Fat Guy

But isn't offal by definition whatever is not in the mainstream? It's the waste, the by-product, the trimmings. When sweetbreads cost more per pound than tenderloin, can they really be called offal?

The cocktail lounge SM23, in Morristown, New Jersey, uses those large spheres of ice in some of its cocktails. They use molds purchased in Japan by their cocktail consultant, Grant Collins of Bar Solutions in Australia. When Collins was setting up the cocktail program at SM23, he told me that these large ice spheres are popular in Japan not only for their aesthetic and theatrical interest, but also because they can keep a drink cold for several hours with far less watering down than ice cubes would cause. Apparently many Japanese like to sit with a glass of whiskey with one of these large ice spheres in it for three or four hours and sip and contemplate while watching a musical performance or whatever. For those of you in the Greater New York Metro Area, it might be a worthwhile expedition to check out Collins's work at SM23, because there seem to be a lot of Pacific Rim cocktail trends on display there. SM23 Bar * Lounge 88 Headquarters Plaza 1 Speedwell Avenue Morristown, NJ, 07960 Tel: 973-871-2323

Do you all think sir would feel better if I started doing this to sir?

I'm not saying Becco is a great restaurant -- please don't hold me to anything like that -- but I am saying it's a leader in this category.

There are also some contradictions or at least tensions there, for example Platt says: and So on the one hand Batali is irrelevant, but on the other hand Batali's restaurant, Del Posto, represents the crescendo of New York's hotness. On the one hand, out-of-towners like Ramsay and Robuchon are irrelevant, but on the other hand out-of-towners like Thomas Keller (Per Se), Masa and Stephen Starr (Buddakan) -- three out of four of his examples of the old hotness are imports -- represent the crescendo of New York's hotness. To me, that sort of writing and thinking constitutes twisting the facts to support your argument, as opposed to building an argument from facts. The reality is that the globalization of the restaurant business is something that started long ago and will continue long into the future. Ducasse will open a new place in New York this year, and maybe another in another year or two. Danny Meyer just opened in Tokyo. That's the way it is these days. And while Batali and Jean-Georges may not be in expansion mode this year -- at least not in New York -- plenty of other chefs and restaurateurs are. I mean, ask Laurent Tourondel or David Chang -- today's "super-chefs" (to use Platt's silly designation) -- if their era is ending, or just beginning. These are guys who have to beat investors away with a stick because they don't have the time to open all the restaurants that people are begging them to open.

If you poured one of the frog leg dishes into the other, there would have been hints of Jean-George's dish, yeah. But I didn't experience either as JG-influenced, and my guess based on Bellanca's background is that any commonality with anything JG-like is because of common influences back in France. Many of JG's signatures can, after all, be traced back to general trends in contemporary French gastronomy. That's not to say JG isn't a brilliant innovator. But he doesn't get credit for scrambled eggs with caviar either!

I'm not sure what Chicago has to do with the hotness issue. Neither Alinea nor Moto is hot anymore. They're in cool, established middle age now. If there were other similar restaurants opening in Chicago but not here, it might have some relevance to the issue under discussion here. But that's not happening. Anyway, I think Platt is overreaching. It's safe to say that there are fewer hot fine-dining openings this year than in the past several years. At the same time, there have been hot openings along the Momofuku, Bouley Upstairs and Degustation lines, as well as Inn at Little West 12th, Waverly Inn, a number of interesting cocktail lounges, dessert-bars, etc. So it's not a question of hot or not hot. It's a question of what's hot. Platt is saying the scene overall is not hot. That's incorrect. Fine dining, at this moment, is not hot (though not as cool as he makes it out to be by trying to bury Ramsay and Robuchon as an aside), whereas haute-cheap, gastropub, cocktails, dessert bars, etc., are hot.

I'm also not down on the Carmine's/Tony's di Napoli/Sambuca segment of the market. These family-style Italians are not at the level of Parkside, Don Peppe's, et al., but they deliver a really solid Italian-American experience. They have basically replaced Little Italy as the place to go for this type of cuisine, served family style in a celebratory atmosphere.

I think Rich's recommendations are very solid. He's got the experience with this cuisine, and he speaks from the perspective of someone who loves it. I do think he's made a category error with Felidia, though. I would not go to Felidia for classic Italian-American cuisine. It's way too upscale, way too refined for that. Of the Bastianich places, I'd recommend Becco as the classic Italian-American. (Becco, not Felidia, is the model for the KC and Pittsburgh restaurants). Indeed, I recommend Becco all the time -- literally dozens of times a year -- to people looking for a high-quality but not ridiculously overpriced pasta-and-osso-buco experience.

Just out of curiosity, where does the six visits number come from?

