Fat Guy

Merriam-Webster says: "Etymology: Italian (caffè) espresso, literally, pressed out coffee." But even if the "espress" root has multiple meanings in this context they're all equivalent to "express" in English. So the use of "expresso" by English speakers is hardly surprising. I favor "espresso" but I wouldn't criticize someone for saying "expresso."

I'm pleased to announce that we just sold eGullet to Chodorow for $22 worth of beads, trinkets, and Sysco peanut butter. Hmm. I think I have several stories confused.

The Italian "espresso" does not as far as I know have anything directly to do with speed. I believe it means "pressed out," just as one of the definitions of the English "express" means "to force out by pressure." Combined with frequent common usage, I assume that's why every English-language dictionary I've seen lists "expresso" as an acceptable variant. In the UK in particular, they all seem to say it that way. That being said, I think around English speakers who are seriously into coffee you're better off with "espresso."

Not to take anything away from Andy, but seeing that this thing was going to be a disaster didn't require any preternatural abilities!

In that local, casual, seafood restaurant-bar category, there's no restaurant I know of in Vancouver that's better than Blue Water. It's owned by the same restaurant group that owns West, and the product and level of cooking have been at a high standard the three times I've eaten there. Sounds like Hest had a bad service experience, so there's a risk there, but with Brian Fowke gone from Joe Fortes I'm not sure there's a strong alternative in that category anymore.

I have one foot in both Louis Lunch camps: I don't think the product is "all that" but I do think it's quite good and the place is an institution one wouldn't want to miss. Given that the wedding food doesn't have the right to very much stomach real estate, you may want to consider Louis Lunch as a snack. That would be number three on my list of New Haven must-visits.

Sally's and Pepe's are in my opinion the two most worthwhile dining destinations in New Haven, so why not go to Sally's for dinner and Pepe's for lunch? Although Sally's is only open for dinner, Pepe's was open for Saturday lunch last time I checked. Since the strengths of the two places are so different, it will hardly be like eating pizza twice. The Pepe's clam pie is sui generis, and you should have your normal pizza combinations at Sally's.

I believe the name of the restaurant in Fort Greene is "Cambodian Cuisine." My notes from a meal in 2000 indicate that it may have a self-explanatory name, but that enlightenment is not exactly forthcoming from the massive, uninformative menu. Still, most elements of the cuisine will be identifiable to those familiar with Thai and Vietnamese cooking. You'll find a few lo mein-like clunkers that are strictly Chinese take-out quality. Chicken ahmok, a shredded and steamed chicken patty with coconut milk and broccoli leaves, was the best strictly Cambodian offering I tried. But far and away the most excellent dish I had was listed on the menu as "B-21," which consists of tender strips of beef in a creamy gravy. 87 South Elliott Place, near Lafayette Street, (718) 858-3262

This is an example of the standard NYC street-ready folding shopping cart: http://www.stacksandstacks.com/html/8451_s...-cart-jumbo.htm Some people swear by them; my mother uses one religiously. Me, even before I had a car, I preferred a combination of delivery (you can get ANYTHING delivered in NYC) and small-enough-to-carry purchases.

In any evolving area of human endeavor, at each watershed moment, people are going to ask "what happened to the days of . . ." What happened to those days is that they ended. It is extremely unlikely that anyone will ever open a new three-star-type restaurant based on the "great works" model. The restaurants that already succeed in that niche may continue on indefinitely, and if they perform exceptionally well they deserve their three-star ratings, but they're well understood to be from another time. Newer restaurants may develop a few signatures and keep them around long-term, but the major focus is now on creativity. Traditional cuisine will always have its place -- indeed in terms of raw number of meals served, it will always be dominant. But at the top levels of the culinary arts today, there is an overwhelming sense that forward motion is inevitable and required. In terms of Marcus's framing of the issue "The question is simply whether a restaurant this important deserves to keep its stars as a legacy or not." I think the answer is emphatically no, it doesn't deserve to keep its stars as a legacy. It deserves, on account of the legacy, a very high degree of deference and caution when reevaluating the star rating, but if it doesn't deserve three stars for what it's doing today then it doesn't deserve three stars. Michelin guide ratings are supposed to be current as of the year of publication of the guide. The guide you buy today says it's for 2004, not for 1904-2004. It's a disservice to everyone to overrate Bocuse -- even to Bocuse.

Oh, yes. Some previous discussion of Mohonk: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=8870

I'm officially revising my opinion to concur with those abouve who place The Back Page at the top of the NYC wings heap. As I mentioned before, I thought the best wings in the past were at Entourage, which closed long ago. The Back Page appears to be a partial reincarnation of Entourage, in the same location, and with a wings recipe "acquired from The Entourage." http://www.backpagebar.com

A&P owns Waldbaum's, Super Fresh, Food Emporium, Food Basics, Sav-A-Center, and FarmerJack.

