Fat Guy

My primary adaptation/contribution to the effort has been to stop caring about the temperature of food. Once you get past that issue, a whole world of room-temperature dining opens up. Some foods normally consumed hot are actually kind of interesting cold, for example a grilled cheese sandwich, cold, is not the same as a normal cheese sandwich at all. Not only is it different, but it is also different from a grilled cheese sandwich an hour ago. Indeed, it has many different stages of its life. For example, after it has been sitting in front of the TV for two hours while you've been trying to get the baby to sleep, if it happens to be in front of a drafty window, it takes on a patina similar to a caterpillar's cocoon-building efforts. There are also interesting permutations of trying to reheat and reconstitute a cold grilled cheese sandwich. I don't recommend the microwave. I thank our son for helping me to acquire that and other important gastronomic information.

I'm not sure why the fine-dining reviewers review steakhouses at all, however since they all do they should have a good technical comprehension of steak. I'd say they all underperformed. True, they don't have the luxury of Steingarten's seventy-gazillion-word space allocation, however in 1,000+ words it should be possible to present a thorough brief on why a particular steak is great and still have, say 600 words left for everything else. And it's not hard. The critics have just not bothered to do it. They've failed to instruct on the most essential point. That said, my reading of the excerpts above is that Reichl said it best. For one thing, Reichl's is the only example that even gets the mineral point, which I think is by far the most important aspect of first-rate dry-aged beef. Her "fine, funky, mineral aroma" is spot on -- I think Steingarten would agree that's a technically correct description. Whereas, when Bruni says "crunchy, tender, smoky, earthy," that's not particularly illuminating -- it has little to do with the salient feature of a Peter Luger steak, which is the unique flavor of that meat as opposed to what's true of any old broiled steak. I don't even get what he means by earthy -- I think he's either wrong about that or made a bad word choice -- and smoky is also misleading. Heck, crunchy is kind of a weird choice too, since Peter Luger puts a lot less char on its steak than the average steakhouse. But even if his description made sense, it would be pedestrian. It's the difference between one critic (in the Reichl position) describing Pouilly-Fumé as "smoky and flinty" and another critic (in the Bruni position) describing it as "white, liquid, poured and sipped." For another thing, Reichl is operating within the parameters she sets for herself as a critic. She's technically well-informed but strives for non-technical presentation, instead opting for an experiential account. I think she does that very well indeed. Her excerpt is really the only one that evokes much of anything -- it gets the point across. Also if critics are going to bother with steakhouses, they should conceive of their writings as a body of work. They should, early on, spell out the criteria for great steaks, and they should keep hammering those criteria home through the whole unfolding series of steakhouse reviews: here's one that gets it right, here's one that doesn't, here's one that caused me to question or expand the criteria. I think the best move, however, is to have steakhouses handled separately. Once a year, go around to all the top contenders and do a roundup: start with a discussion of criteria, move on to a couple of paragraphs on each place, put them in some sort of rank order. It's the sort of thing Ed Levine is better at than most of the actual restaurant critics: he really gets out there, does a ton of comparative tasting and presents his findings in a pretty compelling manner.

I need to know how to get my chocolate NOT to look all wrinkled like that!

John, at any fine dining restaurant in the US the term plancha refers to a specific piece of cooking equipment and "a la plancha" refers to something cooked on that piece of equipment. A plancha looks exactly like flat stainless steel griddle that every greasy spoon in America has, except its surface is chrome plated and the build quality of the units tends to be high because they're considered prestige items. For some reason planchas seem always to be six square feet. I believe Spain was the leader in introducing this technology, which is why chefs in France and the US call it by a Spanish name. While the attention of late has been focused on sous-vide equipment as the technology of the moment, the plancha is also an important piece of modern kitchen equipment. It allows wonderful minimalist preparations, especially of fish. Ed Brown of the SeaGrill in New York has achieved great results with the plancha, and the Alain Ducasse Formation (the Ducasse culinary training center) emphasizes the plancha as an important tool. I'm not sure I'd say the chrome plating imparts a particular taste. I think it's more that the chrome plating over a thick steel or aluminum mass allows a certain kind of result. If you sautee fish in a skillet you bring the skillet and a lot of fat up to a high temperature, and when you add the fish the temperature of the pan drops. On the plancha you maintain a constant medium temperature across the surface. I've heard the effect described as "gently toasting" the fish. The flat surface also makes it easy to put a long spatula under a delicate filet and flip it whole. There's actually a Ducasse-published book of plancha recipes, with the silly title Plancha Mania. It's not yet available in English, but here's the French synopsis: http://www.bief.org/?fuseaction=C.Titre&Tid=16112&language=F

