Fat Guy

The one problem with this plan is that some very good producers may be hurt if this becomes more widely adopted. As imperfect as the Greenmarket is (very), there are still some excellent producers selling their product there, many of whom are very upset with the current direction of the greenmarket. My suggestion would be to use the Market very selectively. Nobody is going to adopt my plan, but were it to be widely adopted you'd see new Greenmarket management in about two seconds. The good vendors are wearing golden handcuffs right now; they dare not speak out aggressively for fear of winding up at the greenmarket on 408th Street and One-Millionth Avenue.

Same experience here, Vic, when we did a travel show for some New Zealand TV station. As an aside, there were two hosts on the show: a totally hot babe in tight leather pants and this complete schlepper of a guy who looked like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. Of course the segment I did was with the scraggly dude. As an added bonus I couldn't understand a fucking word he said because he mumbled in an already-thick Kiwi accent. Anyway, they had gone through the Upper-Volta-border-crossing permit exercise, and still every two seconds some Greenmarket thugs would come around to make sure we weren't stealing their state secrets. Let's stay on this, Vic, and maybe we'll finally get our legs broken for something. And somebody e-mail Nina Planck so she can come here and give us the real scoop. We don't need any of this polite New York Times Op-Ed shit. Let's hear about the non-taxpaying off-the-grid shady types, the corruption, the graft (is there a difference between corruption and graft?), the mislabeling . . . And chefs, give up the Greenmarket party line already. We all know you hardly get any of your produce from the Greenmarket, so stop doing free advertising for these people. Instead, feature the best individual vendors without regard to their Greenmarket context (since they all deliver anyway). Guys like Tim Starck deserve the good PR, but they don't deserve to be stuck at that piece-of-shit Greenmarket.

A lot of vegetables lose their "snap" if you sear-hold-reheat, but for peppers I can't imagine that would be much of a problem since they tend to be cooked until somewhat soft anyway. It would be worth a try. After all, various forms of par-cooking and heating-for-service are ubiquitous in restaurant vegetable cookery. Any vegetable that takes more than a couple of minutes to cook really has to be par-cooked to be usable in anything less than a Michelin-starred type of environment. Take a look at your plate the next time you're in a restaurant. You think they made your mashed potatoes to order? You think they made an individual portion of ratatouille just for you? Other than greens, the entremetier station at a busy restaurant rarely cooks anything from raw. It's all about putting last-minute heat on what's already par-cooked. I'm not terribly experienced with clarified butter, but the couple of times I've used it I've gotten very nice crusty color and "roasty" flavor. Not sure about the Maillard implications -- may not Maillardize as much on the butter side but may cause more reactions on the meat side?

The Union Square Greenmarket becomes more Soviet with each passing year. I've long been disgusted by the extent of the cynicism and hypocrisy, not that the organization's treatment of Nina Planck -- who was their last best hope of avoiding the dustbin of history -- was a surprise. Before the Greenmarket can undergo its long-overdue renaissance, the current stranglehold is going to need to be broken. I intend to purchase nothing more at the Greenmarket until Nina Planck's suggestions are implemented or someone else is put in charge of the operation. Instead, I'll again be participating in Carnegie Hill/Yorkville CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and shopping at Fairway.

I've never tested the limits of the phenomenon, but I've had no trouble at all with 2 hours on fish -- and surely beef is more stable and less prone to drying out than fish. In some busy restaurants -- not top-tier places, but the next level down -- they sear a bunch of stuff before service in order to accommodate the peak dinner rush, which means they might be doing that at 4:30 in the afternoon for people ordering dinner as late as 9:00 at night. Of course it gets a little gnarly at that point, but most customers never notice or care.

Tommy, another tip: you can sear off the steaks before your guests arrive, get your kitchen all cleaned up, and rest the steaks on a rack over a sheet pan until it gets close to time to eat. At that point you can roast them in the oven, put a little pat of butter on each towards the end of cooking, rest them for a few minutes, and serve. Nobody will be able to figure out how you did it. This works for other proteins as well. A couple of years ago I had to cook dinner for something like 16 people for a charity event. There were so many people who were pseudo-kosher and otherwise difficult to feed that I had to go with fish. I was freaking out trying to figure out how I was going to do fish for that many people without fucking it up. Tom Colicchio and Matt Seeber told me to do big pieces of cod, sear them off before the guests arrived, and then oven roast them for service. They were even like, dude, just sear them on one side -- they won't even see the side that faces the plate. I had my doubts but I just went for it, and it worked brilliantly. Roasting in the oven allowed me to get the fish to the exact right internal temperature, and the pre-searing in butter gave them a gorgeous brown crusty appearance on the top side. (Mind you, I'm only talking about my occasional cooking successes here. I'll conveniently disregard my routine and frequent failures.)

