ballast_regime

suvir: you should just hit the dog tracks. a lot. then you treat all of us to trotter's for a second and third night and maybe trio too. awbrig: even if i don't convert to the trotter camp (of which i'm already a closeted member), i'll probably jump ship and join the awbrig brigade. anyone who takes me charlie trotter's is immortalized in my book. and a sidenote: i don't think absolutely fabulous goes over well anywhere.

suvir: that's way too precious, "suvirneers." classic.

i'm just learning to master that oblique british form of "humour," wry self-deprecation; after that crash course, my syllabus has me scheduled to acquire the subtleties of benny hill and then "absolutely fabulous."

wait until he sees the life-sized monstrosity of a kansan artifact that is me, then you'll see him shiver.

mid-january it is; i'm there. i'll even bring cute, kansas-themed gifts for all of you (yes, you too, suvir), like the "evolution is wrong" mudflaps that are so common here, or "the wizard of ozzie" spinoff mugs that MTV has licensed for "the osbournes."

all seriousness: you say the word, awbrig, i'm there tomorrow.

awbrig: you see, i'm a poor, starving college student, and i'm just as liable to take you up on your offer because, remember, i'm just as capricious as the next guy or girl, i.e., if you have reservations this weekend, i'd be in chicago this weekend with a lobster bib around my neck, ready to eat. but what if, during the eleventh hour of our meal, i repent and become a sudden convert to the trotter religion? would all be forgiven? would i ascend to his and your gustatory heaven? "i see the light. . ."

steve: i've tried bad stage make-up to convince those restaurant-operating folks that i am indeed older than i am, but it usually just ends up with me being cast as an extra in "les miserables." if only i could get a 401k right now. . .

awbrig: damn, i was expecting a showdown in egullet's corral, but, if we must be friends, so be it.

my best friend's brother's beer was pretty damned awful. a do-it-yourselfer, this lovable and mathematically-gifted hippie (think don knotts aged 40 years younger, his brain reduced to having only five THC-enabled neurons left to do all his mental work) decided that his homebrew recipe was probably wrong and put six times the amount of recommended yeast. after opening one of the bottles, his "beer" fizzed estactic and vesuvius-like for minutes until there was only a teaspoon of liquid left at the bottom. and what a liquid it was. it tasted of coffee crossed with orbitz. mmm.

marcus: thanks for the comments. charlie trotter's is definitely a great restaurant. steve: thank you for the encouragement; too often i have been a voyeur here at egullet, reading everyone's posts daily. problem is, i'm a 24-year-old with limited income and time who is obsessed with food. i find that all too often i am not taken seriously enough at restaurants--primarily due to my age--and so i have this complex about not necessarily wanting to state my mind, given that most foodies are twice my age and have twice, maybe even ten, times my experience with restaurants and dining out (this is something i have only been doing obsessively [and i mean fanatically] for approximately four years of my life, which is just enough time to read nearly a thousand books on the subject and over-extend my resources to experience all things culinary); given time, i'll probably have more confidence, but i feel like i'm always learning, thankfully, even when i disagree with someone. i know awbrig said that my opinion should be scrapped, maybe respectably so, but even when i don't necessarily agree with what someone's saying in a post, i still tend to take it seriously, learn from it. i don't know if i can share my two cents about other restaurants--and there are a lot i have feelings about--but in time. . . i will. in the mean time. . . i'll just keep reading, and posting occasionally.

201: woody allen is a perfect example; he's my favorite filmmaker simply because he has quantitatively made more films that i like than any other person, even though i HATE 10 of his movies. i respect charlie trotter, and he is certainly one of my favorite chefs. but nothing's perfect.

