mamster

Is Saigon Gourmet the place right next to the bus tunnel entrance, across from the old Uwajimaya? I've had their papaya salad, but never their banh mi. Okay, it's time for me to stop promising a banh mi excursion and start having one. Friday lunch, I'm going to be down at 12th and Jackson. Anyone care to joinh mi (sorry)?

jhlurie, I had a similar experience. I've eaten tons of so-called Szechuan food in my life, but I never had a real szechuan peppercorn experience like that until my first meal at Grand Sichuan International. There were about ten of us at the table studiously pointing out peppercorns to one another so we could all share in the experience. It was your basic drug party.

Once my brother-in-law called me to say he wanted to make some Thai curry but was having trouble following the instructions on the curry paste tub, which were as follows: "Direction: Red curry paste 50g stir and fry in coconut milk 2 cups (400g). Put meat 200g add vegetable: small egg plant. Taste and season as needed." "What's your problem?" I asked. Most curry paste has salt in it to begin with, so I would salt last. In general the order doesn't matter a whole lot, though. I usually toss in a bit of palm sugar near the beginning of cooking, and then wait and adjust the rest of the flavors at the end. I'll add some lime juice or tamarind, a bit of fish sauce, and then more palm sugar if I think it's needed. Doing this at the end doesn't affect the cooking either way, I don't think, but it gives me a better idea of what needs adjusting, because whatever it is, I just added it.

Steve, that is a better and tougher question, one which I will clumsily dodge. I don't want to read back over the whole thread, but I think it was you, Steve K, who argued that the paper would do well to have a single person under Consumers Unionesque restrictions, and I am swayed by this argument for the reasons outlined above: that ethical lapses mislead the public and hurt the paper's reputation, and ethical lapses are caused less by bad people and more by bad situations. On the other hand, I think these restrictions make the restaurant critic's job as annoying as a job can be when someone else is picking up your dinner tab. "I've got a great idea for a story!" the critic might say to himself. "A week in the kitchen at--damn, can't do THAT story." So I'm also swayed by the other side of the argument, which I'll attribute to Shaw, that says that critics fenced in by such tough standards produce neither good criticism nor good writing. And I do think there's a difference between restaurant criticism and Consumer Reports. I would call it extremely unethical if an editor at CR were to form an outside relationship with an auto executive. The public derives an important service from knowing that CR can't be bought. (Whether this is true is another issue, probably one that will come up. I believe CR has largely earned the public's trust, although not their restaurant reviews.) Is it necessary to hold a restaurant critic to the same standard? We've also drawn parallels with movie critics, and my favorite, Roger Ebert, provides a good example. Ebert loves to pal around with movie stars. He chats up studio execs. And at the same time, he makes no secret of his prejudices, and he does give negative, often scathingly negative, reviews ("I hated, hated, hated this movie," etc). You could argue that Ebert is an unusually ethical person (doubt it) or that freed from the traditional critic's restrictions, his reviews become paradoxically more valuable. I don't know the answer. Is that obvious enough?

Simon wrote: Gotham is Alfred. Anyway, here (and I'm essentially agreeing with you and Shaw) is a hard situation to imagine: I recommend you go to a restaurant that I know to be lousy just because the owner did me a favor or is my pal. Wouldn't it be more likely that I would convince myself that the lousy restaurant is good because the restaurateur is my friend, and then recommend a bad restaurant with the best of intentions? I think Shaw is right that some people are better at avoiding this kind of psychological misfire than others, but I'll bet every one of us thinks he is the good kind. We can't all be right, can we? Ethics guidelines aren't there to prevent bad people from doing bad things. They'll do that anyway. They're there to restrain certain impulses that lie in all of us (present company excepted, of course). That said, the idea that Shaw should have turned down the opportunity to do his Beard-nominated Gramercy Tavern series because he was a working restaurant critic is insane. Maybe it should probably disqualify him from then writing a traditional review of the place, but I doubt he had any interest in doing that anyway. As for me, I have a clear picture of what I want my reviews to accomplish. I review the kind of place that you, time-pressed food-obsessed reader, drive past and wonder whether it's worth laying out for lunch there. If you read my reviews regularly, you probably know that I like spicy food, like having my water glass full, am willing to try the weirdest thing on the menu so I can make a joke about it, and various other quirks. Add this in with the review and you'll decide whether to go or not. But my job is so easy. There's almost no chance that someone at one of these places is going to recognize me, and often they have such a dedicated neighborhood clientele that they wouldn't care if they did. And if someone decides to spring for dinner at one of my Neighborhood Deal joints, they're out maybe $30, max. The lead reviewer, who does the big-ticket restaurants, has a much more complicated task, one I don't envy her, and a mission much less well defined. Hey, Shaw, is your Last Days of Lespinasse piece still on fat-guy.com? I couldn't find it. That was a seriously great piece of restaurant criticism with all its prejudices hanging out.

