russ parsons

i don't know about the rest of you, but it seems to me that the obsession with what one recipe writer used to call "tender-crisp" vegetables is waning. there is a good scientific reason for thoroughly cooking vegetables (though not, perhaps, as thoroughly as they may have been cooked in the past). cooking softens the cell walls, allowing their contents to mingle and creating more complex flavors and aromas. i think the whole thing with crisp vegetables was an overreaction to years of having had bad cooks boil vegetables for hours (though if you've never had green beans boiled with hamhocks for that long, you're in for a treat).

i've got to say that hte most amazing zinfandel i had last year was made by hartford court. it was their "dina's Vineyard", a russian river valley wine. supposedly 100-year-old vines, very small production. extremely elegant with a structure more like a old-style bordeaux ... very well-knit, round tannins, not at all over-the-top, little bit of chocolate, leather, blueberry, you know the drill. if anyone can find any of this stuff, be sure to try it. and i have to give all credit to my buddy rod smith, a wonderful wine writer, who turned me on to it; i'd never even heard of hte winery before.

the chef worked with lee hefter at spago before opening his own place. he is very interested in japanese fusion cuisine. i am much more interested in traditional alsatian cuisine, which is much harder to find around here. if you are amused by fusion, those dishes are certainly worth a try. for myself, i'm much more likely to order tarte flambee and choucroute.

i haven't been in several years, but the salones are among hte best food events ever. a couple pieces of advice: 1) pace yourself. when you walk into a hall and find there are a) 6 sources of traditional lardo; b) a half-dozen parmigiano producers offering everything from 5-year-old stagionato to red cow to black label; c) an entire porchetta being carved for sandwiches with a glass of valpolicella for $3; d) a sicilian guy hand-making cannoli to order with sheep's milk ricotta ... well, you get the picture. allow several days. 2) along with 1) don't plan on dinner. well, you can. maybe a walk for some bollito misto. 3) give yourself plenty of time and, as our current governor used to say: "stay hungry".

it does seem to me that a critical part of this argument has been side-stepped, and that is the issue of what the intentions of the spinoff restaurants are. using the case of thomas, because he seems to be the one people are talking about most, if he was trying to reproduce TFL all across america, that would inevitably mean a diminishment of standards. that kind of food simply can't be replicated without a staff that is equally highly trained (and obsessed). but in the case of bouchon, which is food that is very replicable, then it seems that the reverse is true: rather than the diminishment of the restaurant, it could mean the raising of the standards for the community by educating the public as to what good food is all about (not necessarily haute cuisine).

this would be a good time to go. the chef is from alsace and those dishes, in particular, are quite wonderful.

i had a quick dinner there a couple of weeks ago (sorry melkor, et al, i was in town for a conference and my only opening was the night i was driving up ... next time). i had the charcuterie plate and a vegetable salad, the brandade beignets and orange pots de creme. i drank a glass of a melon de bourgogne, a rose from costiere de nimes and something else i no longer recall. the charcuterie plate was good, everything else was very good to wonderful. the vegetable salad, which i hadn't had before, was, in fact, very close to FL food, perfect ingredients, subtly combined, artfully arranged. the brandade balls ... what can i say? i order them every time i go, whether i'm hungry or not. the pots de creme were absolutely perfect, silky with a very subtle orange flavor. made up for all the student food i ate for the rest of the week.

i did a piece on them last year. if you get a good one, i think it's a decent value. there will be people who will insist that they are not as good as the french-grown t. magnatum. they are right, of course. and if you're one of those people who insist that only the very best will do and damn the price, then you should certainly avoid them. for the rest of us, i find they give a decent flavor for a relatively little amount of money.

mimi, you have a book out? (seriously, i've looked at it and it's very good; congratulations ... and i did review the bialy eaters, which was incredible). i don't mean to harp, but i do think that this is an incredibly important point that is at the heart of so much of what is wrong with food these days. sometimes this gets dismissed as more airy-fairy california cuisine stuff and that's a shame. it's important to recognize what travels and what doesn't (and what the costs of that travel are). wasabi, a dried root, ground into a paste, will ship easily. even fish, as long as it is handled right, will ship fairly easily. a great strawberry, which is the very definition of fragility, will not. if you insist on buying strawberries when they are going to have to be shipped, there will be a farmer willing to grow them. and they will be something like the current favorite Camarosa--a strawberry-like fruit that will bend forks. if you want, you could probably have them air-freighted, but even that probably wouldn't be enough to protect a great strawberry (i once had a farmer next-day me some fraises des boises ... they came in an elaborately protected series of boxes ... and they still had been smashed to jam). personally, i am quite happy to pass up maine lobster most of the time (why not when I've got dungeness crab?). but even when i do get it, i would never dream of assuming that it would give me the same experience as eating it at a dockside place up north. by the same token, i may eat bialies and bagels in southern california, but it is always with the knowledge that they are probably not going to be as good as the ones you get on your block in manhattan.

without wishing to belabor the point, the two questions are inextricable. what i was trying to say is that any strawberry that is able to withstand transnational shipping is almost by definition a strawberry that is not worth eating. therefore, the problem is not california, but the rest of the country, which is not pulling its weight in growing strawberries for their local markets.

mimi, while i have to concede that most californians would agree with your assessment (we'd probably blame prop 13), i have to ask why in the world you would epect a strawberry that had been trucked from salinas to manhattan to be anything but tasteless?

i just went to one in montecito. took her pork chops ala charcutierre (spelling woefully off, probably). pork chops baked in tomato sauce with cornichons and capers. very good.

