Fat Guy

These sorts of behind-the-scenes restaurant pieces were hardly revolutionary when I did them, and they're positively tired at this point, but he did a good job with his version. I'd have rather seen him try a kitchen experience, but maybe next year.

I wouldn't be so quick to stereotype the Central Park South area as exclusively the province of grand luxe restaurants. I think you'll find as many or more good moderate and inexpensive restaurants in that area as anywhere else. Let's say you live on Central Park South between Seventh and Eighth Avenues and you take the area from Fifth Avenue to Tenth Avenue and from 49th Street to 69th Street as your walkable neighborhood, in other words where you could walk in 10 minutes. That gives you access not only to 100% of the New York Times four-star restaurant and 100% of the Michelin three-star restaurant in New York City, but also to all the good, cheap ethnic eats on Ninth Avenue in the 50s as well as a ton of assorted stuff in Midtown ranging from great expensive Japanese to great cheap Japanese, tons of steakhouses, the Carnegie deli, good pizza, Grand Sichuan, etc. You get access to everything in the Lincoln Center area. Look in a Zagat guide or any book organized geographically. It's an incredibly dense, diverse, restaurant-rich area.

People for whom money is no object tend to cluster in a few Manhattan neighborhoods: Upper East Side especially along Fifth and Park Avenues in the 70s-90s, Upper West Side especially near Lincoln Center and along West End, Riverside and Central Park West from the 60s-80s, Central Park South, Gramercy Park, Greenwich Village, SoHo. The choice depends on personality. By most any objective measure, as in number of restaurants within walking distance with high star ratings from the local newspapers, you'd have to give it to Central Park South. But the funkier, more diverse local joints are more prevalent downtown. If you factor in shopping, as mentioned above, you want to look at the Upper West Side in the 70s -- a nice apartment in the Dakota is always a good choice, or perhaps the Village or SoHo although SoHo has I think been slipping. For me, however, and I assure you I'm a person who cares a lot about food, none of this is as important as being close to Central Park, especially if you have a dog, a baby or both. I live in a not-great food neighborhood -- Carnegie Hill -- but I'm half a block from the park and I have enough acceptable local options to get by. I use the subways and buses to get where I need to go, and we have a car, so it's no problem to shop at Fairway even though we don't live within walking distance. We just drive over to the one in Harlem -- it has a parking lot and the shopping experience is much more pleasurable than at the one on Broadway and 74-75. And you have to remember that the city is not the best place to get everything -- it's nice to be uptown and have a car because you can so easily get to Yonkers for Costco, Home Depot, Stew Leonard's, etc., to the Bronx for Arthur Avenue shopping, and to Queens for Greek food in Astoria, Flushing Chinatown, Roosevelt Ave., etc. It's also the best neighborhood if you want good access to La Guardia Airport or if you often go to the suburbs northeast of the city (Westchester, Southern Connecticut). Also good access to the GWB, though not to the various tunnels.

Must . . . bring . . . Jell-O . . . mold . . .

You've already found one of the surest paths to unlocking your potential as a food writer: it's called the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters. Just ask JJ Goode, who parlayed his Daily Gullet internship into an internship at Saveur and now a job at Conde Nast. Or Monica Bhide, Andy Lynes or any of the other people who started out writing online here and are now bona fide full-time professional food/travel/lifestyle writers. Send Dave Scantland ("Dave the Cook") a PM and see if he has room for you on his team.

There have been highlights during each of the three Ducasse chefs' regimes (Didier Elena, Christian Delouvrier and Tony Esnault). There are dishes I miss now, and there are new dishes that seem better than anything that came before. I will say unequivocally that Tony Esnault is the most Ducasse-like chef to inhabit that kitchen: the food looks, smells, tastes, reads like Ducasse's food. And while I'll never eat at the restaurant enough times to establish a statistically meaningful sample, I get the impression that Esnault is a very consistent performer -- a technician operating at a high degree of precision. That being said, I agree that the fish dish oakapple described is unremarkable as were two other fish dishes I tried on our most recent visit, when we also had the four-course menu with all the same choices oakapple described. On the whole, the fish course was weak. Maybe as part of a longer tasting menu I'd have seen it in a different context: a beautiful little piece of fish with a technically correct sauce. But as an entree-type course the fish dishes fell flat. Not so all the other courses, especially the cote de boeuf, rack of lamb and blue foot chicken entrees. Each was amazing, especially ingredients-wise but also the sauces were the most vibrant, pure, extracted sauces I remember having in New York. My only complaint is that I miss the tableside service for two that used to be standard for the beef and chicken dishes. These dishes are now available for just one person, which is great if you're one person and want to taste the dish, but something is lost in translation when it's plated up in the kitchen without the wonderful carving ritual.