That's a little patronizing, isn't it? A chef who takes that approach — giving diners what he thinks they should have, rather than what they want — would probably be an unemployed chef before very long. (I know there have been rare exceptions.) ← Well, unless you mean that it's by definition patronizing to do anything other than exactly what people think they want, then no, having principles is not patronizing. It is, rather, the opposite of pandering. A chef who gives diners what they want rather than what he believes is good is pandering. That's the operative theory at a mediocre, middle-market restaurant, or at McDonald's, where menus are designed by focus group and approval rating. But if all chefs did that, there would be no great restaurants or, rather, there would be a handful of popularity-based restaurant formulas with many copies -- a state of affairs that pretty much describes the middlebrow restaurants of the world. Of course, part of being a great chef is that customers like your food. But to a serious chef making food that customers love is not specifically the same as giving customers what they want. The same goes for a critic. It's the critic's job to say a restaurant sucks even if everybody else in the world thinks it's fabulous, and to explain why; and to say a restaurant is great even if everyone else hates it, and to explain why.

Except that if a recipe specifically calls for kosher salt there may be a reason for that beyond quantity. It may be that you're being asked to put crystals of kosher salt on top of oatmeal cookies before baking, or it may be that you're salting a piece of meat, etc. In such applications, if you switch to table salt, you're going to alter or possibly ruin the recipe. In a soup or any recipe where the salt is totally dissolved, though, yes, you can do a volume conversion based on equal weight.

I was dragged kicking and screaming to dinner at Le Cirque tonight. I went not because I was even the slightest bit curious, but rather to humor an out-of-town visitor to whom I wished to be kind. Poor yokel, I thought, he has such a malformed opinion of what constitutes a peak New York dining experience. Another guest and I commiserated before the meal: "Boy, John really wanted to go to Le Cirque, huh?" "Yeah, there was no talking him out of it." The joke was on us. We had an amazingly good meal. In December of 2006, Le Cirque dismissed its long-time chef, Pierre Schaedelin, who had been with the restaurant since 2000, when it was launched as Le Cirque 2000 in the New York Palace hotel. Last year, Le Cirque reopened in the Bloomberg building on 58th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues (actually the building runs through the block from 58th to 59th and the main Le Cirque entrance is mid-building, however the bar entrance is on 58th). The reviews and reports were uniformly mediocre. I don't know any knowledgeable person who thought Schaedelin was doing a particularly good job. At the beginning of 2007, however, a new chef, Christophe Bellanca, took the helm at Le Cirque. Bellanca, who is French-born and of Sicilian and Spanish descent, worked at a long list of Michelin three- and two-star restaurants in France, and was most recently chef at L'Orangerie in Los Angeles. To dispense with the necessary framing of any discussion of Le Cirque: yes, we received super-VIP/FOS treatment; yes, we were comped to high heaven; yes, Sirio hovered a lot, took us on a tour of the kitchen, etc.; yes we got good service and lots of it. So these impressions are of Le Cirque at its best. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if the meal we ate was the best meal served at Le Cirque in 15 years, since Daniel Boulud left in 1992 to open his own restaurant. Our group was food-media-heavy and well-taken-care-of. Still, the fact that Le Cirque could produce a meal of this caliber -- a meal on par with what's being served at the handful of top restaurants in the city -- indicates that something serious is going on. I had no expectations of the meal and wasn't planning to write about it, so I didn't take any notes. It wasn't until a little while into the meal that the gravity of the situation -- that I was having one of my best meals of the past year -- hit me. Our tasting menu began with a platter of three dishes -- these were not amuses, but rather small appetizers -- that included (somewhat bizarrely) two frog-leg dishes and a tuna tartare. The tuna tartare, while not a revelation, struck me because it was just as good as the best tuna tartares I've had anywhere, made with pristine tuna with the occasional bit of coarse salt in the mix. The frog-leg dishes were both terrific. One I designated "frog chowder," though I'm sure it had a real name. It was bits of frog legs in a gloriously creamy white soup (perhaps even cheesy?), served in a clear glass. The other was a frog-leg croquette, on a bed of vegetables heavily laced with garlic. It's probably the most garlic I've ever had in a dish in a fancy restaurant, and I mean that in a positive sense: the kitchen is not afraid of flavor, and this was the right flavor for the dish. But hey, any restaurant can pull off a few good appetizers. I thought for sure it would all be downhill from there. The next dish, however, raised the bar. It was a simple, small portion of very soft, creamy scrambled eggs, with a dollop of caviar on top. It disappeared quickly. Three of us felt it was fantastic. One complained it was too mushy and not eggy enough. My position was that scrambled eggs are supposed to be mushy, and I imagine the addition of cream or butter and various other ingredients may have dulled some of the pure egginess but I was happy for the end result, which was better than eggy. The next three dishes continued the escalation: Foie gras ravioli with black truffle, the first example of this dish I've had in the past several years (since maybe 1998 at Les Crayeres in Riems) that had a properly made, delicate pasta wrapper. The truffles, probably preserved in some sort of fat from winter, were quite flavorful. A zucchini-stuffed zucchini blossom, very correct and presented with minimal garnish (on, by the way, one of the old monkey plates -- we later found out they also do a version of this dish fried and stuffed with mozzarella and anchovies). And, perhaps the highlight of the evening, a single, airy langoustine fresh from the North Atlantic -- a Dublin Bay prawn, I believe. The final two savory dishes were also excellent, though not as impressive as the ones before. A small filet of monkfish was beautifully cooked and almost lobster-like, but was diminished by a weirdly sweet sauce. Likewise, a very fine and properly cooked piece of duck breast had some weird sweet crunchy things on it -- it almost seemed like somebody had hijacked a Mr. Softee truck and poured a few of the colored sprinkles over the duck. Once those intruders were brushed aside, however, it was a wonderful dish. The slices of duck breast were on a bed of crushed potatoes and duck confit. A very rich reduction sauce was poured at the table, though unfortunately it didn't show up until we had already started eating the (we though strangely unsauced) dish. Desserts at Le Cirque have always been first-rate, and the pastry kitchen put out what must have been most of the dessert menu for us. There were some classics, like the Le Cirque stove, and some new desserts like coconut rice pudding with pineapple sorbet, a tasting of four chocolate desserts, and a vacherin with yogurt-lime ice cream. No change in status: desserts at Le Cirque have always been first-rate. The wine list is expensive, but we were able to find a few decent things in the $50 neighborhood. The restaurant itself is quite beautiful, with a lot of glass and a soaring dining room -- you really couldn't ask for a better space. And it does seem that there has been an attitude change: the average age of the clientele was not anything near the 70 it seemed to be heading towards before; there were plenty of thirty-something business types in the room. Lots of female waitstaff in evidence, including our sommelier and our superb, relentlessly poised captain. The new location and new style of the place seem to be attracting a good number of younger professional types. And perhaps, if the food is nearly as good as it was for us tonight, it will keep them coming back.

