Fat Guy

I agree that there are a lot of sweet components to the savory dishes at Alinea. There are also savory components to the sweet dishes. I think it would be accurate to say that, in most dishes, there's an attempt to balance and play with sweet, sour, salty, bitter, spicy, umami, texture, temperature, etc. Overall, there's a progression to the meal that's somewhat unusual. The printed menus they distribute have (I'm sure this has been mentioned above) a code that zigs left for more savory dishes and zags right for sweeter dishes. You can see from the example of our menu that there are actually a few points in the meal that represent dessert-type interludes. I enjoyed the back and forth -- I preferred it to an avalanche of desserts at the end. The menu code also uses larger circles for larger dishes and smaller circles for the one-biters. And the weight of each circle indicates the lightness or heaviness of the dish. Here's the best scan I could come up with:

Hardly obvious to me. I'd assume, if anything, that someone coming from Rome would be particularly harsh on New York's Italian restaurants.

I'd be wary of casual, indiscriminate, mix-and-match use of the term "bias." Some people are using it to mean a prejudice, others are using it to refer to a statistical deviation (sometimes in the same post), and in some contexts it just means an inclination. It's also not clear to me what the "Italian bias" is supposed to be. For one thing, most people I know who are aficionados of Italian food and have traveled extensively in Italy think the Italian food in New York is a joke. Their "bias," such as it is, is against New York's Italian restaurants. Is the allegation that Bruni has some sort of pro-New-York-Italian agenda? I really can't comprehend the claim. I'd also be wary of substituting statistics for judgment. Statistics help establish various quantitative realities. They don't adequately describe the decisions a critic needs to make on a daily basis. Critics aren't hired to be robots. They're hired for their judgment. The problem is that Bruni has poor judgment. That's about it.

Weird choice. We definitely did better than you on that pairing. We were drinking Ogier "Viognier de Rosine" 2004. Very nice marriage.

A few random thoughts I had while dining at Alinea last night . . . I went in with very high expectations, and Alinea exceeded those expectations by an unexpected order of magnitude. That just doesn’t happen very often. Alinea is clearly one of the handful of top restaurants in the world. A meal at Alinea is a multi-tiered work of art: the individual dishes are beautiful little sculptures in food, the service pieces represent the pinnacle of design, the overall menu is a symphonic composition, the meal experience itself is a piece of performance art. It’s hard to believe there are still people out there who believe food can’t be art – indeed, that’s probably the overwhelming majority position. Yet, a meal at Alinea is so obviously art that the overwhelming majority position is about as credible as any of the most unenlightened majority positions in history. I knew a lot about Alinea going in, and have read many exhaustive accounts of meals there, whereas the other five people in my group had never heard of Alinea and had no preconceived notions of what to expect. I enjoyed their experiences of the meal even more than I enjoyed my own – I envied their sense of wonder and discovery. It’s only possible to enjoy Alinea if you give yourself over to the experience – to Alinea’s way of presenting the experience. There’s no other way a restaurant like this can operate. The dish-by-dish account of a meal at Alinea, while valuable from an information perspective, doesn’t convey the experience. In some ways, to think of an Alinea meal as a series of dishes misses the point. Rather, the meal is one larger composition. I found that every dish worked beautifully within that composition. Did I love every individual dish unequivocally, standing alone, on its own terms? Of course not – show me a restaurant with 26 dishes that one person is going to love, show me a symphony where there are no parts that are better than others. Serious art can be challenging. All the senses are engaged by Alinea, and particularly noteworthy is the olfactory engagement. The rosemary arrangement in the middle of the table gives the whole area a subtle rosemary aroma, and then later when the rosemary sprigs are added to the hot stone for the lamb dish you get a full-on rosemary blast. The duck is served on a lavender-scented pillow that compresses under the weight of the dish, discharging its aroma. Most art is only for the eyes and ears. Culinary art also engages the senses of touch, smell and taste. Pardon the awful photos. I’m not sure they contribute anything to the historical record, but here they are anyway.

Not that Sysco is the epitome of artisanal ingredients, but Sysco and US Foodservice are often somewhat misunderstood. Restaurants at just about all levels use these companies as suppliers. Perhaps a restaurant like the French Laundry doesn't use Sysco, but restaurants at every other level do. You can order anything from lame frozen bar food ("Sysco Reliance") to better stuff ("Sysco Classic, Sysco Imperial") to pretty high level haute-cuisine ingredients ("Sysco Supreme" and various Sysco-owned brands for organics, etc.). It's up to the restaurant. Sysco didn't invent bad food. Food was bad before Sysco became a dominant distributor. Sysco just delivers what people order.

