Deacon

Take a good map with you if you plan a meal at L'Etoile. I tried to get there on my last trip through Madison. All the streets around the Capitol look exactly alike. I must have circled around for forty-five minutes, never getting any closer, it seemed. Finally I gave up and went to a Mexican restaurant.

Another positive vote for the Georgian Room in the Four Seasons Olympic. Highly recommended by my sister and her husband when they were in Seattle. VERY attentive service--almost to the point of being too much. Campagne also very good!

They'd have to fly me to French Laundry. That's a last meal for you. Or, alternately, I'd ask for obscure foods that would take a long time to collect: hummingbird tongues, orlolans, etc. Or go to "Hole in One" in Manhattan. A hundred different and obscure, bizarre single-malt scotches and other whiskeys. Drink yourself to death before they get a chance to execute you. Send the bill to the governor. Or I'd ask to be flown to Charlie Trotter's, where they keep bringing you food until you tell them to stop. Meal lasts forever = no execution. (Until they bring the firing squad INTO Charlie Trotter's and finish me off right there. . . .)

. . . your server waits until the precise moment your mouth is full and then asks you "Is everything OK?"

Hey buddy, this is the food forum, not the sex forum. We is all highly ed-u-cated round here. We don't want nunna that "sex talk." Haul that kinda talk over to the "seven barely legal virgins and a mule" type of site. OTOH, it was probably the "eGullet" title that got you thinking of oral sex. My mistake. Carry on.

Yes, Heineken. Stop laughing. Have you actually HAD one? Lately? No, everything by Samuel Smith's is. Now if we could only get them to put the stuff in brown bottles instead of clear ones. *cough*choke* [heavysarcasm] No, Schaefer is. [/heavysarcasm] Seriously, I wouldn't wash my feet in Schaefer. But I think the president of the company does, just before it's put in the can. The best beer brewed in America is my beloved Anchor Steam.

What a detailed and verbose riposte.

My favorite recipe that includes bourbon begins with "first, pour two ounces of bourbon into the cook."

That's a somewhat qualified suggestion. I haven't eaten extensively in Pittsburgh. But the Steelhead Grill wasn't bad.

Um . . . the Steelhead Grill at the Marriott City Center?

Sounds like Glengarry Glen Ross: the best salesmen get the best leads so they sell more so they're the best salesmen so they get the best leads. . . .

No, but I am curious as to why and how Peter Luger's buyers get first pick at the meat wholesalers. I hope Shaw will enlighten us. He's written authoritatively on his own site about the subject. Perhaps a fair way to compare the steaks at Peter Luger, Sparks, and Smith & Wollensky would be to let Sparks or S & W get first pick for a period of six months to a year. Then, everything else being even, we'd see if it was the buyer's eye for meat, the way it's aged, or something else.

Oh, I see. Well, allllrighty then. Yes, I fully agree. If Peter Luger always gets first choice at the source (there's the conspiracy theory of the week) and if they age in a certain formulaic way--yes, by all means, those things are quantifiable. Definitely. And when Shaw's Peter Luger nightmare is filmed, the part of Peter Luger will be played by Kevin Spacey. Keyser Soze's Steakhouse--you'll take it our way and like it! No wonder nobody else can compete.

Well, you tried to make a good analogy, anyway. . . . Okay, that's far enough. I can only hold my tongue up to a point, any further and the top of my head's going to come off. Matters of taste are not scientific absolutes. I don't want to rehash Nina's "subjectivity" thread again, but as I said, I can only tolerate this line for so long. You can't argue about the height of the Chrysler Building or the Empire State, but you can validly argue about which building you "like better." The speed of light is an absolute, the "best" (whatever that means to you) steakhouse in NYC (or anywhere) isn't. If it were, the Management might as well close down the site right now for further input. Why not just argue about which end to crack an egg on? (That's from Gulliver's Travels, BTW.) Wars have probably been started for less. The whole reason there's a site is that taste varies. I can't "prove" to you that what I see when I see "blue" is the same as what you see. For all I know, you might look and see what I call "red." But as long as your vision and mine are consistent over time, we can still have a discussion about art.

