Fat Guy

My two cents: kashruth is to a large degree binary. Something is kosher or it isn't. The spirit of the law doesn't really enter into the equation. One should be careful when viewing ancient ideas through modern lenses. Montesquieu, writing in the 18th Century, is coming at things from a modern perspective. The laws of kashruth, for their part, are decidedly un-modern. Indeed, orthodoxy rejects the notion of reasons for the laws of kashruth altogether -- it's about obeying the law, not finding the reasons behind the law. Thus, if one were to say that, historically, pork was a high-risk food because of trichinosis, but that this is no longer a threat, and that Jews should therefore be free to eat pork because the law no longer has its underlying justification, no orthodox person would find that argument the slightest bit compelling -- you'd just be demonstrating ignorance by trying to argue it, because it's beside the point. Orthodoxy is likely much more concerned with the issue of mistaken appearance. For example, although there may be some sealed, packaged items in conventional fast-food restaurants that are kosher (an individual package of carrot sticks, whatever) most orthodox people in North America and Europe will not be seen eating in a McDonald's or the equivalent because of the fear that, if an identifiably Jewish person is seen dining at McDonald's by ignorant people, they might assume McDonald's is kosher. (In Israel and one or two other countries, where they have actual kosher McDonald's restaurants, the situation is a little different.) At the same time, there is a lot of ignorance about food out there. For a long time, mayonnaise was rarely seen in observant Jewish homes because it looked like dairy. I think most Jews just thought it was dairy. They didn't join online culinary arts societies and start topics "What's in mayonnaise?" They just made an assumption and probably didn't think about it very much. You still see vestigial suspicion of mayonnaise in Jewish culture. It makes some people uncomfortable. Take, also, the example of margarine. If you're going to say, oh, I won't eat tofu cream cheese with a meat meal because it just feels wrong, you're going to have to address why every orthodox person in the universe seems to use margarine as a butter substitute in a thousand recipes. The way I see it, if the Orthodox Union certifies Bacos as kosher, you have to be more orthodox than the Orthodox Union to say that's not good enough.

I do think there's a point at which consumer behavior becomes exploitative, however neither of those scenarios strikes me as remotely so. I mean, if there's some desirable garnish on a buffet item, and a person takes 100 of that item, eats the garnish and discards the rest, that's just bad faith behavior. In such an instance, I think it's entirely reasonable for the staff to step in and ask the person to leave. If, however, the staff is requiring that patrons only engage in a narrow set of behaviors, yet is advertising an all-you-can-eat buffet, that's just dishonest. I suppose if the restaurant provides a list of rules in advance, people can look at that list and decide whether or not they want to dine there. Otherwise, the implied promise is that you really can eat as much of whatever you like within the bounds of reasonable behavior. I should add, I've never encountered this problem. I can, on a good day, be a pretty scary buffet customer. Yet nobody has ever been anything but supportive. Maybe I'm choosing particularly good buffets, but my experience has always been that the staff encourages me to eat and enjoy. I think the first time I experience an all-you-can-eat buffet with an anti-enjoyment attitude, I'll find it quite unsettling.

