Fat Guy

As Sunny Simmons Steincamp mentioned, Ruby Tuesday has a reliable salad bar at every outpost. (There's one in the Garden State Plaza in Paramus). We utilize Ruby Tuesday plenty when we're on road trips. You can get just the salad bar, or you can get it in combination with a baked potato, a soup or any of the entrees for a pretty small upcharge. In my opinion, however, the best salad bars are at Souplantation. This place is amazing in terms of selection, quality and value. Were I a vegetarian, I'd have to live near one. Unfortunately the chain has not penetrated the Northeast. It's concentrated primarily in California, and also in Florida and a few other states where it's branded as (mentioned above) Sweet Tomatoes -- even though Souplantation is a much better name. http://www.soupplantation.com/

The service, ambiance and not-great value at Cafe Gray are weird enough that, unless you really focus, they affect your perception of the food negatively. And who wants to work that hard? It's kind of a bummer that, in order to experience the cuisine of one of the best chefs of the era, you have to navigate that obstacle course.

Just a quick note: it's Snowdon, not Snowdown. I love the place. A few years ago I tasted several examples of smoked meat and liked Snowdon the best, better than Schwartz's. Although, a couple of years after that, I had a better experience at Schwartz's. Still, Snowdon is great. I think the source of the meat and the way it's cured and smoked are important, but perhaps equally important is the way the restaurant handles it. Snowdon gives the meat a good, long steam and slices it by hand.

I finally made it to Johnny's in Mount Vernon. It may be the best pizza between Harlem and New Haven. The place is in a marginal neighborhood a few blocks from where the Bronx River Parkway and Cross County Parkway intersect -- and it's just a few additional blocks to 87. Beware, if you Mapquest it, there's a lot of construction in the area and not every exit is going to work for you -- there are detours galore. We were coming from Manhattan and took 87 to Yonkers Ave./Raceway and then Yonkers Ave. East about a mile and a half and then a left on Lincoln Avenue for about half a mile. Johnny's is in a little plaza and not well marked, though the Mexican place ("Cancun," I believe it's called) in the same plaza is quite visible. The parking lot accommodates about ten cars so chances are you'll need to find street parking nearby. Anyway . . . Johnny's turns out faithful, old-school (as in the 1970s) pies from a plain old steel pizza oven. When you note that DiFara's also uses a regular pizza oven, the whole coal/wood thing sort of gets thrown into question. I mean, why can't everybody make pizza like this? No special equipment required. The pies are not at all like DiFara's, though. DiFara's is more towards the gourmet end of the spectrum, especially now that there's a cult following willing to support the buffalo mozzarella, baby artichokes and all that. Johnny's is more like a beautifully preserved specimen of a good Bronx (well, Mount Vernon) pizzeria of one's youth. Nothing fancy here. Just a really nice crust with a thin, crunchy bottom layer and a sourdough-like interior (I'm guessing there's some preferment at play here, but maybe not), and good sauce, barely enough cheese to tell if the cheese is good or not, and good sausage and pepperoni (those are the ones we tried). There's also a full menu of exactly the stuff you'd expect: iceberg lettuce salads, heroes, pastas, etc. The salad is appropriate for the setting, and the house vinaigrette dressing is actually pretty good -- it has some parmigiano mixed in. The waitresses also have well-preserved 1970s Bronx-ish accents, even though they don't seem to have been born until the 1980s. Johnnys Pizzeria 30 W Lincoln Ave Mount Vernon, NY 914-668-1957

Citterio makes several small salume products -- maybe 1-2" around and 6-10" long -- called, for example, Abruzze and Calabrese. These are in my opinion the best of the Citterio products and the best mass-produced salume products available in most of the large New York gourmet markets. The size is great because you can buy a whole one and, as Swiss Chef advises above, just cut off what you need when you need it. Once you get into pre-sliced salume, things go downhill quickly. The best salume you're going to get around here, though (again tracking what Swiss Chef says), is from the places that make their own. I go to Calabria up on Arthur Avenue, people who live downtown probably have better access to Faicco's, and there are various non-Italian places in the East Village and in Yorkville that make some great stuff (including the Schaller & Weber store, where they seem to have about a thousand items that never make it into commercial distribution).

Sally's is never open for lunch. Pepe's is open for lunch on Friday and Saturday only.

I haven't been there in awhile, but the steakhouse Flames is a very strong Peter Luger imitator. Flames Steakhouse 914.923.3100 533 North State Road, Briarcliff Manor You're also going to be very close to Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

They're available in a lot of supermarkets. The last time I needed some, I just went to my local Food Emporium here in Manhattan and they had plenty.

It's especially ironic that a professor of journalism and frequent New York Times contributor would rip in to a corporation in this manner (e.g., the numerous comparisons between Whole Foods and Wal-Mart) without even requesting an interview. I'm surprised it passed legal review at the publishing company. When my book was being reviewed by the HarperCollins legal department, I had to provide either written documentation or interview notes in several equivalent situations, and in a couple of places they made cuts because they thought I didn't have enough hard information to back up my claims. Pollan is such a great writer and such a tremendously smart guy that it makes me cringe to hear about him making such an elementary misjudgment. I think the better move for Pollan would have been to come right out and say "I was wrong not to ask for an interview." By arguing (weakly) around that issue, he perpetuates what could become a red herring in the debate. Instead, if he just said he was wrong, he could go on to say, "Okay, so now that we've established that I should have asked for an interview, and now that I've met with the source and done a lengthy interview, let's look at the facts . . . ." No more red herring. And he could get a good lesson out of it for his journalism classes: "See, class? Here's what happens when you don't give the target of critical reporting the opportunity to comment. I learned my lesson, and I hope you'll learn it too."