Interesting. I know that butter helps anything to brown, but I hadn't given it a lot of thought. I bet it has something to do with the fact that the butter solids brown and undergo Maillard reactions. One interesting thing about Maillard reactions is that, if there are other already "Maillardized" molecules around, it makes the Maillardization of whatever you're cooking go that much faster. This is why, when you're browning off a bunch of steaks (etc.), the subsequent steaks take color much more quickly than the first steak. Dude remember when we made hamburgers in the stainless-steel-lined copper skillet, over medium heat with butter? Remember how much better those came out crust-wise than the ones we made under the 1800-degree infrared broiler? Butter, baby!

Anna, yes, regular butter. Although clarified butter works too. But it's hardly necessary. Zillions of restaurants use regular old butter for this purpose every day. Al, you don't want a no-noise situation, and you don't need an explosive sizzle situation. Something moderate and in-between is the target if you want to minimize smoke and char but still get a nice brown buttery Maillard crust. When I say omelette temperature, I'm talking about letting a pan heat up nice and slow to the type of temperature at which you'd cook an omelette -- such that when you add butter it doesn't burn immediately, and it doesn't sit there solid forever, but rather melts quickly, foams up, the foam subsides, and then it goes brown. As the foam is subsiding, that's when you add the steak. In cooking it, the butter will eventually go brown, which is okay because that contributes a nutty flavor to the crust, but you don't want to outright char the butter. One of the reasons some chefs will use oil at first and then baste with butter later is that it buys some extra flexibility -- you don't have to worry about burning the butter at the early stages.

Unfortunately the article from the New York Times about the Ducasse method of cooking steak isn't online anymore. There's some material in Colicchio's cookbook, for anyone who has it. There are various approaches to butter and oil usage in meat cookery. Some chefs will brown in oil, then roast, and then baste in butter later. Or you can go with butter all the way. The last time I cooked steak was in North Carolina, when we were cooking for friends at their house. This was in a very under-equipped kitchen (by eGullet standards, that is). I had ordered steaks from Lobel's to arrive in advance, and the plan was to cook them there. I had to use flimsy T-Fal non-stick skillets, a pretty weak stove, and an old-ass electric oven. So, I let the steaks come up to room temperature before cooking. I got the pans to omelette-cooking temperature and added a couple of tablespoons of butter to each, and after the butter melted, foamed up, and started to subside I added the steaks. I browned both sides and all the edges (there weren't even tongs available so I manipulated the steaks with a potholder) and then put the steaks in the electric oven to roast at 350. Who knows if it was really 350 or anything close. I just kept checking by feel, and when the steaks got to rare I put a pat of butter on top of each one and returned them to the oven for 2 more minutes. Removed, rested, served -- beautiful rare to medium-rare steaks, great restaurant-quality crust . . . a success.

Oh, I very much feel a "Loading the Dishwasher" thread coming on . . .

Butter! I'm telling you, folks, butter plus moderate heat equals a beautiful, rich, golden-brown crust. High heat just means you're going to create crust by burning. If you go into a top restaurant kitchen, such as Ducasse or Craft in New York, they sear their meats at relatively low temperatures -- like, omelette-making temperatures. They use lots of butter, keeping it just this side of brown. There is very little smoke or splatter. Once they have the crust, they throw the item in the oven to finish cooking. It won't work with oil. Butter is your friend here. This works very, very well.

I want to make clear that it's always okay to make fun of Andy. This is long-standing board policy, established during the 9 days between when the site was launched and you joined.

There are some sources of smoke that you can address, and some that you can't. The smoke that actually comes from the pan is a result of the seasoning burning off. If you keep your pans well scoured and minimally seasoned, that issue will subside quite a bit. The smoke that comes from your cooking oil can be reduced by using an oil, like grapeseed oil, with a higher smoke point. You can cook at lower temperatures and/or not let the pans get so hot. You can still get good crust at a lower temperature if you take your time (and use butter!) You can't fundamentally alter the fact that some foods will smoke at a certain point.

To be fair to the Lynes family, my understanding is that since they only eat fish and chips, and they wrap that in newspaper anyway, their food doesn't actually come in contact with their unrinsed dishes.

Yes but do they use specially designed English dishwashers -- like the one recently installed at the Lynes residence in Brighton where Opson used to live pre-dishwasher -- that have the rinse cycle disabled? I've got to say, having been to England a few times and having actually met a couple of English people here and there, there's no way this bizarre holdover non-rinsing practice could be any sort of uniform national behavior (sorry, behaviour). It sounds as though this is some sort of vestigial behavior from way back that survives in places -- which is something that happens in every country.

Let me step in here for a second as an outsider with no stake in the outcome of the British Dishwashing Question: I am finding this issue fascinating, but I can see it as developing into a culture war rather than a discussion of the arguably food-related issue here. So I would say, if you don't want to force those bad-ass UK moderators to shut this thread down, it is necessary to avoid political discussions and claims of general British uncleanliness, which are offensive, off-topic stereotypes. And I would add, from personal experience, that Andy is quite clean and smells rather nice. And also that Opson once spent 5 weeks living with Andy in Brighton . . . but that's another matter.