John, thanks for starting this topic. I especially agree that the overall meal experience is something that not only transcends food but is also highly personal and, I would add, often tied to a moment in time that will never be repeated. 2006 was not one of the greatest eating years of my life. The birth of our son, PJ, saw to that. Nonetheless, I managed to have more than a few wonderful and in some cases unique dining experiences. Roughly in chronological order: In January for the first time I was on a panel at the 92nd Street Y ("Restaurants from the Inside Out"). I'd love to say I thought it was no big deal -- I do it all the time! -- but growing up with the 92nd Street Y as a cultural icon, and having attended dozens of events there as both a child and an adult (indeed, our child is now in the "Mini Park Bench" group there), I must confess it was pretty humbling and a bit overwhelming to be up there with Calvin Trillin, being interviewed by Leonard Lopate, talking about my book. But far exceeding that experience was the fact that Dave Scantland ("Dave the Cook") paid a surprise visit from Atlanta in order to attend the talk (rather, he manipulated a business trip to coincide). And he made reservations for the following night at Alain Ducasse at the Essex House. And he had conspired with Ellen to make sure she arranged for my mother to babysit. And Janet Zimmerman ("JAZ") was in town as well, and joined us. I'd like to say it was the best meal I ever had at Ducasse, but it wasn't -- it was the second or third best. It was surely the most pleasant and meaningful surprise, though, and among several other excellent dishes we had one dessert that was the best souffle I've ever had in my life and, I'm pretty sure, that any of you have ever had in your lives: pear souffle with Bartlett pear compote and beurre sale/caramel ice cream, executed with such elegance that even a died-in-the-wool souffle hater would swoon. Yeah, it was a good souffle. Alain Ducasse at the Essex House just closed -- New Year's Eve was the last service -- and will be reinventing itself at the St. Regis hotel later this year. I'll be interested to see what happens. At the end of January we had the Fourth Annual eGullet Society Asian Lunar New Year Fundraising Dinner & Year of the Dog Celebration at China 46 Restaurant in Ridgefield, NJ. What can I say about China 46 that hasn't been said a million times here already? I won't pile on, but I feel lucky to have this place in my life. And it was at that meal that I started my brief friendship -- all relationships with him were by definition brief -- with Matt Hassett ("M.X. Hassett") who died tragically at age 22 that summer. In early August, I flew out to the eGullet Society Heartland gathering, arranged by tammylc, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The dinner, prepared by a group of members, was great, but that doesn't count as a restaurant meal. For lunch, however, we ate at Monahan's fish counter in the market downtown, and that was a fantastic experience. Not only is the fish at Monahan's great, and not only are the french fries even better (I think they toss them in butter or something outrageous like that), but we got to eat standing up around stools and a counter piled with tasting plates that I got to share with several of my most favorite people in the whole world -- I won't name names lest, for example, Kris Yamaguchi ("torakris") feel embarrassed. At the end of August we spent a week on Cape Cod with my sister and her family. We had many memorable meals, but none more memorable than our final meal (yes, we went there more than once) at Bobs Sub & Cone when Bob himself posed for a photo with PJ. The account can be found at the end of this eG Foodblog post (I was the designated blogger that week). I'm surprised that only Ulterior Epicure included Sushi Yasuda on his list. Every meal I've had at Yasuda has been just wonderful. I can't think of a year, no matter how well I ate, where a meal at Yasuda wouldn't have ranked near the top of my list. 2006 was no exception. A meal there in September reminded me of many of the reasons I love Sushi Yasuda -- I presented them here. In October, we took a road trip that touched on, among other places, Ohio and North Carolina. A few of my most memorable 2006 meals occurred on that trip. In Massillon, Ohio (it's near Canton, which is about an hour south of Cleveland), our friends Eddie and Lori introduced us to the best breakfast restaurant in memory: the Cameo Grill. Though I couldn't shake the feeling that we might get our asses kicked by bikers and mill workers at any moment, the breakfast food was so amazing that we went back almost every day during the week we spent visiting the area. In Cleveland, I spent time in the kitchen with the inimitable Annie Chiu of Sunluck Garden -- I was doing research for a forthcoming book on Asian restaurants. The food at Sunluck Garden is great, but this particular memorable meal was elevated by the fact that it was the staff meal, served after the lunch service, and I got to sit with a couple of cooks who spoke little English. All my life I had seen staff meals served in Chinese restaurants and wished I could be a part of them. I finally got to do it and the experience didn't disappoint. In Charlotte, North Carolina, I got to eat at the student-run restaurant at Johnson & Wales, where I was giving a talk. This isn't a restaurant open to the public like the Culinary Institute of America restaurants. Rather, it's an internal teaching operation and the customers are the Johnson & Wales faculty. So, most of the fun of the meal was getting to dine there with Peter Reinhart (the brilliant baker and pizza maven who is a professor at J&W) and Kathi Purvis (the brilliant food editor of the Charlotte Observer) and be served by the students. The food wasn't a revelation by any means, but it was a great experience. Finally on that October trip, on Oak Island, where PJ's godparents have a beach house on the Cape Fear coast, we had fish at the creatively and memorably named Fish House restaurant. This was a gritty, local place attached to a not particularly nice looking motel and marina. And it was just one of the most pure, peaceful, honest meals we'd had in ages. Really good fish, simply prepared -- hard to beat. Crap, I only have one slot left, so I'll fall back on an old magazine editor's trick: there's a six-way tie for tenth place! That would be between Ellen's birthday dinner at the Modern, the amazing Chowder Dinner at Beacon, Danny Meyer's book party at Hudson Yards featuring food from all the Union Square Hospitality Group restaurants (even "mini Shack burgers"), a particularly good meal at Sally's Apizza in New Haven CT, a preview tasting of Casa Mono's entry in an international cooking and wine competition, and a media lunch in New York prepared by chef Scott Boswell of Stella restaurant in New Orleans.

