Fat Guy

Haute cuisine is not the only example of French national cuisine. There is also a relatively standardized set of dishes served in casual resaurants all over France as well as in restaurants outside of France that summarize French cuisine: onion soup, steak tartare, etc. To that extent, it can be said of most any country with many regional cuisines that there is a national "greatest hits" cuisine that draws from all over and embeds itself in the international culinary consciousness as a summary. For Spain that national cuisine would be paella valenciana, the tortilla, various tapas (especially chorizo), gazpacho, flan, sangria, and the like. It may be a dumbed down, inaccurate, poorly rendered take on Spanish cuisine, but you can find it in Spanish restaurants everywhere from Newark to Tokyo to Salamanca. Ask most anybody in the world who dines out casually and thinks about food somewhat but not a lot "What is Spanish cuisine?" and I assure you they'll name those dishes.

It's a good start; it's just incomplete. A well-designed taste-test would include a blind comparison of the naked products, just as a comparative wine tasting would. But that would be incomplete (I happen to think non-contextual wine ratings are also incomplete). The next part of the tasting would involve a comparison that includes several appropriate sauces. I'm not sure that the failure to do that is particularly American -- the lowest-common-denominator and often ill-informed tests performed by Cook's Illustrated are by no means representative of a majority of Americans or of any group of Americans other than Cook's Illustrated's editors -- but then again I've never seen the European versions of such tests, if they even exist.

Plenty of the people who write for those newspapers, glossy magazines, and guidebooks read eGullet. So if you're trying to keep something secret by posting it here, don't!

I'm sure the restaurateurs of France very much appreciate that there are so many helpful diners who will love their restaurants enough to keep them secret.

It's extremely difficult to coordinate the actions of two people, no less a hundred. The notion that all the customers of a restaurant could get together to keep it a secret is laughable. Information is more powerful than people. It will find its way around those who try to bury it, and it will wind up in all the same places. Great restaurants will get discovered. You can either be generous, help them get discovered, and be part of the process of giving credit where credit is due; or you can make a failed attempt to bury the information while you watch the other thousand people who dined there recently make it happen. But it's going to happen either way. Furthermore, if a restaurant allows itself to be ruined by being discovered, it's not as great a restaurant as you thought it was. The truly great places don't get ruined. They turn the extra business and attention into better food, decor, and service.

My personal favorite, and I have to thank Wine Spectator's Sam Gugino for turning me on to it, is Benedetto Cavalieri. I agree that Setaro is excellent, but have to give the edge to Cavalieri. To me there is no significant difference in flavor among the good mass-produced brands (and I would include Ronzoni on that list, along with of course De Cecco and Barilla) and the artisanal brands. If the artisanal producers are using a better class of wheat (Canadian super-wheat clone 49373 instead of clone 38503 or whatever) or a superior milling process (windmills and such), and I'm sure they are, I don't notice it on the palate. This is why, I think, the magazines like Cook's Illustrated tend to dismiss the notion of artisanal pasta: they're tasting the pastas plain, and plain pastas can be pretty similar. The major differences that I've been able to detect, however, have to do not with flavor but with texture and the closely related attribute of absorbency. As I understand it, dried pasta is extruded through dies. The mass-production facilities use teflon-coated dies and push the product through quickly so as to maximize production. The artisanal producers use copper dies and push slowly. This creates a rough-textured surface on the artisanal pasta that is rarely seen on mass-produced pasta. That texture affects the way the pasta interacts with sauce and other added ingredients: it not only helps the sauce cling, but if I'm not mistaken the porousness helps flavors to penetrate deeper within the pasta. I also believe that pasta made in the artisanal manner is easier to cook al dente -- it has a more forgiving window of opportunity, perhaps on account of its looser structure. In terms of my own purchasing behavior, I have come to think that the surface texture of pasta is so far and away its most important attribute that I've started buying pasta by appearance and not necessarily by brand. Awhile back I was at Wegmans and they had a store brand of pasta that had a beautifully textured surface. It was right around the De Cecco price point, but it turned out to be great stuff. All that being said, I'm always happy to eat De Cecco or even Ronzoni provided it is prepared with care and combined with good ingredients. I like the artisanal products but have never had the "I'll never go back!" reaction.

