MarketStEl

Should I be looking in Wawa instead?

[...] I never even heard of this restaurant, but it seems to have at least tried to fit the paradigm of haute cheap. For whatever reason(s) it wasn't successful. Of note is the quote that "Charlie is focusing on larger properties now." It can't be easy being successful with an haute cheap concept as haute ingredients aren't cheap, especially if they are of at least decent quality and rents in NY aren't cheap. ← (emphasis added) Maybe he might want to ask Marc Vetri for his opinion and advice on the subject?

Is this a product test limited to specific areas of the country? I have yet to spy these on the shelves of any Philadelphia supermarket.

I had a rather interesting cheese encounter on Thursday evening, when I traveled up to New York City to audition for the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" contestant pool. Afterwards (I'll find out whether I'm in in about three weeks), I went down to Greenwich Village to pop into the Stonewall Inn. (Those of you who know history know the history.) A gentleman two stools down from me pointed out a cheese platter in front of him. On it were large wedges of four cheeses: Wensleydale with apricots and ginger, Gouda with almonds, underripe Brie and Emmentaler. It seems that there's a market somewhere in the East Village or on the Lower East Side that buys the cheeses Fairway and other cheese emporia can't unload before their sell-by dates and sells those cheeses at fire-sale prices. The Stonewall's manager goes down to this place several times a week and hauls back whatever cheeses are in stock when he visits. I must say that this made a great substitute for dinner. The cheeses were in fine shape, though that Brie should have been runnier. (The Wensleydale was interesting, the Emmentaler nice and nutty, and the Gouda benefited from the almonds.) I wonder if there is a place like this in Philadelphia?

I think most of the people participating in this discussion feel the same way. There is a difference between not-great food and truly bad food, and it shouldn't take an excessive degree of education to tell the two apart. I doubt that the Old German Woman who could tell that the sauerkraut hadn't been washed would consider herself a "foodie" or "food fetishist," but she could tell when something wasn't right. Now, most of us aren't German, old or otherwise, so we might miss this unless we have had sauerkraut made by someone who knows how to make it. But mushy French fries, soggy fried foods, burnt steaks and the like should be unacceptable to anyone with even a modicum of discrimination, given how frequently such foods appear on American plates. I will admit that I'm usually not the sort of person who sends a dish back when it's not up to snuff. My preferred form of registering my displeasure with a restaurant meal is to avoid the offending restaurant in the future. I'm willing to wager that you could probably find several Joe American Averages who have done the same, and I'll also wager that if I took those same people to Tom Jones, they would enjoy their meals, as did I. And yet the fact that there are places that serve bad food yet remain in business for years (what's the name of that tourist-trap Italian restaurant near Times Square in New York?) does indicate that there are many who do not. (Of course, tourist-trap restaurants are a special category, as they depend for their livelihood on customers who will in all likelihood never make a return visit. Some of these places can be incredibly pricey, too, as the prior incarnation of Old Original Bookbinder's here in Philly was.)

I spent some time avec le Monsieur this afternoon. Here's the six piece fried chicken, with a little dish of seasoned salt and a bowl of moo in the background: And what, kind sir, is moo? From this angle, it looks like tiny tofu cubes. I'm sure you recall my posts on H-Mart in my first foodblog. The little-United-Nations character of the clientele is one of the things that appeal to me about the store. Next time you are out this way, Andrew, you should make a point of visiting the 56th and Chestnut Freshgrocer for an international experience of a different sort. The customer base isn't as diverse as H-Mart's, but the range of products carried is -- though again from a different perspective: you will find many Caribbean items in stock here, including entire product lines I've not seen anywhere else in the city. Note also the condition of both the store and the neighborhood surrounding it. There's a reason that both the new shopping center next to the La Salle campus in Olney and (I believe) the empty space in Progress Plaza where a Super Fresh once stood are getting Freshgrocer stores as anchors. Kudos to the suburbanite who took Penn up on its offer and learned some valuable lessons about the "inner city" food shopper that he has taken to heart. Makes you wonder where foreigners pick up their place associations, doesn't it? I suspect that you'd be hard pressed to find anyone of Indian or South Asian descent anywhere in the Green Mountain State, not even in the part of Vermont that's closest to Dartmouth College (which I don't think has as large a South Asian presence as, say, Penn does anyway). Then again, there's a pretty damned good salsa that's made in the state, Green Mountain Gringo. So who knows? What? No Pocky?