I don't believe Johnny's book is coming out this year. I think it's scheduled for 2008.

For me it's a close call, because my records aren't entirely accurate, but it's definitely one of these three, in chronological order: When I first started drinking wine in earnest, as a law student, I got turned on to Terra de Lobos Ribatejo, from Portugal. Ellen and I had spent a couple of weeks in Portugal the summer after our junior year in college, and we got hooked on the cheap and tasty table wines that were starting to hit the international market around 1990. At the time I was able to get it for $4.99 a bottle from K&D, my local wine shop. For several years I went through a few cases a year -- it was what I drank with meals, what we served at parties, and I never hesitated to open a bottle even if I was only going to drink a glass because I knew it got better after a day and if I didn't finish it then I could always cook with the rest -- before moving on to something a little more complex for my house wine. For what it's worth, Wine Spector gave this wine 86 points in 1992. I noticed recently that this wine was available, with a spiffy new label, for $7.95, so I think I may try to grab a bottle to see how I view it now. The grape, formerly named Perequita, is now called Castelao -- same grape, they've just renamed it. The wine that got me through much of the mid- to late-1990s was Notarpanaro, from Dr. Cosimo Taurino. Parker said some really nice stuff about it at one point. I loved this stuff dearly. It's from Salento (Apulia), and I believe back in the day it was a mixture of mostly Negroamaro with some Malvasia Nera, though when I looked up a recent bottling it seemed to be 100% Negroamaro -- perhaps it varies year to year. The most notable feature of this wine is three years in oak, and a heck of a lot of complexity for $11 -- though now it's more like $15. I need to grab a recent vintage and see how it's doing. Finally, for the past 8 or 9 years, the house wine here has been Argyle Pinot Noir from Oregon. We visited the winery in maybe 1999 and fell in love not only with the wine but also the people there, particularly the winemaker Rollin Soles, whose career we've tracked and written about in a number of places. Having a connection to the vineyard, winery and winemaker enhances every sip of this wine for me. We keep a range of Argyle bottles on hand. We get half bottles shipped from the winery -- I don't think you can get them any other way -- and we have many full bottles of three different Pinot Noir bottlings from recent years (right now the basic one is $22, the reserve is $35, and there's a super-special bottling for $70 that we crack open maybe once a year). We also have a couple of Argyle Chardonnays and a couple of sparkling wines around, but we primarily drink the red. At $22 this isn't exactly everyday wine for us, but we don't drink wine at home every day. Maybe a bottle or two a week, plus a case here and there for a party. Although, I haven't bought any this year because Argyle sent like six cases of wine over for my book party in 2005 and most of it didn't get consumed -- there are still about eight bottles in my closet. No you can't have them. And a reflection: I've long felt that there was value to getting to know a wine really well. I mean, I'm not a wine expert. I don't drink a ton of wine. But I love wine. For me, that love is enhanced by repeated encounters with the same wine over a period of years -- different vintages, different bottlings, paired with different foods, on different special occasions, and in the case of Argyle we've even on three occasions tasted barrel samples at the winery. If I know the winemaker and/or have been to the place, it deepens the connection. I mean, I certainly have less breadth of wine experience than the average person who posts online about wine. But I probably have more experience drinking Argyle than any professional wine writer, sommelier or most anybody else who doesn't work at Argyle. So, when I drink that wine, I think I have a different experience of it than somebody on his first, tenth or hundredth bottle. For me, it's an old friend. I know him well. Next person?

I suggest you get a copy of the original Elegant but Easy Cookbook. Published in 1960, it would of course have been written in the late 1950s -- and many of the recipes are really good.

