Chris Hennes

Different libraries make the decision in different ways, but for most the fundamental question is: do our patrons receive greater value by our putting this book on the shelf, or in our selling it and using the proceeds to buy other books? So no matter what, you should ask for the book at the information desk: if they don't know anyone wants it, it's hard to justify keeping it!

Dinner last night was at Catalan, which I'd give a very mixed review to. First off, the wine list was again very reasonably priced, and they have a unique and interesting selection of champagnes that we availed ourselves of. Ordering champagne for no occasion in particular is fun sometimes, and the Rosé we got was quite good. We stuck entirely to small plates, and started out with the Bread service, Crabmeat croquettes, Foie gras bon bons, and a Bruschetta with some sort of pork belly and a soft-cooked sous vide egg. The bread was served with a flavorful whipped lard and was pretty good, and the Bruschetta was also OK. The croquettes themselves were nice, but the lemon sauce they were served on was cloying. The foie gras bon bons were terrible in too many ways to enumerate (I do believe this is the first foie dish I've ever had to describe as terrible... bummer). On the upside, when the manager discovered I didn't like them he insisted on taking them off the check: all told the service was probably the highlight of the meal, everyone was very gracious. The waitress then recommended the Roasted Berkshire Pork belly, which we ordered, along with a cheese tray. The pork belly was fine, if not exactly thrilling, and the cheese tray was a bit off-kilter, with one very assertive cheese and two quite bland options. We finished off with a couple of nice dessert wines. All told, we ordered a pretty massive quantity of food and liquor, and the bill came in around $160, so the price was quite reasonable. Unfortunately, the food was simply not that great. Of all the places we ate this weekend, I think Haven was easily the best, both in absolute terms and in terms of value. I think considering the rather large number of restaurants that I haven't yet tried in HOU, Haven is the only of the four fine dining establishments I went to that I will go to again.

Had lunch at Himalaya yesterday and it was excellent. It was a little intimidating because they just came up to the table and asked what sort of thing I wanted to eat, there wasn't a printed menu that I could ascertain. But the food was very good: the portion sizes were massive however. I felt bad because when the waiter came back with boxes for the leftovers I told him we didn't want them (I don't think you can bring curry through airport security): he had a shocked and then dejected look on his face, I had to reassure him several times that we liked the food quite well, we simply couldn't take it with us!

I've personally found the book to be very well organized: if you start at the beginning each thing you learn as you go builds on stuff they told you earlier (this is most important considering the information on water). I started at page 1 volume 1 and have been plowing straight through (with the occasional detour to actually cook something: recipes don't show up until later on).

Well, we tried to stop by Anvil for a pre-prandial cocktail this evening, but they were already pretty busy at 6pm, so we gave up and just headed straight to Stella Sola. Oh well, hopefully next time I'm in Houston I can plan that better. Stella Sola was pretty good: not as good as Haven, IMO, but better than RDG, even not considering price. I started with the beef tartare, which had a good hand-cut texture, but was overdressed to the point where you could not taste the beef. The dressing was good, mind you, but my preference for steak tartare is to be able to taste the steak under whatever dressings the chef chooses to employ. Not a bad dish, but not a good one either, in my opinion. Next up I had the gnocchi, which was an excellent dish: it was easily the most interesting gnocchi I have ever had, and evoking an almost Asian quality in its sauce, and was very spicy: overall I thought it was very successful. Following that was a fish course. The menu said snapper, the waiter said grouper, and the taste said "red pepper." I think there may have been fish on the plate, but I couldn't taste it. Once again, the flavor was good, but the sauce completely overwhelmed the main ingredient. One final point in their favor was their very nice, and incredibly nicely-priced wine list. I have never seen wine priced so close to retail, it is really remarkable that they are able to do so. We enjoyed a very nice Vigonier with our meal for only maybe 20% more than I pay in the store for the same bottle. The courses themselves were hit and miss, but I suspect with judicious choices you can have a very good meal here for a very good price.

I had lunch at Feast today and it was very good: I had the fat on toast and the chicken pie, and enjoyed them very much. The price is good, too: I think it was $14 prix fixe for the two courses.

