Fat Guy

I'm very pleased to announce the appointment of Chris Amirault (aka "chrisamirault") to the newly created position of Director of Operations, eG Forums. In this capacity, Chris will be charged with the operation, organization and growth of the Society's most visible program service. Assisting him will be a team of more than forty volunteers on three continents. eGullet Society Director of Operations Dave Scantland (aka "Dave the Cook"), who has led the eG Forums since 2005, will now be focusing on the Society's editorial content, with a new eG Features segment to launch in 2007. Most recently, Chris spearheaded a major reorganization of the non-regional portions of eG Forums, a wide-ranging platform where Society members gather to discuss food and drink in their many aspects, from preparation to presentation, food processing to food politics. eG Forums, established as eGullet.com in 2001, had outgrown its original arrangement. The new alignment focuses on topicality and searchability, and better reflects the mission of the Society, which became a not-for-profit public charity in 2004. Like all Society volunteers, Chris first distinguished himself as an enthusiastic and intelligent contributor to a variety of eG Forums discussions. He also established the wildly popular eG Recipe Cook-off, a series of interactive cooking adventures where members concentrate on a single dish, trading tips, personal associations and historical facts in the pursuit of wider understanding of cooking and culture. He was appointed host of the General Food Topics forum in 2005, and later assisted in managing the Cooking and Pastry & Baking forums as well. Chris directs a preschool in Providence, Rhode Island, holds a doctorate in cultural studies, and teaches at Brown University. With relish,

Yes, I actually was inspired to start this topic by a buffet meal at Indian Taj in Jackson Heights last Thursday night ($7.99 and several items were quite tasty). I definitely agree that the curry caserole-type dishes do really well on the buffet/steam table. Still, you have to use all the strategies above with the rest of the food. For example, the naan situation has to be monitored, as does the replenishment of the tandoori chicken, and especially those fried potato rounds that are only good for about five minutes after they come out from the kitchen.

I've got to reject completely the notion that Europeans are not wine knowledgeable. Again, we're talking about small percentages here. Americans are incredibly wine ignorant as a whole, but there's a very small subset of Americans with wine knowledge. Europeans are less wine ignorant as a whole, but of course the average European knows less about wine than the average American sommelier. But does the average American sommelier know more than the average European sommelier? Of course not. Does the average American customer at a Michelin three-star restaurant know more about wine than the average European customer? No way. You go to these restaurants, they have massive wine lists, they have sommeliers who are super-educated, they have customers accustomed to drinking these wines. There's no ignorance issue at that level. However, what you will find is that the overwhelming majority of super-educated sommeliers and consumers in Europe just don't go in for, as Sam calls them, micro pairings. They like bottles. They drink wines by the glass at wine bars, not at great restaurants -- not even at El Bulli (aka elBulli), which to me is the example that emphatically disproves any claims that avant garde cuisine somehow requires micro pairings to be enjoyable. Make that claim to Ferran Adria and see how far you get.

If you're willing to waste a little bit of each grape tomato and invest some labor you can make them perform pretty well on sandwiches. You have to square them off a little by creating two facing edges, and then you can slice them lengthwise to get two (or three if they're on the large size) pieces that lie flat. It takes a few pieces to cover a sandwich, but they work and they stay put if they're anchored by mayo, mustard, etc. I think in terms of why they taste good the primary reason is the brix level -- they're just very sweet. But they also do seem to have good tomato flavor, sweetness aside. I do think small tomatoes are naturally sweeter than large ones -- this has been the case since long before grape tomatoes came on the scene, for example cherry tomatoes were always the best of the bad tomatoes in winter, and when growing tomatoes in the garden (at least around here) the little ones always seem to come up sweetest. Right now the ones I have in my kitchen are grown in Mexico, but I think I've seen them from California (and maybe Florida?) at other times of year.

I've seen the strawberry tomatoes but not purchased them. I know Produce Pete recommends them. I think they're grown in Canada. I'll give them a try.

