vengroff

We went to Ella's again. This time we were four adults plus an almost-two-year-old. We went four for four on the pizzas: four cheese; mushroom, pepperoni, fontina, and roast garlic; olives, parmesan, and basil; and carmelized onion, gorganzola, and rosemary. The toppings are all good, but the crust is the key. The thing is, no matter what you put on top, the crust is so excellent that the pizza can't help being good. You pick up a slice and in doesn't wilt at all. The bottom is crisp and lightly charred, but not so much that there is any burned taste. Salads were acceptable, but the pizza is the star. If you are interested in seeing how the pies are created, you can get a booth in the back across from the open kitchen and the brick oven. The rest of the dining room is pleasant enough, but perhaps a bit brighter than necessary at the dinner time hour.

It may not be traditional, but one of the first things I'm going to try to recreate once I have a working kitchen is Michel Richard's black bean and duck confit chili. It's like a cross between chili and cassoulet.

Really, I'm sure there are competent people out there in this business. I'm absolutely sure there are. But depsite several recommendations for the people I am using, they have turned out to be universally horrible. It seems they may be a victim of their own success. One of the subcontractors told me they called him yesterday and said they have 17 new kitchens that they have promised to start work on by the end of August. They asked him how many he (already working 70 hour weeks for them) could take on. Sounds like they need to retrain some of their top salespeople to do plumbing and electrical work so they can catch up before they sell any more. I've decided to start double checking and QA'ing everything they do in advance (you know, kind of like what the general contractor is paid to do). So I called the appliance manager and asked him to fax me a copy of the distributer's invoice for the appliances. All I have in my files is the original quote he gave us back in March. I compared the two, and curiously enough, one of the model numbers did not match up. They got us a 30" oven instead of the 27" model specified in the quote. They were nice enough not to charge extra, but that's little consolation when the oven won't fit in the cabinet. This invoice is dated March 14. The appliances have been sitting in the warehouse awaiting delivery to my house for months. Yet in all this time, nobody bothered to cross check and make sure they were the right items. Nobody looked at the invoice long enough to think it was strange that we would be getting a 27" cabinet, a 27" microwave, a 27" warming drawer, and a 30" oven. Add a few more weeks delay now while they order the proper one. At least I caught it before they delivered it and it went onto one of the piles of unusable junk that now almost touch the ceilings in my living room and dining room.

Is this made with whole kernels, or just the milk from the corn?

Vodka Collins Yum. Chilled dungeness crab with aioli. A crab cocktail is another option, but probably not after the wasabi in the previous course. Composed salad of diced veggies, featuring e.g. corn kernels, tomato, green beans and others you listed. Sounds good to me. Whatever looks good at the market and doesn't end up in the salad. Soft polenta, with slices of your pork roast piled on top. Blueberry cobbler and/or homemade peach ice cream.

Anyone have an idea as to why this happened so quickly? It sounds to me like whatever the food and service problems may have been, the financial problems must have been worse. If you're not fiscally and emotionally prepared to bleed cash for a year, you should probably not be thinking of opening a restaurant. Two weeks must be some kind of record. It's not even enough time for Tom Sietsema to have gotten a review in the pipeline before they closed.

Yesterday the big cheese from the general contractor came out to see how his designer had managed to fail to order, or mis-order 12 of the 20 cabinetry components. While he was here, we went over some more of the plans, and discovered that the electricians failed to install one of the circuits they were supposed to have put in. The timing was perfect, because the drywall on the 14 holes they cut in the walls and ceilings of the apartment downstairs was finally patched, dry, sanded and ready to paint. Now they are down there cutting them out again. My tenant is going to love this. All the electrical work was supposed to be done in April before the tenant moved in. It didn't start until July. I was just down there to see the carnage and guess what else I saw? The copper water supply line (see #7 above) was never reconnected to the new valve. It's just dangling from the ceiling.

