Fat Guy

Okonomi? (Japanese speakers please help.)

If you're flat out barred from interacting with the sushi chefs, there's probably no advantage to sitting at the bar because your order goes into a computer and gets made up all at once on a platter just like it does for the tables. Then again, in that situation you have to ask if it's worth dining at the place, because interacting with the sushi chef -- or at least the option to do so -- is part and parcel of a serious sushi experience. At most good places I've been to, yes, a server comes to the sushi bar and tries to take your order, but usually you can just give a drink order and say "I'd like to order my sushi from the chef." There's actually a Japanese word for ordering that way, which of course I can't remember. I don't think I've ever had that request flat-out denied. Then again I haven't had sushi everywhere.

The following comes from the recently published book, "The Sushi Economy," by Sasha Issenberg. This is part of a profile of sushi chef Tyson Cole of Uchi, in Austin, Texas:

I can't imagine the stuff is wild ripened. I assume they get deliveries of a culture powder from some factory that mass produces a "natural" culture. If so, it should be easy enough to buy or reproduce.

Why is it that there isn't any good Parmigiano-style cheese produced outside of Italy? Save for a few artisanal producers, Parmigiano-Reggiano today is a mass-produced, industrial product. It's not made from particularly special milk: the cows are generally raised in confinement. There's no secret method being used: the way to make it is public knowledge. Most of the best Parmigiano-Reggiano doesn't even make it out of Italy: what you buy at the average market in the US is totally inferior to what you can get in Italy. It can't be significantly cheaper to make anything in Italy than in, say, California. There's a huge demand for the stuff, and people are willing to pay. Any time I see a US-made cheese of this kind, for example, the cheesemonger is always like, well, it's good if you grate it and use a lot of sauce. Why aren't there competing products from outside Italy that are anywhere near as good?

We just received this mailing from the Velvet Tango Room. I'll reprint it here: I'm no cocktail authority, and I've only sampled two cocktails at VTR, but based on my limited knowledge and exposure to VTR and most of the highly regarded cocktail places in New York I'd say these first-place accolades for VTR are well deserved. There are very few places anywhere that combine such a serious dedication to cocktails with such an incredible space and wonderful, wacky attitude. Has anybody made note of what the sign by VTR's front door says? Please post it if you know.

I just had the leftover rice for breakfast, with a fried egg on top. It was great. I'd have to do a side-by-side tasting to be positive and to identify the attributes I like, but my impression is that the Koshihikari rice is tastier and more enjoyable to eat than the regular white rice I usually get at the supermarket. I may start using it just as my regular rice for eating, even though it's rather expensive -- it's not like I eat so much rice that it matters. I also thought it was much better than the rice I get in most sushi restaurants in the US. Not as good as a really good sushi restaurant, but better than most.

I agree, ajgnet: when it comes to getting good information, sitting at the sushi bar is necessary but not sufficient. It's unlikely that, on your first visit to any given restaurant, you're going to get the best that restaurant has to offer. But there are various things you can do to increase your chances: express interest, communicate, be nice, demonstrate appreciation. I've found that with sushi chefs sometimes less is more: you don't want to start going on about how much you know about sushi; rather, you want to be deferential to the sushi chef. Sure, sometimes the economics of the situation mean that the sushi chefs have been told to push some lesser fish, but there are plenty of customers in the restaurant and most chefs are unlikely to screw over a kind, interested, enthusiastic, deferential customer sitting at the sushi bar when they can just as easily send the substandard stuff to a table or to the jerk at the end of the sushi bar who's talking loudly and incessantly to his girlfriend about how much he knows about sushi because he spent three days in Japan on a business trip.

