Fat Guy

There are several drawbacks to induction: - Of course, there's the issue of what cooking vessels you can use. This has already been gone over, but one point worth making is that the next generation of induction cooktops -- rumor has it they're being sold in Asia -- will work with any metal. To me, that's a pretty convincing argument for waiting. - The thing I've found most inconvenient, the few time I've used induction, is that the power output controls are stepped -- usually from 1-10 -- rather than continuous as on a gas range. I imagine they'll cure this in future versions. - The ceramic surfaces of induction cooktops are not as sturdy as the heavy iron grates of a good gas range. They can scratch and break much more easily. I think the next generation have metal surfaces. - You won't have much success with elongated cooking vessels or with two-burner griddles and such. - The repair service infrastructure just isn't there. Once your warranty is up, good luck finding the right person to fix your induction cooktop. I'd wait for better induction cooktops. Maybe five years. At that point I'll probably get a single burner unit to supplement my gas range.

I'd have little trouble going through four dozen eggs in the normal course of things. I mean, if you have six people over for weekend brunch and make a couple of big frittatas, that's two dozen eggs right there (you'll have some leftovers, but still). A double batch of chocolate chip cookies uses four eggs. You get quite a bit of time to use your eggs. You normally have several weeks until the sell-by date during which time the eggs are usable as eggs for omelettes etc., and then you can easily go a few weeks past that for baking and such, and as you get to the end of the usable life of the eggs you can hard cook and peel a bunch and use those for a couple of weeks for egg salad, salad garnishes, deviled eggs and such. And eggs are so cheap -- four dozen probably cost $4 -- that, while I'm hesitant ever to recommend wasting food, it wouldn't be the end of the world here. Then, having eaten or otherwise disposed of all those eggs, you'll be free to cook and freeze whatever you want for early motherhood -- beef stew, chili con carne, lasagna! -- so that when you're hovering within an inch of a nervous breakdown you don't have to open up the freezer and say, "I can't believe I cooked all this stuff with eggs that I didn't really want to eat; I want some damn chili."

I believe the information, which I saw in Science maybe two or three years ago, pertained to the MM genetic profile.

This is where science and policy meet, and "the best evidence" and "least risky course," while often easy to determine scientifically (as in, "the least bad evidence" and "if we never do anything, there will be no risk"), are not as easily translated into public policy, especially when that policy involves coercion and great economic cost. The near decimation of the British beef industry led to much loss of quality of life -- maybe even a few suicides and the like -- and it's certainly possible that the billions in costs could have been better spent some other way to save more lives in a less speculative manner.

As Bux says, a block shouldn't show up as a charge, because the actual tip amount should replace it. My guess is that what happened here has to do with the fact that there was no tip (on the card). It must have caused something to get screwed up with the release of the block. There are also some differences between the ways credit and debit cards are treated for accounting purposes -- that could have something to do with it. Who knows? In any event, again as Bux says, this should be taken up with the establishment not lodged as a public complaint prior to any investigation. I seriously doubt the Modern tried to steal anybody's money.

In terms of the block: restaurants need to block extra funds because you don't leave the tip until after the card has been authorized. For example, let's say you have $200 remaining of your limit (or $200 in the account in the case of a debit card) and you charge a $199 meal. Then you fill in a $40 tip. By the time the restaurant processes the tip, you're long gone and over your limit (or you've overdrawn your account in the case of a debit card). So in order to charge that $199 meal, you need to have about $240 in the account so the restaurant can block 20%. Raji, have you called the restaurant yet to inquire about this?

At the height of the mad-cow scare, or at least one of the mad-cow scares, I had a really big steak in London. I figured it was probably the safest place in the world to have a steak, given that they were incinerating whole herds if one animal anywhere near it was suspected of having mad-cow. The steak was actually from some part of Scotland where, according to the somewhat defensive server, there were no recorded instances of mad-cow. It was delicious. The general media representation of mad-cow is as follows: 1) mad-cow is caused by cows eating other cows; 2) there are these things called prions that are unlike any other infectious agent and are responsible for transmission of mad-cow; 3) people who eat mad-cow tainted beef get new variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. Each of these points is stated as incontrovertible fact, so much so that they're often run together, for example, "If you eat beef you'll get mad-cow disease!" Needless to say, people don't get mad-cow disease. Cows get mad-cow disease. There is some good evidence to suggest that some cases of Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in humans are related to some cases of mad-cow (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy aka BSE) in cows. It has not actually been proven that any of these cases were due to eating beef. The cases of nvCJD in vegetarians, the possibility that pharmaceutical gels, the water supply or surgical supplies are to blame, and the disconnect between the scare and the actual epidemiological information (there should be an epidemic but there have only been a few hundred human cases since the beginning of the mad-cow scare) all raise serious questions. Likewise, there is some information that there's a genetic predisposition, in that all victims of nvCJD (last time I checked -- it has been a few years since I wrote an article on this) had a certain genetic marker and that nobody without that marker has every gotten the disease. I wouldn't be so quick to accept the whole chain of causation that is presented so often in the media and by funding-dependent scientists in soundbites. It all may turn out to be true. Then again, some day some researcher in Australia may say "Hey, I was just looking at a totally unrelated thing and I found the virus that causes nvCJD. Yep, it was a virus all along!" Just as we learned a few years ago that the cure for ulcers is antibiotics -- a reality that escaped us for decades as an entire branch of medicine proceeded based on totally false assumptions about the nature of ulcers. Just as, currently, extraordinary steps are being taken to combat mad-cown -- steps costing billions of dollars and affecting the livelihoods of many -- based on assumptions that are hardly as certain as the literature makes them out to be.

