Fat Guy

Kashrut. I have yet to see a convincing argument that there is anything distinctively different about, e.g., traditional Ashkenazi cooking and traditional non-Jewish cooking of Eastern Europe other than the fact that the Ashkenazi cooking is kosher. ← The kosher dietary laws primarily rule out certain dishes and variants of dishes, though -- they're not really responsible for creating a lot of dishes. Maybe some adaptations -- "green eggs and lamb" -- but not much actual creation. The only dish I can think of that has actual origins in Jewish law, besides matzoh, is cholent. Because observant Jews can't light a flame on the Sabbath, the cholent needs to be cooked on a low flame starting Friday late afternoon, for service Saturday afternoon. This leads to a stew that is, if not unique in the universe, at least pretty closely tied to the Jewish religion. So I think the choice is between saying "there's really no such thing as Jewish food except maybe cholent, matzoh and a few kosher adaptations" and looking at a different way of defining Jewish food -- an approach that's culturally centered rather than focused on individual dishes and derivations. If you go to a traditional New York Jewish deli or dairy restaurant, you can certainly prove that pretty much everything served there derives from regional European cuisine, yet you can't find a restaurant like a traditional New York Jewish deli or dairy restaurant in Europe, unless it's in a Jewish neighborhood like the Marais in Paris. Likewise, if you look at Jewish cookbooks, it's not so much that the individual dishes are wholly Jewish. Rather, it's the collection as a whole, the sum total of all the little adaptations, traditions, etc.

The dubbawalas are fascinating. I wish we had a system like that here in New York. It's worth noting, as well, that a little over four years ago Monica Bhide wrote about the dubbawalas in the Daily Gullet. The story is here and there's a discussion topic here.

Platt's characterization of Momofuku, where I recently had two nearly all-seafood meals, as a "pork bar" is almost as puzzling as his earlier characterization of Momofuku as being about "offal products done up in an elegant, Asian-fusion style." I do think Craft spurred a trend, but I don't think Momofuku or the other new-paradigm restaurants are part of it and I don't think the trend had to do with ingredients. Rather, the trend has to do with the deconstructed menu and minimalist preparations. I'd look at places like the BLTs as Craft-derived. While it's true that David Chang did time at Craft, he also worked for Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Daniel Boulud, and in Tokyo, and his menu is very much his own, not to mention the only thing on the Momofuku menu that seems at all related to the Craft concept is the selection of country hams. Platt basically has had one idea in his career as a restaurant critic -- the "haute barnyard" concept -- and he tries to plug everything into it, like a phrenologist attempting to explain everything in the universe by the bumps on people's heads. There's always going to be some subjectivity when deciding whether a given step is incremental or a paradigm shift. But to me the Momofuku-Upstairs-R4D axis represents the tipping point, whereas places like Tasting Room and Atelier represent what in scientific paradigm shifts would be called "significant anomalies." At some point, the significant anomalies become overwhelming enough that the old assumptions can't be maintained. So yes, Atelier serves at a counter, and Tasting Room tried to take an haute sensibility and place it in a casual context, etc., but Momofuku does it all.

The point isn't that all the food at these places is four-star food. Four-star food coexists with casual, rustic dishes like free-form pork sausages and hamburgers. These aren't haute-cuisine restaurants but, rather, postmodern restaurants that shatter the traditional boundary between high and low cuisines. You can put together a meal at Momofuku that's composed of some dishes that would feel at home at Jean Georges and others that would feel at home on 32nd Street. Needless to say, nobody is saying literally that these restaurants have four-star ratings from the New York Times's restaurant critic of the moment.

Just googled my way to a listing of pies from the movie: * I Don’t Want Earl’s Baby Pie Quiche of egg and brie cheese with a smoked ham center * Kick In The Pants Pie Cinnamon spice custard * I Hate My Husband Pie “You take bittersweet chocolate and don’t sweeten it. You make it into a pudding and drown it in caramel…” * Baby Screaming It’s Head Off In The Middle Of The Night And Ruining My Life Pie New York style cheesecake, brandy brushed, pecans and nutmeg… * Earl Murders Me Because I’m Having An Affair Pie “You smash blackberries and raspberries into a chocolate crust.” * I Can’t Have No Affair Because It’s Wrong And I Don’t Want Earl To Kill Me Pie “Vanilla custard with banana. Hold the banana…” * Pregnant Miserable Self Pitying Loser Pie “Lumpy oatmeal with fruitcake mashed in. Flambé of course…”

