Fat Guy

The excuse, made in response to the Whole Foods challenge and repeated here, that Omnivore's Dilemma is not journalism does not square with what Pollan says in the book itself. When Pollan wrote the material for the book, he certainly saw it as a journalistic undertaking: (Page 17)Also, from the introduction: He certainly does not claim in the book -- nor does the reality of the book's general conclusions support such a vision -- that he's only writing about personal experience. Rather, he says that's half of the project, the other half being, as I understand it, a sort of anthropological journalism. Also from the introduction: I suppose he may be claiming more narrowly that the book contains some journalism but the material on Whole Foods is not journalism and is therefore exempt from journalistic principles, but that strikes me as an awfully feeble claim, devised defensively in response to getting called on an error.

It probably would have made sense for me just to ask the managers' names. Woops. In any event, to keep enhancing the descriptions here, one manager is tall, thin, I guess you'd say delicate or elegant, and maybe 5'10" tall (I'll bring a tape measure next time too). The other one -- the one you want to deal with -- is more in the 5'5" neighborhood and is more substantial, with a more gruff appearance.

Do you want exclusively cooking-themed, or is food-themed okay? I was just in the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory tonight and they have some really tiny shirts for sale. That's got to be cooler than a Charlie Trotter shirt.

As a cultural trend, at least in the US, fish steaks -- especially swordfish, salmon and tuna -- seem to have come into favor at a time when Americans were still being taught to like fish. The thick, meat-like appearance of the fish steaks got a lot of people to like fish. Fish steaks were such a success that the fish-you-can-make-steaks-from have mostly pushed the fish-you-can-only-fillet out of the market. Nobody wants to deal with skin and bones anymore. It's like the way we buy meat: we just want easy, solid, thick, even flesh wrapped in plastic on little styrofoam trays.

So I put my money where your mouths are and took this topic for a road test. Very positive experience at Oriental Garden tonight, both on the food and human relations sides. I think the price point will probably keep it off my pay-myself-six-times-a-year list, but it will definitely go on one of my secondary lists like go-when-someone-else-is-paying (which is not too shabby a list, I must say).

Thanks to the three of you who sent PMs with advice, I was loaded for bear at Oriental Garden. I won't out you, but maybe you'll publish your advice here for all to see? We were advised to insist on ordering from the shorter of the two managers in business suits. This was the single most important piece of advice to be armed with. I interrogated the taller guy up front as I was perusing the fish tanks and he was relatively unhelpful. The shorter guy, however, was extremely helpful and really behaved as an advocate for us. I had arrived with a game plan, but hardly played it out at all on account of the advice we got. We started with a triple order of steamed scallop dumplings. These were categorically the best of their kind I've ever had. They were filled with huge chunks of good quality scallops, and the skins were wonderfully thin. I think next time I go, I'll insist on an order of these (three dumplings, $3.95 per order) per person. For our other appetizer we had a pound of the boiled live coral shrimp. We were told these were from Vancouver, which doesn't make complete sense because, you know, there are no shrimp actually living in Vancouver. Still, they were indeed almost exactly like the shrimp I remember having at several of the big Chinese seafood places in Vancouver and Richmond, so they probably came from wherever those came from. Pretty much as good as shrimp get; on par with really good shrimp from the Gulf, though different (the Vancouver ones are more langoustine-ish and less shrimp-ish). I had the first of two mishaps when, upon pulling the head off the first one, I wound up with shrimp "brains" all over my shirt. This helped the others at my table to avoid the same mistake. These were $48 per pound. We had a pound, which was maybe 20 head-on shrimp. Not cheap, but delicious. Served with the aforementioned scallion-shoyu dipping sauce. Next, a small live lobster hacked up and, after lengthy discussion about the best preparation (they have about a million ways they can cook most any kind of seafood), sauteed with ginger and scallion and served atop E-fu noodles. This was absolutely fantastic -- the lobster itself had a very hard shell and firm, succulent flesh. The E-fu noodles and an unidentified green soaked up all the ginger, scallion and lobster flavors and got better as we worked through the dish. This was $28.95. A second mishap occurred at this juncture, when a small piece of lobster shell wedged itself between two of my molars, requiring the resources of the entire table and several advisors to remove -- we finally extracted it with the point formed by the crease of a folded-in-half straw. After reviewing all the fish in the tank for relative merit and price -- the manager guy was very forthcoming about what he thought was overpriced and what he thought was a good value -- we ordered a two-pound green bass. I'm not exactly sure what a green bass is -- it sort of looked like a smallmouth bass but I'm no bass expert and certainly no bassmaster -- but it was a light, delicate fish and, boy, they steamed it just right. Our son PJ was particularly fond of it. He ate more than his fair share. The green bass was $24 per pound, so $48 for the dish. We also had sauteed pea shoots with garlic. As good as that dish gets. $13.95. All that, four beers and two bowls of white rice came to $168.25 plus $14.09 tax and a $30 tip. Surely, it's possible to eat for a lot less or a lot more, but for four adults and a baby eating a lot of seafood it wasn't all that bad. I'd expect to pay about the same for about the same meal, but not quite as good, over at Ping's. Still, at this price point it's hardly an everyday place. We never opened a menu. On the way out, the shorter manager guy and our waiter walked out into the street with us and we chatted a bit. I thought about breaking protocol and slipping him an eGullet Society business card -- he was definitely web-savvy -- but decided against it; maybe another time. At one point the manager guy looked deep into PJ's eyes with a penetrating Confucian stare and announced "Ten months and one week old?" PJ was born on August 17. Cash and Amex only, by the way. No Visa/MC.

