Fat Guy

Truly ecumenical eaters are rare, even among chefs. They have likes and dislikes. A restaurant menu will typically be a combination of the chef's preferences and commercial reality. You need to have a chicken dish, you need to have a distribution of dishes that works with the way you have the stations in the kitchen set up and staffed, etc. In addition, there is a collaborative element. Any fine-dining restaurant above a certain size has an executive chef, a chef de cuisine and several sous chefs, any of which might be contributing ideas or designing a dish (especially the daily specials). And those people all have different preferences. I know an excellent Indian-restaurant chef who's a vegetarian, but is better at preparing meat dishes than most any carnivore. Perhaps most famously, Thomas Keller has told several interviewers over the years that he has never tasted his "oysters and pearls" dish, which is perhaps his best-known and -loved signature dish. He invented it in his mind.

I can't pretend to comprehend the reasons some steakhouses do well and others don't. I disagree with the consensus on most of them, so my advice is suspect. Some steakhouses seem to succeed without serving great steaks or offering anything unique. It may be that the "location, location, location" maxim is especially true for non-unique steakhouses. It seems to me, though, that if you want to succeed by offering something unique, the best move is to emphasize one unique selling proposition that's easily summarized and promoted. That's what I'm not hearing here.

Tonight, thanks to an abundance of zucchini from a friend's neighbor's garden, I prepared two batches of sauteed zucchini with garlic. For one batch I used Christopher Ranch pre-peeled garlic that has been in my refrigerator for a week, but from a new mini-pack within. For the other I used a few cloves of garlic off a head I bought in Chinatown about two weeks ago. As if on cue, the Chinatown garlic was some of the most stubborn-peeling garlic I've ever encountered. It was hard to judge strength and flavor raw but I ate a very small slice of each raw and the strength seemed comparable while the pre-peeled garlic was sweeter or at least less bitter/acrid. Cooked, I couldn't tell the difference at all. I'll need to repeat this on a much larger scale with multiple samples. This mini test doesn't really establish anything.

If you give him credit for the two ratings he wasn't responsible for, the picture looks a little more complete and less ridiculous. However, when you consider that he reviewed Eleven Madison Park three times and Tabla never, and gave three stars to the Bar Room but never even reviewed Blue Smoke, it's a pretty weak list, with 2 out of 5 (aka 40%) of the ratings he gave being nutty and 2 others (another 40%) being stretches. Combine that with the rushed "midnight appointments" of the most recent reviews and it's a pretty weak oeuvre.

I don't have a garlic peeler, but the reason I don't have one is that when I used a friend's garlic peeler it didn't work all that well. I think all these systems -- peeler, slapping the knife, etc. -- work only with garlic that's predisposed to peel well. When you get stubborn garlic, you have to get in there with knife and fingers. And that slows everything way down.

Some garlic is definitely stronger than other garlic. This seems to me to be most thoroughly correlated with the hard-neck/soft-neck distinction. Although, within those categories there are significant variations. One problem with saying "pre-peeled garlic is weaker than regular" is that the samples aren't the same and there may be no way to get them the same. To make a legitimate comparison you'd need the same type of garlic from the same harvest, and you'd need both a whole head and some pre-peeled cloves. Then you'd know if pre-peeling results in a loss of strength. Otherwise all you know is that the specific bulb of garlic you got in a given store is stronger or weaker than some pre-peeled cloves that could have been grown 12,000 miles away from an entirely different strain. Strength of garlic is also not, to me, a terribly significant issue. It just means you have to use more or less. For a restaurant computing pennies, I suppose having garlic that's 4 times as powerful at 2 times the cost is a sensible purchasing decision. But for someone using a couple of dollars worth of garlic a month, assuming you don't live in a country where $2 a month is the per capita income, it really doesn't matter and all you do is use twice as many cloves. All you need to know is how much of your garlic you need to use. Now if there are quality differences, that's another story. I do think the fresh, in-season, hard-neck garlic I've purchased at the Hudson Valley Garlic Festival in Saugerties, NY, has possibly had a more interesting flavor than supermarket garlic. It's certainly more powerful. Does it make a cooked dish taste better? I don't know. I haven't tested it carefully.

