vengroff

Yes, it's in City Hall Park. I used it a few weeks ago when I was in NYC. The signal strength was a little low, but it worked.

Monica, Much as I hate to admit it, I've done something much like Emeril. Olive oil, crushed pistachios, and some herbs. Slather it on the lamb and then roast it.

Pistachio brittle, although it's not savory. You could crust a rack of lamb with them and roast it. You can also use them on a pork loin. The only problem with crusting is that you'll need to crush them first. If you have big beautiful whole pistachios, you probably want to use them that way and save crusting for cheaper pre-crushed ones.

No matter what I think of a restaurant, what really matters can always be boiled down to one simple question: would I choose to dine there again? Sure, there are shades and nuances, choices of appropriate occasion, and so on, but really, that's the ultimate question. It's payoff pitch with two out and two on in the bottom of the ninth. Nectar knocked it out of the park. Chef Jamison Blankenship and his staff work wonders in their small galley kitchen. Book now for what is going to undoubtedly become a very tough table to secure once all the reviews are in. Our party sampled four breads, three different appetizers, four mains, two wines, cheese, three desserts, French press coffee, herbal tea, and calvados. There was not a single miss. Everything was intelligently conceived and beautifully executed. Our starters ranged from $9-15; entrees were clustered in the mid twenties. The evening begins with a roving bread basket reminiscent of the Bouley bakery in its heyday. Offerings included raisin, a soft asiago cheese bread, and a beautifully textured pain de campagne. A crock of soft sweet butter topped with a sprinkling of sea salt allows guests to season their various breads as they see fit. For me, the transformational event of the evening came in the form of soft-shell crabs. I have been waiting a long time for a dish to convince me that the world of crabs should be viewed as anything more than Dungeness and other. This was the one. Three half-crabs, in a crisp-edged cloud of fluffy tempura, with two dipping sauces and a ginger pickle. The mustard oil dipping sauce put the crabs over the top. They were crisp, smooth, piquant and creamy all in a single bite. Rounding out the appetizers, the pea soup with speck was springtime in a bowl, from the color to the aroma, to the flavor. Foie gras was seared to just pink inside, and served with thin slices of fresh banana, each with a glassy coating of caramelized sugar on one side. A very nice twist on the fruit and foie motif. For main courses, we had meltingly-tender braised veal cheeks topped with subtly tea-smoked baby carrots on a butternut squash puree, diver scallops bisected and seared to a perfect golden brown along their cut edge then topped with an arrangement of haricots verts, nuts, and pea pods, a delightfully crispy-skinned filet of char with speck and lentils, and a New York strip, cut lengthwise to reveal a perfect medium-rare interior, then topped with morels. Along with the steak, Nectar served a side dish that I can only hope points the way for the future of foams--a cup of mashed potatoes topped with a horseradish espuma. The dish was beautifully presented, but with no, "look at me, I'm a foam, isn't that great" pretense. Instead, the espuma simply did what any component of any dish should do; it meshed with the flavors and textures of the other components to produce an enticing whole. The cheese course is a very carefully designed progression of five cheeses: a goat, a young triple cream, and aged hard cheese, a blue, and a runny stinky cheese. Within this framework, the cheeses are subject to change based on availability and market conditions. It's really a fantastic approach for a small restaurant that had neither the space nor the staff resources to devote to a full cheese cart. It shows that quality cheeses can be presented affordably and effectively. I only wish more restaurants realized this. Finally, the deserts. The favorite was one listed on the menu simply as oatmeal creme brulee with blueberries. Like the steak, it read as the menu item that was included out of necessity rather than choice. But as with the steak, there was something special lurking behind the banal description. As our server explained, the dish was deconstructed. The creme was presented as a cone, held in place with agar agar. The bruleed sugar was alongside it, in wafers that sandwiched fresh blueberries in a mini Napoleon. The wine list emphasizes careful selection over expansiveness. Around twenty whites and twenty reds are available, from wine producing regions all over the globe. Our waiter knew each and every one of them inside out. One really nice feature of the list is that everything is available by the glass, half-bottle, or bottle. This makes it very easy to tailor your wine selections to your particular preferences, course selections, and drinking habits. A selection of French pressed coffees and an assortment of teas are available to complete the evening. The front of the house staff, from restaurant director and Gordon Ramsay alumnus Jarad Slipp on down, were cordial, knowledgeable, and fluid. The small room was fully booked, but service remained smooth and effective, right down to escorting guests back past the kitchen to the restrooms. In addition to his duties in the front of the house, Slipp is also behind Nectar's pastry offerings, which makes for a very long day indeed.

