Fat Guy

Thank you all for the comments thus far. It looks as though I'll be making yogurt in Suzanne's machines on Monday, so if you have any further advice . . . bring it on.

Can you elaborate on this method? What's this about a brown cow? And to what exactly does incubation refer?

I can't seem to find this item mentioned online. Is there a brand name that might help me to search?

I was about 11 seconds away from clicking on Cooking.com to buy a Donvier, so your offer is most welcome. I think I'm seeing you tomorrow, right? We can have a handoff then. Many thanks.

I wouldn't be able to alter my schedule, and that would impact those to whom I've promised rides.

Always a pleasure to read your notes, Jim.

We're fairly significant consumers of yogurt here in the Fat Guy household, so I was thinking it might make sense for us to make our own. Does anybody have any experience with this? The Donvier machine seems to be the standard. Is it so for good reason? Is there competing equipment that's better? Is homemade yogurt better than store bought? Why? What are its most noticeable characteristics? How does the basic process work?

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This escaped my notice on Friday, but I just caught up with Amanda Hesser's "Diner's Journal" piece on Union Pacific: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/23/dining/23JOUR.html This is exactly what I think the Diner's Journal should be used for.

I'm not sure how productive it is to devote a lot of effort to debating the numerical cutoff. Ultimately, if the list can be sorted by price, it doesn't matter for now -- it's something that can be decided as things develop. My suggestion would be to focus on the strongest candidates. Already there are a few emerging. It's also important to cut loose anything that's not in the absolute best-of-the-best category -- anything else misses the point of the exercise. It might be helpful at this point just to nail down a few of the best and start building the list.

I'll eat my hat if the pours (on the non-dessert wines) are less than 5.5-6 ounces. And at top-level restaurants my understanding is that they usually get 4 pours from a bottle. At most places at this level, they'll also let you taste the by-the-glass selections, and there are various other instances of waste (and, indeed, if they like you they may very well top off your glass gratis). But we should check this with Mark Sommelier -- he could tell us the exact size of pours at this range of restaurant. ADNY by the way does not use standard Riedel or Spiegelau. The stems at ADNY are individually crafted by Jean-Claude Novaro, a glassblower from Biot (South of France, near Nice). It's little touches like this that put ADNY so firmly in its own category. Even at Mix and the Spoon restaurants, however, I believe they work with their own stemware producer (in Hungary, I'm pretty sure).

I think the simplest thing would be to set a price and that's that.

I think there's a consensus regarding many of the places on that list. The rest will, I think, require discussion and debate. But I think voting in this context would be a mistake. What we need are reasons, not Zagat.

Felonius, if I didn't think it silly to get hung up on the number, I'd pursue some of the mathematical assumptions here. For example are you working with the above-stated theory of 7-8 pours from a bottle? That's not the denominator on my home planet. But ultimately the reason the factor isn't important at the low end is that it ignores the higher fixed costs. For example if we have a glass of wine with wine cost of $2 and restaurant X has fixed costs of $2 and sells the wine for $6, the markup is 300% and the profit is $2. If restaurant Y sells that same wine for $14 and has fixed costs of $10, we're still looking at a $2 profit but the markup is 700%. Yet if that restaurant sold the glass for $6 it would suffer a $6 loss. I'm sure ADNY has extremely high apparent markup percentages at the low end and I'm sure ADNY has extremely high fixed costs. I don't know that we're talking about 1200% or 1400% but if we are it's not particularly relevant. Once you get into the heart of the list the percentage markups fall closer to the range of normal overpriced multi-star Grand Award-type establishments. The highest part of the range, to be sure. But as in Mark's example above, you can find wines at ADNY that are priced lower than the same wines at Veritas. This most likely has to do with how and when the wine was acquired.

I don't think anybody is trying to prevent them from noticing.

