johnder

I had a clover cup yesterday with a kenya aa full city+ roast and while it was good, I couldn't really see the justification for the price (of the machine and the cup). I had the same coffee at home via a drip filter and thought the results were just about as good.

Tickets are now on sale of the 2008 Tales of the Cocktail. They just announced the full lineup of classes, and there seems to be even more this year than last year. I am hoping they come up with a better way to view all the classes because the current website makes it hard to see what each class is about. Hopefully they can provide some way to print them all out for review and study on the train rides home. Also it doesn't look like the the info about the spirited dinners is up yet. Ticket info is on this page.

The website has been updated, pitmasters this year include: Blue Smoke Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q 17th Street Bar & Grill Mitchell’s BBQ Ubon’s “Champion’s Choice” The Salt Lick BBQ Dinosaur Bar-B-Que Black Jack BBQ Hill Country Rack & Soul

What about the Italian dressing in the fridge? Oh, yes, I just happen to have 3 bottles of SPICY Italian dressing unopened in my fridge. I can only imagine the producers that day -- ok, I want you to open the fridge, grab one of the bottles sitting in the front of the shelf there, make sure the label is facing the camera and say "Hey! Italian dressing, SPICY Italian too!"

Mark your calendars now - the Big Apple BBQ dates for 2008 have been posted on theirwebsite. No other details yet aside from the date: June 7th and 8th.

There is a great short piece in this sundays NY times that mentions Elettaria as well as Brian Miller and Lynette. It is an article about the Navy Grog they are serving there. Link is here. They also have the recipe on the site, which I paraphrase: 1 oz each of Cruzan Light, Goslings Black Seal and Demerara rums 3/4 oz each of lime and grapefruit 1 oz of 1:1 honey syrup Shake and strain into a collins glass, top with soda. If somehow you are lucky enough to live in a place that has Lemon Heart Demerra, that is the way to go. Sadly, in NYC it isn't available.

Well I am not surprised it tasted strong, it has 3 rums in it, and one of them is 151 proof rum. There is almost 5.5 oz of liquor in that drink. As far as it tasting like jungle juice, not sure where the comparison is. Yes, there are a lot of ingredients in it, but when I had it, the flavors were balanced.

When I was dining there on Monday, a gentleman next to me didn't eat oysters, so they replaced the oysters in the pork/oyster dish with a few pieces of smoked duck. So it seems they will try to accommodate requests.

I will still be around and posting, just unfortunately didn't have time to do my other 2 jobs and volunteer her with any regularity.

For me, it would be the Jimmy Roosevelt, combines 3 of my favorite things. Champange, Chartreuse and Cognac.

I had dinner tonight again at Ko, this time with Weinoo who managed to take up my extra seat at a moments notice thankfully. Nothing has changed much with the menu from when I was there at F&F with the exception of the additional english muffin with whipped lard. Man, that was tasty. Of the remaining dishes they remained pretty much exactly the same as F&F with a few minor tweaks. The fluke dish with whipped buttermilk was slighly more spicy than the first time. The rice cake served with the miso course was no longer dredged in seaweed. In this case the seaweed was sprinkled over the pickled vegetables. Those were the big changes. The wine was pretty much unchanged, aside from the carbonated banyuls with the desert course which was pretty amazing. Oh, I also got to try a new desert. A panna cotta desert, served with chocolate and hazelnut with an avocado mouse. The fat and luscious in the avocado worked great in pairing with the milk in the panna cotta and the bitter chocolate and hazelnuts that garnished it. Pretty great. Just sad I didn't have my camera. The guys on the line looked a lot more relaxed and in the groove as well and them along with the 2 floor staff had everything moving smoothly. The wines for the pairing were always served 2-3 minutes before the next course with a great description of what we were drinking. Overall, another great meal.

I can only hope that over the next few days as people go to ko we can actually start talking about the food

How does being up at 10am clicking a mouse any different than you getting on the phone at 10am and hitting redial for an hour to get through to Babbo? It's the same methodology, just a different technology. The big different is there are back doors into Babbo. Calling someone you know, showing up at 10am to speak to the reservationist in person. Ko doesn't (or say they don't) have any back doors. Everyone treated equally. First come first serve (assuming you have a computer)

On of the best deals in that area for lunch is Gramercy Tavern. They have a soup and sandwich combo at the bar that can't be beaten. I haven't been there in 2-3 months, but when I went last it was 12 bucks. I had an open faced croque madame with house cured ham and over easy egg with asparagus soup. Combine that with a tap root beer are you are set.

This is a wine called "Helio-something Project" that's on the Ssam Bar glass list. It's REALLY good. ← I think I found it: http://www.scholiumwines.com/ Yes - this is a very nice wine... ← Yah thats it. I recognize the label. It had a great fruit nose, but was incredibly dry and good acidity.

And it is down now. My guess it wasn't supposed to be live yet and when they had everyone booking reservations for tonight they quickly pulled the plug.

It will be interesting when the link gets posted on the homepage of eater. The server will probably be crushed.

Indeed. They did say it was going to go live sometime before Saturday. I am sure their traffic is going through the roof with people hitting reload.

For those that want to see the pearl dropper in action, there is a video floating around youtube from the Paris event

Someone seems to have had the same thought as you. momofukuko.com was registered today by some dude on the UWS. I'm almost positive this is not where the reservation system is going. koreservations.com, on the other hand, is still not registered. I'm with Fat Guy--they'll put in another option on momofuku.com. ← But if you look at the ip's where momofuku and momofukuko.com are registered, it is within the same "class b" address space. momofukuko.com is 74.208.88.51 momofuku.com is 74.208.86.109 It also is throwing very similar 404 pages example: momofuku 404 page momofukuko.com 404 page The odds of someone registering a domain and hosting it at the same hosting provider as momofuku.com is pretty slim. I think it is probably legit.

I have some more photos from the night last night of the food as well as some of the action in the kitchen. I will post them tonight or tomorrow. I purposely had an early, light lunch in case the meal was big -- I didn't expect it to be quite so big though. The pass starters were great -- the Heart Tartare was tender and meaty, if you didn't know it was heart you would think it was the most tender beef you have ever tasted. The salted heart crostini was good, but wish there was more of the shaved heart on top. The flavor of the soft cooked egg kind of washed out any meat flavor. Coronets of deep fried tripe with gremolata -- awesome. Should have stopped at one cone, not had 2. Testa -- had 3 of the passed forks. So tasty. One thing FG forgot to mention is those huge hockey pucks were deep fried in duck fat. Awesome. The lamb neck was big on the level of being Flinstonian big. It was seriously brought out to the dining room and people started cracking up. They were easily 1.5 - 2 pounds, probably the diameter of a huge pomelo and 4-5 inches long. If that wasn't enough it was served on top of cheese polenta. After the meal the Chefs and a few others (including FG) headed over to Tailor for some drinks. My mouth was so saturated in fat that I was trying to figure out something that could cut it, a beer didn't work. I didn't want to go the Fernet Branca route so I ended up having a sidecar with 1/2 cointreau and 1/2 campari that did the trick.

Some more pictures from last night

hrm, maybe it was 14. After making a little diagram to help me figure out where I was sitting and the seats around me I think there were 11 along the wall and 3 across the front now.

There are 12 seats total. Going to be a hot ticket, thats for sure. From what I heard they started F&F last week and it will continue for a few more days. edit: 14 seats actually, not 12.

Here are some pictures from the event last night. Sorry about them being blurry, it was fairly dark in there and also the effects of the Zombie cocktail were kicking in.