if i were amanda, i would take it as high praise that the worst thing anyone could say about me was that i wasn't as good as mfk fisher. (though, personally, i think mfk fisher is horribly overrated--i've used the line before, but she's the anais nin of food. she wrote some very good things, but a lot of very bad things, too)

kids! kids! if y ou can't play nice you're going to have to go to your rooms. seriously, one of the things that i find interesting about the dried pasta tastings most other pubs have done (see related thread on pamela's board), is that they taste the pasta by itself. this seems to me to be a very american way of doing it--focusing on one ingredient without regard for the context in which you'd normally use it. to repeat from the other thread: taste a great pasta with a sauce, and it makes the sauce taste better. that's why i don't think $2 a pound for a good pasta is a needless splurge (look at the per-dish cost, rather than the per-ingredient cost). on the other hand, if you have actually tried them side-by-side and didn't notice a difference, what the heck?

yup, that's the one. i have only eaten at udupi once and liked it. but i really love woodlands. check out the breads, especially. they make a channa batura that is like a giant fried balloon stuffed with a little bit (in proportion) of stewed chickpeas. also the various dosas are amazing. the paper dosa is at least 18 inches across, rolled and filled with another vegetarian stew. i went the first time on the recommendation of a couple of very gourmet indians who happened to be sitting next to us at renu nakorn. figured they must have good taste.

all good suggestions. let me add a couple (based on almost 20 years working downtown?!): on olvera street, the best place to eat is la luz del dia, but only if you get the carnitas with homemade tortillas and, if they have it, the nopalita salad. in little tokyo, i really like suehiro for noodles and tokyo coffee shop food. really nice grilled mackeral with fixings. also, if it's hot, the soba noodles with everything are really good. almost next door is mr. ramen, which has very good broth and the benefit of being made by (apparently) a japanese rastafarian. for sushi: imai, next to the japanese american museum is very good. lately, i've been going to sushi gen a lot. very good, but a little pricey (and way crowded). i've also had good sushi at hama. at the south end of little tokyo is mandarin deli, which seems to me to be sliding a bit. i think i'd go to the one in chinatown instead. and also pho 99 in the same building. and don't miss dim sum at empress pavilion. may not always be the absolute best (knowledgeable people differ), but it is always very good and it is downtown. for mexican: la colima on sunset used to be pretty good (haven't eaten there in a couple of years, though). or, of course, the grand central market. i like the gorditas at annas. roast to go is also good. man, i'm going to have to go in to the office more often.

hi pamela! let me chime in with an interesting experience i had when working on a story on dried pastas. i was tasting a whole range, from very artisanal to commercial and, to tell the truth, except for a few very bad, cardboardy ones, it was pretty much like tasting different shades of beige. at the last minute, i noticed that on two types of pasta, i wasn't getting much difference in the wheat flavor, but they tasted like there was much more (and better) oil drizzled on them. i think it's important to remember that hte primary role of pasta is to convey flavor, not to be a dominant flavor on its own. the two best were rustichella and my first choice, latini. the runners up were distant.

a friend asked a question i couldn't answer: panko are usually described as japanese bread crumbs. but what constitutes japanese bread? do they come from the (usually pretty terrible) baguettes i find at japanese groceries? or do they come from something else? is the bread distinctly japanese, or is it the process by which the crumbs are produced that is japanese?

hate to say it, but at the santa monica market this morning, not a fig in sight. i'm afraid the window may have passed.

i wonder if this is a chain? my favorite indian restaurant in my neighborhood is called woodlands and it's a vegetarian place, too. unbelievable paper dosas.

fig season is winding down down in southern california, though there are still some in the market. but last week i was up near uc davis at the wolfskill germplasm repository (MUCH more fun than it sounds) and they tried us out on about a dozen different figs from their collection. it was surprising how different they can be. my favorite was one called verte that had a light green peel but opened to a dark red, cooked-raspberry jam interior. great flavor. there was also a gorgeous fig called panache that was green and yellow vertical stripes on the skin and a pale raspberry interior. it also was very good. i was strangely unmoved by the violette du bordeaux, which i had always heard was the apogee of figdom. i think growing conditions might have had something to do with it. one of my favorite recipes from "french fry" is a fig tart: simple crust, spread it with raspberry jam. split figs over top and then sprinkle with sugar you've ground in the food processor with a little lavender. bake it just until the crust browns and the figs begin to glaze. maybe i'll do that this weekend.

and it does have the advantage of quite nice guest rooms next door, even with a sauna (not to be recommended for the honeymoon, probably).

on the other hand, it sure drained that wine "lake" pretty danged quick.

it was working on a story on this topic many years ago that actually got me interested in writing about cooking and science. i had interviewed the usual suspects (chefs) and the answers were so all over the place i realized they had no earthly idea. one guy swore the best way was to slip a piece of raw potato under the ball of his foot. i am not making this up. so i decided to find out what it was that created it, and that got me onto a couple of scientists (as someone pointed out, it's the disrupting of the cells ... technically the gases [a kind of sulfur] are not enclosed in the cells, but are created when the chemicals within the cells combine when the cells are ruptured ... if you want more, go buy "french fry"). interestingly, there is still some disagreement among scientists whether this reaction occurs only in the eye or also in the upper sinus. i have very sensitive eyes (and, presumably, sinuses) and have tried everything short of going back to contacts and nothing works very well. i keep my knives sharp and i cut quickly.

three words: strauss family creamery. their yogurt is amazing (and, amazingly, in trader joe's)