Fat Guy

Which is best? The main choices are: Side by side Freezer on top Freezer on bottom Freezer on bottom, French door refrigerator Me, I've really come to dislike the freezer-on-bottom models. We've been staying at a friend's house where the freezer is on the bottom, and it's kind of a disaster area. There's one deep bin and a sliding basket shelf on top. It's comically difficult to get to anything without taking everything else out. The one nice thing about freezer on bottom is that it gives you a nice wide refrigerator all of which you can access without bending over. I really like side-by-side in theory, but only if it's big and wide. For narrower refrigerators, the freezer on the side-by-side models is so narrow there are too many things that just don't fit. Freezer on top tends to be the design of the crummiest refrigerators, but I think it's a decent design. If you don't have room for a wide side-by-side this is the design I recommend. Having the freezer at eye level makes it convenient to get stuff out. The fridge does get pushed low, though -- your fruit and vegetable bins will be near the floor. I'm indifferent to French doors. I guess they're nice.

If you invent a process like fat washing, that's something you can patent -- today, under current patent law. There are plenty of culinary patents. I'm sure Nabisco has a villion of them. I don't think Freeman invented it, so it would be hard for him to patent it. If he had invented it and patented it then, yes, I definitely think it would make sense for him to get a licensing fee from anyone who wants to use his process for the duration of the patent. What we're talking about here, though, is copyright. What I'm saying is that if Freeman creates the melon ball cocktail and someone else wants to serve it, there should be a royalty arrangement available. Big food companies are already protected by the intellectual property laws because they can afford to push through patent applications for every little thing they do, and they can afford to defend their trademarks. Individual chefs and restaurants can't afford to do that, just as individual musicians, authors, artists, photographers, etc., can't. That's why they need the protection of the copyright laws.

They would have to pay royalties or come up with creative ideas of their own.

We were just at a Trader Joe's in New Jersey and up front there was this huge display "Farmer Joe's Locally Grown Produce." The tomatoes were from Virginia.

That's something to be negotiated when a bartender, chef or consultant is hired. Someone of Freeman's caliber can say, if a restaurant company tries to hire him, okay, I'll come work for you but I own whatever I invent. The company can then choose to hire Freeman for the prestige, hire someone else, or offer Freeman more money to come work on the company's terms. For younger bartenders (or others) starting out, yes, the employer will own the work product. Most people will never invent anything worthwhile. The few that do presumably have more ideas in reserve. That's what they can use to attract investors when it comes time to own a business, or it can be the basis for negotiating a new contract with the current or future employer. Remember, right now, a bartender or chef's ideas have no intellectual-property value at all. So objecting to IP rights on the basis that they'll sometimes flow to employers makes no sense. Nobody will lose anything over the zero value we currently see. Some will gain. Some will not be able to take advantage. Some will get swindled. That's the way it is.

As far as I know Freeman is a partner in Tailor. Not that we have to look far for plenty of other examples of bartenders owning bars.

How would you fit something like fettuccine Alfredo or Caesar salad into that taxonomy? In other words, dishes that were probably invented by one person but have developed iconic status.

I think this is where the work of someone like Freeman is a break from the past. I'm not deeply familiar with his oeuvre but take for example his melon ball cocktail. Here you have a cocktail that's not even served in a glass. ("Solid cocktails," he calls them.) The melon ball cocktail is served in a dish and looks sort of like a psychedelic fried egg. You've got the vodka-infused melon ball in the center, which looks like a yolk, surrounded by a pineapple-foam white, garnished with little cubes of vodka gelatin that look like disproportionate crystals of kosher salt. I think it's pretty brilliant. Even before he adds the little cubes of vodka gelatin I think something like that crosses the threshold of creation. Now I assume the melon ball cocktail has by now faded into memory, as most dishes do. But what if in the summer of 2008 someone from Applebee's had been drinking at the bar at Tailor, saw this thing, took it back to the test kitchen at headquarters, and put it on the cocktail list at 1,600 Applebee's restaurants, proceeding to sell 16,000 of them a day or 5.84 million a year for an annual profit of, say, US$17.52 million. I think Freeman deserves a cut of that.

By the way, my solution for cooking on the go is a Forschner Fibrox 8" chef's knife ($30 US) wrapped in a kitchen towel, secured with two rubber bands, and thrown in my shoulder bag.

I think I'd rather use a hunting knife than a santoku for on-the-road kitchen work. I really just don't like the santoku shape. And once you get into hunting knives you can find plenty of decent ones for $20 (US). I mean, I'm sure one can work with something like thisBuck knife. That being said, I'm not sure I'm sold on the advantages of a folding knife. I'd lean more toward getting a good-fitting plastic cover for a cheap Forschner or something.

