Fat Guy

The perpetrators of this big lie should be forced to write personal letters of apology to every hen that ever squeezed out an egg that was discarded on account of it. I'm outraged.

The avatar pizza is from Otto. Nick's is a whole-pies-only place. It's a sit-down restaurant with table service rather than a slice shop.

I keep forgetting to post about Nick's whenever we go there. Especially now that we're possessed of a toddler, we've been going more often to the various casual Upper East Side places within walking distance of our apartment. Nick's is certainly one of the best casual eateries on the Upper East Side, but I also think the pizza is, if not on par with the best pizzerias in town, at least at the top of the second tier. In particular, the white pie with mozzarella and ricotta is one of the better pizzas available in Manhattan. Every time I have one I think of our visiting German art collector acquaintance who called it a "symphony in white" back in '03 (see post #12 above). And some of the other elements have improved, for example the sauce is applied a bit thinner so it doesn't end up soggy, and the crumbled fennel sausage is terrific. If you're in the area, it's worth a visit. A meal consisting of a white pie (there are three choices, and the best is mozzarella and ricotta) and a regular pie with sausage plus a large Caesar salad (with a nicely anchovy-heavy dressing) serves four people nicely for about $13 a head.

Oakapple, my poorly placed parenthetical may not have made clear that I think the weak link on my list is the Bar Room, not Room4Dessert. I think Room4Dessert is firmly NP, whereas the Bar Room has NP food but not an NP vibe. For me the center of gravity of NP is the food, but there's a social element as well. Nathan, I don't necessarily think fine dining is collapsing. It's becoming more casual -- the jacket-and-tie requirement is all but gone -- but there are still plenty of very luxurious restaurants out there and more always opening. The NP places, however, are cutting out all the familiar elements of fine dining except the food (and, to some extent, the service knowledge). To paint a picture that I know is imperfect, the way I see it is that there have long been fine-dining and non-fine-dining restaurants, and that the division for a long time was similar to the standard French division between haute cuisine and bistro/brasserie/rustic cooking. There have always been casual restaurants, but they've traditionally offered casual food: pizza, burgers, bistro food, casual Italian stuff, etc. The fine-dining restaurants had the monopoly on advanced, cutting-edge technique, artisanal ingredients, artistic composition, etc., in part because they had the only kitchen teams with any sort of training or experience in this area. Today, however, we have this surplus of chefs and cooks who have worked at the world's top restaurants, and who are familiar with the haute-cuisine idiom. At the same time, we have younger customers being better educated about food, and wanting that kind of food even on casual nights out. And we have better availability of ingredients than ever before. So those trends combine to support NP restaurants, which is why I think we're seeing a cluster of them now with more, apparently, in the works. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I think some of this comes from the Pacific Rim, especially via Vancouver, which really spearheaded the haute-tapas trend in North America. And in France and Spain there have been haute-casual trends as well, due to many of the same factors as here. I think it will spread, perhaps not immediately to Providence but have a look at the Element topic, about Richard Blais's new place in Atlanta.

For all we know, food was her number 6 concern, but since we're in a food discussion forum it's the only one relevant here . . .

Doc, are you talking about La Maison Japonaise on East 39th Street? I wasn't there in the '80s -- didn't even know it dated back that far (assuming we're talking about the same place) -- but went in the '90s and didn't think it was particularly interesting. Then again, maybe by the standards of ten years before I went, it was interesting, which would I guess be your point. This is what Eric Asimov said in 1998: I haven't been able to find a menu online, but would be interested to see one from the 1980s if anybody's Googling skills are better than mine. I'm certainly willing to believe that there have been haute-casual restaurants here and there over time. It just seems that right now there's a significant confluence of new restaurants that are of a piece and reflect a new dining culture.

