Fat Guy

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There are a lot of claims being made on this thread about how all the good barbecue restaurants in North Carolina serve pork only. Those claims would not seem to reconcile very well with the reality of so many top North Carolina barbecue places that serve, for example, barbecued chicken. The standard throughout barbecue country, from Texas to Tennessee to Missouri to Illinois to the Carolinas, is multiple meats. This is the case even at the top-tier places. An establishment serving only one meat would be deviant, not standard.

Dinosaur opened, and prior to the Voice and Times reviews we had reports from: lambretta76 tcavallo Jason Perlow jhlurie Mister_Cutlets verysleepy Rachel Perlow pete ganz juuceman ahr Daniel wannabechef Me Several of the people on the above list are members and staff whose opinions I have tracked over the course of hundreds of posts and several years. These are not random idiots posting on epinions and citysearch. Every single one of the people on the list above kept a level head and delivered what seemed like balanced critiques of Dinosaur. The overwhelming sentiment was positive. Very positive. In many cases celebratory. Then the professional reviewers came along with disdainful, condescending reviews that barely hold up on their own terms no less against the testimony of so many people I trust, not to mention my own experience. Something is going on here. I don't think it's a question of ignorance. There are troublesome issues with each review, to be sure. Sietsema pushes up so close to a misstatement -- a reasonable and attentive reader would be likely to conclude that Sietsema was saying Dinosaur uses no wood -- that the Voice really should print a clarification. Severson's talk of axioms and inescapable truths is not only misguided but also indicative of closed-mindedness. But ignorance? No, I think Sietsema and Severson probably know a good deal about barbecue, and I wouldn't care if they didn't. There is no hard-and-fast expertise requirement for reviewers. A good reviewer gets the job done even when reviewing a restaurant that serves a totally unfamiliar cuisine: you do research, you find experts to visit the restaurant with you, you taste and taste until you start to identify and differentiate the relevant flavors, and you write to the best of your ability. I don't think inconsistency can explain it. The probabilities just don't align very well in support of that theory given the quality and quantity of positive testimony we've seen here, and the language of the reviews hints at more than a simple case of inconsistency. No, this feels more like a chip-on-the-shoulder kind of situation, in both cases. In both cases the reviewers are unreasonably holding Dinosaur up to absolutist standards that not only create self-fulfilling prophecies but also are not particularly sensible. Both reviews betray a certain hostility towards the idea of Dinosaur being a legitimate barbecue restaurant. I expect the average clueless diner to be blinded by atmospherics. Negative reactions to the silly decor, the chain-like menu language and the frat-party scene are unsurprising, and plenty of people are so put off by that sort of thing that they are incapable of enjoying anything else about the meal. Likewise, there are all sorts of people wandering around out there with opinions along the lines of "only X is legitimate barbecue, therefore everything else is bad" and "barbecue is only good in place Y, therefore it is bad everywhere else." But professional critics? They should be doing exactly the opposite: seeing past the distractions, the biases and the cliches, and drilling down to the essence of the food. I believe these two reviews simply failed to do that.

I'm looking at Arthur Bryant's menu right now. It lists: Beef Ham Pork Turkey Chicken Sausage Burnt Ends Long End – Ribs Short End – Ribs I'm having a lot of trouble thinking of any major barbecue places in the South that don't serve a variety of meats. Would anybody care to give, say, ten examples of generally accepted world-class barbecue restaurants so that we can derive the average number of meats on offer?

I hear if you lock yourself in a closet for a week without food or light, everything tastes really good when you get out.

