markk

Because an amuse is a gift from the chef... ← I think you will find that the customer pays for the "gift" and if the customer doesn't like it why eat it. Hardly rude just common sense ← I've seen this go two ways. If the chef sends a "gift" of something that you just don't eat, you can simply not eat it, and leave it uneaten, and you can explain to the person clearing it later that you don't eat that item (so as not to be rude to the chef), or, if you don't eat it but want something else (assuming that the chef meant to send something you would enjoy), you can explain that you don't eat whatever it is when it is served. (Both of these assume a non-political scenario.)

Yeah, so much for food safety, raw chickens touching raw beef. In this country, we sell food in plastic for a reason.

Wow. What a great dinner and what a great post! Thanks. And of course Happy Birthday !!

I recently started a thread about Michy's after three stupendous meals there. I'd certainly consider it worth a cab there and back. It's also a very happening place (not necessarily my own style, but the food's spectacular) so you probably won't even miss South Beach.

Is taking cabs an option?

Does tuna salad help at all? You can buy the tuna now in a foil bag, so you don't need the can opener, and you can dice celerly quietly, and even make a salad to serve it over. Or if you're out that day and pick up a roasted chicken, you could make a nice chicken salad, even with the chicken at room temperature if you leave it out? (Apologies if picking up the chicken implies thinking ahead.) Also, you didn't specify if cooking something while you can (when the baby's awake) was an option, only because I was thinking that if you had a flank steak grilled or broiled at some point, it's something you can eat cold with olive oil and lemon and not have to make noise reheating. Again, very sorry if that implies thinking ahead; I was more thinking of stuff that would keep for several days and be good cold.

I hear they're all the rage among sophisticated high school and college students in North Carolina.

And is is true that several hotels, including the Concord, have been completely modernized and refurbised, and now have casinos, and are waiting for gambling to be legalized before they reopen? (We once stayed at a hotel in Monticello, don't remember the name. The room was so small, you had to go outside to change your mind.)

There are a few things i don't understand in Hoboken and this touches upon one of them... Who is getting pre-made sandwiches at places like Garden of Eden, or worse: Subway, Quiznos, etc, when we have some great real delis such as Fiore's, Vito's, M&P Biancomano, and to a lesser extent, Lisa's. All of these places make their own fresh Mozarella (mutz) daily and get some of the best bread the area has to offer from the local brick oven places. It's not even a matter of cost, as a sandwich at Quiznos would run you just about, if not more, than a similar sandwich at Vito's, M&P, etc. (maybe Fiore's is a bit more). ← There's a much broader issue than the one you raised. Who, in Northern NJ, if not America, with a car, is going to dinner at Chili's or Applebees, when they're not in an airport and limited to those places? Quality wise, I think you need to put Lisa's much higher on your list, by the way, and Fiore's a lot lower.

So, what have we to offer the world, besides McDonalds and a few handy basics like corn, tomatoes, the peanut and potatoes? e one believe. To the original question, I'd say that American cusisne isn't so much a "copy" of the cuisines that people brought with them when they came here, but a distillation of it. In the same way that the current generation of Americans includes a fascinating and endless mix of DNA (more so than most countries, where the immigrant population has always primarily been from one specific country or region), because the premise on which America was founded is unlike that of any other country to begin with. Can you find one or two dishes that may be original to the USA and not descended from any other cusine? Maybe. But I can live with the concept that American cuisine is primarily a distillation. To the second question of what we have to offer the world, I'm always very surprised when chefs I know from other countries want to come here to sample the food. I hope they're coming for the variety. When they want to come to New York, I hope it's so that they can sample the tremendous array of choices, and that they're not coming in hopes of finding some "American national dish" that they think is a secret only to be discovered here.

Mmmm. That whole meal looks incredible.

Extra Crispy. I was waiting for somebody to mention KFC. Extra Crispy does it for me. They sometimes offer a large bucket of dark meat for $5, and I've been known to get it in extra crispy and eat the whole thing.

I've never been to the CG location, but comparing it to the NYC branch, I think you had a pretty representative experience. If you couldn't get more water, that's a stike against any restaurant, and of course service varies by who's waiting on you, but in re-reading your description of the whole meal, that's exactly what I would have expected going in.

I don't think that John's proposed answer is argumentative either. Or less than "classy" as long as it's said nicely.

It may have come from France. As I was explaining to a newly cholesterol-conscious friend, in France, there seems to be an unwritten law that you must consume at least 2-4 eggs a day, at least two of them runny. I've had them there served poached, in soup (Oeufs en meurette), definitely on salad (Salade Lyonnaise), and one more that I thought of when I started this post but can't remember. (In the case of what I told my friend, these are in addition to the eggs in the other things in France that you must consume daily which contain fully cooked eggs ; e.g., but not limited to, savoury tarts, desserts (such as pain perdu), and most verything else they cook.) Runny oeufs, they're not just for petit déjeuner anymore.

To inject a little humor here, I'm not the most organized shopper, and even on those few times I make a list, I forget to bring it. And like some other people I know, I don't always pay close attention to what I already have. So occasionally I'll see something and think "I should stock up on that" and when I get home and put them away, realize "oh, I guess I'll put them with the 20 cans I already have." And because I don't always put things in the same place, I might have a stock of them in various places. Who knew I had a lifetime supply of organic maple and onion baked beans? Will you look at that!

