Fat Guy

Some of the names attached to these pilots are pretty serious. Rufus Sewell in the cast of Taste, Ivan Reitman as a producer on Cooking Lessons. And if CBS is doing two food-inspired pilots that certainly marks a trend. If so, presumably the other networks are working on food-related shows as well.

Thanks very much for the report and the photos! Do you happen to know how mom and dad got the reservation?

Just to clarify, in case anybody is reading the topic title and gets confused, there is no soft-shell crab season in New York because there are no soft-shell crabs harvested in New York. The season we commonly refer to is the season in Maryland and the Carolinas. However, while the Maryland soft shell season starts in April, I believe it's possible to get fresh soft shell crabs from March through October by utilizing Louisiana suppliers. I think the reason some may have had bad experiences with frozen soft shells is that a large part of the frozen soft shell supply comes not from the blue crab but from imported mangrove crabs from Asia. They're very similar to the blue crabs, but they're not as good. Whereas, if you get a high-quality frozen domestic soft shell you're going to get pretty damn good results using any cooking method that crisps up the "skin" (basically any method but grilling). Here's a piece Sam Gugino did on soft shells last year. One thing he notes is that they don't have to be alive, as long as they're fresh.

I love my Russell Hobbs electric "cordless" kettle. Not that I have an office. Or a job.

They must be taking friends-and-family, VIP, and other non-public reservations only. Per Se could easily fill its dining room for months and months that way. If that's the plan, they're actually, in a sense, doing a favor for "civilians" with reservations, because those post-May-20 customers will reap the benefits of the three-week training period. Still, this is just the latest unsavvy and consumer-unfriendly PR move by the restaurant. Why Per Se's management persists in operating the restaurant in such an obfuscated manner is beyond me. The French Laundry's publicists had no problem bulk-mailing me and a zillion other writers the other day about the stupid Restaurant Magazine award yet as far as I know there still hasn't been a single press release issued about Per Se since the fire. As has been the case for months now, neither customers nor the media can get a straight answer about what's going on at Per Se.

It may not be a totally straight continuum, but for example I'd say a personal chef falls in the home-cooking overlap zone whereas a food chemist/flavorist-type chef is at the extreme opposite end of the continuum from a home cook. Malawry, I don't mean to sound like I'm trying to define you as abnormal but, well, you sort of are. And so are the people you worked with at the restaurant. The very small subset of restaurants where the top culinary students do their externships are the bastions of caring about food -- the cooks at those places are the honors students, intellectuals, and Renaissance people of the industry. They're the few who are likely to pursue cooking 24/7, save up in order to travel to Europe to eat at Michelin-starred restaurants, etc. But if you go one step down in the pyramid -- to the normal restaurants that actually feed a significant percentage of the population -- you're going to find an overwhelming majority of cooks who are essentially laborers, mostly young and male, and who don't have the kind of enthusiasm for the enterpries that you do.

Additional sources of half-bottles: - Go to Wine.com, select your region, and search for the word "half." This will pull up, in most regions, several pages of half bottles. They have some good stuff. - Order direct from the producer. If you have favorite wines, especially if they're domestic, just go online and check out the producer's offerings. For example Grgich maintains a half-bottle page and only charges a 50-cent premium on half-bottles. Of course, you have to live in a state where shipping is legal. Also, point of terminology re a few posts upthread: I was under the impression that a "split" is not a half-bottle but, rather, a quarter-bottle (187ml). Here's a short article about half-bottles as a trend.

Hey that's a great nomination! Let me also throw in for consideration the $20 wine list at Becco here in New York. There are $20 lists at Lidia's Kansas City and Pittsburgh locations as well.

