Fat Guy

It always comes back to the cherries! To me, though, there's a meaningful difference between buying imported cherries in the middle of winter when no cherries (or any other fresh fruits except stored apples) are available here and buying imported apples at the height of the local apple season. Even Michael Pollan allows that, "In fact, even the most fervent eat-local types say it's okay for a 'foodshed' (a term for a regional food chain, meant to liken it to a watershed) to trade for goods it can't produce locally -- coffee, tea, sugar, chocolate -- a practice that predates the globalization of our food chain by a few thousand years." Although, I guess, since there are some edible cherries grown in New York for a short time each year, buying cherries from anywhere else or at any other time of year doesn't fit within the localvore rules. I could certainly live without them, but I'm not sure buying them is any worse for the planet or the food culture than buying cherries from Washington.

I'm sure I spend more money on local produce, including greenmarket apples (the closest greenmarket to me is now actually closer than the supermarket), than 99% of the city's inhabitants. I also buy the occasional out of season cherry. Indeed, everybody in the business of producing food anywhere in the world, whether it's New York or New Zealand, should love me because I spend more like 111% of my income on food. I hope you'll allow that I've earned the right to complain about the lousy apples that dominate the supermarkets, but if not I guess I'll have to do so without your permission!

Mr. Return to Agrarian Society is a straw man; he's not posting here and he's not all that common in the literature. I just think it's stupid that I can go to my local market at the height of apple season and nine tenths of the apples on display are from the Northwest or from other countries altogether. They certainly don't taste better than New York apples by the time they get schlepped all the way here -- I doubt they even tasted better right off the tree at the point of origin, since they're from stock bred to be shippable, attractive and long-lasting. I don't know, I guess somebody somewhere figured out that if you grow a zillion apples in Washington and ship all of them across the country at the lowest possible per-apple cost they wind up being a few cents a pound cheaper than apples grown in New York. But they suck, and it's a big waste to ship apples from Washington to New York when we have plenty of better apples here.

As a card-carrying Costco member who buys Chilean extra-pesticide cherries in winter I can say there's no danger of either of us giving up the jobs we don't have in order to put up a six month supply of preserves. Still, I think there's a tendency to overstate the case against local, seasonal foods. It's not like when you cross the California border you all of a sudden can't get any fresh food in winter. The chickens still lay eggs, or you can kill the chickens and eat them. The cows still give milk, or you can kill the cows and eat them. The pigs, well, you can just kill them and eat them. There's plenty of delicious food all year round, even in New Jersey.

Anybody who hasn't already should read Bill McKibben's piece from Gourmet, "A Grand Experiment," wherein he eats locally through a Vermont winter. The interesting thing isn't that he was able to do it, but rather that, as he puts it: "I'm writing this, so you know I survived. But in fact I survived in style—it was the best eating winter of my life." The growing season in the Hudson Valley is neither terribly long nor terribly short. The CSA I get produce from delivers for 24 weeks, roughly half the year. It's not hard to imagine taking half the delivery each week and freezing, canning or otherwise preserving it (in frozen soups, etc) so as to be able to eat vegetables and fruits for the other half of the year. No, they wouldn't be fresh (though fruits like apples can be stored fresh all winter, as can things like potatoes), but fruits and vegetables are only part of the diet anyway. There are few climate restrictions on grains, meat, fish, dairy, etc. So I think the horror of having to eat seasonally is often somewhat overstated.

Just out of curiosity, how much farmland is needed to feed the population of the Greater New York Metropolitan Area? Somebody must be able to do that computation. Is it more or less farmland than exists in New Jersey, Connecticut and the Hudson River Valley? Or would it be possible to pull it off, just in terms of the raw calories needed for survival and leaving aside issues of what would be available when?

A couple of food-miles-related issues that bug me: first, that so much of the organic produce in local supermarkets here in New York comes from South America; second, that so many resources are expended to ship bottled drinking water around the world.

It's necessary for the Times reviewer to be somewhat suspicious about chef changes. He can't allow a situation where all a restaurant needs to do to get re-reviewed is change executive chefs. It would be even more problematic to do re-reviews upon every change of chef de cuisine. I mean, some would say that the chef at ADNY has never changed -- it's this guy named Alain Ducasse -- and that he has had three chefs de cuisine over the years. Sort of like how Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Daniel Boulud periodically have to replace guys like Didier Virot and Alex Lee. You don't get re-reviewed when that happens. At the same time, the transition from Delouvrier to Esnault was major. I think if Frank Bruni had dropped in for a single meal he would have seen that the restaurant had undergone a major direction change, worth writing about despite all of the aforementioned reservations.

I think of the "food miles" concept not as a mathematical absolute but as an illustration of how a system that emphasizes price over all other factors can be gratuitously wasteful of natural resources. To be sure, the search for quality also consumes resources, though.

According to this summary there are actually, in the Japanese system of classification, five categories of yellowtail -- and more than one word for each category: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showto...ndpost&p=712110

Needless to say, the conduct of a restaurant's staff is more important to a restaurant review than the behavior of the ushers at Carnegie Hall is to a review of a classical music performance. However, Frank Bruni's reviews are the equivalent of reviews of classical music performances at Carnegie Hall written by people who haven't got enough classical music experience and knowledge to understand why the performance was a good one or not -- you know, like your tone-deaf cousin who really does only care about the comfort of the seats, the smile of the usher, the clothes the solo violinist is wearing and the fact that some B-list television celebrity is sitting in the row in front of you: "I loved the violin soloist -- she played really fast; that must have been hard!"