I'm going to check out Oriental Garden tonight. Sure would appreciate specific dish suggestions over on the Oriental Garden topic.

Has anyone else been to Oriental Garden lately? We're thinking of checking it out tonight and were wondering what, in addition to the above recommendations, to order. Accepting suggestions for about two more hours . . .

The uniform thickness of a steak cut makes it easier to cook it . . . uniformly.

This Daily Gullet piece, the precedent posts by Sam Mason and the companion topic "The merit of preservation: Further tales of culinary plagiarism" prompted a feature in today's Wall Street Journal, by reporter Katy McLaughlin. Unfortunately, due to the Wall Street Journal's subscription policy, we can't provide a link to the full article. Here's the link that works for subscribers, though. The article, titled "That Melon Tenderloin Looks Awfully Familiar...," looks at the issue of culinary copying mostly from a business-law perspective, as would be expected in the Wall Street Journal's coverage. It includes a few interesting new pieces of information. First, it's the only public mention I've seen of the fact that Jose Andres is pursuing the Tapas Molecular Bar copying issue as a legal matter. (If you're not up to speed on this issue, you should check the other culinary plagiarism topic -- "The merit of preservation" -- for context). Some folks were arguing that chefs don't care about protecting their intellectual property. That's certainly not the case with Jose Andres: Second, the Journal reporter uncovered some other chefs, as well as an intellectual property lawyer, who are concerned about protecting culinary intellectual property. There's a brief account Tom Colicchio's concerns about a restaurant in Hong Kong called Craft Steak. There's a quote from Norman Van Aken about how he uses the threat of lawsuits to prevent theft of his dish concepts. And there's this piece of information: Third, the eGullet Society gets a nice mention, in the context of a discussion of how the web has become an essential tool in exposing culinary copying: Oh, and three months into this, Wickens has now claimed to the Wall Street Journal that "'he told many patrons that the dishes had originated at the American restaurants."

Oriental Garden has come up here, by my count, three times -- and I'm not sure that I've ever been there. There does seem to be an eG Forums topic devoted to Oriental Garden, which until now had escaped my notice. I'm off to read it.

