Fat Guy

I've had the slippers in Singapore, and the spiny lobsters many times in various places. To my mind, when it comes to lobster, nothing beats Homarus americanus. And while freshness is nice, they really stay quite good for a long time if well cared for.

The restaurant is very good about sharing recipes. If you call up and play it cool, you may be able to get it faxed to you.

The Society is pleased to welcome Raw Gastronomy as an eG Ethics code signatory. Raw Gastronomy is a raw-food blog by The Raw Gastronome, based in Melbourne, Australia. Welcome!

Definitely correct. It's often possible to get a table on the phone when you couldn't get one on OpenTable. It's also possible to get on the waiting list, look at options outside the OpenTable search parameters, find out the standby policy, etc. So you should always call. At the same time, what I've heard is that there are sometimes programming errors with OpenTable, especially with new accounts where the restaurant's staff isn't fully conversant with the system. There have been times when I've seen a restaurant listed as closed when I knew it would be open, and I've heard plenty of other stories. So, again, always call. From the restaurant's perspective, it's important to get trained on OpenTable if you're going to rely on it. Otherwise, as you can see, there can be lost opportunities.

Some people buy Nikes . . . The buy-in at the standard price tier of three-to-four-star places is about $300-$400 for a party of two for a meal with a conservative drink budget. So, for example, Gramercy Tavern for dinner: Prix-fixe menu $86 per person = $172 Beverage budget of $75 Subtotal = $247 Gratuity = $50 Tax = $21.29 Total = $318.29 Here's a sampling of prix-fixe dinner menu prices at nice restaurants. Several of these places do lunch at a considerable discount, but these are the dinner menu prices: Gramercy $86 EMP $88 The Modern $88 Le Bernardin $109 Jean Georges $98 Daniel $105 Picholine $92 Of course when you get into Per Se and Masa it's a different story. But let's say $400 a pop for each incidence of buy-in at dinner at many of the best restaurants in the city. Now I don't know how much any given person here spends per year on dining out. So it's hard to offer an exact analysis. But I can tell just from reading people's posts that we have plenty of members spending many thousands of dollars a year on dining out. There are different ways to allocate that money. But for some people it's worth allocating half that sum to supporting regular visits (whether quarterly, monthly or weekly) to a single restaurant or a couple of restaurants, and the rest to playing the field, sampling the occasional high-end place and spending the rest at neighborhood restaurants and other non-extravagant meals. For those who place a high value on the treatment regulars receive, that's the way to do it.

As a starting point, here are the lists of current four- and three-star restaurants from the New York Times website. So, who has experience as a regular, or dining with a regular, at these places? Let's try to flesh out the list a bit. Of course, if there are additional restaurants to discuss, we should add those. This is just an easy way to get the ball rolling. NYT four-star restaurants Daniel Jean Georges Le Bernardin Masa Per Se NYT three-star restaurants Adour Alain Ducasse Alto A Voce Babbo Bar Room at the Modern BLT Fish Blue Hill Bouley Café Boulud Convivio Corton Cru Del Posto Dovetail Eleven Madison Park Esca Felidia Gramercy Tavern L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon Le Cirque Matsugen Minetta Tavern Momofuku Ko Momofuku Ssam Bar Nobu 57 Oceana Perry St. Picholine Scarpetta Sushi Yasuda wd-50

This has happened to me a couple of times, but not enough to justify all the other wastes of money taking up space. I'm willing to gamble wrong on 2 items for the sake of clearing out 100.

Right. At neighborhood places, tables, recognition and the occasional extra snack or sip -- and maybe an invitation to the anniversary party or whatever -- largely defines the universe of perks for regulars. And given the price point and the convenient location (by the standards of wherever one lives), if you get all that it's well worth the investment. The destination restaurants generally have more capacity for VIP treatment, both front and back of the house, so if you're investing in those places you can hope for more. If you find a destination restaurant that isn't offering that level of front-to-back benefit for regulars, there needs to be a good reason or the restaurant is likely to lose the business of anyone who's familiar with the standard perks. A good example of a situation where it's not particularly necessary to offer VIP perks is the Jean Georges lunch service. There, everybody who walks in is already essentially being given a loss-leader lunch. There's no benefit to the restaurant if you come every day and eat that free lunch. If you're ordering expensive wine with lunch, the picture changes.

What you get for being a regular at a given restaurant is what I'm hoping to establish with this topic. Some of the possibilities are: - Access to reservations (last minute, at busy times, etc.) - Your preference of table location - Your table assigned better servers - Comped food and/or drink - Access to off-menu items - Help with other reservations, e.g., the Maitre d' calls over to his Maitre d' buddy at some other restaurant, where you're not a regular, and gets you a table - Invitations to private events Those are basically the two ways to do it.