In 1993, when Vince Staten published "Can You Trust a Tomato in January," the answer was no. Back in the day, supermarket tomatoes out of season (and even in season) were awful, flavorless red-colored balls of cellulose. You had to leave these rocks on your windowsill for about a week to make them soft enough to be chewable, but they still tasted like nothing. If you used them routinely, Lee Bailey had contempt for you. Today, it's possible to walk into most good supermarkets and pick up a little plastic box of so-called grape tomatoes. And they're damn good. No, they're not as good as a freshly picked tomato from my father-in-law's garden in Connecticut in August. No, they're not as good as the tomatoes at the Union Square Greenmarket in late summer. But they're good. They're sweet, they taste like tomatoes -- they're a remarkable innovation. I can't place exactly when they came on the scene, but one year they weren't around and a couple of years later they were ubiquitous. And those aren't the only good tomatoes available in January in my supermarket. I just bought a somewhat larger plastic box of multi-colored tomatoes that look and almost taste like the heirloom tomatoes at the greenmarket: orange, yellow, striped, various sizes -- really good. I served them on a platter and my guests were amazed. Grown in Mexico, of course. The brand seems to be "Sunset" and the product is called "Tomato Medley." Of course, there are still a lot of terrible tomatoes in the supermarket too. Like, those tomatoes on the vine just aren't good, and the Campari tomatoes are weak, and the beefsteak and plum tomatoes are pretty much guaranteed awful unless it's summer and the supermarket has a local supplier. It's amazing anybody buys them, when the good grape tomatoes are right there and usually don't even cost very much.

Craig, I'm equally surprised by your position. I was anticipating that you'd be the first to ring in with an endorsement of a more casual, Italianate approach to wine with food, and to join me in railing against anal retentive Americanized wine overmatching, which is probably somehow symptomatically connected to the 100 point scale, Vinovation and other innovations that treat wine as consumer electronics. I love great wine, and I love great food. I probably love great food more than I love great wine, but love them both I do. And I love them together. I just don't think it's necessary to get all crazy about matching a dozen different wines to a dozen different courses. And I think a lot of people who are much more knowledgeable about wine than I am agree, because I'm sure if you study the behavior of the top-spending percentile of wine aficionados you'll find that they almost never order the pairings. Heck they prefer to bring bottles from their own cellars.

I just don't think it would be credible to claim that Americans gourmets are more sophisticated about wine than French and Italian gourmets. Only a tiny percentage of the population of any country is going to have access to the finest wines (not that the finest wines are offered in most course-by-course pairing situations). The question is what level of knowledge does that subset of the population possess? The food-and-wine knowledgeable subset of the European population is super-knowledgeable. We're talking about the people who create much of the world's greatest food and wine, and the people who dine at the finest restaurants in the land. And when you look at those people -- that super-knowledgeable, sophisticated subset of the population that has intimate familiarity with the great wines -- you find that they don't go in for hyper-matching. They prefer to order bottles.

I've got to say, if you live uptown and are accustomed to schlepping down to Chinatown for dim sum, you should really consider giving Cafe Evergreen a shot. Everything I said above has been confirmed on subsequent visits. Today the three kinds of shrimp dumplings were, as usual, the standout items. They were also serving some really nice shredded duck rolls -- that's bits of shredded duck and vegetables rolled in bean curd skin. I also found them to be totally amenable to executing orders for anything they didn't have on the carts, for example I asked for vegetable dumplings and they went back to the kitchen, screamed a few things, and a little while later they brought us an order and added a bunch of orders of the same to the carts. I think that being outside Chinatown they're more accustomed to dealing with customers who don't eat pork, so they have a good selection of non-pork dim sum, such as chicken dumplings, beef dumplings and bean curd crepe beef roll (similar to the shredded duck roll but with seasoned finely ground beef).

In my initial post I mentioned two reasons: first, it's interesting to see how the same wine tastes with different foods; second, it's a great pleasure to live with a wine throughout a long meal and to watch it develop over the course of two or three hours of drinking.

Nor are we talking about the best wines here. It's extraordinarily rare to see a great Barolo as part of a course-by-course by-the-glass pairing, or if you do see a wine of that caliber it's likely to be the only one out of six or more wines. The occasional full-on high-end pairing does come about -- Joseph Nase used to offer some super-premium pairings at Lespinasse, and Andy gave an example of a special £295 per person pairing at Fat Duck -- but it's not the norm. Usually with these pairings the wines themselves are just okay and it's the pairings themselves that are relied upon to provide synergy. So no, we're not talking about the best wines of Europe.