i've been to charlie trotter's a total of over a dozen times; probably not as many as a lot of people, but enough to draw general conclusions about the restaurant and its cuisine. moreover, i have gone with as little as three people and as many as five, meaning that we did the round-robin strategy of trying each other's food, and there was always someone present who would order each of the tasting menus (i myself usually opt for an all-seafood menu, which has always tended to be very, very inconsistent [the kitchen would often just plop fish down in the place of a meat, using a lot of the same elements (e.g., a red wine reduction or a chicken liver puree) that probably weren't best designed for the type of fish they were using], which is understandable since trotter's kitchen does way more covers per night than, say, gagnaire's, and this is a case where there isn't strength in [customer] numbers). i would say that his meat and game dishes aren't nearly as good as any of those in the top restaurants (re: french) in new york, and are relatively boring. again, this might just be personal taste intervening, so one should take my opinion with a grain, if not salt lick-sized, of salt. yes, some of his dishes were inedible; i received on average two dishes per visit that i wouldn't touch (and these were primarily the improvised dishes the kitchen made), which is very conceivable. i would think that a restaurant that does as many covers as trotter's (approximately 90) per night wouldn't be as successful with improvisational cuisine as one that does, say, 35 per night. in my book, whenever my time and money's involved, if something's inedible (and incidentally expensive), i would call it "crap." this doesn't mean that i'm panning trotter's overall, as others have pointed out. in this case, i think the sum is greater than its constituent parts, thankfully, as long as one is willing to disregard the bad to mediocre dishes that come out of the kitchen. i'm glad that trotter's at the hospital failed because i'm not big on chefs spreading themselves too thin; although ducasse's and vongerichten's empires are respectable, they're not something i necessarily enjoy or like. perhaps it's just me. i'm more into boutique-y restaurants where the chef is always present, but that's just me. lastly, i respect everyone's opinion, and mine is by no means authoritative; it just is. do with it what you will.

i find this thread very interesting for several reasons, among them being the implications for a restaurant's approach to the individual dining experience (i.e., of a trotter-gagnaire approach versus, say, those of the ducasse-boulud persuasion) and also how we, as diners, look at our roles as participants in the whole "food-down-our-mouths" affair. but, first, a simple preface: just because i have received some "crap dishes" at trotter's--and by crap, i mean simply inedible--it doesn't mean that i discount the ostensible talent of trotter's kitchen, which is, in many ways, very versatile and refreshing. many could argue, quite successfully, that trotter's kitchen is not only more interesting than most of the top kitchens in new york, but that it is also prone to producing some of the greatest culinary highs one will experience on this, if any, continent. problem is, one has to be willing to either (i) be disappointed and move one (which is sort of the same advice dale chihuly offers his aspiring glass-blowers), or (ii) to simply ignore the occasional lows (i.e., crap) that may or may not come from the dining experience. for me, trotter's kitchen "assembles" dishes in that his plates seem to be a collection of (often-times) perfectly-cooked vegetables and sauces. his cuisine very much reminds of john cage's aleatory or "chance" music, where notes are chosen according to some scheme that isn't necessarily apparent to the listener. this approach is neither good or bad; it just is. it is up to the input of the person experiencing the cuisine to determine its validity, whether it is indeed crap or if it's great. there are a lot of off-moments, where something that is poorly-cooked is plopped down in front of a customer. c'est la vie, man, because that is the trotter way. like "beavis and butthead," trotter is at times quantitatively great, but his highs are remarkably higher than most restaurants in this country. does someone like having peaks and valleys? this having been said, there are ways to receive a great meal at trotter's. first, his kitchen is more talented with vegetal foodstuffs than any other, followed by fish (assuming it's prepared in a very minimal, asian-styled [re: japanese] way). the kitchen's midas touch quickly drops off when it comes to game and meats; perhaps this is just my personal preference, but i tend to hear similar sentiments from fellow dining companions and other foodie acquaintances. second, as fat guy has pointed out numerous times, repeat customers are often more rewarded (and deservedly so) than first or second-time customers. by this point, if the kitchen knows you, you may receive a more personalized meal. i have. third, trotter has often spoken many times that his ultimate restaurant would be one where there would be no menu, where the customer could sit down and order whatever he or she felt like having at any given moment. knowing that this is his end goal, i would strongly recommend that someone assertively taken control of their dining experience at trotter's. let them know you're willing to be adventurous, what your preferences are, and so on. fourth, dine when trotter is there. he has been out of the kitchen A LOT lately because of his (now defunct) plans for a restaurant in london (thankfully). i have noticed that his kitchen is a lot more sketchy when he was absent. considerably. i don't think that trotter's cuisine is as cutting edge as, say, gagnaire's because it is so sprawling and expansive; it seems to me to be a jazzy riff on what is popular at any given moment at other innovative high-end restaurants in the world (i.e., trotter doesn't necessarily seem to be inventing a new cuisine to me; instead, he is awesome at reading the pulse of the culinary world at large and then assimilating and reproducing his own version of it [which isn't necessarily saying that he "rips off" others, but that he does a lot of creative paraphrasing]), but with a novel, "trotterized" twist. if you haven't been, go. if you've been and liked it, go again. if you've been and didn't like it, go or don't go. really, everything is ultimately up to each of us.