The Bittman piece also, it seems, prompted an editorial response (by Helene Cooper): http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/opinion/25sun4.html So I guess this predictable argument is going to unfold any time a convenience item is introduced to the kitchen. Although, she has a unique take on the argument, making her very short piece worth a quick read. In any event, I don't enjoy peeling garlic. It doesn't take me 3 seconds to peel a clove. Once in a while, I get a head of garlic that peels really well -- where a smash of the side of a blade causes the peel to burst away like the booster stage of a rocket. Most of the time, though, there's additional knife- or finger-work required. Usually the skins won't come off cleanly until I trim the ends. Sometimes not even then. I'm happy to have this done for me with an air gun. Bittman is really enthusiastic about the stuff: The reason I converted recently is that, several nights in a row, I cooked dishes with garlic. The daily grind of doing it became tedious. So when I saw the Christopher Ranch product I grabbed it as an experiment. I was pleased with the results. I don't intend to switch back unless some sort of counter-results present themselves.

I think of the ability to produce a four-star meal experience as a necessary but not sufficient condition for a legitimate four-star rating. It's not something to be dismissed lightly. Most restaurants simply don't have the chops to produce a four-star meal, even if every cook on staff and every server works on that one meal. I recently had a full-on four-star meal experience at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. It was second only to a Per Se experience. Just fantastic. For me, it's a four-star restaurant because 100% of my meals there have been four-star meals. On that topic, several other credible people noted that they had been and not had experiences on that level. Okay. I don't know. I only had the meal I had. Likewise, I've only had the meals I've had at Eleven Madison Park. I haven't had anything approaching a four-star experience. It felt to me like, if everything I experienced reached its logical apex, it would constitute a very strong three-star experience. Then again I haven't been in a while. I'll certainly have to make a point of returning.

It seems the indefatigable Mark Bittman was four years ahead of me on this: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/21/dining/21mini.html He writes, speaking of the Christopher Ranch product I mentioned above: He also explains the method used to peel the cloves: a high-pressure air hose simply blasts the skins off.

They became translucent.

Whatever these noodles are, we boiled them for 5 minutes, drained and tossed with sesame oil. Then we added julienne cooked shiitake mushrooms and the green outside parts of some zucchini as well as steamed broccoli cut into very small florets, garlic, scallions and onion. Mixed all that with some soy, mirin, hot pepper sauce and sesame seeds. I have no idea what we created but it's tasty. Will serve at room temp in about an hour.

With most of these toxins the issue is dosage. Are you eating the green stuff every day, or once a year? I wouldn't worry about the latter. My favorite use for the roe is a compound butter. Spread the roe on a piece of aluminum foil and cook it in the toaster oven until it's dried out. Then mix that with butter. You can then use the butter to make amazing sauces.

The lazy-cook argument of course can be made any time one adopts any kitchen convenience ranging from buying cooked beets to having other people mill your flour. But it's only a rational argument when there's a loss of quality attributable to the substitution. Which, in this case, there doesn't seem to be.

My friend Sean and I have been marinating beef for bulgogi since yesterday. In thinking about side dishes, I suggested jap chae with vegetables. Not that I've ever cooked jap chae. We're in Danbury, CT, where there aren't a lot of Asian markets, but there is one, Atlantic Market, and they seem to have just about everything. I grabbed this package of what I'm pretty sure are jap chae noodles (or at least noodles made from potato starch of some kind): The thing is, everything on the package is in Korean (not that I even know for sure), and I don't speak that language (or whatever language it is). So what I need to know is how to cook the noodles. Google has yielded divergent advice, ranging from boil for 5 minutes to soak for 20. What's the deal? (edited to clarify)

This is the spec sheet on the product I've been buying: http://www.christopherranch.com/products/P...zBAGPACKETS.pdf I've seen peeled garlic packaged a lot of ways, but this is by far my favorite. The bag is well sealed, and within the bag are smaller vacuum-sealed pouches of about 6-8 cloves. The cloves aren't perfectly denuded of everything -- you could still trim the stem if you wanted to -- but they're well peeled enough that I just chop them as-is. The garlic is grown in California, which is nice to know -- the fresh garlic in most markets doesn't seem to state a place of origin.

Peeled garlic seems to be a standard supermarket item wherever I go. It's also available at Costco. When you take a whole head of garlic, break it apart and peel every clove, you're left with quite a bit of material on the cutting board: the skins, the core of the bulb (whatever the term for that is), the end pieces of some of the cloves, etc.. That's the waste.