I think you're going to find grocery shopping in New York City to be different from shopping in Florida in many ways. Let me try to explain it from my perspective, and maybe some other New Yorkers can try to give their perspectives. Supermarkets in New York City tend to be small, poorly run, and overpriced. There are very few supermarkets in the city that conform to the suburban ideal of the supermarket. At the same time, New York City is teeming with great markets that are not supermarkets in the suburban sense: Fairway, Zabar's, Garden of Eden, Citarella, Gourmet Garage, Vinegar Factory, Eli's, and many others, plus Whole Foods. There's also a whole category of small neighborhood produce markets that just doesn't exist in the suburbs. I'd hazard a guess that most eGulleters who do all their shopping in New York City do most of their purchasing at the Fairway-type markets and only go to supermarkets for certain packaged products that aren't really available at the standalones. Or, those of us with cars often buy all our staples and packaged items once a month or so in New Jersey or Westchester (where we have mega-supermarkets, Costcos aplenty, Target, etc., just like everywhere else in America, not to mention ethnic megastores that are not as common) and do all our weekly shopping at the local non-supermarket stores. To get to your question, though, which may not be relevant anymore in light of what I've said, the generics you'll find in New York supermarkets are fine. For the supermarkets that are part of the national chains, the generics here are the same as the generics you'll find at those same supermarkets in other places. For example if you go to a Food Emporium here, which is owned by A&P, you'll get the "America's Choice" generic brand, which tends to be pretty good. Our Whole Foods stores sell the same generic/house "365" brand as those stores anywhere else. For the more locally oriented chains, like Gristede's and Pioneer, you'll often find the White Rose brand to be the generic of choice, and that's pretty good as well. Of course you'll find that you have to experiment product-by-product, but on the whole the generics are, as always, cheaper and just as good as the name brands in many categories.

Gary Zemola, the owner of Super Duper Weenie, is a big advocate of Roseland. He's told me many times to go there. I guess I really have to listen.

Well, there's the kosher Uzbeki place in Queens -- Salut -- that Robert Sietseman has championed in the Village Voice Top 100 Inexpensive Restaurants.

I live a block from the Upper East Side outpost of Ciao Bella. I'd count that as very good gelato, and I agree with Pan that the Ciao Bella flavors are nicely concentrated. I don't know of any made-on-premises places on the UES, though.

Yes, the New York hosts are going to be incredibly busy!

Oakapple, do you remember where you read that?

Cones, on Bleecker, is also a favorite. Although Il Lab beats Cones on many flavors, Cones is actually open during the evening and maintains the best temperatures I've seen at a gelateria. I rarely have ice cream any time other than after a dinner-without-dessert, so as much as I think it's great Il Lab almost never gets my business. To be clear, Ciao Bella and Il Lab have common ancestry. Jon Snyder, the owner of Il Lab, was the founder of Ciao Bella. Il Lab makes gelato to a higher, more artisanal standard (he's fanatical about his milk supply, he uses some better ingredients) than Ciao Bella, but there are noticeable similarities in the products. If you buy Il Lab gelato prepackaged at, for example, Dean & DeLuca or Grace's Marketplace, or you have it at any of a number of restaurants that Il Lab supplies, you'll be getting something not terribly far from the Ciao Bella product. Ciao Bella, it should be noted, is a large producer but maintains a pretty good product especially in New York City because the delivery distance is only a few blocks -- last time I checked they were doing production on 40th Street and delivering to the four Manhattan stores.