That hypothesis doesn't stand up to cross-cultural comparison, though, does it? Because if we accept that top restaurants in Europe rarely if ever do course-by-course pairings, then we have a large body of "wine people" who don't fit the hypothesis.

Bryan, my experience has differed from yours in one respect. Yes, I have often experienced the limited supply phenomenon, where a ration of lobster tails comes out every half hour and runs out in five minutes. But no, I have not noticed that they don't bring any out until the restaurant is full -- just the opposite, the last time I was at East Buffet (Queens) we went right when they opened and ate our fill off the first tray of lobster without much competition, whereas subsequent trays were descended upon by vulture-like crowds.

John, I'm not sure where you're getting an "either or" vibe from. To the extent I can control what vibe I put out, what I'm trying to radiate is the "gone too far" vibe. I enjoy course-by-course wine pairings on occasion. But take a look at the pushy language you encounter when you go to the wine page on Alinea's website: You're not even allowed to see the list until you read that. Then, when you do click to see the list, they take another run at you: So they still lean on you to do the pairings, even if you order bottles. To me, that's a "gone too far" situation. Especially when you consider that El Bulli itself just wants you to order some bottles of wine. Rich, sorry to make an example of you. I don't think you're really all that crazy. I was mostly just remarking on the coincidence of your comments and markk's on the same topic. One comment, though. Restaurants serve strip and tenderloin together all the time. It's called a porterhouse. And there are plenty of combination dishes that offer two or three cuts of beef together, for example the combination of a steak-type cut and a braised cut is commonplace in high-end restaurants ("sirloin and short rib," "filet and beef cheeks," whatever). More to the point, restaurants other than steakhouses and Craft knockoffs don't just serve you a meat monolith on a plate. Dishes are composed. Look at some menu items from a recent Gramercy Tavern menu: Each of those dishes has many components -- some even have multiple meats (chicken breast, chicken thigh and foie gras . . . what's a matchaholic to do?). Yet I've dined at Gramercy Tavern, I don't know, about a million times, and I've never had the slightest bit of trouble enjoying my meal with a bottle of wine. It's just not such a big deal. As supporting witnesses I call everybody in Europe.

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the same is true of Australia, and of course it happens plenty in Canada -- the phenomenon could easily be something that runs as a thread through the Anglo world (in this instance I wasn't considering the UK to be European). But I wonder why.

So true. I wonder if there's some big national symposium where all the buffet owners get together to present papers. "We rerranged three different test buffets each day for a year per the slides on our PowerPoint presentation. In arrangement 221-C, customers ate 2.9 percent more white rice than in any other arrangement. We are therefore resolved that all buffets in the nation should switch immediately to arrangement 221-C for profit maximization."

The wine-tasting dinner, where you taste a different wine with each course, is a time-honored tradition. But when did it become mandatory? The Europeans who make much of the world's greatest food and wine don't seem to go in for it very much, do they? Yet, in America, you have a restaurant like Alinea where they start arguing the point right on the menu -- you must have pairings, all other approaches will lead to disappointment -- and you have people saying the same wine won't do for a turkey's breast and thigh, or the end and middle of prime rib roast. Which gets back to my question: have we become too matchy? Nobody is saying it's bad to match food with wine, but perhaps we've gotten a bit carried away. I mean, serving good wines by the glass was no doubt an innovation meant to address the situation where Americans no longer drink a whole bottle of red and a whole bottle of white with a meal, particularly lunch. But we seem to have taken it to an extreme that threatens to lose sight of some of the basic pleasures of drinking wine with a meal.

John, I'm not necessarily convinced that avant-garde restaurants are better candidates for course-by-course pairings than reqular restaurants. I mean, that has certainly become the conventional wisdom (to the extent that there can be a conventional wisdom of the avant garde) and the folks at Alinea are particularly committed to that position, but what do they do at El Bulli? Do they even offer course-by-course pairings? I'm not sure I recall ever seeing such pairings offered in a top European restaurant. Is it an American thing? I think there are plenty of versatile whites that will carry through an avant-garde tasting menu. And what do the wine pairings cost at Alinea? A hundred bucks? That means if you have two people you can pick a $200 bottle of wine or two $100 bottles of wine on the same budget. I assume most of the wines they use for the pairings come from bottles that, as bottles, would be at a much lower price point. So for my $200 maybe I'd be happier sipping Clos Sainte-Hune throughout the whole meal.

