Fat Guy

If the establishment gives off an underdog vibe, it's certainly possible for two writers to use that same turn of phrase. It happens all the time, especially with headline writing where the stock in trade is the lazy pop-culture reference. I'm not familiar with the incident so I can't comment on it.

You're probably thinking of TurnItIn, which is used by many academic institutions. What it prevents, however, is verbatim copying of publicly accessible documents. That's only one type of plagiarism. It doesn't detect plagiarism by paraphrasing, where you steal someone's work and ideas without using the exact same words.

I don't see a photograph of anybody at that URL.

I'd take issue with your characterization of this as an instance of "obvious plagiarism." Chez Pim apparently titled an article "The Little Wine Bar That Could: Bin 8945" A few days later, a sentence appeared in the LA Times's coverage of the same place: "In West Hollywood, BIN 8945 Wine Bar and Bistro, which may be the most serious of the bunch, has opened near the corner of Santa Monica and Robertson boulevards. Think of it as the little wine bar that could." The "Little X that could" construction, which is used often even though it is never credited to Watty Piper, is commonplace. Even the specific language in question, "the little wine bar that could," gets hits on Google that predate both the Chez Pim and LA Times usage, including: "Carly's is the little wine bar that could." http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/Issues/2005...ining/cafe.html and "fans of the little wine bar that could." http://www.boiseweekly.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A157655

It was a weak and ignorant piece from the standpoint of the food-knowledgeable minority, however I bet it resonated with the majority. I hear all of those complaints, often. If I'm giving a presentation about my book to a live audience at a Barnes & Noble, you can be sure a middle-aged lady's hand will shoot up and that she'll gripe about the lack of salt on the table or something along those lines. I'm just surprised Nora didn't include the "it's so dark I need a flashlight to read the menu" complaint -- that's the one I hear the most.

Went to Yasuda for lunch the other day and was reminded of a few of the touches that make it my favorite place for sushi. Needless to say, the fish is excellent, but beyond that: - The way the individual sushi pieces are formed really appeals to me. While most sushi chefs in town seem to be aspiring to make pieces of sushi that look as much as possible like they've been crafted by robots -- perfect angles, grains of rice lined up in a row like soldiers -- Yasuda's sushi pieces display strong evidence of the human touch. The rice is loosely assembled, with studied casualness. It collapses and activates its flavors the moment it enters your mouth. The thin, irregularly shaped slices of fish aren't sitting on top of the rice as such; rather, they're embracing its full curvature, integrating with the rice. - Yasuda has simply amazing rice. It is categorically better than any other I've tasted. It has just the right balance of starch, sweet and acid. - Each piece of Yasuda's sushi is a complete composition: if it deserves soy sauce, a finger tip worth of soy sauce is applied by the chef. - Yasuda uses a few grains of coarse sea salt to garnish some pieces of sushi, such as the scallop. I can't for the life of me understand why this isn't universal practice. - The cooked sushi deserves special mention, because it is made with such care. If you order a piece of shrimp, for example, you don't get some gluey old crustacean that has been sitting in the refrigerated glass case for six hours. Instead, Yasuda takes a raw shrimp, flash boils it, shocks it in ice, peels it and forms a piece of sushi out of it. - Speaking of the refrigerated glass case, at Yasuda there is none. There is no fish visible at the sushi bar. It is kept in refrigerated stainless steel drawers, wrapped in gauze, not in a glass display case. Yasuda believes the exposure to light and air is bad for the fish. In the pursuit of the best possible storage and handling, Yasuda has been so bold as to dispense with the focal point of most every other sushi bar.

January.

We received a press release today from the Union Square Hospitality Group announcing that the new chef at Gramercy Tavern will be Mike Anthony, formerly of Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Nancy Olson, formerly of Django and Dona, will be the new pastry chef. According to the press release, the new team will start in October and will change over to an original menu in January.

Okay, so WHAT'S UP with the Upper East Side branch of Saigon Grill? There has been an "under renovation" message on the voicemail there for weeks and weeks. Can somebody in that sector of the 'hood wander by and take a look?