I'm very much on board with the principle that the rights of people with disabilities shouldn't depend on an ID card, however I'd choose an ID card over an interrogation every time. Since that seems to be the choice, I lean towards ID card, especially since the ID card dramatically reduces the potential for fraud. Right now, assuming there's no readily apparent disability, the de facto standard is how persuasive a person with a disability can be about the function of the animal. The person asking the questions is likely to be a low-level restaurant employee. It's silly to place the burden of judgment there. It's an invitation to conflict, police involvement and lawsuits that prove nothing except that the average host or hostess at a restaurant is not equipped to make such personal judgments. It takes years to train a service animal, and applying for a license is a totally insignificant burden compared to that training burden. It doesn't even have to be a card. It can be a tag worn on the animal's collar, next to the other required tags like the rabies vaccination tag and annual state license tag. A licensing system isn't a statement that the rights of people with disabilities depend on the license, but rather it's a way to avoid embarrassment and limit fraud. The card or tag shouldn't even have to say what the animal does.

I'd certainly like to know more about the math behind the measurements. But assuming this is a size-adjusted productivity index that's relatively sensible, it's interesting to see California at number 3. These are the top ten: State Rank in 1999 FL 1 GA 2 CA 3 WA 4 NC 5 AR 6 AZ 7 ID 8 IA 9 NE 10 I'm very surprised to see Arizona on there, so this measurement must include livestock, which I hadn't really been considering. Also interesting is that California was #1 in 1960 but fell to #3 by 1999.

Doc, in the 19 March 2007 issue of Crain's New York Business I wrote a story about the haute-cheap phenomenon. The way I described this "new generation of Manhattan restaurants," was: The restaurants I named and did mini-reviews of for that article were Momo-Ssam, Bouley Upstairs, Degustation, Room4Dessert and (though admittedly this one is marginal) the Bar Room at the Modern.

I'm proud (I think) to say that "new paradigm" is an idiopathic eG Forums buzzword, not something Mr. Chang came up with.

One problem with the cheese in a fixin's bar type arrangement is that it doesn't get melted properly onto the burger. If the grill cook isn't going to be skilled and organized enough to make cheeseburgers on the grill, and is just going to put out a platter of plain burgers for people to assemble and garnish, you might consider bringing a blowtorch in order to melt the cheese onto the burgers for people. Your foodie cred would skyrocket. Also, who's responsible for bread? This is an area in which you could probably make some improvements over the basic crummy rolls. Like, Martin's potato rolls, if available near you, are a big step up. If the person in charge of the grill isn't competent to deal with bread, you could also bring a toaster and have it out on the buffet table, giving people the option of toasting their bread. Or you could bring a toaster oven, allowing someone to toast bread and melt cheese onto it simultaneously.

That's like saying a traffic light is defined as a light that is 1- red, yellow and green and 2- directs traffic, and then saying "but this light over here is red, yellow and green and doesn't direct traffic, therefore there's no such thing as a traffic light."

Doc, it goes back to this topic in the New York forum, about what I've called "haute-cheap" restaurants. I'm pretty sure it was in this post, 42 posts into the topic, that Nathan first used the "new paradigm" language, and it seems to have stuck -- I've had no traction on "haute-cheap" but you'll see "NP" now used as an abbreviation in posts. So, NP it is. One of the better descriptions of NP comes from Frank Bruni's Momofuku-Ssam Bar (the poster child for NP) review. He speaks of Momo-Ssam as being "a nearly full-fledged restaurant in near-perfect sync with the times," and writes:

