Fat Guy

Irwin, I'm speechless. Thanks for your kind words. And yes, my intent is to write at least two companion volumes -- but on account of ongoing talks with publishers I'm not yet at liberty to discuss those plans.

You can read a part of one of the chapters here. It's an account of a week I spent in the kitchen at Gramercy Tavern. This is the original version, which was published in Best Food Writing 2002 and received the James Beard Journalism Award. There was some rewriting done to bring it up to date for a book being published in 2005, but its essence is the same. Most of the book is original material or, where I incorporated some existing work, heavily rewritten, but the Gramercy Tavern piece was a favorite so I worked it in without changing much. Later on, once serialization and various other rights issues are worked out by my agent, Michael Psaltis, maybe we'll be able to offer additional excerpts. But that won't be for awhile.

If the primary goal of a publisher was to create books that would be useful as in-kitchen tools then cookbooks would be spiral bound, with water-resistant coated pages. Professional texts meant to be used in food service environments, like the NAMP book, are produced this way. Therefore, given that virtually no cookbooks are sold this way, we can conclude that usability in the kitchen is not the primary goal of a cookbook publisher. But that may be beside the point. Are these books even meant to be cooked from? I think when we're talking about books like the El Bulli and Spoon books we're talking about texts that are meant to inspire. Although they are not strictly targeted at professional audiences, they are not meant as recipe books for home cooks (or for any cooks). In other words, they are not cookbooks. They are more documentary and pedagogical in nature. Books like Ducasse's Grand Livre are somewhat more likely to be used as in-kitchen references, especially for stocks and sauces. They are closer in nature to the CIA Pro Chef book than to the culinary art-books. It's worth noting, in this regard, that the Grand Livre is available in a 6x8" paperback version with a lay-flat binding.

The lag between handoff of final manuscript and printed book was about a month, but that was for the 500 or so copies they've already printed to send to media and other advance readers. The delay doesn't have anything to do with technology -- it only takes a few hours of actual printing-press time to create thousands of copies of any book. It's all about sales, marketing and publicity. The editorial lead time on a high-circulation glossy magazine, for example, can be as long as a year -- the piece I have in Cooking Light's April 2005 issue was assigned to me in May of 2004, and submitted in August 2004. Highly rated shows like Today start planning many of their segments just as far in advance -- we've already had conversations with the show's staff and have had to send video clips and supporting materials. Barnes & Noble and Borders need a couple of seasons lead time to allocate display space. The 92nd Street Y has its talks for September scheduled already, at least tentatively -- I'll add that to the calendar when it's a definite. The book fairs, speaking engagements and other events for fall 2005 are being planned now -- we already have something like ten such appearances scheduled for September-October. Since for a book like mine it's very important to these sorts of things, it's beneficial to be able to send advance reader copies to media in January for an August book. Now, of course, there are exceptions. If you've got a title that's a multimillion dollar property and it's extremely time sensitive -- like the Starr Report or some such -- you can take it from manuscript to bookstore shelves in a week. And when you get into trade paperbacks, there are different standard schedules for different types of books. Computer books move very quickly because they have such a short life cycle, and the relevant media like the computer magazines all publish on very short lead times (which is one of the reasons their writing and production values are so poor). When Ellen writes travel guidebooks those get produced very quickly not only because they're time sensitive but also because there isn't a lot of media to coordinate -- books like that don't really get reviewed or written about outside of the trade journals; it's a totally different species. And there are various ways to accelerate the schedule even with hardcover narrative nonfiction books like mine. But with Turning the Tables, there's no reason to do that -- it's not particularly time sensitive (at worst there will be a few outdated references, because I might describe a chef as working in one restaurant but by August he may be in a different one, but that's not relevant to the core of the book) and so the best move is to have lots of time to plan the release. The author discount isn't much better than what you can get the book for from Amazon.com, and even if it was I'd rather have people buy the book through retail channels. But anybody who wants a signed copy can mail one (or ten) to me with a SASE and I'll take care of it.

The book will be available from the various Amazon sites for Europe, like Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.fr -- actually you can order it from them today for shipment this summer. In terms of separate editions, like in other languages or printed by foreign publishers, a lot of that sort of thing gets worked out at BEA (BookExpo America), where in the first week of June they hold the big International Rights Marketplace ("rights" in this context meaning publishing rights, not human rights). We have received an inquiry from a Spanish-language publisher, but I don't think there will be a decision on that right away.

