Fat Guy

Now that's a spoon.

You know, Kim, this discussion is making me wonder whether I actually like rotary graters. I do think my Zyliss rotary grater was a huge step up from the piece-of-crap flimsy steel paddle-shaped grater I was using before. But I think I need to investigate the various improved graters that have come on the scene since then. I know I acquired a microplane or three awhile back but I'm not even sure where they are. I've also seen some other interesting models while surfing around, and I'm intrigued by the one Dave linked to, and I'm remembering various graters I've seen in people's homes. For example, awhile back I remember admiring this Bodum grater at a friend's house.

Robyn, I think you've established your street cred on the adult entertainment scene. I'll try to remember to send you my CV as well. But the reason this is interesting is not because it's a gentlemen's club, and not because it's a serious restaurant. It's because it's both. I only know of one other such example, which operated briefly about a decade ago. So, I think that meets the definition of unusual.

More and more, we order in waves at Asian restaurants. It's the easiest way to control the pacing. You don't have to be sneaky or feel awkward about it. Just order some stuff and say, "I'm keeping the menu; we're going to order more later." You also don't have to go in a set order -- you can have soup at the end, or shrimp first. If you go the route of negotiating for a slower pace, your best bet is to find the senior-most manager and approach that person. The servers are not as likely to be able or willing to accommodate you. And definitely, when you show up with a large group, a lot of restaurants default to more of a banquet style service, where they bring the food slowly in waves. I think you'll find that this happens whether or not you're Asian. It also helps to be a regular and have a relationship with the owners. At the two Chinese places where we're regulars, it's a simple matter for us to specify a given approach, request special dishes, whatever. At other places it's definitely harder to establish that sort of thing.

Hard cheese only.

So they use no tomatoes, corn, artichokes, chocolate, peppers, potatoes, coffee . . . . I hasten to add, how many actual Italians do we have posting on this topic?

Since it doesn't say a brand, it's hard to tell for sure who makes it, but I'm suspicious of the $20 price. On Amazon they have a couple in that price range -- Miu and Cuisipro -- and people really seem to have a lot of problems with them. Not that I place a tremendous amount of stock in Amazon product reviews, but these do seem somewhat compelling. I'd have to imagine that a really well made, professional quality, stainless rotary grater would cost $50+. But maybe I'll wander by Bridge and try one of those. It's no huge loss if it sucks.

I'm sort of surprised nobody seems to make a professional quality, all stainless rotary grater. Not even JB Prince has one. I guess anybody grating cheese professionally is going to use a motorized unit. Looks like I'm buying another Zyliss.

What puzzles me is the source of the compulsion to say "That's not Italian." It seems bizarre and exclusionary, especially against the backdrop of a constantly evolving, globally influenced set of regional cuisines. Perhaps it would be helpful for Italophiles to think of North America as an Italian culinary region. There are, after all, something in the neighborhood of 26 million Americans of Italian descent (as in, at least one Italian grandparent, a definition that would include Steven Anthony Shaw, aka Fat Guy, named for my grandfather Anthony Pugliese). That's more than any region of Italy, a country whose whole population is about 58 million. Given all the exchange going on between the Old World and the New -- tomatoes going from the New World to the Old and then returning as part of Italian-American cuisine; corn from the New World becoming polenta; Canada growing much of Italy's wheat; pizza as or more popular in North America as in Italy -- it seems silly to take the narrow, historic-preservation view, especially since the history is ever changing.

One thing I find more exciting about the Upstairs menu than the Bouley menu is that (and this is also true of Momo-Ssam) it cuts across stylistic boundaries. Haute dishes coexist with home-style dishes. There's nobody saying, oh, we can't serve a hamburger, or rice cakes with pork sausage, because that's too rustic. All these things can coexist at a restaurant where the only standard for inclusion is that something be delicious.

Don't know about Bon App, but the letsgel.com mats are advertised in the back of Saveur (page 93 this month). In professional kitchens they use these industrial black rubber honeycomb mats -- now those are really ugly.

