Fat Guy

If a culinary professional is someone who works in the food service industry then of course I'm not a culinary professional! If the term culinary professional includes those who write about food professionally, then of course I am that. The International Association of Culinary Professionals would say a writer is a culinary professional -- it includes writers, photographers, nutritionists, publicists, etc., in its membership classes. And this matters because . . . ?

I've met Tony Esnault twice now and sampled some of his work product, but in neither case was it a proper meal. On August 16, we had a launch party for Turning the Tables at Tavern on the Green and several of the restaurants that I wrote about in the book came and served food. Esnault and his pastry chef were there doing the "Chocolate / raspberries for the contrast lovers, Tahiti vanilla ice cream" dish, which was very tasty. A photograph, for those who are interested: After the party we went and had dinner at the Modern's bar room with some friends from North Carolina who had come up for the party and then at 5:45am Ellen went into labor and that afternoon she delivered our son, so I haven't been able to post much in the way of book-party follow-up and I'm not sure how interesting it would be anyway. (Oh let me mention that the moderating team has asked that if you have any good wishes to send regarding the baby that you do so by PM or e-mail not on-thread -- thanks). I was at ADNY this Wednesday for a "meet Tony Esnault" cocktail party. Apparently there were all these famous people there (Martha Stewart, et al.), but I was unaware thanks to a combination of poor vision and cultural illiteracy. Anyway, the food served was tasty (well, it was excellent and better than most meals at most restaurants with New York Times stars) but it was a butlered hors d'oeuvre thing so again not really worth a full report. If you're interested in getting a look at Tony Esnault, here's a photo from the Ducasse PR people taken by their photographer (the photo above of the chocolate and raspberries is from Ellen). That's (left to right) Drew Nieporent, Tony Esnault, Alain Ducasse, Gwenaelle Gueguen (she's Ducasse's significant other) and Alain Sailhac (while now known mostly as the dean of the French Culinary Institute, Sailhac's greater claim to fame is probably that he was the first chef ever to receive four stars from the Times -- he was the chef at Le Cygne at the time). Now that we've got the baby we're a little less mobile in terms of dining out, but I'm hoping to make it to ADNY before we go on book tour in a couple of weeks. We're going to try to get in there with the whole mishpacah on a night when the aquarium is empty.

I hope the new urbanism will help with wine acceptance. Right now, a substantial percentage of the population lives in such a way that it is necessary to drive to dinner.

Since I say in the book that I'm a lawyer, it seems entirely rational to mention it in a review! The opening pages are autobiographical, so that information is on the table and open to examination. I felt it was important enough to include in the book, so why would a reviewer be challenged for including it in a review? Not that I get to choose what is and isn't important. If I hadn't said I was a lawyer, a critic could have brought it up anyway. That being said, the inference in this particular case is wrong. I didn't get my approach to discourse from law school. I went to law school and thrived in that environment because that was how I was. Prior to that (also in the book) I was a college and high-school debater, and prior to that (also in the book) I grew up in an academic household -- both parents professors, older sister an editor (currently at the Wall Street Journal, but always with the soul of an editor). In my house, at age three you didn't make a claim unless you could document it with examples!

In the not-too-distant past, an American chef almost by definition had not gone to culinary school. Now, fine restaurant kitchens all over the world are populated by students trained at dozens of American culinary academies. Culinary education seems to be booming, with existing educational institutions adding culinary programs (not just cooking, but also academic programs related to the study of food), new cooking schools opening and the established cooking schools expanding. Surely, this helps to raise the standard. It may also be the reason why the menus at most second-tier fine-dining restaurants are interchangeable. What does the future hold?

Perhaps someone would like to start a companion topic on the role of immigration.

I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts on the role of travel in the future of cuisine. I'm always surprised to learn how few Americans have passports -- I believe the number is something like 22 percent. Not that the statistic is directly comparable to Europe, where a trip from New York to Florida would be a trip through five countries, but still it means that the overwhelming majority of Americans have never left America. Those that have, may only have gone to all-inclusive resorts in the Caribbean. And yet, the most popular foods in America are imports: Italian, Chinese, Mexican. I assume over time travel will become easier and cheaper, even if the short term doesn't look all that great for travel. Eventually, faster and more efficient air travel has got to come along. Will this foster more of a spirit of adventure among diners, or will it cause homogenization, or will it just create a lot of tourist traps?