To return to this for a moment, I was struck by this passage in Restaurant Girl's write-up on Le Cirque: http://www.restaurantgirl.com/restaurantgi.../le_cirque.html

That illustrates the fallacy of serving a constituency rather than serving the cause of good criticism. The public wants early reviews. The restaurants want early reviews, except when the reviews aren't good, in which case they say they don't want early reviews. But early reviews are not actually good reviews. It's just like tipping. Tipping is a stupid system. But customers demand it, servers demand it and restaurants demand it. So nobody is going to change it without some broader vision, like Thomas Keller has.

Well, no, but I do think there's a chronological tension between value-as-news and value-as-criticism. For news value, you want to review asap. For the most valuable criticism (in the context of a restaurant), you would want to wait a year or more.

Ned's point is that premature reviews don't benefit the public.

It would be great if the NEW PLACES section of Dining Briefs provided the impetus to delay the full reviews. But it probably won't.

Per an article in Metro linked from Eater, legal action has now struck the restaurant Republic: and http://ny.metro.us/metro/local/article/Rep...rymen/8195.html

Costco's return policy is supposed to be, "We guarantee your satisfaction on every product we sell with a full refund. Exceptions: Televisions, projectors, computers, cameras, camcorders, iPOD/MP3 players and cellular phones must be returned within 90 days of purchase for a refund." I've returned many, many items to Costco and never encountered the least bit of resistance. I've even been in situations where I got some bad lettuce or whatever, but didn't go back for two or three weeks, and just said, "This lettuce was bad," pointed to it on the receipt, and received a refund. It may be that Costco is experiencing problems with people buying wine, drinking it, and then trying to get refunds. If so, they should have some sort of separate wine policy printed up. To be clear, at every normal Costco I've been to, when you return something you don't deal with anybody in the relevant department (not that there are people in the relevant departments at most Costcos). You go to a customer service desk that represents the whole warehouse. (One exception would be New York, where because of the regulations Costco doesn't have wine, but rather has a wine shop attached to most Costcos.) It sounds like whomever this person dealt with was just being dumb. So yes, I'd take the issue up the ladder, though it's probably not worth much of an investment of time.

That still leaves ambiguity for those of us who were hoping for an Alain Ducasse signature restaurant in the Michelin-three-star style of ADPA and Le Louis XV. Had he announced "Alain Ducasse at the St. Regis," we would be assured of a commitment to three-star dining. The announcement of "Adour" could indicate a range of outcomes.

Wait, are you saying that people who live in ghettos don't really want to live that way? I thought those people were just, well, more comfortable around their own kind. At least, that's what I overheard in a private men's club in the 1920s.

What's the deal with these bottles? Are they historically legit, or are they some sort of imposed affectation?

Recent discussion of the thickness of cold-cut slices led to a discussion of the best way for a deli to wrap and package cold cuts. To my way of thinking, there are two major offenses: 1- Cold cuts poorly wrapped, such that they'll dry out in the refrigerator unless re-wrapped by you. I like the idea of the zipper bags a lot of places are now using, but they're of such inferior quality that often they're not as good as a plain old plastic bag with a twist tie. 2 - Cold cuts piled high such that they stick together into a big clump, or can't easily be separated without tearing. Part of the solution here is to slice to the correct thickness -- this problem occurs mostly with thinner slices. But some cold cuts are still more prone to clumping than others. For these, pieces of wax paper between each set of slices make sense.

That's the misfortune of it. The structural change makes a lot of sense, yet the content still has to sink to the level of the content provider.