This question was inspired by a recent lunch I had at a popular eatery in Brookhaven, Pa., just up the road from where I work. The place is called Tom Jones Restaurant, and it's very popular with Widener students as an after-party hangout (it's open 24/7). It's also renowned for its super-cheap specials and breakfast anytime. (Interesting aside: In the waiting area inside the main entrance is a newspaper article about the lawsuit Tom Jones the '70s pop singer filed against Tom Jones the restaurant asking it to cease and desist using the name. Obviously, the singer lost.) The restaurant menu is very extensive, much as you might expect at a good diner: Breakfast anytime, club sandwiches, burgers, dinner platters, varying lunch and dinner specials, the usual array of nonalcoholic beverages. The decor is a total throwback to the era when Tom Jones the singer was popular: chocolate-brown plywood walls, burnt orange carpet, orange seats in the booths and the counter, low-end 1960s modernism throughout. There's a slit window separating the kitchen from the counter seating with one of those carousels on which the waitstaff hang customer order slips. The food is cheap, filling, and competently prepared. Nothing to write home about, but something that will do when all you want is a basic good meal. It reminded me very much of a coffee shop on the Country Club Plaza where I occasionally ate as a teenager. And that's where the confusion comes in. "Coffee shops" as I knew them also had extensive menus of sandwiches (always including a patty melt, which is also on Tom Jones' menu) and breakfast fare. Their decor, at least by the time I was old enough to notice, was 1960s modern, middle-of-the-road and unoffensive. Seating consisted of a counter in front of the kitchen, which you could see through a slit window, plus booths all around the counter. So what exactly is it that makes one restaurant a "coffee shop" and another a "diner"? Is it geographic? Does it have something to do with the menu? It's certainly not the decor. Clues, please....

Way late update: I now have about 24 hours to find where I buried those free Starwich coupons the owner sent me via Fat Guy. I will be in New York tomorrow evening to audition for the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" contestant pool. (Yes, this is my first non-group visit to NYC since this thread went up.) It's my aim to try this place out either before or after the audition test, depending on how far ahead of 5:30 pm I arrive in NYC.

You and me both, Herb. That includes the two outings I've proposed elsewhere on this board. We need to take remedial action.

No, Bruce, I think you are on to something. Even if Morgan Spurlock hadn't made "Supersize Me!", I think the issue of "How much is too much?" would come to the fore sooner or later. I had an epiphany of sorts on my recent West Coast swing. A bunch of Seattleite eGers arranged a dinner at one of that city's finest restaurants, Union, for the day I was spending "in town." (My brother lives on the opposite side of Lake Washington.) If you go over to the Pacific Northwest board, you can see photos of (most of) what we ate that night in the topic titled "One Fine Day in Seattle." None of these dishes were what I would call "generous" portions. In fact, I suspect that people used to typical chain-restaurant portions would find these quite small, maybe disappointingly so. But all of them were just the right size -- big enough for you to be satisfied with the flavors and character of the dish and feel sated after finishing them. Personally, I don't think the Rouge burger is too big--the beef does not overwhelm the caramelized onions or the Gruyere, and the bun is substantial enough to hold everything in. It may be "too much for one sitting" in terms of total quantity of food (I don't think it is), but it is a balanced composition. Actually, I expect good restaurant burgers to be more substantial (and more complex in some way, such as the Roquefort stuffing in the Good Dog burger) than their fast-food or diner counterparts, and I would probably have been disappointed indeed if I had dropped $15 on a burger as large and as simple as a Five Guys single. But you are right to identify balance as the key element in determining whether something is the right size or excessive (or, for that matter, too little). One can have too much of a good thing -- and too many of us often do.

