Fat Guy

It's not possible. The corn used to make those corn chips, even if grown organically, is a human-engineered product, hybridized and industrialized over the centuries. There wasn't a kernel of it growing in the wild at any time in history. I don't even know what "minimally processed vegetable oil" means, but I assure you it's another human-engineered product: the crops are bred by us, and the process of extracting oil from vegetables doesn't involve some sort of grindstone and bucket arrangement; it's a highly scientific process. Maybe the sea salt is relatively natural, though you'd be eating it in quantities unknown to anybody on a truly natural diet. On the question of technology and food, the train left the station a few thousand years ago. It's now all just an exercise in line drawing: how much technology are you willing to accept, and what kind? To me, it seems arbitrary to accept coffee but not Crisco, tofu but not Triscuits. Indeed the whole distinction between natural and artificial products doesn't survive even casual scrutiny.

Right. I want to eat there because, even if I were to accept Bruni's review as far as it goes, it doesn't really address what I'm interested in. At this stage of the development of a restaurant in the true European Michelin mold, what I'd be looking for is potential greatness. And I have no faith whatsoever in Bruni's ability to recognize that sort of thing.

Right, it's almost a given in the traditional Michelin system that even the best restaurants will open at one or two stars, and then earn stars as they go though their first few years. There are a couple of recent exceptions -- I believe Ducasse opened Plaza Athenee to three stars its first year? -- but the standard is slow evolution. I don't think Ramsay is any busier than Ducasse. How many restaurants does he have when you add up all his ventures? I'd be surprised if it's more than Ducasse. Ducasse does less TV than Ramsay, but I think he does much more in terms of publishing, education and consulting. Robuchon's restaurant here is in a different category. It's not a signature fine dining place, as The Mansion in Las Vegas is. It's the equivalent of Spoon in the Ducasse empire. That's a different sort of opening.

That being said, I think the Continental model of a restaurant opening is not the one most likely to be successful hare. What the chefs from over there need to learn to do over here is lower their standards: accept more technical errors at opening, so as to be able to support more complex, exciting food. Swallow their technical pride in order to get the PR bang.

I haven't made it down there yet, however it strikes me that chefs in Ramsay's category -- a category he may only share with Ducasse -- go about opening their signature fine dining restaurants according to the exact formula that most frustrates and confuses American restaurant critics. They start with basics and build on them. They don't start by trying to achieve the wow factor. They try to get the fundamental contemporary haute cuisine dishes in excellent working order, and then they unleash the creativity. They grow into their restaurants. And they don't quite understand the culture here, where wow openings are so highly valued. They think along much longer, Continental time lines.

The amazing thing, to me, is that editors let this sort of thing slip by. I mean, here in an eG Forums discussion, I fully expect that, without the aid of an editor, I'll say three or four really stupid things a day. But a New York Times piece goes through several stages of editorial oversight. Did nobody notice that one of the writers there just said, "Greek cuisine does not, even at its best, ascend to great heights"?Come on, that's when you say to the writer, "Hey, Bill, you're really overreaching here. You either need to justify this statement with something approaching rigor and expertise, or you need to narrow it to a less general claim. But what you're writing here, it's beneath you, us and our readers." Maybe, just maybe, if the claim had been that in Astoria's Greek restaurants the cuisine doesn't ascend to great heights, and if the author had actually eaten in every such restaurant, that could be an opinion worth printing. But has the guy ever been to Greece, and if so to enough regions and restaurants (and homes) to make such a blanket statement about Greek cuisine? Has he done any reading about Greek cuisine? If I have six or seven Greek cookbooks on my shelf, it means there must be a thousand of them out there. Does he have even one? When you consider that Greece is, historically, one of the epicenters of human civilization, it's no surprise that even 2,500 years ago there was a very advanced Greek cuisine on this planet.

I must say I respect your healthy attitude. We lived through a nightmare kitchen renovation in our apartment in a circa 1890 townhouse -- I don't know how long it actually took anymore but it seems like three years -- and by the third day we were hanging on to our sanity by a thread.

