Fat Guy

Thomas's.

Had a good one for breakfast this morning, prepared by my friend Sean who is a real egg-sandwich aficionado:

Shalmanese, I think your query touches on two areas. There's the fashion for Japanese knives. Today the Japanese knives are very much in favor, and I think their blades do tend to be better. But I think there are still arguments for the European knives. For one thing, I prefer their blade shapes. For another thing, I prefer Western handles (though you can get a lot of Japanese knives with Western handles now). And for still another thing, I think the European knives excel under harsh conditions, whether that's a shared-knife environment or a job involving a lot of bones and such. They're also, at similar quality levels, less expensive. There's the issue of cheaper alternatives within the European milieu, such as Forschner knives. Certainly, Forschner gives you a terrifically usable chef's knife for about $30. In some ways it feels unnecessarily extravagant to buy anything else if you're not a professional working eight hours a day with a knife. At the same time, a Forschner knife simply is not a Wusthof (or Henckels, or whatever).

Will you have the ability to do last-minute assembly when you plate? For the aforementioned mozzarella skewers, for example, you can transport mozzarella, small tomatoes, basil leaves and toothpicks separately and assemble on the spot. Same with deviled eggs: if you bring the filling in a pastry bag you can pipe it into egg halves for service (sprinkle with paprika). Etc.

This will be an interesting transition to watch. I guess it could go either way. It's conceptually possible for the restaurant to maintain standards. The last two times I've been, I had chefs other than Yasuda and on one of those occasions I enjoyed the experience more that I do with Yasuda. But I haven't a clue what goes on with purchasing and handling, and how that will be affected by his departure.

Turkey sandwiches and partial-meal reheats aside, what are you doing with your Thanksgiving leftovers this year? I'm probably going to do some turkey hash, and we've got a turkey-carcass soup going.

Two words: deviled eggs Also, various picnic-type salads: carrot salad, cucumber salad, potato salad, pasta salad, curry chicken salad Cold sliced cheap braising cut of beef with horseradish sauce Non-raw-fish sushi rolls (cucumber, avocado, etc.) Tortilla chips and salsa Crostini topped with any of a million things Tea sandwiches, such as cucumber

It's a truffle store, not a restaurant. They sell many truffle products in addition to whole truffles, but no cooked dishes. I don't know that Eataly will be any more crowded than usual, but you never know.

The Urbani truffle store on 60th and West End, which opened this summer, is pretty incredible.

Exactly. There's a lot of variation here. In some restaurants flash photography is perfectly appropriate. In most restaurants they are absolutely thrilled to have their food photographed and shared with the world. Places like Alinea, where you have photography and video interfering with a temple-of-haute-cuisine-type experience, are the rare exceptions.

Restaurants have always invited media in for free meals. That circle of media now includes bloggers (and has since before the word was in common use -- it has been about a decade now). It's not really that anything the bloggers are doing is new (blogging is very much like old media, as opposed to online communities which are a different animal), but rather that the base of people doing it has expanded so much. The old scenario where a newspaper or magazine photographer would visit the restaurant a couple of times a year is not like now, when most people with enough money to eat in nice restaurants also own digital cameras and most people even if they're homeless can afford to start blogs. So it's like cell phones. If three people a year used a cell phone in a restaurant, nobody would care. If three people a minute do it, it becomes a much different phenomenon. That's when restaurant managers start thinking about how to balance the desires of all their guests, and the less creative, more rigid ones start talking about bans. In terms of the banning trend, it's not that every restaurant is all of a sudden doing it. But it does happen periodically. Momofuku Ko is the most notorious example, and they absolutely do enforce it. I ate there with a person who is one of the most influential people in the world of food and when she tried to take photos they shut her down completely. And because the place is arranged like a sushi bar, they do see you even if you're trying to take photos with a cell phone. Most recently, at Lotus of Siam they asked for no photos at preview dinners, and at Lincoln they asked for no photos though I don't know if they've kept that policy in place or not. But certainly this is a policy trend affecting no more than .1% of restaurants in America, so I'm not sure it's something to wage a full-on campaign against.

With apple cider as the specific flavoring, I don't know if anybody's doing it right now (the doughnut trend feels about five years old), but the plated doughnuts desserts at Craft ("sugar and spice" doughnuts) and Tabla (with orange-blossom essence and three sauces) are both, I think, better. If you widen the scope to include beignets, you can add Artisanal and the Modern to that list. I don't think Greenmarket doughnuts are a direct comparison, but I know this dessert is inspired by them -- and I think if you're going to base a plated restaurant dessert on a street-food item it should be better than that item, not make a person (like me, who is not the slightest bit inclined toward inverse snobbery) wish for the street-food item instead. Based on only one recent meal at Hearth I can't say whether it was an off night for pastry or if the program has fallen off since Lauren Dawson moved out West a few years ago. But I did think dessert was the weak link in the meal.

