Fat Guy

As someone who only speaks English (barely), I've been in plenty of situations at home and abroad where I've been unable to rely on spoken language as a primary tool of communication. Luckily, food is a universal language. You just have to maintain a super-positive, adventurous attitude and be willing to point, gesticulate and otherwise make a fool of yourself. A big smile and a big appetite can work wonders for international relations.

I'm not sure there's any industry -- even the clergy -- in which corruption is minimal. I do think it's simply a fact, however, that corruption in the restaurant business has been dramatically reduced in the past 20 years, bringing it much more in line with other industries. Tip reporting is way up. Corrupt health inspectors have been arrested in a series of high profile sting operations. The illegals problem continues, but employers are definitely increasing their scrutiny of new hires. The problem with health inspections is no longer widespread bribery. It's widespread stupidity and bureaucracy. Poor health inspection scores make for great headlines, especially now that they're available online for all to see, but they're based on ill-conceived regulations that are largely divorced from reality. They're also so vague and broad that on any given day it's possible to give any restaurant a very high score, or to do a cursory inspection that results in a low score. A whole secondary industry of consultants has sprung up. It's a game restaurants have to play, but nobody takes the process seriously because it's not a serious process. You need only look at the Shake Shack's actual list of violations, as opposed to the eye-catching total score, to see how meaningless the process is. In the entire report, there's nothing that should cause a rational person to worry about cleanliness. Meanwhile, you can have rodents in your restaurant and only get 6 points.

There definitely was a time when this was the case, however many arrests and scandals later it doesn't seem to be.

Neither Craft, Craftseak nor Craftbar has anything to do with the Union Square Hospitality Group. The Union Square Hospitality Group manages Gramercy Tavern, Union Square Cafe, Eleven Madison Park, Tabla, Blue Smoke, the restaurants at the MOMA and Hudson Yards catering (and of course Shake Shack). Bouley got a 6 on one inspection, which demonstrates exactly nothing for two reasons: First, because while Gramercy Tavern is getting 19 points for minutiae like "Sanitized equipment or utensil, including in-use food dispensing utensil, improperly used or stored," Bouley is getting 6 points even though it has "Evidence of mice or live mice present in facility's food and/or non-food areas." Second, because Bouley's previous inspection scores, in April and May of this year, were 31 and 31 -- it's no surprise to see improvements during a pending-reinspection crackdown, when everybody is under standing orders to hide the knives and otherwise do backflips when the inspector arrives for the third time in three months. The "real cooking can't do well argument" isn't really an argument -- it's common knowledge in the business. Fine dining restaurants, where the cooks never wear gloves, they're serving all sorts of raw fish, etc., are always playing a game of hide-and-seek with the inspectors. Sometimes they get caught; sometimes they don't. Also common knowledge in the business is that Union Square Hospitality Group wrote the book on excellent restaurant management.

I think you've got the right attitude going in, and that will help you enjoy the experience more: when dining at a brand-new place on a busy Saturday night, you have to adjust your expectations. Chances are, if there's a serious kitchen team in place, the food will be really good. Chances are, service will be a bit confused, especially with respect to timing. No big deal. Just don't make firm plans to be somewhere afterwards. While I generally eschew new places these days, I make it to a few of them. There's no denying that it can be exciting to be present at the birth of something. Restaurants also remember and value their early customers. I hope you have a great meal!

Todd, I'm not sure how you define average, but if you look at the inspection numbers for Jean Georges, Le Bernardin, Alain Ducasse and Per Se, they're all around the same as those for Gramercy Tavern, Union Square Cafe and Eleven Madison Park. The thing about fine dining places is that it's hard for them to score as well as places like TGI Friday's (one of their places got a score of 0 on its last inspection) because the better restaurants are cooking everything to order from mostly raw, mostly unprocessed ingredients, they're doing most of the prep on premises instead of dropping frozen stuff into a deep fryer, they offer more raw dishes, there's more hand work involved in plating the food, etc. The sanitation codes are in many respects totally at odds with the culinary traditions of fine-dining kitchens. The best-scoring four-star restaurant in New York is almost never going to score as well as the worst-scoring McDonald's, because the codes inherently favor the McDonald's style of cooking (if you can call it that). I should add that I've spent a total of months in the kitchens of many of the top New York restaurants, including more than a week each at Gramercy Tavern, Lespinasse and Alain Ducasse at the Essex House. These places are really damn clean, not to mention conscientious. It's a sad joke that McDonald's, which to the common sense observer doesn't have a single store that's nearly as clean as Gramercy Tavern, can score so high on inspections just by virtue of cooking mostly frozen food to temperatures so high it loses most of its taste. Anyway . . . new letter from Danny Meyer today:

