Fat Guy

I concur with that statement, however I'm not aware of Parker having any professional wine background. I haven't studied his biography in detail, but I thought he was a liberal arts major in college who went on to get a law degree and work at a Baltimore bank. I believe while he worked at the bank he got some names from local wine shops and started sending a wine newsletter around to a few hundred people. He's now of course preeminent, but I get the impression that he started out as the 1970s print equivalent of a blogger. Frank Bruni came to the table without any credentials but he's now quite an experienced diner. Restaurant reviewers should be judged on what they write, not on some abstract set of qualifications, especially when there is no such thing as a degree in restaurant reviewing (or, if there is now one being offered by some "food studies" program, it's surely a joke). Culinary-school education is even more irrelevant to critics than it is to chefs. It's not clear whether non-kitchen experience in the restaurant business is a net negative or positive. (Whereas, experience working in a professional kitchen is most likely to give a reviewer some good perspective.) Dining experience is helpful at the beginning of a reviewer's tenure, but after a few months on the job, dining out ten times a week, systematically, in New York, the Times critic is by default one of the handful of most well-dined people in the city. Until Frank Bruni became the Times critic, I had infinitely more experience of the New York restaurant scene than he did. At this point, he has infinitely more than I do -- in reading his recent year-end roundup piece in the Times I found that I had been to a laughably small percentage of the restaurants he mentioned. So at this point, he has plenty of experience. He's just not a good reviewer.

This is the passage you'll find on pp. 116-117 of Turning the Tables: So anyway, all I'm saying is that Chodorow is hardly the first person to challenge Bruni in public. That's three print examples, not to mention all the online stuff (again, probably read by quite a few people), and we could probably go on like this all day. There's certainly no originality or bravery on Chodorow's part here. He's not even the first restaurateur to try this ad strategy, though the last time I recall it happening was, I think (someone correct me if I have the details wrong), when Warner LeRoy took out an ad to respond to William Grimes's review of the Russian Tea Room.

I didn't say it was read by more people than Chodorow's ad in the Times. The implication above was that nobody has publicly made these arguments before. That is certainly incorrect. But Keeler's piece is just one print example. Another from my haphazard collection of Bruni clips: "Restaurant industry veterans are perplexed that such an influential post has been granted to someone sans a formal culinary background." (New York Press.) There's also a page on this in my book, for however many reads that's worth (approximately 108) -- I'll try to find it in electronic form and paste it here. Or they're being read by the same 2,500 people again and again on various different web sites. ← That's actually me clicking 2,500 times.

A critic shouldn't "represent" anybody. A critic should represent the cause of excellence in cuisine.

I was referring to both print and online media, for example Janet Keeler did a piece shortly after he reviewed Masa and noted that many people question Bruni's qualifications -- and even made the same point as Chodorow about Bruni being Rome bureau chief. Still, I think you may be overestimating the number of people who will read the last paragraphs of a single advertisement at the back of the Times dining section, and underestimate the number of people who read online sources. Weekday New York Times circulation is about a million copies (1,086,798 for 2006). At least three New York Times writers have told me that the rule of thumb they use (because there's no way to be sure) is that about 10% of that audience (about 100,000) looks at the dining section on a given Wednesday. Then you have to remove from that figure all the people who don't make it to the review, and all the people who won't notice the ad, or won't read far enough to get to the qualifications point. (There may actually be more people reading Bruni's reviews online than in print, however Chodorow's ad only appears in the print edition.) The many and varied online critiques of Bruni have surely been read by more people than that. So I hardly think they're somehow non-public.

Finally? Publicly? Chodorow's page of incoherent, self-indulgent drivel makes no points that haven't been made a thousand times before. But really, the qualifications issue is a bit of a red herring. Frank Bruni is a failure as a critic because of what he writes and fails to write in his reviews.

This isn't the first time a restaurateur has purchased an ad to respond to a review. The newspaper must be laughing all the way to the bank.