Just a little background on where I'm coming from. I started dining out in earnest in about 1993, when I was interviewing for law-firm jobs. My first five years of serious restaurant dining and relationship building occurred before I'd ever published a word about food. Based on dozens if not hundreds of meals out during that period, I know about being a regular without any media taint. In about 1998 I started doing what later became known as blogging about my restaurant meals. For the most part I still received no special treatment on account of that, because there was very little awareness of what I was doing. For the next five or so years, I experienced the occasional incidence of media-VIP treatment, but it was extremely rare. For about the past five years, as I've published a couple of books, written for and been written about in magazines and newspapers, done the occasional TV or radio appearance and of course written quite a lot of eG Forums posts (and been the eGullet Society's most recognizable leader, even though other people actually run almost everything), I've moved firmly into the middle tier of media. In other words, I'm assigned more weight than the average food blogger and less weight than someone from the New York Times, a major magazine or another top-tier outlet. I know this because I've got years of experience of dining as a regular customer (which still often happens, especially outside of the small circle of three- and four-star restaurants where they routinely recognize people at my level of media), years of experience dining out as a middle-tier media VIP, and quite a few instances of experience dining out with A-list media like New York Times dining-section writers (including one critic), food-magazine editors and my best friend Alan Richman. So I think I know the lay of the land pretty well. In addition, restaurants tend to be forthright with me. They have no reason to engage in the whole double-secret recognition game they play with the mainstream critics, because there's no pretense of anonymity -- I'm not a mainstream critic playing by those rules. In other words, I think I have a fairly accurate lay of the land when it comes to relationship building with restaurants, as well as the way restaurants treat media. What I'd say is that, in the typical three- or four- (or high two-) star restaurant, if you're recognized media at my level what basically happens is that you get to skip the buy-in period. You get treated on your first visit the way customers who've been several times and spent a bunch of money get treated. Typically this means an extra plate or two of food, maybe some off-menu stuff, a glass of champagne, extra desserts, extra attention from management-level staff. Although it can vary a lot by restaurant, and in plenty of cases I still fly under the radar. So that's where I'm coming from, for what it's worth. There are other categories of instant VIPs. For example, chefs. If you're a respectable chef -- even a line cook at a restaurant of note -- you tend to get very well taken care of. If you're a significant chef on the global restaurant scene, you get unbelievable treatment -- far better than what any journalist gets. (I know. I've been at some of those meals too.) Then there are celebrities, as in major television and film personalities, big-deal politicians, rock stars, football players . . . they get instant VIP treatment in some restaurants, not in others. It depends on the culture of the restaurant. It's also possible to get yourself some instant VIP treatment, even if you're none of the above. I've written about this plenty. Just being very interested, engaging and charming, especially on a slow night, can get you some soigne treatment. So can ordering a $1,000 bottle of wine.

I don't think there's an official answer here. Even in the standard NY deli, where the default is an untoasted, unbuttered kaiser roll, you can generally ask for it buttered, toasted, or both. I know one person whose standard order is toasted and buttered with salt and pepper. I don't particularly favor it that way. Some breads benefit from toasting more than others. A kaiser roll, to me, is at its best when served untoasted -- so long as it's very fresh.

Everybody is going to have a different cost benefit analysis here. Me, I take a lot of photos with my cell phone even though I know they're completely inferior to photos taken with even a crummy point-and-shoot digital camera. But the phone is something I already carry with me everywhere. Whereas, once I make the decision to carry a camera somewhere, I kind of feel like I may as well take the best one available. Then again I usually don't, because I'm lazy.

I think that's the big question. The restaurant business operates on narrow profit margins. Each minimal cost eats away a little at that margin. Whether it's a couple of dollars to the credit card company, or a dollar to OpenTable for a web reservation, it all narrows the already narrow margin. This is pretty much the only complaint I've heard about OpenTable: that it's yet another small cost. As a consumer, I love OpenTable for many reasons. And there are definitely reservations I've made through OpenTable that I wouldn't have made without a given restaurant being on the web system. At the same time, I've used OpenTable to make a lot of reservations that I'd otherwise have made by phone. (Though I'm trying to do this less, as a courtesy.) In those instances, the restaurant is losing money. I guess it comes down to which outweighs.

PX is just French for VIP. "Person extraordinaire." Some restaurants prefer to say "soigne" because it seems less hierarchical. (I believe XP is the same as PX.)