I'll have to order a sandwich to double check this, but I've never enjoyed cold toast. Interesting that special requests and phone orders in general aren't handled smoothly. The online ordering interface seems very sophisticated and allows for special requests ("Enter your special requests here") to be printed up right on the ticket printer in the kitchen -- one would think that would virtually eliminate the possibility of miscommunication. I'm going to road test these systems thoroughly when the Upper East Side place opens. P.S. Looking on the Starwich website this morning, there's still lots of talk about the smart card ("Starwich Profile Card").

I haven't heard a peep about the smart cards since shortly after Starwich opened. I have a feeling they've ditched the idea or at least postponed its implementation indefinitely, but we should ask Spiro when he comes online here next month. Personally, I love the idea and wish I could have my very own.

Toast just doesn't travel well. Within a few minutes of coming out of the toaster, it degenerates, and if you wrap it and schlep it outside and in then the situation is worse. I'm wondering if, for delivery, they just skip the toasting phase altogether.

I wonder what Starwich does about the toast issue when it does deliveries. I've never thought to ask, and I've never had Starwich sandwiches delivered because I'm still waiting for the damn Upper East Side store to open.

This is a little different from broadcast radio: here, you don't tune in at a given time. You just follow the link above (here it is again) and download the file, which you can play at your leisure. It's not a live broadcast; it's a recording that you download and play on your computer, transfer to your iPod, etc. I hope that's helpful, but if more help is required . . . a quick reminder: this topic is for discussion of what we're talking about in foodcast 001; for technical questions please use the Technical Support forum and for other comments please use the eG Forums and Society Questions and Comments forum. Many thanks.

We've got our first eG Radio foodcast online and available for download now. The announcement is here. This topic is for discussion of the content of eG Radio foodcast 001, the STARWICH interview, released 17 Jan 06. If you need technical support with, for example, downloading or playing the foodcast, please use the Technical Support forum. If you have questions or comments about the eG Radio foodcast effort that are not related to the specific issues dealt with in this program (e.g., "This foodcast sucks!" or "When will there be more?"), please submit those to the eG Forums and Society Questions and Comments forum. Thanks!

The eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters is delighted to announce the launch of eG Radio, a series of audio foodcasts available online at www.eGullet.org. Foodcasts will be announced on this topic in chronological order as they are released. <br><BR> Click here for the 17 January 2006 eG Radio foodcast.<br><BR> (Clicking the above link should initiate a download of an .mp3 file, which is a recording of the foodcast; you can then play it on most any media player such as Windows Media Player, or you can transfer the file to an iPod or portable device).<br><BR> In the inaugural eG Radio foodcast, recorded on location at the flagship STARWICH restaurant in New York City, we talk to the STARWICH management team about its ambitious program to bring upscale sandwiches to the American consumer.<br><BR> The discussion topic for eG Radio foodcast 001 is here.<br> <BR>To subscribe to our foodcast feed, just click the appropriate button...<BR> <A HREF="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=134732732"><IMG BORDER="0" ALT="Subscribe with iTunes" SRC="http://www.egullet.com/egradio/images/itunespodcastbadge.gif"></A> <A HREF="http://yahoo.com"><IMG BORDER="0" ALT="Subscribe with Yahoo! Podcasts" SRC="http://www.egullet.com/egradio/images/yahoopodcastbadge.gif"></A><BR> <A HREF="http://www.podnova.com/add.srf?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/egsociety"><IMG BORDER="0" ALT="Subscribe with PodNova" SRC="http://www.egullet.com/egradio/images/podnovapodcastbadge.gif"></A> <A HREF="http://odeo.com/channel/79696/subscribe/"><IMG BORDER="0" ALT="Subscribe with Odeo" SRC="http://www.egullet.com/egradio/images/odeopodcastbadge.gif"></A> <BR>Or subscribe to our foodcast news feed with any of the following services...<BR> <A HREF="http://www.bloglines.com/sub/http://feeds.feedburner.com/egsociety"><IMG BORDER="0" ALT="Subscribe with Bloglines" SRC="http://www.egullet.com/egradio/images/bloglinesnewsreaderbadge.gif"></A> <A HREF="http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/egsociety"><IMG BORDER="0" ALT="Subscribe with My Yahoo!" SRC="http://www.egullet.com/egradio/images/yahoonewsreaderbadge.gif"></A><BR> <A HREF="http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/subext.aspx?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/egsociety"><IMG BORDER="0" ALT="Subscribe with NewsGator" SRC="http://www.egullet.com/egradio/images/newsgatornewsreaderbadge.gif"></A> <A HREF="http://client.pluck.com/pluckit/prompt.aspx?GCID=C12286x053&a=http://feeds.feedburner.com/egsociety&t=eGullet%20Society"><IMG BORDER="0" ALT="Subscribe with Pluck" SRC="http://www.egullet.com/egradio/images/plucknewsreaderbadge.gif"></A><BR> <A HREF="http://www.rojo.com/add-subscription?resource=http://feeds.feedburner.com/egsociety"><IMG BORDER="0" ALT="Subscribe with Rojo" SRC="http://www.egullet.com/egradio/images/rojonewsreaderbadge.gif"></A> <A HREF="http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=http://feeds.feedburner.com/egsociety"><IMG BORDER="0" ALT="Subscribe with Google" SRC="http://www.egullet.com/egradio/images/googlenewsreaderbadge.gif"></A><br> Members can also click "Track this topic" at the top right of the topic view page in order to get automatic email notifications when new foodcast announcements are added to this topic.