Tonight, however, was dinner at Haven, which was head and shoulders better than RDG, and at a lower price point to boot. First off, the cocktail program is serious, with well-trained bartenders, a creative menu, and a great ingredient selection. I tried several of the drinks, and all were well-prepared and well-balanced. I'd consider moving to Houston from OKC just for this bar, we've got nothing like it. Next, on to the food: I started with a pork-belly pastrami on sauerkraut with rye (obviously a take on a Reuben, though not a sandwich). The sauerkraut was a bit bland, but the pastrami was fantastic: I really enjoyed this course. Next up was the wild boar chili: very good, rich, meaty and spicy. Hard to do chili much better than this. For a main I had the fish special, a mahi mahi with local oysters and creamed cabbage. It was all delicious: everything was delicately flavored so the sweetness of the oysters and the cabbage was really highlighted. As a final course I had the buttermilk pecan pie: I didn't care so much for this, the buttermilk pie was a bit bland and could not really stand up to the pecans. It wasn't bad, but I'd have rather had another drink (alas, I was driving). The free valet is a nice touch, and they were pretty speedy too. My only complaints are that it is definitely loud in there, and I thought the pacing was a little fast. Still, the food was excellent, and in contrast to last night, well worth the price tag.

Any idea which of those myriad components pushed it over the edge? Mezcal is notoriously difficult to mix with, of course...

Letting a solution develop organically makes sense to me, but I'll let Janet weigh in with an "official" statement on the matter. In unrelated wiki news, however, today we crossed the 500-article mark, due in part to the amazing contributions of a few enthusiastic and fearless members hammering away day and night (do you guys sleep?!): my personal thanks (in alphabetical order) to FrogPrincesse, IraDubinsky, Liuzhou, Mjx, PedroG, and Xxchef for their outstanding efforts, and to the dozens of others helping out as well. Excellent work, folks! Anyone else want to join them in the effort? I saw someone got a good start on the spices of the world, and Xxchef has been doing amazing things in the Cheese category. PedroG is hammering away at Sous vide, of course! I had a start at some French sauces from the classic repertoire, but of course there's always more to add!

That kitchen manual is pretty sweet: I'd love for other cookbooks to start packaging with something similar. It contains very short, condensed forms of each recipe, where a couple recipes fit on every page. For a book this massive it's indispensable, but even for smaller cookbooks, having a small spiralbound (e.g. "lay-flat binding") compact form of the recipes would be great. I think in particular that stir-fries would benefit a lot from this treatment, so you don't have to quite fully memorize the ingredient addition order in advance, just review them quickly and have the recipe handy.

I wish I lived in a city where anything was even OPEN after midnight: in these parts the vast majority of restaurants close at 11pm. If I want food after that I'm often in the position of enjoying Fourthmeal. I'd guess that any negative health consequences of eating late at night are dubious at best, but having not read the studies (or even heard of them) I can't say for sure, of course.

Awesome, thanks for the tip: that's where I'm eating tomorrow night.

Well, this is definitely a different sort of "beer can chicken"---step four is "Empty the beer can." They leave it up to you how precisely to accomplish this process, fortunately. In this version of BCC, the can is there to prop open the cavity, and hold the chicken upright (which prevents soggy skin by allowing the juices to escape at the bottom of the bird, I gather). I don't think it has any liquid in it at all.

Has anyone figured out yet whether it's literally just a jar, oil, and flour in the pressure cooker? Or is there some water in the cooker as well? Someone asked in the comments on that blog post, but there's no answer yet. MelissaH I think that in order to accelerate the heat transfer in the pressure cooker you are going to want water: otherwise it's basically just an oven. You want to replace the air with water vapor, so in a sense it's just like pressure canning: you put an inch or two of water in the bottom, I'd think.

Wow, what a list! Very nice, thanks for taking the time to write it up. Does anyone have any weekend hours information for these places? I'm looking for options for tomorrow and Sunday in particular.

So, dinner tonight was at RDG + Bar Annie's... Started with a couple drinks, a mojito and a "Country Western Manhattan": the mojito was normal and quite good, the Manhattan was a bit sweet, and seemed to be either very light on the bitters or missing them entirely. I have no idea what made it "Country Western"--the lack of garnish? Next up the Crab Beignets and the house bread. The bread was a very lightly-flavored sourdough, nothing to write home about but not bad. The butter was served very cold so was more or less impossible to eat. A common flaw, but I still maintain it is a flaw. The crab beignets were good beignets, but had virtually no crab flavor even before applying the very assertive spiced mayonnaise they were served with. So I don't quite know how to rate it—they tasted good, they just should have been $2 instead of $15, and omitted the crab entirely. That said, I love beignets, I'd probably still order them again. First course was a foie gras on toast with a frisee and pecan salad. The salad was very good: I'd guess the vinaigrette incorporated some foie fat, and it all worked quite nicely. Frankly they could have left the foie off the plate and I'd have been happy, and I'm not a salad guy. Unfortunately, the foie itself was lackluster: it simply didn't have that much flavor on its own, it was overwhelmed by the sear and whatever it was coated with. I don't know who their foie supplier is, but I've definitely had better. Main course was a ribeye with cheddar sauce, served with lovely potato wedges and a totally out-of-place sweet-and-sour dipping sauce. The ribeye was fine, but again nothing special, at all. I was actually quite disappointed, they talked up the quality of their steak, but it simply was not that great. Good, yes. But I've had a lot of better steaks at a lot of different restaurants. This was not even top ten. For dessert, a pecan tart and a coffee ice cream sundae. Both were quite good: again, nothing special, but not bad. Probably outsourced... I am starting to sympathize with complaints that RDG + Bar Annie is overpriced: not just expensive, but actually more expensive than the food is worth. This was a fine meal, but not a great meal, or a memorable meal, or even an interesting meal. The whole place had a "see and be seen" vibe to it, I really don't believe the food is the focus here at all.