I prefer to use either "King Jaffe Joffer, ruler of Zamunda" or "Ruth Reichl."

There are seven states where the tip credit is not applied against the minimum hourly wage (individual states can elect to have higher minimum wages than the federal requirement; just not less), however it's mostly an academic point. Most servers would be earning more than the minimum wage anyway. Whether a server is getting paid $2.13 an hour instead of $6.75 or $10 an hour instead of $20, the tip is still a subsidy that allows employers to shift the wage burden from their books to the customers' and the risk from themselves to the servers.

Britcook, that's definitely the way to go. State your name right up front and go from there. Most restaurants that take reservations these days use computerized "guest management" systems, keyed to last name, first name and phone number (in that order). If I say "William Anthony" the reservationist starts by keying in "Ant..." and as each letter is keyed the software narrows the choices. Chances are "William Anthony" will pop up in three or four keystrokes. If there are two William Anthonys, the reservationist will identify you by phone number. All your visits, customer notes, etc., are tracked by the computer -- including notes like "Super-VIP! Give this guy a table no matter what!" -- so it's important to give the same name and number every time you call. Miss E, I think it's important to note that a tip is not really a gratuity -- at least not completely. Servers are exempt from the regular minimum wage laws (the have a special lower rate), because it's assumed that tips will make up most of their earnings. This subsidy for the restaurant industry, which I think transfers about $26 billion from consumers to waitstaff each year in the United States alone, means you're paying the server's wage not just giving a little extra. As a result, unless a server punches me or something outrageous like that, I won't tip below 10%. I will, however, reduce my tip to 10% if I haven't been satisfied with my service and haven't been able to fix it somehow during the meal. I do this maybe once or twice a year. More importantly, though, you have to speak up. A server has no way of knowing whether you tipped 10% because you think you got bad service or because you're just a cheap bastard -- there are plenty of folks out there who are just low tippers, no matter how good the service is. Tipping is a fascinating subject, I think. Last August I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about tipping, which you might wish to take a look at. Pamela, I don't necessarily have a preconceived notion of what a restaurant should be. I try to take restaurants on their own terms and look for some sort of sensible whole. But I guess fundamentally I look for restaurants where it seems like the people running the place care. I doubt many restaurateurs would be interested in my advice, though. It doesn't seem like my preferences or the preferences of most extreme gourmet eGullet Society types are particularly important at 99% of the world's restaurants. Sure, the chefs and owners of the best restaurants care what we think, but the Olive Garden people don't at all. A good example: you can learn from most any industry source that restaurants attract more business and sell more liquor when they're crowded, dark and play music. Now, I speak to audiences, sometimes as large as several hundred people, and sometimes I ask, just as a fun experiment, "Who here prefers a dark, noisy, crowded restaurant to a well-lit, quiet, spacious restaurant?" In an audience of 300 people, you might get 1 or 2 jokers raising their hands just to be difficult. But the reality is that anybody who comes out on a Saturday night to the Smithsonian to hear a talk about restaurants is going to be in a sub-sub-subset of the population that is pretty well divorced from mass market preferences.

There's actually quite a bit of what I'd call "organic junk food" out there -- stuff like organic chocolate soy milk, various snack crisps and such. The place where I shop most often has a large organic section with a couple of whole sections of it devoted to crisps, candy and other junk.