Well, I think that if the woman is giving a morals lecture and canceling her reservation because of a food they serve, that there's something more going on there, like she's an activist. So I think that John's brilliant one sentence reply should be given, and then of course if there's an argument, the restaurant could say, "I've canceled your reservation, thanks for calling, goodbye". As far as checking out the menu online after a reservation has been made, I could see where that could legitmately happen in other cases (though I don't think this was one of them). As far as the effectiveness of the phone calls, even if there's an employee or manager taking the calls who doesn't know about foie gras, and who gets convinced by the caller that it's a bad thing, I'm not sure what they're supposed to do. Tell the restaurant they're going to quit unless they stop serving it? I don't think at this point that any chef is going to be talked out of serving foie gras if he's serving it now. And having said that, now I'm thinking that the employee's reply might even include "That's your choice, madame; I hope you don't intend to legislate away our other customers' freedom of choice. Anyway, I've cancelled your reservation, and thanks for letting us know. (Enjoy the veal or chicken wherever you do wind up dining!)"

There's just two of us, and I don't ever plan meals in advance. If I find myself one day with a craving for something I can make, I'll make it, and if it needs ingredients I can't get that day, I'll plan on getting them and cooking it in the short term future. If I know that my schedule will take me near a certain store where there's always a certain item that I can't get anywhere else or is especially good there, I'll plan a dinner around that. The only other exception is that if I see that my supermarket's having a big sale on something the next week, which will mean that there will be a guaranteed fresh batch of them and lots to choose from (rib roasts, for example, or jumbo lobsters), I'll plan on having that one night. Otherwise, my dinners are entirely driven by what looks good when I shop, and what I'm craving that day.

Bravo! What a brilliant suggestion.

Interestingly, there's not a bad piece of advice on this thread. Reading it and pondering it, I had some thoughts. Regarding selection, I think that it's not possible for a store to have a trimmed selection and please everybody. Why I say that is that for sure a store could have a limited selection, and if the wine buyer for the store shared my own (eclectic) tastes, it'd be a great store for me, but probably not for another person, and a store in which another person loved every selection might well not have wines that appeal to me. And in fact, I've simply never found any one store (in the tri-state NYC area) that I could limit myself to. So in my travels around the region (I always stop in wine stores wherever I go, though perhaps not every small one), I always look, always ask questions, and always buy trial bottles of the wines I think will do for me. (The best I've ever found is that I know that certain stores will usually have whites I'll like, and others reds.) But then I call what may actually be my "favorite" wine store, which is actually located within a supermarket, and I fax them over the names and info on the wines I've liked from my forays that I want cases of, and they track them down, which is sometimes not easy, and order them and call me when they come in. I hadn't quite realized it, but their willingness to do this probably makes them my favorite. Otherwise, to choose a favorite, I'd probably have to go back and figure what store over the years has had the most wines I've subsequently gotten cases of it, and there wouldn't be a clear-cut winner. So in the sprit of this thread, my advice to the original poster is to be very willing to take special orders. And for sure, carry Spiegelau glasses. As far as meats and cheeses, to my jaded thinking, it's unlikely that you'll carry what I like, but heck, I'd be thrilled if you even came close with the wines. The chances that any store could become my one-stop-shopping for wine, cheese, and meat are too slim for me, and personally, I'd advise you to concentrate on just one thing, but that's just one man's opinion for sure.

Wow. Some years ago I was planning a trip to Burgundy (the Cote d'Or), and since I used to shop in a lot of the 'leading' wine stores and knew a lot of the owners (don't get me wrong, I wasn't a big customer, but they had all at one time or another "sold" me on wines), so I decided to ask them where to eat in the region they all claimed to know so well. I heard every excuse in the book, except for one small store in New York, where the owner wrote down the names of several great restaurants there, plus who to ask for, and what to have (and he was right - the meals were great as was the reception) - maybe that's not the same at all, maybe they're not required to know restaurants, but I'm envious that you had winery visits arranged. The best I ever did at a store was #'s 5 and 6.

Is there or has there ever been any one shop that's given you no's 1-3? You don't have to name it;

Well, I have nothing actually to complain about it, and the day I was asking questions at the fish counter, the guy certainly was friendly and helpful. I was out of town when they opened, and by the time I got there, a lot of the stuff that I guess hadn't sold was still in the cases. The pastries that I bought were very good, and as I'm on that block all the time, I will keep stopping in.

Those are great points. And while I'm not a student looking for a $10 wine, I still would like to find a delicious one from an as-yet undiscovered winery or region - and they're out there. So even at my age, if a store is condescending to me, I'll stop going there. The other great point made was to get to know what your customers like, even if they don't know how to describe it. If they really like all the Loire valley whites you've recommended, and tell you that they just don't like the tropical California chardonnays you've had them try, that should tell you what you should be steering them to. There was a huge store near me with one great salesperson, who really knew his wines and his customers. One day when I arrived, he was describing to a customer, a "big", "oakey" chardonnay with lush tropical fruit, and as he saw me behind him listening, he turned to me and said "you would of course absolutely hate it." (The guy got all concerned that somebody might hate the wine he was supposed to like, and then we explained it. I asked him if he likes liver and tongue and he said "yuck", and we explained that he shouldn't expect to like the wines I like either, which he understood.) So paying attention to the feedback you get and steering customers to the wines they will probably enjoy is an important part of the job. There's another store owner that always, no matter how many times I'd describe what I like and dislike in a wine, and no matter how many bottles I'd report back on not liking, would sell me another wine that he should have know I wouldn't like (that's if he had tasted it). But I discussed this with the guy mentioned above in this post, who told me "I know him, and you know, he just doesn't taste the difference from one wine to another; and he just inherited that store from his father. But I stopped going there. If you have a love of wine, that's a good start.

I swear I will find the original of this and scan and post it... When I was in college, the "upscale" restaurant at the Ramada said in its newspaper ad "Gourmet and semi-gourmet cuisine"