I think it can be said that every restaurant has a baseline experience and a VIP-level experience. What I think happens in most cases is that, if the baseline experience is already very high and a great value, there's going to be less contrast with the VIP-level experience. The strength of the Union Square Hospitality Group restaurants is that they provide such a high-level and high-value baseline experience. This leaves them a bit less room to maneuver when it comes to VIP-level experiences. Which doesn't mean they can't or don't do anything. There's just less of a contrast than at, say, Daniel. Per Se is an interesting exception, in that the baseline experience is so high yet there is still considerable room to maneuver above the baseline. I can't really think of another currently operating restaurant with that combination of baseline and headroom. Lespinasse was that way, as was Alain Ducasse at the Essex House. There's also always room for evolution. Daniel is still wearing the albatross of many years ago, when the baseline experience could be kind of lame and the truly great experiences were rationed to VIPs. I've seen that from both angles over the years, depending on who I was eating with and where I was along my own career path. I'm under the impression that Daniel has made a lot of effort over the years to improve the baseline, such that these days the average customer does quite well.

There were several dishes in our progression that had uncharacteristically "loud" flavors for what I think of as Thomas Keller's cuisine. That's because we asked for them. In the pre-meal discussion of preferences, we indicated that we were interested in offal, strong flavors, etc. The kitchen responded with a spicy gazpacho, a fair amount of offal of both the land and the sea, and some pretty assertive flavor combinations that, based on my limited experience, are not typical for that kitchen. That being said, the dish was very successful. The flavors didn't exactly compete. It's just that when you're trafficking in bottarga it's prone to overwhelm lesser flavors. So you need other assertive flavors to work with it. Fennel, peppers, tarragon, saffron and currants all fit the bill. This dish was also a good illustration of how the scale of tasting-menu dishes, especially the early courses, allows for a different aesthetic. I would not have wanted a whole huge bowl of this dish. But as an amuse-style portion, it worked brilliantly. A few bites of strong, lively, unusual, interesting flavors, then on to the next thing.

I'm very much of the school of thought that it's important to learn from my mistakes. So rather than accuse anyone else of making a mistake, let me focus on a couple of my own. If anybody else would like to chime in with lessons learned, great. Corian. This was mentioned above. We redid our kitchen around the turn of the century, when Corian was quite trendy, and we were bamboozled into selecting it as our countertop material. Now, I could dig in my heels and defend the choice of Corian, as many Corian owners do, but it sucks. It's ugly. It scratches easily. It feels like plastic. The promise that it could be easily sanded, refinished and shined up turns out to be an empty one: doing so requires so much effort and mess it's not worth it. And it was expensive. I'm still not sure what countertop material I'll choose when I next have that choice to make, but I know it won't be Corian. Does that mean Corian was a waste of money? To me, yes. I guess I could say that it covered my cabinets and provided a surface on which to rest cutting boards, therefore it wasn't a complete waste of money, only a partial one, but I think fundamentally I made the wrong choice and if I had a do-over I'd make a different one. Calphalon. This was probably an even bigger mistake than All-Clad would have been. Like many people, we found ourselves engaged to be married in the mid-1990s and had essentially two choices at Williams-Sonoma: Calphalon and All-Clad. Ease of use on the registry meant we weren't likely to go out of the Williams-Sonoma universe, and we were young anyway so had a limited frame of reference. We wound up with a huge set of Calphalon and several additional pieces. I still have every piece but one, a very large diameter "grill pan" that warped about 10 years later. I probably could have brought it back to Williams-Sonoma even after all that time, but I didn't bother. A couple of other pieces, I did have replaced at Williams-Sonoma -- one of them twice. There are some things I like about the Calphalon, particularly the flat, wide, low-angle handles and the tempered-glass lids on some vessels. And they do heat pretty evenly. But it's very slow and non-responsive, and time is not kind to the surface. I've learned to cook with it, just as one can learn to cook with most anything, and I've cooked thousands of meals without ill consequence. But if I knew then what I know now I'd have figured out a way to get a set of stainless-lined copper. I think it was even possible at the time to get Mauviel at Williams-Sonoma, and I did get one skillet in that format, but it just wasn't something we seriously considered. It seemed so expensive and esoteric. In retrospect, looking back over 15 years of use, the copper would of course have been worth it. Or even a set of professional stainless like Bourgeat.

Same here. We put a tablecloth down if we're having people for something formal like a holiday dinner. Otherwise it's bare wood.