In my opinion, one of the best pieces of work on the subject of organics lately has been William Alexander's The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden. He had a good opinion piece in the New York Times, essentially a summary of the book, here. I'm not sure how long the link will stay live, but the general idea is:

When I was doing the research for Turning the Tables, I wanted to include institutional food service. In the end, the material didn't fit in, but I visited a few operations. Among others, I spent a day with the "Chowboss" aboard the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy (an aircraft carrier), toured the kitchens on a Crystal cruise ship, and spent time with the executive chef at the CaroMont Gaston Memorial Hospital in Gastonia, North Carolina. Hospital food is a complex issue. The elephant in the living room is the homeless problem, i.e., homeless people trying to get admitted to hospitals so they can get a bed and good meals. To some extent, especially in the major urban areas (less so in Gastonia), the food at many hospitals is designed to provide sustenance but not pleasure. Only on the "executive" floors of many hospitals -- where you pay a cash premium of a few hundred (or thousand) dollars a night for a more hotel-like room (and a better standard of care, though no hospital will admit to that part of it) -- can you get actual good food from the hospital's caterer. There are other issues as well. The available foods are limited, because a lot of allergies and conditions have to be ruled out. Packaged products are preferred because they're prepared in industrial HAACP facilities and therefore run less of a risk of bacterial contamination. Food for hundreds of patients needs to be prepared at the same time, placed on carts, held at temperature and rolled around to the rooms -- this also limits what can be done. Another unspoken assumption is that a lot of patients have their families bring them food, even if it's just from the hospital cafeteria. The cafeteria food in hospitals, for its part, is always a hundred times better than the patient food and is occasionally good on an objective scale too. The remarkable thing about Gaston Memorial was that the cafeteria food -- the food the doctors and families of patients eat -- was as good as at a white shoe law firm cafeteria here in New York City. The executive chef was Johnson & Wales trained, followed a lot of classic recipes from scratch, used a variety of suppliers and cared about the quality of food. He was media savvy so wouldn't come right out and say it, but I think he was frustrated at the limitations that make it so difficult to provide decent food to the patients.

I hereby grant emsny permission to start that topic!

Who said it was dishonest? The word dishonest has been used exactly twice on this topic: once in each of your last two posts. I see it as more of a strategic error and journalistic misstep.

"It's true that he didn't run his text past the Whole Foods corporate public relations department" "So if he didn't submit his manuscript for review by WF's legal team" "If WF wasn't given the opportunity to rebut (or spin)" "So maybe WF didn't get to review Pollan's manuscript" Talk about spin! These loaded phrasings don't change the basic tenets of journalism. For example, if you go to the code of the Society of Professional Journalists, you'll see that the second point is: "Journalists should: Diligently seek out subjects of news stories to give them the opportunity to respond to allegations of wrongdoing." There's no "I was just writing from the perspective of the consumer" exception. Pollan should have had much of the conversation he's having now before he published, not after. Failing to do so only hurts his case.

It's really good to see some of my 3x-4x places on these lists -- Yasuda (an excellent value at lunchtime), Parker Meridien Burger Joint, Sripraphai, Patsy's -- because I felt bad that my rules prevented me from listing them. Now I feel much better -- the experiment is working.

