Fat Guy

The New York Times published the confit bayaldi recipe back in June. It's interesting that this dish, which has been around for decades, has been attributed to Thomas Keller. While Thomas Keller did clue the filmmakers into the dish, it's certainly not his invention. These folks on ChefsLine.com attempted to do a recipe roundup inspired by the film. My memory isn't good enough to say whether they got it right.

The current price is $250.

I think at $300 or even $350 the place would still be selling out at dinnertime, but that Thomas Keller doesn't believe in pricing himself that far out of reach. Personally, if that's indeed his goal, I'd like to see him push his dinner prices as high as the market can bear, and at the same time lower his lunch prices to $150 or perhaps even offer a less elaborate lunch in the $100 range. This would be a more effective way of allowing middle class people to dine at Per Se without committing $550 minimum (assuming tap water and no extras) to the venture for a two-top.

Tried an "Angus Deluxe" Third Pounder today, and it was quite poor. The photos on McDonald's website make it look sort of like an irregularly shaped handmade hamburger, but it turns out to be a compressed disk of meat similar to a Whopper patty. There's no noticeable benefit from the Angus product.

For the definitive topic on making fun of Thomas Keller's silly restaurant names, please see the "Caveat Emptor" topic here.

It's $250 now but does include service, which would have brought a $150 bill up to $180. So that's a $70 increase, or 38.9%. That's significant, though still a good value for what you get at Per Se. We'd also have to know if the meal you get today is the same as the one you got for $180 or if it is enhanced somehow -- I'm not sure I know anybody who has dined at Pe Se enough times over time to rule on that with authority.

The largest burger I've had was at Fat Mo's in Nashville, Tennessee, where the Fat Mo's Super Deluxe Burger is 27 ounces. That's 765.44 grams, not including probably another pound in toppings and bread. But I think the interesting thing about the McDonald's burger is not so much its size but that it's made from Angus beef and represents at least an attempt to market a product based on quality.

These had escaped my notice, but I'm eager to sample one. I wonder if they're everywhere or just in test markets.

Jeff Henderson's book, "Cooked," which was excerpted in the Daily Gullet, opens with an account of the test meal he had to cook before being hired at a restaurant. I think -- not to add anything here but just to summarize -- there are three main variants of practical test given to potential new hires, when any test at all is given. First, there's the basic skills kind of test, where you make an omelette or roast a chicken or whatever. Second, there's the meal test, where you're asked to prepare a meal, often but not always from mystery box ingredients. Third, there's staging, either for a shift or for a more extended period. I've heard cooks tell of all three. It can also depend a lot on the level at which a cook is coming in to a restaurant. For example, I have acquaintances who've interviewed for chef-de-cuisine positions at serious restaurants, and they've been run through extreme testing procedures, making meal after meal for the chef, the investors, etc. At the same time, if you're hiring a kid out of the CIA to be a line cook in training, you don't expect that person to be able to pass any serious cooking tests. You expect to have to teach that person, so you just want to make sure you're dealing with someone who can learn.

I know a fair amount about food in New York City, and I've lived here all my life, but I'm not above going on a well-constructed tour. I've been on a few professional group tours, and also had knowledgeable friends take me on private tours to help me bone up on a given neighborhood or cuisine. You can learn a lot from books and the internet, but sometimes it's best to have a knowledgeable person walk you around. Hey, I even got a tour from Raji not long ago. One tour I particularly enjoyed was a walking tour of the Brighton Beach/Little Odessa area with Adventures on a Shoestring. I believe AOS is a nonprofit organization, and the tours are dirt cheap. They pack a lot of information into their no-frills tours, and the people who take the tours tend to be either New Yorkers or the kinds of tourists who research things in depth. I don't think AOS even has a website -- at least the last time I checked you still had to call to find out the available tours. I've noticed a trend towards tours getting more expensive and being led by food-world celebrities. I'd only consider shelling out for some sort of unique knowledge, as opposed to for the sake of celebrity.

This has not been my experience at all. There are plenty of European cities with excellent drinking water, yet if you go to a restaurant the locals are drinking bottled water. I'm sure they think it's better for them or that it tastes better -- these are the same excuses Americans make -- but I'm equally sure that blind tastings and lab tests would prove them wrong as sure as the same tests demonstrate the silliness of drinking bottled water in America. If anything, in restaurants at least, Americans drink bottled water less often than Europeans, in part because bottled water tends to be cheaper at restaurants in Europe. In addition, plenty of the fancy bottled-water packaging concepts (e.g., Voss) are European in origin. It's true that at the retail level American stores offer more packaging choices, though.