I'm just learning the ropes myself. Our only child turned one today, so my only serious experience pertains to dining out with a baby -- which in many ways is easier (if the stork brings you the right baby) than dining out with a toddler who can walk, talk, scream and throw stuff. I think you just have to use your judgment (one good rule of thumb: if the restaurant has high chairs and booster seats, you should feel totally comfortable bringing a young child), follow the Golden Rule, etc. For us, that has meant that we've definitely dropped down a level of dining for meals where we don't have babysitting. For the past year we've been choosing mostly really good but essentially casual places with plenty of background noise. Once we had to bail out mid-meal because the baby was melting down. I suppose the people at the next table were inconvenienced during the five minutes it took us to extract ourselves from the restaurant while the baby was screaming, and I guess I feel a little bad for them, but, you know, we're propagating the damn human race and doing the best we can. The other 100 or so times we've taken him out to eat it has been without incident. Last night we were at a place and he was waving to everybody in the room and they were all waving back. Oh, and it always helps to have your kid wear an eGullet Society infant/toddler tee-shirt. It lets people know the family is serious about dining: Beyond that, I don't really think I have anything brilliant to add to the already extensive eG Forums discussion we've had on this issue.

I think maybe it's because they think they're doing something good for themselves, and I have to restrain myself from commenting sometimes!

Restaurants can be new in two ways: new as in newly opened, and new as in new to you. My feeling is that unless you're rich or a member of the food press, you should generally avoid newly opened restaurants. By newly opened I mean less than a year old. It really does take a full year or more for most restaurants to hit their strides -- and a lot of them don't even last the year, so you'll be none the worse for having stayed away. In terms of visiting restaurants that are new to you, by the time a restaurant has been in business for a year, you should be able to make an informed decision about whether or not to put the place on your short list of places to try. All the professional reviews will be in, there will be online commentary, word-of-mouth, etc. Then the question becomes what ratio of familiar to untried restaurants will work for you. There are no hard-and-fast rules here. I think it's important to do both, but some people are going to prefer a different mix. I have a friend who almost always goes to familiar restaurants but, once a month, he goes with the same group of three friends and they always try a new (to the group) restaurant. They almost always go for lunch, which is a great way to test a new place because the financial commitment/risk is reduced. What I'd definitely recommend against is ever trying a new (newly opened or new to you) restaurant for an important meal -- kind of like how you shouldn't cook a new recipe for a dinner party.

Although you've phrased it in a straw-manish manner, the underlying theory is sound: the work of a great chef (or most any kind of artist) should be apparent at all levels of his or her work. If you're knowledgeable about design, for example, you should be able to recognize that the pieces Michael Graves designs for Target are the work of a great designer even though they're mass-produced, made from cheap materials and sold at Target. Short, casual, small-ensemble pieces by the great composers may lack the elaborate complexity of their symphonies but they can still be quite brilliant and beautiful for what they are. Cuisine is a little more fluid, perhaps, but for the most part it should be possible to go into a Ducasse place like Spoon or Mix and realize that, even though it's not an ultra-luxe fine-dining restaurant, the kitchen is producing something world class for its category.

Staff turnover in the restaurant business is rapid, and even the top executives of a restaurant have days off (or they open a second restaurant and disappear, or there's a falling out, etc.). Thus, it's always best to remember that the entity you're trying to cultivate is the restaurant and not one specific member of the staff. While it's always tempting and comfortable to ask, for example, to be served by the same captain on every visit, long-term it's best to establish multiple points of contact, learn as many names as possible and generally be known by the whole staff. That way, no matter when you show up, there will be someone there who will take care of you -- and once you achieve that level of insiderishness, the staff will usually engage in internal competition to see who can do the most for you. Needless to say, this is only a strategy you're going to want to use at a place where you visit several times a year over a period of years. The other thing to bear in mind is that, while staff turnover is high, a lot of good servers stay in the industry for a long time -- and usually in the same general location. Very often the best servers focus on hot, new restaurants. There are guys in New York who I know from now-closed restaurants like Lespinasse who are constantly popping up at whatever the latest three- or four-star contender is. Once you have that network established, you can often walk in to a brand-new place where you've never been before and get treated like family right away.

