Fat Guy

The Observer occasionally runs an interesting, in-depth food piece. It especially excels at food-media analysis. There isn't enough interesting food content in the Observer, though, to justify bothering to read it for food content. So we tend to get Observer pieces mentioned here on a long lag. That being said, this particular piece is not interesting at all. It's crap. It's a clueless celebration of the worst restaurant critic in the history of the Times. It's like they searched far and wide for the one person who is more out of touch with the New York dining scene than Frank Bruni, and they asked him to write an article about Frank Bruni.

We stayed there as well, and it was truly amazing. They treated us like royalty even though (perhaps especially because) we were poor kids pulling up in a decaying subcompact diesel Lancia rental. They arranged for a VIP tour of Pommery and everything. I want to go back and see what Didier does with the place.

I have a fantasy that someday, when we are a larger organization, our members will support one another by bringing them and their loved ones home-cooked food during hospital stays. In the meantime, let me offer this advice: Unless there's some very specific nutrition regimen that stems from the person's medical condition, don't even think about nutrition. Not for one second. When somebody is in the hospital, what you want to focus on is getting the person to eat. Anything. It's the calories that matter most, not whether they're from fresh vegetables or chocolate chip cookies. The body needs fuel to heal, and the mind needs flavor for comfort. If cookies, brownies and candy bars are what's working, do not hesitate for an instant to provide them three meals a day.

You know what they teach in the CIA: the best way to hide is in plain sight. Most any attempt to take notes in secret is bound to be noticed by servers. Most customers have no clue how incredibly advantageous the vantage-point of the server is. They can see right into your lap, right down your shirt and right into your handbag. They can hear you from farther away than you'd think. And rest assured, you are an amateur at concealment -- you probably have a dozen "tells" that you're not even aware of. So, what you do is you bring a briefcase, a legal pad, a datebook, a cell-phone . . . and you just put it all on the table like you're having a business meeting with the person you're dining with, which, in effect, you are. Nobody is going to give a crap or look twice at you.

I haven't been since maybe 1999, but the meal I had there was a three-star experience in every way. While the food lacked the overt creativity of some of the other three-stars, it was the height of contemporary French culinary luxuriousness and perfectionism. I've often thought of the parallels between Les Crayeres and Ducasse's operations, where the interest is in the details, so I'm not surprised that a Ducasse chef is now at the helm -- the approaches dovetail very nicely.

Didier Elena is indeed the new chef at Les Crayeres, according to Relais & Chateaux. But I'm not sure why anybody considers that to be anything but good news. Didier Elena took Alain Ducasse's New York outpost, launched under the most unfavorable media and public opinion conditions of any restaurant I can remember, and against all odds fought his way to a New York Times four-star rating. Very few chefs have the dedication, no less the skill, to force the issue so emphatically. Les Crayeres should be in very good hands with Didier Elena.

Fresca is one of my most favorite sugar-free sodas. I would really like to see them reformulate it with sucralose, though. That would, I think, eliminate the last hint of aspartame aftertaste. I imagine every soda will do this eventually -- there hardly seems to be a good excuse to use aspartame anymore.

With sandwiches, a good trick is to freeze the bread (in other words, freeze the sliced loaf of bread and make the sandwiches on frozen slices of bread). It will defrost by lunchtime, but also provide a cooling "microclimate" for the sandwich contents.

Has the camp given you specific guidelines? Different organizations require different levels of kashruth. Some are mostly concerned about symbolism, so there the only rule would be that you not include any meat in your child's lunches. Everything else would be fair game: PB&J, cheese, tuna or egg salad (although I suppose those are perishable), any kind of vegetarian salad/sandwich like hummus, etc. Other organizations will have more detailed rules involving permissible sources of ingredients (e.g., everything you buy from the supermarket must be certified kosher by certain oversight groups). That gets a little more complex, but is still doable.

But the unique selling proposition of the Mix concept is that the Ducasse name is associated with it. That makes it very difficult to justify scrapping it in favor of a non-Ducasse concept. Anyway, the original Mix concept was great. Everybody was just too stupid to make it work. It could have been the New York version of Spoon, but better, if China Grill Management hadn't screwed it up.

I've heard that's one of a few ridiculous ideas that got bounced around, but there doesn't seem to be an official long-term plan and I wouldn't suggest that any story is official until it's official. In particular, with respect to China Grill Management, there are so many people out there with axes to grind that it's hard to take the rumors seriously. As for official sources, the web site still reads as though nothing has changed since Psaltis was there, I don't know anybody who's eating there and as far as I know there haven't been any press releases since the Gordon opening party. It really seems as though the China Grill Management people have gone off the deep end: Caviar and Banana, English is Italian and now the revolving door at Mix. I suppose they must be making money with these concepts, but it's all so pathetic. I don't know which would be more embarrassing: for the whole China Grill Management strategy to be motivated purely by cynicism; or for it to be motivated by true belief. Ted, I don't think there's a parallel. Gordon was brought in to dumb the place down. You can't be a true believer in dumbing down. What did he expect?

There's so much room for misinterpretation when reporting on interactions with waitstaff. I can't even count how many times I've heard the two sides of a story and been amazed at the disparate accounts from two people who were in the same place at the same time, ostensibly speaking the same language. Maybe the coat check girl was from Honduras. Who knows? Who cares? I doubt she was called by a reporter and asked to explain her remarks. One thing is clear, though: Frank Bruni seems to be a magnet for bad interactions with waitstaff, and likes to write his one-sided accounts of them. And at some point, you've got to assume that somebody who has bad service experiences at so many of the very best restaurants -- Ducasse, The Modern -- is himself part of the problem. Maybe he's carrying around a chip on his shoulder. Maybe he has toilet training issues -- actually we know he did, since he just wrote his toilet training autobiography on Wednesday. Whatever the issue is, surely he'd be happier in a different line of work.

Last night at dinner in The Bar Room, while I was enjoying my fifth course of chef Kreuther's exquisite cuisine (braised pork cheeks with sauerkraut), I reached the conclusion that not only is The Bar Room, standing alone, a serious candidate for three stars (assuming a legitimate critic), but also that it has no serious competition at its price point. My guest (also a journalist) and I racked our brains, trying to come up with names of contenders. But there just isn't anybody else putting out this kind of food in the $15-per-plate price range. There are precious few places putting it out at $30-per-plate, and most of them have three stars (though Cafe Gray, probably the best of the lot, has two, just like Sripraphai). I think that, to miss this, one really has to be tone deaf to fine cuisine. And when you add to that the incredible non-food aspects of the place -- the Danish modern design, the custom serviceware, the well-drilled and genuinely enthusiastic staff, the wine collection -- well, it really does shine.

I don't know that there is a "New York breakfast" -- New York is such a crossroads that there are probably 100 New York breakfasts -- but if I had to nominate something it would be the egg sandwich. Statistically, I'm sure more people eat a bagel or a muffin and a cup of coffee, but the egg sandwich feels like the realest thing that the realest New Yorkers are eating: you know, like if you go into a crummy deli anywhere in the city at 6:30am and you check out what the corrections officers, traffic cops, firefighters, drug dealers, drug addicts and psychoanalysts are ordering, it's always "egg on a roll" or "bacon and egg on a roll" or "bacon egg and cheese on a roll" in infinite variation, e.g., "two fried eggs on a roll runny break the yolks well done bacon salt pepper butter no cheese." And by the way I have nothing against girly breakfasts or girls for that matter. I live closer to Sarabeth's than just about anybody in the city, unless you happen to live in the Hotel Wales, and I think the food is great and the girls are greater. I was just trying to identify the category.

I'm very much enjoying the book, which I spent a couple of hours with yesterday. I would particularly recommend it to anyone who 1) is a cocktail beginner, but 2) is a quick study interested in acquiring a core of sophisticated yet manageable technique.

A two-star rating is a real slap in the face for The Modern, which was purpose-built to be the jewel in the crown of the Union Square Hospitality Group empire. The most confusing aspect of the review, which doesn't even discuss the cuisine until page 2 (if you're reading it online), is that it begins with a discussion of the food in The Bar Room. I've always assumed that, when fine dining restaurants have casual annexes -- Tabla, Gramercy Tavern, Aquavit, etc. -- the Times main review does not factor in the casual element. And there he goes again with his picayune accusations about service: Spare us, Frank. Nobody cares. Stick to writing about bathrooms.

Although this isn't the Doug Psaltis topic, I'll make a quick comment here since he has been speculated about three times upthread and since I'm in regular contact with the Psaltis brothers and have something of an inside line on this: I think it's highly unlikely that there are many meaningful parallels between the Mix/Psaltis situation and the ADNY/Delouvrier situation. Psaltis left Mix because Chodorow wanted to dumb down the restaurant and Ducasse didn't have the economic leverage to fight it. Ducasse offered to place Psaltis in Monaco and Paris, but that's not the direction Psaltis wanted for his career. Whatever happened with Delouvrier at ADNY couldn't be at all similar to that situation. For the full-on telling of the Mix story (as well as what happened at the French Laundry), though, we'll have to wait for Doug Psaltis's book, The Seasoning of a Chef: My Journey from Diner to Ducasse and Beyond, which comes out in September.

Recent is probably an understatement. I had dinner there on Tuesday night and if anybody at the restaurant knew what was going on, I'll eat my hat. I'd have to guess that not even Ducasse's publicists knew, because there was no press release until Monday (and the press release that came out didn't really square with what Ducasse and Delouvrier were telling Florence Fabricant) and everybody in the New York food media was scrambling all weekend to try to figure out what happened. That's not how it goes down if there has been a careful transition planned by the kinds of people who know how to manage such things for maximum corporate benefit. Of course, there had to be some advance work -- they had to get Tony Esnault lined up -- but it feels as though this decision got made in France and announced in America at the last possible moment.

A lot of good suggestions here thus far. I think you've got to be systematic about this. "Breakfast" is just too big a category to approach in a sensible manner. Emma has suggested a few categories. I'll add to some of those and suggest some others, and maybe others can contribute. - Hotel breakfasts. Here you've got everything from the haute breakfast at Norma's to the health-oriented menu at Heartbeat at the W New York Hotel to places like 5757 at the Four Seasons that set the standard for traditional hotel breakfasts. - Non-hotel upscale breakfasts. Here I'd include Cafe Gray, Nougatine . . . surely some others. - Brasserie/bistro breakfasts. I'd add the McNally places -- Balthazar, Pastis and Schiller's -- to this list. In just a few years he has grown and dominated this niche. They are the places to be for breakfast downtown. - Uptown girly breakfasts. This would be the whole Sarabeth's/Popover's/Good-Enough-to-Eat set of restaurants. - Street carts. I'm betting more working-stiff New Yorkers eat breakfast from street carts than from almost anywhere else. I'm not sure they're worth writing about, but they're a category. Anybody know of any particularly noteworthy ones? - Brunches. A whole world unto itself, I won't even go there. I'm sure I'm skipping over a bunch of general categories. Then there's a long list of ethnic categories: - Jewish breakfasts. Here you've got to subdivide further into the meat and the dairy places. On the meat side you've got Katz's deli, Second Avenue deli, etc. On the dairy side it's Barney Greengrass pretty much alone these days -- at least in Manhattan I'm not sure if any of the other sit-down places in that genre have survived. Have they? And then you also need a subdivision for bagel places like Ess-a-Bagel, because that's really its own genre. I don't even know how I'd categorize Junior's -- is it Jewish? Is it black? It's some sort of Brooklyn Jewish-Black-Puerto-Rican hybrid, and definitely worth checking out. - Greek breakfasts. I guess there's nothing Greek about them except that so many coffee shop/diner type establishments have traditionally been owned by Greeks, so maybe this isn't an ethnic category at all, but this is surely the largest breakfast category. Everybody seems to have a favorite. I imagine it would take a single reviewer a decade to perform a thorough comparison. - Chinese breakfasts. Dim sum is the big one, of course. - Polish/Ukrainian/East European breakfasts. These would be the places in the East Village like Christine's and Veselka, and, as Pan mentioned, Teresa's. The list goes on . . . Spanish . . . Korean . . .

Plenty of chefs and restaurateurs have close ties to the Michelin organization, but it's not as though Ducasse's ties to Michelin have prevented his European restaurants from losing Michelin stars and otherwise getting raked over the coals. There are far less deserving chefs, who have fewer ties to Michelin than Ducasse, who maintain three-star ratings in years when Ducasse restaurants get demoted to two. I can't imagine, if Ducasse disagreed with the New York Times or Michelin, that he'd replace his judgment with theirs. A little bit of lip service, sure, that's just good business. But something else is going on here. Either Ducasse decided for himself that he wanted to go in a different direction at ADNY (in which case he's throwing a bone to the Times, Michelin or whomever else he can pretend to be listening to), or there's some other story that hasn't yet been told. Ducasse sits at the head of a global restaurant organization. His decisionmaking process is never as simple or simplistic as "We got a bad review; fire the chef."

Yes, I want to make clear for the record that when I say I over-order I mean I order an obscene amount of food. I don't mean I can't finish it. I assure you, I can and often do finish it.

Rally's currently has 389 restaurants, mostly in the Midwest.

Here in Manhattan, McDonald's delivers. You can just go online and order whatever you want, and they bring it to you.

It doesn't add up. When Didier Elena was chef at ADNY and the restaurant got three stars, Ducasse stood behind him for another year and eventually he got four. And Ducasse has lost and regained more Michelin stars than anybody -- he doesn't fire his chefs every time that happens. I simply can't imagine that he would choose Frank Bruni's judgment over his own -- it would be unprecedented and nonsensical. That this is the New York Times writing about the New York Times should also raise some eyebrows: if the goal was to write the story to say "we gave the restaurant three stars so they fired the chef," the quotes could be assembled that way. It's certainly in the Times's interest to do so -- to make itself seem important even though Frank Bruni is a laughing stock. Take the quotes, arrange them differently and approach it from a different angle and the story could be "Ducasse knows Frank Bruni has it in for Delouvrier so we're trying something else." Although, most likely, I think it's more like: it was an experiment, I wasn't satisfied with the way it worked out, I gave it a year, and I made a change. I mean, if it's true that business isn't off, and if it's true that Ducasse and Delouvrier are considering some sort of partnership in a Bistro . . . well, it doesn't add up.

The idea here is not to bash, not to pontificate, not to right any wrongs. I was hoping we could have a place simply to express our admiration for the unbridled cleverness of the fast-food industry. For example, today I noticed that Domino's is hyping its new American Classic Cheeseburger Pizza. "Tastes like a cheeseburger, only better because it's a pizza." I've also got to give a shout out to Taco Bell for coming up with a word combination that we all should have thought of first: Enchirito.