Fat Guy

Story in Crain's: How to Close a Restaurant.

I believe the story is as yet unconfirmed.

I prefer a cook's jacket to an apron but I agree: some kind of protective wear is a must.

He's 5, in kindergarten, very skinny, and sometimes eats all that food, plus the snack provided at school (every week a different family provides two snack choices a day for the class), and at 2:55pm pickup he demands a snack before eating a huge dinner at around 5pm. This is all after he has something like pancakes or eggs (or, as today, both) for breakfast. Sometimes he rejects one item in the lunch. There's absolutely no way to predict which item it will be. In general, once he starts eating an item he finishes it. So every container will come back empty but one will come back full.

Don't forget sauce spoons. Several of us are fans of the Gray Kunz sauce spoon. If I'm traveling by air and think I might be cooking, two of these are the only gear I carry. Also a peeler. Good spatulas and maybe a fish turner. Conceptually I'd divide this project into what can and can't be included in a knife roll. If you get a good ballistic nylon knife roll you can include in it all your knives, tongs, spoons, peeler, grater, spatulas, honing steel, and even a miniature pepper mill. In terms of the pots, pans and ingredient stuff -- the things that don't fit in a knife roll -- bear in mind that oil might not do well sitting in a car. I would probably not travel with a sharpening stone. I guess if you have a car the weight doesn't matter, but a honing steel in the knife kit should be enough for travel.

Getting caught up a bit. A couple of things to note below. First, you'll see at one point earlier this month we transitioned to cloth napkins (we are actually using mostly bandanas from an old collection my mother had lying around -- also shown). This is part of our effort to pack a waste-free lunch per wellness-committee recommendations. Second, toward the end, you'll see the haul of bread I brought home one evening after a final exam at the French Culinary Institute (I was grading, not taking the exam). The next morning's lunch included slices of baguette with butter.

I've got to say, having spent the day out and about with a five-year old, New York City has got to be the world's greatest place to trick or treat. We started at 2pm at the American Museum of Natural History, where they were holding their 15th annual Halloween celebration. The whole museum was transformed into a fantasy land. They had a live performance by David Grover, arts, crafts, pumpkin carving, various roving characters (e.g., Curious George, the Cat in the Hat) and trick or treating. Then we hit Carnegie Hill, a neighborhood on the East Side where there are a lot of 19th Century townhouses and the residents decorate them really well. We went from house to house and PJ collected plenty of loot. The neighborhood stores also all had candy on offer, as did the larger apartment buildings (in their lobbies). After that we visited the block where I grew up. They have a very active block association that organizes Halloween in the lobbies of all the buildings. Thousands of kids come through, and the buildings compete heavily in the decoration department. It's a little bit chaotic and overwhelming, but it's pretty amazing. Finally, we went through a friend's apartment building. In this instance, the building had put together a list of all the apartments that were participating in trick or treating. We started on the 17th floor and worked our way down floor by floor. On average there were about 3 participating apartments per floor, so it was quite a haul. We have sacks and sacks of candy. Most people did the standard stuff: mini packs of M&Ms, Snickers, Tootsie Rolls, etc., and they generally tell the kids to pick two. In Carnegie Hill, some people did little sacks of candy that were pretty huge -- like a dozen pieces in a sack. There were a few people who were more ambitious. One guy did chocolate truffles. Another guy did a fancy candy called "cherry in rum."

We can be sure SLT doesn't manufacture the stuff. Someone else does it as a private-label job. I wouldn't be surprised if it's made by Meyer, which is a very respectable company that I know has done private label for SLT in the past (they also do KitchenAid, Anolon and a few others).

Some leftover Halloween candy can also be repurposed in your holiday-season baked goods. There are recipes all over the web for things like Butterfinger banana cake and Mounds brownies.

I've done a fair amount of exploratory tasting on this issue and my palate is simply not able to discern the alleged bitterness. So nobody should remove it on my account. If you're cooking for Robuchon, I say remove it.