I guess it's hard to separate the issues, however what I was really focused on when I started this discussion was the contradictory/inconsistent behavior I'm starting to see among consumers in the general population. Surely we could debate the merits of organic milk and eggs versus conventional, and it's no surprise that the American consumer buys a lot of processed garbage. What I've been seeing, however, is a milk-and-eggs exception. It seems that the same consumers who buy a lot of processed garbage are nonetheless buying organic milk and eggs. Maybe it's because, especially with milk, there has been a lot of word-of-mouth and forwarded-email pseudo-scientific rumor circulating about how the hormones in dairy cause early puberty, etc., and that has somehow caused the average consumer to draw a line, kind of like when people get the Big Mac extra value meal with Diet Coke. I don't know. It's definitely something I've seen enough examples of, however, that it can't possibly be a fluke -- it seems to be what a lot of people are doing.

"It was so nice talking to you. I wish we could talk all day. Unfortunately we've got to have a meeting right now. Thanks!"

The question on the table is: "Profanity in food writing: Does it have a place?" The answer to the question is: "Yes." If Kitchen Confidential -- a bestseller, acclaimed, loved, definitive -- is not conclusive proof of this, I can't imagine what could be proof of anything. Russ, while I emphatically agree with everything else you've said here, I don't necessarily agree with your claim that Bourdain's writing in Gourmet doesn't suffer due to being stripped of profanity. I think the toned-down Bourdain in Gourmet is an inferior read to the full-on Bourdain of his books (or his eG Forums posts). I can't currently locate the issue of Gourmet where he wrote about how he doesn't like fine dining, but there were places where I thought it had been dumbed down by the change in demeanor.

Julian, of course your reaction -- or a harsher one -- was justified! However, it was not necessarily the strategy most likely to be effective. There's only so much you can accomplish via direct interaction with your server. As soon as it becomes clear that your server is a dud, the next complaint should go to management. Just get up from the table like you're going to the bathroom, hunt down a manager and explain what's going on. Most of the time the manager is horrified to hear it and will take swift and decisive action. If not, there's always KFC. Kent, way to go. Pamela, readers (and iPod listeners, notebook computer users, etc.) are not looked upon as bad by waitstaff at all. It's just a question of interpreting signals: experienced servers assume that if you're reading a book or otherwise absorbed in a project then you want to be left alone to the greatest extent possible. For my part, when I dine alone, I never pull out a book or anything like that. I converse extensively with the staff -- in most good restaurants, waitstaff know to give extra attention to solo diners who seem to want it -- and when I'm not doing that I'm either paying attention to my food, reading the wine list or scanning the room to see what's happening at the other tables. I guess there are some customers, women in particular, who use the book to avoid being hit on by waiters, but on the extremely rare occasion that I've been hit on by a waiter (or, even rarer still, a waitress) I've considered it a compliment. Some other folks, I think, use the book to avoid eye contact with other customers who might pity them for being alone, but if people stare at me I just stare back -- that usually fixes the situation, and it's fun!

At least according to this Wikipedia entry, a traditional Chicago-style dog is: "a steamed or boiled all-beef, natural-casing hot dog on a poppy seed bun, topped with mustard, onion, sweet pickle relish in fluorescent green, a dill pickle spear, tomato slices or wedges, cucumber slices or wedges, sport peppers and a dash of celery salt — but no ketchup."

It's like telling you that Gray Kunz is one of the top chefs working in America but that, for economic reasons, he doesn't currently have a signature fine dining restaurant -- he just has Cafe Gray. People who go to Cafe Gray expecting to have the Lespinasse experience are going to be disappointed again and again. That's not a reflection of Gray Kunz's talent. It's still possible to understand that, as a culinary artist, Gray Kunz has more talent in his pinky than many chefs of higher-ranked restaurants. Or it's like telling you that Alain Ducasse is one of the world's greatest chefs, but that you're not going to experience the world's greatest cuisine at his lesser restaurants. What you're going to get at one of Ducasse's brasserie-type restaurants is a great chef's take on brasserie-type cuisine -- you'll get pretty much the best that can be done in that style and at a given price point.