I was hoping we could pursue a slightly new line of inquiry with respect to New York-based eGullet Society members' favorite restaurants. - Let's rule out the neighborhood takeout and HMR (home meal replacement) places that you'd never visit again if you moved to the other end of the city. - Let's also rule out the super-luxe special-occasion places. - Rule out business meals, meals of necessity (compromise places near the theater, near your parents, etc.) or any meals where someone else is covering the bill so it's not your personal money at stake. - Don't list a place unless you personally and happily pay to eat there at least every other month (five or six times in the past 12 months, minimum -- past 12 months only; for the purposes of this topic we don't want to know where you used to eat a lot). Based on all those criteria, the following are my favorite restaurants right now: - The Bar Room at The Modern - I think the Bar Room serves the most sophisticated food for the money anywhere, which is why I'm always happy to pay $90 or so for a light but satisfying (and always interesting) dinner for two. I think this is Danny Meyer and the Union Square Hospitality Group's greatest achievement to date (unless you want to count the Shake Shack, but at four visits it didn't make my list). - Bread Bar at Tabla - Like the Bar Room, the Bread Bar is the "lite" version of a fancier USHG restaurant. This synergy works for me, because you get the skill of the fine restaurant's chef, a professionally managed service team, access to superior wines and cocktails and a number of other benefits you wouldn't normally get at the price point. Bread Bar's food isn't as sophisticated and subtle as what you get at the Bar Room, but it's super-flavorful and deeply satisfying. I alternate between the two places based on mood. - New Green Bo - For me, NGB has been the most consistently terrific restaurant in Chinatown. In the last year I've added the boiled pork and leek dumplings to my rotation, and have kind of gotten tired of soup dumplings -- I guess the novelty wore off. Also love the fried pork dumplings, the scallion pancakes (best I've had), the fish fillets in wine sauce, the rice cake dishes, the weird pork with edamame and bean curd skin . . . almost any randomly selected dish is good too. - Dumpling House on Eldridge - Fried dumplings, five for a dollar, and the unusual beef sandwich on a sesame scallion "pancake" (really a raised bread, not like the scallion pancakes you get in restaurants) for a dollar fifty. Best value in town. - Gray's Papaya on 72nd/Broadway - Now we know they serve the same frankfurters as everyone else. Big deal. I still love the place. Second best value. - Katz's Deli - The best pastrami, end of story. People who think otherwise don't understand pastrami. - Wu Liang Ye on 86th - This is a questionable inclusion, because it's in my neighborhood, but I believe I'd travel for it if I lived downtown. Maybe Grand Sichuan is better for Sichuan, making Wu Liang Ye the second best Sichuan in town. But they have different strengths. I love it. - China 46 in New Jersey - The Sunday "Shanghai-style" brunch (I don't know if they actually have brunches like this in Shanghai, but I don't care) is one of my standbys, and a great value. Every meal there is a good value, though, and you can get some really interesting stuff at dinner. Discussion ad nauseam in the NJ forum. - S'Agapo in Astoria - Over the past few years I've done better at S'Agapo, across from the Kaufman-Astoria studios, than at any of the other Greek places in Astoria. They have the most consistently well-made, refined spreads and mezze, and they do a really solid job with broiled fish. I try other places from time to time, and occasionally have a really good meal only to return to the same place and have a bad one. S'Agapo never disappoints. I'd like to go on and on about other restaurants I like, but I'm pretty sure the above list represents every place that satisfies my guidelines for this topic.

My main problem with most salad bars is that there's no mechanism for tossing the salad. You just get an oval-shaped plate and you have to pile all your ingredients on it and then ladle dressing over them. When you eat it, you have to eat down awkwardly through the layers of stuff. I wish every salad bar had a stack of stainless steel bowls that could be used for tossing. Coating the salad evenly with a thin film of dressing makes it taste better yet uses less dressing.

Sure, sure. The point is simply that the act of eating from a salad bar is not in and of itself nutritionally virtuous. You still have to make choices.