Charles Jacquin et Cie., Co. (yes, that's how the company styles its formal name) is a Philadelphia-based distiller that produces a few high-end brands (Chambord blackberry liqueur, Pravda vodka) and a raft of low-end spirits. (Edited to add: The company's historical claim to fame is that it is America's oldest producer of cordials.) Usually, when you go to a bar in Philadelphia and order a well drink, Jacquin's is what goes into your glass. I didn't know they produced port, though.

Okay, thanks for clearing that up for me. The place I described upthread is definitely the latter ("ambitious informal restaurant AND bar") and not the former (four-star chef letting his hair down). I'm surprised Ferran Adria hasn't been mentioned in this context, for he certainly is working both the "formal" and "casual" side of the aisle with El Bulli over here and Fast Good over there. Then again, he's in Spain, not New York, and I'm sure nobody in Spain is writing about a "nuevo paradimo."

Monsieur Fried Chicken. (Photo in my first foodblog.) Guess I'm going to have to sample their wares on the way home some evening. (Hmmmm. Korean fried chicken served at a place with a French name. Wassup wit dat?) Peruvian fried chicken, Herb? Tell me more about this dish. I assume it too is available in the vicinity of the Upper Darby H-Mart.

Now that you mention it, there is a difference in emphasis between Hung Vuong, which is run by Vietnamese, and Hmart, which is Korean-run. I can get miso at either, but Hmart carries far more variety. OTOH, I can find very few Malaysian or Thai products at Hmart, but Hung Vuong carries them in abundance. Put bluntly, Hmart's selection tends towards Northeast Asia while Hung Vuong skews southeast. Since I'm eclectic on the subject of Asian cuisines -- no doubt someday I will make a dish that would offend my Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean and Japanese acquaintances equally -- I find much to like about both markets. However, Hmart looks far more like a standard American supermarket (by design, according to their Web site), and it carries Western foodstuffs you'd never see on the shelves of the Washington Avenue establishments. I guess the folks on Washington Avenue figure that there's always Pathmark and Acme for that.

"Canadian Danish" blue cheese sounds a bit like "Saratoga Vichy water," which is what the people who bottled the water from the famous Adirondack spring in New York State called it in the late 19th century. My guess is it's an expression of cultural insecurity: the makers of the younger domestic product are not convinced that local consumers will accept it in its own right as a quality product, so they appropriate the name of a place they know purchasers will recognize as associated with the product in question, as Vichy was for mineral water and Denmark is still for blue cheese (even though just about every country in the world now produces a blue cheese that is head and shoulders above much of the Danish product that leaves the country). Saratoga water is well enough known in its own right now to have long since lost the "Vichy" appelation, and I am pretty sure that Canadian Danish Blue will sooner or later. This has been a fabulous blog: your home, your hometown, and the food you prepare is loaded with character that more than makes up for the absence of the obligatory fridge shot. I've enjoyed this vicarious trip to Atlantic Canada as your guest. Take care, and bon appétit!

I recall reading a while ago that prior to Prohibition, Missouri was the leading wine-producing state in the nation, thanks largely to the Germans who settled in the east-central part of the state, around Herrmann. (Those same Germans gave the state its brewing heritage, though the craftsmanship I suspect they originally displayed largely disappeared over the years.) I thought I also read somewhere else that one legacy of this heritage is many aging caves in that part of the state, some of which are once again being used to mature wine. Personally, I'd love it if someone tried aging cheese in one of them. If Iowa can give us Maytag blue, surely Missouri can produce an outstanding cheese; even though dairy farming is not a major part of Missouri's agricultural mix, there have got to be some cows (or goats, or sheep) producing milk somewhere in the state.

Hmmmm. A chance to play amateur word sleuth. They're known as gyros (often mispronounced to match the first syllables of "gyroscope") in the United States because that's what the Greeks, who introduced the dish to most Americans, call it. IIRC, the Greek dish is ground lamb cooked on a vertical broiler. That vertical broiler also has a name. It's called a "doner." I've always pronounced that word "DUN-er," after the word "done" in the US, but the spelling and presumed pronunciation of the Canadian term suggests that maybe I've not been pronouncing it correctly, for the Canadian name for this sandwich suggests they took it from the device on which it is cooked. I have seen restaurants -- usually "Middle Eastern" ones, which are often run in this area by Lebanese -- list something called "doner kebab" on their menus. "dun-AIR" (which is what I assume is the pronunciation of "donair") also suggests to me that the word may have passed through some native French speakers on its way to Halifax. Maybe a true Canadian, or a Quebecois, might be able to shed light on this.

