MarketStEl

Oh, also forgot to mention that America's Choice New York Extra Sharp Cheddar is also very good quality--better than anything Kraft produces (which isn't saying much cheese-wise) and the equal of the best widely-distributed New York State cheddar (IMO), Heluva Good. For those of you in South Jersey: I definitely prefer it to Acme's New York State Cheddar, but will buy the Acme product when it's on sale. (I live just a bit too far away from the nearest ShopRite to go there much.)

Stumbled across this dusty old topic by way of another more recent discussion of ideas for food shows, and it hit me: What about taking a page from one of the more interesting programs on E! and doing a digest of what happened on all the other food and cooking shows that week? We could call it "Condensed Soup" or something like that.

I doubt that Forbes ever even got to Atlanta back in 1988 but I lived here then and I can tell you in one word: Barbecue ... It was very big then before we got the 1996 Olympics .. after that though? Tres chic and verrrry cosmopolitan ... ← We Kansas Citians made that possible, well before 1996. Specifically, you all should thank Calvin Trillin, a forever Kansas Citian even though he's lived in New York for years. He is the one person responsible for all those dignitaries tromping through Arthur Bryant's. Had he not dubbed it "The Single Best Restaurant In The World" in his book American Fried: Adventures of a Happy Eater, it would probably still be, like most Kansas City 'cue joints, a very good place to eat delicious beef and pork known mainly to the locals and those into that sort of thing. --Sandy, who engaged in his share of "Which is better--Bryant's or Gates'?" theological arguments on slow Saturday nights at the Kansas City Star copy desk. I--a Gates acolyte--was usually in the minority; besides, since Bryant's was much closer to the Star offices than the nearest Gates outlet, when the crew decided that it was barbecue they wanted that night, the question was moot anyway--Bryant's it was.

Who was this "Dr. Nadeau," in what Boston publication did he appear, and when? I'm actually somewhat surprised to see my hometown on a list of "traditional dining cities of the US". While Kansas City has always had a handful of top-flight restaurants, including at least one great steakhouse if not two or three, and more decent cafeterias and buffets than anywhere else, I recall the rap on dining out in KC growing up as being that the best meals out were in other people's homes. Of course, all this was before barbecue was recognized as Legitimate Cuisine Worthy of Study and Criticism, for the city has also always been lousy with great 'cue places. Hmmmm...kinda like jazz, another thing Kansas City and New Orleans have in common...it got no respect from the serious-minded for decades, then all of a sudden, it's something to be dissected in graduate seminars and performed in concert halls.

You should have tried one of those ice-cream-truck jingles.

Sietsema's comment about liquid smoke flavoring in the sauce is indeed a cheap shot. Many excellent barbecue sauces--including my personal favorite, Gates'--use it as an ingredient. OTOH, while the remark was a bit snide, I would admit to being puzzled by a lack of any wood-smoke smell in the vicinity of the restaurant. Jeez, I was strolling down the outer reaches of Philadelphia's Baltimore Avenue one day, waiting for an inbound 34 trolley back to Penn, and suddenly smelled sweet smoke. It wasn't until I had traveled another block that I spied the little 'cue joint nestled within the trolley turnaround loop. (Unfortunately, a car was waiting there, or I would have eaten. The place has since closed.) Similarly, the six Gates BBQ outlets in the Kansas City area are pure Fast Food Modern in their architecture and kept spotlessly clean, neither of which are desirable qualities in an authentic 'cue joint (well, maybe clean, for obvious health reasons). But stand outside any of them and soon you will catch the wood perfume scent. I would chalk this up to local air quality regulations, though: I can't recall smelling much of anything walking past numerous Manhattan eateries where, were they elsewhere, I would have at least smelled the grease fumes pouring through the exhaust fan. Purists would deduct points for the presence of gas flames anywhere near the meats being barbecued. Well, this is New York City, and I'm not a purist--and, apparently, neither are the Southern places that use the model of smoker you've pictured above. So it's not wood-and-only-wood? If it's good, give 'em a pass here.