For the past several years, every time someone reports on a great meal there and every time I'm in the 'hood, I've been thinking it has been too long since I've been to Hearth. The other night I finally did something about it and went there with some friends from out of town. Man, is Hearth a terrific restaurant. It was good when it opened but has now matured into something with more finesse. I haven't tried every salad on every menu in town, or even on every menu at the places where I've eaten. But I'm still fairly confident in saying that the Autumn vegetable salad is the best salad going right now. It contains a variety of lettuces plus kabocha squash, parsnips, cauliflower, butternut squash, pumpkin seeds and maple-sherry vinaigrette. Not only is the combination brilliant, but also each component is prepared just so and the salad is dressed with a thin film of vinaigrette -- not too much, not too little. There are actually five salads on the appetizer menu (out of 11 dishes). Marco Canora likes salads. Also terrific, the escarole salad with pecorino, walnuts, red onion and honey. For a non-salad appetizer, the ribollita (a soup) with black cabbage, white bean and crispy bits of parmesan warmed me to the core. I know the notion of upscale, refined, comfort food is a bit hackneyed, but when it's done with this level of flair it can't be beat. It's rare that I have a meal with two bests, but in addition to that Autumn salad I think Hearth's Lola duck with confit pink turnips, Concord grape passata and red quinoa is the best duck dish I've had. The breed of duck must get partial credit, because it is an exceedingly tender and flavorful bird, but the preparation is also spot on. The bowl contains several parts of the duck prepared different ways, and the vegetable and grain elements are worthy backup. I'm not going to say the veal-and-ricotta meatballs, served with spaghetti, are the absolute best in town, but they're right up there. Our friend from North Carolina described the lamb papardelle with black cabbage and olives as "The best damn thing I've ever eaten." I won't go that far, but pasta dishes don't get a lot better. The one dish I didn't love was the cod with black cabbage (yes, from a whole-menu perspective black cabbage is overused right now), smoked chickpeas, garlic confit and baccalá. I thought the smoked chickpeas imparted a little smoky flavor to a fish that doesn't benefit from it. I don't think the desserts are all that strong. If I had it to do over again, I'd have ordered cheese in lieu of dessert. The cheese collection is nicely curated. The sweet desserts are mostly run-of-the-mill for this level of restaurant, the one big exception being the chocolate and banana tart. But "Mama's ricotta cheesecake" had an unpleasantly dry outer layer, and the apple cider doughnuts are not as good as the similar dish at several other restaurants. We drank Chateau Musar from Lebanon -- at the restaurant they are big advocates of Musar. The sommelier who helped us, Matt (I have never crossed paths with him before), was exceedingly helpful, as was our server. The bread from Sullivan Street is also a nice touch. I have to remember Hearth more often.

I can't recall seeing a newspaper restaurant review without photos. Generally those photos are not taken by the writer but by a separate photographer. With larger online operations like the Grub Street blog it's the same way. With single-author blogs the writer is also the photographer. I have to say I disagree with the claim that "Food columnists usually have excellent powers of description." I think that's only the case in a very narrow slice of the top of the market. When you get deeper into the market, the columnists with excellent powers of description are the exceptions. I've been in restaurants when the New York Times was photographing in the dining room in preparation for a review. Having a photographer wandering around is a significantly more distracting and intrusive process than having a blogger taking snapshots. But no restaurant is going to say no to the New York Times. I think there are a lot of parallels to cell-phone bans. The simplest way to react to a potentially intrusive technology is to ban it. Of course, cell phones aren't the problem. Cell phones don't talk loud; people talk loud. Those same people can be loud whether they're on the phone or shouting to their friends. Phones can be placed on vibrate. Same with cameras: it's possible to shoot with no flash and to do so in such a way that only an uncommonly nosy person would notice or care. Meanwhile, all those photos by bloggers can be very helpful to a restaurant. It's particularly ironic that someone like David Chang, whose career got launched online, would ban cameras. Banning flash makes sense. Banning cameras altogether just comes across as Soviet and paranoid. Not that Momofuku Ko needs the business, but for most restaurants if the kitchen is confident in its food the mission should be to get as many photos of it out into the world as possible.

