Fat Guy

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of routine kitchen tasks that I perform a certain way based on the combination of equipment I have. For example, when I hard cook eggs I always use the same thick anodized aluminum pot, I start it out at the high-heat setting on my stove and shift it to the low-heat setting for ten minutes (timed on my timer) once it comes to the boil. I do this with so little effort it barely interrupts whatever else I'm doing. Not long ago, I was over at someone else's house and had to hard cook some eggs. I was completely befuddled. A different pot, a different stove, a different timer. Not only do I think the eggs didn't come out all that well, but also I found that I had to pay attention every minute for about 20 minutes. Another example: I have a specific pot I use for popping popcorn. Again, this is pretty much an automated task for me at home. People come over, I offer popcorn, I make it, and they're like, "Holy crap you made popcorn just then?" And I think it comes out really well -- it almost all pops, there's no burning, it's light and fluffy the way popcorn should be. Meanwhile, I was over at somebody else's house and I simply could not make good popcorn. The pot was too thin, the stove was electric -- I couldn't get it together. There were tons of burnt kernels, and the ones that did pop weren't nearly as nice and fluffy as what I get at home. The actual popcorn may also have contributed, but I blame equipment failure for a lot of the mess. I'm hoping to find out that I'm not alone here.

P.S. The Australian equivalent seems to be the AUS-MEAT guide. I haven't fully explored the website, but here's the basic guide to Australian cuts.

The NAMP guide is one of my favorite books to curl up with, however I try to mention every year or so that the same information is available online for free (the NAMP book costs US$65). The NAMP guide, as best I can tell, is a prettied-up version of the IMPS (Institutional Meat Purchasing Specifications) guides published by the USDA. IMPS is the go-to source for definitive answers about American meat cuts. Just about everything else you'll find out there is either derived from IMPS or not authoritative. Flank steak is cut number 193 (on page 75) in the IMPS illustrated beef guide.

You could dip each piece in egg, then bread with corn flake crumbs (or pretzel crumbs, or similar), then bake in the oven at a high temperature so you get a nice crust.

I wouldn't call it a discount. I'm just reading comments like (Docsconz) (JosephB)and taking them at face value. It's certainly possible for someone not to enjoy the food at Momo-Ssam, or to be less than completely impressed by it. Who could dispute that? And it's also possible for the restaurant to be inconsistent. But there has also been an extraordinary level of support for this place, from many of the usual suspects we'd have expected to take a contrarian stance. And the restaurant is a category buster. It's not serving spectacular bistro food. It's serving something that's much more akin to what's being served at the leading edge of the three- and four-star level. On stools.

I think for those who value the trappings of fine dining Momo-Ssam really tests the hypothetical, "Would I enjoy four-star food on paper plates sitting on an upended milk crate in the back alley by the restaurant's dumpster, during a slam-dancing competition?" I really think if you went out back by the dumpster and put the five best dishes at Momo-Ssam up against the five best dishes at Jean Georges, on paper plates, you'd find that Momo-Ssam has the edge on flavor.

Just a quick point of clarification: Momo-Ssam is open from 11am until 2am, and serves straight through. The restaurant doesn't open at 6pm. Rather, it switches over to the dinner menu at 6pm.

Some photos as promised . . . This is the stock after simmering for several hours. Here it is after going through the strainer. This is about half of the total (I did this in two pots), ready to go into the refrigerator. I'll defat it tomorrow, when the fat hardens. And here's what some of the bones, trimmings and mirepoix look like:

New Green Bo redeemed itself this evening. We had a great meal. We were at one of the big tables, 5/8 occupied by another group. They were Asian-American, and we were the whitest people in the restaurant. We ordered boiled pork and leek dumplings, fish in fermented wine sauce, and rice cakes with mushrooms. They ordered hot and sour soup, cold noodles with sesame sauce, beef with broccoli, beef lo mein and sweet-and-sour chicken.

I'll be interested to hear about the menu and hours of operation when the place gets going. In New York, Union Square Cafe is a very different restaurant at lunch and dinner. The lunch food is in many ways the most impressive aspect of the restaurant, because at lunch the restaurant offers upscale adaptations of classic American lunch food, like a fabulous yellowfin tuna burger. That food is not available at dinnertime at the New York original. I wonder how they'll handle it in Tokyo.

Suvir Saran and Hemant Mathur are co-executive chefs at Devi.

There's precedent for it. Blue Hill, for example. It doesn't seem that it was ever a marketing problem for that restaurant. The issue, I would think, isn't so much the marketing as it is the administration of the actual restaurant. If you're going to have a chef team, that team has to work really well as a team. Cuisine by consensus is not likely to be particularly great, and any inconsistencies between the chefs will be exploited by the employees.