So there I was, eating my cherries, thinking about Russ's structural and aesthetic arguments and trying to figure out with which I disagree more, when I noticed on the box that these cherries are distributed by a company called Columbia Marketing International, with an address of 2525 Euclid Ave. Wenatchee, WA 98807. What's going on here? The Washington cherry people couldn't possibly be selling cherries from Chile. Well, yes, they could and are. A look at the Columbia Marketing International website ( http://www.cmiapples.com/ ) indicates that this company, which handles 10% of the cherries grown in Washington, sells Washington produce in season and apples, pears and cherries from Chile and Argentina when Washington produce is not in season. Of course, for all I know CMI is some awful corporation, but the zero sum equation doesn't look so simple when the fruit packers in Washington are selling cherries from Chile. And while I think it's wonderful that people in California want to support their local producers, I'd like to point out that those local producers, as well as the entire state of California, would go bankrupt tomorrow if everybody else in the world only bought local produce. The future is simply not going to arrange itself according to a Von Thunen-like model of concentric development where each city has a core, some suburbs, and a bunch of farms growing produce for that population. It wouldn't even be doable if you mandated it by totalitarian decree, and certainly it's not going to happen ever, so forget it. The train has left the station, the truck has left the loading dock, the ship has set sail, etc., on the reality that for the next few centuries we're likely to be shipping food all over the place. The idea of living with the seasons seems nice, especially the virtuous program of self-imposed deprivation whereby one eats only specified foods at specified times, but come on, are any of these foods really local? They've been schlepped from Europe, Asia, the cradle of civilization, wherever. They've been hybridized -- even those "heirloom" varietals -- and forced to grow on schedules determined by man in places where nature never intended them to be. You can grow anything in a hothouse if you feel like paying for it to be done. The exercise in line-drawing based on geography ignores some big issues like, well, like geography. I have a fruit schedule too, it's just that mine is based on what's available at Fairway and Costco -- institutions no more artificial than farms, as far as I'm concerned. And you know, I buy lots and lots and lots of local produce. I love local produce. There are these nice hippie-commie farmers, Debbie and Pete Kavakos, who provide the produce for the Yorkville CSA. During summers when we're not traveling, we sign up for a share of the CSA and every week we go to the Church of the Heavenly Rest and pick up black plastic garbage bags full of fruit covered in fresh, seasonal, local dirt. We read all the CSA propaganda while we frantically try to figure out what to do with 20 heads of lettuce. I shop at the Union Square Greenmarket too, when I'm not engaging in my futile personal boycott on account of retrograde management practices. All told, I'm sure I spend more money on local produce per person in my household than 99% of people in my demographic. My diet is so diverse the vitamin companies should be studying me. But there's a difference between buying local produce and buying only local produce. Because right now it's January for crying out loud. The is no local produce, or at least not much. A couple of hundred years ago at this time of year around here people just didn't eat anything fresh -- they ate stuff from jars, and they ate roots, or they starved to death. It was ugly. Now we have cherries from Chile. Thank you lord for my cherries from Chile. I promise if you give them to me every year I will never, ever question the aesthetics of shipping cherries halfway around the world. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I just had some more cherries.

Yes, no matter how good the food tastes, if it's not cooked with wood smoke you could make a cogent argument that it's not barbecue. I think most Society Members would agree with this. You can steam brisket in a bucket; even if it were good it would not technically be barbecue. And he won't eat his words when R.U.B. opens because he said nothing about it. He just said that he doesn't think Dinosaur is good, perhaps because it doesn't use enough wood. ← I think Burt is referring to the implication that 1) "these technical modern smokers" are illegitimate, and 2) that the only barbecue methodology acceptable to God is to "use lots of wood and smoke the hell out of the meat!" I've got to say, I think we could pretty quickly find a number of widely acknowledged barbecue masters to disagree with both claims. It seems to me that the average actual pitmaster in the South is less dogmatic about barbecue than the New York Times and Village Voice reviewers.

When you make an absolute proclamation of closed-mindedness, you are a lot of things but you are not open-minded. If a reviewer is operating under the assumption -- the "axiom" and the "simple, irrefutable truth" -- that it's impossible for the food to be good, it undermines the credibility of the conclusions. This review does everything but say outright that if the reviewer had gone 100 times, no matter what she was served, she would have viewed every bite of food in the worst possible light. It would be as if a film reviewer were to say "All action movies are bad" and then proceed to review an action movie negatively. What a surprise! It would be as if I were to review a Jewish deli in Tokyo, and I started the review off with "It's impossible to have good deli outside of New York and maybe Miami. It just doesn't taste the same outside of where it belongs, no matter what." The decision is already made. There is no opportunity for the deli to disprove the hypothesis because it's not a hypothesis it's an "axiom" and a "simple, irrefutable truth." It doesn't matter if the ghost of Katz himself goes over there and teaches the Japanese guys the exact craft of deli production and they produce pastrami to his specifications. I will never give it a positive evaluation. The reader should stop right there, because the rest of the review is meaningless.