A recent New York Times essay by William Grimes, the former restaurant reviewer, was generally innocuous. It was about the food scene in Queens, particularly Astoria and Flushing. But there was one paragraph that struck me as worthy of further examination: Now he does go on to praise another restaurant that serves a different style of Greek food, but that statement, "Greek cuisine does not, even at its best, ascend to great heights," is still out there. I beg to differ with Mr. Grimes. While Greek cuisine may not be one of the four or five I'd put on the short list of the world's top cuisines, and while there is plenty of bad Greek food out there (just as there is plenty of bad French and Italian food), I think Greek cuisine decidedly can "ascend to great heights." I'm wondering if William Grimes just doesn't know much about Greek cuisine. I believe I've mentioned before that one of the best food books to come out in the past few years is Diane Kochilas's The Glorious Foods of Greece, which goes region by region through Greece, exploring its culinary wonders. Dishes like carp roe and fennel patties (from Chios), mackerel stuffed with raisins and walnuts (from Lesvos), savory pastries filled with pumpkin, fennel and cheese (kolokythenies) -- I find it difficult not to take such cuisine seriously. Perhaps he's only ragging on the grilled-fish taverna cuisine of Greece, however even there I think he misses the mark. A beautifully grilled fish is the centerpiece of such a meal, just as it could be at many top restaurants in the world (go tell Alain Ducasse or Mario Batali that a simple grilled or roasted fish doesn't "ascend to great heights") but is by no means its only component. The whole world of mezze, especially the wonderful spreads, is worthy of plenty of respect, as are the wonderful desserts of Greece. Any other thoughts here?

Mark, forgive my ignorance, but is Eater a person?

I'm not sure the 1975 date makes sense. 1975 is when McDonald's opened its first restaurant in Hong Kong. It was already firmly established in the US in the 1950s. Nor was it the first such chain. White Castle dates to 1921. Moreover, people have been drinking Coca-Cola since 1886. My parents, born in 1937, grew up in the 1940s and 1950s drinking soda, eating the same commercial candy bars we eat now, grabbing fast-food burgers in their car, etc. They probably ate fewer vegetables -- especially fresh ones -- that today's kids. I think the baby boomers, who are slightly younger than my parents, are a generation we can examine to see the effects of the modern American diet -- and the news seems to be good. The boomers are incredibly vital as they approach retirement age. If current statistical projections hold, they will push the life expectancy average farther than it has ever been pushed before.

Andrew, I believe there's a difference between corn syrup (like Karo) that you buy in the supermarket for use as an ingredient or topping, and the high fructose corn syrup industrial product that enjoys widespread use as a sweetener. That being said, there are plenty of non-corn syrup products that should make for lovely pecan pies, for example molasses and cane syrup. I don't think high fructose corn syrup is so much cheaper than sugar. Whatever the cost differential, it can't be more than the equivalent of a few cents on a can of soda. Let's say every can of soda went up by 5 cents. I can't imagine that would affect soda consumption at all. Though high fructose corn syrup is a little cheaper than sugar, I think there are non-price reasons why manufacturers prefer it to sugar, namely that it blends better and has a longer shelf life. At the same time, pretty much everybody agrees that sugar tastes better. So if we made a widespread shift to sugar, that would make every piece of sweetened junk food cost a few cents more but also taste better. Perhaps the outcome there would be increased consumption.

I haven't been to Blue Hill in a very long time and still haven't made it to Stone Barns, so I don't have a current view on the food there. The meals I've had at Blue Hill have never convinced me that the accolades were deserved. But I also don't think anybody contends that Mike Anthony was the driving force at Blue Hill (maybe at Stone Barns, I don't know). In any event, the sensibility of his menu at Gramercy Tavern seems to me to be spiritually related more to Daniel's urban contemporary rustic (if I may call it that), with some Bouley-esque sensibilities thrown in (did he work at Bouley ever?) than to the allegedly subtle, minimalist (I call it bland) cuisine Blue Hill has based its reputation on. I think -- maybe we should ask him if he agrees -- that until now Mike Anthony has been working mostly as a journeyman and that this is perhaps the first full-blown independent expression of what he can do.