I forgot to ask last time: Who's Mats Sundin?

Talk about milking it for all it's worth: LaBan's column in tomorrow's "Image" section is about the making of the song and the music video. His Top 6 Burgers are recapped in a sidebar. Edited to add: Make that "he has a feature in addition to his column." His regular review is of Miran on Chestnut Street (two bells).

So I ran into a friend of mine and a friend of his at Bump yesterday at happy hour, and that eventually turned into a nachos plate with my roomie, who joined us midway through. And what does that have to do with this? Well, on the same menu with the nachos are Kobe beef sliders, mussels in garlic broth (served tall-food style), a risotto dish (with something else in it that escapes me right now), herbed chicken, crab cakes, filet mignon, and a bunch of other, similar dishes, all of which are prepared in a creative fashion and appealingly plated, none of which are separated out as appetizers or mains and none of which cost more than $24, except probably for the sashimi sampler of the day ("ask server"). Most of the items on the menu are $15 or less, and there's a good selection of items under $10. (The nacho platter is big enough for two and costs $8. The only disappointment is that it hadn't been heated long enough: the shredded Cheddar and Monterey Jack buried in the middle of the pile of tortilla chips and jalapeno peppers remained unmelted.) After reading through this thread, it struck me that Bump -- which appears in my second foodblog -- fits this description pretty well. It doesn't market itself primarily as a restaurant, but it's clear both from the space and the menu that it does take its food service seriously, and the tables are often as full as the bar at Friday happy hour (if you want to sit at a table, you have to eat something). Certainly the decor and the clientele scream "casual chic." And I'd say that even though I doubt Craig LaBan would ever review it, it certainly aspires to the same level as the restaurants being talked about here.

So I see I wasn't wrong. I wonder how much washing the sauerkraut would have added to the cost of catering that event Stevarino worked? I feel my rant about profit being the byproduct, not the product, coming on. I'd like to think that -- as the Ridder family learned the hard way -- people will realize when a business is concerned more about the profit than about how the profit is made and treat its products with the same contempt their maker shows for them. But apparently that's not the case a lot of the time when it comes to food. Perhaps it's because people need to have their palates (re-)educated -- after all, I suspect that the manager who reassured Stevarino that most of the people attending that Oktoberfest either didn't notice or didn't care that the kraut hadn't been washed was right. Ideally, we should be preparing food for that one old German woman who will notice, but in many volume businesses, the rule is to produce for the masses, not the discriminating consumer. And food, I guess, is a volume business.

You haven't even begun to scratch the surface: Volvos, Saabs, Absolut vodka, aquavit and that cheese that's soaked in it, Bjorn Borg, Nobel Prizes....Sweden and Swedes are way cool. I assume that the thing on the right in this photo is the bag of milk. What do you do to decant it? Put it in a container or rack and tap it? Cut off a corner and pour it into a pitcher? Buy one of those refrigerator-dispensers like they have in the restaurants? I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds this (AFAICT) uniquely Canadian practice fascinating. Anyone know how plastic bags came to be the preferred way to package milk up North? What advantages do they offer over cartons or jugs?

So how was your dinner? And how was Steely Dan? (I went home yesterday evening via H-Mart and walked up 69th Street in search of a drug store. I really need to check out all the topics here more often.)

I'm guessing output per unit of land, but I may be wrong. I do note that mountainous West Virginia trails the rankings, and the state where I live, which is almost as mountainous yet has a significant agricultural sector, ranks at the top of the fourth quintile. I am a bit surprised to see the breadbasket states of the Central Plains in the middle. Alaska and Hawaii have no agriculture?

So what color do lupins turn when they mature? Are they native to your area, or an European import? The only time I'd heard of these prior to this picture was a Monty Python sketch about a highwayman who held up stagecoaches and demanded everyone's lupins.