Fat Guy

As between two places that are equally good, of course most people will choose the one that offers better value. For anyone with a finite dining budget, there's going to be a trade-off between depth and breadth. The more you go to one or a few places, the less of a budget you have to try new places. So if you place a higher value on trying new places than on getting better treatment at old ones, it's best to allocate funds towards new places. A lot of people, however, have the opposite preference.

On the Craftbar topic, Dave (the Cook) recently filed a very positive report. I've only been once to the new location but my meal was also terrific.

I've had some early success with freezing a homemade equivalent of Stouffer's French-bread pizza. Not on homemade bread. Store-bought French bread with Pomi tomato puree, low-moisture mozzarella and grated Parmesan. Heats up nicely in the toaster oven. My experiments are in an early stage, but I'll give a fuller report when I get the process more refined.

It means once you become a parent you get out a lot less.

That's my understanding, not that I understand the topic I started all that well. I agree that Toqueviille is worth talking about. My one meal at Elettaria was not impressive, but I keep hearing good things about it. When you rattle off all those others, it makes me feel out of the loop. Craftbar is very good. Is it in the underappreciated category?

I had a good meal there. Incidentally it was Deathwatched by Eater two years ago. Crispo comes to mind as a possibility. Monday Room. Peasant?

I think this ultimately depends on the size of the burner and the size of the vessel, however I personally would never buy a disc-bottom skillet/frypan whereas I do buy disc-bottom stockpots. For everything in between, there is probably a best answer per piece. I think if price is no object and you just want to have somebody smart give you a good answer for each piece, having considered many factors, one logical answer has got to be Demeyere, the other logical answer is to get mostly stainless-lined copper and a few other pieces (like a disc-bottom stockpot). But if you're willing to do some work on a per-piece basis you can probably avoid a lot of extra expense and invest most of your money on the few pieces where it actually makes the most sense to have super-expensive cookware. For example, for a saucepan actually being used to make sauce, copper is king.

I guess I'm not sure what you're trying to establish here, but I should point out that this is the case with nearly all meal reports and recommendations, online or not, "food board" or not. The only people who routinely pay for return visits to restaurants they don't like are professional critics and masochists.

On spelling and pronunciation, there is a Cooking Issues blog entry here: "A quick note: it’s Skål or Skoal, but not Skal."

As Wemedge noted, participating restaurants do not typically have access to one another's guest databases. Every reservation I've made there, I've made online like everybody else. Thanks to a combination of persistence and teen-acquired video-gaming reflexes, I happen to be better at it than the average person. But no preference.

The Society is pleased to welcome Mark Is Cooking as an eG Ethics code signatory. Mark is the former owner of a commercial brewery and a beer- and wine-making supply store. His blog is about cooking, recipes, reviews and more. Welcome!

It's not that it's a bad value. I think Momofuku Ko is a good value. I've eaten there a lot. I like the place a lot. There is, however, a negligible amount of value added for regulars. Indeed, the whole design of the reservation system is specifically anti-regulars. It places no value on regulars. If you're getting any value added as a regular, it's because individual staff are happy to see a familiar face, not because of any sort of institutional priority that says regulars are valuable and should be cultivated. This may work for Ko but would be a disastrous business decision for most any other restaurant.

Were I specifically looking for an equal-quality but cheaper alternative to All-Clad I'd probably go with Cuisinart Multiclad. It has 18/10 brushed exterior, 18/10 interior, etc. -- it is basically All-Clad at half the street price. That being said, I strongly agree with those above who note that it's not a question of Brand X or nothing. For different pieces of cookware, it makes sense to look for different properties. The only brand I know of that seems to recognize this is Demeyere (they make clad skillets, disc-bottom saucepans, etc., adapting design to purpose), and the only place where it may make sense to use the same design for everything is with stainless-lined copper (though even that assumption collapses, especially as a value proposition, when you scale up to a stockpot). Assuming one is buying anything other than Demeyere or copper, then, it makes sense to look at the function of a given vessel before choosing a type of construction, which in turn narrows the scope for choice of brands. Sam's eGCI class is a great place to start for a better understanding of the parameters.

Why isn't it packed or why is it packed but only with a weird demographic of people who don't know/care about food.

Because it will be even more fun, after the competition reveals that jiggering is just as fast and makes better drinks, to hear the arguments for free pouring continue like nothing has happened.

Couldn't this debate be settled by a well-designed competition that measures both quantity and quality?

Just to clarify, I've found that most people don't even know when their cookware is warped. They think warped means bent and contorted like it has been in a car wreck. But most warping occurs at the level of a millimeter or two, such that even on a perfectly flat stovetop (bearing in mind that a lot of people don't have their stoves properly leveled either) something placed in the pan will roll to one side. Depending on what you're cooking, this may or may not be a problem. For example, for boiling water it's irrelevant. It certainly makes it difficult to coat a skillet with a little fat, though.