We finally made it over to Rack & Soul tonight, and were impressed -- not uniformly so, but overall the restaurant put in a strong performance. We were able to make a reservation, which was nice, and our server was very competent and friendly -- kept the water and lemonade glasses full (I'm not sure I've been to another restaurant in New York City that refills lemonade for free), checked in on us frequently, smiled at the baby, etc. The lack of appetizers is a little disconcerting. We thought about hacking the system by sharing the barbecued chicken wing entree as an appetizer, but we restrained ourselves. An appetizer really isn't necessary anyway -- the portions are generous and filling. We sampled the pulled pork, baby back ribs, fried chicken, fried catfish and barbecued salmon. The pulled pork and baby back ribs were amazingly good. Whatever problems they've had with these items in the past were not present tonight. I'll need to sample them a few more times, but if they can make them this consistently good I'll say they're the best in town on those two products -- and on par with an average place in Memphis. The fried catfish and barbecued salmon were very good -- not revelatory, but well executed. The big disappointment was the fried chicken, which had clearly been sitting under a heat lamp for some time and was not crispy. Some of the sides were quite good: the mac-and-cheese, collard greens, potato salad (if you like Southern-style eggy-and-mustardy potato salad) and the free biscuits they bring out. The okra was bad, even for okra -- way too sweet. The mashed potatoes were okay, as was the gravy. Both desserts we tried were exceptional. I didn't figure this place for serious desserts, but the red velvet cake (baked for them by some bakery -- I wasn't able to extract the name) was beautifully moist and the banana pudding was vibrant (lots of fresh bananas and high-quality custard -- not that fake pudding mix a lot of Southern places use) and not overly sweet. Prices very reasonably by NYC standards. Website is here. I'll be back.

The pint-sized plastic deli containers are a great solution -- the pastry shop near me on Madison Avenue uses them. The trick is to invert the containers -- in other words place the base of the cupcake on the inverted lid and cover with the container. Use a small bit of icing or other sticky, natural product to secure the cupcake to the lid so it won't slide around too much.

I like the sour-cream-and-onion dip, however I find most people don't give it enough time to rest. You really have to make this dip several hours ahead of serving it, or the dehydrated stuff doesn't fully rehydrate. You've also got to mix it really, really well both when you originally mix it and right before you serve it.

There are a few ingredients in there that are in the MSG family: there's actual MSG, there's yeast extract and there's hydrolyzed soy protein. The ingredients list here has a lot of overlap with that of bouillon cubes, where MSG, salt and sugar are used as poor substitutes for real meat flavor, complexity and freshness. I imagine the total flavor impact of one of these onion soup/dip mixes is mostly dependent on that trick. Whereas, I bet if you started with good-quality dehydrated onion flakes and onion powder, seasoned with salt, pepper and various dried herbs, and added some actual reduced beef stock to make it all into a paste, you'd have something really delicious. I'll have to do some experiments. I think I have all the ingredients on hand to do this.

This topic started with a mention of Manischewitz onion soup mix, however I imagine the overwhelming majority of users of this species of product are using the Lipton breed. Probably the one use I never hear anybody mention for this product is "soup." Has anybody actually made soup from it? In the case of the Lipton product they actually stopped calling it "Onion Soup Mix" some years ago, and now package it under the "Lipton Recipe Secrets" brand and have in very small print on the box "Recipe, Soup & Dip Mix." It's an interesting example of a product being used otherwise than for its intended purpose to such a great extent that they had to rebrand it. I wonder how useful these products are, though. That is to say, why not just use a combination of dehydrated onions, salt and beef demi-glace, with maybe some celery salt? I'm sure it wouldn't take a ton of experimentation to come up with a homemade rub/seasoning mix/whatever that works better than the commercial, shelf-stable, preserved, overly salty, laden with MSG, packaged variety. Here are the Lipton ingredients:

The thing to remember is that 375 is just a number on a dial. Ten different ovens will probably be ten different temperatures when set to 375, and over the course of a few hours this can make a huge difference. Also, when braising, the meat itself is in a closed vessel with liquid, so an oven temperature of 375 is not going to translate into a 375-degree brisket. The number is a lot less important than the effect you want, which is a little bubbling in the liquid but not a lot. In my oven, that happens at a setting of around 325, though after a couple of hours the speed of the bubbles increases so I lower it to 300. Using that procedure, I usually get a nicely done brisket in 3.5-4 hours, though just the other day I had one that needed almost 4.5 -- I'm not sure what happened there. That's just my oven, though.

A brisket is a piece of an animal. Every one is different. In addition, no matter how hard one tries to reproduce a recipe exactly, it's impossible to reproduce all conditions. That's why, when cooking not just brisket but just about any natural product, you have to test for doneness. You can't rely on an amount of time or even, in the case of a braised item, an objective temperature measure. Pretty much any brisket, even the crappiest supermarket specimen, can be made nice and tender if you cook it gently and pull it out at the point when it becomes tender -- if you pull it too early, the collagen (I think it's the collagen) won't gelatinize so it will be tough from that; if you pull it too late, it can either dry out or disintegrate. There's a margin for error, though. And remember, traditionally the whole point of braising was to make tough, cheap cuts of meat palatable. Sam's method provides extra insurance, and actually once saved a brisket that I messed up. Picking a good brisket in the first place gives you a leg up. You want as much visible fat as possible running throughout the brisket. If you have a choice between first and second cut, you want the second cut -- even though theoretically it's less desirable. Costco has reliable brisket in a lot of areas of North America. Raw brisket also freezes well.