Professional cooking and home cooking are large categories, with some overlap. What you're doing for your girls is what I might call professional home cooking: you're acting in loco parentis and preparing dinner for what is effectively a large family. I imagine that experience is radically different from what you saw when working the line at a restaurant, where you're cranking out a la minute dishes one at a time for several hours a night. That kind of cooking on a restaurant line is so completely unrelated to home cooking that it's barely recognizable as cooking at all -- to the uninitiated observer restaurant cooking looks more like a bizarre sport or ritual. I think it's also important to remember that your background is rather different from that of most professional cooks: you entered the profession a little older and a lot wiser and better-educated than most; it's not a blue-collar job for you. You're not working in some institutional cafeteria or on a Carnival cruise ship. And most sorority and fraternity cooks don't have your enthusiasm -- your girls are extremely lucky. One thing I can say about most professional restaurant cooks is that they eat like shit: pizza, burgers, anything with fat, sugar, and salt. And they rarely cook at home, especially the young macho guys who make up 99% of the brigade in restaurants the world over.

My initials are, after all, SAS.

I've also started a Landmarc-inspired spinoff thread on the wine forum, called World's Best-Priced Wine Lists. If you follow that link you'll find a list of a bunch of Landmarc's prices on both half and full bottles.

I think it's high time we celebrated restaurants throughout the world that have gone the extra mile to bring fine wines to their customers at everyday, affordable prices instead of at 300% (or more) markups. I'd like to begin by nominating the new restaurant Landmarc in New York City. The list at Landmarc is overall the best-priced wine list I've ever seen in New York, and maybe in the United States. Especially interesting is the restaurant's half-bottle list, but there are also great bargains on full bottles. Here are some examples from the list: HALF BOTTLES champagne: laurent-perrier / 14 pol roger / 18 white wine: sancerre, pascal jolivet 2003 / 12 pinot blanc, cuvée les amours, hugel 2001 / 10 red wine: shiraz, the laughing magpie, d’arenberg 2002 (mclaren vale) / 18 rioja crianza, el coto 2000 / 9 zinfandel, ridge geyserville 2001 (sonoma) / 18 quintessa 2000 (rutherford, napa) / 48 pinot noir, jed steele 2002 (carneros) / 12 FULL BOTTLES conundrum, caymus vineyards 2001 / 29 pauillac, château lynch bages 1999 / 59 puligny montrachet, premier cru les folatiéres, olivier leflaive 2000 / 75 pinot noir, premiere cuvée, archery summit 2001 (willamette valley) / 45 rubicon, niebaum-coppola (napa) 2000 / 105 Can you beat that? Discussion of Landmarc in the NY forum here.

Yeah they should have kept it looking like St. Marks Pizza.

A couple of random thoughts: - I do think there's a certain drama to opening a half-bottle that isn't matched by a quartino or by-the-glass wine. Although, if wines by the glass or quartinos are poured tableside it's nearly as dramatic -- not to mention there can be the opportunity to taste before committing to the pour. I actually wrote an article for Food Arts about by-the-glass programs a few years ago but I can't find it and I can't remember what I said. - It's interesting that France is so far ahead of the US in terms of half-bottles on wine lists, yet the US is so far ahead of France in terms of by-the-glass programs in fine dining restaurants. Indeed, I can't actually remember any Michelin three-star restaurant I've been to that had any kind of serious by-the-glass list.

I was just down getting my hair cut at Astor Place and had a felafel snack at Chickpea. An excellent neighborhood Middle Eastern place. Every neighborhood should have one.

We should assemble a list of tri-state area Korean places that use coals. I'm pretty sure this leaves Won Jo as the only Manhattan place, but in addition to New Jersey surely there are some in Flushing?

It may just be a coincidence, but the only two older half-bottles I've ever ordered in restaurants -- both in France -- did not show well. If I can find my notes I'll post what they were -- one was a Louis Latour bottling and the other was Alsatian -- but I remember with the Latour selection the restaurant had it in full and half bottles and I ate at the place several times over a period of days, ordering the full bottle one day and the half bottle the next day. It was such a disappointment, the half bottle, that, combined with my other bad older half-bottle experience, I swore off older half bottles altogether. In terms of the younger ones -- the ones I drink at home -- my storage conditions aren't particularly good and I have a feeling the half-bottles amplify the effects of temperature fluctuations. This would make sense since they're essentially less well insulated. And since I get a lot of Argyle wines in both formats I've had occasion to get to know these wines as they age in the different types of bottles. To me, the half bottles just don't handle time as well. At this point I pretty aggressively try to turn over my entire half bottle inventory every year.