Two comments on a recent topic, plus some recent restaurant experiences, got me wondering. On a topic about wine for prime rib, markk wrote: "Indeed, a big wine like a Zinfandel might go well with the crusty end-cuts of a prime rib, but if you're going to have a subtly flavored rare, or medium rare inner slice, a subtle, delicate red wine would be the better choice . . ." On the same topic, rich commented: "I can think of no better wine to serve with turkey than a zin. I don't think a pinot stands up to the dark meat at all, though I do think it works well with the breast." Those commets represent the first time I can remember folks suggesting that a different wine might be best for two different parts of the same roast. In the restaurant world, of course, the notion of "wine pairings" -- where, for example, you get a different wine by the glass with every course of a tasting menu -- has become very popular. There is also, of course, a lot of attention devoted to pairings in the literature: long lists of what wines go best with what foods. And I was recently at a preview dinner for an international competition where the victor will be the team that creates the best match of food and sherry. Now, don't get me wrong. I enjoy a great wine pairing as much as the next guy. But have we perhaps gotten a bit carried away here? The wine I drink with thigh meat isn't good enough to drink with breast meat; my wine is only fit to be served with the end cut of the prime rib; I need a different wine (or two) with every single course of my meal? What's next? Five little glasses with each course: drink this one with the interior meat, this one with the crusty edges, this one with the starch, this one with the veg and this one here with the espuma? What ever happened to just drinking a bottle or two of wine with a meal? I mean, back in the day, you just chose a bottle of wine to drink with your meal. End of story. For a bigger deal meal, you chose a white and a red and at some point in the meal you switched from white to red. No, if you just order a bottle of wine and drink it throughout your meal, you don't get the best, most exact, internationally competition-worthy pairing with every bite of food. But maybe you get some other pleasures: you get to see how the same wine tastes with different foods, and you get to experience the evolution of the wine as it breathes throughout the meal. You really get to know that bottle. It's a commitment, not a dalliance. Not to mention, you may stave off the onset of obsessive-compulsive wine disorder for one more day.