Buy yourself a round-trip ticket on Amtrak from Washington Union Station to 30th Street Station in Philadelphia and back. Once you disembark at 30th Street, follow the signs directing you to the nearby SEPTA subway station. Board the Market-Frankford Line eastbound and do one of the following: 1) Disembark at 8th Street and proceed south nine blocks to Fitzwater, then head west one block and order one from Sarcone's (9th and Fitzwater). The bread matters as much as the meat in a really good hoagie, and Sarcone's bread is the best in the Greater Philadelphia area--the birthplace of the hoagie. While you're there, why not kill a little more time? Continue south for two blocks on 9th until you hit the Italian Market. Stroll down 9th Street. Marvel at the glorious mess. Buy some cheese at DiBruno's and meat at Esposito's. You may now return to Washington. 2) Disembark at 13th Street and proceed two blocks south to Walnut. Turn left on Walnut and head to Planet Hoagie (1208 Walnut). They also use Sarcone's bread (along with bread from another very good local supplier) and Hatfield meats, which are relatively unknown in the world of Philly deli-dom (where Dietz and Watson rules, as I believe it also does down your way)--even though it's a local company--and surprisingly good. You might be distracted from your quest for a good Italian by the dazzling variety of choices offered here. 3) Disembark at 15th Street and follow the signs for the Broad Street Line (City Hall station). Board a southbound Broad Street local train and ride it three stops, to Ellsworth-Federal station. Exit the station via the steps to the west side of the Broad-Ellsworth intersection. Turn left on Ellsworth and proceed one block west to Merlino's (15th and Ellsworth). I don't know where their bread comes from--it's a little softer than Sarcone's, but awfully damn good, and their hoagies are huge and well-built (meats are Dietz and Watson). If you get there much past 4 p.m., you're likely to be out of luck in getting a hoagie here, though--they will certainly have run out of bread by then. Or do this: Buy that round trip ticket in anticipation of the responses you will receive when you post this very same question on the Pennsylvania board. You will probably receive further endorsements of the first two places I mention there, plus a bunch of others.

That school would HAVE to be Harvey Mudd College. ← I flirted with applying to neighbor Claremont Men's College in high school. Guess brand snobbery won out.

Well, I'm not a Jerseyite, but since "New Jersey" is the intersection of the set "Philadelphia" and the set "New York" and most of the chains in the state--Foodtown excepted--can be found in one or the other city, if not both (Pathmark), I suspect that some other neighbors might weigh in. My prime candidate is America's Choice soy sauce (at A&P stores in North Jersey and Super Fresh in South Jersey). Its ingredients list compares favorably with Kikkoman's--water, soybeans, wheat, salt--and it's about 1/3 lower in price. Others if I think of them.

...um, check out the photo in this post on the long-running "What did you fix for dinner?" thread. Looks like all that's missing is the cheese. Well, it's white bread and not a steak roll, but who's quibbling? OTOH, Tony Roma's sauce? New York poseur.

Harvard '80 reporting here. There was no such thing as "meal plan" at Harvard when I was an undergrad there. The residential system is modeled on the British university model, in which faculty and students live together in residential "colleges" (which is what they're called at Yale; Harvard calls 'em "houses"); eating together is a central feature of the system, so room and board are a single package. I don't remember that hot plates and stashes of canned soup or ramen were widespread, but hot plates were fairly common; I had one myself. The menus were the same in all of the campus dining halls--each House has its own--but word was that the quality of the food was better in the Houses with their own kitchens than in the five that were serviced by the Central Kitchen in Kirkland House, and that the food in the Radcliffe Quad Houses was best of all. (The Quad dorms did have a policy of offering you a hamburger cooked on the spot if you didn't like anything on the menu, something you couldn't get at the River Houses.) My main memory of dining at Harvard, though, was the contortions the Dining Services people put tofu through. It seems that this was all they knew when it came to offering meatless entrees, and some of their attempts were truly awful: "Polynesian Meatlike Balls" stand out as a particularly memorable flop. Somebody should have showed the managers how to make ratatouille. I suspect that the dining folks at Harvard have since discovered the joys of textured vegetable protein; unfortunately for me, my early experiences with tofu soured me on the stuff for years. It's only been within the past 2-3 years that I have cooked and eaten tofu dishes, discovering in the process that soybean curd can taste like almost anything you want it to be, depending on how you season it, but that it's best when it is allowed to be itself in physical form.

That student center at the University of Delaware? Isn't that a Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates creation? I guess the building is better than the food served there?

