jordyn

There was an article in the New York Times magazine a while back about the surge in allergies over recent years. I don't think it's available for free on the 'Net anymore, though. Someone could probably read it and summarize the main topics of the article, however.

Admittedly, I didn't have much vindaloo, and it seemed to have the sort of heat that would build bite after bite, so I may have understated the experience.

Wilfrid: I don't have a particularly high threshold for spiciness, and I found the "medium" spiced dish to be easy to consume and the "very spicy" vindaloo to be palatable. Phaal, on the other hand, would probably have presented a challenge...

Being an American, I know precious little about the metric system, but I'm fairly certain that grams are only a measure of weight, not volume. Ounces, on the other hand...

Fat Guy: The idea behind figuring out the percentage is to see what proportion of fat there is to the total volume. So, this is a two step process. First, you figure out the amount of fat. You take the volume of the various substances you are adding and multiply by their fat percentage. So, if you have 100 units of 36% fat cream, 36 of those units are fat, right? The skim milk has no fat, so it's easy. To simplify our example, we'll say we also have 100 units of skim milk, yielding zero units of fat for that part, and 36 total units of fat in the mixture. Then we divide this by the total volume of both parts of the mixture. In this case it's 200. 36/200 = .18, so in this hypothetical example our mix would be 18% fat. When one of your elements is skim milk, figuring out how much more skim milk you need than ccream is pretty easy. Take your starting percentage (36%), divide by your finishing percentage (4%), and subtract one. 36/4 = 9. Subtract one to get eight and you've got the number of units of skim milk you need to add to the cream. [Edited for slightly better flow. Now we know why I don't write math books...]

I used a spreadsheet, just like you suggested. But, the general formula is: Fm = ((Fc*Vc) + (Fs+Vs))/(Vc+Vs) Where: Fm, Fc and Fs are percentage fat in the mixture, cream and skim milk and Vc and Vs are the volume of cream and skim milk

1 unit heavy cream plus 8 units skim milk yields 4% fat in the mixture. Fat Guy: Do you want to know much of the other types of cream to add to skim milk to acheive 4% as well--I can't quite tell by your question...

This is a fair point, but is smoking the "object of the bar"? Perhaps it is, for some people. Most people would say that a bar is a place to have a drink rather than a place to smoke, though, and smoking is one of a number of secondary activities such as talking with friends, dancing badly, or finding someone to hook up with. California's experience seems to indicate that removing smoking from bars is not overly disruptive to business despite industry's predictions (New York's smoking ban in restaurants is also evidence on this point). If it is possible to enforce a safety regulation without disrupting business significantly, this seems like a reasonable approach. However, it's possible that for some limited number of places and people, smoking is an integral part of their bar experience. To that end, I think it's reasonable to continue to allow smoking in some circumstances. I'm not sure what these are, but something like Miss J's licensing example seems reasonable, especially if licensing requires installation of effective ventilation systems.

Even accepting this hypothesis (I'm not familiar enough with the body of research to comment one way or the other--a clear increase in risk seems to be indicated, but it may be limited to those with certain risk factors), I don't think it's an adequate response. If there were a simple way of making a chemical factory or a foundry demonstrably safer, few would suggest that we ought to let the occassional worker get burned up by molten iron just because employers should be allowed to do whatever they want.

I think it's offered with lamb, chicken, veggies and one more type of meat (goat??).

As one of the so far unnamed eGulleters participating in the meal that Bux and Cabrales have so thoroughly described, I'll add a few quick comments: - Like Cabrales, I found the tomato dish to be the best. The tomatoes were very good, and while the citrus didn't add anything to the dish, it did not significantly detract, either. The fromage blanc sorbet was interesting, and the slick creaminess of it was a pleasant foil to the acidity and tartness of some of the tomatoes. - I didn't particularly mind the spicing of the branzini. It was fairly intense (although far from being uncomfortable), but in a manner that complemented the flavor of the fish fairly well. There was a distinct clarity to both the fish and the spicing, resulting in two clear notes on the palate simultaneously. Ultimately, I found this dish to be more interesting than the shrimp, which was fine but not more visually interesting than tasty. Additionally, the dish seemed to fit the theme of the restaurant fairly well. - I did not enjoy the halibut or the croquette. I found the halibut to be too hard and the croquette to be too soft and mushy, and neither exhibited a paritcularly good fish flavor. The creamy risotto and rich veal stock tasted quite a bit better to me than the halibut itself. - The peaches at the bottom of the white chocolate cup and the chocolate inside the cocoa ball were fairly good, but these were tasty finds that I had to struggle to find amidst a plate of mediocrity. Sad. Why are good desserts at the mid-to-upper range restaurants so hard to find?

Just a few quick comments: The lamb Madras was quite good. The curry was fairly sweet, with a note of spiciness that was supposed to be "medium", but that I found relatively mild. The meat itself seemed to be quite good. Paratha was average. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing particularly good either. Service was, as Matt indicated, abyssmal. We actually seemed to do better than some of the people around us, but this was a small consolation.

I'll continue to suggest the same three restaurants that I have every time this question pops up: I'd probably go with Masa's or Charles Nob Hill, with Gary Danko as another good option. Are you going to be eating by yourself or with other people? Edited to add: I think the service is weird at Gary Danko. Professional yes, good yes, but also weird yes. It's sort of robotic and overly scripted.

Interesting that some effort may have been made to classify capybara as kosher. I'm led to believe that the Catholics in Venezuela categorize them as "fish" so that they can consumed during Lent. Perhaps for a time there were not a lot of tasty food options in the region.