The guidelines currently state "Businesses may ask if an animal is a service animal or ask what tasks the animal has been trained to perform, but cannot require special ID cards for the animal or ask about the person's disability." So, today, I can interrogate a disabled person: "Explain what your dog does?" How is that not inquiring about the person's disability? How can you answer that question, e.g., "The dog sounds an alert if I have a seizure" without revealing intimate details of your life? If that ridiculous non-protection were replaced with an ID card system, there would be no discussion. Here's my dog's ID, he's a service animal, give us access, end of discussion, I'm not going to explain what the dog does because it's none of your damn business. Bureaucracy just doesn't seem like a credible basis on which to oppose such a system. For one thing, the ADA bureaucracy is already quite large and can easily accommodate all sorts of tracking and registration. For another thing, plenty of service animals are already being trained and certified by organizations and states, so the bulk of the licensing process is already being taken care of. It's really only the owner-trained service dogs that would require any sort of review, and that one-time review is certainly less intrusive than an explanation every time one goes to a restaurant, retail establishment, on a bus, etc. And people definitely are taking advantage of the current system, especially using the emotional support assistance justification. On 14 May 2006, there was a story in the New York Times titled, "Wagging the Dog, and a Finger," that reported on the fallout of a 2003 Department of Transportation ruling: I believe the story is only available in the premium archive, but this is the link: http://travel.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/fashi...ml?pagewanted=1

Just looking over the topic, I don't think Faicco's got enough play. They really do make some excellent stuff.

Foie gras butter.

I was thinking, I hear often about how California is the most agriculturally productive state by just about every measure. But California is also the largest significant agricultural state. Only Alaska and Texas have more land area than California. California is 155,973 square miles. That's about triple the size of New York, Florida or North Carolina, and about 16 times the size of Vermont. If we were to adjust for size and compare that to absolute production numbers in order to derive an "agricultural fertility index," I wonder how the states would rank. Would California have the highest fertility index, or would a state like Iowa suddenly jump to the top of the rankings?

I think, in addition to specific foods, there's some strategic advice to be offered here. The med-student scenario echoes a number of others where the combination of high stress, limited time, unpredictability, too many conflicting priorities and inability to access a home kitchen can combine to create terrible eating habits. In all those situations, whether you're a business traveler, a busy young professional or a cop on the beat, the decisions you make hour-to-hour, day-to-day and month-to-month will cumulatively determine how well you eat. For example, if you maintain your intake of the foods you've chosen, grazing in a relatively controlled manner so that you don't ever become excessively hungry, you'll be much better equipped to resist the crap from the vending machines and bodegas. I'm sure there's other advice that can help, but what do I know -- I'm like a million pounds overweight as it is. Emily, I hope you'll keep us posted on your culinary adventures, or lack thereof. Even just keeping the dialog open might be helpful in terms of maintaining the focus and not slipping into bad habits.

Some people, no doubt, but the question is how many and, more importantly, how many of those people are at the restaurant on any given day on account of that validation, and how many of those people are confused by the lunch/dinner situation? I don't know that it's possible to determine the answer with scientific accuracy without a survey that's never going to happen, so the best we can do is reason it through. I mean, Doc, you went at the end of March, before the Beard Awards were announced, right? Do you really think that if you went back to Momo-Ssam tonight the crowd would be different? Or that if you had gone before the Times review it would have been different? Or that if Frank Bruni had given a no-star review and David Chang had been passed over for his Beard Award, that it would have made any difference? These new-paradigm places, in particular, seem to acquire their audiences before the major reviewers ring in, and don't especially appeal to those with traditional expectations of the restaurant experience. I don't exactly know who's reading the New York Times these days, but I do know that it's not the guiding force on the East Village scene as it might be on the Lincoln Center scene. So, fine, maybe a few middle aged Times readers from the Lincoln Center neighborhood took cabs down to check out Momofuku Ssam Bar, found it uncomfortable and weird, and never came back. I can't see how that changes anything.