Maybe there should be a negotiated settlement: chefs promise to put salt on the table, and customers promise to taste the food before they salt it. Seriously, I don't know that it's arrogant as such to leave salt off the table. I think it's more of a flow of history thing: it strikes me as part and parcel of the shift from gueridon service to composed plated service, and the attendant changes in styles of cooking that flowed from nouvelle cuisine. If you bring a gueridon to the table and you carve up a bird and plate it with some simple garnishes, chances are it may need further seasoning. Moreover, seasoning at the table is a logical part of that process: the sauce may also be in a gravy boat on the side -- it's a different way of eating from what restaurants largely do now. Today, if you're plating a nouvelle cuisine dish in the kitchen and creating a composition of cubes of this and stacks of that and every bit of sauce and garnish each in its place, you're supposed to be delivering a finished product. If it needs salt at the table, it's defective -- or at least that's what current culinary standards hold (personally, I think some people prefer more salt than others, so they should have their salt). That being said, most chefs who refuse to put salt on the table aren't actually up to the task of running a kitchen that puts out properly seasoned dishes every time. And some of the top chefs (Ducasse, for example) do provide salt. In terms of the future, I would love to see a return to gueridon service, dessert cart service, etc., but I think it's not going to happen so long as restaurants have to rely upon human employees. The labor equation just doesn't balance.

Snarkiness in book reviews is quite common, almost as common as plain old meanness. The Boston Globe reviewer, Bob MacDonald, gets snarky in places (though I'm not sure I have a really good working definition of snark). His review begins: http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/20..._kitchen_doors/ It's okay. Book reviews are only partly about the books in question. The reviewer plays a large role in a book review. I don't make much of the amateur/professional distinction either. There was probably not a specific day on which I went from being an amateur to being a professional, unless you use a strict old-style Olympics definition of being paid any amount of money making you a professional. It's not like in the medical profession, where the demarcation between a professional and an amateur doctor is quite clear and settled. Some professional writers suck; some amateur writers are great; some of the best freelance writers do other things for a living and write on the side. Our own Richard Kilgore, an accomplished book reviewer, is a psychologist by profession. What were we talking about?

Maybe I'm dense, but I'm having a lot of trouble understanding the relevance of the claim that dinner is better than brunch. It strikes me as a category error. You can order anything you want, any time -- a la carte is always available. You can go to China 46 on Sunday at noon and order the exact same seafood dishes you can order on Wednesday night at 7pm. The only difference is that, on Sunday at noon, you also have the brunch option. You can even order the brunch and any seafood dishes you want -- the brunch for one person only costs as much as one additional dish, and it covers all your soup dumplings, jaozu, and other stuff you'd have ordered anyway. It strikes me as odd to complain about more choice (and a great bargain) by interpreting it as less choice. There also seem to be a few issues on the table here. There's the pure question of the decline of quality overall at China 46 (I disagree with the claim). There's the claim that the brunch has declined (I disagree) in quality but not the dinner (I agree). There's the claim that dinner has declined (I disagree). Then there are objections to the brunch based on poor brunch strategy (I've tried to offer some solutions). And there are objections to the brunch based on the aesthetics of brunch. Here, I can see how some people would simply prefer ordering a la carte to a buffet. If you assign no value to the bargain and no value to the ability to sample a large and diverse selection of items, then of course you're going to be happier ordering a la carte. That's a choice for everyone to make; however the choice can be made at any meal sitting. For me, the brunch selections are on target. The last time we had dinner at China 46 we ordered nine items and noted that seven of them would have been included in brunch: four from the printed dim sum menu, one from the cold buffet and two from the hot buffet. Only the two that would have come from the hot buffet could arguably be said to be at risk of being worse from the buffet than if cooked to order, but if you "game" the buffet you can get everything as it comes out from the kitchen -- they make small buffet portions and replenish frequently, so this is no challenge. The two items we ordered that wouldn't have been brunch items were good, but against that we weighed the fact that at brunch we'd have had access to 20 or so other items. Moreover, we'd have saved money -- not an insignificant amount especially if projected over, say, ten meals. Just my two cents.

The person of limited means who has no knowledge of haute cuisine but truly appreciates a great hamburger should be said to have a gourmet attitude. The person with every advantage, who has dined in Michelin three-star restaurants and been exposed to the finest wines yet cannot appreciate a great hamburger, has no excuse.

He definitely does that thing with his pinky.

I have long felt that I exhibit a certain chirpy warmth, but have never been able to put it into words.

Can I get a pronunciation on this?

Tom Colicchio

I think the word is up for grabs. One of the two companion volumes to Turning the Tables is supposed to be called On the Table, and it's in part about rescuing the gourmet culture from the snobs and elitists. Of course I have to find a publisher for it first . . . In any event, I think the meaning we should be trying to give to the word gourmet is similar to Ruhlman's definition of gourmand. It often involves a spirit of adventure, though it doesn't have to mean trying new things or traveling far -- there are some gourmets who focus only on hot dogs in New Jersey (like our member John "the hot dog guy"; if I sell the book he's going to be profiled in it). It's a spark of enthusiasm and dedication to excellence that transcends economics and cultures -- you can find it in a four-star restaurant, and you can find it at a barbecue competition; and you can find it absent in those venues as well.