Felonious: Do a Google search. The EPA, WHO, American Lung Association and other groups have shown that secondhand smoke leads to lung cancer; lung diseases such as bronchitis and asthma; heart disease; and other ailments. I'm not familiar with any studies that look specifically at bartenders, but since levels of secondhand smoke are much higher in many bars than in a typical workplace where the studies were conducted, I can't imagine how you'd argue that the results were magically not applicable. I also can't possibly imagine that absent some sort of short-lived calamity that the level of particulates and poisons in the air in New York City ever gets within a thousand times that which you see in a smoky New York bar. Glenn: If people were running around spraying Anthrax on other people "just for fun", would you see no governmental interest there, either?

Glenn: If you accept the premise that secondhand smoke kills other people, the answer to your question becomes fairly obvious. Having said that, I think Bloomberg's current proposal may take things too far. I don't smoke. I hate smoke. But a lot of people do smoke, and they probably ought to have some public place where they can do so. That being said, if it's every restaurant/bar in the City, the "you can work somewhere else" argument begins to lose its luster, so perhaps some sort of middle ground is appropriate. I'm not sure how to get there without some silly licensing scheme, though.

They're not exactly analogous, but it's a matter of degree. Is smoking more akin to drinking or to drunk driving? I'm not sure, but I suspect it's a little like both and not exactly like either. According to my dictionary, analogies work by inferring that because things are alike in one respect, they will be alike in others. Analogies don't mean exactly identical situations.

Ever hear of drunk drivers?

Hrm. I went back and tried to re-write the sentence to make the "a non-eGulleter" a clear separate individual as opposed to a description of Matt Zito. But I couldn't come up with anything. I'll hope the subsequent clarifications will do. (It would be...odd...for me to randomly mention the names of non eGullet dining companions, but I do appreciate how I may have caused some confusion in this case.)

Another week, another Blue Hill report. Matt Zito, a non eGulleter, and I had dinner at Blue Hill last night. We went without our eGullet logo polo shirts so as not to tip off the staff as to our celebrity status, so we experienced a "normal" meal. Here are the dishes I was served as part of the tasting menu. Matt required the kitchen to prepare him a special vegetarian tasting menu 1) Amuse. Shot of cucumber soup. Clear cucumber flavor, very smooth, but without the complexity of flavor that I enjoyed from the corn soup during my last visit. 2) Tuna. Raw or very rare tuna over a green gazpacho composed of various summer vegetables. This was nice in that the gazpacho presented a fairly bright initial flavor on the tongue, which gradually tailed off to the taste of the tuna. Some sea salt was also present, which served to bind the two flavors together. 3) Sea bass over corn and lobster. This was nice. A strong, crisp corn flavor was the overwhelming feature of the dish, although the lobster lent the corn a degree of richness. The fish itself was quite nice, with an extremely soft texture that actually provided less resistance while chewing than the corn did. 4) Berkshire pork loin. Extremely simply presented, this was the best pork I've had. I had sampled the Berkshire pork on my previous trip to Blue Hill as well as at March a few months back; both of those specimins were quite good, but pale in comparison to the wonderful piece of pork loin I sampled last night. Presented fairly rare, the pork was intensely flavorfull, somewhat sweet, a little bit spicy (perhaps through the addition of pepper, although there was none evident) and extremely tender. A piece of meat like this needs no accompaniment. 5) Peaches with rose water and peach granite. As Wilfrid described. I found it more flavorful than he did, apparently. Nothing special, but it cleansed the palate. 6) Some sort of chocolate cake with chocolate sorbet and vanilla ice cream (I'm actually not 100% sure whether the vanilla was actually ice cream). This was underwhelming. The cake itself was a bit mushy, and lacked a really resonant flavor; the cold accompaniments were fairly good. The one interesting part of the cake was that it had a crunchy bottom that seemed to be made of a dense sugar-wafer like substance (imagine wheat puff cereal crushed into a pie crust-like layer). Overall, I was happy with the food. Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be enough of it. This is a complaint I virtually never raise as I don't have a particularly hearty appetite, but I could have eaten more when we got done, and felt that another course would have been about right in terms of delivering an appropriate amount of food. Those with big appetites would probably have been sorely disappointed.

Billy: I don't mean to suggest that they're not interested in making money, and the specific people you mention are good enough at their jobs that they may be able to make more money doing what they do than anything else. As a general rule, though, a person with $5 million could probably make a lot more money spending it on something other than a fancy restaurant. They may want to make some sort of return, but making money is probably less of a motivation than an interest in owning a restaurant as a goal in and of itself. That's just a guess of mine, although it echoes some thoughts of Anthony Bourdain's in Kitchen Confidential.

Billy D: It seems clear to me that (possibly with rare exceptions), fine dining restauranteurs are not in it for the money. You're probably correct that a successful high end restaurant produces more total profit than a mass market place, but the investment is so much higher that the ROI on the cheap restaurant is almost certainly many times higher than it is for the expensive one. As far as business propositions go, ROI is generally a more important consideration than the actual magnitude of the profit.

I think I remember reading some time ago that Lespinasse lost a lot of money, but was subsidized by the St. Regis. At top end places, wine probably goes a long way to explaining how they might make money. I'm not particularly serious about wine, but at most of the meals I've had at the very high end lately, my wine cost is significantly greater than the cost of food. People that order $1,000 or $10,000 bottles generate more revenue than a table (or even an entire restaurant!) worth of food orders. [Edited to correct a grammatical error.]

Can any hot dog cooked in any kind of water really be better than a Gray's dog? How can you get it all crispy and a teeny bit charred if it's cooked in aromatic water?

Wilfrid: Usually it's 75 cents. The location on 8th and 36th has them available for 50 cents, or at least they did as of about a week ago. For some time now, the 50 cent sign has had a "last days" sign on it, but who knows whether or not that is simply gimmickry.