You don't have to cover the whole space, just the places where you stand and work most of the time: the stove, sink, and the key countertops where you do most of your prep. It's not toxic to step off the mats for a few minutes. The issue is that when you stand in one place for a long time it really is murder on your feet. We have wood floors in our kitchen (which by the way are pretty soft by the standards of kitchen floors) and our solution was to go to the carpet store. They had many choices of carpeting designed for staircases -- long rolls of carpeting with interesting designs, only a couple of feet wide. I was surprised at how nice some of the stuff was -- you're not limited to stodgy old fleur-de-lys designs on burgundy backgrounds; they have all sorts of solids with borders, mini-checks and other tasteful modern stuff. You can cut them to any length and have the store put a nice edge on the cut ends. The stuff we got has a no-skid backing, but you can also have this put on or you can spray on some stuff that helps the carpet grip the floor. I think it cost us about a hundred bucks to do about 16 feet of the stuff. The gel mats are good for your feet but, in my opinion, they're ugly.

It didn't take the Times three years to cover it. It did take Bruni three years to write a review. But reviews aren't exactly news stories, and timeliness is just one of many factors newspapers look at anyway (a factor that has more relevance to some kinds of stories than to others). It's just as appropriate to review a restaurant ten years after it opens as it is to review it ten weeks after it opens. In this case, the buzz about Robert's has been building for awhile. Bruni has probably been getting letters and hearing from people he trusts that the steaks are really good. He probably discounted it at first, but eventually was won over to the idea of trying it out. Once he was in the door, the story started to write itself. Once the story was on the editor's desk, it was obvious that it was going to be the section-leading material for the week.

I do think there are parallels at least to the Waverly and Sascha pieces, because in those he intentionally departs from the standard review format. However, I think both the Waveryly and Sascha pieces are failures, and the Penthouse Club review is a success. To me, the fact that Graydon Carter owns a place, or that it's a scene place on multiple floors, doesn't justify a cutesy review. I also don't think those reviews were particularly clever, and, worse, Bruni comes across as believing he himself is extremely clever. The Penthouse Club, however, is an envoronment where women come to your table, take their clothes off, give you massages, flirt with you, etc. That's so unusual for a restaurant that, in my opinion, it warrants a format-buster review. If there is a slippery slope, the Penthouse Club review is not nearly as far along that slope as the Waverly review -- so at least we're going up the slope for now.

But Rich, the scandalous aspect is real. It's a steakhouse where women get naked at your table. It's not sensationalism to cover a sensational story or put it on the front page of a section. If a sensational event with public relevance happens in the real world, and the newspaper's editors think it will be interesting, it's fair game to put it anywhere in the paper including on A1. Sensationalism is taking stories and exaggerating them so they're gratuitously scandalous. Putting a first-person account of dinner at a restaurant in a gentlemen's club on the front page of the dining section is just recognizing a great story. It's what editors do.

Side note on Cambodian Cuisine, the construction is not finished. The proprietor was feeling kind of down about it, because he had been promised a January completion, then a February completion, etc., and now he thinks it could be another month or more. I'll keep an eye on it, since I live on East 93rd a few blocks over.

On the narrow issue of positioning/exposure, I can't see it as sensationalism. I think you're using a definition of sensationalism, Rich, that just doesn't have relevance to any of the living/arts/entertainment sections. But even if we were talking about a news section, sensationalism implies exaggeration or distortion, or just plain inappropriate subject matter. Since we're all agreed that the subject-matter is appropriate, where is the exaggeration or distortion? The story and its positioning meet the criteria for how to run a good human-interest story. Oddity, conflict and emotion -- to invoke some of the terms used in ethics-in-journalism discussions -- do not equal sensationalism. They are actually considered justifications for human-interest stories.