In the most of the best restaurants in France, at least the ones I've been to, it's standard practice for the chef to make an appearance in the dining room towards the end of the service. Not everywhere -- Ducasse rarely appears even when he's in the kitchen -- but in most places. On our first trip to France as adults, when we had the resources to dine at this level, we found the practice charming and hospitable. In the case of La Cote St. Jacques, mentioned by markk, our visits from both Lorains (father and son) led to us extending our stay at the hotel and enrolling in the cooking classes they teach there -- and dining at the restaurant for breakfast and dinner several days straight. But the chefs in France who do this tend to be true artisans, often running family businesses with long traditions of community involvement. Their ventures are commercial in the sense that they try to make money, however that's just the baseline. In the average restaurant -- in France or America -- the chef is the guy who runs the back of the house, and I don't have any overwhelming desire to meet him or her. Indeed, I'd rather not be forced to. If it's an exceptional meal, though, I might ask to. So, sure, I'd always welcome a visit to my table by, for example, Susur Lee -- I loved his restaurant, and the experience was indeed enhanced by his table visits and our kitchen visit.

Warning: do not go to New Green Bo too early in the day. We had our first-ever unsatisfactory meal at New Green Bo today. On account of various scheduling concerns, we went at 11am, right when the place opens. The scallion pancakes were pale and saturated with oil -- presumably because the oil wasn't hot enough. The rice cakes were also underdone and totally white. The fish tasted like the last of yesterday's mise-en-place. Only the dumplings hit the mark -- they tasted the same as always.

Sneakeater, Upstairs actually got me thinking about Cafe Gray. I realized that all these attempts by haute-cuisine chefs and restaurateurs to fashion non-luxury dining experiences fall into two categories: out of touch, and in touch. The problem with Cafe Gray is that it's out of touch -- out of touch with Gray Kunz's audience, and with the restaurant's time and place. Maybe there's some subset of the population that likes that combination of ambiance, price and food, however I get the feeling that even the people paying to eat there and enjoying it would prefer a different formula. Upstairs, for its part, seems totally in touch with its audience and with its time and place.

The coffee, bread, wine and service deficiencies (though I thought the service deficiencies were minor and no worse than many an experience I've had at the luxury dining level) are all easily remedied and are not cause for alarm in an 18-month-old restaurant. The no-reservations policy cuts both ways, and fits well with today's young professional lifestyles where advance planning is extremely difficult. I've not yet heard about anybody waiting hours for a table -- it seems 30-45 minutes is the norm, which is no big deal. Tightly scrunched tables are hardly unique to this place -- there are plenty of much more expensive restaurants where you're packed in plenty tight, and some folks seem to like that kind of energy.