(Author's note: This topic idea came to me after reading about Martha Stewart's culinary complaint over in Food Media and News.) I have now spent nearly two decades toiling in the groves of academe, most of them at one of America's most prestigious universities. More recently, I've added a short stint at a wannabe top-tier technological school to the list. And before all this, I spent the requisite four years pursuing a college degree, in my case at America's most prestigious university, bar none. I have a partner who teaches at our city's community college. A friend and former colleague runs the media-relations office at a Catholic university in the Olney section of town. And during my college days, I would visit friends at other schools up and down the East Coast. All this is by way of establishing my credentials as a seasoned consumer of institutional cuisine, or at least the academic variant of it. Dining halls are at once a central part and the bane of just about every American college student's existence, and I make it a point to try the institutional fare at least once at every college where I spend more than a few hours. One thing that surprises me about college dining hall food these days is this: It's not half bad. Whether the operation is in-house, as it was at the University of Pennsylvania up until the mid-1990s, or contracted to one of the big service companies, as it is at Drexel, which uses Sodexho, it seems to me that the quality of collegiate cafeteria fare has improved since my undergraduate days. Certainly the variety has increased. I can recall very few occasions when Harvard's dining services featured Mexican or Southwestern items on their menus in the late 1970s; now, it's hard to find a campus dining hall that doesn't have something spiked with salsa and covered in queso among its daily menu items. Asian fare also appears much more often than it did in my day. "Vegetarian" no longer means only tofu dressed up to act like meat. And when burgers are offered, they're no longer either too dry or too tough. The salad bars have also improved somewhat, with fresher lettuce and varieties beyond iceberg. The tomatoes in the off-season, however, are still tasteless and almost rock-hard. Some of these changes are driven by the increasingly market-oriented culture that has swept through American academe. When your students are no longer your charges, there to receive wisdom, but consumers of education with rights to good grades and that all-important sheepskin, you find that you have to retool every part of your operations to cater to their demands. In the culinary arena, that most often means goodbye mystery meat, hello pizza and tacos. From where I sit, the quality of institutional cuisine has gotten a good bit better. And yet I wonder whether this opinion may not have something to do with my not eating it every day. Penn did have a very good in-house foodservice operation, and whenever I ate with a staffer, faculty member, student or their marketing person in a dining hall, I had decent food that tasted good and was served at the proper temperature. Yet the online campus discussion boards had a steady stream of posts from students complaining about the food--it was too hot, it was too cold, it didn't taste right, they never got to eat their favorite dishes, and oh, by the way, there wasn't enough choice. So I wonder: If I only had to sit down once to eat what Martha Stewart's having for dinner tonight, would I find it as awful as she does? And would my opinion of campus fare change if it were all I ate, every day? Any of you out there routinely ingest assembly-line fare? What's your take on the state of institutional dining these days? I'd especially like to hear from the company-cafeteria crowd. Any fans of Lettuce Entertain You out there? How 'bout Aramark junkies?

Hey, SWoody: Have you considered doing restaurant reviews for exp? This magazine (founded in 1987 as the Rehoboth Beach Gayzette) is distributed in Rehoboth, throughout Delaware and in and around the cities Rehoboth draws most of its summer crowd from--Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia. (The town's nickname--"The Nation's Summer Capital"--is a reference to its popularity among Washingtonians, but as the years have gone by and the highway connections have improved, more and more Philadelphians--especially gay and lesbian Philadelphians--are forsaking the Jersey Shore for Rehoboth and environs.) I suspect that the mag doesn't pay worth a tinker's damn--on second thought, I know that, for I know Steve Cohen, who writes their goings-on-in-Philly column--but it might be a useful source of pocket change that would allow you to get paid for your meals out. (exp is not as slick or as elegant as its older rival, the spring-through-fall Letters from CAMP Rehoboth, but it is published year-round and more widely circulated.) You're an excellent writer and your contributions would raise the quality of writing in exp immediately. As for me, it's been several years since my partner and I have come down to visit our Philly-turned-New York friends who have a summer place on the beach block of Maryland Avenue, and I miss Rehoboth and the wonderful dining scene. I also appreciate the tolerant attitude most folks down there have--pace that whole "Keep Rehoboth A Family Town" controversy in the late 1980s, there really is "room for all" in Rehoboth! Since I haven't seen either of these places mentioned yet: What's your opinion of the Iguana Grill and the Purple Parrot? I haven't tried the latter yet (and see in exp that it's moving to new digs closer to the beach on Rehoboth Avenue), but the Iguana is my favorite casual dining/hangout spot in Rehoboth, hands down. I've never failed to strike up a conversation with some interesting character from well beyond the region at the Iguana's bar, and the food--heavily Southwestern-influenced--is tasty and reasonably priced.

Remind me to watch out for such places should I ever run across them. BTW, I have in the past and no doubt will again serve chicken cooked on a charcoal grill with the lid closed, slathered in barbecue sauce. This, I believe, is what folks call "barbecue chicken." It really isn't--chicken doesn't take to slow cooking using dry heat. It seems to me that, thanks to the size of the bird, you could do this with turkey. Yes, but make sure the place serves squishy white bread with its ribs and brisket. Given that the owner is from KC, this shouldn't be a problem.