We recently received a review copy of the book "Chef's Story: 27 Chefs Talk About What Got Them into the Kitchen," by Dorothy Hamilton and Patric Kuh. The book is derived from and a companion to the PBS television series "Chef's Story," hosted by Ms. Hamilton, who is founder and CEO of The French Culinary Institute. Patric Kuh, the co-author, is among other things the author of the book "The Last Days of Haute Cuisine." Some of the chefs profiled in the book are Jose Andres, David Bouley, Thomas Keller, Charlie Trotter, Norman Van Aken and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. It's an attractive 300-page hardcover book from Ecco. If you're a Society member and would be interested in reviewing this book for the benefit of your fellow members, please PM me and, if you're the first to respond, we'll send you the book. Your part of the bargain will be to post a review on this topic within three weeks of receiving the book. [EDITED TO ADD: This book has been claimed, but keep an eye out for more offers like this, as we plan to make member-contributed reviews a regular feature.]

The Minibar topic is here. It's a single tasting menu of about 30 courses. There are only six seats, two sittings per evening.

Since having a child our movie-going average has plummeted to about one in-theater movie a year, however we were lucky enough to have a coincidence of babysitting and a conducive showtime this evening and managed to catch "Waitress," starring Keri Russell (formerly of "Felicity"). I thought it was a terrific food movie and also a terrific movie. The two main food elements are, first, that much of the action takes place in a diner among an eccentric ensemble of three waitresses, a cook and the owner (played by Andy Griffith) and, second, that Keri Russell makes all sorts of unusual pies, romanticizes pies, uses pies as symbols and is generally wild about pies (as are those who come within her orbit, like the young doctor, played by Nathan Fillion of "Firefly" fame). I wasn't quite in paying-attention mode so didn't register the names of all the pies, or the lyrics to the title track about pie. Maybe someone can fill in the blanks.

Yes, the baby bistros offer an haute cuisine type of experience. But the baby bistros are traditional restaurants. You order a starter, main and dessert. You make reservations. They have traditional service. There's no new paradigm experience, just a higher level of food than was previously available in bistros. There's no baby bistro comparable in style to Momofuku or even Upstairs. The Bar Room at the Modern is the only new paradigm place that has something approaching a baby bistro feel, and it's at a secondary ring of the dartboard. If there's an influence, it's more Atelier than baby bistro, however Atelier itself is inspired by Asian and New World dining styles. So sure, you can find influences in Paris, Barcelona, London (gastropubs), Tokyo and Vancouver. The new paradigm places in New York didn't spring up out of nowhere. But the current situation in New York is not anything near a duplication of the baby bistros, the Vancouver haute-tapas trend or any of those other influences. You don't go to Momofuku and say, hey, this place is just like . . .

There are a very few large-market publications in the US where the critics nearly always make 3+ visits. The New York Times spends, by some estimates I've seen, something like US$175,000 on the dining budget, and the chief critic dines out on average ten times a week. After that, however, there's a huge falloff. Even in the New York Times regional sections (New Jersey, Connecticut, etc.) my understanding is that the standard is two visits, and this seems to be the case at all but the largest newspapers. And, yes, the overwhelming majority of reviews published in print in the US -- in the smaller papers and city magazines -- are based on one visit.

This is huge news. Norman's has for years been one of the most significant restaurants in the country. I'm terribly sad I never got to dine there.

I think the rise of restaurants like Madeline's in markets like Ithaca is one of the biggest food stories of the recent past. Indeed, I've tried unsuccessfully to sell that story to a number of magazines! But, I think it's a different story than the one we're talking about here. The story of Momofuku and the other "new paradigm" places is also likely to have its effects in secondary and tertiary markets (again there's no question that people like Richard Blais in Atlanta are watching the trend), but I don't think it's happening quite yet.

