Fat Guy

And we'll be sure to remember, in evaluating your comments, that you think the world should adopt the agricultural practices of Cuba!

I was inaccurate on that point. I think he was just pointing out that the poppy seeds add interest, rather than claiming that as part of his adaptation -- and I wrote it up wrong because I'm ignorant. I'm aware of the dish at ADL but haven't tried it there, but I know they use poppy seeds too. The dish was also on Frank's menu at the Florida place -- as were several of the other dishes at Focolare. I forgot to mention, by the way, that there's an 18% service charge added to the bill, and also that Focolare is directly across from my favorite parking lot in the neighborhood -- the outdoor one where from Monday to Thursday if you enter I think between 5 and 7 you can part all evening for $12-something, and it comes to exactly $15 with tax.

Our son will be two on Friday and, like your son Geoff, pretty much just eats what we eat. The problem I'm having with answering your question, though, is that the definitions are a bit difficult to pin down. I understand that McDonald's is the archetype -- and no, our son hasn't had McDonald's yet (it's not something I'm strongly opposed to, but it hasn't come up) -- but what else does and doesn't qualify? For example, I took him to Chipotle a couple of weeks ago. That's surely a fast-food chain, but it's a fairly high-quality chain. He's had a ton of pizza, and I can't seem even to remember whether any of it was at multiple-establishment pizzerias. We went to a mall awhile back and had Chick-fil-A. I love Chick-fil-A and think that, while it's a chain, you get a better product there than you get at most non-chain restaurants serving that style of food. There's also some non-chain food we've fed him that has been terrible -- like way below McDonald's quality level -- such as at diners and buffets while on the road. You get the idea. The category definitions make it hard to answer.

Four months ago, I started an eG Forums topic titled "Shame, shame, shame: shame on Little Italy," bemoaning the awfulness of Little Italy's restaurants. Last month, however, something changed: a new restaurant, Focolare, opened in the narrow space formerly occupied by the unremarkable Fratelli Ristorante at 115 Mulberry Street between Canal and Hester Streets. Franco Lania, who goes by Frank, hails from Northern New Jersey and comes from an Italian-American family with roots in Little Italy. He's not a chef you've likely heard of -- I certainly hadn't -- but he has worked at several first-rate restaurants around town, such as at the Sea Grill under Ed Brown, has been in Michelin-starred kitchens in Europe, and for the past few years was operating out of Miami where he was, among other things, on the China Grill Fort Lauderdale opening team, worked on cruise ships and, after many years as an anonymous journeyman, achieved some critical recognition as executive chef of a place called Sage on Fifth in South Beach. (Indeed, at Focolare tonight, there was a table of Floridians who knew of Frank Lania from Sage on Fifth and sought him out in his new digs.) When Frank got wind of the Fratelli space becoming available, he jumped on it. After eight months of renovation, during which time the space was transformed into something with much more of a SoHo feel than a Little Italy feel, he opened Focolare (which means hearth) on 18 July 2007 -- his 40th birthday. Frank has no publicist or, it seems, media strategy. I heard about the place through a friend in the industry, and her report was intriguing enough to get us down there for dinner. The menu at Focolare is like nothing else you'll see in Little Italy. For example, when was the last time you got a dish like this in Little Italy: That's the house-made beet ravioli, one of today's specials. Frank told me he saw a similar dish at a restaurant in Milan and got inspired to try to improve on it. He replaced the ricotta in the original dish with mascarpone to make it lighter, and he added poppy seeds for interest. It's the most interesting pasta dish I've had in a long time, and it's one of the best I've had too. The sweetness of the beet filling is picked up by the butter in the sauce, and the pasta is nicely al dente. Here's another one I bet you haven't seen in Little Italy: Yes, Frank seems to have a thing for beets. This one is always on the menu and is available in both appetizer and entree portions ($13 and $25, respectively). On the menu it's called capesante: seared diver scallops, truffled mashed potatoes and a beet-grappa vinaigrette. It's a dish I'll be having again. Another good one: Rissoto de gamberi: shrimp risotto topped with a couple of prawns, seasoned with dill. It's $16 for an appetizer portion, $32 for an entree. Well made, and requires 20+ minutes to make, which is a good sign. Anello della casa: marinated roasted lamb with roasted garlic ceci bean puree, prosciutto-wrapped endive and a lamb-rosemary jus. It goes for $29. A terrific dish, cooked medium rare as it should be, and a nice portion for the price. Arancini di riso: balls of arborio rice stuffed with peas and fontina cheese, with tomato sauce. A great appetizer, $12. PJ was particularly fond of the rice balls: The restaurant's operations manager, Diana Casey, is serious about wine. The list is small but covers a good range, from $20 bottles up to a $300 Barolo and a $580 Chevalier Montrachet. We had the Marquis Philips Shiraz from Australia. PJ was insistent that we allow him to "taste dada's wine," so we let him. He seemed to get a kick out of it. The menu is blessedly short, with just a half-dozen or so choices in each of the appetizer, soup-and-salad, pasta-and-risotto, and entree categories. There are also a series of seven piatto del giorno -- I was bummed it wasn't Wednesday for rosemary fried sardines over fennel and grapefruit. There is no chicken, veal or eggplant parmigiana anywhere to be found. There are some nice little touches, like bread served in a brown paper bag: They make their own gelati and sorbetti in a machine Frank got in Italy. The technology isn't as advanced as what places like Il Laboratorio del Gelato are using, but the flavors are excellent. The mint chocolate chip gelato really comes on strong with fresh mint, and the vanilla has lots of real vanilla flavor. There was also a grapefruit-campari sorbetto available. They make their own cannoli, biscotti and a few other desserts. The restaurant is, to my eye, handsome and tasteful: (No, I have no idea why the awning says "bistro" on it.) We didn't try any of the house made pastas -- an oversight in my order -- but there's a $12.50 lunch special where you get soup or salad plus a choice of one of five pasta dishes (plus coffee or tea). If you work near the courts, that's a nice thing to have available. Focolare is only a month old, and there were technical flaws here and there in some of the things we tasted. But the crew is serious about breaking the mold in Little Italy. I chatted with Frank and Diana a bit and was impressed with their dedication. Focolare deserves a closer look.