Yesterday I was at the grocery store, about to buy some rice. I usually buy something called Texmati, from RiceSelect out of Alvin, Texas. It comes in a distinctive package -- if you've shopped in the better US supermarkets you'd surely recognize the squat, square, 36-ounce plastic jars. Anyway, in between the white and brown Texmati rices there was a "Sushi Rice" offering. It got me thinking. I eat a lot of sushi, I opine about sushi in various outlets, I'm writing a book with a substantial section on sushi, yet I've never tried to make sushi. How hard can it be? I grabbed a jar of the RiceSelect Sushi Rice, which purports to be "100% all-natural Koshihikari rice." This afternoon I took stock of what I had around and decided to try to make some rudimentary sushi. I wasn't interested so much in the fish aspect of sushi. I'm confident in my ability to go to a Japanese market, buy fish for sushi in pre-cut blocks, and slice off pieces of it. I was interested in the rice: how to season it and work with it to create nigiri and maki sushi. The term sushi actually refers to the rice: you can have sushi without fish (kappa maki, for example, is traditional in Japan) but you can't have sushi without rice. This preference was also fortuitous, as I had no fish anyway. I did, however, have two avocados that had been ripening nicely on my counter. A bit of sushi trivia: the California roll was built around avocado because avocado's creaminess and fattiness make it an effective substitute for fatty bluefin tuna, which was hard to come by back in the day and also didn't appeal so much to Americans. Early attempts to swap avocado for tuna centered around avocado nigiri, but they switched to maki because the bright green nigiri was too much for people to handle. Me, I think the bright green of an avocado is cool looking -- I was looking forward to making avocado nigiri sushi. At some point, I'll probably ask a sushi chef to teach me some basic technique, but for the purest first experience I decided to go it alone based only on what I've seen and heard, plus the directions on the jar of rice. I started off by rinsing the rice. I put two cups (as in 16 ounces by volume) of rice in a stainless bowl, filled the bowl with cold water, and kept the water running as I swished the rice around with my slowly freezing hand. First the water became cloudy, but after several minutes of rinsing and swishing it ran clear. Apparently in the traditional Japanese sushi apprenticeship system you spend something like 40 years washing rice and mopping floors before you get to graduate up to doing anything with actual fish. I wasn't quite sure how to get the water out of the bowl of rice. I never rinse the rice I'm cooking for normal consumption, but I know rinsing is a big deal in the sushi universe so I did my duty. I tried to dump the water out but was losing too many grains of rice (this is big-time bad luck in Japan, I bet) so I considered a colander and finally settled on a large strainer. It seemed to work. I then hauled out my trusty Zojirushi "fuzzy logic" rice cooker. When I got this thing maybe 13 years ago (it was a wedding gift, or maybe a pre-wedding shower gift) it was state of the art. Even Japanese people were impressed that I had one. Now, fuzzy logic is no big deal -- not that anyone ever knew what it was -- and the rice cooker culture has moved on to induction elements and cooking vessels formed out of single blocks of ceramic. Still, my rice cooker is pretty good. You know it's good because it takes about three times as long to cook rice as it would take to cook it on the stove. It goes through an elaborate pre-heating ritual for something like half an hour, then cooks the rice for a normal amount of time, then insists that you not open the lid for about ten minutes after the rice is done cooking. I added water in a ratio of 1.25 to 1 water to rice, per the instructions on the jar of rice and activated the rice cooker. While this was going on, I watched episode 11 of "Heroes" (as I said, the rice cooker is slow) and searched for the other things I'd need in order to make sushi. In my cabinet I found some seasoned rice vinegar that seemed to be the right stuff for sushi. In my refrigerator I had a bottle of soy sauce formulated for sashimi, that I got at the Hanahreum supermarket in New Jersey (Hanahreum is Korean but sells a ton of Japanese stuff). We got it a couple of years back because the crummy soy sauce they send with the takeout sushi we usually order gives my wife a headache. I the realized I had no wasabi, but I was determined to move forward. I've read in an number of places that most of the so-called wasabi used at all but the best sushi bars is fake anyway: it's a powder derived from horseradish (which is a relative of wasabi but is not wasabi) and colored artificially, and restaurants mix it with water to make the green paste they pass off as wasabi. Well, I had no wasabi, but I had plenty of horseradish. Why not try it that way? Eventually the rice was done. I mixed together four tablespoons of seasoned rice vinegar and two tablespoons of white sugar in a little glass, then added that to the rice and mixed it in. I closed the rice cooker up and left it on warm while I plotted my next move. My wife, Ellen, and son, PJ, were to arrive home any minute, and they were expecting me to have dinner ready. I decided to set up an improvised sushi bar at the the dining room table. I quartered an avocado. I peeled and cut about a quarter of an English hothouse cucumber into little matchsticks. I set out a finger bowl of horseradish and one of cold water, plus a towel, cutting board and small Japanese knife. I didn't have any sheets of nori, so I wasn't going to be able to make real maki, but I figured I could make a pretend maki with no nori. I also didn't have one of those wooden mats that are used for rolling maki, so I took a thick black manila catalog envelope and covered it in plastic wrap, figuring it would at least allow me to roll some rice around a filling. I looked around the house for whatever Japanese service-ware I could pull together. A few years back, during a sale at the Takashimaya department store's New York branch (yes, they have sales at Takashimaya once every few centuries), we picked up his-and-hers chopsticks and chopstick rests (the female chopstick rest is a flat disc, the male is a long cylinder), as well as two little soy-sauce bowls, all for about ten bucks. A couple of years after that, during a sale at the Korin Japanese knife store (an event that occurs even less often than sales at Takashimaya), we got some really nice seafoam-colored square platters for just a few dollars each. For PJ I put out one of our nifty Studio Nova "Food Chain"-pattern plates. I was ready to make sushi. As my skeptical family watched (even our bulldog, Momo, seemed to have his doubts that this project could amount to anything), I cut a thin slice of avocado. Then I wet my hands and grabbed some warm rice. I fashioned it into what I thought looked close enough to the correct infrastructure for a piece of nigiri sushi, being careful not to compress it too much. I then put a small amount of horseradish on the rice, picked up the piece of avocado, and cupped it against the rice so that it kind of integrated into the whole. I had made my first piece of nigiri sushi. If you're Japanese, you can stop reading here. It ain't pretty. I proceeded to make about a dozen of these, passing them out to the family. I'd like to say my technique improved, but it didn't. I got faster, but every piece of sushi I made was just as ugly as the first. If I'd been asked to guess in advance, I'd have said making nigiri sushi would be more difficult than making maki sushi. I'd have been wrong. My first attempt at maki was a disaster. I had no idea how much rice to use, how much to spread it out, how much filling to use, or how to roll it effectively. I wound up with some pieces of cucumber basically sitting in the middle of a "U" shaped log of rice. I didn't use nearly enough rice, something I'd have figured out if I'd thought for a few moments about the concept of circumference. I tried to patch up the roll with some additional rice, but it was a disaster. On my second attempt, I created a much larger sheet of rice before rolling. I was, at least, able to produce a cylinder of rice with the vegetables near the center. It didn't hold together very well when I cut it, though. I need to do a lot more experimenting, preferably with proper equipment.