I wonder if what you're tasting is the effect of ultrapasteurization -- the heating of milk to around 280 degrees -- common to the major brands of organic milk. None of the organic milk I recently saw at the supermarket was locally produced -- it all came from hundreds of miles away. It seems that when you buy organic milk in the supermarket you're getting milk from cows that have been fed according to organic guidelines, but the tradeoff is that your milk is ultrapasteurized and shipped long distances and therefore likely older than the local non-organic milk at the same supermarket. I think again this may have to do with shipping. I imagine those Land-O-Lakes organic eggs are coming from a longer distance than the cheap store-brand eggs, simply because a national brand can't possibly have as many production nodes as the gigantic network of local farms that provides milk and eggs to local supermarkets across North America. Once you start shipping eggs long distance and charging serious money for them, it becomes worthwhile to invest in technology to protect them from breakage. That packaging also, I think, gives the appearance of a premium product. I agree, though, that the trifold plastic egg containers suck -- they're a huge pain especially if you just want to grab an egg from the fridge for a recipe, because you need both hands, a square foot of counter space, and your full attention to extract an egg.

You should feel totally comfortable ordering whatever the heck the menu allows -- and then some. Look, if a restaurant's management is dead set against people ordering two starters and no mains or desserts, then it's the restaurant's responsibility to force a prix fixe menu where you pay a lump sum for a starter, a main and a dessert. And even at such a restaurant, I see no harm in asking if you can swap a main for two starters or if you can grab a couple of dishes from the tasting menu for a small supplement. The worst thing that can happen is that they'll say no, and there's nothing wrong with asking exactly how much they'll charge for a special order. In terms of the way servers react to such strategies, if they can't appreciate your creativity that's too bad for them. I talk a lot in my book and public presentations about getting on the good side of the waitstaff, but that's not the only way to enjoy a meal. Sometimes you need to be willing to push your agenda whether a server wants to cooperate or not. Of course good servers will never let their irritation show, but if a bad server gets irritated because you order a lot of appetizers and share then I think you should seize the day and have some fun with the situation.

As you might imagine, not only because I'm nosy but also because it's my profession, I take a keen interest in what the other people on line are buying at the supermarket. Lately I've noticed that a lot more folks are buying organic milk and organic eggs. Many of these people do not, however, seem to be buying organic anything else. Indeed, they fill their carts with processed industrial crapola like Froot Loops and Easy Cheese, but for whatever reason they draw the line at milk and eggs. Of course, the organic milk they're buying in the big chain supermarkets is also industrially processed -- it's ultra-pasteurized so it can sit on the shelves for 70 days without going bad -- but at least only organic foodstuffs will touch their Froot Loops.

That's definitely an issue, and there are several other issues that can cause servers to give you bad information. For example, if you ask what's good you'll almost always be told what's popular. But of course, if what's popular is what's good then the best restaurant in the world is McDonald's. The mission, then, is to get the server off script. There are a few ways to do this. Certainly, some servers are just too dense ever to go off script. But usually you can break through. First, establishing that personal rapport early on creates a situation where the server starts working for you. Remember, servers in restaurants are basically independent contractors -- the restaurant is paying less than half of their fee and you (or, rather, customers in general) are paying more than half -- so once they sort out all their issues there's nothing to stop them from having loyalty to you. Once a server decides to take the act of serving you seriously, you'll often find that you get the inside line on stuff and that they sell the mandatory quota crap to the other tables. Second, as I hinted above, the more specific your questions are the more likely you are to take the server off script. "What's good?" is not nearly as effective as "I have X, Y and Z preferences; what's good?" Third, use your intuition and your ability to read people. You don't have to listen to everything a server says. Sometimes you're just not going to get good advice from the server. Good advice from the server is the preferred course of action, but there are several levels of backup available to you: you've already been online doing research about the restaurant before going (right?), you're good at reading menus and know basic stuff like "Don't order the steak at a fish restaurant" and "Don't order veal Marsala at the Greek diner," and you can tell if a server is feeding you a pack of lies. And if all else fails, you can always get a slice of pizza afterwards.