If you want to get caught up on pre-reviewer Sifton, here are a few of his "The Way We Eat" columns: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A00E5DF1639F932A0575BC0A96E9C8B63&scp=6&sq=sam+sifton&st=nyt http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/magazine/01food.t.html?scp=7&sq=sam+sifton&st=nyt http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E03EED61639F935A15753C1A96E9C8B63&scp=4&sq=sam+sifton&st=nyt And a piece on Trinidad dining: http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/travel/28trinidad.html?scp=10&sq=sam+sifton&st=nyt I think you're likely to agree that the general quality of the writing is much better than what we're seeing now in the reviews.

I think if you open a Thai restaurant without pad Thai you take a risk, but Lotus of Siam is supposed to be a mold-breaking place. In Lotus of Siam's case, the greater risk may be from offering pad Thai. A customer who might have ordered something else might order pad Thai instead. Serving it sends the message that this is a standard-issue Thai place. It's not a good dish for the ambitious wine program. And the pad Thai is good but not fabulous, so it doesn't represent what the kitchen can do.

I think you're right about corroboration. Traditionally, or at least since the 1990s, a New York Times four-star review was usually just confirmation of what serious gourmets already knew had happened or would happen. With Eleven Madison, things got stretched a little. With Del Posto, it's pretty much out of left field. Perhaps a critic of giant stature could push a four-star restaurant uphill against the consensus. I think most likely in this case Sifton will come to regret the decision, unless Del Posto somehow transforms itself to live up to the review (you can make the argument that Eleven Madison is doing that in the wake of Bruni's four-star review). I don't agree that Sifton doesn't know what he's talking about. I just think that, in the position of reviewer, he has not really brought his talent to bear on the subject matter. When they first appointed him, I remember thinking that he was a great choice. The work he had done on food had been very good, and he had edited the section. Now I wonder if even those who made the choice still think it was a wise one.

There's an interesting bit of text in Sifton's review this week of Lambs Club. In it he details how, for fear of being recognized, he had a confederate at another table report to him on her experience: That's the sort of thing a savvy critic can do to compensate for being recognized: you observe the room, you have confederates, you rely on your experience and judgment to figure out if you're getting a representative experience or if the chef is cooking just for you. I just wonder why he didn't do that at Del Posto. There you have a restaurant where Sifton was surely recognized on every visit, and Ladner (a superb cook) probably made his every dish. In a situation like that, you need to make some effort to get to the bottom of the experiences that other customer are having. It's hard to find many people out there who think Del Posto is a four-star restaurant. It's not like Eleven Madison Park, where you have spirited debate. It just seems like Sifton is an outlier here. His review makes the case for four stars in a very compelling manner, but it rests on a foundation of assumptions that the food is as good as it is.

Trick or treating a day or two before Halloween is a common strategy especially where younger children are concerned -- it can keep the little ones away from the big ones on the actual date. Also, this year, because Halloween is on a Sunday, some folks would just rather not deal with that -- they'd rather do Friday night. Katie's list of criteria is great. To that I'd add no nuts. That seems to be the most common serious allergy. If your trick or treating crowd is small scale -- just occasional kids coming to your door -- it's nice to offer a choice of items. If you're involved in something large-scale, where you might have to hand out to hundreds of kids, it's best to have all the same thing so the line keeps moving. Kit Kat minis seem to work well.

I'm woefully behind on posting lunch photos, but as pertains to a discussion earlier: this is how they store the lunches; this is why the containers need to seal up well...

I suppose there may be someone out there making revelatory pad Thai, but the best I've ever had is not a particularly great dish. It's not even that it's not great. It's more like that it's the Thai equivalent of a hamburger. It's either inappropriate for a serious, fine restaurant, or if you gussy it up with foie gras or whatever the way Daniel Boulud does with his burger then you're serving something so far removed from "hamburger" as to be a different food. I think you'd sort of have that problem if you tried to make a Lotus-of-Siam-appropriate pad Thai.