We recently had some discussion of the Hershey's Cacao Reserve line of single-origin chocolates. That Hershey's is trying to play on the fine-chocolate field is certainly a trend marker, and if there was any doubt before I just had it cleared up by another experience: We were driving home to New York from North Carolina along I-95 and passed a billboard for the Russell Stover Factory Outlet. We figured it was as good a place as any for a rest stop. Maybe we'd get some chocolate-covered marshmallow bunnies left over from Easter for a few cents a piece, and surely they'd have nice bathrooms, air conditioning and plenty of parking. There wasn't actually any signage for the outlet once we got off the exit, but after driving along for a bit we figured the office park we'd driven past a ways back was the only place the outlet could possibly be. We turned in, drove past various low buildings housing companies that sell things like hard-to-find halogen lightbulbs, and finally came upon the Russell Stover factory outlet, which did indeed to be an outlet store attached to a Russell Stover factory or at least a distribution center of some sort. Anyway, we did find the bunnies. But on the checkout line, next to a pile of Whitman's Samplers on sale for a buck, there was something a bit surprising: and assortment of "Private Reserve Origin Select" bars in 4.5 ounce format in elegant, understated white paper box packaging. The dark chocolate options (though, as with Hershey's, dark chocolate in this vernacular still does include milk fat as an ingredient) were Ghana, Venezuela and Ecuador, and there was also a milk chocolate option labeled Belgian (not that they grow cocoa beans in Belgium, but whatever). We grabbed the three dark ones -- a buck fifty each at the outlet! -- and they were all quite good. They had a nice snap, buttery but not waxy mouthfeel, and clear flavor notes like wine, cinnamon and the other things you look for in distinctive chocolates. They weren't on the level of really good chocolate like Valrhona or Cluizel, but they were better than the equivalent Hershey's product -- at least I thought they were, based on memory, without doing an actual side-by-side tasting. I imagine these bars will be available at the supermarket level, and in other places where you'll never see Valrhona, so they might be worth checking out. They also make some other permutations, including sugar-free.