Okay, another idea. I've had mixed results with homemade curry paste, which I gather is what you made. A bland paste can make a bland curry, and it's really hard (for me, at least) to tell how good the paste is until I use it. But one way to see about your paste quality is to make a country-style curry with it, one without coconut milk or sugar. Fry some paste in peanut oil, and thin it out with water and/or stock. Add some tamarind water, fish sauce, and vegetables, and eat it like a soup or over rice. If it's still not good, you've got a paste problem. Country-style curries are delicious anyway, so this is worth doing even (especially) if you know your paste is good.

I think at around six dollars you start getting into almost unlimited lunch choices. Five dollars is a tight squeeze. Under five, you can get two banh mi and eat hearty.

I'm still planning a sweep to try all of the Perfect-Circle recommended banh mi places, but I'm nurturing doubts that anything could be quite as good as the 88 pork. Is there anything else in town even half as good for twice the price?

I'd better jump in before this thread turns into six pages of chili manifestos. The times I've had a curry go unsalvageably awry, I overdid it on the sugar. Sugar tends to mellow and blend the other flavors, and it sounds like your curry ended up too mellow and too blended. But probably an excess of any of the flavoring ingredients would cause a similar problem. I've got to run to class, but I'll probably have more to say a bit later.

Yes, absolutely. I should have mentioned that while I delight in Warde's perceptive essay, it's deliberately overbroad, and crystal goblets are appropriate to some occasions and not others. And don't we all long for an occasional sip from the golden cup in all its metaphoric incarnations? (By which I mean, let me tell you about the great dessert plates we got recently.)

Oh, this thread should be interesting, especially since I've had the idea of replacing our flatware in the back of my mind for quite a while. First, though, a question. A little over a year ago, Laurie and I were at Harrods in London, the day before their big annual sale. While we were there we saw a set of the Oneida "Nimbus" line; it was on sale for UKP 125 (from 250, I think) for either a six- or eight-setting box, can't remember which. We stupidly decided not to buy it, not wanting to brave the crowds or lug a box of silverware back in our luggage. Then we returned to find that no one in the US had ever heard of the pattern. So, UK readers: is the Nimbus pattern generally available in the UK? It's one of the satin-handle patterns, which I tend to prefer. B Edulis--when you asked whether flatware should be "esthetically invisible" it reminded me of the famous essay, The Crystal Goblet, by Beatrice Warde. The essay is about typography. In it Warde argues that just as wine lovers prefer a neutral medium (i.e., a thin, clear, crystal goblet without excessive ornamentation) for their drink, readers are best served by a type and page design that calls as little attention to itself as possible. This has been a controversial topic in typography (and other applied design fields) for a very long time. The stark white plates of nouvelle cuisine owe as much to the ideal of the crystal goblet as they do to modern architecture or any of their other reputed inspirations. Anyway, now I'm wondering whether The Crystal Goblet gets dragged into conversations about actual wineglasses. I'll bet it does.

I think that is the same Hempler bacon and I know it's the same bacon-of-the-month club. The bacon from Bavarian was not especially smoky that I noticed. For smokiness I'm always mentally comparing with Nueske's, which is an extremely smoky bacon; you can blanch it to remove some of the smoke, but that would be missing the point.

Hey, don't knock Fred Meyer. Back in Portland, at least, they had the best croissants in town. I went to Bavarian Meats yesterday--what a great little shop. The guy before me bought some fifty bucks worth of various wursts, including their entire stock of leftover ends. The bacon is sliced to order and is dirt-cheap: I got half a pound for about $2. It fried up nicely for breakfast this morning with some pancakes, and I found it similar to Whole Foods bacon. I'd definitely buy it again, especially at that price (admittedly, not as cheap as FM, which I also intend to try). col klink, have you ever considered joining the Bacon-of-the-Month club? You sound like just their kind of member. I'd help you eat it.