At the same time, the Danny Meyer influence is powerful even with the most independent critics. Bruni's review of Eleven Madison Park and the Bar Room at the Modern contained clear elements of retreat ("I repeatedly found myself drawn back to the Bar Room, at first just worried, then persuaded, that I'd shortchanged it."). The pressure from readers and even colleagues is enormous when you take on an institution like Union Square Hospitality Group and take gratuitous swipes at someone of Danny Meyer's stature -- a stature that exceeds Bruni's by many fold. So the politics of that situation may force Bruni to consider his reactions more carefully than he has before. It's hard to predict. Happy to engage in further general Bruni discussion on the Bruni topic.

The Katz's salamis, both the hard and soft, are in my opinion the best available examples of those products, however they're not the best things at Katz's. (I slightly prefer the hard.) Presumably they're made by an outside concern for Katz's -- a company like A&H or one of the other high-quality kosher meat-product producers -- but I haven't done the investigation necessary to track it down. I doubt Katz's is making its own salami on premises. With the pastrami, it's also probably made under contract elsewhere, but Katz's adds a lot of value by the on-premises handling: steaming, hand-slicing. The salami is just the salami the way it came in the door.

I think that's going to be a tough sell, Marc. Frank Bruni is positively offended by GT's style of service. It's extremely friendly and familiar. I see it as totally genuine, and I think I'm right about that -- I've socialized "off campus" with a few members of the staff there (including a former staff member who's one of my best friends) and the I've never heard or seen anything to indicate that the hospitality is an act. But Frank Bruni thinks otherwise. If we can generalize from his early review of Eleven Madison Park ("Although the dining room is flooded with those smiling servers, their dance is less a ballet than a military drill, glaringly mechanized.") and from his recent swipe at Danny Meyer for having the gall to display his book at the USHG restaurants (by the way, the display of Danny Meyer's book at Gramercy Tavern is totally unobtrusive, off to the side on a low table -- not glaringly commercial or egomaniacal in the least), he's not going to be receptive to the Gramercy Tavern style of service. He'll focus on whatever technical flaws he sees, and assume it's all fake. He may like the food -- it's going to be hard for him not to, especially after giving Mike Anthony such a strong review at Blue Hill at Stone Barns -- but he could easily latch on to all sorts of other perceived flaws. I can already envision a soliloquy about how the room isn't to his tastes.

Yes, Gramercy Tavern terminology can be confusing, because the restaurant is "Gramercy Tavern" and the more moderately priced front/bar room is the "Tavern" or "tavern" as opposed to the "dining room." The formal dining room offers a $76 prix fixe (three courses plus all the extras you'd expect at a fine restaurant: an amuse bouche, pre-dessert amuse, and petits fours/mignardises) and a $98 tasting menu (seven courses). Those numbers are a little lower than they could be, but certainly not cheap. In the tavern part of the restaurant, however, the price point is firmly midrange. Appetizers range from $8.50 to $13. Entrees are in the $16 to $18.50 range, except for a $24 ribeye steak (which for its size and quality is a good value at that price, considering you pay $39 at most steakhouses today for something not a lot bigger and not likely better, not to mention the tavern ribeye comes with two vegetables, at present roasted beets and grits). Forest, just to be clear, if you dined at Gramercy Tavern last month, as in December 2006, you were eating from the old menu. There were a few of Mike Anthony's dishes added over the course of November-December, but when the restaurant opened in January after New Year's it launched a completely new menu -- I think almost no old dishes have survived. So, it's probably worth another look, even if you liked the menu -- the current offerings are really interesting.