I find it neither damning nor even persuasive. Her poor food knowledge and bad writing aren't evident to me -- she seems fine on both counts. Accepting invitations to press meals, etc., just makes you a member of the food media. You're only a shill if you think something sucks but you write that it's great. There's no evidence that she does that. I'm not a big Restaurant Girl fan or anything, but I find your vitriol incomprehensible.

The Eater piece also notes that Restaurant Girl "once wrote a weekly column for the Daily News on fashion and trends called 'Fashion Compass.'" So, it seems she has at least some newspaper writing background and, for all I know, it may even predate her blog. Also, the Village Voice rings in with a predictable caterwaul about how she's easily recognizable and therefore not likely to be anonymous.

Writing serviceable restaurant reviews is just not all that hard. I'm sure she's up to the task and can do it in whatever manner her new client requests. I've looked at her blog on several occasions and think she displays demonstrable food knowledge and breadth of experience (I doubt that, in some sort of controlled test matchup, Bruni on day one could keep pace with Restaurant Girl on day one), is a good (not a great) writer and, while she emphasizes the positive, that hardly makes her a shill -- that's just standard practice for plenty of outlets where the mission is to promote what's good rather than engage in criticism in the style of a newspaper. There are negative comments throughout her writings, so she is not undiscriminating. People transition from style to style all the time -- that's what freelance writers do. You look at someone like David Rosengarten, and you can see how he has transitioned effortlessly throughout his career from popular TV stuff to upbeat newsletter and blog-type writing to serious criticism for Gourmet. While I'm not aware of another steady, weekly (as opposed to occasional, of which I could cite several examples) newspaper restaurant reviewing spot going to someone who got started as a blogger (not that I have any clue what's going on in most of the country), there are countless examples of amateur bloggers making the jump to professional writing of all kinds and the New York Daily News restaurant reviewing position is hardly the most impressive of those jumps. Every high-quality food-related publication I know of has carried articles by writers who got their starts as amateur bloggers, and there's no indication that people who got their starts that way are delivering inferior work product in any regard.

It's common even in the most technical professional texts to use piece measurements in some recipes. For example, if you open "The Professional Chef" seventh edition at random (in this case pages 522 and 523) you'll find "1 red onion, peeled and quartered," "2 cloves garlic, peeled," "salt, as needed," "pepper, as needed," and several other measurements of that type. There are also plenty of recipes in that text, and other professional texts, that call for very precise quantities: ".680 kg asparagus" and "15 ml shallots." But there are two fallacies to that sort of precision: First, as explained up-topic, it's impossible to standardize the strength of natural ingredients. Some garlic is just stronger than other garlic, no matter how carefully you specify type. So 15 ml is not necessarily a more reliable measure than 1 clove. Second, you can be sure no actual professional chef really thinks you need exactly .680 kg of asparagus for the recipe that specifies .680 kg. Rather, somebody decided to use roughly 1.5 pounds, and then when they did the metric conversion they got that .680 kg number. Nobody really cares, and it makes no difference to the recipe, if you use .6 kg or .7 kg instead. Needless to say, for the 15 ml, somebody said "about a tablespoon" and that's how it got codified. On any given Sunday, 20 ml would have worked just fine. Precision is more relevant when dealing with highly processed, standardized ingredients where chemical reactions are important to the finished dish: baking soda, baking powder, pastry flour, white sugar, etc. This is of course why precision and accuracy in measurements for pastry and baking are on the whole more important than in most savory recipes. I think most amateur culinary texts are not serious enough about measurements -- the volume measurements in baking books are particularly troublesome -- but I also think one can go too far in demanding gratuitous precision for the sake of nothing.