I can't comment regarding microwave popcorn because I always make popcorn on the stovetop. (It requires more attention but I really enjoy doing it and I think it tastes superior.) What I can say with great confidence is that different brands and packages of popcorn offer very different results, and also there's some batch variation within brand. There's also no correlation (or maybe even an inverse relationship) between price and performance. Almost without exception, if you have access to popcorn in bulk format, that will be the best -- you'll have the fewest unpopped kernels and the flavor will be nice and fresh. In general, the worst is anything in a jar or can, and that means almost all the most expensive brands. In the middle are the bagged brands, like if you can get Goya or Jiffy Pop in a one-pound bag (the same kind of bag you'd get garbanzo beans in) that's going to be very reliable. So, I can only assume that there are performance differences among microwave popcorn brands as well. There may be technology differences having to do with the bags or oil (I suspect more oil in one brand could explain better popping), but there are also surely differences just having to do with the kernels themselves.

You bet I do. But I've never been served a dish in a weird or uncomfortable sequence there. The dishes pretty much come out in waves, two or three depending on the size of your order, in about the same sequence as they appear on the menu. I'm sure if you dined at Bread Bar 50 times (I'm sure I have, in fact) and you ordered Goan avocado salad and pulled lamb naanini, you'd get the avocado salad first and the naanini second all 50 times. That's exactly how it should be. Likewise, I'm sure if you asked for that order to be reversed, you'd be accommodated. The only thing I don't like about Bread Bar's default sequencing is that they bring all the breads first. So the one thing I do to game Bread Bar is I often wait to order bread after the first plates of food hit the table.

I think it works fine as an interesting food concept. I wouldn't want to eat every meal that way, but twice a decade at Susur it's fun. It's kind of a nightmare for wine, though.

Reinstated.

Membership revoked.

Mark, I'd almost always prefer it at the very end of the savory part of the meal, for two reasons: first, because it's almost always the richest, fattiest savory course; second, because of its affinity for sweet wines like Tokaji. K8memphis, you've got to try Susur in Toronto. The whole progression of the savory part of the meal is inverted. They start with the largest meat portions and end with the smaller seafood servings that most places would position as starters.

When you go to New Green Bo or an equivalent Chinatown restaurant where they use the avalanche method of service, you can purchase enough food to feed four hungry people for about $35 (or for $52 you can purchase enough food to kill them). Meanwhile at, say, Spice Market, there are individual dishes that cost $34 and $36, and a party of four is likely to spend $200+. It's not like you're getting a discount for this crappy service. You pay just as much as you'd pay to eat at a restaurant that serves your courses in order. Also, while I do find some sequencing to be overrated -- and indeed I think foie gras is served at an illogical point in nearly 100% of fine-dining meals -- I also think there is value to sequence. Cold, raw and mild before hot, cooked and spicy just makes a lot of sense to me as a means of avoiding palate fatigue. There's also the relationship with wine -- while I'm a recently outspoken opponent of obsessive pairing, I do think the general progression from lighter to heavier foods and wines makes sense. And sure, if you just put all the food on the table, you can eat it in whatever sequence you want -- if you don't care about the temperature of your food. But there's a difference between all at once and random order. Random order sucks.

You can sort of win that fight, however what happened to me when I tried it a couple of years ago was: - Our server tried desperately to convince us that we hadn't ordered enough food to make up a sufficiently diverse and filling meal for ourselves; - We stupidly replied, "Well, then, we might order more later"; - Every time he returned to fill a water glass or anything, he asked if we wanted to order anything else -- this started before any food even arrived; - When we ordered more, he was visibly uncomfortable, presumably because his manager or someone in the kitchen was going to hassle him about turning the table and two-stepping the order; - The other people I was eating with, who were typical conflict-averse citizens, eventually became uncomfortable too. And really, I thought our server was a genuinely nice, well-meaning guy. He was clearly carrying out the restaurant's policy and just trying to make it work. So there wasn't even any perverse pleasure in torturing him.

Does it really even require any special training or extra staff to get the food out in order? Doesn't it just require a coherent plan?