The issue of sushi bar versus dining room has come up in a few places in eG Forums discussions, most recently in debate about New York's Sushi Yasuda and also discussion of the infamous sushi spreadsheet. I thought it would make sense to consolidate all that discussion here on a dedicated topic, rather than have it be side discussions on other topics. In my experience, sitting at the sushi bar is the single most important thing one can do to improve one's meal at a sushi restaurant. The better the restaurant is, the more important this advice becomes. Sitting at the sushi bar won't make mediocre sushi great. But sitting at a table can make a meal at a great sushi restaurant mediocre. There are a variety of reasons and proofs: First, when you're at the sushi bar, you get more information, because you deal directly with the sushi chef. You get information not only about what's available, but also about what's best. Of course, you have to engage the sushi chef to get this information, and it helps to do omakase or some other variant of ordering where the chef makes the decisions. In general, at tables, you're dealing with a printed menu and working through the server as intermediary, and you just don't get the same information. Second, as soon as a piece of sushi is formed, it's a race against time. The best sushi experience happens when the pieces go virtually from the hand of the sushi chef to your mouth. In a piece of nigiri, warm rice, cold fish and the body heat of the sushi chef combine to create body-temperature sushi pieces that are just right for eating. A few minutes later, the pieces are at room temperature, and not nearly as enjoyable. With maki, as soon as the nori and rice make contact, the nori starts to soften and lose its crispness. Both of these situations are essentially unavoidable when you order from a table because the sushi chef will make a platter with your order on it and then the platter gets delivered after all the sushi is made, whereas if you're at the sushi bar the chef can hand you each piece as soon as it's formed. Third, as an empirical matter, over the past decade or so I've heard and read hundreds of comments from people who have dined at the same sushi restaurants but had wildly divergent experiences. The tie that binds so many of those comments is that the people who dine at the sushi bar overwhelmingly have better experiences than those who dine at the tables. The same restaurant that inspires people to say "best meal I ever had" at the sushi bar can trigger the "I don't see what the big deal is about this place" reaction in those who sit at the tables. If you read through the eG Forums posts about some of the top sushi places, you'll see this pattern assert itself from time to time: the discussion is like two ships passing in the night -- like two groups of people, who dined at two different restaurants but thought they were all at the same restaurant, arguing about whether that restaurant is good. It's also worth noting in this connection that when New York Times interim restaurant critic Amanda Hesser reviewed Masa (arguably the top sushi place in the US) she concluded: "After several visits, my impressions are firm: four stars when dining at the sushi bar and three stars at the tables."

The bibs, while they keep with the spirit of the event, are a bit of an affectation because the lobsters are served with the tails split and the claws thoroughly cracked. Then again, I can make a mess on my shirt while eating bread, so an extra layer of protection is not to be dismissed.

Waldy Malouf's Chowder Dinner at Beacon, held early each August, is the aquatic doppleganger of the Beacon Beefsteak, the late-winter meat extravaganza. Back in 2003, I posted about our experience at the Beefsteak. At the Chowder, instead of beef, the victims are from the sea. As soon as you enter the restaurant and check in, you're given a tall beer glass that you keep with you for the evening. You can have it filled all night long with as much as you like of beer from Brooklyn Brewery or Beacon's own recipe spiked pink lemonade. That's included in the price of admission ($95 per person, plus tax and gratuity) -- you may of course purchase wine and other beverages separately. The Chowder begins with a selection of chowders, served as hors d'oeuvres. You're free to enjoy unlimited quantities of Waldy Malouf's interpretations of New England clam chowder, Manhattan clam chowder, wood-grilled corn and potato chowder, and mixed seafood chowder. All are of exceptional quality, with the corn-and-potato being my favorite. Once you're at your table, you're served flights of mollusks in many forms: raw clams, raw oysters, steamed clams, fried clams, steamed mussels and, best of all, Beacon's signature wood-roasted oysters with shallots, verjus and herbs. Here's Waldy welcoming the crowd: Then there's beer-batter fried fish, Waldy's renowned hush puppies and fried chicken. Finally, heirloom tomato salad, grilled lobster and corn on the cob. This will be one of the few times in your life that you're so full you can barely eat lobster. There are slight variations in the menu from year to year, so you might not get the exact meal pictured. The above photos are from the 2006 event. Here, as well, are a few from the 2004 event: The Chowder is one of my favorite culinary events of the year. Ellen and I had the pleasure of being the restaurant's guests in both 2004 and 2006, and the next one is coming up on 7 August 2007 -- we'll probably be there as well (I just checked, and seats are still available). There's more information about the Chowder on the Beacon website. General discussion of Beacon the restaurant is here. All photos by Ellen R. Shapiro, as usual.

