Fat Guy

It's hard for me to see why anybody would object to a restaurant "banning" bottled water, except in the narrow instance when the particular person prefers bottled water (or believes there to be a preference, which may or may not be reality-based). Other than that, as a general matter, if good local tap water is available or good drinking water can be engineered via filtration, bottled water is: 1. Environmentally destructive, and gratuitously so. 2. A ripoff, being sold for $8 when its retail cost is $1.40 and its real value is 2 cents. Chez Panisse is both a business and a philosophy. I don't really care much about that philosophy, and disagree with Alice Waters (and Michael Pollan) on many issues. But this is one where I see eye to eye with her. It's not the environmental impact as such that's worrisome -- most food production, even "sustainable" production, has environmental impact -- but, rather, the gratuitous nature of the waste. Alice Waters is doing exactly what smart businesses should be doing, and I applaud it: she's doing something that's in the best interests of her customers, and she's likely to be rewarded for it financially. All those restaurants that know they're ripping off their customers and gratuitously wasting resources every time they sell a bottle of water, but are too meek to exercise any sort of leadership, should look to her example. Bottled water is not currently treated like wine. It would be relatively unobjectionable to put some bottles of specialty mineral water on the wine list, for connoisseurs to enjoy. But the basic water being offered for hydration -- Evian sucks, by the way -- should be tap, filtered tap or, if those are truly inadequate, water from other sources. As a consumer, if two restaurants are equally good, I'd be inclined to support the one with an enlightened water program. If enough other people come to feel the same way, it's a good business move.

That's completely not true. Many bottled waters are, for me and many others, a value added proposition. The water I get from my San Pellegrino bottle can't be replicated in my home without expensive equipment. I have a whole house filter (at the tune of over $1000, plus yearly filter costs of about $500), and my water still smells bad and contains e. coli (I have a well). For me to clean it up, add just the right amount of minerals and carbonation, then package for convenience is a non-trivial cost in both time and money. The people who buy bottled water are not all just suckers being led to the slaughter by big corporations selling what they get for free. People find value and quality in what they buy. Just because you get results with your New York city water and Brita filter doesn't mean that others will see the same quality results. Water isn't "just water". ← Woah, nobody is trying to make you drink bad water. If you have a bad water supply, and simple filtration doesn't do the trick, by all means you should get your drinking water elsewhere. Getting it from Scotland seems gratuitous, but sure, get bottled water. If you love a particular sparkling mineral water because of its specific flavor and bubbles, great -- buy it. But if you already have a good drinking-water supply, purchasing drinking water from halfway around the world is just a big stupid waste.

There's at least some rational justification for getting produce from somewhere else: it's usually either cheaper or in some other way preferable to some people for some reason. That's not to say it's environmentally wise. But at least you get something in return for the destruction. With water you get nothing. I do buy bottled water, though. Every few months I get a few bottles so I can fill the bottles with water from my Brita pitcher. After reusing the bottles a hundred or so times, they get kind of gross so I buy new ones. I'd happily buy them without the water in them, but that doesn't seem to be an option.

If you've tasted a few different brands of sparkling water, you've tasted manufactured sparkling water. There are not very many commercially viable sources of naturally sparkling water in the world. Even when water is taken from naturally sparkling springs, additional carbonation is often injected before bottling. I haven't done extensive research on this, but if you check around the web you'll find explanations like this one: http://home.san.rr.com/rj/pmsw/faqs1.htm

Bottled water is, to me, one of the great environmental scandals. At least when you have something like a coal-burning power plant, you get electricity out of it -- something useful. Bottled water is a complete and utter waste of resources. They schlep millions of gallons of water from places like France and Fiji, the plastic and glass bottles, the fuel for transport, it's all so wasteful, yet if you do a blind tasting against tap water filtered with a Brita filter most people can't tell. You've got to crack up at environmentalists who drink eight little plastic bottles of Poland Spring water a day and drive gas-guzzling SUVs. Sure, there are some places in the Western world where the water is kind of lousy tasting, so in those places you need more complex filtration systems -- but they're still surely preferable to shipping water from somewhere else.

This is exactly why they need to stop serving foie gras! Just the other day, I was visiting elementary schools in the South Bronx, and all the kids were wandering the halls eating foie gras kebabs. It was terrible. You could see their arteries hardening, the pounds accumulating, the diabetes, the asthma, the depression combined with hyperactivity. They need to replace that stuff with Wolfgang Puck pizzas so the Bronx can rise again.

