Fat Guy

It's like when a terrible sports team executes a competent play. Sure, it's a cause for celebration, and against the backdrop of the team's overall performance it almost appears impressive. But the team is still terrible.

But it is manifestly not the mission of the Times critic to review only restaurants that are recommended. A magazine like Gourmet, when it was running restaurant reviews, generally followed a policy of reviewing recommended restaurants (with a few noteworthy exceptions like the petty review of Ducasse). But the Times runs "stay the heck away" reviews too. Did Max Brenner deserve such a review? I think it was an ambiguous place to serious food people. I certainly learned from the review that the place is a joke; that's not something I knew on my own, not something that has been publicized a lot, not something I really derived from the New York Magazine review.

This just in from my mother, folks:

So all critics should review the same restaurants, and deviation is unacceptable?

A totally unknown opening of a potentially reviewable restaurant in Manhattan is certainly rare. The issue is more that there are hundreds of such openings in a year and the critic has to prioritize. Some folks seem to think that the Max Brenner review was a failure of prioritization. I think that's a reductionistic view of how restaurants should be chosen for review. Saying he gave half a review to Eleven Madison Park and therefore shouldn't give a whole review to any restaurant that's not as good as Eleven Madison Park makes no sense. The reviews are about more than just the restaurants. In addition, they're a body of work. And yes, there are dozens of one-star-worthy restaurants that have never been reviewed. Does that mean there should never be a no-star review, so that we can have more and more reviews of mediocre one-star places?

Speaking from personal perspective, I have walked past Max Brenner a few times while heading from, for example, Momo-Ssam to Degustation, and have wondered about it. It seems to have gourmet cachet, and I've heard plenty of positive talk about it. Whereas, there's no confusion about the Olive Garden on the part of any modestly well-informed person. So I don't think they're equivalent situations. And I think Bruni does a fine job of explaining himself.

I think the motivation for the review is clearly stated up front: Frank Bruni doesn't decide which restaurants are important. That decision gets made by the universe, and his job is to identify the important ones and review them. I think there's an entirely coherent case to be made for the importance of Max Brenner, and especially for the need to debunk it. Nor did this seem like a lazy review. Bruni clearly got it in his head that he needed to give Max Brenner his attention. I don't think there's any error in judgment there.

I still don't have it back!!! That was the French edition, though. I haven't seen the English. In general, I've found that the English versions of Ducasse's books are full of weird language. I think they do too much of the translation without the benefit of truly expert translation services. Based on what I've seen so far, I'd rather muddle through with the amazing French versions -- even with my terrible French, recipes aren't all that hard to comprehend.

One thing worth pointing out is that both restaurants have evolved a lot since opening. I find that the general foodie mood is that Momo-Ssam is way superior -- more haute -- than Noodle Bar. And when I talk to people in food media about Noodle Bar and Momo-Ssam, they're still holding on to early impressions because they typically cover openings and then places fall off their radar. Having been to both places several times recently, my opinion is that we're seeing a lot of convergence. Noodle Bar has a lot more haute items than it used to, and has generally improved so much that I know a couple of very knowledgeable people with good taste who like it better than Ssam now. I don't necessarily agree with that assessment, but I think there are several amazing three/four-star-level dishes at both places. And of course, if it's daytime your only choice is Noodle Bar because the Momo-Ssam day menu is kind of pathetic, whereas late night Momo-Ssam is the only one open.

I shop at several different stores, and while it's certainly the case that the big box places don't use price tags, most of the smaller ones do. And it's not that they don't have scanners. Everybody uses scanners. But some places use price stickers anyway, for whatever reason. Belt and suspenders? Avoidance of mis-scans? I don't know.

I picked up a bad of these at the supermarket last night. They were featured as a new item -- I can't even find them on the Dole website. They are allegedly made from freeze-dried organic Peruvian bananas. They have no ingredients other than bananas. If you eat them straight, they're like weird super-sweet banana-flavored Styrofoam. If you put them in milk with cereal, they plump up and are kind of interesting. I doubt I'll buy another bag, but maybe there's a use for them that I'm not thinking of. Were I a professional pastry chef, I'd surely be experimenting.