One of the things I've noticed when traveling to established "culinary superpower" destinations like France is that Israelis often make up an impressive portion of the client base. Restaurants in France with Michelin stars do a substantial amount of business with Israeli customers, which means that back in Israel there is the type of knowledgeable, appreciative customer base that will support serious fine dining. When you combine that with all the upper middle class American Jews from places like New York, Los Angeles, etc., who represent so much of Israel's tourism base, it's not hard to imagine the possibilities. That said, "superpower" is an unfortunate exaggeration.

Agreed. Not every restaurant is for every person.

I thought both were well argued, as befits a good debate. I've found that it's suprising to most people, however, that two sides even exist.

eje, Taubes was actually focusing on the prion issue long before he turned his attention to obesity. This really dates back to his 1987 book, Nobel Dreams, which had nothing to do with prions but established Taubes (who according to the New York Times "studied physics at Harvard, aeronautical and astronautical engineering at Stanford and journalism at Columbia") as a strong public contrarian on the conventional wisdom of the scientific research establishment. His work on Prusiner and prions dates mostly to the mid-to-late 1990s and is essentially follow-up to his earlier Nobel Prize work. jsolomon, I'm happy to use whatever set of terminology you think is most appropriate (having written on this subject, I've been through all the debates with editors about proper use of the terms hypothesis, theory, etc.). And it's definitely the case that the prion theory gathers more support with each passing year. It would be interesting to see if that continued to happen if more funding became available for research of competing theories. Currently, where the big grants are concerned, it's prions or nothing.

Based on the reading I've done, this is an accurate summary of the prion theory. The one thing missing from the summary, however, is that it is a theory. While news reports and the writings of researchers who are heavily funded to do prion research are typically written so as to imply that the prion theory is incontrovertible, there are several other theories that could explain BSE, CJD and the like -- the so-called prion diseases. One of the most vigorous skeptics of the prion theory has been the journalist Gary Taubes. One example of his writings on the issue can be read online on Slate in his story "Nobel Gas". Also good on this, and accessible to the layperson, is this debate on the Nova website -- it presents both sides respectfully. This recent summary on the Fox News site, while no doubt politically motivated, makes some interesting points as well.

It's an old British quart (or two pints). It's also, in American measures, one quart plus half a pint, also known as 40 ounces -- a standard measure for some bottled spirits and also my favorite beverage: malt liquor. You want to buy in that size especially if you're taking spirits back to Canada, because customs allows 1.14 liters.

The food Andy Magowan puts out at the Federal is easily in the 99th percentile of bar food. The place is a real gem. Except it does, as Dean says, smell bad. Luckily, you can sit outside.

If I walk into most any restaurant in Midtown Manhattan I see plenty of people with notes, notebooks, notebook computers, notetaking devices and the like right out on the tables. Even at the four-star places, you see plenty of this. Nobody cares, and restaurants don't give super-VIP treatment to everyone with a pen. What staff notice is suspicious behavior, like trying to take notes under the table or constantly going into the bathroom to dictate into your digital recorder. Hide in plain sight is the best strategy, in my experience, which includes both restaurant reviewing and mystery shopper/audit work. You definitely have to take notes when you're auditing -- the information required is too detailed to remember. There is, however, little call for notetaking when writing restaurant reviews. You're writing about impressions, not about the elapsed time between when you received your menu and when you were offered the opportunity to order. Most reviewers jot down a bunch of notes after they leave, get menus and have the opportunity to speak to the chef on the phone after they visit the restaurant, so if there are lapses in memory they can be cured. The two enterprises are quite different, both in approach and result. There's not a lot of personnel crossover between the two fields, though there is some.

Several of the non-food interview shows have semi-regular food guests. Len Lopate (WNYC/NPR, and also available on XM and as podcasts), for example, has Ruth Reichl, Jacques Pepin and other major food personalities on all the time.