I haven't studied it as a statistical matter, but I do get the impressionistic sense that it's happening more often especially at high-profile, newly opened places.

How do you compute your Thanksgiving turkey size? There's the pound-per-person issue, the leftovers issue, the extra white meat issue... We do 2 pounds per person plus 6 pounds to cover the preference for white meat. This formula tends to yield plenty of leftovers too.

This is one of the best uses for the microwave. We almost always have several days' worth in the fridge, cooked according to package directions, with raisins added. Put a portion in a covered bowl with a splash of water, microwave for one minute, stir, microwave for another minute. A larger portion may need a third minute, or a fourth in a weaker microwave.

The solution to the timeframe issue is to bring back Diner's Journal. Write a short, experiential, non-starred piece after the first, early visit to a place. That way you get the scoop. Then weigh in with a multiple-visit-based, rated/ranked review later. That way you speak with authority after everyone else has filed premature reviews. I don't really know what to make of Platt's criticism of the prices and portion sizes. Lincoln is expensive. It is not by any stretch of the imagination the most expensive. If you're trying to order more economically, there are options like the market lunch, and actually the tasting menu is downright cheap compared to, say, Per Se. If you're looking to splurge, that option is available too. Complaints about portion size are red herrings in the context of food as creative art. Complaints about quality are of course germane, but in the context of fine-dining reviews I radically discount the qualitative opinion of anyone whose main concerns seem to be price and portion size. My own experience at Lincoln was incredibly promising. I won't say 100% of dishes on the table were fabulous, but most of them were.

At what time do you serve your Thanksgiving dinner? I find that most people I know go with something in the 2-3pm range. I think that's not a great idea. The same thing happens over and over: people arrive starved because they skipped lunch (and breakfast), they gorge on appetizers, and they're full before the actual meal is served. My preference is to do it either at lunch time or at dinner time, noon or 6pm, with food on the table by 12:30 or 6:30. That way people are on their normal meal cycles.

Although, if you're going to embrace weight (which I'll note is not the exact same thing as switching to metric, because all systems have weight measures), the most efficient way to work is often to have the bowl on the scale and to tare after you add each ingredient. In that case volume measures, even for liquids, don't really work.

I'm still processing my first visit to Eataly. The scale of the place, combined with the population density, overwhelmed me. It seemed like there must have been two thousand people in there midday yesterday, and 1,999 of them seemed completely comfortable in the environment. Me, I wanted to run and hide. The physical space is just awe-inspiring. In terms of square footage, it's about half the size of the Harlem Costco. The unusual combination of large quantity and high quality is a little disorienting. You want to think that, when it comes to stuff like prosciutto, smaller is better. But Eataly is able to power through something like 20 whole prosciuttos a day and is only getting excellent ones. There seem to be a lot of corporate tie-ins such that the companies controlling many of the best Italian products are funneling large shipments of those products to Eataly. My friend and I were, miraculously, able to score a table at La Pizza & Pasta without a wait. There were parties of four being told an hour, but there was no wait for us for two, and then I heard them telling the party of two behind us 20 minutes. We had a mixed salume plate of the highest quality, a pizza Margherita that was correctly made if you like the slightly-soggy-in-the-middle style that fresh mozzarella basically forces, and some agnolotti that could not have been better. The bread-baking operation is impressive, the pasta selection tremendous ... there's no point in listing everything and it will take ten visits to get my arms around it all, not that I'm going to survive ten visits. I'm going back next week for dinner at Manzo. We'll see how that goes.

Yeah the big trick is that you actually have to remember to check your list at the very end, otherwise three hours later the fire department finds the last vegetable dish in your oven. A strategy that has worked well in my family is to do two bowls/platters/whatever of everything. It cuts pass-around service time in half. We use the sideboard for beverages and whatever won't fit on the table, but we don't use it as a buffet. Another thing, a few years ago we started phasing out the pre-meal noshes. People just fill up on that stuff, and then they get to the meal and they have no appetites.

Because a standard pumpkin doesn't actually taste all that good, whereas kabocha is very pumpkin-like but has better flavor.

We're just starting to think about Thanksgiving baking. One thing I know we're going to try is a pumpkin-pie trick one of my students, a pastry chef, taught me: use kabocha instead of pumpkin. What are you all baking for Thanksgiving?

The Whole Foods on 97th Street -- super-close to our son's school -- says they start making sushi at 7:30am. Good call, Sam. 24-hour Korean is also an inspired idea. I really should just learn once and for all to make this stuff myself.