Just as it's important for journalists not to inject personal agendas into reporting, it's also important not to conclude that, just because a piece wasn't written the way you wanted it written, it's journalistically irresponsible. Frank Bruni had a range of responsible options in terms of how much attention he could choose to give the dancers at the Penthouse Club. The New York Times editorial staff had a range of responsible options in terms of how much exposure, how much column space, how many photos to give Frank Bruni's review. Everybody, it seems to me, acted within bounds. And in the end we got a deliciously entertaining review and a great piece of writing. I also don't see any agendas. In the context of this article, the sexual orientation thing is more of a disclosure than an agenda. It places everything in context. Surely, if Bruni hadn't drawn attention to his orientation, everybody else would be snickering about it right now. He has nothing to hide, and the piece is more entertaining given his bemused outsider viewpoint. Nor do I see the slightest bit of hostility towards women. Skip right over, for the moment, the controversy within the feminist community about so-called adult entertainment (plenty of feminists are overtly hostile towards strippers -- it's really just the Camille Paglia minority that celebrates these sorts of displays). I would just like to see which sentences people think are hostile towards women. I can't find one. If anything, Bruni feels bad for these women and adopts a moderately sympathetic posture. Yes, he pokes fun of some of them, but that's not the same as hostility -- not on my home planet.

If you say the restaurant is in a strip club, you're not adequately describing the experience of dining there. Strippers and other scantily clad women come to your table and hang out with you. You're expected to have them dance for you, you tip them, you buy them drinks, you make small talk, you get a massage. Failing to cover all that would make for a poor review, and it would make Bruni look ridiculous. I think Bruni handled this one just right. I think it's also important to remember that Bruni is not writing for people who only care about food. He's not even writing for people who are going to eat at these restaurants. Heck, he's not even writing for people who live in town. He is, or believes he is, writing for people all over the world who want primarily to be entertained. He's on stage, putting on a show about the New York dining culture. He actually does a pretty good job of that. He just doesn't cover the food stuff particularly well.

That's one way to conduct this sort of investigation, however it's also possible to do it more along the lines of a medical inquiry: you have a list of, say, six symptoms that point to a given illness, and if a patient displays any four of them you start treatment.

I don't believe so. He did quip, "It won't be long before Hooters has a tasting menu," in a Critic's Notebook piece. P.S. Gael Greene did a small writeup of Hawaiian Tropic Zone: http://nymag.com/restaurants/reviews/insatiable/28489/

Actually I believe a decade or so ago Mark Strausman was the chef at Stringfellow's. Also, not exactly a strip club but related, David Burke is involved with Hawaiian Tropic Zone.

It's too bad the name "Strip House" was already taken.

Frank Bruni didn't open a steakhouse in a strip club. He's a journalist who reviews restaurants. If someone opens a steakhouse in a strip club, you can either ignore it or review it. Given that the chef worked at Daniel, Le Cirque, et al., and is also a competitive barbecue champion (and also happened to be the roommate of my best friend in law school), and that there seems to be an ambitious (by the standards of steakhouses) culinary program in place, reviewing it seems to have been the journalistically responsible move. Then the question becomes the manner of coverage. Rich, I think you overestimate the extent to which anything written about a strip club can constitute sensationalism anymore. Strip clubs are so mainstream at this point that they're barely even worth noting. Maybe it's a generational thing, but I don't consider it the slightest bit inappropriate to speak of these things in mainstream, non-tabloid newspapers. Moreover, Bruni's approach -- intellectual, dry, funny -- is exactly what I'd expect of someone writing in the New York Times or another elite publication. Indeed, when I first read it, it came across to me like a New Yorker piece in attitude and use of various extremely dry sarcastic techniques. Bruni actually writes at the New Yorker level (old New Yorker, before the bottom fell out), just not very often when he's writing about food. The captions, too, are great. And the photos? Come on. They're as tasteful as the subject matter allows. You'll find far more erotic, titillating, provocative photography at most any gallery these days. So that leaves positioning and exposure. This just doesn't seem scandalous to me. It's a great story. It deserves exposure. It's not an attempt to create scandal, it's not muckraking, it's not lurid or vulgar. Yes, it's a step removed from "In U.S. Overtures to Foes, New Respect for Pragmatism," but it's hardly "Headless Body in Topless Bar."

Plenty of gay men are misogynistic, etc., but the wacky blogger was clearly assuming a different set of circumstances, for example: