Fat Guy

They are not available for sale. The advance-reader copies are uncorrected proofs, printed on cheap paper with soft covers, and they have lots of little mistakes in them (some of which are pretty awful). They're just intended to be used by media for pre-publication coverage, and then discarded. At this point, I can't even get enough copies to give one to each of the people who helped with the book.

I'll find out and let you know. The cards they made me for IACP don't have anyplace to sign -- it's just an image of the cover on one side and Tony's "pure crack for foodies" blurb taking up all available space on the other. Maybe they'll do different ones for BEA.

Suzi, I will be at BEA in the Harper booth at that time, but I'm not sure whether there will be stock by then -- it may just be me. Anybody who is coming to BEA is welcome to come by and say hi, and anybody who later acquires a book can always mail it to me to be signed, of course. Chef Z, I don't know when the paperback will come out. I think such decisions get made after they see how well the hardcover is selling. As for what the book is about, I'm pleased to report that it's about a lot of different things -- it's not the kind of book that can be reduced to a sentence, a reality that drives the marketing and PR people crazy! The title, Turning the Tables: Restaurants from the Inside Out, is pretty much on the money, but if you're expecting a book about what goes on in restaurant kitchens that's not what you'll get. There is one chapter that gives accounts of my time in several different restaurant kitchens and makes general observations about the way kitchens work, but that's only about a seventh of the book. The lead chapter is about getting what you want in restaurants -- it's all about reservations, service, becoming a regular and all that good stuff. There's a substantial chapter on how to read between the lines of restaurant reviews and how to decode the food media, including newspaper and magazine reviews, Zagat, online sources and the forthcoming Michelin guide. One chapter is about the business of the restaurant business: how restaurants open, and how they stay open. Another chapter is about food sources and controversies, and in it I report on many producers and purveyors and some of the major food issues of the day. Finally, there's a chapter about the future of dining in North America, as well as a look at how we got where we are today. My hope is that anybody reading the book, regardless of prior experience, will come away from it with a broad understanding of what goes into a restaurant meal, and I also hope that knowledge will allow consumers to enjoy their meals more and get more out of every dining experience.

Stinging review of Per Se by Jancis Robinson in the Financial Times, titled "Per Se - a case of emperor's new clothes?" On the one hand, I think the review makes some fair points: the cultlike religiosity of Thomas Keller's fans has, I think, led to widespread overestimation of the capabilities of his restaurants. The notion that Thomas Keller is even a candidate for the title of world's best chef is, to me, risible, and given that every time I've eaten a Thomas Keller meal I've had not one, not two, but several sub-par dishes (as well as several superb ones) makes me shake my head whenever I read comments about people's allegedly "perfect" meals at French Laundry and Per Se. On the other hand, sorry Jancis, but this is a sorry excuse for a restaurant review. It's petty ("At this supposed level of excellence and at these prices, attention to detail such as the state of the flowers is crucial"), mean-spirited ("we were to sit through a meal that on three separate occasions was to remind me of nothing more enjoyable than a funeral") and factually sloppy (e.g, it refers to "Thomas Brennan" of Picholine and Artisanal). There's an exhausting recitation of her customer complaint about a dish she didn't like, and how it was handled, which gives the whole thing an air of retaliation. And it is beneath any professional writer these days to trot out the emperor's-new-clothes overused metaphor (aka cliche) and use it as the linchpin of a restaurant review. Come on. Thomas Keller does deserve criticism, he's not perfect, I'm sure it's possible on occasion to get a mediocre meal at his restaurants (as it is at any restaurant in the world), and I think he's a bit overrated, but he operates two of the best restaurants in the United States and it's no longer an open question whether or not he's a talented chef and restaurateur.

Did anybody make it through the second part? I just saw the second part for the second time, and I still couldn't make myself love it.

The link is at the top of the Daily Gullet forum: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showforum=201

I've heard that RC and Norwegian charge extra for better food. On the higher-end lines, like Crystal, you won't find a surcharge for any dining option.

One of the most exciting -- if you get excited about this sort of thing -- improvements to the Daily Gullet is that it is now fully integrated with our eG Forums database. This means that when you search the eG Forums your search will also automatically cover Daily Gullet articles and discussion. There's a lot more to come, too. What you're seeing now is just the beginning.

There has been a lot of consolidation in the cruise industry. I believe Carnival, for example, currently owns Cunard, Holland America, Costa, Seabourn and Windstar. Presumably these are run as somewhat independent subsidiaries, because they have radically different characters, but the trend certainly seems to be towards a few large cruise mega-corporations each owning a portfolio of lines. Cruise ship kitchens face several challenges that mainland restaurants generally don't, each of which can be overcome to some extent, but each of which can be a dealbreaker if not properly addressed. The big one is that all (or nearly all) the food for a week-long (or even longer) cruise needs to be loaded in advance. Cruise ships do not typically pick up ingredients in each port. What you might occasionally see is one well-publicized ingredient pickup -- like live lobsters being taken on in Maine -- but most everything else needs to be brought on all at once. Not only does this mean an emphasis on frozen and otherwise sturdy ingredients, but also it means the people cooking the food (who live on the ship) have little to do with the purchasing of the food (which is managed by a land-based operation). With careful planning, this can be made to work well, but most cruise lines don't push the limits of the system -- they default to worse ingredients and methods than they need to because it's easier (and cheaper) and the passengers don't really care all that much. The other major issue is that you need to feed a lot of people all at once. It's not terribly hard to do 500 covers in a night out of a medium-sized kitchen if you're serving from 5:30pm until 10:30pm. It's very hard to do it when 250 people come in at 6pm and the other 250 people come in at 8pm. Once you get into a situation where you're cooking beyond the limits of a cooked-to-order strategy, you're essentially serving banquet food. And while banquet food can be good, even very good, there are compromises.

Squid landed at Point Judith, Rhode Island, is a widely distributed commodity. That particular dish, "Rhode Island calamari" (aka "Fried calamari, Rhode Island style"), shows up on menus all across the country, most notably at the Legal Seafoods and McCormick & Schmick's chains.

Can we try to go deeper on this? I know it's hard to put your finger on this sort of thing, but try anyway: What's the flavor component you're thinking of? Is it an herbal thing, a richness-of-broth thing, or some other seasoning? What matzoh ball soup do you consider the best? Can you get in touch with the person who made it, or with someone who has the recipe? Picking up on Jason's point, sometimes this sort of perception is tied in to salt. And, if your taste memory involves commercially produced soups, MSG as well. Both salt and MSG are flavor enhancers, and if you're remembering a certain strength of flavor it may simply be impossible to replicate it without enhancement. Also, there's a lot of variation in the herbs people use in their soups. For example my father-in-law always uses a lot of oregano. In a million years you can't make a soup that tastes like his unless you use a lot of oregano. It's not that it's better than, say, dill or parsley or whatever -- it's just that it gives his soups their signature taste. Another thing, if you're remembering a real old-world soup, is that back in the day it's possible the fat was never removed from the broth. So there could have been just a ton of fat floating around in there, which gives a certain flavor and lusciousness (some would say greasiness) that you don't get any other way.

Celebrity has long been known for its strong F&B program -- it's not a particularly expensive cruise line, but it competes culinarily with some of the more elite vessels. Cruise ships are somewhat similar to Las Vegas, in that their cuisine tends to be imitative of mainland brands. This has been going on for ages; I believe it was in Last Days of Haute Cuisine (though I can't seem to find the reference right now) that I read that Escoffier ran a Ritz branded restaurant on one of the cruise lines. Crystal is probably the most aggressive about this sort of thing: everything on their ships (not just the food) is associated with a brand. But the other lines do a lot of this as well, and the Queen Mary project seems to be particularly well branded. I don't think you'll ever get a meal on a cruise ship that would merit, say, even one Michelin star. And if you live in New York, Paris, London, etc., you're not going to be terribly impressed by even the best a cruise ship has to offer (though I've never cruised on, for example, Seabourn, where I imagine the food is as good as it gets in this context). But you may be pleasantly surprised.

I think the idea was that it was supposed to be an impressionistic look at the meaning of food. From reading the book, it's clear that the show's creators were aware -- at least on the surface level -- of the various scholarly treatments of food and its meaning. I just don't think the show itself conveys any of that particularly well. It's as though they spent so much effort trying to make the point that food does have meaning, dammit! that they forgot to do much to show what that meaning might be.

That's totally my third-favorite movie of all time. I hope all the good guys win this year, but I find it extremely difficult to take the Beard Awards seriously in light of the corruption in the organization (not to mention the absurd ways is which many of the awards are chosen). It's going to take more than a couple of band-aids to fix the Beard Foundation, and until it is fixed winning an Award will be the equivalent of winning the World Series during a players' strike; to mix baseball metaphors, they'll have to put an asterisk next to the name of anyone who wins under these circumstances. In the journalism awards categories, where you actually have to apply (and pay!), I'm surprised they even filled up the categories with nominees.

Okay, more information coming in about Sandor: apparently he has not exactly retired; he is merely plotting his next move. I still haven't spoken to him -- you have to work your way up -- but I've now spoken to our mutual friend Bill and Sandor's wife Mary and I'm putting the pieces together. As soon as Sandor gets back from the farm in Alabama that he just bought, I'll talk to him and get the scoop . . .

I've been on a few cruises, and also eaten cruise ship food on account of the occasional invitation to visit a ship docked in New York. There is, as you might imagine, quite a range of quality -- even on any given ship. Most of the large ships these days have multiple dining options (this is also the case at large land-based resorts), and I think these options play to the fact that, as in any population, most people don't care about food and some do. So most people default to a resort-style dining room or a mediocre buffet, but if you care enough to eat better you can reserve at one of the more interesting "restaurants" (it's all included in the cruise fare, so the only investment is the effort it takes to care). So for example on the Crystal Harmony (or was it the Crystal Symphony) you can eat in the main dining room or you can eat at the Piero Selvaggio (of Valentino in LA) signature restaurant, which is a serious cut above. Likewise, even if you eat in the main dining room, you can game it in order to get the best stuff. At that level of the cruise industry (Crystal is high up) the larder is stocked with a lot of premium stuff -- live lobsters, etc. -- so you just have to figure out that a lobster is likely to be better than the lame attempt at a creative "chef's special." Even on the lower end cruise ships, you can eat somewhat well if you stick to the buffets and the smaller food outlets. For example, we went on the Regal Empress for a fall foliage cruise, and the Regal Empress (which may not even be sailing anymore -- I'd have to check) is pretty low in the hierarchy of cruise ships. But at the buffets there were always some high-quality items, like steamed shrimp or whatever -- and all these ships bake most of their breads and such on board to decent standards -- you just had to navigate around the junk. There was also always a guy on deck grilling basic foods like hamburgers, which were usually better than the entrees in the main dining room. You just had to figure it all out. The SS Rotterdam, a Holland America ship that was taken offline shortly after we cruised on her to Alaska, was the same way -- you just had to be proactive in order to eat well. Probably the best cruise ship food we've had has been on the Windstar ships. We haven't been on one for awhile, but when we did go the level of the food was quite high -- the dining rooms on these ships were competitive, quality-wise, with the better restaurants in small American cities. Many of the dishes were designed by consulting chef Joachim Splichal of Patina in Los Angeles (most cruise lines have a big-name chef consulting for them, but one got the impression that Splichal was quite involved in Windstar's cuisine). But I think the big advantage Windstar has is that the ships are so small -- only 150 passengers as opposed to 2000 or however many they have on the mega-ships. The smaller number of covers per night -- 150 is a lot less than a restaurant like Daniel handles in a given evening -- allows a lot more attention to detail and cooking to order. Also Windstar is pretty expensive, so the food budget is higher, as are the expectations of the passengers who are likely to have dined all over.

The most sympathetic reading would be that they checked in with all the major fish retailers in the city (25 would just cover it, I think; "Yet last month, when fresh wild salmon should have been scarce, 23 of 25 stores checked by The Times said they had it in stock") but only tested a random subset of eight samples (presumably on account of the expense of testing; "The Times sent random samples of salmon bought on March 9 to Craft Technologies in Wilson, N.C., for testing"). I felt bad for Whole Foods, which is obviously selling the real thing: you can't blame Whole Foods for getting a salmon that escaped from a farm some years earlier. If you take every possible step to guarantee your supply, you are still going to get the occasional farm escapee. They should have either been more emphatically clear about this, or not hung that particular albatross around Whole Foods's neck, or tested a second sample from Whole Foods.