A few years ago I flirted with the notion of switching over to pre-chopped garlic. It seemed like a huge time-saver. Pre-chopped garlic, however, doesn't taste good. I've tried it a few times and, even when you cook it into a dish, it carries a weird chemical flavor. It has a particular talent for ruining marinades. It also has a sogginess to it and that makes it harder to work with. In addition, because it's chopped to a certain size it doesn't offer much in the way of flexibility if you're looking for a rough chop, little slices, etc. Of late, I've been experimenting with a different product: peeled garlic. I've had much better results. I certainly can't tell the difference in cooked dishes. It may be that the peeled garlic I'm getting is actually better-tasting than the raw sold at the same market. And the convenience is terrific: you skip a whole step in terms of processing and cleanup. When you consider the waste when you peel your own garlic, the per-pound cost of usable product isn't all that different. It also encourages me to use more garlic, because it's so convenient. And I can chop it coarse or fine, slice it, use whole cloves, crush it, etc. -- whatever I want. What are you all doing for garlic?

That sounds confusing enough to be annoying to both customers and servers. Focusing on a single selling proposition is, in general, a good idea for a business competing in an already dense market. I'd gravitate towards "We have the best meat." Work the rest in behind that. You can have steaks of various types and sizes, and you can have some sort of system for putting together a plate so someone can get an 8-ounce whatever with 2 sides or a 20-ounce something else with 3 sides and the prices come out competitive.

Those who have been several times over the past couple of years: 1. Do you agree that, 18 months ago, Eleven Madison Park was not a four-star restaurant? 2. If so, and if you believe it is one today, what has changed to make it a four-star restaurant? (I don't think Bruni answers that second question effectively.)

Brunch at L'Ecole on Sunday revealed one new treasure I hadn't sampled before. The kitchen sent out the croque-monsieur. (I say "sent out" because we didn't order it, not because it was free. I mean, it was free, but so was the rest of the meal, so being free isn't anything unique to that dish.) The croque-monsieur at L'Ecole is the upscale realization of this snack. It's not just a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich. It's an open-face composition, on FCI's superior bread, consisting of really good ham (and a lot of it), sitting atop a gooey Mornay sauce (either that or a layer of Bechamel topped with a layer of cheese -- I didn't break it down enough to ascertain that). It's also available with an egg, aka croque-madame, with no upcharge for the egg. One thing I'm starting to notice is that the brunch menu, unlike the lunch and dinner menus, doesn't seem to change at all. I'm not sure if there's going to be a rotation of brunch items or if that menu is locked in permanently. Separately, today I stopped in with a friend for a cocktail and had the Dave Arnold-designed "cold buttered rum." This is a mixture of rum and a white gooey substance that Dave Arnold manufactures up in the culinary-technology lab. I'm not sure exactly how it is engineered but it does indeed taste like a cold facsimile of hot buttered rum. Go figure. I need to bring some cocktail-savvy people to the bar at L'Ecole for a tasting to get a better read on this, but to me the cocktail program there is high-achieving, as are the bartenders especially a fellow named Gene (sp.?).