I think if you make a list of most-copied dishes you get close to a template for the sort of thing that could generate revenue through royalties. Look at something like molten-center chocolate cake. There the origins aren't completely clear, but if a chef could make a clear claim to having created it then it would be the culinary equivalent of a chart topper. But more fundamentally the field of cuisine is not currently organized to encourage creativity. It is an imitative craft, where change tends to be incremental and only a tiny minority of practitioners strive for originality. I imagine that state of affairs would change radically if serious incentives for creativity came into play.

cdh: Pete Wells, in his story New Era of the Recipe Burglar, ultimately argues that restaurants not chefs will benefit from culinary copyright. But I think he misses the point that there are so many chef-owned restaurants. I spoke to him about it for about an hour when he was writing the piece but he remained unconvinced. Todd: Most copyrights are worthless, just as most songs are worthless, but the potential for a big hit can motivate a lot of creation.

PDF menus are fine with me, because they reflect the design effort that went into a menu. There should be a backup plan for mobile devices, though. Cross streets are helpful. Hours that are accurate (time of last reservation, time of last order, etc.) and that explain what menu is offered when are useful. For restaurants with ambition, a bio of the chef is nice. Photos of the food too. I don't like splash pages that just constitute an extra step before you can get any real information.

Todd, the other possible explanation is that, given the expense and talent required to create original modernist dishes, and the ease of copying them, there's no way for modernist cuisine to achieve much commercial success without better intellectual property protection for its practitioners. At least in the realm of fashion, you have ubiquitous innovation despite lack of much protection. This is a decent argument against extending the copyright laws to cover fashion designs, since the purpose of the copyright laws is to encourage creativity.

I think no matter how much we know better or try to intellectualize it, almost everybody who speaks English sees a value judgment attached to the terms "authentic" and "inauthentic." Authentic is good, and there's something wrong with inauthentic. You will not likely ever see a restaurant advertising "inauthentic Mexican/Italian/etc. cuisine," even though any restaurant with a creative chef is selling exactly that.

I can sympathize with his frustration. Here you have this incredibly creative guy who puts in long, hard hours inventing new cocktails that are an order of magnitude more creative than rum and Coke. He's using cutting-edge processes and when you're working with smoked Coca Cola there's an economic investment beyond just buying a bunch of bottles of stuff. Yet the world is saying, "What you do doesn't deserve the protection of the copyright law." Meanwhile, every photograph no matter how bad, every message-board post on the internet no matter how inane, every book or article no matter how stupid, every song, etc., is protected by that body of law. It seems wrong to me, and I can see why it would seem wrong to him.

I guess I'm not sure what the argument is or why it matters. Back on the issue of copyright and cocktails, I think the discussion winds up being no different than the general culinary discussion. It comes down to whether the culinary arts have changed, and whether that change requires re-examination of the copyright law as applied to food and drink. I think it does, most people think it doesn't. There are some people out there who don't believe in copyright for much of anything. We can't expect them to be convinced on the issue of culinary copyright. But for those who believe that music, art, et al., should be protected by copyright, I think it is becoming increasingly difficult to argue that culinary creations should not. Of the people who have done serious legal research and thinking on this, I think Chris Buccafusco does the best job of laying waste to the idea that culinary creations are undeserving of copyright. Although his article ultimately takes a turn against extending copyright law to cover culinary intellectual property, he nonetheless does a great job making the case for culinary copyright. From his abstract: You can work your way into the whole article by starting here and following the download link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=923712

There are a grand total of about two cases on recipe copyright that generally get cited in law review articles on this subject, both very old and not particularly relevant (they pertain to written recipes in books, and focus on the issue of collections of recipes as unique literary expression). The most erudite lawyers I've heard speak on this issue, however (the partners at Cowan, Leibowitz & Latman, speaking at the Harvard Club symposium in 2008), have been of the opinion that in a clear case of copying complex molecular-gastronomy-type dishes a plaintiff with a good budget and legal team would have some very powerful arguments. It's not so much a question of copyright protection for the list of ingredients -- that is already off the table, pretty much, on account of the Library of Congress's language on the issue. It's about the dish looked at as a creative work -- part art, part sculpture, maybe even part choreography -- and that dish being copied. There have also been several culinary processes patented.

The reason copyright came to the fore in the discussion at large of culinary copying was the rise of molecular gastronomy/mixology, culinary modernism, avant-garde cuisine, or whatever you want to call it. There's a big difference between, on the one hand, taking common-knowledge recipes like Hollandaise sauce or the Daiquiri and making some unremarkable incremental changes and, on the other hand, creating a dish like Adria's Carrot Air with Mandarin Concentrate or Freeman's Smoked Coke with Bourbon. The type of innovation and creation associated with recipes like that is more akin to categories of creative expression that are already protected (art, music, literature, sculptural works, etc.). This new reality demands thinking beyond the old "you can't copyright a list of ingredients" reasoning.

My understanding is that only certain Macy's stores have the glasses: whichever are the company's elite-level stores. I'm not exactly sure how to parse that information.

I have flutes because people expect flutes, but I prefer a standard white-wine glass for sparkling -- the better the sparkling wine the more I prefer using a regular glass.

A good rule of thumb for the home is to fill to just below the elbow where the glass bends in. For restaurants you'd probably want to put in your standard pour and see where that lands you.

I believe the lard was in the filling.

Red are 19.5oz, white are 15.5oz.

I think the Newman's Oreo knockoffs are better than Oreos. I also think Oreos circa 1980 were better than Oreos today.