Fat Guy

I hope they can distinguish the 2 different tastes. ← Not always! Many Americans use soy sauce as an actual sauce -- meaning they pour it over whatever Chinese food they're eating (remember the scene in Joy Luck Club?). I've seen people do the same with black vinegar, in restaurants where both soy sauce and black vinegar are provided as condiments on the table (e.g., New Green Bo), and have no clue that they weren't using soy sauce.

The black vinegar I get here in New York is labeled "Chinkiang Vinegar" and bears the brand name "Gold Plum." Many Americans don't comprehend that black vinegar and soy sauce are two different things.

Just to the right and below the center of that image, there are three long buildings. Mosner is, I believe, in the top one towards the left end of the building.

There's a fun piece in the Telegraph (London) about the book today: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/wine/main.jhtml.../21/edeat21.xml Also I'm going to be on Spanish radio in about an hour. That info is here: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=71293 (It's in English and you can listen online)

I've requested another copy of the press release and can post the details when I get it. In terms of menu language, it has always been quirky because, yes, it is translated. The Ducasse Group is centralized in this regard: everything goes through Paris. Not only are things translated, but also they are sometimes translated several times, e.g., from English to French and back to English, so that different people can work on them. This process has given rise to what I've called elsewhere "Ducasse-speak."

A big box, I should add.

That was David's question too. Neither of us had ever seen veal skirt steaks in such profusion. He was planning to "do something with them" and serve them as a lunch special that week. (Edited to add: Checked my notes, and actually what he planned to do was serve them as part of a tasting menu. Also, it was only one box of veal skirt steaks and three boxes of Bronx chops that we left with.)

Beats me. When I visited Mosner in February 2004 I don't know that there were any such restrictions in place.

I'm pretty sure that's the beef hanger steak, also known as the butcher's steak. Demand for those is so high now, though, and there's only a handful of real butchers left out there, so now it's just "hanger steak, $27" at your favorite restaurant.

Actually we left with four cases of veal skirt steaks, but David Burke took them all for the restaurant and didn't even leave me one piece. He did feed me a Bronx Chop at the restaurant, though. I too think the lowercase letters thing is a bit too '80s for my tastes (sex, lies, and videotape anyone?) but the food there is excellent.

It's domestic. I got a press release about it recently but can't find it. I'll try to get another copy.

Well, you see, nobody gets to call it an obsession anymore, except for me when I write about myself. To everyone else, because I get paid to do it, it's now a profession. And everybody knows that you can't be obsessed with your profession. That you spend all your free time thinking about your profession (save for when you're thinking about sex or worrying about money) doesn't make you obsessed -- it just makes you especially professional. That being said, my obsession . . . I mean my professional interest in food has been driven by a number of different things over the years, but probably the number one factor has been the Frankenstein effect. That is, the effect by which you create a monster and it takes on a life of its own and you no longer control it. Do you think, for example, that the beast known as the eGullet Society listens to me very much anymore? Nope. Everybody on staff has pretty much learned how to do without me, which by the way according to all the professional management texts means I am the world's best CEO.

What you should do is concentrate on comfortable and safe shoes, otherwise your day will be remembered mostly for foot pain. I've never fully sorted out the shoe issue, but am pretty happy with my current strategy: Timberland light hikers. In any event, you need something with good arch support and with a good non-skid sole. Then you should tell Mr. Schlow that you don't want to be protected or treated like a tourist -- that you want to do the actual work he'd give to, say, a stagiare from another restaurant who came to spend a day with him. That's how you're going to get a real feel for what happens in a professional kitchen: by doing menial labor and repeating it over and over again.

The on-sale date is August 16.

