Fat Guy

There may be examples of extra-virgin olive oil that have 320 F smoke points, but there's no way that's a universal smoke point for EVOO. I have personally had EVOO as high as 360 and seen not a hint of smoke, and there are at least some online sources that reference 375. My guess is that the 320 number applies to the kind of boutique unfiltered stuff that nobody would use in frying quantities anyway. But the standard filtered EVOO you grab off a supermarket shelf? You can cook French fries in that no problem -- though it's kind of a waste of money since you can accomplish the same result with lesser olive oil. Also, I'm not sure the smoke point is that big a deal for home cooks. I mean, restaurants have to worry about the cooking fat sitting in a deep fryer all day and perhaps for several days, cranking out batch after batch of food at 375 F. So if it starts to smoke, all the oil will eventually break down and everything will be disgusting. But for a few small batches of potatoes at home? It wouldn't necessarily concern me to see a few wisps of smoke (the smoke point is not, as many people seem to think, the flash point). Heavy smoke, yeah, that would be a problem.

Things aren't necessarily all that stable at the top. Four-star restaurants close, as do Michelin three-star restaurants. Jean Georges, Daniel and Le Bernardin have been stable, but Ducasse and Lespinasse have not. Even Le Bernardin, the longest-running of the current top places, is only 20 years old. Compare that to now-shuttered places like La Caravelle, which ran for 43 years. It's hard to imagine that Per Se will have a 43-year run. I guess it might. I don't really know what a statistical analysis of past high-end restaurant longevity would demonstrate, but I too imagine that restaurants of that sort had a longer life span. There are probably a few reasons for this. For one thing, it was a lot less expensive to open and staff such places. For another thing, customer expectations of food were low. And for still another thing, there wasn't much focus on chefs. Still, there may be some factors that skew our perspective. For example, the only restaurants we remember from way back are the ones that endured for a long time -- we don't remember all the ones that went out of business. I think there has long been a cycle in New York City that would be totally recognizable today, where new places open, their press agents (now publicists) put out the word, a trendy and star-studded crowd descends for a few months, and then that group moves on and the restaurant stands or falls based on what kind of clientele it can retain long term.

I wholeheartedly agree. When you start one of those three-star dinners at 8pm and finish at midnight, you're going to bed on a full stomach -- I find that a lot less pleasant than a stroll after a long daytime meal, followed by recovery, followed by dinner at a bistro-type place, and early to bed so you can be up bright and early to explore the town.

Incidentally, if you happen to use the recipe I provided, there are a few things to note: - Canola oil is not a requirement. Corn oil or any stable vegetable oil is just fine. - Perform a temperature reality check by frying one small latke in the oil. If it burns before it cooks through, the oil is too hot. If it sits in there for a long time and never gets particularly golden, the oil is too cool. - Latkes are always going to be wet, no matter how much water you squeeze out of them, and that means you'll likely get some splatter back from the oil when you put them in. Watch out. - Matzoh meal is not a requirement; you can use flour instead. If you have matzoh meal around, I think it works marginally better than flour, but it's not worth a special trip to the store.

Olive oil doesn't have all that low a smoke point. The folks who market competing oils try to feed us a lot of propaganda about how you can't possibly fry in olive oil, and a lot of people -- even some top chefs -- have swallowed it, however olive oil is used for frying all over the world. Try telling a Spaniard that you can't fry in olive oil. Most Europeans and Latin folks who fry in olive oil tend to keep at least a couple of varieties of olive oil around. The top-shelf extra-virgin oils, in relatively small (< 1 liter) bottles are used basically as condiments. Then there's usually a big jug of some cheaper, more highly filtered olive oil around that's used for frying and sauteeing. In North America, if you go to Costco, you can pick up a huge thing of Filippo Berio "Extra Light" olive oil -- the "Extra Light" referring to extra-heavy filtration not to any sort of reduction in calories or fat (though I'm sure thousands of people every day buy the product based on that mistaken assumption). You can do pretty much anything with that stuff that you can do with any vegetable oil.

Point of context: the Russian Tea Room, in its pre-closing incarnation, had a talented chef and was pretty damn good. I dined there in 2001, when Renaud Le Rasle was the chef (you may remember him as the chef at Medi, where Roger Verge was consulting chef), and I was impressed. Le Rasle collaborated with Darra Goldstein to create the restaurant's modern takes on Russian Imperial cuisine. The Russian Tea Room's pelmeni were the best in town, and the chicken Kiev was moist and buttery. Beverage director Daniel Hartensteinis was infusing vodkas on premises. It was a good restaurant.