I think the phrase is "carrying coals to Newcastle." No, wait. That phrase would describe Bobby Flay deciding to open up a grill shop in Kansas City. Irony is a pretty good fit for the situation you describe. I always ordered ribs or brisket when I went to Gates', so I guess I didn't notice that other stuff. Aside: Score one small victory for us natives here where the people have no Barbecue. Through an exchange in the eG Pennsylvania forum, we managed through the good efforts of one of our fellow Philly eGulleteers to convince the owners of a new 'cue joint in Center City (right behind the Academy of Music) to offer plain ol' squishy white bread with their platters. They had been serving pita!

I think you may be on to something here. Given my upbringing, I tend to think of tomato-based sauces first, but a vinegar-based North Carolina-style sauce might well work better with the cheesesteak. If you go ahead and try your brisket idea, please report back to us on how it turns out.

i don't even put ketchup on it. meat, cheese/cheez, onions, and that's it. ← This is no doubt the Kansas Citian in me speaking, but I am of the opinion that there is nothing that cannot be improved by the addition of the right barbecue sauce. Including a Bloody Mary (Virgin Mary, in my case). But I should note that when I said, in response to Rachel's post: Well, now that it's been brought up, I'll wager that somewhere out there, some BBQ fiend is right now contemplating how one might go about creating such a thing. ← the thing in question was barbecue cheesecake, arising from a misreading of the topic title. Now that's a truly strange concept. But as I said above, I'm sure that someone will manage to make it work somehow.

I'll cast my vote for the Listerine breath strips for effectiveness--and in terms of inventive food chemistry, maybe Ferran Adria might want to offer them between courses at el Bulli. But as for flavor, they're hit or miss. The new citrus strips have an off-flavor that I find a bit unpleasant--and surprising, given that the citrus mouthwash is probably the best Listerine flavor out there. The cinnamon strips are excellent, and the two mint varieties are pleasant enough, like their liquid siblings.

Well, now that it's been brought up, I'll wager that somewhere out there, some BBQ fiend is right now contemplating how one might go about creating such a thing.

I'm assuming you're referring to the Food Hall at Strawbridge's 8th and Market. If so: I agree with your assessment and still lament that what's there now is a mere shadow of what it was when the Strawbridges were still in charge. I think the problem is that this sort of operation is somewhat foreign to American department stores--from what I understood, Stockton Strawbridge got the idea for putting one in his family's flagship store after visiting London and being wowed by the famous Food Hall at Harrods--and most US department store operators really don't feel comfortable running a food market. Aside from seasonal gift items, I do not recall food for home consumption being sold at any other May Department Stores chain. I suspect that May keeps Strawbridge's Food Hall alive in its current shrunken state because it learned from slightly painful experience what happens when an outsider comes in and immediately starts mucking around with a Philadelphia tradition. And even though it's not even a quarter century old yet, IIRC, the Food Hall at Strawbridge's had already become one by the time May took over the store.

Update, 23 December 2004: On the above evening, I ventured over to the Letto Deli (208 S. 13th St.) for a cheesesteak and observed that the establishment had a "BBQ Cheese Steak" on the menu. Naturally, I ordered it. What I got was Letto's standard issue cheesesteak -- which is pretty good as cheesesteaks go; the meat is very moist, fairly tender and not too chewy, and the cheese nicely melted -- doused with barbecue sauce from a ketchup dispenser (probably a foodservice brand). The sauce was a fairly typical tomato-ketchup-and-brown-sugar concoction. This sandwich is okay, but the meat would have benefitted from a rub beforehand. --Sandy, who suddenly wonders whether it would be (a) possible at all or (b) worthwhile to slow-smoke thinly sliced sirloin

I had only one first-time-out dish this past month--a turkey soup with mint and sprout garnish recipe I got off epicurious.com. The one guest I served it to raved about it, and it seems like an interesting way to dispose of leftover turkey, so it will probably return to my repertoire in the near future.

grrblmumbleKansas City striphrrumpharrgh...

It HAS to be. That's K.C. barbecue more than chicken & ribs, or even pulled pork (which is still big, mind you--Missouri is a HUGE pig-raising state). ← Chicken? I'm sure that many Kansas City barbeque places sell some, and it's been a long, long time since I last set foot in Gates' or anyplace remotely like it, but I don't ever recall seeing an actual patron of a good KC 'cue joint walk away from the order counter with any. Ribs, OTOH, are another story. Sure, they're not as closely identified with Kansas City as burnt ends (especially) or brisket are, but they can be found at every respectable 'cue purveyor in the area. They're also something every expat Kansas Citian I've run across knows how to make. Those of you who have never had burnt ends, you're in for a real treat. Glad to see that New York City is finally getting a really good 'cue joint. The lack of one was a serious deficiency for a place that prides itself as a culinary capital.