When I was in law school, my friend Jon and I used to study late into the night, and we’d often order delivery from Dumpling King (on First Avenue between 82nd and 83rd). In addition to having very good (one would hope) dumplings, Dumpling King had the fastest delivery of any restaurant I’d ever experienced. Compared to Dumpling King, Domino’s Pizza is the slow boat to China, a zeppelin to Dumpling King’s stealth fighter. Since we had never been to the restaurant in person, we imagined that Dumpling King was actually a mobile restaurant kitchen in a van. We theorized that, as soon as the kitchen’s supercomputer detected our call, its artificial-intelligence algorithms plotted our location on a map and started driving towards us at high speeds, a team of cooks yelling and clanking on their woks while trying to maintain balance through the sharp turns, the computer all the while asserting control over traffic signals and monitoring the police band. By the time we spoke the order to the woman on the phone, and she tabulated the price and reported it back to us, they were ringing the buzzer to come up to the apartment with steaming hot food. Or, at least, it felt that way.

I'll be incorporating some of the information from the exchange I had with Betty Xie in the book, but I thought you all might be interested in the uncut version.

Where I live, in New York City, if you buy a quart of milk at the supermarket it's almost always in a tall paper carton. A half-gallon is usually in a carton of the same height of the quart carton, but it's fatter. A gallon is in a square-ish plastic jug with a molded handle. Sometimes the half-gallons come in smaller versions of the gallon jug. Meanwhile, I know many Canadians who buy their milk in plastic bags, and I know in a few countries the aseptic box is popular (you can get that here too, but it's a specialty item -- it's not how most people buy their milk). What other kinds of milk packaging have you all seen? Is there any country that does something really unusual? Not that it's going to be easy to find something more unusual than milk in a bag.

I'd hardly characterize the AFJ (Association of Food Journalists) guidelines as "the" guidelines for restaurant reviewers. The AFJ guidelines reflect the opinions of a few people who run a small organization to which some food journalists belong (AFJ has a grand total of 275 members), and the members aren't even required to abide by the guidelines, which are explicitly stated as suggestions. I'm not even aware of any professional publications that have adopted the AFJ guidelines, though there may be some that I don't know about. Most publications, however, have their own policies.

It's a concession to the public hysteria on this issue. It's a way to say we're taking precautions against the feared scenario, implanted in the public consciousness by generations of restaurant reviewers who misrepresented themselves as being anonymous all the time even though they were mostly recognized, wherein a restaurant -- eek! -- gives better food and service to a recognized critic, a VIP, a celebrity, a visiting chef, etc. It's a system that says, okay, here are the rules, we all know them now, no more pretending, we know the restaurant gets to take a clean shot here, but you don't have to worry that my risotto will have twice as much truffle shaved over it than yours because we take simple precautions against that.

You're working from the erroneous assumption, upon which the anonymity system rests, that all restaurants are out to cheat us, and therefore you're assuming an elaborate and expensive network of confederates organized into a restaurant spy ring doing my bidding. I'm just talking about the occasional spot check/reality check. Most restaurants will play by the rules -- I know this because I've done it a hundred times at meals arranged by publicists, where I've said I want only what's on the menu, prepared that way, and then I've reconciled my notes with those of friends. Almost every time the restaurants play by the rules. Once in awhile they try not to and it's pretty easily detected. With a platform like the Times, you just make an example of the first restaurant that tries to pull that crap and the rest will fall in line. It's also not necessary to spend any money on confederates. You can just ask readers to send you photos of their meals -- which they do anyway -- so you can compare. If it becomes clear that something fishy is going on, you can shift gears and try to investigate by sending Peter Meehan or Pete Wells over for a meal with a notebook and a camera. That might happen once a year.

I'm not sure what "engaging in anonymity" even means, but of course there's a radical distinction between the system I'm advocating and the system as it currently exists. I'm pretty surprised you think they're the same. But if you do think they're the same, then I guess you believe my system is just as good as the current one, albeit more complex (though I believe it to be simpler and more straightforward, not least because there's no deception with fake-name credit cards, phone numbers and other hijinks). In that case of de facto equivalence, at least my system would be open, rather than a system that pretends to be one thing but ad hoc works an entirely different way.