Rice pudding. Can be given an interesting flavor, layered with fruit and other stuff in a glass, served cold . . .

Andy Lynes, who has been an eGullet Society manager and UK forum host since the organization's beginning as eGullet.com in August 2001, will be stepping down in order to pursue his culinary writing career full time. All of us here at the eGullet Society are tremendously grateful to Andy for his years of service here. We will miss having Andy on the team, but we look forward to having him as a continuing participant in our discussions and as a friend of the Society. Once we've identified a new host for the UK we'll make a further announcement.

Even in the context of a single meal, which might be the basis for a "Diner's Journal" or "Quick Bites" (New York Times terminology) or capsule review, it's not as though the critic only tastes one dish. You might have six people at the meal, order a mid-course and, if you factor in an amuse and some sort of extra course from the pastry kitchen then you could be looking at 36 dishes -- and if you get into tasting menus the number starts to climb into the 50-100 range. At that point it becomes relatively clear what is an anomaly and what is a real problem. If you have 35 beautifully executed dishes and one screwup (which would be par for the course even at the world's best restaurants), it's just not a big deal. It's the equivalent of a few off notes or other technical errors in a musical performance -- you rarely see a performance without that. You might mention it but it's not going to change the direction of your review. If half the dishes are defective from an execution standpoint, it's not just one cook screwing up -- it's a real problem. Even if you go back five more times and the problem doesn't repeat, it's still significant. Of course when reviewing the performing arts there is always risk that the critic's sample will not be representative. But that's the risk you take as a performing artist: any example of your work may be the basis for a review. You know it, you plan for it and you live with it. It's not as though the theater and music critics attend multiple performances of the same work before writing their reviews, just to make sure you didn't have your one off night in six months. Heck, you're lucky if they stay past intermission. Anyway, the restaurant critics from the big papers are recognized most of the time, so the restaurant has no excuse for simple, avoidable errors.

A lot of this comes down to: do you consider yourself an arts critic or a consumer reporter? Currently, restaurant reviews in most newspapers serve primarily a consumer reporting function. For that, it's not particularly necessary or even helpful to acquire behind-the-scenes knowledge. The consumer, indeed, doesn't and shouldn't give a crap why the steak is overcooked -- it matters only that it is overcooked, something that can be judged with accuracy from the vantage point of the average customer. The arts critic is, understandably, a lot more interested in the nuances of the art form being analyzed. There is no particular loyalty to the consumer, the chef, the restaurateur or anyone else -- the only loyalty is to the cause of excellence in that art form. In that regard, it is often helpful to have a good understanding of the mechanics of the form. This is especially true when evaluating the performing arts -- which restaurants most resemble -- because it becomes important to distinguish among various components of what you're looking at: in music or theater, for example, there's a difference between the composition/script and the performance, and there are all sorts of sub-categories such as the set design, lighting, acoustics, etc. As an amateur theater-goer, I haven't got a clue what effect lighting has on my perception of a production, but I have a friend who does lighting for a living and he assures me that it's awfully significant. Were I to become a theater critic, I'd certainly want to get to the bottom of that sort of thing. I wouldn't have to learn how to operate one of those huge lighting boards with a million sliders and dials (though these days I think it's more like just a Mac running some software), but I might spend a few days with my friend in the lighting booth just to get a clue. It's not even that the critic should talk about all that technical stuff. It would be boring and pretentious. It's just that understanding it should subtly inform a critic's writing. And it helps with accuracy. You don't have to be a professional, but when they read your reviews professionals in the field shouldn't burst out laughing on account of your ignorance.

I agree that the variations among supermarket bacons tend to be minor, even when you get into most of the premium supermarket brands (the big difference there is the slices tend to be thicker). This is a significant issue because these supermarket bacons, which are also pretty much the same as the standard bacon a restaurant gets delivered from Sysco or US Foodservice, surely account for something like 99% of the bacon consumed in the US. Therefore they establish the bacon taste preference baseline among the population.

I like to have small salad of organic baby lettuces and mixed sprouts with a light vinaigrette, plus some multigrain bread and a glass of carrot juice with ginger and wheatgrass.

I "agree."

Same thought here to my knowledge that is the authentic prep although I thought they normally also have the head on, the only part of the shrimp I care for. ← I speculated about that as well and came up with several hypothesws: - The shrimp arrived from the purveyor without heads - The shrimp were so big they had to be butterflied for even cooking, making it difficult to leave the heads on - The heads would have been too big to be edible, because the whole salt-and-pepper shrimp thing works kind of like the whole soft-shell crab thing: the parts that would be unpleasant to eat raw get denatured by the flash frying and become a crusty, chewy, delicious thing. I don't think that works beyond a certain scale, though I guess we can ask.

Thanks to all who came for your generous contributions. This fundraiser brought $600 to the eGullet Society.