Here's the thing about regulars: a restaurant isn't likely to survive without them. So no matter what happens with reviews, the see-and-be-seen crowd, trends or anything else, a restaurant has to start attracting a significant amount of repeat business to survive. And the pool of potential regulars is small relative to the pool of all customers. It includes a small percentage of the Greater New York Metro Area population (whether they're the people with expense accounts, the foodies with disposable income or others) plus a small percentage of out-of-town visitors who come here regularly. If you can't attract your share of that pool, you're dead unless you're a total tourist restaurant like the WWE wrestling restaurant or whatever. So I do think, as Nathan and Sneakeater have suggested, that there's a finite market here for restaurants in the $100+ per person category. As a result, it's not likely possible for every such restaurant that opens to succeed -- it wouldn't be possible even if they were all great restaurants. Then again, they're not all great restaurants. So the question of market size may not be all that relevant: there may currently be fewer great restaurants than the market can bear, and there may not be enough great ones opening to satisfy the demand. There are lots of expensive restaurants opening, but if they're all bad it doesn't prove anything about the market except that the market isn't stupid.

This isn't exactly applicable to the $100-plus restaurant universe -- I don't think there's a ton of serious market research on that sector -- but the National Restaurant Association said this about repeat business: http://www.restaurant.org/rusa/magArticle.cfm?ArticleID=284

I have no idea the percentage of regulars at Jean Georges at a given service, however when I was researching Turning the Tables and talking to dozens of restaurateurs about their businesses it was common for them to tell me that 50-75 (one said 85) percent of their business on any given day was repeat business. I don't think anybody ever told me less than 50 percent. Now, there's probably a gap between "repeat business" and "regular who comes 6+ times a year," but still.

I guess I don't understand what you mean by "regulars."

Hardly any restaurant can survive if only 10% of the customers on any given night are regulars. If you have to fill the dining room with 90% new people, night after night, you're in trouble. That's exactly the scenario under which so many places see their business go south after the opening few months -- that's the one time when you can actually count on 90% new people every night. That's also why restaurants value their regulars so highly -- even the ones who only come in a few times a year.

One thing to bear in mind about restaurants in the grand-luxe category is that two restaurants with identical food costs and menu prices can nonetheless have radically different balance sheets. Things get especially murky when a restaurant is part of a hotel's food-and-beverage operation or a centrally planned mega-project like the Time Warner Center, or is a signature/flagship operation subsidized by lower level places within a conglomerate built around a chef's brand.

Who decided there's a rule that says the review has to explain the star rating? If anything, it's the other way around: one should interpret the review in light of the star rating. That's how you can have a one-star rave or a three-star pan.

The good motivation for parsing reviews this way doesn't actually make it useful to do so. Anyway, even if Bruni subdivided his opinions, they'd have little value: garbage in, garbage out.

I've eaten several hundred of those in my lifetime, including one almost every day of high school. Well, I don't think those plastic boxes of Campari tomatoes existed at that time, and I don't actually think Campari tomatoes are all that great, but they're better than whatever crap tomatoes they had at the deli near school. These days, now that I actually buy the individual components, during tomato season this sandwich is a particular joy to eat. It's also good with capers and a little fresh ground pepper -- essentially everything you'd have on a fully loaded bagel-with-lox sandwich, but without the lox. Also good in tomato season: sharp cheddar cheese, sliced tomato and mayo. Out of season, in my opinion the best-tasting widely available tomatoes are so-called grape tomatoes from, for example, Splendido. The drawback is that it's kind of a pain to manage several of those little tomatoes onto a sandwich. But if you don't mind the labor and you have a good paring knife, you can take six of those little tomatoes, trim each so it has two flat sides the long way, then cut each in half also the long way, and you'll have twelve flat slices that will stay put in a substrate of cream cheese. Another favorite is butter plus Swiss cheese, with a little salt. Try it before commenting. At the deli I frequent these days (actually I go there maybe once a week, so it's hardly frequent) I've noticed that one of the most popular bagel orders is cream cheese and jelly. Oh, in terms of the topic title, I'm not accustomed to using the term "schmear" to refer to anything other than cream cheese. Where I'm from, a "bagel with a schmear" is a bagel spread with a modest amount of cream cheese.

(Responding generally to several posts upthread.) Restaurant reviews aren't algebra problems, where you balance an equation of good and bad comments. Nor are they exercises in star arithmetic. I don't know any reviewer who thinks of his or her own reviews that way. A review has to be understood as a whole, and part of that whole includes the rating. It's easy to pick apart Bruni's reviews because they tend to be easy targets, however there has never been a New York Times reviewer whose reviews would fit into a structure that, for example, demands five examples of bad dishes for a one-star review, four examples for two stars, etc. It just doesn't remotely work that way.