The question for me when I wrote the book was: will anybody review it? I was concerned that it wouldn't be taken seriously as a reviewable book -- that it would be seen as light summer reading (the August release was problematic from that standpoint) and sit unreviewed as most food books are. So it has been a thrill for me to see it reviewed in the New Yorker, Washington Post, Boston Globe and other serious outlets -- real book reviews, not necessarily even in the food section. Most reviewers have found things to like and thing not to like about the book, and that's fine. I'm just glad to have the book reviewed, so I thank Mr. Fine for that. I don't agree with or even comprehend everything he has written, and I've never heard of the book he's comparing mine to, but I enjoyed the review.

I think the Silver Pond dim sum brunch is awesome. The one time I went to Silver Pond other than brunch it was awful. This doesn't make me love or hate Silver Pond -- it's just a fact I file away so I know to go there for brunch not for other meals. Same with China 46. I don't care that some things are good and others are not; I just need to know what's good.

You can heat and cool it all you like -- just don't let it sit at an in-between temperature; that's when it can attract bacteria and such.

"The brunch is good, but they don't even put out the good dim sum...you need to order it." Okay, but just to be clear: it's all included in the brunch. Quick China 46 brunch refresher course: there are several components to the brunch, including 1) the cold buffet of Shanghai-style appetizers, 2) the hot buffet of assorted dishes, 3) the soup, bun, shumai and dumpling station, 4) the printed brunch menu and 5) occasional items they send out of the kitchen especially to regulars. I think the strategic mistake a lot of people make is focusing on number 2. This is surely the weakest part of the brunch. Which is not to say it's uniformly weak. There might be twelve or more dishes out at any give time, and of those three or four might be outstanding -- as in, as good as anything you'd get at C46 dinner. There are usually either whole crabs or salt-and-pepper shrimp (or both), there's usually at least one really good egg dish (like the one with the tiny fish, or the whole eggs with pork), etc. Yes, there are some Westernized stir-fried-brightly-colored-chicken-with-X dishes. Just don't eat them -- it's a buffet; nobody is making you. You just have to be smart, ask questions and focus on what's good. The other four categories of the brunch are always, in my experience, excellent. And it's incredible that you can order all you want from the printed dim sum menu and it's all included in the price: two varieties of soup dumplings, two varieties of jaozu (sp?), various first-rate soups, vegetable dumplings and vegetable buns, scallion pancake with egg (fabulous!) and more. That alone would be worth twice the price of the brunch. Go in, sit down, spend a few minutes with the printed menu before you eat anything. Order your first round of hot kitchen items. Then get some cold appetizers and do a survey of the hot buffet and cooking station so you can start planning what you'll eat later. After you've had your cold appetizers and your hot kitchen items, get stuff from the cooking station and choose selectively from the hot buffet. If you're a frequent customer, by this time some little snacks have probably also come out of the kitchen for you. Still hungry? Order some more soup dumplings or whatever. The amazing thing to me about China 46 is not that it's so good, not that it's so cheap and not that Cecil and Mrs. Cecil are such great hosts. Rather, it's that so many of the items are the best of their kind. At most restaurants you never see a single item that's the best of its kind. At most of the best restaurants you see one or two items that are the best of their kind. At China 46, I'm constantly amazed by meals where four, five and six things I've had are the best I've had of their kind in the New York Metro area and sometimes anywhere (not that I've been to Shanghai). So, I respectfully disagree with the brunch detractors. I don't think the quality has declined. I do think the hot buffet is better on days when there are more customers -- Cecil has said to me several times, "The more people who come, the more things we can cook!" But once you internalize the idea that the hot buffet is not the focal point of the brunch, you're going to do great.

Nice countertops. If the stock tastes good to you, I wouldn't worry about a little more or less fat and particulates. We're not running a four-star restaurant here -- our stuff doesn't have to be visually flawless. Sometimes, for whatever reason, the fat and stock want to be together, or you have other stuff coagulating in there. There are various processes you can use to get rid of a little more of it -- you can make a raft, you can use a defatting pitcher, you can keep heating and refrigerating forever -- but it seems like you've made most of it go away and really there's no law that says you've got to get rid of all of it. Fat and other "impurities" actually add flavor in many instances -- you may find that you get a better beef-vegetable soup out of this stock than out of a fully defatted and clarified one. I just wouldn't use it to make the most delicate sauces or a consomme. You are to be commended for your dedication to the craft of making stock.

It seems that the era of the globetrotting chef is upon us: Ducasse, Vongerichten, Nobu, Puck . . . even artisans like Thomas Keller, thought to be the last holdouts against mitosis, are now operating multiple restaurants (including in Las Vegas). I'd be particularly interested to hear where Michael and Clark think the future is taking us with respect to multiple ownership. Will it ever again be possible to be a globally influential chef with just one restaurant, or are Adria and a few others the last of a breed (though even Adria is involved in many projects now)? Will this be good or bad for cuisine?