Much appreciated! I'll be interested to hear your comments -- and especially the way you'll describe what the book is about -- after you've read the whole thing. Presumably you have a copy of the uncorrected proofs because you have a connection to or are one of the few hundred journalists and restaurant industry people who received advance copies. These are sent out mostly so that media can plan editorial coverage with sufficient lead time, so the protocol is usually that nobody actually writes anything about the book until closer to the publication date. But I'll do my best to answer questions and address comments as they arise. I wish I had 15,025 more copies so I could send one to everybody in our member database. But that's not the reality, so any discussion of Turning the Tables prior to August (when the book will be available in stores) is going to be somewhat awkward. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Although it's common to make pastrami from brisket, the best places (like Katz's) make it from plate (aka navel). Not the best brisket in town, but arguably one of the best brisket-based items served in a restaurant in New York: the "Something Different" sandwich at Junior's in Brooklyn (corner of Flatbush and DeKalb Avenues). It's a thinly sliced brisket sandwich, but instead of two slices of bread it's served between two large potato latkes. Comes with apple sauce on the side.

I think it's fair to say it's modeled, stylistically, after a Viennese cafe, in the sense that it looks much more like a Viennese cafe than it is like anything that existed before in New York. In particular, many of the fixtures come from that part of Europe or are based on designs inspired by that region. Then again, I'm not aware of any cafe in Vienna that looks like Cafe Gray. What Diego Gronda of the Rockwell Group (the designers) called it, as we reported in the Daily Gullet far in advance of the opening, was "abstraction of brasserie . . . different representations of brasserie." I guess I'm wondering whether the alternative would be preferable: if you use Asian spices in your cooking, must you be limited to decorative schemes that involve paper lanterns and pagodas? Must you print on your menu, "WARNING: Whilst we have chosen decor reminiscent of Vienna, please be advised we utilize many Asian spices in our cuisine"?

This course really struck a chord with me. I definitely don't give enough attention to plating when I serve food. Yet it doesn't seem that it takes too much more effort to plate food pretty well than it does to plate it poorly. There are two issues I was hoping you could expand upon, Tony: 1. When I'm serving food to guests, sometimes I'll plate a dish, but most of the time what I have to plate is a platter of food to be served family-style. (Well, I guess that's not technically plating, but surely a lot of the same principles come into play on the large canvas.) Do you have any plating advice for large platters of homestyle food? You know, like braised brisket with potatoes and spinach -- how would you plate that on a family style platter? Or a whole roast chicken? Or spaghetti carbonara? 2. What about soups? When you have a nice bright color to work with -- like a zucchini soup or a coral-colored shellfish soup -- it's easy to present it well. But I find that a lot of my soups look really bad -- like lentil, split pea and all those other soups that look like greenish-brown goo. What can you do to make those look more enticing, without resorting to tired old tricks like sprinkling tons of parsley around the bowl? Here, by the way, I'm talking about individually plated portions. Many thanks for a great course.

I don't think the idea is to serve typical Viennese cafe food. I think the Viennese cafe acts as a stylistic inspiration. Gray Kunz's food is sui generis.

I'm UVM class of '91, and I remember when I went to visit UVM as a prospective student (that must have been '86) the Pam's Deli truck was celebrating its 10th year in business. It must be almost 30 years now that Pam's has been doing business there. So it certainly qualifies as a part of the UVM campus culture. Over the course of four years, I probably ate my weight in Pam's food several times over, although I favored the now-defunct Monty's burrito truck. But JJ, unless you're hoping for a truck that serves cheddar cheese topped with Ben & Jerry's ice cream and maple syrup, or New England boiled dinner in a cup, or fresh lamprey eels from Lake Champlain, I'm not sure there is any true locally appropriate lunch-truck food to latch on to. I guess the Phish/Ben-and-Jerry's metaphor can be extended to cover anything containing alfalfa sprouts or marijuana, but I'm not sure that makes for local cuisine.

Nancy, does D Magazine accept comps of any kind? For example, there's currently a piece running called "Twenty-Five Great Escapes," by Jennifer Chininis, Allison Hatfield, and you. Did D Magazine pay to send one of the three authors to all 25 of those places -- New Zealand, Belize, Sardinia, Zimbabwe -- and pay for one of the three authors to dine at each of the recommended restaurants in each of those places? If a freelancer writes a piece about a travel destination or a restaurant, is that freelancer required to pay for all travel and meals, or is it acceptable for the freelancer to write on the basis of a press trip, press event at a restaurant or by-invitation trip or meal? I didn't notice anything in the writers guidelines about not taking comps, nor could I find a posted ethics policy. Do you personally ever go to restaurant opening parties or industry events where free food and drink are served? Do you ever accept, in the course of a meal that D Magazine is paying for, an extra dessert or taste on the house?

