Fat Guy

I love how Italian Tomato is a pastry shop.

That makes intuitive sense, though the article Todd points to seems to say that there are not gradations -- that the point of farming the stuff is to make every side as close to identical as possible -- and the article by the Lee brothers speaks of "the same salmon" pretty emphatically. So, who knows? One thing I can say from experience examining a few industrial food processors and distributors is that at the production end uniformity is the goal whereas the salespeople who handle the individual accounts often imply (I'm trying to use a nice word) that a given client is getting something better or unique. You know, like saying "I'll pick the nicest ones for you, just like you like them" to the client and then saying "Hey, Louie, throw twenty more on the truck!"

Here's Acme's product list: http://www.acmesmokedfish.com/pdfs/2003ProductList.pdf And here's Acme's smoked salmon page: http://www.acmesmokedfish.com/wholesale/acme-salmon.html It seems you can specify Scottish, Atlantic (presumably Chilean), wild Pacific, Norwegian, kippered, lox, gravlax, etc. My recollection is that most of these places sell all or most of the listed varieties. The products are available in various formats, e.g., for the farmed Atlantic: "available in a wide range of sizes and packages including whole or trimmed sides, pre-sliced sides, exact weight vacuum-sealed packages and even in snack-sized pieces or ground." Todd, I know that in the refrigerator cases of these places you can find many brands of smoked salmon. I think what we're talking about here, and certainly what the article is talking about, are the sides of smoked salmon in the deli/fish case that are sliced to order. Given the number of styles Acme makes, it's certainly possible most or all of them come from Acme. It's also possible they come from elsewhere. I do wonder, however, how many operations are shipping unsliced sides for deli/fish counter presentation -- that's got to be a niche market. I mean, if you go to the really big sellers like Costco you're not going to see anything sliced to order. I wish the Times article by the Lee brothers had been more specific. It gives the impression that there's one style of smoked salmon being produced by Acme, when in fact there are many. It would be even more amusing if Fairway, Zabar's, Murray's, et al., were all selling the exact same 10 kinds of salmon from the same supplier. I'd love to find out. Murray's did the smoked salmon for my sister's wedding in around 1990. Because it was in an orthodox synagogue, and because Murray's was not strictly kosher, we had to go out to Brooklyn to buy a new knife and have "Heshy" from Murray's come to the synagogue with the sides of smoked salmon and slice them there. The expert slicing did seem to make a difference. Pastrami is the same way: the exact same pastrami carved by hand is a lot better than from the deli slicer.

All these reports are likely incomplete, because if you go to any of these places there are several styles of smoked salmon to choose from. It's not clear whether they all come from Acme or if each place is buying a functionally identical product from Acme plus various other suppliers' products. Or perhaps Acme makes 20 kinds of smoked salmon. But I've been to the food shows at the Javits Center where every ten steps you take you trip over a manufacturer of smoked salmon. Maybe those folks just don't sell in to the top ten old-school New York City places. I don't know. The piece Todd cites seems to make a distinction between two national sources of Salmon, but indicates that for each of those two sources there's a high degree of uniformity. There also seems to be some evolution of claims between the older and newer articles. I may have to go out to Acme this summer and get some real answers.

I believe the Chicago-based Kronos company is the leading manufacturer of gyros meat, and distributes to restaurants all over including in New York. I'm not sure whether Krinos of New York makes a food service gyros product. I'm sure somebody in the business could find out, but simple Google searches aren't quite turning up an answer.

Yeah, the product is specifically called Gyrokones, from Kronos. It's a lovely truncated cone of "savory layers of select beef and lamb, perfectly seasoned with zesty spices, and formed into a kone that 'turns around' and cooks on a flame broiler. Juicy hot slices are cut off the kone and placed on Pita bread to make an authentic Greek sandwich." http://www.kronosproducts.com/pages/prod_cones.htm

Dryden, the Lee brothers (who wrote the piece) and Buzz Billik (Acme's director of business development) agree with you -- the main point the article makes is that all the fish is the same but the best places handle it differently. Todd36, I don't see those quotations or anything like them in the article. Can you be more specific?

Sammy, you know that's not what I'm saying, and more importantly it's not what the article says. However, since you're clinging to this point so strongly I'll simply note my complete disagreement with your argument and move on.

The quoted language clearly says we're talking about the same product being sold at different prices, not different levels of quality sold at different prices.

Overall they are getting from the same pool, without any sort of differentiation such as Prime v. Choice. As the article states, "A pound of farm-raised Atlantic salmon from Norway smoked on Gem Street and sliced to order costs $30 at Zabar's on the Upper West Side and $35 just six blocks away at Barney Greengrass — a statistic that may say more about the role of marketing in the food industry than taste." This is not analogous to Peter Luger taking the best steaks from the same supplier used by other steakhouses, nor is it analogous to Browne Trading selling better fish to better paying or longer standing clients.

In these cases, however, it seems we're talking about packaged, mass-produced products that are identical.

I'm not sure I agree that fresh mozzarella based on Polly-O curds is such a fantastic product. Certainly it's better than Polly-O supermarket-refrigerator-section mozzarella. But I think the perceived freshness and texture can sometimes misdirect us from the reality that this stuff has little flavor compared to mozzarella di bufala. I think it's a stage in local taste evolution, like crummy fake balsamic vinegar was (and still is) a stage along the way to good balsamico. And even with cow's milk mozzarella I wonder if, made from actual farm fresh milk instead of the Polly-O curd product, there might be some improvement.