Had another terrific meal, even better than the last, at V yesterday. Was totally charmed at the outset by our lovely server and another bottle of properly chilled Spanish red. This time around we had two New York strips and a double-cut pork chop. I thought the strip was first rate and, again, thought the technology used to cook it was very flattering. The 1/4 of it that I didn't eat made one of history's greatest cold steak sandwiches today, on multigrain bread with horseradish mustard. Tried the "ribbons of tuna" appetizer, which continues Vongerichten's tradition of having a great tuna app at most every one of his restaurants. This wasn't his best, but was very pleasant in its fake-Asian marinade. The Caesar salad comes with the romain hearts tightly bundled and the dressing packs a great punch. The seafood platter for one person at $25 is a bit of a splurge (especially when you figure that the New York strip is $43 on top of that) but the seafood is excellent: it contained kumamoto oysters, clams, raw scallops, crab claws, shrimp, and maybe something else, all a major cut above standard steakhouse fare, and served with four dipping sauces. Also had the onion soup deconstruction again, and am thinking it might be one of my favorite new dishes of the year. Desserts are still a weak link. The carrot cake composition was just okay -- nice try, but ultimately unfulfilling as its components just don't come together. The carrot sorbet (more like a granite, really) was the only part I'd want to eat again. The carrot foam is gratuitous, and of the two species of actual carrot cake on the plate (a brown and a white variant) neither is good. The molten-center chocolate cake was excellent again, but tired in that similar desserts are so widely available, except for the remarkably good salted caramel ice cream that accompanies it.

On behalf of the whole eGullet team, I'd like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Craig for his tireless service as a forum host and manager. Those of you who have seen Craig's public face on eGullet have long known of his prolific excellence, good nature, and deep knowledge, but the other half of what he has always done has gone on quietly, behind the scenes, where he has tirelessly and thanklessly worked to improve eGullet from a strategic and content-management perspective. In addition, we wish Craig well in all his ventures and will always think of him as part of the eGullet family and a beloved alumnus. I'm sure I speak for everyone on eGullet when I say that we look forward to Craig's continued voice as a member of the eGullet Society. On a pragmatic note, we'll be making an announcement very soon about the next generation of wine forum hosting staff, and look forward to beginning that journey. Thanks again for everything, Craig, and we wish you all the best.

As packaging, I've got no problem with the can: the plastic-lined cans don't interact significantly with the product so they're great for short-term storage and conveyance because they're so durable. The straw idea, however, is a bad one: wine is more enjoyable when served in an appropriate glass. If you drink your wine through a straw, you get no bouquet and the whole drinking experience is diminished.

Maya was packed tonight. Great scene and vibe if you like high-energy restaurants. Service was extremely friendly but terribly slow and somewhat inept. The kitchen couldn't get the food out on a reasonable schedule, and the servers couldn't keep straight which dishes went to which people at our table of four. The guacamole was excellent, served in an attractive two-tiered contraption with a stone bowl and the guacamole suspended above the chips, with huge chunks of avocado throughout. (That wasn't a very good sentence; sorry.) The margaritas didn't have enough triple sec, and that's a complaint from someone who prefers margaritas on the dry side. I find it extremely annoying when restaurants put lime in the beer glass. On the side, fine, I can just ignore it. But once it's touching the glass it's no longer a choice. On the one hand, the dishes I tried demonstrated that the "fancy Mexican" category can be the real deal: the flavors at Maya can be, at their best, sophisticated and subtle, especially in the seafood dishes. Unfortunately, on too many of the dishes we had, the ingredients and execution weren't up to snuff. The tuna in my appetizer was sub-par, as was the lobster in my shrimp-and-lobster entree (the shrimp were fine). The amounts of seafood included in the dishes were a joke. I'm not one to complain about portion size, but this was a pretty extreme example of loading plates up with starches and using protein almost as a garnish. The meat dishes were far more generous, especially the lamb which was probably the best thing on the table. The mole poblano was also quite good. Desserts arrived cold and soggy after a long wait, and most wouldn't have been all that good anyway. One of us got served the wrong dessert (ordered cheesecake, got chocolate cake) but we didn't have another 45 minutes to waste. The corn flan was a winner, though.

Yes, but now it's retro.

As I recall we had a report from a member complaining of unsatisfactory wine pairings. I didn't think the pairings listed were bad. They were just overpriced, as are pretty much all the wines at ADNY. The basic issue is that you need to spend a lot of money if you want to drink really good wine at ADNY. If you want to eat at ADNY on a relatively (for the establishment) limited budget, the pairing option will get you a glass of middle-market wine with each course that will probably pair pretty well. If you want more upmarket pairings, give the sommelier a bigger budget to work with. For better or worse, that's how it works. I happen to think the sommelier at Ducasse -- his name is Andre -- is excellent. If you engage him and state your preferences, chances are he will work with you outside the bounds of any predetermined pairings. And if you don't like a pairing, just say so. The last time I was there, Andre poured a glass of wine that I didn't like and didn't think went well with the dish I was eating, so I said so and he took it back and brought another. No big deal. A lot of this stuff is about personal preference.