I agree that much of the food is recognizably Bouley food. This does not, however, mean that identifying it as such would be the basis for a confident prediction that it came from a Bouley restaurant. There's Bouley food being served all over the city and all across North America. He's one of a handful of the most influential chefs in the world, having mentored generations of up-and-comers. When Brian Bistrong was at Citarella, I recognized Bouley food there. I'd be very interested to see you dine at Rafael Gonzalez's place in Vancouver with that blindfold on. Most of these disciples, like Doug Psaltis, have layered subsequent influences over the Bouley influence, but almost unanimously they'll tell you that David Bouley is one of the world's greatest chefs. He's often referred to, appropriately I think, as the Joel Robuchon of America (he trained with, among others, Robuchon and Giraret, but Kunz is the Girardet of America -- though Bouley is Connecticut born and Kunz is Swiss by way of Asia). David Bouley has been at this a long time. Since he started at Montrachet in 1985 and spearheaded the TriBeCa restaurant revolution, he has been an amazing force. From 1987 through 1996, when the original Bouley restaurant was in business, it was widely thought to be one of the best restaurants in North America, if not the best for several of those years especially the early 1990s. To me, the most startling thing about David Bouley's cooking, tasted today, is how absolutely contemporary and alive it is. I can think of no other chef who, more than twenty years after establishing classic status, is still on the cutting edge in every way. Upstairs is a telling illustration of this phenomenon. It feels to me like the restaurant of the future. I don't see it as "three star food in a no-star setting" -- that sort of obsession with stars, unfortunately ubiquitous in New York restaurant discussions, utterly misses the point of Upstairs. This is post-star dining. The setting is exactly what it wants to be -- it's targeted at a specific, young, downtown, sophisticated audience, and they don't see it as a "no-star setting." They see it as the way they want to eat in this millennium. They'd rather be in that setting on any given night than at Per Se. David Bouley has tapped into the main artery of the downtown Gen X plus Y foodie culture. Every chef from Vancouver to Virginia needs to visit Upstairs to see the restaurant of the future done right. Last night, Jim Pechous was working the pass. He dates to the original Bouley -- that's the spelling they gave me -- and his title is chef de cuisine. Flanked by two assistants and backed by a diswasher, he cooked most every sauce and plated most every dish except what came out of the sushi bar. Having dined at the various incarnations of Bouley dozens of times, I can say with confidence that Chef Jim channels Bouley with uncanny accuracy. There were minor service hiccups, if you measure service by inapplicable standards. Upstairs has a decentralized and relatively egalitarian service model that inserts the customer into the action. Again, it's startling how young everybody is -- it's as though David Bouley has found a fountain of youth for restaurant staff. Everybody working there has immense regard for David Bouley, but it's not the cult-like worship one sees around Charlie Trotter or Thomas Keller. Bouley is a more tragic figure -- he's a human chef, he's the Mets to Keller's Yankees. He inspires a different kind of loyalty. The greeting was friendly. We were told it would be about half an hour and that we could wait in the bakery or on the floor below where they have a few seats. They sent us away with a cocktail menu and a few minutes later a bartender came by to take a drink order. They have a few good beers, sakes and sparkling wines -- more than sufficient for the purpose, though not by any means a fantastic list (as mentioned uptopic, the wine list sucks and has no good bottles in the $30-$40 range, where it should have 20+ good bottles given the restaurant's approach -- someone needs to revamp the wine program). Communication between floors was accomplished by enthusiastic young servers running up and down and keeping each other updated. We got the best table in the place -- the corner overlooking West Broadway and Duane -- a wonderful perch for three people. The menu is large, which is impressive given how small the kitchen is and how much a la minute cooking goes on -- every sauce made to order, very few prepped items visible. Anybody who can man this kitchen, well, man who can catch fly with chopstick can do anything. We asked our server if Jim would just cook for us and, after clearing it with the chef our server said sure. We started with a plate of blue point oysters with three sauces, all very restrained so as to enhance rather than ruin the oysters. Next, four shrimp in a wonderfully bitter and peppery broth with radicchio. The most beautifully cooked piece of cod in a semi-smooth pool of peas, with little bits of what might have been prosciutto. A huge scallop served over brie cheese with currants -- a combination I've never experienced before in an haute dish and hope to experience many more times. The one misstep: an overcooked piece of caraway-crusted swordfish with brussels sprouts. I get the intended point of the dish but it wasn't successful at making it. Recovery with a small lamb chop and three slices of loin with potato puree, zucchini-mint sauce and the best lamb demi-glace I've ever had (though I think it might have been demi-glace in name only -- it tasted like it was possibly a straight reduction, though I'm not sure). Then some desserts, not fabulous but good, especially a chocolate mousse brulee and a fruit soup with lots of chunks of citrus in it. They charged $75 for the tasting. They'll only do it if they're not slammed, and the price isn't firm -- you've got to be flexible. Lousy coffee and, much to my shock and chagrin, a very poor bread service. What's up with that? The bakery downstairs makes some of the best bread in town. They should be taking much more advantage of that situation. A bountiful, diverse bread basket is a no-brainer.

Brian Bistrong, one of the most talented young chefs in New York (a disciple of Gray Kunz and David Bouley, formerly at Citarella's restaurant and now at the Harrison), was recently interviewed by New York Times critic Frank Bruni. The interview is here. One of the questions Bruni asked Bistrong was "Which three cooking tools or gadgets are your favorites?" First on his list: "My Gray Kunz cook's spoon." I initially thought maybe this was a token that Bistrong had claimed from Lespinasse (many of the former Lespinasse cooks have souvenirs; even I have one, an apron with a small gray "GK" embroidered on the bottom). But then I thought maybe it was an actual retail item. I googled for "Gray Kunz cook's spoon." Nothing. A little while later, unable to sleep with this issue unresolved, I debated calling Bistrong at the Harrison. I decided I'd spend five minutes on Google and then call him if I couldn't solve the puzzle. As luck would have it, a search for "Gray Kunz spoon" brought up a JB Prince product, item number U715, as the first result. The proper name of the product turns out to be the "Gray Kunz Sauce Spoon." It costs $9.70 and appears to be a large stainless-steel spoon. The description is "The perfect size for saucing plates. Heavy stainless steel, 2-1/2 tablespoons. 9" overall length." There is also available the "Gray Kunz Small Sauce Spoon. The perfect size for saucing smaller plates and more precise saucing. Heavy stainless steel, 1-1/3 tablespoons. 7-1/2" overall length. $5.50." I suppose when you eschew squeeze bottles and you sauce 300 plates a night with a spoon, it makes sense to have the exact right spoon for the job. I sauce about one plate a week, so I may not be purchasing one of these. Then again, if I'm near JB Prince and I have twenty bucks burning a hole in my pocket I may not be able to resist getting one of each. Would I be the first eGullet Society member to do so? Or does anybody else possess these spoons? Pray tell.