Well? Tell us about it, Simon.

hollywood: It was a great trip. I'm still paying for it. We tried to go to Preservation Hall, but I was feeling a bit ill that evening. That place is like the Black Hole of Calcutta even when you're feeling at your best; I couldn't take it. Would've passed out. I also considered Brigtsen's, as long as we could've gone on the St. Charles Ave Streetcar. Much more ambient than a cab. Roll tide.

Amen to that comment. That's #1: 1) I tried to cook something relatively simple, the easiest recipe in the book Cooking for Bachelors, or something like that. Dijon chicken. It came out of the oven looking exactly the same way it did when it went into the oven. Part raw, part Michelin (the tire, not the guide). Followed by ice cream that had been in the freezer too long and had become crystalized. This is why I let other people do the cooking. 2)Aunt Sarah's lasagna, brought to the table with great ceremony. It had a curious chewiness to it. We found a few seconds later, before we had all poisoned ourselves, that the sheets of paper that had separated the slices of cheese (from the plastic pouch) had been left on and baked in. 3) Aunt Sarah's famous saline soup. Originally French onion. At least she remembered to take the paper off this time. 4) Weekend trip to the beach at a friend's house. The entire contents of a huge vat, drained and then emptied on to newpaper on the kitchen table: crabs, shrimp, crawfish, boiled potatoes and old corn-on-the-cob, together in a huge pile, heads and tails and shell still attached, and the victim diners left to fend for themselves. We still refer to the "infamous seafood incident."

I've often said that there should be a smiley for :sarcasm: just for situations like this. Maybe the Ubermeisters will consider adding one someday.

Wouldn't work. During the Group Hug he'd just brazenly walk outside and have a smoke.

(howls, HOWLS of laughter at this) Nina apparently didn't get the joke. Maybe she didn't read back far enough. And whoever came up with that analogy of the symphony conductor being like a chef is a frigging moron. Waitaminute. . . .

That's why some people prefer the James Beard House.

Seven pages??!?? My God, some people here are long-winded. (I include myself, BTW.) When all the white noise is filtered out, I've gotten only one really good piece of information from this thread: take the hype about Rockenwagner with one more grain of salt than you would have before, if you're ever in a position to eat there. Perhaps ol' Doc Revenue would've said the same thing, if he'd calmed down before posting. But that's the whole purpose of a rant. People rage even at innocent bystanders, if they get angry enough. I'm interested, for the sake of a comparison, in hearing Dr. Revenue's review of some place that he DOES like. Of course, that might start another ugly melee. . . . Strange Days, Morrison Hotel, L.A. Woman -- classic Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine -- why bother?

Ok, fair enough. I think I have an even better analogy. How about: You've paid to see a certain symphony conducted by a certain conductor. On the night you were to attend, the conductor is not conducting. The management assures you that the symphony will be composed of the same musicians as always, playing their usual program, but with no one at the podium. Are you justified in thinking that perhaps the experience you came for will not be provided? And until Hunter S. Thompson learns how to cook, no one's replacing Bourdain. . . .

Let me just thumb my nose at the anti-Plotnicki crusade long enough to say: If I buy a ticket to see Bruce Springsteen, I want to see Bruce Springsteen, not Bruce Springsteen's band.

Well, yes. When you're burning blue-hot on an issue, you're not in the mood for reasoned discourse. You want to be reassured that you were right. Drrevenue has come here, I believe, only for a sympathetic ear. Bad choice of site for that. He sounds not only angry but personally hurt--and he says the chef was considered a friend, so that may explain it. I once had a similar experience--not dealing with a restaurant, but with another "service industry." There were friendship involvements complicating my story, as well. I was treated like a cockroach by the staff of that facility, and while the "event" was still fresh in my mind, I wasn't interested in rational discourse, either. I basically was looking to be told, "You're absolutely right, Deacon, the people at [that place] were total assholes. World-class turds. You're totally right." So I can sympathize with drrevenue. I can only repeat the idea that when the chef said that he was "disappointed," what he meant was that he was "disappointed" that a trusted friend and customer did not have a good night at his restaurant. Not knowing anything about drrevenue or Rockenwagner, I can only go on what I've heard here. Perhaps drrevenue will be able to analyze the subject dispassionately in time. Perhaps he will return to Rockenwagner in six months, or a year--perhaps never. But LA has a thousand restaurants. You can afford to burn your bridges behind you when there are a hundred other bridges across the river.