(For discussion of Gramercy Tavern under the former chef, Tom Colicchio, please see here) Gramercy Tavern used to be one of my favorite restaurants. More importantly, it was a restaurant I felt totally confident recommending to other people -- for example, to friends coming into the city for one big meal, perhaps their only splurge of the year. I always knew Gramercy Tavern would deliver, and that people would thank me for the recommendation. Then something happened. Over the past four or five years, Gramercy Tavern started to slip, first in small ways barely noticeable to anybody but a regular customer familiar with the restaurant (I'm particularly sensitive to the vibe at Gramercy Tavern, having spent time in the kitchen as a participant-observer -- my first and only James Beard Award grew out of the story I wrote about that experience), then in more overt ways. In addition, it got boring. Whether all this was because Tom Colicchio, a brilliant chef in my opinion, was distracted by other projects, or because the relationship between Tom Colicchio and Danny Meyer was strained, or because the restaurant just generally moved into a period of complacency on account of good revenues and no motivation to better itself, I don't know. But I stopped going. Then, in September, the news came out that, first, Tom Colicchio and Danny Meyer were getting a divorce, with Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group to retain control of the restaurant surely at an astronomical price, and, second, that Michael Anthony and Nancy Olson would be coming on as the new chef and pastry chef, respectively. Michael Anthony is best known for his work at Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, however before that he worked at many of the top restaurants in New York and France, including Daniel, March, L’Astrance and L’Arpege. Anthony's arrival at Gramercy Tavern continues what I see as a transformation of the Union Square Hospitality Group -- a handing over of the kitchens to a young, exciting generation of chefs including Floyd Cardoz, Daniel Humm and Gabriel Kreuther. I had confidence in Anthony's skills as a chef, but wasn't entirely sure how he'd adapt to the large format of Gramercy Tavern, which I believe can do 300+ covers on a busy night. From September 15 through the end of the year, Anthony worked largely within the framework of the old menu -- a major menu change at a restaurant like Gramercy Tavern, right in the middle of the holiday season, just wasn't an option. On January 2, finally, Anthony's menu was put into play. I've now been in to Gramercy Tavern, both the main dining room and the tavern room, and tried quite a few dishes. Friends, I'm pleased to report that Gramercy Tavern is back. Tonight we had an extraordinary dinner in the main dining room. It felt like the good old days of Gramercy Tavern, but with more contemporary food. If I had to sum up Anthony's approach to cuisine, it would be that he works the flavors of his main ingredients to their logical extremes. So, while his braised beef short rib with red cabbage and puffed potatoes is one of the most richly beefy dishes I've had in years, his "lightly smoked" lobster with fennel puree and pomegranate sauce is one of the most delicate. You'd almost think they came from different menus at different restaurants, except that they're linked by that common sensibility. Anthony's tuna tartare with a salad of sunchokes, radish and beets is just one example of a readily apparent commitment to seasonality that runs through the menu. Given that it's January, it's amazing how much great local stuff Anthony has worked into the menu with total credibility and no feeling of deprivation. Radishes -- watermelon radishes I believe they said -- also work their way into a wonderfully delicate salad of snow crab. The "lightly smoked" approach can be seen in a few dishes, including the Spanish mackerel with scallions, leeks and cilantro, which we were able to grab from the tasting menu, to an appetizer special of the day of lightly smoked trout. These dishes are hot-smoked for just a few minutes to finish them. They have only a hint of smokiness -- not enough to compete with the delicate ingredients; more of a seasoning, a flavor enhancer. A special of venison today was moist and medium rare, just gamy enough to be venison (it's farmed of course), served over some lovely Italian beans. Suckling pig with Swiss chard could have been improved a little bit by being crisped up somehow. An appetizer well worth ordering is the broccoli soup. Yes. It contains sweetbreads, shiitake mushrooms and a quail egg that oozes around all the other ingredients when you break it. In both the main dining room and the tavern room (the Tavern is again one of the great mid-priced restaurants of New York), Anthony is to be commended for his use of sturgeon, a wildly underrated fish that's ready for a comeback. Why isn't there more sturgeon in restaurants? I mean, they're killing plenty of them as part of the caviar business, so what happens to them (I have the same question about what happens to all the duck eggs, but that's for the Casa Mono topic)? They can't all be smoked for appetizing shops can they? Sturgeon as a fresh fish is a meaty, firm yet tender, white-fleshed marvel with a subtle but complex flavor profile -- it's great. In the dining room, the sturgeon is served with salsify, cipollini onions, fingerling potatoes and lemon-fennel sauce. In the tavern it's served with cranberry beans, shiitake mushrooms and a sweet garlic broth. They're two of the best fish dishes going right now. There are plenty of other good dishes in the tavern room, many of which come off the wood fired grill. Grilled sea scallops are served with braised red cabbage, celery root puree and crisped prosciutto. I can't decide whether the rabbit loin and sausage with spaetzle, cauliflower (heirloom cauliflower, no less), roasted chestnuts and apples, or a special of braised lamb shanks is the best dish I've had in the tavern so far. The servers seem psyched about Anthony's menu -- the restaurant has energy like it hasn't had in years. All the other great things about Gramercy Tavern are still in place: a very good cheese program, an eclectic and fairly priced (for a restaurant) wine list, some of the best restaurant cocktails in town and the new vintage beer menu (from which I've only thus far tried two selections -- there's a lot more exploration to be done here). Nancy Olson's desserts are good, but she hasn't come out swinging the way Michael Anthony has. Many of the desserts I've tried still need work. It's a question of the combinations and overall compositions, not the components. Everything I've tried has been technically excellent, especially the ice creams, however the overall effect of, for example, the chocolate peanut butter cake with frozen milk, which I've now tried twice, is too sticky and dry. The desserts I can recommend unequivocally right now are the coconut tapioca with passion fruit sorbet and cilantro syrup (this is also the dessert that seems to fit most seamlessly with Anthony's cuisine), the chocolate coconut tart (an extreme version of an Almond Joy) and, as mentioned before, the wonderful ice creams (especially the rum raisin). And the bread at Gramercy Tavern, still, after all these years, is just not particularly good. I've been complaining about it for something like a decade, and I guess I need to keep it up.