from many recent meals at charlie trotter's, i'd have to say that in many ways it is preferable to a lot of meals that i've had at new york's top rung of restaurants--namely, daniel, lespinasse, le bernardin, jean georges, et al. the reason for such is that, in many ways, i find a lot of what trotter's kitchen does to be very conceptually different from most of the french stalwarts in nyc, and, if anything, refreshing, which is a dead horse that has been mauled many times over in other forums (and i'm not about to go on about it ad nauseum here). unfortunately for trotter, his kitchen is very imperfect, its dishes executed in a manner that one could describe as incomplete and sloppy, and conversely as organic and naturalistic (both assessments would be correct in my mind, because there are dishes the kitchen churns out where the in-the-moment cooking--sometimes where a dish is produced that is different than expected--bolsters the dining experience, but there are just as many moments where it detracts and is ultimately frustrating). perhaps the best thing i can say about charlie trotter's is that it is, to me, the most frustrating restaurant in the country. i have had some of the best dishes i've eaten in the past two years there (a simple salad of raw or slightly-cooked shellfish with watercress and horseradish comes to mind), but it also has disappointed me (by the inedibility of certain dishes, like a daurade dish that was horribly cooked and that came with little, if any, accoutrements to divert my attention from the poor quality of the fish) more than any top-end restaurant. daniel is certainly more homogenous, and in some ways boring, but i know that i will rarely receive a dish that sucks as bad as some of the ones i've had at trotter's. i suppose that those who eat at trotter's have to go and expect, well, heterogeneity in the meal, i.e., that it's going to have a lot of ups and downs, and that, in order to have a decent meal there, you have to pretty much ignore the crap that can occasionally come out (and believe me, it is indeed crap). whether this is an appropriate way to dine, i don't know. i guess it depends upon the diner. i do know that i probably won't be returning to trotter's any time soon, but it is a restaurant whose highs are very noticeable and endearing, if not a little quirky. i much prefer the simplicity of bouley's cuisine, which is more focused and not replete with many of the wrong-turns that trotter's takes. i have heard many good things about trio, but have yet to eat there. i was impressed with your report, steve, so keep it up (as always).

What are the best cookbooks people have stumbled across? My faves include Charlie Trotter's Vegetables, Michel Bras's Essential Cuisine, Tetsuya, and many more.

cabrales: feenie is also an ex-charlie trotter's alum (which is why i got my signed copy of the lumiere cookbook for normal price at trotter's to go in chicago).

yes, degustation, that's a good one that i've forgotten about. unfortunately, despite having seen the movie, i don't really remember him being in it, even though i've had a billion quadrillion friends tell me about his cameo.

this past weekend proved interesting for me because i plopped down in a movie theater seat long enough to be subject to a mental reprogramming a la malcolm mcdowell's alex delarge (a clockwork orange) because of austin powers in goldmember (sort of like a lobotomy without any physical incisions made). the most notable part of the film came when dr roboto--the evil japanese tycoon supplying austin's foes, goldmember and dr evil, with a tractor beam--came onscreen for the first time and i screamed out, "holy @%$ing *$%@#, that's nobu matsuhisa!" the entire theater sharply turned my way and stared for a few seconds. such outbreaks are not uncommon for me. e.g., during chris nahon's kiss of the dragon, i emitted a similar whelp (with full-on profanity) when jean-georges vongerichten appeared for a brief 5 seconds as a bartender. my question is, what's the dilly? are there any other movies people know of with chef cameos?

perhaps one of the most memorable aesthetic choices i've seen in a restaurant, at least as far as adding a more approachable or warm or personalized component goes, was at charlie trotter's, where every bathroom has signed copies of menus, usu. from chef trotter's own past dining experiences (my brother and i got up to go to the bathroom a number of times, only to come back, wide-eyed, comparing notes on what we had just seen; i mean, i'm only 24, and have never had the pleasure of dining at, say, girardet's place, but to see an original menu of his (what's cool about his menus was, there's this alphabet and his initials are in bold print, like: a b c d e f g h i j, and so on) is just unspeakably rad!). ever since, like many have already said, i do not feel in the slightest bit intimidated to ask for a copy of the menu. reactions vary, from the cool "yes, sir" i received at alain ducasse at the essex house to the bewildered "are you sure you're not a food writer?"-look of my waiter at papillon. of course, i also photograph/film everything i eat, which usu. doesn't bother anyone.