I must respectfully disagree with Mr. Z. My experience and the reports I've heard and also the credible-seeming message-board posts I've seen all point to Cafe Boulud delivering a weak Restaurant Week performance. I get the impression of a restaurant that is doing the Restaurant Week thing reluctantly. Cafe Boulud is one of my favorite restaurants in all New York, but I would not recommend it for Restaurant Week. Over the course of many Restaurant Weeks, I've come to the conclusion that the Danny Meyer/Union Square Hospitality Groups are by far the most enthusiastic participants in the promotion, as is their cousin Craft.

I've run into this excuse in several restaurants around the United States, and also in Canada and the UK. It has never been clear to me that it is actually illegal, as in against the law, to serve rare or even raw beef. It may be, but I haven't yet seen the text of any actual legislation or regulation on that point. However, there are surely health advisories put out by various federal and state government bodies, so I can certainly see why many establishments would interpret that as a legal requirement or at least be concerned about liability and would therefore require a certain doneness as a matter of company policy. Between the litigiousness of consumers, the alarmist information put out by governments about rare beef, the lack of care with which many establishments and companies purchase beef and the lack of any significant demand for rare beef, why bother?

There have traditionally been two buffets at the Waldorf=Astoria: the everyday one (weekday breakfasts, weekend brunches) at Oscar's and the more elaborate, better one at Peacock Alley (Sunday and holiday brunches only) that spills out into the lobby. The Oscar's buffet has, as far as I know, been open pretty much continuously -- it's the Peacock Alley brunch that ceased for a few years. My understanding is that Peacock Alley, having recently reopened, is going to relaunch its brunch program. That's the one I'd recommend. They did one on Christmas day and I was hoping to go but something came up, so unfortunately I can't report on it.

There seems to be a lot of line-blurring these days between steakhouses and non-steakhouses. Of course, the description was never all that accurate since lobster is such a big part of the experience at the classic steakhouses like the Palm, which really defined the genre. It seems that right now the term steakhouse is often used simply to justify full a la carte menu pricing (no side dishes included) rather than to describe what the restaurant serves.

The two new stores will be 86th & Amsterdam and 84th & Lex.

The idea of the buffet has gotten a bad name among the urban-upscale gastronomic intelligentsia by being associated with the obese, undiscriminating American strip-mall culture. And indeed the nation is awash in awful quantity-over-quality buffets full of utility grade beef and "Rangoons" and such. At the same time, the close quarters, high real estate costs, narrow profit margins, high ingredients costs and various sanitation/hygiene issues make it difficult to run a Golden Corral or Ponderosa-type buffet in Manhattan or any other densely populated urban core area. Buffets (which are almost by definition all-you-can-eat, though there are limited exceptions) are, however, a time-honored culinary tradition. When done well, they offer diversity, abundance and individual control. A good buffet is so enjoyable because you can sample a bite or two of everything and then have more of what you like best. Aquavit is a great example of a place that does brunch right. There are several other upscale buffet experiences that are also worthwhile, mostly associated with hotels, especially the brunch at the Waldorf=Astoria. But there are also good, cheap buffets in Manhattan here and there, especially Indian ones. My favorite is the vegetarian Indian lunch buffet at Dimple (30th Street just West of Fifth Avenue).