A full-page ad in the New York Times costs $24,000. The retail value of a comped restaurant meal is a few hundred dollars, and the actual cost to the restaurant is a few dollars plus the wholesale cost of whatever wine is served. Yet many would have us believe that somehow a comped meal is likely to corrupt a journalist while a $24,000 ad is not. That makes no sense to me. Anything that can be said in defense of carrying restaurant ads can be said in defense of someone like Mariani accepting comps: It doesn't matter. The public trusts Mariani because he is as likely to blacken the eye of a restaurant that gives him a comp as anybody else's. There is a wall that separates expenses and comps from editorial positions--reputable pubs observe it strictly and bottom feeders blatantly ignore it and trade editorial for comps. But Mariani? C'mon. If Burger King buys a meal for Mariani, do you think he's suddenly going to lean pro-Whopper? Hey, if Mariani is shown to be trading favorable coverage for comps, I'll be the first one to say he should be thrown to the lions. But if he's providing honest coverage, I don't care who's paying for it -- his rich uncle, a budget derived from restaurant ads, the restaurant via comps or the government of Saudi Arabia.

It's a fair question. I'll answer it briefly here. But since this isn't supposed to be a chat about me, I'll ask that if anybody wants to pursue it further we do so on one of the existing topics that addresses this issue. The short answer is that I'm not a restaurant reviewer and haven't been for several years. When I was actively writing weekly restaurant reviews for the now-defunct EdificeRex project, I was fortunate enough to have an employer, Insignia ESG, with deep pockets who didn't mind reimbursing me for $1,000 a week in dining expenses. Currently, I write mostly articles (and a book) about restaurants, and of course I write about restaurants here in the eG Forums, and I take comps just as the non-reviewer freelancers for the New York Times and all the major food magazines do. If there's any hint of a quid pro quo or other expectation that someone wants to buy positive coverage with a comp, I walk away. Otherwise, I eat and then I write what I think. I dine out a lot. Sometimes I pay, sometimes I'm on assignment for a publication that pays, sometimes someone (most often my friend Ken) buys me dinner, sometimes the restaurant buys me dinner, sometimes I've been invited in, sometimes I've gone in expecting to pay but have been comped and no, I'm not rich or stupid enough to argue when that happens -- who paid for a meal makes no difference to me when I sit down to write about it. More importantly for the purposes of this discussion, the staff of the eG Forums and eGullet Society are permitted to take comps -- we don't think it would be appropriate to spend member-donated funds to support our dining habits, and we don't accept restaurant advertising so we don't have that income stream to pay for our meals -- but if our editor in chief Dave Scantland or I believed anybody on our staff gave positive coverage in exchange for a comp we'd be having a very serious talk with that staff member. That was the short answer!

I'd like to dig a little deeper on two points that arose above: Perhaps it's naive of me to be offended or surprised by frivolous lawsuits, but I strongly believe that frivolous lawsuits are more than just frivolous. They are wrong. They represent an abuse of democratic processes, misappropriation of taxpayers' money and a rarefied form of vandalism. In situations like this, I worry that the media can become part of the problem. For example, do you think that in a million years Romano would have filed this absurd lawsuit -- which, presumably, somebody had to pay good money to defend (in addition to the share of the burden of maintaining the civil justice system, which is borne by taxpayers) -- if he didn't know he could rely on local media to write lots of stories about it? I'm far more concerned about magazines and newspapers carrying restaurant advertisements than I am about a critic getting a comped meal. Critics of many kinds get comps: book reviewers get their books from publishers for free, performing arts critics generally get their tickets free, sports columnists sit in the press box. On the news side, reporters ride the campaign bus and fly on Air Force One. To me, good journalism isn't about not taking comps; it's about not letting those comps create conflicts of interest or exert undue influence over your coverage. What I find in discussions of comps for restaurant reviewers is that many who oppose those comps happen to work at well-funded publications that can afford to spend the money. In that situation, the need to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for a critic to visit restaurants acts as an anticompetitive measure -- it means only heavily financed journals can play in that arena. But when I look at actual results, like Mariani's restaurant reviews, I think he provides more valuable information than, say, the critic for the New York Times. Mariani publishes a free online newsletter. How is he supposed to pay for these meals? I'd much rather have him getting comped and writing about those meals than I would want to have a situation where only a few wealthy publishers control the world of restaurant reviewing. Yet, while they protest comps, those same publishers invariably carry restaurant advertisements. There they are in the New York Times, right next to the restaurant reviews. And there they are, it so happens, in D Magazine. Do you believe that carrying restaurant advertisements is morally superior to accepting comps?

There's a distinction that has been made upthread that I think is worth emphasizing: Yes, turning vegetables helps them cook uniformly and better in some applications. No, a seven-sided vegetable does not cook any better than a six- or eight-sided one, or than any of a variety of other shapes. So while there is a practical reason to turn some vegetables in general sometimes, there is no practical reason to do it with seven sides. The seven sides are pure aesthetics.