I drink plenty of half-bottles at home, and have through persistence been able to find some very good wines in that format. Argyle, for example, bottles a limited amount of reserve pinot noir in 375ml bottles. And of course if you purchase Bordeaux as futures (or you know somebody who does) you can often have them bottle it in any format you like. There are also a few good wineries that have carved out a niche as reliable half-bottle producers. Champagne and sparkling wines in particular tend to be available in 375ml bottles. But the number of wines available in full bottles is, oh, about a million times greater than the number available in any other format. And in a restaurant setting, half bottles are relatively unnecessary because you can sell wine by the glass. At home, if you're a solo drinker or you just want a glass of wine, you have a logistical problem if you open a 750ml full bottle, because all the basic home-preservation methods suck. Whereas in a restaurant you can sell by the glass or quartino (250ml mini-carafe) and radically simplify your inventory. There's another problem with half-bottles, which hasn't been mentioned here: they tend to be of inferior quality to full bottles. In my experience half-bottles just don't age well, and this becomes quite noticeable within the first year. I've had occasion to compare half and full bottles of the same wines on occasion and within a few months you start to notice a marked inferiority in the half bottles. I think this is because the half bottles are less well insulated against temperature fluctuations. They also may have more of the wine exposed to oxygen, but I'm not sure. I do know, however, that full bottles are better than half bottles -- even more so than magnums (1.5l bottles) are better than full bottles.

I'm looking for an excuse to be in that neighborhood around lunchtime one of these days. I'm going to get a fried pepper and egg baguette ($7), a half-bottle of that Spanish red ($9), and a slice of lemon tart ($3), and I'm going to be happy.

Presumably the methode Champenoise is not performed in the can!

Did we touch on the issue of mussels yet? We had some mussels with pesto and cherry tomatoes, and the were terrific. The sauce -- kind of a pesto broth -- was so good we burned through two baskets of bread sopping it up. Marc Murphy told us that when they opened it took them a few days to figure out why bread consumption was so high; turned out it was the sauces with the mussels. "It's a good problem to have!" he laughed. Also, the rustic foie gras terrine with pickled onions -- the best twelve bucks you're going to spend. The spaghetti carbonara, which was the Tuesday pasta, was beautifully al dente and had big-ass chunks of bacon in it. Better in my opinion than the version served at Lupa.

True, most of the veg options are available as sides for $4, so effectively the cost of a substitution is $4. Still, I'm not convinced that, operationally, it's all that big a deal to do veg substitutions on, hypothetically, every dish. Nor do I have any aesthetic objection to substitutions when the dishes in question are steak, grilled tuna, roast chicken, seared salmon, etc. -- although the awesome cod dish I had (with rock shrimp, fennel and tomato-basil consomme) did represent culinary artistry to the point where a substitution could have ruined it. But hey, if you want to be a neighborhood place, you have to not care when someone replaces the rock shrimp, fennel and tomato-basil consomme with spinach, and asks for the cod "just grilled no oil or butter." Saying you're a casual, first-come-first-served neighborhood place, and then saying no substitutions, sends a mixed message. In any event, as a chef of Marc Murphy's caliber well knows, you pretty quickly learn what substitutions are common and you adjust your mise en place accordingly. Most likely it's going to net out to zero additional food cost, but if it's enough to push entree prices up by a dollar (hard to imagine, but hey it could happen if everybody subs mushrooms) you probably still buy more goodwill by allowing substitutions than by charging a dollar less. Not that I care. I'm happy to play by Landmarc's rules and I wouldn't be tempted to ask for any substitutions. I just think this particular policy is user-unfriendly enough that they'll eventually have to repeal it.