It's not likely they'd miss him, now that he's known -- though it's worth noting that the first time he went he wasn't recognized at first, and he had some sort of unfortunate encounter with the assistant sommelier that seems to have poisoned him against the place. This is his version of it: He follows up with: The odd thing is that, while I've heard plenty of complaints about Alain Ducasse at the Essex House (and indeed about every top restaurant), the one complaint I've never hear is that anybody was ever treated with "derisive huff and repellent hauteur." I really think this must have been some sort of awful miscommunication or bad fit, maybe a language issue. I mean, go to the Modern and ask for the sommelier -- same guy at his new job -- and see if you get anything near "derisive huff and repellent hauteur." It's just not going to happen. As for the analogy to music criticism, can you imagine any of the above being written in the context of serious arts criticism?

It's easy. The best one is pretty much always either the one you hate the least or the one you hate the most -- you just have to figure out which.

Interesting. The AoE piece really made it sound like Mecca for unusual tropical fruits, unique in all the USA.

I agree with a small percentage of that: I don't think a very picky eater should be a critic, unless there's some particular beat that's tailored to that person's preferences (like you could be a vegetarian and review restaurants for a vegetarian magazine, but a vegetarian as the New York Times reviewer wouldn't fly). Beyond that, I can't buy the love-every-ingredient requirement. I mean, do you reject the whole notion of acquired tastes? A good food critic must be born into the world appreciating every food on the planet? Anything he needs to learn to appreciate represents dereliction of duty, and if there's so much as one edible substance in the world he doesn't enjoy he should slink away, humiliated, because his palate isn't sufficiently broad? I assure you, all critics -- at least every working critic I've ever gotten to know -- have preferences, likes and dislikes. The good ones come to terms with them instead of imposing them willy-nilly. Go back to mackerel. There's no need to like it. Let's say you're going to write an article comparing six sushi restaurants. What you need to be able to tell the reader, among other things, is which place serves the best fish. So, among other samples, you get a piece of mackerel at each. You don't have to like the stuff to be able -- assuming you've bothered to educate yourself -- to tell which place serves better mackerel and why. So, you've done your job -- you haven't sacrificed your flavor-preference principles, you've just dealt with a situation.

No. Yes. Would you trash mackerel, or learn what makes mackerel good? Are you contending that a food writer who's personal taste doesn't accept mackerel should go out and campaign against mackerel in order to "shape opinion"? Of course not. How about a "Chinese food sucks" campaign? It would be absurd. A food writer who engages in criticism and does a really good job of it mostly shapes opinions at the margins, not at the core. For example you might pick a restaurant that you think the consensus of knowledgeable diners has under-rated, and you might explain by reference to common standards and language why you think it deserves better. But you're not going to make your case by saying "USDA Prime beef is bad, moldy fruit is good."

I think it's easier to explain the point at the micro level. I don't like the taste of mackerel. I would never voluntarily order mackerel. So, do I declare mackerel a bad fish and write negatively about every mackerel dish I taste? Of course not. As someone who writes about food, part of my job is to be able to tell whether mackerel is good or not by reference to objective standards -- and it's no great feat of genius to do that, you just have to taste a bunch of examples and learn what characteristics the sushi chefs, fishmongers and other knowledgeable people find desirable in mackerel. All this is very easy to do without actually liking mackerel. You can of course scale that example up to cover dishes, menus, restaurants and entire cuisines.

Right, hamachi is not tuna. Hamachi is the young yellowtail, aka amberjack. A lot of folks confuse hamachi with tuna because there's a type of tuna called yellowfin, however they are not the same. Edited to add: I was recently at Sushi Yasuda in New York and our sushi chef told us that there are four categories of yellowtail. Two were hamachi and buri (3 kilograms and 5 kilograms, I think). I can't remember the others -- I'd never heard of them before. I'm sure there's a whole interesting story behind it.

Nathan, I really don't think you have to be illiterate to be wrong here. You're obviously so highly literate that you see meaning that Sneaky and I are incapable of grasping. If anything, you're too literate. Us normal people are just reading.

You can be wrong without being illiterate, just as you can use the word illiterate incorrectly without being illiterate. I mean, obviously, you're writing and reading, so you're not illiterate in any sense of the word. But I understand what you're saying, because I know you're using the term illiterate to mean "profoundly incapable of getting what this means." In this case, though, I'd say you're being so literal as to lose sight of the plain meaning of Bruni's comments.

Nathan, it's not one incongruous word; it's the premise. "There are no assigned percentages for food versus service versus ambience. The star ratings take into consideration all of those elements, giving primary importance to food, to come to a conclusion about how excited I would be to return to the restaurant. The number of stars chart ever greater degrees of excitement." Res ipsa whatever.

In other words, the term "excitement" has zero meaning. The sentence could have been written without it. "The star ratings take into consideration all of those elements, giving primary importance to food, to come to a conclusion about how excited I would be to return to the restaurant." Equals exactly: "The star ratings take into consideration all of those elements, giving primary importance to food." Or maybe the common-sense reading of Bruni's comments make more . . . sense: that he's giving independent value to personal excitement.

If we've just been driving all night through dense fog on I-77, I'm really excited to return to Waffle House.

This strikes me as flawed on two levels: first, excitement should be at most one of several criteria for evaluating a restaurant, unless the critic's personal sense of excitement is exactly in line with norms of good cuisine; second, the star system should be bigger than any critic and, indeed, the latest critic should not be the one determining what it means -- that should be a higher-level executive decision made by the guardians of the paper's traditions and the critic should serve that system. Not that I'm in favor of the star system at all, but if we're going to use it then it should be used correctly.

The one review in that set that mentioned the number of visits cited three: "Based on three recent meals, the Hermitage kitchen already rates one star, with a second held in escrow until such time as the chef has more confidence in his own palate and really seasons food as though he means it." That was for half of a dual review. The other restaurant was a kosher place, Lou G. Siegel. She didn't mention the number of visits but did allude to recently visiting 83 kosher restaurants in the city.