It's not evident to me how that's relevant. Perhaps you can clarify?

There's a phone number on the website -- 908.209.2657 -- why don't you call and let us know what's up? Will Goldfarb's restaurant, Room 4 Dessert, is currently closed. I don't know if that affects Willpowder or not.

What does this mean? ← 'wichcraft is Tom Colicchio's chain of sandwich shops -- part of the Craft restaurant group.

BLT Steak is in three cities, with four more on the way, for a total of seven in the foreseeable future. He also has the three other restaurants in New York. It's not an outrageous number. It's a similar size restaurant group to Tom Colicchio's Craft group, actually a little smaller if you count the nine 'wichcraft locations. It's definitely possible to do quality at that group size, or even at a larger size (Ducasse has 21 restaurants, give or take).

It's a very light cure. Perhaps your level of sushi expertise is high enough that it would be obvious to you, but I'm far more than semi-observant and it took me by surprise.

We received a news release today saying that the long-awaited BLT Market, Laurent Tourondel's restaurant in the Ritz-Carlton hotel on Central Park South, is opening this week. BLT Market is the latest venture from the seemingly unstoppable BLT Restaurant Group, which is owned by partners Jimmy Haber, Laurent Tourondel and Keith Treyball, and operates the restaurants BLT Steak (in New York City, Washington, DC, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, with locations planned for the coming year in Los Angeles, White Plains, Dallas and Miami); BLT Fish, BLT Prime and BLT Burger (all in New York City). Some of the details: Website: http://www.bltmarket.com

Mo Gridder's has been championed by Peter Meehan in the Times, but I don't know much about it.

This proves to be fertile ground. I'm looking forward to learning a lot here. Let me start with a basic problem, though. Let me tell you what I did yesterday and maybe we can unpack it and figure out where my technique could have been improved. I cracked an egg into one wide, shallow bowl and beat it with a fork (I added salt and pepper to the egg -- was that wrong?). Into another wide, shallow bowl I poured a bunch of panko. I took boneless, skinless chicken thighs from the refrigerator. I dipped each thigh first in the egg, then I put it atop the panko pile and flipped it over and around and smooshed it around until it had what looked like a good coating on it, then I laid the breaded pieces out on a half-sheet pan. Cooked in about 1/4 inch of corn oil. I'm fairly confident in my actual cooking methods -- I've got good pan frying, deep frying and convection baking skillz. However, the breading phase just didn't go well. I had a lot of trouble getting the panko to adhere, and although I was able to force the issue by pressing and manipulating the chicken pieces, a ton of the panko came off during cooking. So by the time I was done pan frying the first batch, the oil was completely ruined by hundreds of little floating burnt pieces of panko. It was beyond skimmable. I had to start new oil. And the finished pieces had a lot of gaps in the breading. What breading there was, was not of uniform thickness. So there were patches of no breading, patches of light breading and patches of heavy breading such that there was no way to get the stuff cooked to a desirable degree of exterior crispness. I also thought the flakes of panko were too coarse. What's this about using your hands to change that?

Any relation to the food writer John Mariani?

Mexican vanilla is the best value, but not in my opinion the best tasting. I think the reason people ask their friends to bring vanilla extract back from Mexico is that it costs about $5 for a liter, as opposed to $5 for a crummy little bottle here. But flavor-wise, no Mexican vanilla I've had has been competitive with the Madagascar Bourbon extracts from Nielsen-Massey, and now with Costco vanilla being such a good value it's hardly worth schlepping vanilla back from Mexico. Then again, if you're just using it for chocolate-chip cookies, it's not clear to me that it makes much of a difference -- though I'm still in the process of doing some experiments to get to the bottom of that issue. There have also been some food-safety scares with Mexican vanilla, because a lot of it was adulterated with tonka bean extract, which the FDA here doesn't consider safe, however I think that practice may have largely ceased.