I'm having one this week; the menu is simple but I don't think anyone will complain. Beef bourguignon (Côtes du Rhône) Egg noodles Roasted asparagus Chocolate soufflés (tawny port) some French cheeses I'm mixing it up with some things I know will be easy and great (the beef and the asparagus) with something that could fail spectacularly (the souffles, which is why I'm giving them a test run today).

Well, I'm sure there are as many Frances as there are travelers. We ate mostly in bistros and went unstuffed. At La Régalade, I got seconds on soup. There was also an apparently unlimited amount of pork terrine to be had. I guess these things are in the "eat more bread" category.

May I answer this with a link? It's something I discussed in my column in the paper last week: essentially, I was so moved by a simple dish at an Italian restaurant that I had to make it even though I was barely cooking at the time due to a hate-hate relationship with my kitchen.

The Franco-American restaurant, maybe. The few meals I've eaten in France were remarkable for their perfect portion size; I felt comfortably full after every meal in Paris except the one that followed a cup of that godawful Angelina hot chocolate. I've also found this true at La Côte Basque. At most restaurants I routinely leave a third of the plate uneaten. Obviously, one portion size does not fit all, and it doesn't seem fair for a restaurant to let you leave hungry. Any clever solutions, folks?

I have two observations about learning to cook. First, there is something of a conspiracy of cookbook authors and TV hosts whose goal is to make cooking look easy. It is easy, compared to some things, but it's not something you can accomplish in a week. It's more like learning to read or play an acoustic guitar or ride a bike--things that anyone could learn to do, but that take a little time before you feel proficient, and there's always some way to improve your technique. Second, as in all of those other things, you have to be prepared to make mistakes and throw out whole dishes because you screwed them up. And you have to be able to say at that point, "Okay, here's what went wrong, and here's what I'm going to do differently next time." Anticipating problems is a large part of being a good cook, and it's something you can only learn through practice and mistakes. If you're the kind of person who blames herself when things go wrong (and don't we all have that tendency to some extent?) learning to cook is going to require swallowing your pride along with sips from the tasting spoon. And thanks for the inspiring story, franklanguage.

I've been pretty happy with the Whole Foods meat case bacon, but then I'm pretty happy with Oscar Meyer, too. The best bacon I've had at home came from Nueske's, but even though we split the two-pound order two ways, it was frighteningly expensive, near $15 per pound. Anyone know if Nueske has plans to crack the Seattle market? I use pancetta as often as smoked bacon, and I particularly like the Boar's Head sliced to order at Admiral Thriftway (they may also have it at Delaurenti). A while back, Salumeria on Hudson cured their own pancetta and sold it cheap, but I don't think they do anymore.

Dude, if that's plagiarism, we're all going to be sentenced to eat fish sticks in the pokey. To give credit where credit is due, I was plagiarizing John Lennon, who wrote the beloved song that begins, "Imagine you're at a conveyor belt sushi joint."

So, did Jennifer Diaz win the Miss Railroad Days Festival Pageant or what?

I love that Taco Time was replaced by a real Mexican restaurant. I haven't been to this chain; I'm a little behind on my eating, but this should definitely go on my list.

Batgrrrl, klink may have said it was "Boy's Night Out," but I made clear that it was actually "Man Eating Fish Night". Hope that clears everything up. You're more than welcome to come next time. I haven't had steak tartare, but I've had the ethiopian raw beef dish described in the Stranger article, and it was very good. I'm willing to bet some wiseguy sushi chef has made a nigiri piece with a slice of raw beef tenderloin--I'd try it.