Just like with sushi. The argument would be that every place that any particular food is good, it was at one time or another new. New York has a long history of assimilating cuisines from all over and making them well here, and sometimes improving them. It requires neither large immigrant populations (we have very few Japanese and French here) nor anything more than a critical mass of people willing to pay for quality. We may have that critical mass of ready consumers here in New York City, and if so then history teaches that it is only a matter of time before New York City is at least a good barbecue town and possibly a great one. Either way, the business of sweeping predictions is not necessarily a good one for reporters to get into, especially when it gives the appearance of self-fulfilling prophecy. Nor are your arguments the ones made in the review. The review stakes its claim on the theory that "Regional food tastes best in its region. Ever eat a Chicago-style hot dog in Seattle or a bagel in Salt Lake City? Take a Mission-style burrito out of San Francisco, or Maryland blue crabs from their shoreline, and you're just asking for trouble." Well, my friends, that's simply incorrect as a matter of provable fact. Two pieces of food that are the same taste the same. Even the examples given aren't particularly compelling: you can get Maryland blue crabs in New York that are the same as the ones you can get at a crab shack in Maryland. They may be more expensive, but if you cook them the same way they'll taste the same. You can get good Chicago-style hot dogs outside of Chicago at, for example, the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. No, Salt Lake City doesn't have good bagels, but there are plenty of good bagels all over the Northeast. There's good pizza in Berkeley, CA. There's good Mexican food in Dundee, Oregon. Etc. If it's good, it's good. In terms of barbecue, you can probably get better pork here in New York City than in most of the South, not to mention better brisket. You can also charge more money in order to support a better class of ingredients. There's a lot going for New York when it comes to barbecue. I'm optimistic. I would not, however, let that influence my opinion of the barbecue being served at a given establishment were I writing a review. The food at Dinosaur simply is not as bad as the New York Times reviewer claims. It's not bad at all. But of course, having already decided that it's impossible for it to be good, how could the author ever conclude otherwise?

The New Yorkers who don't know about good barbecue seem to be the ones who write for our newspapers. There are, of course, plenty of non-journalist New Yorkers who don't know good barbecue. Perhaps they're cut from the same undiscriminating cloth as all the people in the South who support all those awful chain barbecue places where they steam the meat and bathe it in liquid smoke. I would guess there are at least 1,000 times as many bad barbecue places in the South than in New York City. So maybe it's better to focus on what a lot of New Yorkers do know about barbecue. A lot of New Yorkers have traveled extensively in barbecue country, tasting and appreciating -- go into any serious well-documented Southern barbecue institution and say you're from New York, and you'll hear "Oh, so are those folks over there," or "Yeah we get lots of New Yawkers through here." Plenty of New Yorkers go to university in barbecue country, they travel there for all kinds of reasons, and some go just for the barbecue. Plenty of New Yorkers were born in the South -- now more than ever it feels as though every newly arrived New Yorker you meet comes from Texas, Georgia, Florida or the Carolinas. There are enough people here that can appreciate good barbecue and are willing to support it. Our critics, who think they know a tremendous amount about barbecue even though they apparently don't, are a lot tougher on New York barbecue restaurants than, say, Bob Garner is on barbecue places in North Carolina. And, as in the South, there are plenty of clueless people who will eat any meat with sauce on it and be perfectly satisfied.

This is the sort of review that challenges even a writer's fans. It begins with an unprovable premise ("New York will never be a great barbecue town") backs it up with nostalgia ("Regional food tastes best in its region") and then falls into the abyss of self-fulfilling prophecy, not to mention questionable research (I would not be so quick to complain that a North Carolina-style barbecue sandwich is "more chunked than pulled," given that North Carolina-style barbecue sandwiches are supposed to be more chunked than pulled). It is extremely difficult for me, even accepting the idea of significant variance in smoked products, to accept the conclusions in this hatchet-job as having been based on open-minded tasting at the same restaurant I visited. And in "$25 and Under" there's just no reason to slam a place this hard. Eric Asimov would have focused on constructive criticism. It is unfortunate that this important function has now been handed over to a gaggle of writers who don't necessarily seem to have a feel for the column. Every time I see an injustice like this perpetrated on a hard-working, conscientious restaurateur who is trying to improve the New York food scene and is showing early signs of success, I grow even more disappointed with the community of New York City restaurant reviewers. Dinosaur no doubt has flaws, but it also serves some really good food. It did not deserve this slam or the one from Sietsema.

Especially in the colder climes, much of the "fresh, seasonal, local" produce is grown in hothouses. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But if you have to grow something in a hothouse it ain't seasonal. In the overwhelming majority of places where humans live, there is not and could not be enough "fresh, seasonal, local" food produced to prevent famine. Some places in the world are really good for living; some places are really good for growing stuff; a few places are good for both but most are not. So we live in some places and we grow stuff in other places. This is a really nice system. I'm in favor of it. It's very nice that well-to-do people with discretionary income can buy a little bit of "fresh, seasonal, local" produce and support all those nice farmers and greenmarkets, but most of what they eat comes from afar anyway: wheat, rice, meat, chocolate, coffee, pepper, vanilla . . .

I would just like to take a moment to thank all those who toiled during the human race's first few hundred thousand years of misery so that I could have anesthesia, electricity, a reasonable expectation of living past age 27, and Costco's cherries from Chile in January.

Oh man are these cherries good.

