Fat Guy

Thanks for clearing that up. The J&R is indeed the one that uses electric assist; the other popular barbecue pits from Southern Pride and Ole Hickory are the ones that use gas assist (J&R pioneered the gas-assist pit, but no longer manufactures that product). The point being, all these units are utilized all over the South in good barbecue restaurants, like Three Little Pigs in Memphis and of course Mike Mills's places. There are also places like Mitchell's in Wilson, NC, where they use Kingsford charcoal plus wood in smoking whole hogs. To reduce it to simple terms -- the only ones I really understand with respect to barbecue -- when you smoke meat you are applying two things to the meat: 1) heat, and 2) smoke. Those who use gas, electric or charcoal to assist with heat would tend to argue that the heat source as such is irrelevant -- heat is heat -- and that the important thing is your smoke source. If wood is being used for 100% of a pit's heating needs, some would argue that's a waste of wood.

They either use wood or they don't. Sietsema is a journalist. He could have picked up the phone and asked, and if he doubted the answer he could have confirmed with a supplier or other source. There's much interesting discussion of the challenges of NYC barbecue in our Q&A with Danny Meyer.

I would be happy just to have the four-star system make sense and be applied with a healthy degree of theoretical rigor, i.e., according to an explicit or even well-established implicit code that carries through from review to review and reviewer to reviewer. I think abolishing the system altogether is too much to hope for. It has so much perceived value to the Times, the restaurant community and the dining public and is I think in part responsible for the dominance of Times reviews over those in Gourmet and New York Magazine (which have, in some eras at least, been better as reviews).

He did indeed.

I'm definitely surprised by the hostility; it seems beyond the scope of any criticism I'd have thought possible. Surely the barbecue at Dinosaur is not the greatest in the world, but it is very good. In terms of the factual claims, is Sietsema saying that Dinosaur doesn't use wood? If I'm not mistaken, Jason posted a photograph above of the J&R smokers, standard-issue in many Southern barbecue places. These are, I believe, combination gas-wood smokers -- they derive heat from gas and smoke from wood placed into a chamber. At least, that's what I think is the case.

Probably more appropriate to discuss this either on the actual Masa topic or its own topic, but I hope this is intended more as provocation than as a serious statement. What the statement demonstrates to me, mostly, is that if you evaluate sushi through the lens of European-derived culinary expectations, there really isn't much to say about it. That, however, is a limitation of European-derived culinary expectations, not of Japanese ones. One might also ask whether Masa is really a restaurant. Although it is technically a place of public accommodation, it comes closer to being a private dining room than most any restaurant I can think of. If you made a list of a dozen things that most restaurants have in common, Masa would probably lack half of them, for example menus. To me, Masa seems analogous not to a four-star restaurant but, rather, to the chef's table at a four-star restaurant. If you dine in Alain Ducasse's "aquarium" or Daniel's "skybox," you have a chance to come much closer to the kind of up-close-and-personal experience you'd have at Masa. You'll probably also spend more money than at Masa. Yet you'll receive less service than in the main dining room. There's a certain minimalism to the service in those private rooms that actually has the effect of elevating the culinary experience. I think without a doubt you can have a four-star experience in Ducasse or Daniel's private room despite or perhaps on account of the reduction in the number of middlemen between the customer and the chef -- indeed, it's hard to regard the dining-room experience at any New York restaurant as being in the same category. There are also, of course, analogs to Jose Andres's Minibar in Washington, DC; Joel Robuchon's Atelier in Paris; and Chika Tillman's ChikaLicious dessert bar here in New York. These are all derived from the sushi-bar concept, but serve Western food. Minibar, on account of its frenetic casualness and positioning, isn't intended to provide a four-star experience, but I could just as easily imagine Minibar transformed into a four-star experience (with very little change to the food) by, for example, being transplanted to a serene French Laundry-like setting. Of course, Andres's Minibar, Ducasse's aquarium and Daniel's skybox are not actual restaurants. They are what one might call "business units" within restaurants. Masa, too, is a business unit of the larger operation that includes Bar Masa. One wonders, then, if we will start seeing separate reviews of the private dining rooms and other business units of luxury restaurants. If so, we could double or triple the number of four-star restaurants pretty quickly. We could start with the chef's table at Cafe Gray, $2,200 minimum on the table (seats six).

