Fat Guy
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Posts posted by Fat Guy
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Good luck finding a significant number of Italian-operated pizzerias in New York City. There might be an Italian owner somewhere in the chain of command, but the Greeks took over much of the market long ago and today the people making and serving pizza in NYC today are often Hispanic.
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Well, to my knowledge, most of the water in the tristate area is "soft" where as most of the US has "hard" water.
Most water in NYC is soft, and some water in NYC is moderately hard. I believe 3 grains/gallon of CaCO3 is the dividing line between soft and moderately hard, and NYC water ranges from 1 to 5 grains depending on whether it comes from Catskill/Delaware (1 grain/gallon) or Croton (5 grains/gallon). More importantly, though, I don't understand what it is about the water that's supposed to have such an outsize impact on the quality of bread, and if it really is such a big deal a water softening system should do the trick. I just find it very hard to believe that if you loaded up a tanker truck with New York water and took it to Nebraska that it would make the pizza there suck any less. Also New York water itself has changed quite a bit since the early days of pizza and bagels. It is now chock full of additives. It doesn't even taste the same as it did when I was a kid.
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I don't buy the water argument, or at least I'd need to see serious evidence before taking it seriously. The water in various parts of New York City is hardly uniform. In particular, I believe parts of Queens don't even draw from the Croton/Catskill/Delaware system. But also distance from the source makes a big difference in terms of additive and sediment levels. Likewise, the water in New Jersey, Long Island, and Connecticut is totally different and these areas have always made top-quality bagels and pizza.
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Fat Guy, are you saying that L & B Spumoni Gardens is better than DiFara's? That would be pretty amazing to me.
L&B doesn't rank all that high in the grand scheme of best pizzerias, but it ranks number 1 within the style it pursues. There isn't anyplace else making a square slice in quite the same way. So, if you want to taste it, you have to go there -- you can't get out of it by going to DiFara's and Patsy's and Sally's a million times each. Until you go to L&B, you haven't tasted that style of pizza. Thus, for those who are very interested in pizza taxonomy, there's no escape. It also happens to be quite tasty.
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Where in the oven is the coal fire. In Naples the wood fire is in the same oven iopening as the pizza itself. The smoke rises above the pizza and vents up a flue so the pizza is not smokey.
It depends on the oven. At Patsy's in Harlem, the coal is in a fire box below the oven. At Pepe's in New Haven, the coal is in the same chamber as the pizza.
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For a normal person, I'd say 1 minute. For an obsessed eGulleter, maybe 4 hours.
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It's on 86th between 10th & 11th (in Brooklyn). Here's all the info:
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Once you embrace the notion that inauthenticity is the one authentic thing in New York, life becomes much simpler. There are several styles of New York pizza, all of which are equally authentic in their inauthenticity. Pretty much the only thing you won't find integrated into New York pizza culture is the wood-oven-fired pizzas like they have in Naples. There are a couple of places that make them, like Pizza Fresca, but they're not a significant local style here.
Coal fired pizza is certainly the oldest of the New York pizza-baking traditions, and it has been well described here. For the most part it does not use fresh mozzarella (buffalo or cow) of the "wet" variety. I'm not sure one could even obtain that product at the time pizza rose to prominence in the Northeastern US (and that's probably the more relevant geographic designation, since pizzerias from Pennsylvania and New Jersey to Connecticut and Rhode Island follow the style and had large Italian immigrant populations of their own). Rather, this old-style New York pizza often uses "low-moisture mozzarella" -- really more of a provolone-type cheese. At Patsy's in Harlem, you have to ask for fresh mozzarella as a special topping and in my opinion it's not as good a cheese for pizza. Neither of the top New Haven pizzerias uses fresh. Totonno's uses fresh, but to its detriment I think. Also, in the event low-moisture cheese is used, it's not critically important whether the cheese goes on top of the sauce or vice-versa. Old-school pizzerias have been known to do it both ways.
Does that make coal-oven pizza authentic? Well, it's certainly not authentic by the standards of pizza in Italy. I'm not sure there's any coal oven pizza in the whole of Italy.
Coal, by the way, burns hotter than wood. Or at least it has the ability to do so. It's hard to get a straight answer on the temperature of an oven, and temperature doesn't tell the whole story, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the ovens at Patsy's in Harlem are burning hotter than the average wood-fired pizza oven.
But coal-oven pizza is a niche market, and in the post-War era it was mostly eclipsed by pizza baked in gas ovens, with a thicker crust, larger size, and more portable slice format. This invented style of pizza is, I believe, what the overwhelming majority would say is authentic New York pizza. And, when made well, as at DiFara's, it's a delicious product that, while probably not authentic, is wonderful in its inauthenticity.
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There should be plenty of it around, given that something like a quarter of the damn planet's crust is made of it.