It was inevitable. It's truffle season. Starwich has already demonstrated that people will routinely pay $8.95 for a sandwich (actually, I think average cover is over $10). So, is it any surprise that, starting today, 9 January 2006, two grams of shaved truffles will be available to top any sandwich or salad for a $15 supplement? The truffles will be available through January 31 at all four Manhattan Starwich locations (there are also two more stores coming in February: Upper West and Upper East). Truffles will be added to the menu of more than 130 high quality Starwich ingredients at all four Manhattan locations through January 31. I'm heading over as soon as I can find an excuse to try a soft shell crab BLT with the truffle supplement.

I think it's probably traffic from Grand Ave. using Route 46 as a Turnpike onramp.

This is one of my favorite subjects. There is only one way to get to China 46 if you don't have a helicopter: you have to be traveling WEST on Route 46. If you're traveling East on Route 46, you have to go past the restaurant and then make it through one of the most incredibly complex "U-turns" (I use the quote marks because there is no letter of the alphabet as complex as this turnaround) in the universe. But back to the Westbound thing. Here's the deal: in order to get into the China 46 parking lot you have to cut across two lanes of merging traffic from the Turnpike. Say you're going West from the GWB. First you'll be traveling on the part of 46 that's really 1/9/46 together. Then 1/9 will split off -- that's how you know you're getting close. Then you'll go under an antiquated underpass/tunnel thing. As you rise up out of this marvel of ancient engineering, on your right there will be lanes merging in from the Turnpike. This is the exact moment at which the glorious yellowish sign of China 46 (which is in a former Greek diner in the parking lot of the Days Inn motel -- though the ownership of the motel tends not to be all that stable) will come into view. So now you have to cut hard across that merging traffic, and then you have to decelerate rapidly so that you can turn into the lot. If you're lucky, there will also be extensive and confusing roadwork going on at that point on the highway -- there usually is.

I think it depends on the type of restaurant and its clientele. At the places where I encountered at least some candor on this issue, the main point the managers made was simply that locals calling from home base statistically seem to show up for their reservations (or call to cancel rather than just not show) more often than people calling from out of town. That the locals are more likely to be converted into repeat customers is another consideration. But then there are restaurants that do very little local business -- they attract mostly business travelers, families on vacation, tour groups or whatever. At those places, you want to be sure you're in the good graces of concierges, travel agents, CVB people and the like. Which is not to say that all restaurants demonstrate preferential treatment in a rational manner from the standpoint of maximizing profits. Sometime the preferential treatment is based on mistaken assumptions (like a restaurant that, mistakenly for its demographic, prioritizes concierge calls over local calls), and other times it's motivated by personal concerns (the owner just really likes having soap opera stars in the restaurant, even if they don't spend more money or generate any buzz or secondary sales).

They prefer that you make the reservation directly, because there's a fee for each online reservation. The upside of the online reservations is that on nights when they wouldn't be full they might get a few extra covers. But if someone has a choice between online and by phone, restaurants prefer by phone. Caller ID is standard on most restaurants' phones, but it's also of limited utility. I didn't keep a log, but in looking at a whole lot of calls coming in, the overwhelming majority seemed to be from cell phones (mostly with no name information attached), office PBX systems (with the ID showing the main line in an office) and hotels, whereas when people leave a number they tend to use their home number or their direct dial office number (although OpenTable can accommodate multiple numbers associated with one record). It is occasionally the case that the reservationist actually gets your name and number with the incoming call, but chances are that information has not been keyed into OpenTable yet when the phone is answered -- OpenTable doesn't interface with the phone system the way telemarketing systems do. Most likely, if the reservationist recognizes you from caller ID, it's because he or she actually remembers who you are. Another tidbit: restaurants that deal with a lot of no-shows will sometimes demonstrate favorable treatment towards people calling from home from local numbers -- they'll find a table for you, whereas they'll tell someone calling from a hotel or from out of town that they're fully committed.

A restaurant that doesn't ask you for a phone number probably isn't using OpenTable. A restaurant using the OpenTable software uses name and phone number to identify guests. The online and in-house systems are reconciled in real time, at least that's how it has worked in the restaurants where I've observed the system in action -- and I assume it's uniform. Online, OpenTable also asks you if it's a first visit, and there's a notes field that you can use to send a shout-out to the restaurant if you're concerned they won't figure out that Joe Smith is the Joe Smith who comes all the time and asks for Table 34.