That's beef fat in the Elgin sausages. They're made from beef navel (just like pastrami) plus some drier cuts to bring the fat content to 25-30% raw, according to the pitmaster there. As they smoke, the sausages self-baste and they're incredible. I only had them today, so I can't say if they were the same yesterday (I imagine there's batch variation, as in most barbecue), but the ones I had today were one of the best sausage products I've ever tasted -- and made from beef no less.

Major improvements today with the payment processing -- they really moved the FastPass lines along at most of the pits, though a couple still couldn't plate the food quickly enough to keep up. All in all -- and I'd be interested to hear others' perceptions -- it seemed to me that Sunday went much better than Saturday. Aside from Ed Mitchell's whole hog, which is always my personal favorite, I thought the best things were Paul Kirk's brisket, the sausage from Elgin and Mike Mills's ribs. I mean, all the barbecue I tried both days tasted very good to me, but those were the standouts. We had a good panel discussion, I thought, on "The Future of Barbecue." It was moderated by Lolis Elie, and on the panel were John T. Edge, Jeffrey Steingarten, Paul Kirk, Chris Lilly and me. Danny Meyer, speaking from the audience, also participated a bit at the end. Maybe there was someone in the audience who can post about it more impartially than I. If not, I'll try to sum it up later.

The barbecue was terrific today as always, but the event has grown so much that managing it has become a logistical near-impossibility. They oversold the Bubba FastPasses, so the FastPass lines were long to begin with. In addition, a lot of people had gamed the system and were ordering as many as 30 sandwiches (that I saw), causing some individual transactions to take 10 minutes. Towards the end some of the pits figured out that rationing (2 servings to a customer) was the only way to get through the day. And, indeed, the POS machines were very slow and there weren't enough of them, or enough people plating the food, or enough efficiency in the plating process. I went to a pretty interesting seminar on "Good Pigs," about the trend -- well, it's barely a trend, since only one person is doing it -- towards using better hogs in barbecue. Ed Mitchell, the one guy who's trying to do this, got stuck in the elevator at ICE for about half an hour on his way to the seminar, so they started without him while the BABBP staff stood in the hallway calling Ed on his cell phone and searching for building maintenance staff to retrieve him. He arrived to great applause from the small audience -- by charging $20 for the seminars and locating them all the way over at ICE on 23rd between Fifth and Sixth (closer to Sixth) they created serious disincentives to attendance. Anyway . . . the gist of the seminar was that pork today sucks compared to the way it used to be, primarily because it has less fat and the feed they use today is garbage, and the fact that pitmasters today are working with pork that tastes like tofu has led to the need for injecting, aggressive rubs, etc., to compensate for the pork's flavorlessness. Probably worth a separate topic, if anybody would like to pick up the conversation.

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I'll be flying out early Saturday AM, staying at a hotel near the airport and flying back early Sunday AM. So only include me in the head count for Saturday events.

I've just bought a plane ticket and will be there. Looking forward to it.

Darren Vengroff did a terrific lecture for the eGullet Culinary Institute (eGCI) called "The Kitchen Scale Manifesto," which makes the definitive case for weight over volume measures.

The book is more of a cooperative venture between the CIA and cookbook author Martha Rose Shulman (she has written 20+ cookbooks). They are listed as co-authors, with the CIA listed first, though she seems to have done all the writing. Wiley, the publisher, does all the CIA books.

La Tacita de Oro (La Taza de Oro is a non-Chinese Spanish place in Chelsea) closed a couple of years ago. It was the best Cuban Chinese place uptown, in my opinion. Same ownership for something like 30 years. I'm not aware of any other places in the 100s or thereabouts that have survived. When I was a kid there were a bunch up there, and a bunch in Chelsea. Now most of them are gone. La Caridad has never been good -- it's just filling, greasy and cheap. It serves a purpose -- I've been there many times, though mostly in the pre-internet era -- but has never been a flattering representation of Cuban Chinese. La Dinastia (on 72nd Street) is pretty weak too. There's a La Dinastia II up in Washington Heights -- not sure how it is. Here's a piece from the Gotham Gazette on the demise of the Cuban Chinese restaurant culture: http://www.gothamgazette.com/citizen/jun03...n_chinese.shtml

I think of Bacos.

Am I the only person who's wondering what the heck a vibrating table is used for, in the culinary arts that is?

I have no doubt that, some day, humans will eat mostly synthesized food, and will look back at the practice of eating animals as utterly barbaric. I'm just glad I was born before this happened. Chances are, it will never taste as good as the real thing.

Let me also add to the list really good iced herbal tea. It doesn't have a tremendous amount of flash when presented, but made well it can be a great pleasure to drink.

The virgin cocktails topic contains some excellent suggestions.

Poaching, simmering and boiling are nebulous. Most sources will tell you 160-180 degrees equals poaching, but if you stick a thermometer in the water any restaurant is using to poach eggs you're likely to read 205 (I only know this because I've done it three times -- go figure). Likewise, various sources peg simmering at 185-205, but most simmering I see in the real world involves bringing the liquid all the way up to boiling and then turning back the flame so as to maintain what is essentially a very slow boil -- we could easily be talking about nearly 212 for a lot of simmering. Boiling is 212, of course, assuming you're at sea level, but it's different in a submarine or on a mountaintop. I imagine Saran can tolerate 212-degree water, but they're probably dishing out conservative advice because of all the variables they can't control. The biggest fear has got to be that the plastic will come in contact with the metal pot, which in some cases could be conducting a lot of energy.

That's the entirety of the communication. I was hoping for a more detailed answer. It doesn't make a ton of sense, because the steam from microwaving (which the product is certified for) is surely hotter than boiling water. Oh well, I tried.