Hallelujah! (Rich, I live on 93rd Street -- the Harlem Fairway is a very short drive; the Red Hook Fairway is a very long drive. I'm going to check it out one of these days, though.)

I'm sure you're thinking of Elk Candy Co. They're at 1628 Second Avenue, near 84th Street. 212.585.2303

The first time I noticed anything like this (though I'm sure the practice predates whenever I became aware of it) was at Chanterelle in New York, in maybe 1991. The servers were dressed very much like kitchen staff. I asked about it, and our server said the idea was to show that the whole staff was a team. I didn't cross-examine.

It's rhetorical only in the sense that I couldn't care less about any of those things, so long as the food is great. So, to me, if Richman is saying his meal at Guy Savoy Las Vegas was better than at Guy Savoy Paris, all the rest of what he's saying is irrelevant.

These arguments seem ill-conceived. No past: on the one hand, any new restaurant can be said to have no past; on the other hand, an outpost of Guy Savoy or another established restaurant surely has a past. No personality: do the restaurants in Las Vegas really lack personality? It's hard to know what Richman means by this -- perhaps it is explained elsewhere in the story -- but it seems there are plenty of establishments there that reflect the personalities of their chefs and of the city of Las Vegas. Maybe Richman doesn't like that personality, but it's a personality nonetheless. No uniqueness: this objection would seem to apply to any duplicate restaurant, such as (in the case of New York City) Per Se and Nobu. Even so, the restaurants in Las Vegas do seem unique, in that most are much more glamorous than their originals. Again, I think Richman may be confusing something of which he does not approve with a lack of that something. Do Daniel Boulud and Guy Savoy represent real people to those eating at their restaurants: do they represent real people to those eating at Daniel in New York and Guy Savoy in Paris? Is everyone dining at those places a personal friend of the chef? Does Daniel Boulud cook any of the food at Daniel? Is he always there? Once chefs put their names out in the public eye they're brands, whether they like it or not and whether have one restaurant or a hundred.

Pasteurized eggs -- in the shell, nearly indistinguishable from standard eggs -- are now widely available. And I wonder what the actual labor cost of tableside preparation is. I mean, perhaps this is an oversimplification, but aren't we just talking about ten minutes? That's about $2 or $3 in waitstaff wages even at higher-end places where servers are well paid. It seems you could easily get a $5 premium on a Caesar salad prepared tableside. Mexican restaurants manage to prepare guacamole tableside withour much of an apparent premium, Chinese restaurants do plenty of stuff tableside, and in fine-dining restaurants there seems to be a trend towards doing more tableside presentations. Maybe it's just that there isn't much demand for tableside Caesar, bananas Foster, etc. I like them, though. (PS I think in some places the fire codes are the problem for flaming desserts.)

You have my permission, my blessing and my support for your decision to visit new restaurants. It's obviously something you love to do, and it's not my goal to deny anybody his or her pleasure. I appreciate that you're willing to spend your money on new restaurants, and write about them here, so I don't have to. You're the best friend or guinea pig a guy could have. I love you, man.

Certainly, not every well-established restaurant is good. The point is, rather, that with a little research you can find out which of the well-established places are not resting on their laurels but, rather, are at the height of their powers. In addition, we're not talking about trying a different well-established restaurant every time you go out. We're talking about choosing a few -- the best restaurants for you -- and developing deep, long-term relationships with them. I've got to say it again, or maybe I should ask it: everybody who is getting all agitated about my bias against new restaurants, have you ever had the pleasure of a long-term, deep relationship with an excellent restaurant -- dozens of visits over a period of years? I can't imagine that anybody who has had that experience would say new restaurants are the holy grail. Not for diners at any level of seasoning. Nobody is going to put new restaurants out of business here. There will always be plenty of people who flock to what's new. The question is what should you do if you want the best meals, and the answer is go to places where you know you'll get the best meals. It couldn't be simpler.

This is a fertile insight, and may be the closest thing to a culinary litmus test that I'd ever consider using. I think eGullet Society members who are single should specify in their Match.com ads that they "cleave to the perimeter" of the supermarket. "Only respond if you really know what that means."