To address the original question a bit more directly, I don't think salad bars have gone the way of the dodo -- as in extinction. Rather, I think they have evolved into things that may not be immediately recognizable as salad bars: buffets. You don't find a lot of pure salad bars anymore. What you find are buffets with a zillion items, with a salad bar as a subset, like at Bonanza/Poderosa, Sizzler, Golden Corral, et al. Some places will allow you to get just the salad bar part of the buffet without paying for the rest, but not many. Then again it's not like the whole buffet is expensive. These buffets are usually under $10, sometimes closer to $5 at lunchtime especially with coupons. One of our old road-trip salad bar standbys used to be Wendy's. There was a time, maybe around 1990, when there was a salad bar at most every Wendy's. Then they started expanding the salad bar into the Super Bar, which had all sorts of prepared foods in it. Then they axed the concept -- now you can't find a salad bar at a Wendy's to save your life. Pizza Hut was another, but their salad bars really suck. I think it's worth looking for a moment at the health issue as well. Salad bars sound healthful in theory, however when you take a plate of lettuce, tomato and cucumber and cover it in eight ounces of blue-cheese-and-mayo dressing and maybe some coleslaw, potato salad and egg salad, you have a seriously caloric plate of food -- you'd be better off, calorie-wise, eating a hamburger.

My understanding is that the wine sales portion of eBay doesn't work like the rest of eBay. Sellers have to be licensed and qualified before they can sell wine through eBay. As far as I know, there are only a few licensed and qualified sellers, and their reputations are critical to their success.

I'm not sure that you can spend food stamps at Taco Bell, and I'm not sure I'm ignoring the time issue -- it's just not the issue here. What I'm saying is that we hear very often in the public discourse on food that "the problem is that food is too cheap." And that's not the problem. Cheap food is a fantastic achievement. The problem is that a lot of people are buying the wrong cheap foods. (Lack of physical activity, however, is probably a much bigger problem.) The point being, the "food is too cheap" argument doesn't hold up. There are all sorts of issues of preference, education, culture, etc., that combine to push some people towards bad food choices, but pure economics isn't really one of those issues. For most any cheap-bad-food scenario, it's possible to demonstrate a cheap-good-food scenario that costs the same, takes the same amount of time and tastes better. Here are some interesting accounts from Iowa State University's program. I also think the stereotyping of poor people that tends to occur in these discussions is kind of ludicrous. I mean, let's hear some real accounts of eGullet Society members' experiences with poor families and nutrition. It's not so simple. The one seriously poor family that we're friendly with eats better, from a nutrition standpoint, than we do. Thanks to the cheap and abundant American food supply, most meals at their house involve a starch like rice plus some meat and veg either stir-fried or in a curry-type stew (they're Asian immigrants). The mother works all day taking care of someone else's kids, then comes home and cooks for hers -- mostly that involves pulling rice out of the rice cooker and heating something up from the one big day of cooking per week. I don't think they eat any junk food -- they wouldn't spend the money on it. Needless to say, not all poor people are eating that way, but there's nothing in the economics of the situation to prevent it. The causes lie elsewhere. And if the causes lie elsewhere, making food more expensive is just going to be a perverse form of taxing the poor.

I don't know. McDonald's and its ilk have a reputation for being cheap, but they aren't necessarily. I mean, the last time I went to McDonald's it was like eight bucks for lunch. For about four bucks I can get a much better quality meal at any number of ethnic restaurants. And that's not just a New York thing. Once you get to most any population center above a certain size, the cheapest prepared foods tend to come from the ethnic places -- especially Latin and Asian -- not from McDonald's-type establishments. Often the quality in those places is pretty high (well, not at the worst of the Chinese-American places, but a lot of the other types of places do a good job). I mean, they may not be using organic beans (and I'd question the point of that anyway), but they're often serving pretty wholesome stuff or at least a range of items from which you can select decent food.

The "cheap food = bad food" logic doesn't survive even the most casual scrutiny. The cheapest foods in the supermarket are decidedly not the processed foods. The cheapest foods are rice, beans, lentils, potatoes, pasta, cabbage . . . stuff that people the world over live and thrive on, usually supplemented by small amounts of animal protein. Water is free, soda costs a dollar a liter. Potatoes are cheaper than potato chips -- not that there's anything wrong with potato chips. Beans are cheaper than Doritos and donuts. And there are lots of fat people shopping in Whole Foods. You don't all of a sudden get thin just because you pay more for your food.