Well, what can I add to that? The essence of the omakase experience, I think, is that it's the only meal the average person can have where the chef prepares whatever he thinks is best, in front of you and directly before you eat it. None of this kitchen-full-of-cooks business where the chef might take a look at your plate and throw some parsley on it as it goes over the pass. Your sushi chef is cooking for you. And because the food is so simple, the chef has to be a sucker for quality, or it will show. I was hoping for a bit more of the crazy stuff like the scallop hamburger that klink got at Mashiko, but it was hard to fault anything at Shiki. My favorite thing was probably the river crab, six beautiful little creatures presented on a bed of puffed noodles. The crunch is a reminder of how closely insects and crustaceans are related. My favorite things at a sushi place are anything with fat. Fatty tuna, I love it. Mackerel is often derided as an "oily" fish--why is this an epithet? (I have this sneaking suspicion that there are people who would turn up their noise at a piece of mackerel and then go home and pop fish-oil pills "for their health".) But perhaps best of all was the fat in the heads of the deep-fried sweet shrimp. First there's the crunch of the shell, and then hot, juicy flesh with an actual squirt of fat. Thai cooks sometimes toss shrimp heads into a wok to release the fat and then cook the rest of the food in that fat. They know what they're doing. I'll also second klink's admiration for Shiki's flying fish roe. The only piece I was unsure of was the uni, or sea urchin roe, which has a delightful flavor and a texture that can only be described as pond scum. The funny thing is, just as I was thinking of myself as a Philistine for disliking the uni, I read Nancy's sushi article in today's Times, where she admits that it took her 20 years before she liked the stuff. Sushi is a food that exerts a strange pull on me. The first time I had it was at a restaurant in Vancouver a few years ago. I tried a couple of bites (it was a piece of tuna nigiri), smiled politely, and turned back to my shrimp tempura. The next day I realized that, as much as I had enjoyed the tempura, I was still thinking about the sushi. I hadn't liked it, and yet I wanted more. (It turned out to be quite a while before I had any more, but once I did, I was hooked.) Now when I cook fish at home, I often say to myself over my poached halibut steak or pan-roasted salmon, "This is good, but I think I would have enjoyed it more raw." James Peterson says the same thing in Fish & Shellfish: "Those who have tried raw seafood sometimes end up preferring it to cooked." klink was polite enough not to note that while he kept finding roe in his mouth, I kept finding mine on my plate, since I foolishly attempted to eat mine in two bites. The price before tip was about $46 each. I've only spent a little less than that the last couple of times I've been to Shiki, and I got much less food and no live stuff. I've long believed that the best way to get people to try novel foods is to put them in comfortable surroundings, and by this standard, Shiki would be a great place to take a sushi newbie. Chef Ken is an affable fellow, and the whole place has a casual, laid-back demeanor which belies its almost neurotic emphasis on fish quality.

In what sense are you using the term "tenure", Steve? It sounds like you're calling for something more like term limits. In academia, tenure means achieving a position from which it's difficult to be fired. The goal is academic freedom, the freedom to do unpopular research without the fear of losing your job. You're making the opposite argument, though, right? I'm both a restaurant critic and a food writer. So far I've avoided conflict of interest by never interviewing a chef for one of my food pieces whose restaurant I might review. (Although "might" is a weasel word.) The sad thing about food writing, maybe the sad thing about all journalism, is that sometimes you have to almost literally bite the hand that feeds you. I wonder if food writing gets into more hairy ethical issues than, say, theater reviews because of the power of food as a symbol. That is, when I go to a restaurant, someone has taken the time to prepare and serve me a meal, and they are going to take care of doing the dishes and thank me for coming to their establishment. If a friend did this for you, you would never consider writing something about how you went to Jill's house, and you liked her plates and napkins, but the chicken should have been served hotter and the dessert was a disaster. Okay, you might consider it. But in restaurant reviewing, you do have to do that, and it goes against all of our instincts about reciprocity. I think some reviewers are up to the task and some are not. I'm largely insulated from it at this point--I've done a couple of negative reviews but most often get to throw those out. The lead reviewer at our paper, like anywhere, has to eat at every new restaurant of note, and if it sucks, she has a responsibility to say so. I don't know if I'd have the stomach to carry that off for long. For the food pieces where, say, you have a private session with a chef and she makes you something special with a particular ingredient to try, it's even more of a bind. The food may stink, but that's no longer the point of the article, and there's even more of a personal connection than in the earlier scenario. I think we should demand that food journalists be impartial, but we should also understand that we're asking a lot, and in my own case, I think I'll only be able to get away with straddling the line between restaurant critic and food writer for so long, and eventually I will have to, like Fat Guy, move away from reviews and more toward restaurant "coverage" or just home cooking.