I didn't exactly leave meat on the bones. The bones were left over mostly from braised short ribs. So, you know, what happens with short ribs, at least for me usually, is that the meat pulls pretty cleanly off the bone once you've cooked them. What I did was I took all the meat off the bones, then trimmed the meat into nice semi-rectangular chunks of edible short rib meat for service. Then I set the trimmings plus the bones aside for stockmaking use. So, there's a substantial amount of meat in the stockpot with the bones right now, however there wasn't actually any meat on the bones themselves. The frozen block of bones and trimmings wasn't photogenic -- it wasn't even recognizable as food. And I put the whole frozen mass straight into the stockpot. I have, however, just grabbed a snapshot of the stock after simmering for several hours, and I'll post it later on.

A year or two ago, I was writing something that involved cooking a lot of beef short ribs. I think over the course of a couple of weeks I cooked 20-30 pounds of short ribs. Much of that weight was bone, and at the time I used a bunch of the bones and trimmings to make stock. But I also took about five pounds of short rib bones, put them in a huge zipper bag, and stuck them in the back of my freezer, in a little-visited nook behind the ice-cube tray. I completely forgot about them. Until today. I was literally moments away from heading out to buy some groceries, including the makings of beef stock, when I decided to take a quick inventory of the refrigerator and freezer. I was just about to close the freezer door when I caught the corner of a zipper bag in the corner of my eye. Hmm, what's that, I wondered. The bag's contents had frozen in such a way as to present a real challenge of geometry: everything kind of froze around the L shape of a corner, so it was difficult to maneuver out of the freezer. I had to empty almost everything, and use a fair amount of brute force. Now I'm making stock, no grocery shopping required. I don't have a good term for this type of happy discovery of long-dormant items in the freezer. I think this is a different case from finding an old can of something great in the back of a cabinet. It feels more personal.

Glendale Bake Shop 1290 Lexington Ave New York, NY 10128 212.410.5959 This place is great. A total throwback to the days before Hot & Crusty, before Atkins, before cupcakes, and before the supermarkets started baking their own bread. Remember when there were bakeries and cake shops all over the city? This is just like one of them. And yes, they have pretzel rolls in a couple of shapes: traditional pretzel shape, torpedo, maybe some others. It's amazing that pretzel rolls aren't more widely available. They're so good.

The standard rule is "italicize foreign-language words." However, because the English language borrows so many words from other languages, it can be difficult to determine whether a word has been sufficiently incorporated so as to be considered English. For example, if you look at older books and magazines, say from the 1920s, you will invariably see "foie gras" typeset in italics. Today, you'll almost never see that, though you might see "pate de foie gras" italicized because, as a phrase, it's more foreign. Terroir is gaining acceptance as an English word, and at some point it will surely no longer be italicized. For now, it sort of depends on context. In food and wine media, I wouldn't italicize it. Were I writing the style guide for a general interest publication like Newsweek, I might. Of course, I didn't even bother to italicize Newsweek, so who am I to talk? Anyway, the eGullet Society has a concise style guide of its own. Here's how we handle foreign-language terms:

Actually the Sun had the story yesterday, cited by Grub Street. Who can keep up?

The story was in the New York Times this morning, here: It's not hard to see that this is going to start happening more and more. Restaurants would be wise to get ahead of the game and get their employment practices in order. Once a restaurant gets into a big labor dispute involving back wages and penalties, the costs really mount -- most restaurants can't survive that hit.

I'm guessing Gawker was employing a more modern usage, as in "Soviet hagiography," where for example histories are written so as to humanize various brutal dictators. Or maybe not. In any event, my main complaint is that the piece was boring and minimally insightful.

Union Square Cafe here in New York is one of the city's favorite restaurants, but it's hard to put a finger on why. It's one of those formulas that just clicks, probably for a hundred reasons. That's why it will be very interesting to see if they can reproduce it -- I'm not positive that even Union Square Cafe's owners really know why Union Square Cafe is such a success! The restaurant opened in 1985 and was on the leading edge of New American cuisine, at least on the East Coast. The food, and the setting, are quite casual and simple -- it's not a luxurious restaurant at all. Everything about it is utterly unpretentious, such that for many people who hate fine dining Union Square Cafe is the only fine-dining restaurant they like. You don't hear a lot about Union Square Cafe in eG Forums discussions because it's not much of a "foodie" destination restaurant. It's more about doing a few simple things really well. The restaurant is legendary for its service team. The servers manage to balance informality and professionalism better than at any other restaurant I've visited anywhere. Also there's an incredibly deep wine list. The restaurant is just a few steps away from Union Square Park, which is where the famed Union Square Greenmarket is located. The primary owner of the restaurant, Danny Meyer, is sort of a New York legend, some jokingly refer to him as the "future mayor of New York," because he's so beloved. Lots of images here: http://www.unionsquarecafe.com/