I've noticed that across many categories I prefer to make my own blends rather than buy things blended by others. For example: - I'd rather have many different spices, and use them in combination to season chili, than use a blended chili powder. - I'd rather have several different types of frozen vegetables than use a packaged "vegetable medley." - I'd rather put together my own set of cookware than use the set a manufacturer sells. - Similarly, knife sets -- they're the worst. All those useless knives in the set are like the green peppers you have to pick out of the vegetable medley. You know what I'm saying?

Cook's Illustrated did some work on button mushrooms a few years back and started pushing high-temperature roasting as a great way to bring out deep, earthy flavor in button mushrooms. It really works.

While searching for something else today I saw that Frank Bruni did a "Critic's Notebook" piece on this phenomenon in September, titled "Making It There Before They Make It Here." He makes a number of interesting comments, and one of his main conclusions is right along the lines of what we're talking about here: "many of the chefs and restaurateurs who can best afford to open here — to take the gamble — are those whose food and concepts have already made them saints elsewhere. They’ve gone through out-of-town tryouts." There's also a warning that perhaps New York's center of the American culinary universe status will be challenged: He also catches a few examples we missed, like Koi (originally LA) and Japonais (originally Chicago). Definitely worth reading.

Which brand of seasoned salt do you use?

When you reconstitute dried mushrooms, you're basically creating two things: reconstituted mushrooms, and mushroom-infused liquid. The longer you soak the mushrooms, the more flavorful the liquid becomes and the less flavorful the mushrooms become. Almost all directions I've seen for reconstituting specify 20-30 minutes (pour boiling water over mushrooms, let soak while the water cools), except for mushroom broth directions which can say to soak overnight. This all raises some additional questions: - In a braised dish, or any dish where there's liquid, where you add both the mushrooms and the liquid, does soaking time matter very much? - Indeed, if you're braising a dish for several hours why bother soaking the mushrooms at all? Why not just add them dry to the braise? - There must be a point in the osmosis process when the flavor stops coming out of the mushrooms. I wonder, if you soak mushrooms in mushroom liquid, will you be able to reverse the osmosis and put more flavor into the mushrooms?

I don't know that today's business models and practices of high-end restaurants would support a scenario where a one-star restaurant becomes a four-star restaurant. But 30 years ago, it's easier to imagine.

Leonard, I don't think the issue of expertise is as clear cut in the culinary arts as it may be in a field like music. Sheraton was referred to uptopic as a culinary professional but I don't believe that's the case, unless you define a food editor as a culinary professional (as the IACP does). I guess she did some work for Restaurant Associates, but I think it was in a research-type capacity. It doesn't really matter one way or the other, though. Professional culinary training is relevant to becoming a chef, not to becoming a critic. Until recently there haven't been academic (as opposed to vocational) programs about food, and they're not all that relevant to restaurant criticism either. The restaurant critic is a self-taught creature. The subject matter is mastered primarily through experience, secondarily through research, and also to some extent through relationships -- Bryan Miller being a good example of that -- though these days relationships with culinary professionals are looked down upon at the Times. So it's not so much that Sheraton had more expertise than Bruni according to some set of codified standards. It's just that, for her time, she knew a heck of a lot more about restaurants than Bruni does for his time. In addition, she came to the table with extensive culinary journalism experience. And really, it seems utterly amazing to me that the Times would ever hire a restaurant critic who has zero experience as a restaurant critic or at least as a serious culinary journalist. It's the Times, not some local paper in the middle of nowhere. But I'm easily amazed. Put it this way: were she the critic for some free newspaper handed out on the subway, or a blogger if such a thing were to have existed in the '70s, I would care very much what Mimi Sheraton had to say about restaurants. Whereas, I don't think anybody would care at all about Frank Bruni's restaurant opinions -- except perhaps as a sought-after walking-tour guide to Rome -- were he not the reviewer for the New York Times.