As a reality check, we went back to Porter House Monday night with three friends (party of five), which allowed for much tasting. Reality checked out: I like Porter House even more after a second visit than I did after my first. I had planned to wait until January to revisit Porter House -- I do as little dining out between Thanksgiving and New Year's as I can -- but a friend from North Carolina came to town with two business associates (bankers) and they wanted steak. The Porter House decision-making calculus worked, I think, as intended: I considered that we had a woman in the group, a fish-eater and two people with meat-and-potatoes tastes, and Porter House was all of a sudden at the top of the list. Each of the five people in the group couldn't have been happier. I mean, it's possible that the steak eaters would have been happier with their actual steaks at Peter Luger, but there's no way they'd have been happier with the overall meal experience. The steak lovers got first-rate T-bone steaks (as good as at any non-Luger traditional steakhouse in town), hash browns, onion rings and creamed spinach (the creamed spinach is amazingly good, but the portion size needs to be doubled -- the potato sides are more appropriately sized). Our dainty female had a filet mignon which, despite my prejudice against tenderloin, I found delicious thanks to superior quality, a nicely maillardized exterior and a coating of maitre d'hotel butter -- and due to her daintiness I got to eat about half of it. The fish-eater had the chili-roasted lobster with tomato and basil (out of shell, a plated fine-dining restaurant dish), and pan-roasted mushrooms. I had the best thing of all, though: the "natural veal porterhouse chop." This was one of the best pieces of veal I've had, served on the bone medium-rare and thick. For an appetizer three of us had the scallops with brown butter, capers and crispy parsley -- this is a great dish and I considered that a double order would make a fine entree. Someone else had the lobster bisque. I need to talk to Lomonaco about his lobster bisque method -- I think there's room for improvement in that dish. The pineapple upside-down cake, trio of puddings and cheesecake were the best of the desserts. The "1927 Ultimate Martini" is my new favorite cocktail. Service was technically proficient and very accommodating of our staggered arrival times and last-minute change in party size. Our server for dinner was amazing, though when we were in the bar for a bit before dinner our server there was kind of perfunctory. Both were women, which I note because that's atypical for steak places. The formula works.

Though I'm not aware of a Times critic getting hassled at a New York restaurant, major newspaper critics have been kicked out of restaurants in other cities in several well-publicized instances. Stephen Downes, who I believe is the leading Australian critic, was recently kicked out of Jamie Oliver's restaurant in Australia, and reports that there are half a dozen places where the staff have standing orders to keep him out.

A lot of folks swear by this trick, and it does seem to make sense. I did not personally find that it makes a substantial difference when added as a step to my recipe, but I've only tried it once.

Jewish Food, by Matthew Goodman, points to buckwheat flour fried in poultry fat as the European Jewish standard prior to the mid-19th Century, when potato latkes became dominant. Prior to the migration of Jews to Eastern Europe, Goodman says, latkes were traditionally made from curd cheese and fried in olive oil. The Hanukah party I went to on Sunday night, hosted by very religious folks, had no latkes. There were, however, about a billion soufganiyot (jelly dougnuts). In Israel it seems soufganiyot are the Hanukah standard, though they have plenty of latkes there too.

I'd definitely suggest that anybody who uses the freeze-microwave-slice-toast method do a comparison with the slice-freeze-toast method. I think the bagels come out better using slice-freeze-toast. But even if they came out the same, you save a step and you consolidate the slicing labor at a time of your choosing rather than in the morning when you're least likely to want to do extra work.

I'm not sure that would be a foodborne illness. On cruise ships, it's usually spread through the water or the ventilation system, isn't it?

Once bagels are a day old, you pretty much have to toast them. The first few you eat, you should just toast without freezing -- in my experience a two-day-old never-frozen bagel toasts up slightly better than a frozen bagel. In terms of freezing the rest, my preferred method is to slice them in half before freezing, freeze in individual zipper bags with as much air squeezed out as possible, and toast directly from the freezer -- no defrosting or microwaving. They come out well. I mean, I live in New York City but always keep a few frozen bagels on hand for when I don't want to go out to buy fresh. I just had one this morning, with cream cheese. It was good. You'll actually have a harder time getting good cream cheese in most of America than you will have toasting a frozen bagel.

What you're describing is similar to the standard American method of making gravy.

Here's the information on Kyotofu: http://www.kyotofu-nyc.com/ -- It's on Ninth Avenue between 48th and 49th. I guess the answer to this question depends on how you'd define a "dessert bar." I mean, there's a big difference if you define the category as only including sushi-bar-esque dessert places like Chikalicious and Room4Dessert, and if you define it to include all "places that are worth visiting just for dessert in NYC." The latter category would include a broad selection of places, new and old. Like, how do we categorize Rice to Riches, or Veniero's, or the Tavern at Gramercy Tavern, or Serendipity, or Dylan's, or Lexington Candy Shop? Those are all places that are worth visiting just for dessert, but I'm not sure one would call them dessert bars.