Robert, Have you been to other place that Joe H really likes, or dislikes for that matter? That's probably the best way to judge whether your palates are in tune with one another. If they are, then I'm sure you will enjoy Maestro very much. Like Joe, I think Fabio is doing some really exceptional work, but you can read all about that above. If I understand you, you're asking whether driving all the way down from upstate New York, for the sole purpose of eating at Maestro, is worth it. I don't know precisely where your coming from, but it's got to be at least an eight hour drive, possibly a lot more, right? If it were me I would be hesitatant to put all my eggs in one basket. I have no reason to believe you will have anything short of a lovely meal at Maestro, but if you can spare the time, I'd recommend you take three or four days to explore the city. There are some really excellent dining options across the price spectrum. Browse though the threads in the forum and you will read all about them. If you plan your trip in this way, then if one of the four places you go has an off night, you can still come away with a satisfying return on your driving investment.

I woke up this morning with the urge for a diner breakfast. Nothing fancy at all, just a decent cup of joe, a couple of pancakes and a properly cooked over-easy egg. Maybe some bacon on the side. Served someplace I can sit at the counter and read the paper. Sure I could make it myself at home, almost certainly with better bacon, but that's not really the point. I want the diner experience. I don't get this particular urge very often, but when I do, it's incurable. I haven't had it since I moved to DC and I now I realize that I have no idea where to go to satisfy it. Please help me out. No fancy brunch places please, just diners or dinerish establishments.

I had a look through the website yesterday. It failed miserably on Safari. Checking the code, it has pretty standard cross-browser issues. The Javascipt is probably more complicated than it really needs to be. If Trotter's web programmers are decent they can easily fix it in an hour or two.

They are across the street from the Senate. In that market, patriotism sells.

Autocrat coffee syrup has been a staple in Rhode Island for years. It's most commonly mixed into milk or used to make a coffee cabinet. Out-of-staters commonly substitute a p for the t in the name when describing it.

In the Fressermobile, no doubt.

First, by way of introduction, I'm not an ecomomist and I rarely read the academic literature in the area. After reading the article, I couldn't help but wonder why this isn't just a special case of a much broader general theory that I'm sure other economists have come up with by now. The theory, as I would state it, is that the spectrum of choice available to economic agents is a high-dimensional non-linear space, as is the space of economic outcomes those choices map to. Each agent has their own view of how this space maps to utility. Standard mathematical, statistical and computational methods that scientists and engineers have used for years can be applied to analyzing the form of these utility functions, e.g. the nature of gradients and the shapes of isosurfaces. This can be done either theoretically or by analyzing survey data. My guess is that what you would find is that small private concerns, subject only to the desires of their owners, will have all sorts of unusually shaped utility functions. Larger concerns, especially those with broad based or public ownership, will necessarily orient themselves towards utility functions that are almost perfectly linear in profitability and all but ignore other variables.. The simple reason is that money is the most fungable asset available, and can be most easily transformed into the personal utilities that match the preferences of a diverse set of owners. That's why we have money in the first place, isn't it? Sorry that this has nothing really to do with restaurants of food writers per se. I was just surprised to learn that this is the kind of work that Ivy League economists do.

Yo hjs. I look forward to hearing about the Bethesda Jaleo. I've also only ever been downtown.

You're an insider invento, so I'm sure you know the business much better than I do, but I've seen some massive PR campaigns in New York. 66, for example, hosted a long series of pre-opening parties for the stretch-limo crowd. If JGV needs to make a big PR splash when he opens a new place, then who doesn't?

Woohoo! I'm going this weekend with a friend who's visiting from Seattle.

Tony could get himself in quite easily. Any of us could. It's the getting out that's the tough part.

Ok everyone, dig out the article and your fine-tooth combs. What's Holly got?

I'm not 100% sure about the sizes; 8 was really just a guess, because the large pour seems very large indeed. Perhaps it's only 7, but I doubt it's less than that.