Michael, I'm married to someone who is, by the standards of extreme gourmet omnivores, a picky eater. She doesn't eat pork, or about a dozen other things that are part of the gastronomic pantheon. And we've never had trouble ordering tasting menus in top restaurants. You just tell them your preferences and they deal with it. No big deal. In one extreme example (this one not involving my wife) I dined at Sushi Yasuda with a reporter who was pregnant and not eating any raw fish. At Sushi Yasuda! She called me before the meal to say we should cancel -- she had just found out about her pregnancy -- but I said we should go. After all, she was interviewing me about my book, in which I tell people how to get the most out of restaurants! So, when we got there, I just said to Mr. Yasuda that we'd be having the omakase but that my friend here is pregnant and won't be eating raw fish. He just nodded, said "congratulations!" and served her cooked and vegetarian items. He was totally committed to making sure her experience was as great as that of anyone else at the sushi bar, and that attitude is shared by most of the best chefs out there.

I'm saying the problem of obesity is wildly overstated, that many of the solutions are worse than the problem, and that the medical and weight-loss industries are just as callow and motivated by dollars as the largest, most evil agribusiness multinationals (indeed, they are sometimes just the same corporations hedging their investments, e.g., Nestle buying Jenny Craig, Heinz buying Weight Watchers). Moreover, I marvel at the willingness of so many people to accept the existence of an obesity epidemic as conventional wisdom despite the well-publicized avalanche of evidence questioning every aspect of it. Barely a month goes by that there isn't a story like "Heavy People May Beat Critical Illness More Often" or "Some Extra Heft May Be Helpful, New Study Says" in the New York Times. Yet these reports, and there are many, are simply ignored by those who are invested emotionally (or financially) in the conventional wisdom. They are drowned out by ceaseless repetition of the same old claims.

Yes, it is disputed. For example, in the New York Times article, "The Fat Epidemic: He Says It's an Illusion," Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and the discoverer of the gene for leptin, is profiled. More and more required reading piling up around here.