Like them or not, buffets are -- at least in much of North America -- a popular means of experiencing Asian and Indian cuisine. They certainly have their advantages in terms of economy and diversity: for usually less than US$10, you get to try as many items as you like (and as much as you like). The drawbacks tend to be lack of freshness (stuff sitting on steam tables for too long) and, often, low quality. To a great extent, however, your fate is in your hands: you may never have an excellent meal at a buffet, but your strategy at the buffet can mean the difference between a bad meal and a good one. As I've been doing research for a book on Asian restaurant dining, I've been eating at more of these buffets than ever before in my life. I started the journey believing that I'd simply exclude buffets from my research, but in town after town it became clear that this form was dominant, and that the real question isn't "buffet yes or no" but, rather, "how do I get the most out of a buffet?" Here are a few of the strategies I've accumulated along the way, with the aim of maximizing quality and value (there are also strategies one can use to maximize healthfulness, though I don't go into those here). Maybe you experienced buffet eaters will have some tips to contribute too (I may use your ideas, if you don't mind). Timing is key. At any buffet there's a life cycle to the meal. The best time to go is almost always right at the beginning of that cycle, because the food will be at its freshest. If the place opens at 11:30am for lunch or 5:00pm for dinner, that's your first choice of when to go. The best situation to be in is one where you arrive and the buffet is just in the process of being set up, so that over the next half hour or so you get to see all the new food come out. Another good time to go is at the peak of the meal service, because there will be the most turnover of food at that time. (A related point: choose a popular restaurant; buffets need a critical mass of customers in order to be able to offer a wide variety of good, fresh stuff.) The worst time to go is towards the end of a meal service, when it's dregs all the way. Seek the high ground. Where you sit can make a big difference to your success at the buffet. If you can, get a table that has a good view of the part of the buffet containing the hot foods. It's also helpful to be close, though for comfort's sake you want to be at least one row of tables away from the buffet corridor. Let the kitchen guide your meal. Flexibility in the sequencing of your meal is essential. It's not about when you want dumplings. It's about when the fresh, new, hot dumplings come out from the kitchen. Sometimes you're going to get your dumplings at the beginning of the meal, sometimes at the end and sometimes you have to be willing to dispense with dumplings because the fresh ones just didn't become available while you were in the house. I have, on many occasions, gone back for a freshly replenished savory item even after I've had dessert. Fried foods are always the top priority -- they degrade rapidly on the buffet. Dishes of a soupy nature hold up the best -- that what you should be eating during the down time. Many trips, small quantities. Loading up big plates with tons of food -- sometimes I see people two-fisting it -- is just a bad idea if you want the best of the buffet in the best possible condition. You've really got to commit to the idea of making a lot of trips to the buffet. I think of my first trip or three as mostly exploratory: I'm trying to determine what's good. (If you've been to a given buffet many times before, and the offerings are always the same, you can of course skip this step.) I may very well taste the smallest available portion of every item on the buffet that isn't self-evidently terrible. There are often surprises. Once I figure out where to focus my eating, I can start prioritizing based on freshness. In some extreme instances, where you find yourself at a buffet that only has two or three good items, take as much as you can of those when they're fresh -- and resist the temptation to eat anything else. Don't eat a lot of rice, noodles or other carbs unless they're really good. Fried rice and lo mein are rarely all that good, and they fill you up when you could be eating different, better food. (Not to mention the restaurant is hoping you'll fill up on carbs, thus keeping the food cost down.) Don't overlook fresh fruit for dessert. Most of these places have a decent selection of fresh fruit on the buffet. You have to select carefully -- often there's unripe melon or whatever -- but when it's good it's good. Most other dessert items are likely to be terrible. Finally, some buffets require special strategies because they're so elaborate. The really extensive places may have active cooking stations, or special nights when they feature seafood. In such cases, the made-to-order and special items are often (though not always) the best. Remember, a buffet is a system in which the participants exercise a tremendous amount of self determination. The most facile person at the buffet is going to get the best meal.

Those of us who live in the US are surely familiar with catalogs like Williams-Sonoma -- if you're like me you a few copies every month. This topic isn't about the popular catalogs. It's about the lesser-known ones. I'll go first. I marvel at the Kitchen Krafts catalog every time it arrives. Based in Waukon, Iowa, these folks have a ton of unusual stuff for the advanced home pastry-and-baking aficionado. If you need a cone roller, a cake-slice marker or a dozen pastel silicone cupcake cups, this is the place. They also have interesting non-pastry/baking items, like a book on napkin folding and ice-cube trays that make ice in the shape of strawberries, dolphins and shells. And they have ingredients, such as decorative dragees, those little metallic colored balls that you can use to decorate the edges of cookies -- for whatever reason they're "not shippable to California." Who's next?

By industry standards $250 seems about right for the meal and experience you get at Per Se. The restaurant was an inexplicable bargain when it opened, and has now adjusted up closer to what it's worth, i.e., same as Ducasse. So now, if you want a bargain, walk across the street to Jean Georges where the dinner tasting menu is $125 -- half the price for seven eighths of the experience -- and lunch can be had for like forty bucks.

New York City also had 44 million visitors in 2006, and they spent USD $22.8 billion here.

Craig and Sneakeater, are you telling me that you've put a California or Oregon pinot on the table at the same time as a jammy zinfandel, for a group of non aficionados, and gotten more favorable reactions to the pinot than to the zin? Maybe the local palate here is different, but I just did this like a month ago and there was no contest. The wines were Nuthouse and Renwood. The meal was turkey but the preferences were well established before anybody ate anything. I was the only person in the room who preferred the pinot. I haven't found that people have any problem with high-alcohol wines, either. The closer to Port the better. I drink a lot of Oregon pinot noir -- more than I drink of any other wine -- but have pretty much stopped bringing it to people's houses because I find the zins, syrahs and things of that ilk are better received.

If I serve a pinot to that sort of group I'll get polite responses, but a jammy zinfandel is, in my experience, far far more likely to elicit raves.