The way we're taught by the professionals to chop onions is: - Cut off the bud end - Cut in half vertically - Peel the halves - Lay each half flat - Make a series of vertical cuts - Make a series of horizontal cuts - Make a series of cross-cuts It makes sense, of course. You're dealing with a three-dimensional object. You should have to cut it three times to get a good dice. But there are a couple of additional factors that I take into consideration: - I find the "Make a series of horizontal cuts" step to be particularly difficult and dangerous. - An onion is not a solid block of matter but, rather, comes to us in a series of layers. I've found that, if you just skip the horizontal cutting step, you still get a pretty good, usable dice. The sections of the onion make the cut pieces fall into little polyhedrons anyway. You save time and effort. And nobody is ever going to notice in most preparations. Like so: Sure, if you're doing this at a professional level, you need to be more serious. But this approach works just fine for me, the home cook. Am I the only one who does it this way?

There's some information about the series finale on TV Squad. The show had a good run -- seven seasons -- and looking back I think the food references in those seven years were about more than just clever writing. Rather, they reflected the fact that food culture has gone mainstream in the US. I think as we see more food references in general on mainstream shows, Gilmore Girls will be seen as part of a progression, rather than as the anomaly we may have thought it was back in 2003 when this topic started.

I believe most if not all cans these days are plastic lined, aren't they? Maybe I'm misinformed. I don't think metallic taste as such is the problem with most canned tomatoes. It's the violence of the canning process. Canned tomatoes (or canned anything else) are basically cooked in the can for 20-50 minutes. The big advantage of aseptic packaging is that the time is more like 3-15 seconds. So what comes out of the aseptic package is a much fresher tasting product. Now, of course, if you cook the crap out of it for an hour anyway, there's no advantage to that. But for sauces that are basically just heated through and served, the fresh taste shines through.

I'd be interested in assembling a list of commercially published books by food bloggers. Even better, if you've read any of these books, and especially how they compare to and reflect the blogs that inspired them, please share your comments. So far on my list I've got: "Chocolate and Zucchini: Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen," by Clotilde Dusoulier, based on the chocolateandzucchini.com blog. "Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen," by Julie Powell, and while I know she has a blog now I'm actually not sure where the Julie/Julia blog is archived. "The Amateur Gourmet: How to Shop, Chop and Table Hop Like a Pro (Almost)," by Adam D. Roberts, based on the amateurgourmet.com blog.

Pomi tomatoes have no salt added at all. There's only one ingredient: tomatoes. You can get them chopped (aka "Parmalat Pomi chopped tomatoes") or strained (aka "Parmalat Pomi strained tomatoes"). I imagine the strained product has no seeds but I've never used it. Many years ago, they also sold whole tomatoes in the same packaging, but today the only choice is chopped or strained. So at least within the brand there's no superior selection being made for a whole tomato product. I don't know if, when you list tomatoes as your only ingredient, you're allowed to add paste, juice or whatever -- I'm sure it's in the FDA regs somewhere -- but I was under the impression that Pomi simply chops the tomatoes and puts them through the aseptic packaging process.

I'm not sure Regional will work for a really picky, unadventurous group. While there are plenty of items on the menu that seem unadventurous to the foodie set, the reality is that the average unadventurous eater is likely to look at the Regional menu and say "There's nothing for me to eat here!" With dishes like "whole wheat noodles in duck ragu" and "raw filet mignon with red apple and toasted walnuts" I think to a lot of people it's too adventurous.

It used to be that the Fulton Fish Market was an overnight thing, in part because that space had to be vacated by morning. But up at Hunts Point I don't know that it's on an overnight schedule. Certainly the other areas are on more of a very-early-morning schedule. Please let us know what you learn.

Not sure how far north you live but if you're anywhere near 125th it's quicker to take the 6 train to Hunts Point Avenue and then switch to the BX6 bus. Hunts Point is divided into three main areas: the meat market, produce market and fish market. It's huge -- it takes a long time to walk between areas. The last time I was there, anybody could get in -- we were charged a few dollars to park, but I'm not sure you have to pay anything at all if you're on foot. The occasional civilian would walk into one of the vendors and get a bag of veal chops or whatever, for cash. It was pretty informal. It's not like the stuff is displayed in nice glass cases. You have to know what to ask for. I don't know specifically about the fish market -- I haven't been there since it moved from Manhattan. In Manhattan, you needed to be with a licensed distributor to go there, or you needed to be on a formal tour. There also wasn't much to buy from a civilian perspective -- it was more an exchange point for cartons of stuff. Hunts Point has a website. You might want to call the market manager and find out what the deal is. http://www.huntspoint.com

Russ, you wrote: Is that because they're picked later? You also got me wondering about varieties. Those big-ass strawberries that seem to be the supermarket standard, do they have a name (besides "strawberries")? What about the little ones (those are my favorite)? I'm assuming size is a function of variety, but maybe not. I remember in maybe 1998 we drove from San Diego to Vancouver, and there was one stretch somewhere in the middle of California where there were strawberry fields as far as the eye could see, for mile after mile. We stopped to buy some strawberries from a roadside stand, and as we ate them in the car we were like, hey, these suck! So we drove a few more miles and tried another roadside stand. We couldn't find a single decent strawberry. It was actually a defining moment in my view of California produce, because up until then I had been conditioned to think that California is this produce paradise. And I guess it can be, but lots of the flavorless industrial produce tends to come from there too.