John Doherty is hardly a household name, even among those of us for whom names of chefs are household names. Yet he has fed more heads of state than any other chef, not to mention his fair share of dignitaries, moguls, celebrities, wise guys, beautiful people, ugly people, and just about every other category of people. John is the chef at the Waldorf=Astoria. As a corporate chef feeding thousands of people a day, however, John rarely gets to put his highest level of personal signature on a given plate. There is no "Café John" at the Waldorf where you can go and have his personal cuisine. Indeed, from the perspective of pretty much everybody other than his inner-circle staff, there has never been direct proof that the guy can actually cook, save for an episode of At The Chef's Table devoted to him. I visited the Waldorf kitchens and spoke to John while researching my book, and I developed instant respect for him. So it was great news when the Waldorf's PR people contacted me to say that John was going to prepare a series of private chef's table dinners throughout 2004. And it was even better news that John was going to do a media preview where 30 legitimate reporters and I could have this experience for free. I've been to quite a few chef's table dinners over the years -- publicists love to set these things up even though they're rarely worth writing about -- and they've ranged from pretty bad to pretty good. This is the first one I've attended that was categorically excellent, or even worth posting about. It was, I realized afterwards (because I was so not expecting it, it came as a slow realization), one of the best meals I've had in recent memory. It would have been well worth the $150 price tag, especially given that the tariff includes a ton of Champagne and hors d'oeuvres, a three-course dinner plus an amuse that would qualify as a full course at most restaurants, wines paired with every course, radically unremarkable coffee, and all taxes and gratuities. The hotel's staff meet you at the big clock in the Waldorf's lobby and escort you upstairs and through a service entrance to the kitchen. The kitchen takes up an entire square block -- the whole footprint of the Waldorf -- and parts of it are split-level so it's actually larger than a square block in terms of square footage. It's not currently the largest kitchen in the world (the Bellagio is definitely larger, and there may be some others) but it's damn big. The dining area for the chef's table dinner is right at the end of one of the service lines, and they bring in plants and interesting tablecloths to soften some of the kitchen's hard edges. The first 45 minutes or so of the dinner are occupied by a Champagne (Jacquesson rose I think it was) and hors d'oeuvres reception. The hors d'oeuvres are served on platters right off the line, and constantly replenished. Each of several sous-chefs handles one of the platters -- some of the presentations are pretty nice, such as a pea custard-soup-type treat served in an egg shell and garnished with bits of ham. You could easily be served something just like one of these as a course at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Europe (ahem, Arpege). Here you can eat twenty of them if you like. One thing I noted that was interesting to me about the hors d'oeuvres, and that carried through the meal, was that the cuisine was so totally contemporary. John and his crew of chefs and managers, all with long lists of impressive credentials, make it their business to dine, travel, and study what's going on in the top restaurants all over the world. If like me you've only been to the lower-rent Waldorf banquets, this seems surprising, but apparently they do food like this all the time for those who are willing to pay for a certain level of banquet service. Also during the hors d'oeuvres service, you can chat with the various cooks, the chef, and some of the managers, who will if asked take you for quick kitchen tours. You can see the rotisserie oven, the only surviving one of its kind, that has been operating continuously since 1931 and that can hold something like 1500 chickens. You can see the rows of 80-gallon stockpots and all kinds of other impressively large-scale apparatus. It's hard to spend the 45 minutes well, because you need to eat as many of each of the 8-10 hors d'oeuvres as possible and drink a lot of Champagne while talking to the cooks and managers and touring the kitchen. There were two amuses, served such that if you're a couple you get one of each. The first was the meat of half a lobster on a bed of mango (mango is one of the very few things I don't eat so I didn't note the other flavors), and the other was a platter with four ceramic spoons (the platter was crafted so as to conform to the spoons -- I think it's a Portuguese ceramic item intended for tapas bars) each with a different taste: mushrooms, baby white asparagus, etc. The so-called appetizer course (I mean, we had been eating for an hour and a half at this point) was branzini with licorice root, fennel pollen, and brown butter, paired with Aigle Blanc Vouvray 1996. This was the dish and pairing of the night, with the vanilla in the Vouvray picking up the licorice and fennel flavors in a freakishly good marriage. Lots of picky food writers in the room, all making comments along the lines of "I didn't know what to expect coming in, but this guy knows his shit." The big meat course was roast rack of lamb with braised shank, artichoke hearts and tomato fricassee, paired with Kazmer & Blaise pinot noir. A terrific dish from both a product and execution standpoint, and fitting nicely into the progression of the meal. The dessert was ambitious and great looking -- "Caramel Luster: Flourless Chocolate Cake, Vanilla Panna Cotta, Soft Caramel Mousse, Caramelized Almond and Chocolate Sorbet" -- but it tried too hard and ultimately had the signature of a hotel or cruise ship pastry kitchen on it, wherein the sculptural and performance aspects overtook the flavor and texture considerations. The savory part of the meal was surprising exactly because it was so non-hotel-ish. The coffee was poor. But the Ferrari Carano El Dorado Muscat Noir (a red Muscat) was a fun ending. Throughout the meal, John came around to various tables and asked for volunteers to step away from their tables for a few minutes in order to participate in plating up the courses. The attendees seemed evenly divided between really wanting to do this and really not wanting to -- which was fortunate because they could only handle a limited number of volunteers. I did not choose to participate, but I can't deny that the people who did enjoyed themselves immensely. These dinners will occur throughout 2004, on May 7, May 19, June 4, Sept. 15, Sept. 24, and Oct. 8. The reservations number is (212) 872-1275. To read a bit more about John Doherty, have a look at the piece Marian Betancourt did for the Associated Press (you can read versions of it here and here).

Tony you worked in a restaurant?

A lot fucking harder than cooking the steak to the right temperature in the first place.

The thing I especially enjoy about getting an overcooked steak is the position it puts me in with respect to the other people at the table. I really love sitting there with no food while the people I'm with first insist on waiting, then reluctantly eat their steaks (which have gotten cold), then offer me bites, and finally stare at me while I eat mine, which arrives just as they're finishing theirs. I also enjoy the contrast of temperature between my freshly refired steak and the remnants of all the cold, nasty, soggy $8 side dishes on the table.

Here's what the New York Times had to say at the time: and More here: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/07/dining/07OFF.html (We had the story on eGullet a day earlier, though, thanks to Bux's source)