway. I know the location of most items at Fairway better than I know where stuff is in my own closet. I notice little changes that most people who work at Fairway probably wouldn't notice. I have, as the cliche runs, forgotten more about Fairway than most people will ever know. Unfortunately, what's forgotten is forgotten. Looking back, I wish I'd been more rigorous about documenting the changes at Fairway over the years. Going forward, however, I'm going to post various notes and observations gleaned from my weekly shopping trips to Fairway. And I hope those of you who also go to Fairway -- either often or just occasionally -- will contribute too. Thus, together, we will be keeping tabs on Fairway. I was also thinking that we all have favorite places that we frequent, where we know the lay of the land better than the average person ever will. So why not start a "Keeping tabs on:" topic of your own?

Kai, what are you saying is totally unknown in Europe? Multiple sittings? In my experience, plenty of restaurants in Europe have multiple sittings.

You mean there are people who just eat them the way they come?

Or perhaps "traditional" and "authentic" will be seen as the cliches.

There's so much fertile ground for discussion here I just don't know where to begin. Like the wise feedmec00kies, my ideal sandwich is uncut. "Don't cut it" is a standard instruction that I give when ordering sandwiches. I even say it when ordering, for example, a buttered bagel. Needless to say, the bagel has to be cut once in order to spread anything on it, but a lot of places will, after spreading, cut it in half again like a sandwich. I find that if you say "Don't cut it," every bagel schmearer in the business knows exactly what you mean, even though the instruction is inaccurate. If a sandwich is so well endowed, either in length or girth, as to be inedible without cutting, I acknowledge the need to cut. In such cases, I want the cut to be a good one. For crying out loud, cut all the way through the bottom piece of bread. And don't press the life out of the sandwich when you cut. At some point I'll grab a photo of one of my mother's sandwich-cutting techniques. She has some bad-ass sandwich-cutting skillz.

Because they're in the freezer, I always forget about them!

Yup. Fresh bay leaves freeze really well. I've had a small bag in the freezer for like two years and they're still in great shape. I use them so rarely that the bag will probably last me another year or two.

I think this picks up on a regional distinction, which is that in some places a restaurant has little choice but to make its own everything if it wants those things to be really good, whereas in other places the commercial suppliers are so good that the bar the restaurants need to clear is very high. If you're in New York City and you're operating a restaurant, and you decide to make your own bread or your own ice cream/gelato/sorbetto, then you've got to be prepared to bake better bread than Balthazar, and you've got to be prepared to do better frozen desserts than Il Laboratorio del Gelato. Those products are so good that a restaurant needs some serious resources and dedication if it wants to do better. A few restaurants pull it off, but far more places try to pull it off yet would actually be better off buying those products.

The last time I checked -- and this information could easily be out of date -- Jean Georges was getting its rolls from Le Pain Quotidien (Alain Coumont), which baked a special run of rolls (usually they only sell whole loaves) for Vongerichten, Portale, and just a couple of other clients. In my opinion Alain Coumont is one of the great bakers, and Jean Georges serves better bread than almost every other restaurant in town. Three New York restaurants with, in my opinion, better bread than Jean Georges, however, are Per Se, Daniel and the now-defunct Alain Ducasse at the Essex House. All three of those restaurants do (or did) in-house bread baking at great expense. I think it may make economic sense for Per Se to do it because Thomas Keller is also administering Bouchon Bakery, and I think the bakery operation at Daniel supplies some of Boulud's other places around town. At Ducasse, it was just an outright huge expenditure but they insisted, and I though the little baguettes, epis, and brioches were definitive. Oddly, I'm pretty sure Cafe Gray has a full-blown commercial bakery steam oven but doesn't bake its own bread. However, the bread service there is really nice. So, I think the very best bread in town is indeed the bread baked in the very best restaurants, however you can operate very near that level with purchased bread if you're in New York City or another place with serious commercial bakeries that take their craft seriously and deliver twice a day to their restaurant clients.

Right, and if you look at certain types of restaurants you'll find that everything can be made off premises and simply heated for service. It's actually impressive what they can do in this regard. The pages of Food Arts are full of ads for pre-fab stuff that's targeted at upper-middle-market restaurants.

A further thought on this topic: rivets are particularly silly on non-stick cookware. Or, rather, it's kind of bizarre that non-stick cookware made with rivets is always (as far as I know) made with rivets that don't have a non-stick coating on them. The problem this presents is that you can't really use any of your regular rivet-cleaning tricks on the interior of a non-stick pan. So you can't use a metal scouring pad, you can't use Barkeeper's Friend . . . you're just stuck scrubbing the rivets fruitlessly with a Scotch-Brite.

I'm not sure I agree that bread is easy to make very well. It's a technically involved specialty product that a dedicated operation should be able to make better than a place that makes it on the side. I imagine this is why some restaurants even at the level of Jean Georges buy their bread instead of making it. Gelato is another example. A lot of restaurants just are not equipped to make gelato and sorbetto as well as dedicated operations.

A couple of recent discussions about cheese and bread got me thinking about things restaurants buy versus things they make. Needless to say, across the spectrum of restaurants, there are differences. In the first instance I'm focusing on fine-dining restaurants, though we can discuss them all of course. Anyway, it seems to be a given that a fine-dining restaurant will make its own food. However, upon examination, this is not exactly the case. Rare is a restaurant that makes its own cheese, for example. And purchased bread is common even at some of the very best restaurants. These items are served without particular intervention by the restaurant (as opposed to, say, beef). Beverages, needless to say, tend to be purchased. Except for bar drinks, which are mixed on premises. And iced tea, at least in North America.

I personally don't confuse newness with relevance. Jean Georges, Babbo, Blue Hill, Sushi Yasuda, Gramercy Tavern, Peter Luger, and many others . . . these are all well-established restaurants that maintain relevance regardless of age. Relevance to whom? I'd say it's a larger group than just "foodies." I'd call it the educated dining public.

That sounds about right to me. And of course the exchange rate situation is probably the only thing that creates a price difference right now. If the dollar goes up 50% relative to the Euro, Parmigiano-Reggiano at Fairway will be back to $8.99 a pound (or less) before you can say "Steve Jenkins."

For the past few months, the standard Fairway Parmigiano-Reggiano has been $10.99 a pound and the stravecchio has been $3.79 per quarter pound ($15.16 a pound). The grana Padano has been $8.99 a pound. As a totally informal assessment, having not done a real side-by-side under any sort of controlled circumstances, I think the American stuff I tried at $8.99 a pound was about as good as Fairway's $8.99 a pound grana Padano.