I just don't understand the pink lemonade thing. You go to a supermarket, and they have cans of frozen concentrated lemonade, or they have powdered lemonade mix. There's always a choice of pink or white. You look at the ingredients, they're exactly the same except for pink food coloring. What's going on? Were there pink lemons somewhere in history, the appearance of which pink lemonade attempts to recapture?

The way I've seen it done in restaurant kitchens is through basting. In other words, you use your neutral vegetable oil for the actual cooking. Then, towards the end, you add a big lump of butter, lard, duck fat, whatever, to the skillet. As it liquefies, you tilt the skillet to that it pools up at one edge, and you spoon the liquid fat over the piece of meat over and over again. Then you turn the meat over and repeat. This gives the meat a really nice exterior flavor and color.

As I recall, the butter was already melted into the bun.

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I was at the supermarket tonight and tried to buy some of the frozen cubes. They had them all together in a special display chest freezer. Unfortunately, they were completely sold out of everything except dill and ginger, which didn't particularly interest me. Maybe next week. Incidentally, there were some other ingredients in there with the herbs, like some oil I think.

Send him an email. He'd probably answer.

I haven't been inside the Shake Shack kitchen in awhile, however a couple of years ago Rich Corraine (aka "RC," who is, or at least was, the closest thing there is to a person in charge of the Shake Shack) took me into the kitchen and demonstrated the preparation of a Shack burger. There was no butter on the burger -- just meat on the griddle -- however there was butter on the bun.

To be clear, I have no problem at all with a restaurant review based on one visit, so long as it accurately represents that it is based on one visit. I also think that, with six visits under one's belt, one should be able to write a brilliantly nuanced review that really gets what a restaurant is all about. But that's not the point here. The point is simply that, if anybody is saying "Frank Bruni visits every restaurant he reviews six times" then I think that's about as credible a statement as, "Frank Bruni is always anonymous" or "Nobody at the Times takes comps."

I believe the finished product is made on premises from a liquid mix that has been shipped. This is a pretty good system, allowing for laboratory-level control of the mix but fresh, on-site production. However, I think such a system can hardly be called artisanal. It's industrial. Good industrial, but industrial nonetheless.

If you read the Robert's review, one conclusion you might draw is that it was based on three visits. Because of the way it was written as a narrative, one gets the sense that he describes each of his visits, and I count three descriptions. Also, it seems that for this review he visited other steakhouses, like Peter Luger and Sparks. In reviews where he does that sort of comparative dining (like for a review of a Danny Meyer restaurant), he's using up even more of the presumed 10-meal weekly budget than normal. And while it's theoretically possible to eat 20 meals out in a week, Bruni also has to write reviews, Diner's Journal, feature stories and Critic's Notebook, and he travels a fair amount. I'd also say that his budget is not truly unlimited. It's huge, but there's some point beyond which the Times would surely cry foul.

Seen on Grub Street: Scott Conant said to be leaving Alto and L'Impero.

Seen on Grub Street: Scott Conant said to be leaving Alto and L'Impero.

My impression is that, in recent times, the New York Magazine menu archive has been kept more up to date than MenuPages. http://nymag.com/listings/restaurant/casa-mono/menu1.html

However, one should also factor in that it is in the interest of Bruni and the Times to portray the number of visits as high, and therefore only to mention numbers when they're high. It does not follow from the mention of several high numbers that all reviews are based on the average of what's mentioned. Remember, Bruni and the Times need to buy their restaurant reviewing credibility. They don't earn it anymore, the way they did in the old days. The Times can't compete on the quality of Bruni's reviews because their quality is so low, but thanks to a large budget the Times can try to divert attention by emphasizing anonymity/payment, number of reviews, etc. -- the areas in which they know bloggers and other publications can't compete. I would take the claimed number of visits with as much of a grain of salt as I would take claims of anonymity. Bruni is, no doubt, a hard-working reviewer. But if he's visiting every restaurant six times, I'll be shocked -- doubly so given how weak his reviews are.