It's 527 miles from San Diego to Napa. San Diego is no more "local" to Napa than Raleigh, North Carolina is to Manhattan -- in fact Raleigh is closer to Manhattan than San Diego is to Napa. In Europe we're talking roughly the distance from Lyon to Venice. Just because you live in California and it comes from California doesn't mean it's local (or good, but that's another topic).

Yes, yes, I know "fresh, seasonal and local" is all the rage. Apparently even Canadians think it's a good idea, and they have eleven months of winter. But I've got to say, I'm really enjoying these out-of-season cherries from Chile. Anyway, they're not out-of-season in Chile. If you live there, they're "fresh, seasonal and local" all the way. And it's not like the cherries I eat during summer in New York come from New York. They come from the Northwest. Is there really a categorical difference between shipping from Washington and shipping from Chile? I guess Chile is farther, but once you pack stuff up and start handing it off to the logistics industry, it may as well be coming from the moon. When is cherry season on the moon, anyway? So, I will be enjoying my cherries from Chile via Costco all week, and I hope the rest of you enjoy an eight-course tasting of winter root vegetables every night.

Perhaps another topic would be appropriate for this. Much of the terminology of cooking has been handed down to us from times when equipment was different and comprehension of science was poor. Thus much of our cooking terminology, like "oven roasting" (aka "baking") is unhelpful. You can braise something over a flame as on the stovetop -- the chamber ovens that we all have in our homes are a modern invention -- and not all braised dishes involve browning (some of the daubes of which Paula speaks, for example, are marinated but not browned). Some braised dishes are cooked with just a little liquid in a tightly covered vessel, whereas others are cooked almost or fully submerged. If you use a broad definition of braising, which I think you should, sure, poaching, simmering and braising are all birds of a feather -- it's all cooking with moist heat, and the differences are in the details, and the sets of details often don't get coupled with the right words anyway. If you go look at technical definitions, you'll find that poaching temperatures are lower than simmering and braising temperatures, which are in turn lower than boiling, but then again your "poached" pears were probably simmered and "poached" eggs are almost always simmered or boiled.

I've never bothered to keep track because I'm pretty flexible when it comes to condiments, but in my travels back and forth across North America I have noticed all sorts of regional variations in the default application of ketchup, mustard and mayo to fast-food sandwiches.

Melissa, is this the device you're talking about? I think it's a really nice tool for making tea. Shaking it wouldn't be a good idea at all, though.

So long as the infuser is not overfilled -- in other words, so long as there is room for the leaves to expand and for water to circulate around them -- I wouldn't see that as much of a concern.

Black tea, however -- which I think is the most common type of tea prepared in the West -- is best when the water comes directly off the boil. You'll definitely want to consult the temperature chart for everything else. Or, if you're not striving for exactitude, wait one minute after you take the water off the heat before you pour it over the tea. I suggest one level teaspoon per 6 ounce cup. For an 8 ounce cup measure, make it a heaping teaspoon. Traditionally, one also adds a teaspoon "for the pot." I do it. It won't hurt. Straining when you pour is nice, and those Fortnum & Mason individual silverplate strainers (we have four of them) are lovely, but this approach is only good if you're planning to pour all the tea into cups at once or transfer it to a whole 'nother vessel. Otherwise, use a pot with a removable insert or an infuser. This will allow you to remove all the leaves at once as soon as the correct strength is reached.

Per Se.

My understanding is that in the United States it is not legal to serve game hunted in the United States in a restaurant or to sell it at all. I believe the reason for this is that hunted game cannot conform to USDA inspection requirements. There seem to be some exceptions to the rule, however: You can trap the game and bring it alive to a USDA-inspected facility for slaughter; there seem to be some exceptions for Native American production (or maybe that's the case in Canada -- I can't remember); and it seems it's legal to import hunted game from other countries, though I confess I don't know how they get around the USDA inspection requirement. So, for example, there are restaurants -- expensive ones for the most part -- that sell wild Scottish game in season, including woodcock. I don't know who happens to have it this year, though, and it's likely to be a briefly available seasonal item on a game-theme menu. I haven't read all these laws. I'm just pulling together a bunch of stuff I've heard. Maybe someone in the biz knows more.

I think you will find that outside of formal professional contexts the terms "white" and "brown" stock are not terribly important. Most stocks -- whether chicken, veal, beef, pork, duck or lamb -- will become brown stocks if you simmer them for a good long time. That is the case even if you don't roast the bones. The utility of white stock in home cooking -- even very advanced home cooking -- is so limited that most advanced amateur home cooks will go a lifetime without making a real white stock. So, my suggestion is don't sweat that particular detail.