This just in from Tabla:

There's a pretty big gap between run-of-the-mill Thai and what they do at Lotus of Siam. It's not like Sripraphai, where the reasons the dishes are better than the norm mostly have to do with execution. The level of refinement at Lotus of Siam is more on the level of something like Vong, where it wouldn't just be a question of slippage to get to average Thai -- it would be a complete reinvention of the schema. I think it's sort of like saying I worry that if Le Bernardin is around long enough, and the owners are insufficiently vigilant, it will become a mussels-and-frites joint. Okay maybe not that radical, but close. Although, I do think they should 86 the pad Thai. Of the dozen or so dishes I tried last night, that was the only one I felt was fundamentally pedestrian and generic -- that no matter how well they make it they'll still only be a half step away from average Thai.

I'm not sure how else one would open a second restaurant in another city. You have to train local cooks unless you're planning to shut your other place down and relocate everyone. I was in tonight for a preview meal. They're a bit publicity-averse, it seems, so they were discouraging photographs and such. I won't catalog every dish, but we tried a lot of dishes and most were superb -- living up to the restaurant's reputation as a cut above all other American Thai. The flawed items were minor and easily fixable. My one significant piece of constructive criticism is that I think they should simply not offer pad Thai. Cooking of that caliber doesn't deserve to be cannibalized by a pad Thai offering.

A few photos: Most of our supplies (except refrigerated items), ready to go: The tables set for seed extraction: Most of the photos we captured aren't appropriate for posting on a public website, because they contain images of other people's kids, but this one only shows backs of kids' heads. This is their teacher reviewing the recipe: And the finished loaves:

We used canned pumpkin. The schedule and sequence of events allowed no other option. We had only one block of time to cut the pumpkins and make the batter, so after cutting we switched to canned. We didn't actually say it was canned (didn't say it wasn't either) -- just said "This is what pumpkin looks like after you cook it and mash it." While the class was still working on something else, I cut the tops out of each of five pumpkins, and I cut one really big pumpkin in half. I left the tops in place for the time being. Meanwhile, Ellen was setting up the baking station. The kids gathered around tables in groups of four or five to a pumpkin. They scooped out seeds and pulp with their hands and put the seeds on pieces of foil. They counted their seeds and filled out data sheets for their teacher. We also looked at seeds from different size pumpkins -- the seeds were pretty much the same size. Ellen had the kids come up to the baking station in groups of four. Each kid got to measure one ingredient into the bowl (e.g., a cup of the flour, a teaspoon of a spice). Once all the ingredients were in, each kid took a turn stirring. We took the batter and the seeds home. We baked the batter into pumpkin breads and roasted the seeds. We'll be bringing those in for morning meeting tomorrow.

There are several pumpkins. I imagine groups of 4-6, each with a pumpkin. I think just the nature of kids' attention spans and the limited time we'll have, not to mention the equipment and space restrictions, means there's no way to do every step with the group.

That was the first thing I thought of, but it felt wrong. We may end up there, though. We'll see.

We have been charged with baking pumpkin bread with our son's kindergarten class. They have been to the farmers' market and purchased several pumpkins -- both the bland kind used for Halloween and the more flavorful "butter" kind. Equipment consists of a small convection oven and some loaf pans. So it needs to be a recipe that can be mixed in a bowl with a spoon. Ingredients mostly need to be pre-measured and brought in. 24 kids, so two normal size loaves should be enough for everyone to have a small slice. I've heard two schools of thought on how to process the pumpkin: 1. Cut in chunks (how the heck do you get the skin off without killing yourself?), steam or boil, puree in blender -- this gives you something like unsweetened canned pumpkin puree. This would have to be done at home then brought back to the school. 2. Grate and use the shredded/grated raw product directly in the batter, like you would use carrots in carrot cake/bread. Does the pumpkin really bake sufficiently if you do it this way? This will be a two-visit project no matter what: Once to cut pumpkins and remove and count seeds (which we'll take home to toast), and another time for the cooking part. Any ideas, suggestions, recipes, experiences to share?