I can live with it in Chinese restaurants, because it's a when-in-Rome (China?) thing, but I definitely prefer at least a little sequencing to a Chinese meal and will often submit the order in two stages -- most restaurants don't mind that (though I hasten to add that if you try that at Spice Market or Asia de Cuba they'll say, "We need your order all at once."). I've actually found it to be more of an issue in non-Chinese Asian restaurants, though. Most Chinese places, even the ones in the Chinatowns that cater to a lot of Chinese, have adopted at least the notion of starters and mains (in an actual Chinese home, at least in my experience, EVERYTHING comes at once -- at once, as opposed to in random order), and that has also been my experience during the very little time I've spent in Asia. But there are plenty of Vietnamese, Thai, etc., places where they really do just bring stuff, so a little bit of forced sequencing is helpful. I prefer not to have a million things crowding the table at once, getting cold before you have a chance to try most of them.

When Hal Rubenstein mentioned this in his review of Spice Market (both Spice Market and "66," another of Jean-Georges Vongerichten's restaurants, serve this way) he used the term "sequenceless."

Am I the only person who finds this practice incredibly annoying? It seems that more and more restaurants are opening -- especially the small plates and family style places -- where they refuse to let you determine the order in which your food will be served, or even to tell you the order. Rather, "The dishes come out as they're ready." Give me a break. I first experienced this phenomenon at Asia de Cuba, a Geoffrey Chodorow-owned restaurant in New York, in the 1990s. In 2001, I wrote the following about another Chodorow project, Tuscan Steak: I thought for sure by now this trendlet would have died out -- surely, I thought, people won't stand for this for very long -- but it actually seems to be expanding. So, from here on in, I refuse to eat at any restaurant that serves food in this manner. Unless someone else is paying.

Totally anecdotal and with no scientific evidence or explanation: 1 - Most contemporary China seems to be made with much more durable processes than older China -- it seems to be designed not to allow the crap to be kicked out of it by a dishwasher. 2 - Silver trim seems to be more durable than gold trim. 3 - I would strongly recommend that you never wash older China in the dishwasher, especially if it has gold trim -- I've seen many, many examples of such China with most or all of the gold washed off.

What did you think of it, Ray?

I remembered that one thing, knowing some day it would come up. Now I plan to forget it. I found this online source, sort of a general chemistry reference: http://antoine.frostburg.edu/chem/senese/1...by-volume.shtml If I understand it correctly, it agrees with me. In answering the question, "How do I calculate percentage by volume of a solution containing alcohol or any other liquid?" it says: I never realized that temperature would make a difference to this sort of computation, so long as everything is liquid -- I'd have thought the ratio would remain constant throughout the phase, but I guess the 60-degree regulation says otherwise.

If I remember correctly from chemistry: when you're calculating alcohol by volume, the volume of water isn't part of the equation at all. The only two variables are volume of alcohol and volume of total solution: it's just volume of alcohol over volume of total solution times 100, right?

Per Se or Ducasse (when it reopens) would be super-desirable targets for enforcement. There's not much that makes prosecutors and enforcement bureaucrats happier than taking down a few overprivileged people in order to demonstrate that nobody is above the law. Would it be a uniformed raid? Probably not. More likely an undercover operation culminating in a press release, penalties and such.

Same here, dude.

I think there may be some confusion here regarding what a culinary trend is. The cupcake explosion seems the very definition of what such a trend is generally understood to be. That's why I could go on all day long citing report after report of increased cupcake sales, new cupcake bakery openings, etc., pretty much every one of which points to Magnolia and Sex and the City as the core trend marker. That's why if you ask someone like alanamoana, who works in the pastry-and-baking business, you won't hear a moment's hesitation at declaring that this is the trendy thing of the moment. Nobody is saying Magnolia invented the cupcake, and of course Magnolia and several other places were driving a cupcake trend before Sex and the City took it global. Sure, we know there were plenty of cupcakes all over the place before all that. Perhaps they were especially popular, for example, in the Midwest or Texas or California. But if you take something that's popular in a few places, and all of a sudden it becomes popular everywhere else and starts ratcheting up in price and concept, you're looking at a trend phenomenon. It doesn't quite make sense to say, "Oh, we always did it this way in the Midwest, therefore the fact that sales have increased a villion percent across the country isn't really a trend." It would be like denying that there's a cocktail trend now, because, hey, I've been drinking mint juleps since before you were knee high to a grasshopper. Some more citations: http://www.gazettetimes.com/articles/2005/...food/food01.txt http://www.boston.com/ae/food/articles/200...ut_the_cupcake/