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We ate there quite some time ago. What I recall is that the longer-cooked dishes were wonderful - really delicious - but that the short-order stuff wasn't prepared with the care it might have been. Delicious wine; pleasant service. All in all, a happy evening.

Interesting that, per Bruni's Diner's Journal, the vindaloo is veal, not pork. Presumably to broaden its appeal in a neighborhood where many people don't eat pork. I remember visiting a kosher Chinese-style restaurant, oh, 25 years ago at which veal was the meat of choice as a pork stand-in.

And how were the cakes and cupcakes at Crumbs?

The "dry" cookies (as opposed to the little financiers, etc.) at Fauchon are first class. Park and 56th - the other two locations have closed.

Fat Guy being a lawyer, I don't know whether hearsay is allowed on E-Gullet, but a couple of friends ate at Kalustyan's a few days ago and were wildly enthusiastic. He's English; she's Indian; they live in Paris: in balance, a reliable mix.

Let's see. Sweat an onion (one of those nice wet ones from today's market) and a teeny-weeny bit of garlic in butter; add cubes of seasoned (perhaps with, inter alia, coriander seed) veal and stir for a minute or two - don't get much color on the meat; put in a bouquet of the mint and some parsley; a little white wine and let it reduce; stock to barely cover. When done, pull out the ugly old herbs and finish with a little cream and more freshly plucked mint. You'd want something sharp in there too if the wine doesn't balance it nicely, so perhaps a squirt of lemon juice. Let's call it a quick stew rather than a sauté, shall we? Serve with rice. Or use the mint with chopped raw tomatoes to dress spaghetti.

I bet choc peppermint would be dandy in a light sauté of veal.

And, just now, two big chickens and a little slab of pork belly from Flying Pigs Farm. I've been buying pork from them for quite some time (before they got a niche at Union Square), but these are my first chx from them. They certainly LOOK great: plump birds, these. Nothing exotic by way of breed, but well fed and given lots of space to peck around in the pasture.

Thanks for that useful post.

FatGuy, I think, is right here: the dishes are not intended to be thought-provoking so much as fun, a word the Bruni review did not contain. Wait; let me check on that . . . Nope, the word didn't appear, unlike "ellipticity," which my in-depth research ("define:ellipticity" on Google) suggests doesn't mean what I imagine Bruni meant it to mean: that Vongerichten is famous enough that elliptical references to his name are sufficient to identify him. Spell-checkers go only sew far. Although perhaps it was intended as a highly intellectual joke.

One stand at our little East 47th St Greenmarket had a few shishito peppers - the pale green, elongated ones that find their way into tempura and yakitori in Japan. Having been to Barcelona for the first time in April, I thought these would be good cooked like pimientos de Padron: fried (unbattered, unfloured) in olive oil until they blister, then served plain with salt as a snack. They worked well - very similar vegetably flavor and thin skin/flesh. Unlike the Padron peppers, none (at least in this batch) were hot - my experience with the Barcelonan variety was that about one in seven would surprise you. Also, a bunch of lovage to intensify the celery flavor of my braised goat (the meat also from the Greenmarket).

I wish I could be more specific about the Russian dressing, Phaelon56. It was creamy and vinegary and, my wife recalls, had finely diced cornichons in it.

We had a very good dinner there last week. Miniature radishes among the crudités - a friend who ran into these in Paris referred to them as "foetal" radishes. Floored by the tomato/onion salad - vivid variation on Russian dressing; good sliced tomatoes; thin, crisp, lightly battered onion rings; micro-basil. That'd make a good meal on its own. Perfectly cooked Texas wagyu steak - 1.5mm blackened outside, but evenly red within (thanks, I am told, to a charcoal-fired grill/oven that gets up to 1000 degrees F). It was enormous (for a restaurant that serves tempting appetizers, anyway), and we fed four with the 2/3 of it that was taken home (as an appetizer "salad" with roasted beets and roasted onions). Wonderful, wonderful six-dollar sides - sweet creamed corn (billed as corn pudding) with a little hit of acidity; roasted beets; peas and asparagus with ginger; and batter-fried potato slices ("frips" on the menu) were standouts. Appealing and varied dipping/shmearing sauces - superfluous, but amusing to eat on their own. My wife ordered wild salmon, which was simply too big a portion to remain interesting - but that's steakhouse expectations for you. Very happy with desserts, fun and delicious. I'd read that the "lemon meringue pie" was a deconstructed version, but this went even further than I'd imagined: even the meringue was divvied up into little piles, some soft, some crunchy, some raw. The crackling cherry tart sounded like rice krispies when it came to the table(snap, crackle . . .) and caused little harmless explosions in the mouth due to an ingredient they won't tell you about til afterward and the surprise of which I won't spoil here for the few e-gullet readers who don't already know. But the point for me is that it was a GOOD cherry tart, with an extraordinarily subtle almond ice cream on the side. And it introduced me to the Secret Ingredient, which I've surreptitiously begun snacking on. The menu is full of imagination and, on the basis of one meal, even the things that sound over the top are cannily devised. I'd certainly go back next time I felt like a restaurant steak. I can understand why some would find the decor Vegas-y, by the way, but not once the sun has set and the atmospheric blue up-lights set the ceiling aglow.