Andre Michelin published his first red guide in 1900, and the stars assigned by publications the world over are I think derivative of his system. Although I haven't seen a direct comment on this from Claiborne, I think there's a strong inference to be made that when he decided on the four-star system he was using Michelin as a model. He was, most likely, also trying to do something different for New York, but I think the use of stars was an outgrowth of the experience and expectations of well-traveled epicures of that time. I don't question the writing talents of any of the New York Times restaurant reviewers. If anything, William Grimes and Frank Bruni are two of the best. The problem with their reviews isn't lack of writing skill, but rather lack of depth with respect to the subject at hand. They know how to write, just not about restaurants. But they are certainly much better writers than Craig Claiborne and Bryan Miller were when they were writing restaurant reviews (Bryan Miller is, I think, a much better writer today than he was back in the 1980s). Ruth Reichl was probably the most complete of the Times critics: an excellent writer and extremely deep in the subject matter. Incidentally, she never seemed to take the star system all that seriously. At the four-star level she maintained a high level of rigor, but below that it was anarchy, so much so that Bryan Miller was filing written complaints. Indeed, Grimes's mission was supposed to be to get the star system back in order -- a very weak premise for selection of a reviewer, although he performed admirably (albeit without much enthusiasm) after a couple of years of on-the-job learning at reader expense.

The ShopRite brands of fake breakfast cereals cost almost exactly half as much as the name-brand equivalents and taste almost exactly the same. The Cheerios knockoff -- ShopRite Toasted Oats -- is, to me, indistinguishable from the General Mills product. I also like that ShopRite uses the word "scrunchy" in so many of its cereal product names, e.g., ShopRite Scrunchy Cocoa Meteors.

I tried to query the delivery guy -- he was restocking the shelves when I bought the stuff -- about the status of the beverage, and he indicated that "It's all so fucked up, pardon my French, nobody knows what the hell is going on. One day we got it, one day we don't." I think beverage distribution is like that when you get to the street level.

Normally, if a newspaper ran the same story twice, I'd say the second instance was a waste of space. But in this case, the need for the second review arose directly out of the deliberate incompleteness of the first one. So the first was, I think, the waste.

The right questions are: what were her options, and what could she have done better given the hand she was dealt? I actually think her Masa review was one of the more interesting pieces of writing to appear in that space; far more so than a forced one star review of some obscure bistrattoria she had to dig up in the boroughs would have been. ← As far as Google is concerned, you just invented the word "bistrattoria." Mazal tov.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I certainly agree with that.

To parapharase Fiddler: because she had a bad week, I should suffer?

Oakapple, the reason Hesser's review was a waste of space was that it called for its own destruction. It contemplated a re-review by the new critic, and now that we have that re-review, which said pretty much what every other review everywhere has said, including Hesser's review, we have yet another 1,200 words spilled in making the same set of claims about how Masa serves such good fish. So why bother with her review? With only 52 slots available per year, why allocate 2 of them to what is probably the smallest restaurant ever to be reviewed, especially when both reviews make pretty much the same set of no-brainer claims?

When you make leaping assumptions such as this, it shows that you didn't read what I wrote with any degree of thoughtfulness. ← What you wrote was, "Pull aside any restauranteur in the country. Ask him or her whether it's fair for one single person's whim in assigning stars to have such a dominant influence." That does on its face seem to me to be a species of the standard chef/restaurateur complaint leveled against all critics when unfavorable reviews come in: "Who is this person to criticize my establishment?" Those same chefs and restaurateurs can often be heard to say, when a favorable review comes in, "You know, he gets it. He really gets it! He gets what we're about!"

In 1968, Peter Luger held four stars (as did Shun Lee Dynasty). I'm not exactly sure how one might categorize the Quilted Giraffe in terms of ethnicity, but it held four stars as recently as the early 1990s. Our set of "Back to the future" topics makes for interesting reading in this regard: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=49482 http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=49627 http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=49641

Right. We've pointed out several times in the past that, despite the conventional wisdom that the Times only awards four stars to French restaurants, there have actually been Chinese, Japanese and other types of restaurants with four New York Times stars -- just not in the past 15 or so years.