How does Jay Weston do it? Weston, who publishes Jay Weston's Restaurant Newsletter, is based in Los Angeles and writes primarily about Los Angeles restaurants. Yet he periodically breaks stories about New York restaurants ahead of any of the local New York and national media. For example, awhile back Weston's newsletter was the first to break the story that Charlie Trotter would be opening at Time Warner in New York. Nobody even believed it when Weston wrote about it. It took weeks for anybody else to print the story. Weston was also the first to call Amanda Hesser "winsome" in print, and look where that got us. Now Weston has broken the news on the new location of Le Cirque. I haven't seen any mention of this anywhere else, but in the July/August issue of his newsletter it says: "Now that he [sirio] has announced his plans to move Le Cirque 2000 from the Palace Hotel as early as January, we have a scoop for those of you who care: he'll be taking over the two-level Nicole Farhi store and restaurant at 10 East 60th Street."

In my opinion the best non-meat item at Katz's is the lox and onion omelette, served with bread, pickles, and steak fries. I agree, however, that your best bet might be to split your meal among multiple establishments: you nibble on some pickles at Katz's, and then go someplace else for a non-meat item, like a knish at Yonah Schimmel's, which will be quite a bit better than a Katz's knish. Unless you're going to schlep out to Coney Island and Mrs. Stahl's, I think Yonah Schimmel's serves the best knish you're going to get your hands on.

This sounds like a fantastic meal. I'd drive down from New York for it if I though the Plymouth would survive the trip! I was wondering about those Wagyu short ribs too. Is there an advantage to using a Wagyu source for a braising cut like short ribs? I understand that with something like a filet or strip the marbling and tenderness of Wagyu are advantageous, but for a tough, slow-cooked, collagen-rich cut like short ribs is there a noticeable difference? Save me some!

I received a bulk e-mail on Beard Foundation letterhead signed by George Sape yesterday saying, regarding the scholarship issue:

It's interesting that we have so many respectable places in the upscale Mexican category, but not one that is really exciting to this group. I wonder how Maya would actually do in a side-by-side against Frontera, though. Or that fancy place in Austin, Fonda San Miguel or whatever it's called.

Had I been online I'd have beaten you by a minute.

In Zagat '98 the picture was indeed quite different. The top few picks in order were Rosa Mexicano, Mi Cocina, Zarela, and Zocalo. When Maya opened it immediately knocked everybody else down a notch, so in Zagat '99 we have Maya, Rosa Mexicano, Mi Cocina, Zarela, Zocalo. I can't quite get why Mi Cocina seems to hang around the list every year -- it's the only one of that group still on the 2004 top Mexican list. But I guess there's a bit of apples-and-oranges mixing of the haute Mexican restaurants with the earthier places. I haven't been to any of these places in a long enough time to have any sort of currently valid opinion, but Maya to me always seemed to be a big cut above the others. I never did have very good luck at Rosa Mexicano or Zarela, though I did have a few very good meals at Zocalo.

Interesting Zagat aside here: In Zagat '04 the top Mexican pick is Mexicana Mama, with a 25 food rating, with Maya in second place at 24. Rosa Mexicano, Zarela, and Zocalo -- all on the obvious potential contenders short list -- aren't even on the list of top Zagat picks, though I imagine at one time they were at the top. Let me check some older Zagats.

Is Maya the consensus or are there other contenders?

That's one possibility; the other is that he was invited or given reservations by confederates. I've done as much for other critics when I've had a hard-to-come-by reservation that I wasn't able to use. William Grimes gives one such account in an early piece he did on Ducasse.

This is a great idea, Robert. One thing I think should be tracked is menu prices. If the "Eurocreep" phenomenon is any indication, we should be at least somewhat fearful that the end-user cost of the VAT will sublimate into higher menu prices.

How come all you guys are getting better numbers than I got? No fair! By the way, I have a nice little "charticle" coming out in the "Fare" section of the November Saveur comparing the Ducasse Spoon book with the Adria El Bulli '98-'02 book. Keep an eye out for it. I do promise to get back into this thread and do some cooking. The site upgrade and the edits on my book manuscript of late have been keeping me pretty busy, but my schedule should be opening up again soon.

I don't know enough about this area of the law to say anything definitive, but the conduct as you've described it certainly strikes me as arguably fraudulent. You might want to notify the Zagat organization about it -- I'm sure they have lawyers who attend to this sort of thing. Then again, a few years back when Cosi was displaying inaccurate Zagat information at its World Financial Center store, I notified Zagat and nobody replied or, as far as I know, did anything.