Jason Perlow

Very worthwhile reading. There are some excellent growers and suppliers (both Bay View Farms and Greenwell are mentioned favorably in the article) but there's also some unfortunate stuff going on with larger companies who sell Kona "blends". Caveat emptor - this despicable practice has also started appearing with coffee sold as Jamain Blue Mountain "blend" or "style" coffee. It may have as little as 5% of the real bean in it and bear no resemblance to the genuine article. Just curious... is there much of this deception going on with other food and beverage products or is it confined mostly to the coffee industry? ← Owen: Coffee Times buys its Kona coffee from Roz at Bay View Farms. I actually built the original version of that web site back in 1995 and he had all the same Kona informational articles there. Les Drent, the owner of Coffee Times, also sells Kauai Coffee, which is pretty good stuff. Back then I traded my web design services for coffee -- this was years before Frontpage and Dreamweaver and all that cool design software, you had to code it by hand, and it was basically a cottage industry then unless you were a huge corporation. I'm not sure who he buys it from though.

I'd get some nice aged provolone, fresh mozzarella, and some parmigiano reggiano. With some nice foccacia and perhaps a few drops of balsamico tradizionale.

Fresh OJ is still too expensive in any quantity, though. Some of us are still on budgets. :)

For a restaurant that is only a month or so old, Dinosaur is serving excellent barbecue, never mind the fact that it is in New York. Barbecue is a technical process, every restaurant needs to tweak and test and continually refine that process until they get the consistent end product that they want. That kind of a thing can take months to perfect.

There's plenty of wood. Sietsema clearly has not seen the whole back area of the restaurant where all the smoking takes place. I have.

I actually wish I had closer up photos of those paper instructions that are taped onto the smokers, even with the high res versions I had at home you can't really read them. When I took the photos of the smoking room they had just completed unloading all the meat for the night, and hadn't started a new batch yet, so I was unable to look inside the chambers for the wood being used, etc. However, John Stage told us he was pretty much using hickory entirely.

Yeah, I find Sietsema's writeup to be a bit of a unnecessary panning as well. I also don't agree with his view that the 'q lacks wood smoke taste.

Some harrowing footage here from the BBC: http://tinyurl.com/4nzkx and here: http://home.earthlink.net/~ca902/Tsunami1.asf http://home.earthlink.net/~ca902/KATC.wmv http://www.simnet.is/pah/tsunami/thai.wmv http://home.earthlink.net/~shortman0523/penang.wmv http://www.simnet.is/pah/tsunami/patong_beach3.wmv http://www.simnet.is/pah/tsunami/ysri_lanka_tsunami3.wmv http://www.simnet.is/pah/tsunami/1tsunamiphuket13.wmv

While I have had issues in the past with Bruni's writing, and I feel he lacks the necessary fundamentals to evaluate the qualitative level of Japanese restaurants and all restaurants in general, he's in a bit of a pickle because he did choose to review Masa, and he has to award it some kind of a rating. Unfortunately the NY Times star rating system is not well equipped to handle restaurants that are outside the scope of traditional fine dining and the evaluation matrix that goes along with it. I'm going to repeat myself like a broken record here as I (and Steven) have said this before on this thread, but that is to say there is a set of generally subscribed guidelines by which French, Italian or some type of modern Euro-eclectic haute dining establishment is evaluated, in terms of the pristineness/luxury of the ingredients used, the quality of the service, the relative luxury of the atmosphere/setting, the extent of the wine list, and the extent to which the restaurant or chef contributes unique additions or value to a cuisine. Short of the pristine/luxury aspect of its fish, Masa does not conform to what you would expect of a 4-star restaurant in according to the modern accepted 4-star criterion of the NYT, if you had to lump it in with ADNY, Per Se, Jean Georges, Le Bernardin and Daniel. It would be more fair to compare it to other high end sushi restaurants, such as Kurumazushi or Sushi Yasuda, or perhaps even Nobu, except that Nobu is a 3 star and it has unique dishes it has developed, where it is hard to say Masa has contributed anything new to Sushi as a cuisine.

Florida's Natural is a competing co-op to Tropicana that basically grows the same exact stuff. I think a good amount of the growers may originally have been part of the Tropicana org in some way and then parted ways. The difference is that the growers own the land and the trees and shares in the company, whereas Tropicana is owned wholly by Pepsico. http://www.floridasnatural.com/history.htm There is another major brand of OJ that goes on sale pretty often that is horrid, horrid stuff though, it has the nastiest aftertaste -- Tree Ripe. AVOID!!!!

I reject your reality and substitute my own! Nyeah Nyeah Nyeah!

Masa, the first NYT four star Japanese restaurant. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/29/dining/2...d=all&position= Survey says...

Melkor, our MIA forum host vacationing in Thailand and Cambodia has now checked in with the start of his Southeast Asia foodblog: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=58326&hl=

Cool. Human Warner Brothers Cartoon.

Welcome to the site, FrenchWench!

In actuality the waves do not hit the coasts at 500-600Mph. This is a misconception. The energy released from the earthquake creates a siesmic pressure wave that is transmitted thru the ocean at 500MPH, but the wave crests are very small and you cant even feel them as they pass under you if you are on a boat in the ocean. That energy is released in physical form when it gets to its destination at the coastal shoreline as a tsunami and of course there is some energy loss -- the speed diminishes to a fraction of what it was, but the wave height increases dramatically. So in actuality those waves only hit the shorelines at 30 or 40 miles per hour. Still, extremely destructive because of the sheer force of such tall walls of water hitting you. Historically tsunami waves have gotten as tall as almost 1700 feet high but that is extremely rare. The tallest tsunami ever recorded was at Lituya Bay, Alaska on July 7th, 1958 -- 1638 foot tall waves that were caused by a huge ice/rock fall. The ones that hit Southeast Asia were between 20 and 30 feet high because of the distance the wave had to travel and how deep in the ocean the earthquake originated in. http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2004/d...041227top5.html

Japanese McDonalds seems to have more interesting looking buns. And is that a different kind of Special Sauce?

Specifically guys, its Kosher for Passover Coke. Coca Cola is normally Kosher. You're correct Jon, I think the Coca Cola Bottling Company of NY is the ONLY bottler that does it for the whole US during Passover. As I understand it, local supermarkets in the NY area run out within a day or two after receiving the entire production run for Passover.

192 MEGATONS of energy was released from that quake. Holy crap.

Apprarently, the one served at the Claridge Hotel in Atlantic City is good, according to Rachel.

I have a large supply of Penguins. I actually feel their best product is the Caffeine-laced Cola-flavored gum, though.

Personally, I find the Medium claws to be the best tasting. The Large and the Jumbos, while nice, are expensive just because they are harder to come by, not because they taste any better than the Medium ones.

Jon: The orange Tic-Tacs are not bad, but I am not sure how effective they are at freshening breath.

The Wondee's piece is now avaliable in the NYT archive: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...751C1A9629C8B63

Doc, I think that is the crux of the issue. Rocco is an unbelievably talented cook -- WHEN HE GETS BEHIND A STOVE. What I am hoping is that he realizes is his talents are in cooking, and not being a pretty face in TV and magazines or a voice on the Radio, and that he gets behind a stove again, soon. He's still pretty young for a celebrity chef, and conceivably has many years ahead of him as a restaurant chef if he decides to pull himself up by the bootstraps and go back to his roots, perhaps working at someone else's restaurant again, or starting a small place where conceivably he can run the kitchen, cooking the eclectic food that he does so well and not Queens corner pizza parlor red sauce crap -- and get someone else -- preferably not his ailing mother and someone with experience in this area -- to do FOH.