Logic dictates the rumor is false, because there is no eating contest in which Bruni could defeat me. I think there's a pretty simple reason why Bruni took the job: it's fun. And I think there's a simple reason why the Times offered it to him: they wanted a company man in the position. The same thing happened with Grimes. His appointment was, I believe, backlash against Reichl's independence. Then, after a few boring years of Grimes, I imagine the powers that be wanted to bring in somebody with a bigger personality. But it seems that during the search process -- again, I've never seen evidence that job offers were made, just heard that several other people were considered (Bill Buford, Julian Barnes, and wasn't Michael Bauer rumored to be a candidate?) -- they realized that's not really what they wanted at all, so they once again turned inward and chose a top-notch generalist reporter with a history of dedication to the Times. Bruni is certainly having fun, unfortunately it's at the expense of the public, the industry and the cause of excellence in dining.

For what it's worth, McInerney won the MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award (that's the most coveted Beard Award) for his piece on Ducasse in Departures, and wrote a similarly impressive piece on Jean-Georges in New York Magazine. I wouldn't be so quick to write off his wine writing as irrelevant -- it has plenty to do with food. He's also a serious gourmet, bon vivant and "scenester." His fiction reflects this as well. He knows the New York restaurant culture extremely well. Not that there has ever been conclusive evidence presented that they offered him the job, but certainly there were talks.

I think the American inferiority complex about food extends even to most of American cuisine's defenders. I would caution against assuming that most European culinary traditions are as old as most Europeans want to think they are, and I'd also suggest that 1492 was a long time ago, as was 1776, especially from the standpoint of culinary history. There were also Native Americans here before then, and several of our culinary traditions derive from them.

Yes, Bruni wrote the New York Times bestseller "Ambling into History." He's truly a first-rate journalist and writer. He's just not a good restaurant reviewer.

Currently I think Eric Asimov has both qualities as does Mehan. ← I think both Asimov and Meehan are strong writers, and Asimov is also super-genius-level in intellect, and of course they're strong on food, but they're not at the Grimes or Bruni level as writers. Either Grimes or Bruni could easily, under the right circumstances, win a Pulitzer or something on that level. Bruni actually was a Pulitzer finalist when he was at the Detroit Free Press. And did you read Grimes's chicken story? He's also quite brilliant as a book reviewer, I think. He just wasn't a particularly good restaurant critic, though he did grow a lot in the job.

I have no idea where he was on any given day, however it's worth noting that he has a G5 at his disposal. The world is a whole lot smaller when you have a private jet. You can be in London for lunch and New York for dinner no problem.

Yes, I don't think it's necessarily sensible to divide frozen produce into good and bad. It all depends on purpose. In general, where a fresh, crispy-crunchy textural snap is very important, frozen is not going to cut it. But that still leaves open a world of possibilities for just about every frozen vegetable.

They have three stores: SOHO 482 Broome Street Corner of Wooster SoHo, NYC 10013 212-226-9463 UPPER WEST SIDE 2492 Broadway @ 93rd St New York, NY 10025 212-721-9999 HUDSON VALLEY at Rivendell Winery 714 Albany Post Road New Paltz, NY 12561 845-255-2494 http://www.vintagenewyork.com/homepage.html

Okay, it's just confusing because the title of the linked page is "Vancouver's Top 10 Restaurants."

So neither West nor Lumiere is one of Vancouver's top ten restaurants?

I also think the question is confused by the fact that Grimes and Bruni are such good writers in general. The old-school critics were not necessarily at that level. But they were much better on food. Ruth Reichl is probably the only Times restaurant critic who was at the very top of both the writing and food-knowledge heaps.

Interesting. I tend to avoid the blends. What do you use them for?

If I had to guess (and I hope somebody will do a statistical analysis -- word counts are given for post-1981 Times articles in the search results pages) I'd say it's more like 20-30% more space for the average review (as opposed to 200-300%), but that the most important feature reviews, such as the four-star reviews, still have equal space to past reviews (or maybe a little more). I also agree that Bruni wastes space and could in many cases cover a couple of restaurants at a time while being as or more effective, however I think the better approach to multi-restaurant reviews is definitely the modern one, where restaurants are thematically connected rather than just randomly reviewed in the same place (though the Bar Room - EMP connection was a weak choice). In this sense, I think book reviews are a good model. And, as I've said before, it would make a lot of sense to implement a third review, for mid-priced restaurants. This could be done for little or perhaps no additional cost.

Vintage New York does and is allowed to. They're able to operate under a different set of regulations, because all the wines they sell are produced within the state. Also, there are several places that integrate wine shops with food shops pretty closely, though they're technically two different stores. Visit Stew Leonard's in Yonkers to see this arrangement in action.