I would think this would put you in the driver's seat. What kind of concessions is the contractor giving you since he blew the completion date? Well, I still owe him a couple of big checks that I have not written. Once everything is properly installed, we can worry about that. The frustration and waste of time and effort is almost worse than the money, and there's no way to get that back.

I stopped in recently for a couple of glasses of wine to try to wash away thoughts of the disaster that my kitchen remodeling project has become. They are in the middle of a summer rosé event, and it seemed like the perfect time for one. A week or so ago I had a Spanish rosé that was something like a cheap chardonnay mixed with rasberry kool-ade powder. I counted on John to have something that would turn me back on to pink wine. I had a Montesierra Rose from Somontano, which did the trick--a glass of smooth easy-drinking light fruit. I decided to stay for dinner at the bar, and had a nice dish of crisp-skinned duck leg confit atop wilting frisee. It proves that the French still have a place in modern American cuisine. It also made me appreciate how well frisee can work as a real vegetable, as opposed to just another salad green. I finished with a light crisp key lime cheesecake with coconut cream. After my experience at the bar, I'm looking forward to going back for a full meal at Firefly soon. There are a lot of interesting looking bottles on the wine list too. For the price range, it's nice to see something other than the standard big-name producers.

The cabinets are now stacked in our living room, dining room, and kitchen. Several are missing, and several others are incorrect. We are expecting a minimum of 3 weeks will be needed to get the replacements. Our original contract specified substantial completion of the project by June 28 (of this year). Did I metion my in-laws are coming for a one week visit tomorrow, and my wife is in Europe on a business trip this week?

Braise and serve with canellini beans.

The cabinets were delivered this morning and will be installed starting tomorrow. I did a quick inventory and cross referenced them with the plans. In the design there are two 15" base cabinets with the same model number. On the delivery invoice, there is one of that model number and one of a very different model number. I'm afraid to open the boxes and look inside. I am also crossing my fingers that the overlay panels for the fronts of the refrigerator and dishwasher were seperated from the cabinets and will be delivered with the appliances. They didn't come with the cabinets as I had expected they would. I'm a little concerned because the invoice that came with the cabinets is directly from the cabinet maker, and doesn't mention any such panels. The contractor says he will go through everything and try to sort it out when he comes to install the cabinets tomorrow.

Perhaps some silicone would help fill it out. People are always complaining about rubbery tasting chicken breasts. Could that be the reason?

I'm sorry I don't have any information for you, but I am curious: what sort of cheese do you make? I've never considered making cheese myself, but now you've got me interested.

Sounds like a great meal, Mark. You mentioned you have been there several times for lunch. Did you get a chance to try the signature frog leg dish?

Looks like imagestation has gone strict also, and perhaps taken it too far. This would seem to imply that even if you create a public photo album there, you are violating the user agreement if you point people to it from your home page, or anywhere else. Why make it public then?

This link tells me that I am forbidden from seeing Al's butt. Repaste the address, and hit enter. It works that way for me.

Click here to see Al's butt. If that doesn't work, paste http://images.ofoto.com/photos445/4/69/24/80/10/0/10802469405_0_ALB.jpg into your browser. Ofoto doesn't like to serve inline images to other sites. Imagestation will do it for the preview-sized images, but not the full-sized ones. Edit: Once you have the image in your cache, it magically shows up in the posts above.

I would think that many restaurants housed in hotels do some sort of brunch as part of the terms of their lease. Big-city hotels love to be able to offer getaway packages with extras like brunch thrown in to help fill rooms on weekends. You have to be a little careful, though, as far as who is cooking the brunches. It may not be the same staff who are usually there for dinner. It's nice to hear that Bistro Bis takes things more seriously than that.

Here is a another discussion, with some pics.

This is great, the versions I've had also include cubed beets. I've also had it with tuna mixed in. Beats your ordinary potato salad any day of the week.

I like them stuffed with riccotta seasoned with nutmeg, frito misto battered, then deep fried to a crunchy golden brown. Like all deep-fried foods, they are best eaten within just a minute or two of being cooked.