BeeZee: totally; and that trend managed to infect pretty much all food for awhile.

Correct.

Crosnes Nettles Fiddleheads

I can't for the life of me understand all the griping about the room. What more could one ask for? To me it's one of the most beautiful restaurant spaces in the country, it now looks better than ever without the intrusive hoops around the original chandeliers, and I don't find the size bothersome -- I don't even find it relevant. I think it's great that the restaurant now has a chef who has the talent to equal the room. When it comes time to write the history of Eleven Madison Park, I hope it will be the story of this wonderful room becoming, in every way, the restaurant it deserves to be. That said, I think we're still midstream in terms of the development of Eleven Madison Park under Daniel Humm (pronounced "whom," by the way). There's no question in my mind that the cuisine at Eleven Madison Park is vastly improved (which is not to say I don't miss the pea flan and a few other dishes). There's also no question in my mind that Humm is a talented perfectionist with a broad command of contemporary culinary techniques and a nuanced sensibility when it comes to flavors. He has done so much with the restaurant and the menu, the primary focus should be on his accomplishments. The secondary focus should be, I think, on what remains to be done. First, an excellent pastry program is an absolute necessity -- and right now it simply falls short. Nicole Kaplan's wonderful desserts were probably not appropriate for the new Eleven Madison Park, however the restaurant needs to find someone of her caliber who does pastry in a style compatible with Daniel Humm's. That, or the current pastry chef needs to ramp it up quite a bit -- certainly there were enough excellent components scattered among the four desserts we tried to indicate that there is talent in the pastry kitchen, but it needs to be focused. The restaurant would be wise not to be lulled into a false sense of security by its now-prix-fixe formula. With dessert included in the menu price, there's no immediate market-based feedback, however I doubt many people would be ordering dessert at Eleven Madison Park at, say, $16 per dessert right now if given an a la carte choice. Dessert is the grand finale of the meal. If it's not great, too many people will walk away with a negative impression. Currently, it's not great. A more serious cheese program would also be appropriate for the new Eleven Madison Park. Second, service is still not fully re-tooled for Humm's style of cuisine. Everybody we interacted with this evening was warm, courteous and competent -- I liked our server, which counts for a lot -- however the team still needs to pull together into a service team for an haute-cuisine restaurant. Eleven Madison Park used to have the ideal service for the kind of food it was serving in the relaxed style of that incarnation of the restaurant. But the rules of the game have changed. The kitchen is putting out a whole lot of plates, the cuisine is complex and the whole attitude needs to be more serious. There's a way to be personable while still maintaining the requisite level of rigor. The Modern has this down in its formal dining room. It may very well be that a price increase to bring Eleven Madison Park on par with the Modern is the way to handle this: right now the Eleven Madison Park menu is $76 and the Modern's is $85. I'd hate to see higher absolute pricing, and that $9 may not seem like a lot, but it might give the restaurant a lot more cash (and gratuity basis) to play with in order to finance a more seamless integration of the back and front of the house, not to mention a bump up in portion sizes (not so much for the purpose of more food as for being able to do more with the compositions), thus offering better value despite a higher price. Third, I hope Daniel Humm will start giving more thought to the notion of a unique selling proposition. Right now he's demonstrating a range of virtuoso talents. I'm convinced that Daniel Humm can cook everything, that he is a master of every technique. But to what end? I think the approach could use some editing. Because right now, I'm not really sure how I'd describe the food at Eleven Madison Park without resorting to a dish-by-dish description. And as good as I think just about every dish is (or at least the nine menu items and assorted amuses I've tried), in the end I want to go to restaurants that distinguish themselves -- that offer me a package I can't get elsewhere. A few notes on specific dishes: I thought the foie gras torchon came the closest to the style I hope Humm will adopt across the board. The torchon comes on one plate, and there's a separate dish of foie gras brulee. There's also brioche served on another plate. The dish takes time to work through and offers much in the way of counterpoint. I agree with many of the comments here that have noted that the prix-fixe menu items are mostly like tasting-menu items not actual appetizers and entrees. The foie gras torchon is an example of how to do a great regular-menu dish in Humm's style. Another favorite was the marinated hamachi with foie gras -- the very thin slices of foie gras are hidden under the hamachi. The hamachi and foie gras combination works even better, I think, than eel with foie gras or tuna with foie gras (two fish-and-foie pairings that have enjoyed popularity in the past few years), I think because hamachi is a full-on fish experience as opposed to meat-like seared tuna or eel. So it's both a good match and an interesting contrast. There's a $20 supplement for the "gnocchi of la ratte potatoes with Hawaiian prawns, leeks and black truffles," which I fear may lead too few people to order this amazing dish (we didn't order it -- the kitchen kindly sent it out as a mid-meal taste). Gnocchi have become ubiquitous, and ubiquitously mediocre, of late, but these are way out ahead of the pack. They're texturally textbook, and the prawns, with their firmer but also soft texture, cut into chunks similar in size to the gnocchi, add a multiplier of interest to the dish -- as do the truffles. Finally, I'll add my voice to the voices of everyone else who has praised the Four Story Hill Farms poularde with truffles and butternut squash. The flavor of every ingredient is intense, and the plating artful. Now how about doing it with a whole bird rather than a tasting portion of boneless breast? I also really like that you can order any two (or three if you go up $12) savory dishes from the prix-fixe menu and they'll size them appropriately. So, for example, if you want the sturgeon as your first course you'll get one size portion and if you want it for your main you'll get about twice the portion (though in absolute terms all the portions are rather small). I didn't take advantage of that arrangement, but it's good to know it's available.