This to me comes about as close to zero value added as possible. No help with reservations, no extra food, no special food, no special treatment other than a smile and conversation. Which isn't to say it isn't worth eating at Momofuku Ko ten, twelve or more times. It just means that what you get for your investment is simply that number of meals at Momofuku Ko. You don't get anything more of notable value, as you would at most restaurants at that price point.

The Society is pleased to welcome Edgeplay as an eG Ethics code signatory. Edgeplay is the food blog of San Francisco-based software engineer Charles Haynes. Welcome!

A friend today asked what I think are the best "undervalued" restaurants in New York City. By that I think she meant places that are as good as the places with a lot of critical and popular acclaim, but that don't have the same kind of buzz. I didn't really have a good answer on the tip of my tongue, so I thought I'd bring it back here. Needless to say, you're not allowed to answer with Momofuku Ssam Bar.

I'm not sure it counts as fraud as such. But anyway, a tangentially related story: we have friends whose father has the exact same name -- first, middle initial and last -- as a major, big-time regular at a major, big-time restaurant in New York City. This isn't somebody terribly famous -- it's not like his name was Paul Newman or anything like that -- it's just that in this particular restaurant's subculture this guy was a wildly important customer. In any event, without knowing any of this, our friend's father called one day to make a reservation at this restaurant. He was like, hi, do you have a table at 8pm on Friday night, tomorrow night, in the middle of Christmas season, and the reservationist was like, no, but let us put you on our waiting list, and he gave his name, and she was like, oh, Mr. X., why didn't you say so, of course we have a table for you! This restaurant is just big enough, just computerized enough, with just enough different shifts of managers and staff, that when our friend's father arrived nobody really figured out that he wasn't the VIP. They handed off a super-soigne chit to the captain and the kitchen, and he got taken care of like nobody's business. Over time, he would go occasionally to the restaurant, and always be treated like a king. One day, the real VIP died. Soon after, our friend's father made another reservation. It was only then that anybody at the restaurant figured out that there were two guys with that name. But by then our friend's father had become a regular in his own right. Nobody minded. It just became a funny story. He's still a beloved regular there to this day.

They had the El Verano Taqueria cart set up recently at the Big Apple Barbecue event in Manhattan, and I tried the pork-and-chicken taco combination box as well as an ear of corn. I was very impressed with both. I thought the fillings in the tacos as well as the salsas were as good as any I've had, even though the wrappers were as unremarkable as most. The corn was really nice -- not exactly a light item (it's slathered in mayo and cheese), and not exactly easy to eat without making a mess, but delicious. If you've had the corn at Kampuchea or Num Pang, it's a sibling of that.

You just need to be willing to pay several dollars a peach to have them shipped FedEx. At Per Se restaurant in New York the other day I had a peach from Masumoto Family Farm in California that was the best peach I've had, and I've had some good ones. A few years ago I was visiting a friend upstate and he had found a mail-order source for some pretty amazing peaches from, I think, Michigan. Alain Ducasse favors the ones from Ohio. Although, presumably, those Midwestern peaches come in later on. The California ones, you don't have to wait for.

With any luck, twice. That's especially true if you plan for it: go for the first time when the restaurant is least busy, engage in heavy interaction with the staff, introduce yourself, take names, etc. If you then return soon after (the next day is most effective) and re-engage with the staffers you dealt with the first time, chances are you'll have bought into whatever system of VIP treatment the restaurant has. Once you're in the system as VIP, soigne, PX, whatever, it doesn't entirely matter how often you go. If you go back a year later, provided you've kept your same name and phone number, that's still going to be in the computer. Even if nobody working at the restaurant knows who the heck you are -- even if there has been a complete staff turnover -- that information will still come up when you reserve. It will still be announced at the service meeting. A soigne chit will still be handed off to your server by the maitre d'. Of course there are levels of VIP-ness, both vertically (within a restaurant) and horizontally (from restaurant to restaurant). At some restaurants, as discussed above, the only benefit to being a repeat customer is that you get to pay to eat there a lot. But at others there's a whole range of possibilities. If you go to Daniel four days a week (some people do) or you routinely spend thousands of dollars on wine you're going to be in a different category. That's when Daniel Boulud starts personally making you some old-school virtuoso French dishes involving whole animals stuffed into other whole animals. But earning the basic designation needn't be an outrageously expensive proposition, especially if you do it at a restaurant that offers a lunch service.

I realize this was meant tongue in cheek, but it's worth noting Rao's for a moment. The only way to eat at Rao's is if you're a regular or a guest of a regular. So nobody really knows how non-regulars are treated. It makes the analysis difficult. I was a regular at Il Mulino for about a year in the late '90s, when I worked downtown and had the budget for that sort of thing. I'm not sure there's any food benefit to being a regular there. It's just easier to get in. But you get offered the same stuff as everybody else, and you pay the same.