I'm just wondering, how often does this happen to you? My experience over the past decade is that I've very rarely seen turned vegetables on a plate in a restaurant, and never in anybody's home. The only restaurant where I distinctly remember seeing turned vegetables -- as in the traditional seven-sided football shape -- any time in the past few years is Alain Ducasse New York.

For the most part, there's no practical reason to make food look nice. As a factual matter, the compounds in food that account for its flavor (taste and aroma) will be identical whether the food looks beautiful or looks like crap. Haute cuisine is greatly concerned with appearance, however, because it rises above flavor and entertains a host of additional concerns, with appearance being chief among them. Turning vegetables in general does have a purpose: it aids in even cooking. It's a real pleasure to saute a well-turned carrot or potato, because you can create a great looking exterior that is almost totally uniform. The classic seven-sided football-shaped turned vegetable, however, has no practical advantage over a number of other possible arrangements. It just happens to look nicer, not least because the lack of symmetry and good technique combine to make the seven-sided vegetable look more rounded than an eight- or six-sided cut would.

Fascinating. Can you let us know the formula you followed?

Four people would be a lot of people to cook for in a restaurant. Although mise en place is done for large numbers, most restaurant dishes at this level are made to order for one person. I just got my copy of the English version -- now I have the French and English side by side on a shelf that is noticeably bending in the middle. So far, based on spending about 15 minutes with the books, I prefer the French edition. Even with my very limited kitchen-French, I can tell that the French is less awkward -- it would be nice if they'd bring an American or British editor in on these English-language editions, and also a recipe tester to QA the translations. Nonetheless, it's great that the book is out in English, even if it hasn't translated as well as it could have, because it will now be accessible to a much wider audience -- not just to native English speakers, but also to people in places like Japan, Israel, etc., where they're more likely to be able to get through an English book than a French one.

Hello Nancy. Thanks so much for joining us for this conversation. I'd like to kick it off with a question about the role of the media in providing characters like Romano with what Margaret Thatcher used to call the "oxygen of publicity." Thatcher used that phrase with respect to terrorism. Of course, Romano is not a terrorist -- he is using legal means to accomplish his strategy of self aggrandizement and intimidation. Nonetheless, I see frivolous lawsuits such as Romano's as clearly immoral, and I think news media have a responsibility to consider their actions carefully before allowing immoral actions to achieve their desired results. In general, do you think that by providing Romano with so much excellent (and free) coverage of his clearly frivolous lawsuit, the media have encouraged this kind of offensive conduct going forward? Do you think the message is that if you're poorly reviewed or reviewed in any way that varies from exactly what you wanted, and you have money to burn, you should file a frivolous lawsuit against the local restaurant, architecture, music, etc., critic? Specifically, what of the role of D Magazine, and now the eGullet Society as carrier of a reprint and this Conversation, in keeping the flow of the "oxygen of publicity" coming to Romano? I'm referring in particular to language like, "As a lawsuit, it’s a waste of time. But Romano himself told me it was his critique of Dotty Griffith and the star system, and, as such, it raises all sorts of interesting questions." And, later, "Finally, Romano’s lawsuit attacks the star rating system. Here is where I applaud him . . ." My immediate reaction when I read those passages was to think that the ends don't justify the means -- that immoral acts like filing frivolous lawsuits are unworthy of being applauded, directly or indirectly. So, since we are all now about to embark on the project of giving Romano yet another round of free publicity, can you offer us any thoughts on how you think the media should balance the journalistic imperative against the (we hope) desire to avoid aiding and abetting those who abuse the system?

One problem New York restaurants have in creating economical menus is that New Yorkers (and Americans in general) are too finicky. A huge percentage of the people in most any New York restaurant's client base believe they're allergic to things they aren't allergic to, are on one or another fad diet at any given time and have wacky beliefs about why some foods are "icky" and others aren't. As a result, it's not really possible for restaurants these days to offer a very economical set menu where there are no choices or just two or three choices. Could you imagine? Everybody would be asking for this and that on the side, substitutions, etc., and would become indignant at the slightest sign of resistance -- by the standards of the local market it's just not possible to have very strict set menus. Whereas, in France, when people go into a restaurant like that they just eat what's on the day's menu and shut up. Duck? Eels? Whatever! They don't give a damn so long as it's good food and a good value.

Great. Just so you all know, I've been in touch with Paul's business partner and we're looking at ways to get Paul in here to answer some questions. I'll keep you posted.

Wow, I haven't thought about that place in ages -- I can't believe it's still there! They've even gone digital: http://www.pergoladesartistes.com I agree that much of this kind of food is passe, but more in the sense of being out of fashion than being worn out. When made well, this sort of food is delicious -- it doesn't get any less delicious just because the recipes are old.

Liz are you stil trying to get in touch with Paul? If so I think I can get hold of him.