I've never given much thought to breading. The breaded and fried (either pan fried or deep fried) or baked cutlet or chop has never been part of my culinary repertoire. Lately, however, I've been dipping a toe into the ocean of breading, particularly with chicken tenders and cutlets, those universally beloved foods of today's youths (one of whom lives under our roof). So, can we talk about breading? There seem to be a whole mess of ways to do it. You've got your breading itself, which can be bread crumbs of various kinds (toasted, fresh, panko, herbed), or cereal (corn flakes, etc.), or other stuff (ground up pretzels, crackers, whatever). I guess some people also use just flour -- is that technically breading? There are also batters -- is that breading? Then there's the liquid you use to make the breading adhere to the meat. That could be milk, or eggs, or some people seem to do both in stages. I'm not really sure I understand how that works. There also seem to be different methods of getting the breading on to the meat: the zipper bag "shake and bake" method, the shallow bowl method, maybe some other methods I've not noticed. Then of course you have to cook the stuff. Who's going to give the primer on all this?

Nielsen-Massey is an excellent brand, albeit expensive. The vanilla extract sold at Costco isn't half bad either, and is a bargain. However, you should also consider making your own. Those of us who have tried have found the process rewarding.

It has been about five months now, and my vanilla has really started to take shape. Most of the harsh aromas are gone now, and what remains is a gentle, floral, buttery smell. My one regret in this experiment is that I used all Tahitian vanilla pods. I wish I'd done half with Bourbon vanilla. I've somewhat remedied that oversight, however, in that a little while back I split off half of one of my three batches and added several Bourbon vanilla beans from Madagascar -- so I now have both pure Tahitian and a Tahitian-Bourbon blend going. Already, the blend seems more interesting to me. It retains the floral aromas of the Tahitian but also has some of the velvet-glove traditional vanilla aromas of the Bourbon. I should probably make some pure Bourbon too, but it would be so far behind the curve as to make side-by-side comparison difficult. It so happens that we're also just a few teaspoons away from being out of commercially made vanilla extract. So as soon as that runs out -- probably right around the six-month mark -- we'll switch over to homemade.

Maybe, but New Yorkers are not the general population. There has been a diverse culinary scene here for a hundred years. While there has been continued immigration, I'm not really sure whether the city today is more or less ethnic than it was in the 1890s or 1970s. The descendants of immigrants sometimes have less diverse palates than their ancestors. Perhaps the influx of Americans from the rest of America has in some ways made the city less diverse as well. And some of the trends of modernity, like chain restaurants, which are gaining strength in the city, may indicate a homogenization of the local palate. Market share, maybe, but the population is much larger than it used to be so the market can accommodate more restaurants.

I wonder how efficient home and small-scale gardening is. I'm not particularly concerned with "carbon footprint" since I think the data on emissions and global warming are not compelling, however I'm a firm believer in reducing energy consumption -- especially oil consumption -- for a variety of reasons, and I'm also concerned about soil and water resources. Growing food in your garden at home, or in some sort of community garden, certainly reduces energy expenditures from transporting the food once it's picked. But what about the other inputs? When I see people standing there with hoses spraying fresh drinking water on their tomato plants all day long, I have to wonder whether a large-scale commercial operation would use so much water per plant. I also see a lot of people starting their gardens from plants that have already been grown a bit somewhere else, so those surely require plenty of transportation -- especially since they come in soil already. Is anybody aware of a computation of the energy and resource inputs per pound of produce from a home garden versus a commercial farm?

There were just six letters in the New York Times on this subject, in response to the earlier op-ed. Two of the better-argued points, from two different letters: and

Yes. The CSPI's 2007 report, “Wok Carefully: CSPI Takes a (Second) Look at Chinese Restaurant Food,” begins, “Popular Chinese restaurant meals can contain an entire day’s worth of sodium and some contain two days’ worth.” This is just one example of the CSPI's emphasis on the evils of sodium. It's astounding that the CSPI, as well as many other groups that should know better, is still railing against salt as if there has been no progress in medical knowledge since the 1970s. Reality is just not an issue for these people. At this point, the health claims against salt have been so thoroughly debunked that it's hard to imagine any research-based organization being unaware that the salt-hypertension connection is a myth. As you say, Doc, given current scientific knowledge, the only thing that can really be said about salt and hypertension is that a percentage of the population may possibly be "salt sensitive." However, for healthy individuals with normally functioning kidneys there's no reason to be concerned about salt. Putting the nation on a sodium-restricted diet makes as much sense as treating the entire population for a condition that only affects people with blue eyes. Worse, by steering people away from foods solely on the basis of salt content, the CSPI is discouraging the consumption of lower-fat items, like soups, which tend to be high in sodium.