I'm not sure it's a question of qualifications as such -- there is no course one can take, no certificate one needs to acquire -- and he strikes me as no more or less competent to judge a Japanese restaurant than a French one. I'm also not entirely sure the divisions among cuisines apply all that well to restaurants like Masa and Per Se, where the cross-cultural influences are so pronounced, in terms of ingredients, preparation and aesthetics. What strikes me about both reviews, and many others, is that they are so irrelevant-seeming on their own terms. That is to say, without the podium of the New York Times, nobody would take these reviews all that seriously as standalone pieces of work. Virtually the only thing noteworthy about Bruni's four-star reviews is that they award four New York Times stars. They contribute little else to the discussion that hasn't already been said. Whereas, the work of someone like Ruth Reichl, Mimi Sheraton or Craig Claiborne had a certain internal force of authority to it -- it would not have been as widely read without the Times podium, but it would have been taken seriously by serious observers.

The first review of Masa (Hesser) was 100% a waste of space. The review of Wolfgang's contained precious little actual discussion of steak.

This tri-ply Calphalon set for $69 from Amazon seems to be an exceptional buy, given that it includes a non-stick rack. I can't imagine what would be better about an All-Clad piece costing twice as much -- indeed, the construction of the Calphalon piece appears to be preferable. Did somebody already mention this?

Do yourself a favor, however, and make sure your rack is non-stick. This is probably the second-most useful role for non-stick coatings after the omelette pan. This Amco unit from BigTray is 20 bucks and will fit the pan I referenced above.

Anecdotally, I can confirm that non-stick performs poorly for me when it comes to stovetop browning. I've read here and there that without some stickiness, the maillard reaction doesn't occur to a sufficient extent. I imagine the coagulation issue occurs for similar reasons: the stickiness allows bits to coagulate, which then brown and trigger additional reactions and impart flavor to the jus. If you do need to brown with non-stick, use plenty of fat -- I've had pretty good results starting with vegetable oil and finishing with butter. The remnants from this process might, moreover, be helpful as a foundation for "juice retention."

I would say that is not a correct assumption under most circumstances. If, for example, you are roasting something on a rack, the thermal properties of the roasting pan are nearly irrelevant. Roasting is not about the pan cooking the food; it's about the air in the oven cooking the food and the pan is there mostly to secure whatever is roasting and to catch drippings. Even if you make a reduction on the stovetop after roasting, it's not as though you need quick responsiveness -- you're not making hollandaise. If you're braising -- in other words not using your roasting pan to roast -- you want a thick vessel like a Staub or Le Creuset oven, though I think heavy all-metal Dutch ovens are also terrific for braising and a lot cheaper and better for roasting smaller items. I think the best values in roasting pans (and stockpots, and lots of other things) are to be found at restaurant supply places. You can find something like one of the Johnson Rose 24 gauge (that's a little more than 5mm thick) steel roasting pans for about 25 bucks. These things function day in day out under restaurant conditions, where handles would mostly just get in the way. Check out this one from BigTray. And you can probably do better in most any Chinatown.

Slow Mediterranean Kitchen I have, so I'll have a look at the recipe today. I still think that substitution tends to be a less worthy process than reconstruction. When you think in terms of substitutes, what often happens is that you erode a dish bit by bit. One minor ingredient, nobody notices except the eG Forums types. Two ingredients, a few more people notice. Eventually, if you make enough substitutions, you do so much violence to the dish that everybody who eats it becomes a radical anti-substitutionist. The better move is, I think, to take a step back and ask more fundamental questions about what makes a dish delicious, and to reconstruct a dish from a new palette of ingredients -- similar in spirit, equally delicious, and not the result of pure mechanical substitution. Perhaps the simplest example is scrambled eggs with bacon. Sure, you can replace the bacon with a variety of nasty soy- or turkey-based products that look and smell like bacon and taste like crap. Or you can take a step back and ask what it is about the combination of bacon and eggs that is so appealing (the creaminess of the eggs contrasted with the smoke, salt and fat of the bacon), and you can wind up with pastrami and eggs -- a great dish in its own right, not really a substitution at all, yet so much more delicious and satisfying than eggs with fake bacon. I'd suggest thinking of cassoulet, or anything else, the same way. Don't just go line-by-line and replace each non-kosher ingredient with a kosher one. Rather, focus on reconstructing the overall appeal of the dish, even if in the end you wind up with something that isn't exactly cassoulet.