JC tells us that there are two Masamoto knifemakers in Tokyo, one at Sumida and the other at Tsukiji. Is this like Sabatier in the fragmented old days? Certainly, there were vast quality differences then (I speak of late 1960s, early 1970s Sabatiers). I ask for this reason: I ordered a western-shaped Masamoto from Korin a while ago and had to return it because, while the blade was quite good, the handle was like a junior high school shop project: projecting metal made it enormously uncomfortable to use. Are the Tsukiji Masamotos different/better? Or is it a completely different outfit - different steel, different shapes, different sharpening, etc.? I'll be in Tokyo for a few days in April, and this information will find a practical application. Thanks.

One of these multi-compartment silicone molds is ostensibly for mini-kougelhopfs (choose your own spelling of that one). Has anyone used a flexible mold for a yeast dough? When it rises in the oven, would it not distort the mold? Then again, madeleine batter rises too - though that's a flatter form. Any experiences here?

We were at Spice Market last week for an early dinner - even at 7 p.m. the place was beginning to jump, so reservations would probably be a good idea. Loved everything about it - the first post covers it all. Worth mentioning that the tables are spaced quite far apart; the chairs/sofas are very comfortable (and beautiful); and the service enthusiastic and professional. There's recorded music, but (at least early in the evening) its volume did not interfere with normal conversation. We tasted lots of things - not a dud among them, really. Both recipes and execution were simply grand. And SUCH FUN. Didn't strike me as very expensive either.

I'm pretty sure that Atelier does not serve lunch.

In junior high school, back in the 1960s, lunch was often supplemented by ice cream from the Bungalow Bar truck that was conveniently parked outside the school. When I graduated, I asked the ice cream man to sign my autograph book, which he kindly did. In a cramped, childish scrawl, he managed to fill the page with the words "Mike the Bungalo". This was one of the early signs of the fallibility of grown-ups.

Oh, yes, Fini - one among many restaurants that does an elaborate bollito misto presentation, and good too. But the place I was thinking of is more of a countryside/roadside operation - and EVERYBODY orders the bollito misto, though I think you can get arrosto misto too (roasted meats). I've looked it up: it is Ciccarelli, in a locality called Madonna di Dossobuono, 8km outside Verona. The guy who first took us there, probably 20 years ago or more, is no doubt horrified that it is now in the Michelin red guide - it even gets a "Bib Gourmand" icon to indicate good grub for a fair price. Gosh, I don't think I've been there in ten years!

Boiling lots of stuff makes for one of the world's best dinners: Bollito misto. And Steven's restaurant already exists outside Verona; I can't think of the name (obviously, it isn't as catchy as any of Steven's ideas), but it serves almost nothing but bollito misto, preceded by fresh egg pasta with three choices of sauce. What beautiful words they are: "And a little slice of head, sir?".

I think that in terms of one's Dining Pleasure, this whole question of losing flavor/gaining flavor is something of a red herring. My father-in-law, who was an engineer before he retired and became a full-time gardener and kibitzer, maintains that if you can smell something cooking it is losing valuable flavor molecules to the aether. He is probably right in theory. Anyway: part of the dish that gave rise to this whole thread - rare-poached as opposed to long-boiled beef - is the spoonful or two of broth that surrounds it on the plate. Poaching the beef in a liquid - Bittman's NY Times water, my Washington Post salted-water-with-aromatics, or stock - adds flavor to the liquid and makes that part of the dish better. If it is a zero-sum game (which I guess it is, again in theory), then the diner still gets 100 per cent. The full flavor of the beef, even after leeching out some of its goodness to the poaching medium, is attested to by the fact that, as I said in my Post story, most tasters preferred it without condiments, just with a moistening of broth, some great salt and pepper. And something I didn't say in the story was that people who really LIKE the taste of beef loved the standard version, while those who like beef probably for the caramelized crust and the salt (and the french fries - yum) preferred the spiced-wine-poached tenderloin, the recipe for which was axed at the last minute for want of space in that day's paper. Bittman is so right about tenderloin staying tender: this is true even after re-cooking the stuff. My leftovers went into a miroton (for which the seasoned-water broth was a more than adequate sauce base - another bonus), and even after reheating to ultra-well-done they remained fork-tender.