The eGullet Society is pleased and proud to announce that our petition for 501c3 tax exempt status has been granted by the US Internal Revenue Service. This means that donations to the eGullet Society are tax deductible in the United States. In addition, under Article XXI of the United States-Canada Income Tax Convention, US 501c3 exemptions are recognized in Canada. Our tax exemption, as approved by the IRS, is retroactive to October 4, 2004, so even if you made a donation several months ago you can still claim a deduction for it. (Soon, we will do an e-mailing of tax receipts to all those who made gifts prior to the 501c3 approval; if your e-mail address has changed since the time when you made a donation, please do update your member profile to reflect the new address). At the same time, we are able to announce our first corporate sponsorship. The Travel Channel and the new Anthony Bourdain television show, No Reservations, have given a generous gift to the eGullet Society. For the next five weeks, you will see a banner on our web pages acknowledging this sponsorship. We hope to have many more and different corporate sponsors in the future. Between their contributions and the contributions of members, plus funding from grants (which, now that we have 501c3 status, we can finally start applying for) and other sources, we hope to be able to continue the growth of the eGullet Society at an even greater rate than before. On the content front, for the next few weeks we will have Anthony Bourdain with us more so than usual. Today in the Daily Gullet you will find an exclusive interview with Mr. Bourdain, conducted by Rachel Perlow. Expect periodic Bourdain appearances in the follow-up discussion. If you haven’t already, we hope you’ll all take the opportunity, on the occasion of these bits of good news, to look around the eGullet Society web space with fresh eyes and consider making a monetary gift by upgrading your membership (to do so, you must already be a member and logged in) to society donor status. Thank you. With relish,

My involvement in the above is overstated -- it consists mostly of carrying the heavy bags of ingredients in from Tammy's car and meddling in preparation. The one thing I can sort of take credit for is the selection of the veal shoulder roast. We were at the butcher and had every intention of buying either a rib roast or a pork loin, but this gorgeous veal shoulder roast caught my eye so we started talking to the butcher about it. Then Tammy decided to get the pork loin, and that's when stuff started happening: unbeknownst to us, the butcher had become emotionally invested in us having the veal roast. So he offered a discount -- a big discount. In the end, he gave us an almost six-pound veal shoulder roast, tied and ready to go, for $20. So what we're doing now is braising it in a little stock, garlic, two varieties of sage (one from the farm market and one from the garden here) and thyme. Later we're going to let the roast rest and we're going to make a sauce from the pan liquid, shallots, a little wine and some figs. But that wasn't my idea -- Alex got the idea from Epicurious and we adapted it to what we have.

I always consider my audience, but I won't pander to my audience. Amazingly, I think a lot of folks don't see a difference. I see myself as having an obligation to write what I believe -- I won't change my beliefs for my audience. However, of course, you have to explain your beliefs differently to different audiences, for example if you're giving lectures on food writing to, on the one hand, a group of fifth graders in career-day presentation and, on the other hand, the International Association of Culinary Professionals, you're going to present the same ideas differently. Which isn't to say I always succeed. Especially when writing for magazines that are heavily edited, things often get diluted and dumbed down. And of course there are those assignments that totally lack substance, for example if somebody wants me to write some silly food-trends piece or recommend five restaurants in the theater district and I'm going to get paid $500 to do it, that's great -- I'm happy to take the money. But setting aside the money, in many ways I prefer writing online and writing books: I have more control over subject-matter and more involvement in the editing process (if there is any editing at all).

See you all in the morning. Over and out.

While I think plenty of the things Slow Food advocates are admirable, I have a problem with Slow Food's opposition to many other things. When the Slow Food people -- and by that I mean the leadership because there are plenty of well-meaning people involved in Slow Food who just enjoy the events and gourmet culture and don't realize the extent of what else they're supporting -- get into politics, they go off the deep end. In many ways it's a political movement disguised as or manifested as a culinary movement, and I don't agree with its anti-globalization, anti-progress ideology. But yes, I think the politics are beyond the scope of this topic and indeed beyond the scope of eG Forums discussion, so I'll leave it at that.

Have you tried calling Zabar's?

So far, based on buying cherries twice, I've observed, casually, that this is the best cherry year I can remember. The cherries in the supermarkets near me are huge, plentiful, sweet, flavorful and cheap.

Sooner than that. It's just a question of getting through some negotiations. Maybe a couple of months.