Felonius, I find myself in rare disagreement with you on this issue. Let me try to make a few points in the hopes of swaying you: At the most fundamental level, ADNY has one of the best wine lists in the world. One of the 89 best, to be precise, if you use the Wine Spectator Grand Award system as a guide. ADNY received the Grand Award last year after three years in business; both of Ducasse's other fine-dining establishments also hold this designation. Not to rely on Wine Spectator, I personally think it's a great list. Conveniently, it's online for anyone to read: ADNY wine list. Most of the wines are of course totally outside my budget, but I enjoy a list like this one that's rich in verticals and full of interesting choices. Ducasse's proffer from the beginning was that ADNY was not going to be classically French but would, rather, embrace the New World and aim for internationalism and modernity in both cuisine and wine. Thus the American, Italian, and Spanish sections of the list are quite large -- perhaps as much as a third of the list. There are also, not listed, a number of Southern Hemisphere wines in inventory (the unlisted wines of ADNY is a whole 'nother thread). So I don't think there's any issue of the quality of the wines available at ADNY, nor do I think there's any valid objection to the list based on ADNY being French and some wines being not-French. In terms of the high markup, I think that argument kind of misses the point. It seems obvious to me that, if any restaurant is going to have the highest markup, ADNY is going to be the one. Here's a deep, Grand Award-level, world-class wine list -- millions of dollars in inventory -- on call for 65 or however many people a night, dinner only, six nights a week, a single sitting, presided over by a disproportionately large wine staff, served in the finest hand-blown crystal you'll find in any restaurant, etc. Which isn't to say I embrace the notion that all these high costs justify the markups we see in restaurants today. But if we're going to accept a universe in which four-star restaurants in New York charge $X for wines, then I have no problem accepting it when ADNY charges $2X for those same wines. I see no other way for the restaurant to do business. Perhaps at a bigger operation, I might argue that lowering prices might increase wine sales volume, but that's just not going to happen at ADNY where every potential wine-buying customer is already drinking. In other words, I think those who complain about the ADNY wine list prices are making exactly the same logical misstep as those who complain abou the food prices. I understand it's harder to come to terms with this on the wine side because the restaurant doesn't cook the wine, but it's not about what's in the bottle -- it's about the overall business model, the carrying cost of the inventory, the staff, the size of the restaurant, the lack of table turns, etc. It's just another way in which ADNY gets singled out and attacked for being the best. Now, what about these crap-ass wines that Bruce got served? I think in order to understand that situation one needs to step back and ask what ADNY is all about. ADNY is a restaurant for rich people. Very rich people. Yes, anybody willing to shell out the $150 per person plus tax and tip (in other words, $400 for two people just for the most basic food menu, tap water, no coffee) is allowed to eat there -- it's not a private club and you don't have to provide proof of your wealth to be admitted. But fundamentally the restaurant was not conceptualized to serve the customer for whom a $400 tab for two is a big stretch. Rather, it's aimed at people who are going to order a couple of bottles of wine from the center of that wine list -- bottles in the $300 range. If most of the restaurant's customers don't do that, the restaurant goes out of business. If you're in there splitting a $125 pairing, you're essentially a money-losing table for ADNY. I'm glad the restaurant offers an option for people who want to spend only a small amount on wine but still want to enjoy wine with the meal. Really, the only other options are not to provide any wine below the $200 per bottle price point or to raise the food prices. But beyond that, complaining that ADNY serves cheap wine at high prices is like complaining about the price of popcorn at the movie theater: those of limited means should actually be grateful that the price of popcorn is so high, because it allows us to buy movie tickets for less than they'd have to cost if the popcorn cost 50 cents. At least we have a choice. In a similar vein, buying cheap wine at ADNY and then complaining about the cost is similar to a scenario wherein you've just picked up your bespoke suit from Leonard Logsdail and, on the way out of the shop, you buy a couple of pair of decent-quality socks from the small selection on the table -- then you get upset that you paid $20 for a pair of socks that costs $3 at Century 21. Well, Len Logsdail isn't in the business of selling cheap socks. But he nonetheless knows that on occasion one of his customers will for whatever reason need some socks. So there they are. Some people are offended by the mere idea of a restaurant for rich people. But once you get over that, the rest of it makes sense. And the nice thing is that ADNY has set itself in such a way as to allow middle-class people (like most of us on this thread) to get a taste of the wealthy person's fantasy experience at a somewhat approachable price. The staff knows when this is going on -- they know when I show up and order the cheapest bottle on the list,that they're dealing with someone outside the target audience, someone who doesn't represent a profit center for the restaurant. Yet they'll still treat me, or Bruce, or you, or anyone who eats there like royalty. That's what being a world-class establishment is about. I'm also not nearly as offended as some seem to be by the wines in question. Not that I've had every one of them -- have those who are criticizing the choices, other than Bruce, tried every one of these wines? -- but I've had two of them and wouldn't in a million years characterize either as plonk. The Ferrer-Ribiere is a terrific wine -- it's on the list at several three-star restaurants in Europe I believe -- and I've had it a couple of times. It's exactly the kind of choice I'd want the restaurant to make for me within tight budgetary constraints. Likewise, I've had the Alion and I also think it's unassailable. As for the other three, I don't know. Maybe they sucked. They shouldn't have, and they should at least have been well paired. But I'd want to hear the sommelier's argument before dismissing those wines or those pairings out of hand. I've found the wine director at ADNY to be extremely talented and sophisticated about wine pairings, and I've learned quite a bit in my conversations with him. I'm not ready to write off a wine just because it's from Long Island -- I'd need to taste and try to understand. And, if at the end of the night I still thought the wine sucked, I'd say so and I bet their response would be to remove the whole wine pairing fee from the bill.

This reminds me of Chris Rock's "one rib" scene in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka.

Well, you could get one piece of cheese!

I'm thinking I might get my kitchen redone to look like a fire-engine-red labyrinth, but until then I'm sticking with the appliances-and-junk-atop-ugly-ass-fake-blue-Corian look.

I think the way to do it, Trish, would be to figure out a format for the list that allows for price range to be listed. Ditto for ethnicity/cuisine type. Then it becomes easy to sort the list alphabetically, by price, or by type of food served.

It's not that small -- my kitchen is about 18' long and has countertops on parts of both sides because it's a galley layout. I'm pretty sure I have 15 linear feet of countertops, 11 of which are in the ugly blue and 4 of which are wood. I only ever use about 3' of my counter space (the part adjacent to the sink), but I bought a lot of that stupid Corian.

I'm sure you're right. And no, it doesn't make it any more acceptable!

I don't think I was even 30 years old at the time, and I assure you it was the totally "in" product and we were the envy of our peer group. You could have opened up any design-and-decor magazine at the time and found this material and color used in kitchen and bath renovations. I hadn't quite figured out at that time that following trends is kind of stupid when you're buying something you have to live with for decades.

That depends on your computer's monitor and settings, so I can't say. On my monitor at my resolution it's roughly to scale. The name of the pattern is Mediterranean Blue, I believe. The most awful thing about it is that it seems to be the favorite color of hospital and doctor's office renovations that were done around the time I renovated my kitchen. So for example if you go to Metropolitan Hospital there's tons of this exact same ugly-ass Corian in the reception area.

That reminds me of the Italian deli angle: Melampo. I really need to get there more often. Oh, and Charles for fried chicken.