We recently received a review copy of "A Moveable Thirst: Tales and Tastes from a Season in Napa Wine Country," by Rick Kushman and Hank Beal. The book is divided into two parts. The first part, maybe 60 percent of the book, is a narrative of the two authors visiting all 141 publicly accessible wine tasting rooms in California's Napa Valley in the course of a single year. Kushman (the narrator) is the television columnist for the Sacramento Bee, and Beal is executive wine buyer for the supermarket chain Nugget Market. The rest of the book is devoted to mini-reviews of those 141 tasting rooms. Has anybody seen the book? I took a quick look through and it and enjoyed the passages I skimmed. It seems to cover a range of subjects and is definitely written with a good deal of humor. If you're a Society member and would be interested in reviewing this book for the benefit of your fellow members, please PM me and, if you're the first to respond, we'll send you the book. Your part of the bargain will be to post a review on this topic within three weeks of receiving the book. [EDITED TO ADD: This book has been claimed, but keep an eye out for more offers like this, as we plan to make member-contributed reviews a regular feature.]

I was just there for Sunday lunch and as far as I could tell I was the only person ordering from the haute end of the spectrum. It was me with my soft-shells and crawfish, and twenty other people with soups, pickles and pork buns. I was right in front of the "pass" and just didn't see the interesting stuff going out.

Many of the better restaurants in New York use Four Story Hill Farm products, so I've tried the poularde and other poultry several times, but never in a serious comparison. No question, Four Story Hill Farm produces excellent stuff. Whether the milk helps, I have no idea.

Just wondering: has anybody seen or used a restaurant infrared grill, as opposed to a broiler? Also, what specifically is the patent that expired?

I'm glad Tom Cat came up. Tom Cat really used to be the gold standard, back in the day -- I think Lutece in its heyday used Tom Cat. Today it seems that Tom Cat is pretty obscure, and I see it in the strangest places: totally unremarkable bodegas, etc. I've had some good Tom Cat products but have never found a consistent supply or anyplace where I could sample a range of Tom Cat offerings.

I haven't cooked on one of these units, but have used infrared broilers (including my own) and they're great. The infrared upright broiler is a pretty common fixture in steakhouse kitchens. I didn't realize there even was such a thing as an infrared grill, but it makes sense that there would be.

In a recent "Diner's Journal" blog entry, Frank Bruni, the chief dining critic for the New York Times, gets to the bottom of "milk-fed chicken." Needless to say, as chickens aren't mammals, they don't drink the milk of their mothers. But, it also turns out, they don't drink milk at all, and certainly not exclusively. Rather, powdered milk is mixed into the feed.

Perhaps it's a semantic dispute, but I don't think the readers are unique in being owed the truth. The truth (or at least a true representation of the critic's beliefs) is also owed to the industry, the newspaper, everybody and everything -- even Jeffrey Chodorow. My concern with the "loyalty to the readers" formulation is that it implies taking sides as between, say, the readers and the restaurant industry. But the critic should be no more on the side of the reader than on the side of restaurants, even assuming it's accurate to say there are sides in such a situation. The critic shouldn't be taking sides except insofar as a given position naturally supports one constituency or another. The sides shouldn't even be a consideration.

On the Momofuku Ssam vs. Noodle Bar topic, I mentioned: I still think that, as I said up-topic, "the best Noodle Bar items are a little more rustic, a little less elegant and sophisticated, than the best Ssam Bar items," however the last couple of visits I've had to Noodle Bar have been incredibly successful. Two dishes on the current menu that I think are dynamite are: Louisiana crawfish with garlic sausage, rice cakes and ramps. These are huge whole crawfish that you have to dissect on your own. They're sauteed with little patties of garlicky pork sausage, glutinous rice cakes and pickled ramps. As the cook builds the dish in the skillet, adding the various ingredients, it creates a broth-like sauce (this is aided by the addition of various squeeze-bottle items that I couldn't identify). It's served in a big soup bowl with a side plate for the shells. Best to remove the crawfish and let them cool a bit while you nibble on rice cakes, sausages and ramps. Then take apart the crawfish tails and remove the meat, and dip it in the sauce/broth with your chopsticks. Fantastic, and at $18 a very good deal for the portion size and quality of product. Pan-roasted soft-shell crabs with pickled cherries. Fat, excellent soft-shells cooked so crispy you'd almost think they were fried, but with none of the heaviness of frying. They're served over a small pile of fried rice, ramps make another appearance here, and the whole plate is topped with pickled cherries. Beautiful contrasts. Borderline pricey at $24, but you don't get soft-shells like this from Sysco.