← Wow, this is really brave stuff. They're going to send a letter. That's pretty serious. Next thing you know they'll make a phone call or even call a meeting. Vegetarian options on menus? That's pretty radical. What, you mean like pizza?

The discussion of how much information restaurants should provide about the food and wine they serve would make a good topic, or maybe I'm forgetting topics that have already covered it. I'm definitely in the larrylee camp: no amount of information is too much for me. I should say, I've never yet been passively offered (passively as in printed on the menu, etc.) more information than I wanted. I have had information actively pushed (actively as in the server gives a speech and expects you to listen) on me to a greater extent than I would have liked. But that's different. I can't see why anybody would mind having stuff explained on a piece of paper. I also don't think there's any shame in not knowing what grower Champagne is. Even if you're a well-placed full-time food writer, there's going to be nomenclature that for one reason or another you missed. That has nothing to do with the point here, though. The more important question is what do you do when you run into nomenclature that's new to you, or that you think will be new to many members of your audience? Do you just ridicule it? That's kind of lame -- it's a pretty low-level move. Especially if you're the critic for the New York Times, you should at least Google it and run it through Dow Jones or some other news search. If you do that, for starters you'll see the thousands of uses of the phrase "grower Champagne" stretching back a decade. Then you can decide whether you should be ridiculing Varietal for using well-established terminology.

It's tantamount to writing: It might have been cute to write that. In 1994.

There's a big difference between nitpicking and explaining the obvious.

Boy--that's a stretch! To me it's the plain meaning of what Bruni wrote. So, not even remotely a stretch. Whether or not Bruni knew what the term meant, he wrote in such a way as to imply that he didn't. So, as I mentioned above, he's either being disingenuous or he's surprisingly ignorant for someone who dines out ten times a week in New York and is nominally the world's most important dining critic. If by "widely accepted" you mean everybody in the English-speaking world knows what it means, of course not. It is, however, a standard term on fine restaurant wine lists, in wine shops and in the media -- mainstream media like Time, not just the professional or niche media. It's not the least bit surprising for restaurant wine lists to contain explanations, annotations and other educational materials. That's a good thing. To summarize: 1 - Varietal didn't invent the phrase "grower Champagne." 2 - Varietal is not alone in using or explaining the phrase "grower Champagne." It appears on restaurant wine lists from Houston to Melbourne. 3 - The term "grower Champagne" appears in mainstream media ranging from Time Magazine to the Asbury Park Press to the Hartford Courant. 4 - Given all that, it is ridiculous to attack Varietal for using or explaining the term "grower Champagne." 5 - Bruni either knew what "grower Champagne" meant or didn't. (Here we're talking about before he read about it at Varietal; needless to say, he now knows what it means.) a. If he was already familiar with "grower Champagne," why did he imply that he learned about it at the restaurant? b. If he didn't know about "grower Champagne," he should have. Or, at least, he should have sought to educate himself and establish the term's usage and relevance before ridiculing it. c. Again, what he wrote was: d. I suppose it's possible the he was just really sloppy about conveying his reality, however given that his intent was clearly to demean Varietal he should have taken at least some care to be clear and correct.

The question is would that theory survive a blind tasting? I imagine merlot or cabernet would be different enough to notice, but I wonder if a pinot noir from somewhere else in the world would be a detectable substitution. If cooking does indeed remove the subtleties, what we're left with is likely to be the same whether it's California, New Zealand or Burgundy pinot noir. It depends how valuable the wine is. If you're drinking $10 wine, there's probably no reason to open $5 wine for cooking. If you're drinking $100 wine, it seems a waste to pour a third of a bottle into a sauce -- especially if the objective reality is that there is no discernible difference. Were there a discernible difference, the question would become one of how rich one is. If there's no difference, the question is how stupid one is!

If I'm reading various sources correctly, the way the "zero waste" systems accomplish their "100% efficiency" is by running the waste water into the hot water line. In other words, for drinking and cooking you're only using cold water. So the cold water gets treated by the filter, creating 1 gallon of waste water per 1 gallon of purified water. That 1 gallon of waste water gets cycled into the hot water system, and is used for things like washing dishes, where it doesn't matter that the water contains impurities. So, the claim of zero waste and 100% efficiency is not meant to say that the system produces no waste water internally, but rather that no water is sent out of the system and down the drain before being used.