I'm not asserting it will be inferior: no more than I am asserting that wooden furniture is superior to metal and plastic furniture. Some people think it is, and some don't. I love to build tables, but give me an Aeron chair over a wooden one any day. But I am theorizing that it will be cheaper: perhaps even in the same way that particle board is cheaper than solid lumber, because there is so much less waste. Take the example of the modern pimento-stuffed olive (not hand-stuffed artisanal ones, just the normal cheap ones): that pimento is not really a slice out of a pepper. It's a gelled pepper puree that has been formed into big flat sheets and reformed, in a manner analogous to particle board. It's cheaper, more consistent, and no one even notices the difference. Is this the way of all food eventually?

But people do it at home all the time: there is a thriving community of craftsmen who are building furniture by hand and not selling it at all. I think the analogy still holds: people will do traditional cooking at home, and in rarified restaurants, but when truly artificial food is vastly cheaper than the natural equivalent, when you eat out it's almost always going to be the manufactured stuff. It's only when cooking at home that you will have the opportunity to go high-end and spend the time and money to cook something "natural."

Yeah, the folks in the gumbo topic have had good things to say about jarred roux, but it's hard to find in much of the country. And it's one more thing I'd have to keep in the pantry: if this oven method is foolproof and easy, that would be awesome.

Regardless of what form our artificial food comes in, I think the question of "what will it do to cuisine?" is an interesting one. My guess is that what we'll see in this hypothetical world is something like what we see in the furniture world: for furniture that just needs to serve the purpose of propping people off the floor, the cheapest option wins. Sometimes that's an inexpensive lumber, and sometimes it's steel and plastic. At the high end of the furniture market things tend to be very split: some furniture makers produce staunchly traditional pieces out of exotic hardwoods (some go so far as to eschew the use of power tools... sound familiar?), and others push the boundaries of what furniture even is with exotic man-made materials. There is a place in the world of furniture for both schools of thought. Likewise, I think there will be a place in the world of cuisine for "all natural food cooked the old-fashioned way" and a place for "our ancestors would not recognize this as food and chimpanzees won't eat it." But outside the rarified realm of "cuisine," in the rest of the world where food is simply sustenance, society will gravitate towards whatever is cheaper. How else are you going to feed so many billions? Not the all-natural old-fashioned way, that's for sure... (whether that is a desirable outcome is an argument for another forum, of course)

I'm looking for ideas for lunch in Houston, especially favorite local haunts and anything that's unique to the HOU area, though a fantastic burger or tacos would not be objectionable either.

Chris, Check the SV chapter, they do have an explanation in there, and charts to go with it (of course). It's a speed thing: you can get to temp much faster with only a little bit of a temp increase.

The suggested finishing time for the risotto was only three minutes, which would have made nine minutes of total cooking time. To get mine (arborio rice) to what I consider al dente was a bit over six minutes to finish. I should note that I hate pasty risotto, so it was still pretty firm at that point.

Agreed: I'm looking for food that tastes good, and is even potentially intellectually and emotionally engaging. I enjoy cooking whether it is the romantic "a pinch of this and a pinch of that" or whether it's the Modernist "cook at 72.3°C for 18.4 seconds": it's more important to me (and to my guests!) that the end product be great every time, and it's Modernist techniques that make that possible, and accessible to the home cook. Sure, the cook at the high-end steakhouse can cook a perfect steak every time: now we can too.

As I've mentioned in other topics, I love my electric smoothtop. I use cast iron and heavy stockpots on it all the time. I would not give it up for gas for anything, given the choice. It heats quickly, it cleans easily, it's awesome.