Roth's Westside Steakhouse on 93rd and Columbus has proven useful to me in similar situations. Equally appealing to the meat-and-potatoes crowd is Carmine's on Broadway and 91st.

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Even in towns with limited food media, there's no such thing as a serious restaurant that's unknown. So given that there's no such thing as an unknown restaurant period, the question becomes one of degree: how well known is it, and more importantly has it been getting the right kind of attention. A major critic will of course cover the major openings, but other duties include giving the right kind of attention (be it positive or negative -- a corrective in either direction) to restaurants that aren't getting it.

I prefer the Pomi chopped tomatoes to anything else. I've gone through a learning curve with them, starting from a point where I didn't like them at all, then buying them occasionally, then mostly, and now exclusively. When you're accustomed to the taste of canned tomatoes, Pomi tomatoes taste wrong. A lot of people perceive them as flavorless by comparison, as I did at first. But the reason for that is the lack of salt. It's not until you season the Pomi tomatoes properly that you really start to see their superiority. You need to use a generous amount of salt, not just a few shakes from a salt shaker, because first you have to get them to the level of salt that canned tomatoes have (yeah, they have a lot), and then you have to get them to the level of salt that canned tomatoes have after you'd season them for cooking. That's when the Pomi tomatoes reveal all their fresh, sweet, clean flavor. You also have to cook the Pomi tomatoes less than you'd cook canned tomatoes, in order to preserve that freshness, and you want to make sure not to junk up your sauce with tons of dried herbs, tomato paste, etc. After awhile, once you get used to having very fresh tasting tomato sauce all year round, it's hard to go back to canned.

P.S., regarding choking, I was pretty alarmed when he took a whole piece and shoved it in his mouth. I had disassembled a piece and was figuring he'd pick it apart further and eat it in bits -- that's what he has done in the past. Instead he grabbed a whole piece, inspected it, and chowed down on it. He seemed fine with it, so I photographed him on the next piece.

He's about 20 months now. My concern isn't so much with digestibility -- he seems to be able to digest anything from duck to small toys. I was thinking parasites. At least here in the USA, we're constantly told not to let various vulnerable people (elderly, pregnant/nursing, babies) eat raw fish. I'm sure it's mostly nonsense, especially since so much of the fish used in sushi-making has been flash-frozen at some point, but I was wondering whether in Japan anybody worries about the safety of giving raw fish to babies.

I've always known, in theory, that the more you open and shut a refrigerator the more you expose the food to higher temperatures, and therefore the quicker it degrades. I never really considered the extent of the effect, however, until one day . . . . . . I had just done the week's shopping when a family emergency struck and we headed out of town for about a week. Though we were of course preoccupied with the family emergency, throughout the week I couldn't help but occasionally think back to all the food that was surely rotting in the refrigerator. I have a pretty good idea of how long things like lettuce, milk, button mushrooms and cucumbers will last in our refrigerator. I can usually predict it to +/- a day. Certainly, the lettuce never lasts a week. Mushrooms are getting kind of nasty after about five days. Etc. Upon returning home, I went to throw out all the presumably rotten food in the refrigerator. It was as if time had stopped while we were away. Everything was as fresh in appearance as on the day we bought it. There were simply no signs of decay -- not even the slightest brown spot or wilted bit on the lettuce; not a blemish on a single mushroom. Now I understand.

I prefer Viva -- it's softer and seems to be more absorbent. I don't know if scientific tests would show that it absorbs more or quicker, but in real-world use I vastly prefer it to Bounty or any other brand I've tried. If only Costco carried Viva instead of Bounty.

When do Japanese babies start eating sushi? We've been feeding our American baby things like kappa maki since pretty much when he started eating solid food, however we've shied away from raw fish. Would a Japanese baby typically be encouraged to eat raw fish at a year and a half? A scene from dinner this evening:

I was interested, in that when I saw it was going to be reviewed I said, hey, I've been wondering about that place. And the review seems trustworthy on its face. I suppose I could go there and disagree completely, sure.