As we come to the end of Bruni's tenure at the Times, it's probably worth pausing -- as he has -- to consider the Danny Meyer/Union Square Hospitality Group empire from a multi-restaurant perspective. Taking the recent Union Square Cafe and Eleven Madison Park reviews separately is one thing, but the choice to review the restaurants back to back -- to, in effect, give one of Union Square Cafe's stars to Eleven Madison Park -- seems to say that Bruni feels a duty to put the House of Meyer in order. If that is his goal, he has failed miserably at it. If it's not his goal, he hasn't failed at it -- he has simply made a mess of the house that will be extremely awkward for the next critic to sort out. To my mind, the USHG restaurant that comes closest to delivering a four-star experience is The Modern, which currently carries two stars. That's not to say it definitely is a four-star restaurant. The Modern and Gabriel Kreuther have probably not yet reached their four-star potential and being saddled with two stars from the New York Times can't help because despite the declining relevance of those stars they still hold sway. But to say the Modern is anything less than a three-star restaurant is to me just nutty. The Bar Room at the Modern, which has three stars, is or was excellent but more of a one-star establishment serving some dishes that go above and beyond its rating. I'm not sure there's anything in Bruni's tenure that says more about his anti-fine-dining inclinations than the two/three-star split for the Modern and the Bar Room. Union Square Cafe is now down to two stars, which is and long has been a defensible rating for that restaurant. I don't really agree with that rating, but it's not crazy. However, I think Bruni's notion of slippage, which I suppose gets him around the stare decisis problem, is not correct. If anything, based on my dining experiences there, the restaurant has improved under Carmen Quagliata. I'd still be inclined to give Union Square Cafe three stars, though. It falls into the category of restaurants that, I think, overachieve enough to merit an extra star. So while the food at Union Square Cafe may be fundamentally two-star food, it has been tweaked to such an extent that nobody else is really doing that kind of food that well. In addition, the service ethic at Union Square Cafe is pretty impressive, as is the overall experience. So I see no reason to alter the three-star rating. Three stars for Gramercy Tavern makes sense. There was a time when I thought Gramercy Tavern might be the first American four-star restaurant. That seemed like the opening proffer. And I love the restaurant. But I don't think at this point Gramercy Tavern strives to be a four-star restaurant. It's a little confusing that the Modern and the Bar Room have been reviewed separately, because Gramercy Tavern also has a restaurant within a restaurant (the Tavern at Gramercy Tavern) with a completely independent menu that does not carry a separate rating. As far as I recall, Tabla and the Bread Bar at Tabla have not been reviewed by Bruni. Not that I think there's a change in rating called for there, but certainly Tabla has undergone significant change since it was originally reviewed. I think it's still a three-star restaurant but with different justifications now. When is the last time Tabla was reviewed anyway? Two critics ago? If memory serves, and it may not, Tabla was reviewed by Ruth Reichl upon opening and has not been re-reviewed by Grimes or Bruni. I think Grimes may have penned a lukewarm Diner's Journal on it, when Diner's Journal was still a newspaper column, but maybe one of our resident Times experts can confirm or deny that. Blue Smoke got a star from Eric Asimov when he was pinch hitting for Grimes, I believe. Which leaves Eleven Madison Park and its four stars. It does seem that enough credible people (I don't count Bruni among them) think that Eleven Madison Park deserves four stars that the notion deserves serious consideration. And I haven't been there recently enough to comment on the restaurant's internal trends. But I'm relatively un-ready to accept the notion of four stars for Eleven Madison Park. Luckily, if there is one restaurant operator who will live up to an overly generous review instead of exploiting it, it is Danny Meyer. So this is how, I think, Bruni has left the Danny Meyer universe: Eleven Madison Park - 4 Gramercy Tavern - 3 Bar Room at the Modern - 3 Tabla - 3 (from another critic) Union Square Cafe - 2 The Modern - 2 Blue Smoke - 1 (from another critic) Am I missing anything? The list to me seems absurd on its face, with The Modern being the most bizarrely inaccurate of the ratings.

The review is here: http://events.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/dinin...ews/12rest.html

Rather than water down the whole cocktail, which will simultaneously dilute the spirit and the other ingredients, would it make more sense to water down the spirit? I'm sure this runs counter to some unwritten cocktail law, but isn't the difference between a 94 proof spirit and an 80 proof spirit generally just the addition of more water? If my ideal drink is what I've described above, but made with an 80 proof spirit instead of a 94 proof spirit then, subject to mathematical refinement, why not just replace, say, 1/2 ounce of spirit with 1/2 ounce of water before shaking?

I will enjoy experimenting with this until I run out of 94-proof gin.

I start with a 3:1 ratio of booze to citrus. I don't know if that's lean. It's certainly leaner than an old-style 1:1 gimlet but not as lean as some I've seen made in bars where it's mostly booze with the tiniest splash of lime cordial. For the citrus component I use half fresh lime and half Rose's lime. So for two cocktails I'd use 1/2 ounce of fresh lime, 1/2 ounce of Rose's lime and 3 ounces of gin or vodka. On top of that, usually a little simple syrup and a couple of drops of bitters, both to taste. This seems to produce a balanced cocktail with 80-proof spirits but offers too much alcohol burn for my taste with a 94-proof spirit. Maybe the solution is just more citrus.