I think there's a story for every restaurant. The situation at Ko is due not to its trendiness but to a firm stance that David Chang has taken on the issue of equality before the law of Ko. No special treatment in reservations. Everybody pays the same. Everybody gets the same meal. Soigne treatment at Ko means some of the cooks are nicer to you (others remain equally grouchy with all customers) and you may occasionally, at the end of the second sitting, be offered a glass of liquor from the shelf of accumulated liquor gifts that customers have brought in for the staff. What I've found is that freebies are extremely rare in the traditional-sushi universe. You can get better treatment and better stuff if you're a regular -- but you'll pay for it. It also never hurts to buy the sushi chef a beer. It may make said chef more forthcoming with information about what's best that day, access to limited-inventory items, etc. Incidentally, for everybody's benefit I should mention that a clever acquaintance recently bought a drink for one of the cooks at Momofuku Ko and received some appreciation in return. Shame on me for not thinking of that one first.

That's why I started this topic: so that people in your position can get reliable testimony on where it makes sense to invest.

Dave Scantland ("Dave the Cook") and Janet Zimmerman ("JAZ") were in New York recently and posed for tripartite skoal shots. They can be found at the bottom of this week's skoal compendium on the Cooking Issues blog.

The public conversation about dining -- as in mainstream restaurant reviews and online discussions -- is almost exclusively concerned with the first-time dining experience at restaurants. Recommendations are made and accepted based on the assumption that an average consumer is entering a restaurant for the first time. This is in part why so many mainstream reviewers try or claim to try to be anonymous, and why hackles are often raised when a soigne customer gets special treatment and files a report based on that. But for many diners, indeed perhaps for the critical core of diners at any given restaurant, the question of what you get on your first visit is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to evaluating a restaurant. Many people are interested in knowing what a restaurant can do for its regulars. They see going to a restaurant for the first few times as an investment in future meals, just as one's first few dates are a courtship period and help determine whether a long-term relationship is worthwhile. So, setting aside the mainstream concern with first-time visits, who here has opinions about which New York restaurants are most worth having long-term relationships with? Where is it worth spending a few hundred or thousand dollars to become a regular? What's the return on investment in terms of special treatment? I'll say that one extreme is Momofuku Ko. Momofuku Ko is an excellent restaurant but there is very little that happens at Momofuku Ko for regulars. I've been there ten times, which makes me in the top percent of a percent of regulars in terms of frequency of visits -- you can count on your fingers the number of people who've been more times than I have. And what you get for that is some extra conversation with the cooks and maybe a glass of Scotch after dinner (if you're in the later sitting). So there is little added value to becoming a regular at Ko. Meanwhile, it is very much worth becoming a regular at Per Se, as I saw recently when dining there with a frequent customer. The level of dining experience we were afforded made his investment well worthwhile. Even though it was an expensive meal, we both felt like we should be paying triple for it. He had earned an incredible value proposition with his patronage.

Holly, just to amplify one bit of what David has said, learning to control the aperture lets you take advantage of the big thing that distinguishes SLR photography from point-and-shoot photography for web use. Other image quality considerations (such as resolution, and all the issues of RAW versus .jpg) are not as relevant when you're shrinking every image to 600x400 pixels anyway. But the depth of field control you get with mastery of aperture settings makes a huge difference. I'd say the other most important thing is lighting, which doesn't have a lot to do with your camera, except that SLR lenses tend to have better light-gathering ability (also related to the aperture issue).

Recyclability is one aspect of a product's environmental impact. Glass is generally more recyclable than plastic, however glass requires energy to produce, transport and recycle. The plastic used for boxed wines is partly recyclable and, perhaps more importantly, is often made from largely recycled material. In addition, boxed wine requires less energy to produce and transport than bottled wine. I've see at least one credible-seeming claim that the overall "carbon footprint" of boxed wine is half that of bottled. In addition, while glass can be recycled, it often is not. And the process of recycling itself carries both economic and environmental costs that have to be weighed.

Reading Alexis Kahn's wine blog, A Thirsty Spirit, I recently learned about the Black Box Wines video challenge. They're asking consumers to serve their wine-in-a-box blind to guests and then record Folgers-like reactions. Alexis is the general manager and beverage director at the French Culinary Institute's restaurant in New York City. I know her because she was a student in my class recently. She has, in my experience, very reliable taste. She recommends the "From the Tank" boxed wines from Jenny & François Selections. These are natural, unfiltered wines. If you're in New York City they can be had at Astor. Here's some media coverage of the product: http://nymag.com/restaurants/features/47545/ http://www.esquire.com/features/drinking/best-box-wines-0309 http://www.drvino.com/2008/09/17/jenny-fra...inside-the-box/ http://www.bloombergnews.com/apps/news?pid...id=am6kAHVrJ5G4