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Granite has been with us for like a billion years. There's granite from ancient fucking Rome that has been sitting outside exposed to the elements every damn day for millenia and it still looks fine. Nobody sealed it every year and I refuse to believe the Coliseum would fracture if you put a hot pot on it. These are the same bullshit objections to granite that the lying scum who sold me Corian raised -- I was stupid enough to believe this once, but never again. My next kitchen is going to have tons and tons of granite in it and in the year 4000 they're going to find it and say, "Hey, this stuff is great -- we need to get it in our kitchen!"
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In my entire life, I've never heard tell of anybody's granite countertop fracturing. I consider the likelihood of that happening to be about on par with the probability of Jason spontaneously combusting.
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My apologies that we won't be able to make it today. I had the Sephardic meat pie recipe all ready to go, and Ellen was advocating an ice-cream pie, but events intervened and there's no way we're going to be able to make it out. I promise someday to bake each of you a pie.
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Woops. Sorry; didn't mean to start this digression. All's I meant was that distributor-produced wine lists are just another form of marketing.
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At some point perhaps every restaurant will get with the program and ditch the printed wine list altogether. Once the price comes down, the technology improves a bit, and customers become more familiar with the notion of paperless solutions, more restaurants will I'm sure adopt the eWine Book (in use at Aureole) and similar technologies. These handheld digital lists are wirelessly connected to inventory and reflect stock up to the nanosecond. They're also searchable by any number of criteria (variety, region, etc.).
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It's amazing, in the age of desktop publishing, that restaurants still fail to print their daily specials (I'm talking about food here) on a readable page, with prices, and instead choose to have waiters recite them (a practice pretty much everybody I know hates).
Many restaurants delegate the selection of every bottle on the list to a distributor anyway, so in that case I don't think it matters that the distributor is also printing the list. The distributor is less likely to spell stuff wrong, at least.
Even when a distributor has nothing to do with making the list, though, there can be undue influence over the content of the list: the quid pro quo is "buy this crap, and we'll give you a better allocation of the non-crap."
In the grand scheme of things, this problem doesn't matter to me all that much because the restaurants using distributor-produced lists tend to be at a middling level and probably wouldn't have good lists anyway. I'm far more concerned about the fact that drug companies essentially pay off doctors (Broadway show tickets, fancy restaurant meals, whatever) to influence which medications they prescribe.
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One point in favor of my recollection is that Peter Luger usually prices its mail-order steaks exactly as it prices them in the restaurant. Right now, according to Luger's Web site, it's currently $157 for two porterhouses-for-two.
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You might get some respectable ideas from the Campbell's site. Most cream of X soups are interchangeable. Although many of the recipes are 70s-ish and awful, Campbell's has also expended a lot of effort getting some of the recipes up to date. You might be able to find some worthy advice.
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My issue with defatting pitchers (aside from the fact that they're usually too small) is that you often have to leave too much product behind for them to be effective.
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When chilling is not an option: first skim most of the fat with a spoon; then strain the product through a colander lined with a double or triple layer of cold, damp paper towels -- this should pick up most of the remaining fat.
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The last time I was there I believe the price of a steak for two was $78.50. Approximately 3 years ago I believe it was $59.50.
And there we have it! Thanks - I saw you browsing the thread and was hoping that I'd get a concrete answer. Thanks to everyone. Now does anyone know how much the beers are?
Of course I could be wrong!
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The last time I was there I believe the price of a steak for two was $78.50. Approximately 3 years ago I believe it was $59.50.
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Don't be taken in by the buffing/repairing sales pitch. They love to tell you how easy it is to repair the stuff, but it's actually a complete nightmare. The one guy I know who had his Corian surfaces refinished spent a fortune and it made an awful mess -- and that was after several Corian fabricators refused to do the job in the first place.
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The other advantage of fake products is that they can be cast in a variety of shapes, such as with an integrated sink or whatever, plus they can be made into tiles or other things for color-matching. Silestone is also a bit less porous than granite, I believe, so theoretically it may be even more durable. It should be, given how damn much it costs!
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When you say Corian type surface, what exactly do you mean? At this point, I would not recommend Corian. I might recommend Silestone or one of the newer fake-stone products, because they're better.
Still, overall, granite is the clear winner in the real world. Pretty much everybody I know who has chosen granite is very happy with it. Pretty much everybody I know who has chosen anything other than granite has eventually come around and wished for granite after a few years. None of the factors you've cited ("husband loves, great color choices and very trendy") are good reasons to choose granite because they have short time horizons whereas you may live with this kitchen for the rest of your life. Rather, granite should be chosen because of its long-term utility: it is durable, can handle hot items, is highly resistant to all sorts of damage, and is timeless rather than trendy. A dark color with a speckled pattern works best for the long term, because it won't show wear as much as a solid color.
Marble is a poor choice for its lack of durability and ease of staining.
New York Style Pizza, what makes it one?
in New York: Dining
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Maybe. I'm pretty sure Nick Angelis and his extended family are Greek. I'd have to dig out the old Eric Asimov pizza family-tree article to check which of the current crop of best places are Italian owned and/or operated. Ultimately, it's training not ethnicity that matters.