With the recent announcement of an ethical purchasing policy by Burger King, the phenomenon of ethical purchasing has come fully into the mainstream. According to the New York Times's coverage: Please do feel free to discuss Burger King's new policy on this topic. However, going forward, this topic is intended to be the master topic for discussion of ethical purchasing. Thus, if additional companies make ethical purchasing announcements, we'll consolidate that discussion on this topic. After a time, we may start a successor topic as we sometimes do.

The New-York-based Union Square Hospitality Group (known as USHG) announced yesterday that, on 30 March 2007, Union Square Tokyo (UST) would pen under a licensing agreement with the Wondertable restaurant group. According to the press release, "USHG provides the trademarked name, expertise, and know-how to create UST, as well as on-going consultation following the restaurant’s opening." Also, "In preparation for the transatlantic opening, Chef Matsuda and General Manager Hideo Mogi spent several weeks in New York City, working side by side with Michael Romano and the Union Square Cafe staff, absorbing the spirit, hospitality and cuisine of Union Square Cafe. Additionally, Chef Romano has visited Tokyo several times over the past year, and has been there for the past month, working closely with the UST team; in addition to teaching both the front and back of house about the food and culture of USC, Michael is absorbing numerous details about Japanese cooking, restaurant operations and local culture, many lessons he intends to share with the USC staff. Union Square Cafe’s service director Kellie Brooks will spend the year at UST, translating the gracious hospitality of the original for the Tokyo audience. To conduct service and hospitality training seminars, and also to participate in opening celebrations this week, USHG partners Danny Meyer, David Swinghamer, and Paul Bolles-Beaven are all spending the week at UST as well." UST is on the ground floor of the Tokyo Midtown project in Tokyo’s Roppongi district. The location is: Tokyo Midtown Garden Terrace, 9-7-4 Akasaka Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-0052. I hope one of our members will dine there soon. It would be great to hear about it. One point that a lot of folks back here in New York City are talking about is that the main person behind Union Square Cafe, Danny Meyer, has long resisted licensing or franchising. So this announcement came as a big surprise to many.

As I mentioned the first time the article came up, I thought that while it contained a lot of details it didn't really do anything to further the discussion except for the bit about the reservations book. I can't recall ever seeing such a weak effort from Buford, who is normally a great writer who can make a zillion-word New Yorker article breeze by. I'm surprised one of the New Yorker's normally excellent editors didn't say look, Bill, this needs a rewrite -- it really drags. Gawker called the story "maddeningly hagiographic" and I have to agree.

The minimum wage in New York is $7.15 per hour. Food-service employees who receive tips also have to earn $7.15 per hour, however restaurants are able to take a credit against tips. Thus, a restaurant (in New York) can pay its tipped employees $4.60 per hour so long as they can document that their employees are actually making $7.15+ per hour when their tips are counted. The tip credit subsidy (consumers subsidizing the ability of restaurants to pay out less than minimum wage) is estimated at something like $25 billion per year. I have no doubt that a Saigon Grill delivery man, making 30 deliveries a night, makes more than $7.15 per hour. I wouldn't be surprised if the number was more like $15 per hour in cash tips, with little of that being reported on tax returns. While the occasional cheapskate may give a small tip, New Yorkers are, on the whole, generous tippers. And Saigon Grill has delivery minimums that increase with distance, so the tip basis on the orders that require longer bike rides is still going to be decent. I know when the Saigon Grill delivery guy comes to me, he's often also carrying a couple of other orders. I doubt the issue of net wages, if laid bare, would be all that persuasive for the delivery guys. It's the inhumane conditions under which so many delivery people work that are far more of a concern, to me at least. Unfortunately, in this particular face-off, the demagogues have now taken over. So, truth will be the first casualty. However, I also think this may be the leading edge of a long-overdue realignment of the ethnic restaurant world, to bring it into conformity with modern employment practices. This is ultimately going to raise the price of Asian and many other types of ethnic food, I'm sure. So be it. It's time.

Just checked on, and agitated, my three jars. They have less of an industrial aroma than they did the first time around, but they still don't smell like vanilla extract. I imagine I'm looking at a few more months of aging before things really click. I also haven't got a clue how to taste this stuff. I licked some off a finger and I just didn't get any helpful sensory data. Maybe I have to mix it with a sugar solution to taste it properly. In the meantime, I'm running out of vanilla extract.