The original proposal had the working title How to Dine, and it was essentially a how-to book. We had a publisher interested in doing the How to Dine book, but at around the same time Susan Friedland at HarperCollins expressed interest in doing a book with me -- but she thought How to Dine wasn't significant enough. After meeting with her, it was clear that she was the right person to be working with, and not just because Harper has a lot of money -- she had vision, and more importantly she believed in me. She kept saying, "Is this the book you really want to write?" and "There needs to be more of you in the book." So the whole How to Dine concept got refigured as Chapter 1 of Turning the Tables (which was originally called, ugh, Restaurants Revealed until Dave Scantland suggested Turning the Tables as the title and Susan came up with Restaurants from the Inside Out as the subtitle -- though we briefly flirted with "from the Outside In" as a possibility). After the introduction (some of which you've read above) you get the chapter (Chapter 1) on how to get what you want from restaurants. It covers all the basics -- it's the guerrilla dining guide: how to get that hard-to-get table, how to become a regular, how to behave at a sushi bar, etc. It's the most commercially appealing and potentially popular part of the book, which is why it's first. From there, the chapters progress as a walk through every aspect of the restaurant business: what goes on behind the kitchen door, the ins and outs of food sources (and related controversies), the media, the business of the restaurant business and, finally, the past, present and future of the American dining scene. So the rest of the chapters are not overt in their how-to-ness, but the idea is that as you learn more about all those facets of dining you will be a more informed and therefore more effective consumer. Not only did the order of those chapters change somewhat, but also what went into each chapter changed. I would look at something and one day I'd think it belonged in the "behind the kitchen door" chapter, and then I'd realize it was a much better fit for the "business of the restaurant business" chapter. Of course I had to rewrite the whole thing to make that work. In the end the flow of the book wound up going from -- surprise -- beginning to end, simple to complex, fun to serious. You know, like how a book is supposed to be. It's easier said than done, though.

Just to be clear, North African and Arab are not synonymous. The largest group of Arab-Americans -- about 1/3 overall -- comes from Lebanese ancestry. Moroccan immigrants and their descendants only make up about 3% of the Arab-American population and the whole Arab-American population is about half a percent of the whole population. When it comes to Arab-derived cuisine in the US, you are much more likely to see the street foods of Lebanon than the kinds of food you might find in Morocco. I mention all that just so we can keep the demographic picture in perspective. Farid's point is, to me, the interesting one: since the mid- to late-1990s there have been incessant predictions that North African cuisine would be America's next big food trend. There has been, at least I think this impressionistically, a lot of investment in North African restaurant projects. I think they just haven't done very well.

Sometimes it does suck. I mean, Dave, you've edited plenty of my work and said things like "This is beneath you, Steven." In the early drafts of Turning the Tables there were parts of the manuscript that were so bad I would wake up in a cold sweat thinking "Oh my god oh my god oh my god, this book is going to suck." But, when I do write something good, it comes out that way for a few reasons: First, there's practice -- and that doesn't just mean writing a lot. It means writing a lot and being aware of what's bad and good about it. It's just like in photography: you have to take a lot of photographs to get good at photography, but if you take a thousand photos and never look at them critically (a process that requires self-criticism and criticism by others) you won't learn anything just from the simple act of pressing the shutter a lot. Second, there's breaking away from forms of writing that weren't appropriate to my subject matter. A restaurant review isn't a law review article. I know that seems obvious, but it takes some time to unlearn habits of writing and to learn new ones. Third and, I think, most importantly, there's the thinking behind the writing. Writing itself -- as in the act of putting together readable sentences -- comes pretty easily to me. I mean, I was born in an English-speaking country, grew up with two college professors for parents and spent something like 22 years in elite schools. I don't have any serious learning disabilities or anything like that. So if I couldn't write at least passably I'd have to be considered a complete idiot. But writing well about a subject, in my opinion, requires that you think well about it first. Otherwise you're just stringing words together artfully (most food writing doesn't even accomplish that, and much of what is called good food writing accomplishes only that). This is what I think really marked a turning point in my writing. If you look at the work I was doing up through I guess about 2000, what you can see is a steady progression of improvement in the first and second areas I highlighted above, but a lack of very much in the way of ideas -- I was writing about food for the sake of writing about food because I found food interesting. Then a number of issues presented themselves to me all at once -- the media reactions to the Ducasse opening in New York, my mounting disillusionment with the Zagat survey, the decline (and now I'd say fall) of New York Times restaurant reviewing, the spread of Slow Food and various other movements and ideas that I think are deeply flawed, and of course the founding of eGullet -- and I realized that the next step for me was going to have to involve developing bigger ideas about food and, in particular, about dining and food media. Of course, that makes it possible to do "serious" writing about food, but that's not the point I'm making. The point is that when you have a foundation of serious though about a subject, everything you write about that subject is going to take on depth and dimensionality that couldn't have otherwise existed.