My understanding is that the backbone of OpenTable, from a restaurant's perspective and from the profitability perspective, is the reservations computer system hardware and software that the company provides to the restaurant. Restaurants pay a fee of a few hundred dollars a month for this system. The online reservations part of OpenTable is the most visible part to the public, but a lot of the popular restaurants actually release very few or none of their prime time tables to OpenTable. So while I'm a fan of OpenTable, and I use it often, I know that getting a prime time table at a popular place still requires an old-fashioned phone call. If you go to the OpenTable site there's a huge archive of news articles about the company.

I only discuss politics with people who disagree with me, because there are few things less interesting than listening to a bunch of people agree with each other about politics -- as is the case at almost any dinner party in New York City. I also only discuss politics with people who can disagree with me in a civil manner -- as is never the case at any dinner party in New York City. So, basically, I don't discuss politics at dinner parties in New York City. In New Jersey, maybe.

Always glad to be a source of intrigue, but this is pretty pedestrian stuff I'm afraid: two family members get pretty bad (like major swelling-puffing) allergic contact dermatitis from mangoes. I've never experienced more than a mild tingling of the lips, but I'm told the reaction can get worse. Apparently the reaction people have is to the oils in the skin of the fruit, so you're safe if you're just eating the inside, but if the fruit isn't handled well by the person preparing it then some of those oils can get onto the flesh of the fruit. So it's one of those situations where I say, what's really the point of pushing the limits of this thing? I so rarely encounter mangoes anyway that when I see them I skip them. If I'm on assignment and need to write about something with mango in it, I taste it, but otherwise no. Robert, yes, Peacock Alley had excellent coffee, and Owen I'm sure the Waldorf has a nice espresso setup somewhere (or in 10 different places for all I know). It's just that the whole hotel-institutional kitchen model is so different from what we normally encounter in fine-dining restaurants. If you go to Daniel, you're always going to get something that reflects a certain standard befitting Daniel. You just can't go into Daniel and say "I want to pay half as much and have crappier food." Whereas hotel kitchens can and do accommodate requests like that all the time, because they're supporting a larger operation that makes money from renting those ballrooms. So we were getting hit with the A+ cuisine but the D- coffee. I bet there's A or A+ coffee somewhere in the hotel, but for whatever reason it wasn't where we were.

Was also in NY Magazine on Monday. http://nymetro.com/nymetro/food/openings/n_10195//index.html I'm sure I posted somewhere here about the contest they were having to rename the place, but it must have been on another thread.

Just to be clear: the piece may as well have been written by someone based in LA, but she's not an out-of-towner. She resides here and reports for the LA Times, a move she made around the same time Michalene Busico switched from the NY Times to the LA Times food editor position.

Sam, I just checked and it seems espresso actually means "Eat Me."

Were that the entire list of new New York restaurants, viewed against a backdrop of no restaurants, I'd be inclined to agree with Doc and Marcus. But viewed in context I don't have any objection to some restaurants focusing on scene and others focusing on substance -- especially when the scene places are serving some terrific food. I think the energy of davidburke&donatella is a great thing, and Burke is an amazing chef -- a true innovator. Meanwhile Per Se, Cafe Gray, and Masa appear to be substance-heavy, significant, serious ventures. Hearth, Citarella (being relaunched), Union Pacific (making renewed effort), Lever House, etc. -- there's a lot of new substance out there, and it's not like ADNY, Le Bernardin, Jean Georges, and Bouley aren't still anchoring the four-star end of things. There's room for all kinds of restaurants in New York, and thankfully we have all kinds. I found the article itself shallow in its optimism and in its content, though, but that's no surprise. When the New York Times covers restaurants in Philadelphia, those pieces are just as scatterbrained and heavy on stereotypes, generalizations, and conventional wisdom as this one.

Although this is a well-constructed and effective piece of criticism, had I been in the Wine Spectator's position I'd have let well enough alone. This just feels like revenge for Hesser's attack on the Wine Spectator awards. I'm particularly surprised to see Tom Matthews embracing the anonymity religion, at least implicitly, in the above-quoted paragraph. I've long been under the impression that Wine Spectator's reviewers (including Tom Matthews) purposely do not adhere to an anonymity policy, and indeed reject such policies as silly. Tom Matthews's excellent, objective, and fair reviews in the Wine Spectator are some of the best evidence of how non-anonymous reviews can easily be better than anonymous ones.

American Heritage says "ETYMOLOGY: Italian (caffè) espresso, espresso (coffee), past participle of esprimere, to press out, from Latin exprimere : ex-, ex- + premere, to press; see per-4 in Appendix I."