Awhile back I bought a set of two Granton-edge santoku knives, one large and one small (7" and 5" respectively). Every once in awhile I pull one out and try to use it, but I must be missing something. I know Japanese knives are supposed to be the be-all-end-all of cutlery, but I vastly prefer the shape of my Western-style chef's knife. I can barely guarantee my own safety with the santoku (the only two knife injuries I've had in the past couple of years have been santoku cuts), no less cut efficiently with it. Every move I make is plodding, and to me it seems like the shape of the knife contributes to that. What's the deal? Am I just using it wrong?

It sounds to me like you got either langoustines or crayfish, not shrimp.

(Note: my copy has been claimed)

I have an advance copy languishing in my mail pile, which I haven't had the time to look at yet and probably won't until after the book is out. I'd be happy to send it to someone, if that person will post a review. PM me if you're interested -- first come first served.

That language of course leaves open the possibility of reviews based on two visits.

I think it helps to talk about specifics, and the specific examples cited here just don't seem to resonate, especially if you look at the underlying material. For example, fedelst, you wrote: The first thing one feels compelled to note here is that Lesley's short piece on cooking barbecue was not a restaurant review. It was a cooking piece, and a very short one at that: basically a recipe with an introduction. The target audience for the piece was, it seems to me, people who may not even know what barbecue means in barbecue country. So she writes from the perspective of someone discovering barbecue: she talks to a butcher to learn that "butt" means "shoulder," she builds a two-zone fire, she provides the appropriate information for this sort of piece. It's here if anybody wants to read it. I think one would already need to have a pretty serious axe to grind in order to take offense at this utterly harmless piece of recipe writing. I also don't understand why this is a problem: What Lesley wrote was: It seems self-evident that this information should matter to anybody who would bother to read a restaurant review of Toque! in the first place. We're not talking about a busboy, we're talking about the chef de cuisine. So yes, it matters. Yes, I believe it, because Lesley makes the case for it. She even responded to your eG Forums posts on the subject in May.

It's difficult for me to understand how anybody could question Lesley Chesterman's credentials as a restaurant critic. On the one hand, the notion of credentials/qualifications for the job of restaurant critic is silly. There is no degree program or agreed-upon set of qualifications. Restaurant critics are judged by what they write, not by education or professional background. On the other hand, if anybody does have the theoretical qualifications to evaluate restaurants, it's Lesley Chesterman. She attended the Institut de Tourisme et d'Hotellerie du Quebec, has worked as a professional pastry chef in Quebec and in France, and has written the books "Flavourville" and "Basic Techniques: Baking and Pastry." In addition, she has been reviewing restaurants for the Gazette for years now, and so has acquired quite an impressive range of on-the-job experience. She is better qualified as a culinary professional and critic than most any other newspaper restaurant critic that I can think of anywhere in the world. I also know Lesley pretty well, from even before she spent several years volunteering as an eG Forums host, and have always found her to be highly informed, articulate, balanced and ethical. In terms of flak from disgruntled restaurateurs, I think there's a difference between standard griping and challenges to a journalist's ethics. Yes, a critic of any kind needs to be psychologically equipped to deal with hostility. But when a journalist's ethics are questioned, a defense is required. And no, a journalist shouldn't just let ethical challenges slide. People who make such accusations without basis are doing more than just complaining.

We received a news release today from Moto restaurant:

That's a great idea, Anna. Another possibility would be to do pan-fried cutlets of veal, pork, chicken or eggplant, and top them with Manchego, red onion and proscuitto. Sauteed arugula would be an excellent side dish.

That hypothesis certainly tests positive with respect to the first book I randomly selected: "Crust & Crumb: Master Formulas for Serious Bread Bakers," By Peter Reinhart. The formulas in Reinhart's book are expressed as percentages, for example: Needless to say those numbers don't add up to 100%. I believe the way it works is that the flour(s) add up to 100%, and then you take all the other ingredients in ratio to the flour. So, if you have a kilogram of flour (500 grams of all-purpose and 500 grams of bread flour) the you'd use 660 grams of water, .5 grams of yeast, etc.

In several professional culinary texts I've seen, the term "formula" is used to refer to what in general-audience books is called a "recipe." What explains the different terminology?

Another advantage of doubling up is that you're able to appeal to a car full of people with differing wants.