Culinary history surely follows "regular" history, though it tends to lag behind considerably. The restaurant kitchen was one of the last places to be reached by the industrial revolution. Escoffier largely gets credit for reorganizing the kitchen along those lines -- as an assembly line rather than a pre-industrial craft studio. It would be silly to ignore that Nouvelle Cuisine is a product of the post-War era, both culturally and economically. It's hard to believe it can be tied unequivocally to specific events in 1968, especially since Point died in 1955 and was the father of nouvelle cuisine, but the events of 1968 and the nouvelle cuisine movement certainly have common roots. In the present day, Adria and Ducasse, among others (Wolfgang Puck, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Nobu Matsuhisa) represent the latest move forward: Adria leads the culinary avant-garde, and not a moment too soon (a couple of decades behind the avant-garde in most other artforms); Ducasse has brought the modern management revolution to the restaurant kitchen and the restaurant corporation, much as Escoffier did with the industrial revolution -- Puck, Vongerichten and Nobu have played their parts as well. In the future, I think we can expect to see culinary history continue to go along for the ride with general history. In some cases, food may even drive history. The modernization of the food business -- here I'm talking about the food industry as a whole rather than the fine dining business -- has been one of the most powerful historical forces of the past 60 years. Eric Schlosser probably overstates the case when he views contemporary American society through the lens of fast-food, but he contributes much in terms of showing how influential the food business has been on American culture.

There is no average citizen in a polyglot culture like ours. But I have certainly shared the table with people whose incomes and assets place them well below the generally accepted definitions of poverty and been served what I would consider hedonistic, gourmet meals. Not haute cuisine, but excellent cuisine eaten for the joy of it. We have some friends in Queens, for example, who are Tibetan refugees. They are poor, as in they live in a two-room apartment in Woodside with what seems to be about twelve adults and children and they have about twenty jobs between them -- everything from babysitting to rolling sushi in the basement of an industrial food production facility to driving an unlicensed small moving van. When we've gone there for dinner, we've dined very well indeed. And it hasn't been expensive for them to produce these meals -- food in America is cheap; good food in America is cheap. Nor is cooking all that labor-intensive for them; they're just good at working it into their day. I have plenty of immigrant stories like that to tell, but it's not just limited to immigrants bringing food culture from elsewhere. We ate very well a couple of years ago with some poor folks in South Carolina who were so white and so American that they saw me as an immigrant. And you know, they ate pretty well too -- they cared a lot about what they were buying, cooking and eating. There is gourmet culture -- as in fanaticism about excellence in certain foods -- among plenty of poor people. Of course others are eating badly -- there is a big education problem. But I agree with Busboy that the dual-income family is at risk -- even the affluent dual-income family. Ironically, the families that are too poor to afford babysitting and other forms of substitute care may have a better chance of raising offspring who have learned to love food in the home.

It's nearly universal in the food industry right now to work under the assumption that consumer tastes are getting more sophisticated and demanding. Not all of that is being addressed by eGullet-level solutions -- some of what the industry considers sophisticated would be a joke here. But the trend is well documented. You have to pay a lot of money to get most of the reports that go into the actual data, but the summaries, abstracts and press releases are out there to be found. On the restaurant side of the equation, at least, the National Restaurant Association is constantly studying this situation and all its sub-trends. In its top four trends to watch in the coming year, it lists "The sophistication of Americans' palates and knowledge of food" and "Continued increased focus on healthy lifestyles and restaurants providing customers with balance, choice and customization." Only about 25% of Americans, still, are what the NRA categorizes as "adventurous eaters," and they are heavily weighted towards urban areas, but the trend is nationwide. Of course, big trends are made up of little trends. In the post-war period (World War II, that is), there was a gastronomically devastating move away from quality, craftsmanship and connoisseurship and towards quantity, technology and convenience. Yet, you can get Parmigiano Reggiano now and you couldn't get it in 1950. I think the point of on-balance reversal came sometime in the 1980s -- that's when things started getting better. Now, I think every year you see better restaurants and better supermarkets most everywhere -- and especially in the cities (even the small ones). You have media educating people about cuisine -- even if it's just at the level of Emeril, for most people that represents an improvement. You have FedEx and the shipping/logistics revolution. And there has also been a significant back-to-basics movement, with farmers markets and the like going strong these days and appealing to wide audiences -- not just rich people, but even in some of the inner city impoverished communities. Even the fast-food chains seem to be reversing some of their worst excesses: right now McDonald's, Burger King, et al., seem to be improving their products not making them crappier the way they did for the last couple of decades of the 20th Century.