The reverse osmosis system I've seen from Costco, which costs $239, is marketed as "zero waste," which is what I meant by 1:1 (one gallon in, one gallon out). Maybe it's some sort of phony thing, but that's what they say: http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?...topnav=&browse=

John, I was sort of with you (I think you fail to give grower Champagnes their due, but I believe your factual statements were accurate) up until you said "I believe Bruni was right to use the grower Champagne menu to make his case." I can show you wine list upon wine list from restaurants all over the world that use that terminology. There's nothing pretentious or weird about it. It's just standard language used to describe these wines. Just a few examples from restaurant wine lists: t'afia restaurant, Houston, TX, USA The Chef's Table, Newcastle, DE, USA Church St Enoteca, Melbourne, Australia

I kind of like the taste of prune juice and would be fine drinking it simply chilled over ice, however I think if the goal is to cut through the flavor one of the best mixers would be pineapple juice.

Indeed, last year (or was it the year before), The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion was named Cookbook of the Year by the James Beard Foundation.

It depends how you define dying. Certainly there are more restaurant reviews now than ever before, and more people reading them. If there is a death, it's more of a dilution or heat-death type of phenomenon. First, the importance of any single review or reviewer is diminishing -- even the New York Times critic, who is far and away the most important American critic, is losing relevance. Second, the form itself is collapsing in on itself, because pretty much across the board it has lost touch with any real sense of purpose and is instead governed by irrelevant agendas. This is so much the case that the people who would make the best reviewers aren't interested in the job -- just try to get a top tier food writer to take a reviewer position; why do you think the Times has to turn to company men like Grimes and Bruni? Now, if you want to define posts on internet message boards and blogs as reviews, you start getting into a different discussion.

Sam, are you sure this isn't a figure for treated sea water? I think the reverse osmosis filters sold for light-duty purification of tap water essentially produce 1:1.

Given how much money restaurants make on bottled water, it's probably hard for them to justify cutting into their own sales. I love the idea of restaurants improving their tap water, but I'm not hopeful about immediate widespread adoption of the practice.

True, but at the same time the good wine was cheap. According to William Sokolin's investing book, Liquid Assets, 1961 Petrus came on the market at $10 a bottle ($120 a case).

Excellent thought, Bud.

Three data points in the discussion of the death of the restaurant review: 1. In 2005, Steve Cuozzo, the restaurant reviewer for the New York Post (and also the paper's executive editor), announced that the Post would no longer be publishing restaurant reviews and would instead focus on news, trends and multi-restaurant comparative pieces: Mr. Cuozzo began by saying: His primary argument (though probably not his strongest) was that restaurants are too ephemeral to review with any accuracy: He also takes a swipe at the "myth" of reviewer anonymity: 2. Also, when Ruth Reichl was in the eG Spotlight, she said the following about Gourmet magazine: 3. And, for what it's worth, in the introduction to my book, Turning the Tables, I commented:

Bruni says: For me the issue with the grower Champagne swipe is that he takes the swipe at Varietal, and implies (perhaps intentionally) that this terminology may even be Varietal's creation, when in reality the phrase grower Champagne enjoys widespread use and is standard language in the food-and-wine world. Use of the term grower Champagne is about a decade old. It was the big wine trend in, oh, 1998 (Terry Theise brought his first nine grower Champagnes into the US in 1997). For example, Richard Nalley wrote an article in Esquire's December 1998 issue titled, "Champagne with Indie Cred: The hottest french bubbly follows a trail blazed by microbrewers." The article says, among other things: and Time magazine reported on the trend in the year 2000, in an article titled "Grower Champagnes." Time magazine, people. This is not some obscure wine-geek trend. This is mainstream information: Grower Champagnes are something to be celebrated, not ridiculed. Yes, the term lacks elegance, but Varietal didn't invent it, as any reader of the Asbury Park Press or Hartford Courant should know (both papers have written about it). I could go on and on listing non-ironic uses of that terminology in the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle . . . even the New York Times, in this story by Jacqueline Friedrich from 2000: ("Choice Tables: Savoring Champagne, Reveling in Foie Gras, in Reims," 12 March 2000) So I can't tell whether Bruni's comments are disingenuous, ignorant or just out-of-touch and behind the times.

I'm pretty sure the Wells WB-2 is a regular waffle maker. In any event, there are regular waffle makers out there that conform to commercial specs and cost hundreds of dollars, e.g. this one from BigTray. I just wonder if they're any good.