I had a fantastic dinner at Citronelle the other night. Michel's tasting menu was creative and very well executed. Mark's accompanying wines were very well selected. The service was exceptional, and the room, despite being one level below ground, is warm and inviting. What got me more than anything though--and it took me a good twenty-four hours to put my finger on it--was that this place is just pure fun. The food is whimsical, but never contrived or forced. On the night we were there, we were treated to an egg leitmotif. That's not to say that every other course was a quiche or souffle of some kind. Instead, quite the opposite was the case. Eggs and egg references popped up on our plates in the strangest places. The meal began with a caviar egg. In this case, only the shell of the egg was used. It was cut longitudinally, using a spinning blade that I can only imagine was orginally designed for delicate surgery. The halves of the egg shell was then fashioned into a treasure chest, complete with a crisp potato handle, and filled with caviar and aspic. Later, we were treated to what appeared to be a poached egg atop asparagus. The egg, however, was made from mozzarella and filled with egg yolk and caviar. Shaved parmesan completed the dish. It was served with a Vincent Delaport Sancerre. Finally, for dessert, we had an egg "breakfast," an assortment that looked like it came straight from a short-order cook's griddle. A fried egg had an apricot yolk, and a soft cooked passion fruit and merengue egg was presented in the shell. French toast was pound cake, bacon was a crisp wafer, and had browns were cubes of cinnamon apples with rasberry sauce in place of ketchup. The only thing missing was the orange juice. Mark looked to Hungary instead of Florida and found us a 95 Oremus 5 Puttanyos Tokaji, which we were very happy with. In between the egg courses, we had a number of outstanding dishes. My favorite was a chili made of duck confit and black beans. I've had chili made from beef, turkey, venison, and wild boar, and I've heard legends of people making it from armadillo, but I think they all missed the boat; duck is meat the use. The chili was further complemented by a hunk of sauteed foie gras and a Riesling Grand Cru "Geisberg" Domaine Keintzier 1999. Other highlights included halibut, served with a crown of crisp fried herbs and presented atop a bed of corn polenta. I admit being a bit confused when I saw "corn polenta" on the menu; I would not have expected polenta to be made from anything else. In this case, though, the soft polenta was heavily infused with the sweet aroma of fresh corn. I was floored. The other dish that really did it for me was the wagyu beef with potato and mushrooms. The dish consisted of medium-rare American Kobe beef strip loin with sauce grande-mere accompanied by thick-cut pomme frites twice fried in clarified butter and a pile of sauteed golden chanterelles. A '96 Clos du Marquis, our only red wine of the night, drank very well with the beef. Those were the highlights, which is not to say that any of the other dishes were less than excellent. I rarely walk away from an long tasting menu without thinking there was at least one course that fell flat. Here, none did. Artichoke hearts in a cool cucumber consomme were refreshing and very well complemented by a Hopler Guner Veltliner. Romaine salad sent ordinary caesers back home to Baja. Cherry clafouti, always a favorite of mine, burst with fresh fruit. Chocolate-covered grapes were a wonderful treat to share in the taxi on the way home. The Michel menu we had is $120. As an anniversary treat, we were very happy with it. There is also a shorter tasting menu for $100, and three or four course options can be had for $75 or $90.

I have no idea what to expect either. But I think the idea of the rising star category is that these are some of the chefs who may be showing up at the $300 Beard events in years to come. In this case, one of them (Fabio Trabocci) already is.

StarChefs is sponsoring a series of Rising Stars Revue events around the country to recognize hot up and coming chefs. The DC edition will be at Hotel Monoco on September 16. The chefs are Morou of Signatures, Fabio Trabocchi of Maestro, John Wabeck of Firefly, Koji Terano of Sushi Ko, Jamie Leeds of 15 ria and Cliff Wharton of TenPenh, Pastry Chef Steve Klc of Zaytinya, Jaleo and Café Atlantico and Host Chef Jay Comfort of Poste. You can read more about it here. Tickets are for sale for $60 here. For those in the restaurant business, there will also be a career seminar associated with the event.