There is surprisingly uniform opinion about this, both from critics and diners. The top three tables, in no particular order other than alphabetical, are Citronelle Laboratorio Galileo Maestro

I always thought the whole Greenwood thing was just the straw that broke the camel's back. In isolation, of course it's a joke. But many of Clark's other complaints are less silly than the sundae one, don't you think?

A Tempura batter, perhaps?

I'm all over the San Marzanos. I use frozen peas and corn, but rarely any other vegetables. I also buy frozen stocks more often than not. I like to melt some frozen stock in a saucepan, bring it just to a simmer, and then toss in some frozen peas. It's a zero effort side dish that tastes quite good. Finally, and I'm fully expecting to be asked to turn in my eGullet badge and spatula for this one, tubes of factory-made cookie dough have been known to spontaneously appear in my refrigerator.

Is the question of tipping on wine cost really any different than the question of tipping on food cost? Suppose customer A orders a green salad and bowl of soup. Customer B at the next table orders foie gras with black truffles, and a lobster, and had a bill five times as large. When the check comes, A leaves a $5 tip and goes home. B sees this and thinks, "that server didn't work any harder to serve my food, why should I leave any more than $5?" It seems to me that if you are unwilling to tip on wine cost, you can only be consistent if you are also unwilling to tip on food cost. But that's not how the current system works.

Blue Ribbon Bakery in NYC offers three pour sizes, and is much closer to home for Tommy. I would estimate the pours are about 4, 6, and 8 oz.

My personal livelyhood has never depended on a tip from wine sales, but I would never consider not tipping on wine. In America, the tipping assumption is woven into the social fabric of the restaurant/customer relationship. Beyond that, it is codified in tax and employment law. Until and unless a restaurant specifically advertizes that they are charging more than they otherwise would, but paying servers at a rate commensurate with what they would make based on lower prices plus tips, I will continue to tip on both food and wine. The amount I will tip varies somewhat with the quality of the service, but I would almost never not tip. I know the argument that wine service is different than food service is going to come up in this thread, so I'll go ahead and start it. Some say that opening and pouring a $20 bottle of wine is no more work than opening an pouring a $200 bottle, and thus deserves no more of a tip. Suppose the same argument were applied to food service, and by extension the tipping that goes along with it. Opening a tin of caviar and scooping it into a little bowl is less work than making a decent hamburger. Does that mean that caviar which costs a restaurant $50 wholesale should be sold for $57, just as $3 of ingredients are sold as a $10 burger and fries? There are several reasons why this is not the case, and most of them apply as much to wine as to food, if not more. First of all, stocking expensive raw ingredients, like stocking fine wine, ties up capital, which costs money. A good cellar ties up more capital, for a longer time, then a kitchen stocked with even the finest fresh ingredients. Second, there is necessarily a certain loss percentage associated with any ingredient or wine. Arguably, restaurants have even less control over whether a bottle of wine comes to them corked than they do over spoilage of fresh kitchen ingredients. If your bottle is corked, the restaurant takes it back and opens another one for you. They pay for this by spreading the cost of the bad bottle over all their wine customers. Finally, as the quality of ingredients or wine goes up, people expect more luxurious service and presentation. Just as the caviar comes with little mother of pearl spoons and a little crystal bowl set in crushed ice, the '85 Chateaux Margaux comes with Reidel glasses and decanters. So, if you are willing to tip on food on a percentage basis, you should be willing to tip on wine on a percentage basis too. Restaurants operate on a percentage profit basis, not on cost of materials plus fixed fee basis. That's the way the accounting is done, that's the way the taxing is done, and that's the way tipping is done. Is there conceivably a better overal system? Perhaps. But is there a path from where we are to such a system? I sincerely doubt it.

It was my understanding, which doesn't necessarily mean it's correct, that junmai refers to the fact that the sake is not diluted with extra alchohol. Ginjo and diaginjo refer to the level of polish on the rice, diagingo is better, i.e. more polished. You can get ginjo that is either junmai, or not; same with diaginjo. The best possible combination is junmai-diaginjo. Someone please correct me if I am wrong. I don't drink sake enough to know brand names, but I always look for junmai-daiginjo, which should be served cold. To answer jhulrie's question, it is available in the US. I had some last night.