I'd be amazed if the conventional wisdom that "eating late is bad for you" held up in light of cross-cultural studies. For example, eating late is standard operating procedure in Spain, Brazil and many other places. Do people in the Midwestern United States who eat at 5:30pm live longer than people in Spain? Are they healthier, happier, smarter? Doubtful, and doubly doubtful that any differences could be attributed to time-of-dinner. Looking at what happens in different countries is one of the most compelling refutations of many types of conventional wisdom. Fatty foods cause heart problems? Oops, French people have better coronary health than Americans. Sushi is bad for pregnant women? Oops, the entire nation of Japan eats it and there's no uptick in miscarriages or anything else that would indicate a reason for concern. Eggs MUST BE REFRIGERATED!!! Oops, in most of the world they don't refrigerate their eggs and there's hardly a salmonella epidemic. (Also, Carswell, can you provide a link to that post -- we like to give credit where credit is due.)

Did anybody watch the show on Sunday?

My mother had one of the very first Cuisinarts, given to her as a generous gift by someone who shopped at Bloomingdale's with reckless abandon (it wasn't something we'd have been able to afford): a boxy contraption that weighed a ton and made a noise like a steam locomotive. That same model sat atop my mother's kitchen counter until 2003, though there may have been a replacement (with the same model) sometime in the late 1970s. The Cuisinarts you can get today at Costco for $179 are better (and better-looking) than the originals (which cost something like $500 in the 1970s), but it took decades to improve upon the basic design.

This just in: Sandor's has closed, and Sandor has retired. I haven't spoken to Sandor about it yet, but according to our mutual friend Bill (who has dined at Sandor's more often than any other person) he has sold the property and shuttered the restaurant. More as it comes in.

It's not unbelievable that an industrial frozen dinner producer would use wild salmon. It's not like every wild salmon has the chops to be served at Nobu. Somebody has to get the worst, bottom-of-catch, bruised, otherwise-unsellable crap. Although farmed salmon is on the whole cheaper than wild, those are generalizations -- there is likely a subset of the frozen wild catch that's really cheap especially if you're willing to warehouse it. Likewise, a lot of claims about farmed salmon are generalizations. True, most farmed salmon doesn't get anywhere near the exercise that wild salmon do. True, Pacific salmon have their charms. But, for example, the salmon farmed in the Bay of Fundy, which has the world's greatest tidal variation, get significant exercise. And there are plenty of chefs -- serious chefs -- who will tell you they prefer farmed Bay of Fundy salmon to most any other salmon in the world for some applications (the two I've heard cited most often are sashimi and cold-smoked). Not that all Bay of Fundy salmon is excellent, but some of it is. I also wouldn't group all aquaculturists together in one category. I met people in the New Brunswick salmon industry who were quite ecologically sensitive -- I even went to a whole trade show where there were hundreds of salmon farmers around the place all going to lectures about sustainability et al. It's hard to take seriously the arguments of people who are totally opposed to all aquaculture. Like most things, it's beneficial when done right and harmful when done wrong.

Sam Gugino did a nice piece on wild salmon in Wine Spectator awhile back. He seemed pretty objective about the taste differences between wild and farmed, giving points to each:

Typical fine-crystal table salt, in turn, is substantially denser (i.e., packs tighter) than kosher salt. I'm eyeing a new scale that's very precise and accurate, and if I get it I'll be sure to weigh a fixed volume each of several different salts and report the results here.

Maybe, but the answer is probably d. You can't get good fish retail. This problem is endemic; the salmon story is just an illustration of the poor quality of one type of retail fish in the marketplace. In particular, if you're buying pieces of fish -- filets, steaks -- you're basically screwed. You have a better chance of getting something decent if you buy whole fish. Of course you're not likely to buy a whole salmon or tuna. I can't wait for the story they do demonstrating that 1) most of the fish being sold as fresh was actually frozen and defrosted, and 2) that the average piece of fresh fish being sold retail is something like a week old.