My dinner at Landmarc a couple of nights ago was a pleasant surprise: Landmarc turns out to be a destination restaurant disguised as a neighborhood bistro. There's not much to say in addition to what has already been reported here, but there are a few places where I think the New York Times review needs further analysis: I'm not sure if she tasted the other desserts, but the lemon tart is the best I've had and the blueberry crumble is on par with desserts costing $12+ at fine-dining restaurants. I'm also not sure how "routine" is a criticism -- apparently it is meant that way -- of creme brulee. It's a very well-made creme brulee. Are all classics "routine"? Of the six desserts on my sampler platter, I felt that two were categorically excellent, one was very good (the crème brulee), one was okay (apple tart), and two were weak (mousse and granitas). In discussing the granitas with Ms. Murphy, she acknowledged that they're having consistency problems with that dessert -- so she's certainly not in denial. I imagine, given the newness of the restaurant, we're looking at opening glitches rather than a bad dessert program. Then again, given how packed the place is, I hope they'll be able to afford a real pastry chef eventually. Strictly speaking, "frisee aux lardons without the lardons" is not a substitution. I wonder, was such an order refused by the waitstaff, or is this just speculation? At my table, we had one SOS (sauce on the side) order and it was happily accommodated (we did not identify ourselves to Ms. Murphy until later, so I doubt it was a put-on). My impression is that "no substitutions" means you can't get spinach instead of the fries that come with the steaks. That's something different. Also, for a non-haute-cuisine establishment where full-on culinary artistry is not a selling point, it's hard for me to find anything to celebrate in a refusal to accommodate a veg-for-veg substitution of that sort. Indeed, I imagine the neighborhood clientele will resent it enough such that management will eventually buckle. Talk about an understatement. This is the most important New York wine list of the 21st Century. Has Wine Spectator done a feature on this yet? Has the New York Times dispatched its new head wine writer to champion Landmarc's bold undertaking? Overall this wine list has the lowest wine markups I've ever seen in New York City. It is nothing short of radical to price wine this way, and if Landmarc can make it up on volume and other restaurants copy it, we will have seen a turning point in the history of wine list pricing. We as eGulleters and advocates of excellence should do everything we can to get the word out about this list. Go to it, people!

That pretty much eliminates Kang Suh's unique selling proposition. Were you able to get any more information about the reasons, etc.?

Not that eGullet has ever been credited or even mentioned in passing in the New York Times dining section. This just happens to be a glaring omission because we were most likely (though not definitely) the source and because we are so dominant in avant-garde cuisine coverage (as we explained in a recent NewsGullet mailing that goes to many New York Times writers). All three times eGullet has appeared in the Times it has been in situations where the dining editor, Sam Sifton, was not involved, such as the Magazine and the New Jersey section. The pattern at this point is so flagrant it gives rise to a very strong suspicion that Sam Sifton is maintaining a de facto ban on eGullet mentions. Which I guess is understandable, given how often we level criticism at the Times dining section here. Still, we are also a tremendous asset in terms of new media relevance for the Times dining section at a time when it is weak and struggling, a gutted shell of its former self: we offer Stan's digest, we bring Times dining section writers on here for Q&A, and of course we know many of them lurk here (as they do on Chowhound and other Web sites that they also fail to credit often enough -- though at least Chowhound, as a lightweight non-threat, gets the occasional mention). For our part, we'll just keep being the adults here, giving plenty of exposure to the Times dining section and expecting none in return, because we're on the way up and they're on the way down, so we feel a little bad for them. We'll keep pointing out their embarrassing flaws, their Johnny-come-lately coverage, and their weak use of sources whenever we need to. And when they do good work, we'll applaud them and wish they could get it together to produce high-quality food writing every week in every article. Hey, we're optimists. From the New York Times code of ethics: http://www.nytco.com/pdf/nyt-coe-3.pdf