Mimi Sheraton and other major figures in the food writing community write controversial, provocative things all the time, yet only one in a thousand gets discussed in depth in eG Forums. Likewise, there are lengthy debates in eG Forums all the time that are triggered by comments made by people who aren't major names in food. The reason this topic has been dwelling on the Momo-Ssam lunch/dinner issue is, I think, not because Mimi Sheraton said it but, rather, because it's an interesting and controversial issue about which people have strong views. If a random eGullet Society member had posted here (I realize Mimi Sheraton's comments were published elsewhere) and said, "I went to Momofuku Ssam Bar for lunch and I don't get what the big deal is," then someone would have replied with the information that you need to go for dinner to experience the serious stuff. If a set of people had then taken the position that it's criminal to serve different food at dinner than at lunch, and another set had taken the position that it's fine, I'm sure we'd be in the middle of a lengthy debate regardless of who made the original point. This topic was going on full bore for 270 posts before and of this lightning-rod situation and will go on long after the lunch/dinner issue becomes tiresome, if it hasn't already.

Just to be clear, the James Beard award that David Chang won was: 2007 RISING STAR CHEF OF THE YEAR David Chang Momofuku Noodle Bar New York, NY In addition, there was a nomination for Momofuku Ssam Bar as 2007 BEST NEW RESTAURANT however that award was won by L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon. Another nominated restaurant that didn't win was Wolfgang Puck's "Cut" in Beverly Hills. Anybody heard of it? Care about it? So an observer of the Beard Awards would have to go a second level deep in order to get to Momo-Ssam as opposed to Noodle Bar. The thing that's especially silly about Chang winning a rising star chef award in 2007 is that he hasn't been a rising star for quite some time. Heck he even got the same nomination in 2006 (who won, you ask? Corey Lee -- quick, who's that?). He's a well-established risen star. Those guys on Top Chef, maybe they're rising stars. Chang is someone who has more restaurant deals being thrown at him than every other "rising star" put together, except for Daniel Humm, whose nomination as a "rising star" in 2007 is even stupider than Chang's. The Daniel Humm of Campton Place was a rising star; the Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park? Come on. I therefore think somebody would have to be simultaneously out of the loop and in the loop in order not to have heard of Chang and Momo-Ssam until the 2007 Beard nominations. I suppose there may be some people who fit that description, but I can't imagine the numbers are significant. And certainly, the flood of out-of-town chefs running to check out Momo-Ssam predates March 2007, when the nominations were announced. Not to beat a dead horse, but the New York Times review only predated the Beard nominations by a month. And in that review, on 21 February 2007, Bruni wrote:

My sense is that even people who are familiar with the Beard Awards don't make dining decisions on that basis. The Beard Awards are about recognizing old news. In the case of this particular Times review, as well, it was an old-news review. It was so behind the curve that Bruni explicitly went into a self-conscious explanation of how he was hopping on the bandwagon. Momo-Ssam was jam packed before the Times review, before the Beard Awards. Momo-Ssam couldn't conceivably owe an iota of its success to those outlets. Those were just late recognition, not input. At this point, sure, maybe a few new people are going there to check it out based on the Times review, but the restaurant was full without them. In terms of expectations, my point is that "two-star expectations" require knowledge of two-star ratings. I doubt, when you control for things like people who were already going to the restaurant before the Times reviewed it, that the two-star rating is particularly relevant to any significant number of people's expectations. And of course anybody who follows that sort of thing should already know about the lunch/dinner dichotomy.

I'd be interested to see a survey of 100 Momofuku customers on that point. I wonder how many could correctly identify the number of stars the restaurant received from the New York Times critic.

If it's a stout, there are a few desserts that call for stout, ranging from the more traditional (e.g., Guinness Stout brownies) to the modern (e.g., Johnny Iuzzini did a dessert with Guinness and pretzels at Nougatine). I wonder about using beer in a quick-reduced pan sauce, in lieu of wine. Might require some experimentation, but there does seem to be a potential application there.

Yorkville is a good wurst destination, because you have Schaller & Weber and the Yorkville Packing House (1560 Second Avenue at 81st Street) within an easy walk of one another. Don't confuse the Schaller & Weber mass-market products, available in many grocery stores, with the Schaller & Weber in-store experience. The store itself is a real old-world German butcher shop with excellent sausages. Yorkville Packing House is a smaller-scale Hungarian operation, also excellent.