Don't tons of people pour grease down their drains anyway?

That may have been true of an earlier generation of disposals, and may be true of cheap ones today, but the good disposals they make now don't have any trouble with artichokes. I know that when the InSinkErator people demo their disposals at trade shows they run corncobs, potato peels, rib bones and artichokes through them. I guess it's just easier to ban them all than to require good ones.

There are many culinary advantages to living in New York City, but there are disadvantages too. Small kitchens, in general, are a pain. But perhaps most annoying, for me, is the difficulty of acquiring an in-sink garbage disposal. Most apartment buildings simply won't allow them. I think at some time they were even against code, though I believe that changed awhile back. I know a few people who have them, usually in violation of the building's rules, but examples are few and far between. The justification for no-disposal rules is that, in an apartment building, the consequences of a clogged drain can be significant. I wonder, though, is the evidence against these devices at all compelling? Don't they create a puree that's easily drained? And isn't it actually more likely that a solid chunk of drain-clogging debris will get down a normal drain than one equipped with a disposal?

In the end I decided to cook it whole, en papillote. Unfortunately, after devoting much attention to deciding on an approach, and after clearing off the bottom shelf of my refrigerator, the guy who was supposed to drop off the haddock called to say the road conditions (congestion, slush) made it impossible for him to get to me yesterday. There will likely be an opportunity for a repeat one of these days, though.

It's kind of big -- I'm rearranging the refrigerator as we speak -- but I have the same 30"-size range that most Americans have. The oven accommodates a 30-pound turkey so it should be able to accommodate an 8-pound fish, right?

I'd really like to avoid cutting it up. I think it will be more special to cook and serve it whole. I imagine that means it will have to be cooked in the oven somehow. Salt crust sounds interesting. We did it once in a cooking class in France but I don't actually remember how to do it anymore. I'm just wondering if haddock is going to be flattered by that preparation. It's such a delicate, subtle fish that maybe en papillote is the way to go.

Our DCS range has been totally reliable since we got it, now almost a decade ago (I think). Nothing has ever gone wrong with it. It's very sturdy and at the time cost less than comparable pro-style Wolf, Thermador, etc., ranges. I read somewhere that Gray Kunz has two of them in his home kitchen. http://www.dcsappliances.com/index_flash.php

Let's say an 8-pound day-boat haddock (gutted, head off, but otherwise intact) from Chatham, MA, USA, shows up at your home and you need to cook it for dinner. Suggestions? (Edited to add: I'm in an apartment so no smoking, and I don't have a poaching vessel large enough for this fish)