Ruth Reichl's disguises were an open joke in the New York restaurant community. Captains all over town recognized her in her wigs and glasses. The whole premise of the split-personality review of Le Cirque was false: Sirio told several writers at the time that he recognized her the second her foot hit the first step up to the restaurant. I've written one short restaurant review piece for the esteemed New Jersey section of the New York Times, and I followed the guidelines propagated by that newspaper, as I have whenever I've written anything for the New York Times (maybe four or five pieces in all). I follow whatever policies my employer or client has in place. Fundamentally, I think this issue of anonymity is quite unimportant, so it's not where I'd waste my political capital. I'd spend my political capital on getting the star system revised or abolished, and otherwise bringing some sense and discipline back to the process. As a purely intellectual exercise, however, yes, I'd advocate notice to all restaurants. The way I'd do it is in writing. I'd develop a standard letter that sets out the rules of engagement, for example I might specifically say I expect every dish to be served exactly as it appears on the menu, in the intended portion size. I'd also note that I may send confederates to the restaurant before and after I eat there, and they'll photograph and make notes on dishes, and if I see that I got a better or different dish than they did then I will make that the focus of the review. So, basically, I'd say here's your chance to hit me with your best shot, but it has to be within your normal parameters. (On subsequent visits, I might ask the chef to show me the ultimate off-the-charts VIP experience as well, so I can explain the range of what the restaurant is capable of.) I'd call the restaurant's owner to make sure the letter was received and I'd insist on assent to the rules of engagement, and if I didn't get assent I'd write about that in the review. I'd also publish the standard letter in a column, and generally try to set forth as many of my practices and beliefs to the readers and to the industry as possible. I'd explain that anonymity has always been a charade, that it's an anachronism anyway, and that I'm doing things a different way, openly and without the patronizing deception of the anonymous reviewing system.

Ken, I suggest you follow the link Toliver and I have provided above to the discussion dedicated to making your own vanilla extract. There's a wealth of information there. I don't think, however, that you should expect to make it happen in three days. It's a months not days thing.

Maybe, maybe not, but in either case so what? He can still experience bad food and bad service when recognized, otherwise every restaurant that recognized him on all his visits would get a great review. That's a great way to ensure that we never have a great, experienced, authoritative critic again. Of course, in the year 2007, the anonymity farce ensures that anyway. It excludes most people who have written about food for a long time in a non-reviewing journalistic capacity. So the only people eligible for the position will be inexperienced nobodies who will learn on the job at the expense of quality.

They sold it earlier this year. I don't believe I said it was a great restaurant (though we can check my post -- who knows what I'll remember on any given day). What I think I said was that it was "instrumental in bringing Korean cuisine into the New York mainstream." I also think at least one excellent dish, besides the spicy squid, was the pork ribs. In the very-good/almost-excellent category, I'd have placed almost anything from the "soups and stews" portion of the Dok Suni menu. I agree the central portion of the menu had a lot of holes in it, though.

Do you really think Bruni is never or rarely recognized on a first visit? Where do you think restaurants get their servers and managers from? They don't breed them in incubators. They hire people who have worked at other restaurants. Lots of these people recognize Bruni, and the longer a critic is in the game the more likely this becomes. For example, most any new restaurant I go at the two-star or higher level has someone working at it who worked somewhere else where I used to be a regular or whatnot. Where do you think the entire service staff of a place like Lespinasse goes when a restaurant of that caliber closes? They go to the other top restaurants in town, or they get in on new openings. New restaurants, when they interview captains and managers, often specifically ask, "Would you recognize Frank Bruni?" and the answer is often yes. Inconsistency in dishes and service isn't evidence that Bruni wasn't recognized. Restaurants screw up all the time, even when they recognize critics. I know several restaurant managers who, when they spot a critic, don't even tell the servers on the table, because they don't want the awkwardness, the stress, the bumbling. Well-trained servers have nothing to worry about, and hacks usually can't pull it together for a critic anyway. In kitchens, they can gather ten chefs around the pass and they can cook six of every dish -- and they can still mess up a dish. Happens all the time. Anyway, all they can do is cook an error-free example of the dish. If the concept of the dish sucks, there's nothing you can do about that. No-reservations restaurants have phones. The critic can still call up and say when he's coming, just like the regulars do at most of those places. Not that there are very many no-reservations places reviewed -- maybe a handful a year. And the prospect of calling in extra staff is a red herring. The very few cases in which that would happen, and the even smaller number of cases where it would matter, don't amount to a hill of beans compared to a 75% recognition rate, if we take the Asimov statistic at face value. (Even if you weight that percentage to reflect lower rates of recognition on first visits, there's only so low you can get it). So yes, a restaurant that can pull together that sort of effort might have some sort of advantage -- then again a restaurant that can pull that off is probably a three- or four-star place anyway.

In addition, the most compelling testimony I've seen on the factual issue of how often the Times critic is anonymous comes from Eric Asimov, posted in eG Forums here:

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