Noodle Bar is half the size of Ssam Bar. In addition, the restaurants have to be looked at as a unit. There may be enough demand for this sort of lunch to make it worth offering at a 25-seat restaurant (to be clear, not everybody eating lunch at Noodle Bar is eating this way -- most seem to be ordering the meal-in-a-bowl dishes), but there may not be enough demand to make it worth offering at a 25-seat restaurant plus a 50-seat restaurant, for 75 seats in all, plus maintaining that level of staffing at both places. They might sell exactly the same number of fine-dining dishes even if they offered the full menu at both places. I imagine Mr. Chang is far better versed in the economics of it than every armchair quarterback combined. He seems to be an excellent businessman.

Owen, I haven't been able to find a menu for Madeline's online in order to perform a serious analysis, but I have heard tell of the place and I think it's indicative of a type of restaurant -- but not a new-paradigm restaurant. I'd call it a contemporary bistro, or something along those lines. The thing about the new paradigm restaurants is that they're serving food that's absolutely cutting edge and, in many ways, on par with what's being served at the top fine-dining restaurants in terms of quality of ingredients, sophistication of concept and technical skill. I mean, to take a Momofuku dish that has been mentioned many times -- Santa Barbara uni with whipped tofu and black tapioca -- when you look at that dish, taste it, think about its ingredients and the techniques involved, you're looking at something that could easily be served at a restaurant at the Jean-Georges/Per-Se level. Fusion of the Asian/French/New-American variety was cutting edge at one point as well, but I don't think the casual restaurants that tried it were ever putting out food at the quality-and-sophistication level of, say, Lespinasse under Gray Kunz. Casual restaurants that did "lite" versions of haute cuisine have been plentiful for a long time -- they were truffle oil to the top restaurants' truffles -- but now it's more a situation of real truffles of different sizes. If you go through the menus of the new paradigm places I've listed, you see dish after dish that represents the best cooking of American chefs today. No allowances for price or anything else -- that the Bar Room at the Modern got more stars than the formal dining room to which it's attached, combined with the many statements from knowledgeable diners saying they like the Bar Room food better, is an important marker for this trend. Because this isn't a situation where people with average tastes are saying, "I like hamburgers better than that fancy French stuff." This is apples to apples. I think this is one trend that Frank Bruni has nailed pretty consistently in his reviews. He gets Momofuku, Bar Room, Upstairs and Degustation. He hasn't reviewed Room 4 Dessert, but most every dish on the Room 4 Dessert menu is state-of-the-art by the standards of the top contemporary pastry chefs. I agree with Oakapple that Bruni goes too far -- and exhibits a lack of imagination -- when he frames the trend as being in opposition to fine dining. There are actually plenty of consumers for whom the trend is complementary: they'll go to Jean Georges for a special occasion, but they also want to be able to get that quality of food for $17, without a reservation, without the time commitment, in a convivial bar-like atmosphere.

If 99.9% of professional critics -- including the most influential ones (New York Times, New York Magazine, etc.) -- don't meet those standards, maybe it's better just to give the genre a rest. Also, I must take issue with Mr. Rogov on one statement he makes: "The critic's loyalty is not to a newspaper, a magazine, an editor or a publisher. And it is not to restaurants. The critic owes loyalty only to his/her readers." I disagree. The critic owes loyalty to nobody. His only loyalty should be to the cause of excellence in cuisine.

What I'm hearing simultaneously is that the new paradigm doesn't exist and has existed for a long time. I can't really comprehend the first claim. It should be self-evident to anyone who eats at the five places I've listed that we're dealing with an identifiable phenomenon. It's not just Frank Bruni and me. Oakapple is the only person I've seen who's adamantly opposed to believing there's anything going on, and with respect I think he's just tone-deaf to the phenomenon for some reason. As for the newness of the paradigm, sure, there are influences, there's history, there are places we can look at as models. But nobody who eats at a couple of the baby bistros and then goes to Momo-Ssam and Upstairs is going to confuse the styles. Of course, when you have multiple restaurants from different owners they're not all going to meet the exact same set of criteria, but if you have seven criteria and a significant number of successful new places meeting five then you have a trend. I suppose one might equate the Bar Room to one of the baby bistros, and Room4Dessert to Espai Sucre -- yes, those influences are also clear -- but those are the second ring of the dartboard. The original tasting room was a precursor as well, definitely, but it never gained traction as its original concept and instead became a regular restaurant. There's a reason why visiting chefs from all over are flocking to Momo-Ssam and Upstairs, why they're so heavily buzzed -- and it's not because of the Johnny-come-lately recognition of the Beard foundation. It's because they're the places so many people are looking to as the future of dining for a new generation.