In June of 2002, eGullet Society member John dropped the bombshell that the frankfurters served at Katz's deli, Gray's Papaya and Papaya King are all the same: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showto...indpost&p=47482 It was fun to be able to tell people that. It was fun for about three years, until Ed Levine wrote a piece for the New York Times in May of 2005 and brought the same information to a larger audience: http://travel2.nytimes.com/2005/05/25/dini...045caad&ei=5070 Now, the hot dog identity thing is relatively common knowledge (among those who care about such things). This past weekend in the Times Magazine, the Lee Brothers punctured another New York City myth of differentiation when they pointed out that pretty much all the top places are getting their smoked salmon from the same supplier: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14food.html So . . . what else can we debunk? I'll start by resurrecting a point that has been made in eG Forums discussions a few times in the past: It's commonly believed that many of the gourmet markets in New York make their own mozzarella. Well, in a way they do. But as far as I know nobody is taking milk and turning it into cheese. Rather, they're buying manufactured cheese curds, heating the product and molding it into balls of mozzarella. It's the equivalent, conceptually, of buying pre-made dough and baking it into loaves of bread (or pizza). Not exactly "make their own." And, to top it all off, in every instance where I've been able to observe the raw product (not many, but I expect a little investigation could reveal a widespread practice), the curds come from . . . Polly-O. That's right, Polly-O Gold Curd. Google it and weep. Anybody else?

There are more than 20 basic skills just involving a knife, so to say there are only 20 basic skills in all of cooking is just silly -- or it has to mean something other than what it seems to mean. Perhaps there are somewhere around 20 basic families of skills, if you reduce all of pastry to one skill family and you limit your list to standard, traditional Western techniques.

We offer a service called eG Foodblogs, where one of our members blogs for a week or so. We like this approach because the most interesting people often don't have the time to write an infinite-duration blog, but they'll blog for a week and we reap the benefits. There's a term that hasn't gained much traction, "clog" (community blog), that might describe our eG Forums offering. Most people just call that "forums" or "boards," though. Of course we have many other offerings: we publish an online literary journal or webzine (the Daily Gullet), we have our online culinary institute (eGCI), we have our eG Radio foodcasts, we have eG Spotlight conversations, we offer food media digests, RecipeGullet, ImageGullet . . . we're pretty diversified. We're web 2.0, or so we're told. In terms of what we call ourselves, it has nothing to do with the web. We call ourselves a nonprofit organization, specifically a culinary arts society. Most of our offerings are online and focus on increasing awareness of the culinary arts and the literature of food and drink, but some, like the eG Scholarships program (which gave away $20,000 in culinary scholarships this year), are more like traditional philanthropy (our status, legally, is that we're a "public charity"). To get back to the main part of the topic, I've got to say I'm not sure anybody has raised any particularly compelling arguments against blogs. As far as I can tell, what we're hearing is that most blogs are bad, and a few are good. I assume every single person who has posted here agrees with that? If so, what's the problem?

I don't think it's a question of integrity on the parts of the judges. As far as I can tell, this is what the judges are being asked to do. The Beard Foundation isn't paying to send them to all these restaurants. There are probably only a handful of people in the world who have dined at Alinea, the Mansion and the Modern (I don't actually know a single person who has), and of that handful few are likely to be Beard Award judges. So it's a popularity contest, not an evaluation of food. Did the Mansion even open in 2005, by the way?

I don't know if this trick works in Philly, but in NYC one of the best strategies if you want a turkey sandwich made from roasted-on-premises turkey is to bypass the deli and go to the diner. A lot of the standard-issue, usually Greek-owned diners in NYC roast a couple of turkeys every day and carve them for sandwiches as a matter of course.

There is a weeding out process, just as there is for any kind of website. That's why we know about some blogs and not about others.

Here's my guess at what goes on inside the black box: "Hmm, Alinea, I hear the food there is weird and that guy Grant Ay-shats seems kind of cocky. No way a restaurant in Vegas can be good. Danny Meyer, now that guy is a mensch, and everybody says that French dude is a good guy. The pictures I saw of the restaurant look really nice. The Modern. Check." Actually it's probably a little different because that ballots contain more choices and both the nominees and winners come out of that larger pool. If it's anything like the journalism awards, the nominees aren't actually nominees. Rather, they're the top three choices listed in random order, and then the top choice from that same selection is announced at the awards ceremony. It's a way of getting extra PR out of the same process. Clever.

For some reason, they've never asked me!

http://starchefs.com/james_beard/2003/html/gala.shtml

No, it's just imperfect. Life is full of shades of gray. Would you require that judges submit receipts with their ballots? ← Todd, the point isn't that the judges are lying about having dined at the restaurants. The point is that the rules, at least the published ones I've seen, don't require them to dine at the restaurants. http://www.jamesbeard.org/old/awards/policies.html

A process that allows people to vote on restaurants they haven't visited is corrupt.

Why are you assuming that they did not? Could you present some evidence. ←

A couple of people have mentioned some of the secondary brands of enameled cast iron cookware. I haven't had any direct experience with these. However, I've inspected some of them pretty thoroughly at places like Marshall's. Were I to buy a piece of enameled cast iron cookware, I'd buy one of the knockoffs that's trying to be like Staub. The price of Le Creuset and Staub cookware is scandalous -- you're paying for the brand, not for anything real. Cast iron and enamel are two of the cheapest substances on earth, and the fabrication expenses -- as evidenced by the knockoffs -- can't be all that great. This isn't like mating copper to stainless steel. Chances are you'll get a lifetime of use out of a made-in-China knockoff, and if you don't you can just by a new one in twenty years.