The stent story has been all over the news lately. This story, "Doctors Rethink Widespread Use of Heart Stents," from the New York Times, is typical: Another Times story, "New Heart Studies Question the Value Of Opening Arteries," reports: Likewise, the oft-repeated claim of a diabetes epidemic is not necessarily accepted by all observers, as noted in the Times in an essay titled "Well-Intentioned Food Police May Create Havoc With Children's Diets." I think a good piece to add to the mandatory reading list is the recent essay in the Times, "What’s Making Us Sick Is an Epidemic of Diagnoses." For each of the above reports, there are hundreds of others that make similar points. I've simply chosen the Times for its relatively strict journalistic standards and web accessibility. It's important to remember that large food corporations aren't the only companies with a stake in the nutrition debate. The pharmaceutical and medical products industries (not to mention doctors themselves) benefit from alarmism concerning public health. The weight loss industry is a multi-billion-dollar venture that includes products, publishing, classes, clinics and resorts. Following the money doesn't always lead to ConAgra. Sometimes it leads to your pediatrician.

But with all due respect, Counselor (and I think much is due), you didn't answer my question - since you brought your "kid" into the discussion, are you going to raise him on a steady diet of Pop Tarts and Coke for breakfast, and McDonald's Value Meals for dinner, with rarely a piece of fruit or a salad? Are you going to set the example for him that food is something that comes from a box with a list of ingredients longer than his arm, or will he grow up eating foods that your great grandparents would have recognized as food? ← I wouldn't want to inflict any aspect of my great grandparents' life on my child, certainly not the poor quality of food available to them as East European peasants. If I could ship them Pop Tarts in a time machine, I'm sure they'd be better for it. We feed our kid a politically correct upper middle class Manhattan diet, but I don't judge those who let their kids eat Pop Tarts. And if it turns out we have a genetically picky eater on our hands, I'm not going to create some insane, dysfunctional, forbidden fruit dynamic where we refuse Pop Tarts only to find out that our son uses his lunch money to buy a box of them at Associated Foods every day. Moreover, as between "sweets" I don't make a huge moral distinction. I suppose a homemade chocolate cake is more "natural" than a Pop Tart, but I don't really care if my kid chooses one over the other. I don't think there's any convincing evidence that, for example, high fructose corn syrup is less healthful than white sugar. You could ban high fructose corn syrup tomorrow and it would just be replaced by white sugar from cane and beet sources, and nothing would change except the price of sweets by a few percent.

Examples of processed, refined foods include white flour and white rice. Surely those are sufficiently traditional as to be accepted parts of respectable foodways or whatever. You know, bread, the cuisine of China, stuff like that.

The claim that we're only living longer because medical science has figured out ways to cure the diseases we're giving ourselves by eating badly is not supported by statistical analysis. Again, from the Kolata piece: "Common chronic diseases — respiratory problems, valvular heart disease, arteriosclerosis, and joint and back problems — have been declining by about 0.7 percent a year since the turn of the 20th century. And when they do occur, they emerge at older ages and are less severe." It may very well be that even if we eliminated all cardiac surgery, diabetes medications and things along those lines, people would still be living much, much longer. Indeed, many of those medical procedures, like bypass surgery and the stent procedure, have been called into question -- there's plenty of information arguing that they may be overused and in many or most cases unnecessary or counterproductive.

Yet there are millions of strong, healthy young adults who grew up eating just that. I know plenty of families -- I mean, middle class people I went to law school with -- whose kids eat almost exclusively processed foods, starting with things like Pop Tarts in the morning, moving on to awful public school lunches, to various convenience foods for dinner, with chips, cookies and other snacks in between. They rarely eat a piece of fruit or a salad. And they're in great shape. Is it the best way to eat? Maybe not. But no matter how much you, Pollan and anybody else believes there's no nutrition in McDonald's food and that soda is going to kill our children, it's not a supportable claim.