sigma

Tips are only truly discretionary if you believe that social norms are not determinative. Does anybody believe that these days? No. In fact, the common refrain in this thread that Euros don't tip while Americans "make up for their stinginess" is just evidence of how determinative social norms are. Simply stating over and over that tipping is discretionary is begging the question. But let's look at it another way, because you all seem to focus on an individual tipping event and not the mean. The average tip is pretty standard. It is about 17%. That means that some are more and some are less. This is fine, because nobody waits one table a pay period. The focus on an individual event is silly and it leads to silly conclusions. If you are saying that you believe the average doesn't hold, then you may have a point, but anecdotes don't make for good policy, and as long as people keep waiting multiple tables over multiple nights during a pay period, then individual tables don't mean anything. Also, the idea that big tippers are running around making up for small tippers is not a sound way to understand the structure in place. Different people tip slightly differently and all means have standard deviations, but people in restaurants in North America tip a certain amount, and it is consistent enough that if you decided to bet against it on individual tables you would go broke quickly.

Ehh.... No. Servers get paid exactly what their paychecks state, and if it states $2.13/ hr x "X" hours, then that's what they get paid. Tipping is discretionary, it's not guaranteed, Pay rates are. Being willfully ignorant is an unattractive trait. It is one thing to be unexposed, but this is different. Under your system, of course, bonuses are not pay, benefits are not pay, nothing is pay besides the hourly rate or salary. Think if this makes sense. Generalize it to other fields. Think on it. What bonuses? What benefits? Geez.You too? My point is that if only contracted monetary remuneration, wages and salary, are pay then our understanding of compensation in every field, and thus our understanding of labor market economics, is wrong. If we apply to the restaurant business what we do to other fields then tips, as they are an expected part of the normal course of affairs, are part of standard pay. If not, well then we get up on our high horses and piss in the wind.

Ehh.... No. Servers get paid exactly what their paychecks state, and if it states $2.13/ hr x "X" hours, then that's what they get paid. Tipping is discretionary, it's not guaranteed, Pay rates are. Being willfully ignorant is an unattractive trait. It is one thing to be unexposed, but this is different. Under your system, of course, bonuses are not pay, benefits are not pay, nothing is pay besides the hourly rate or salary. Think if this makes sense. Generalize it to other fields. Think on it.

Most of us in this thread think that $2.13 per hour plus a large tip percentage is a ridiculous way to earn a living. The problem is people like fvandrog, who basically represents the vast majority of foreign tourists, along with homegrown cheapskates. Those of us who DO have a little empathy for our fellow man need to tip more and more to subsidize the tightwads and to keep up with inflation. Which is why 20% is the new "standard" and that's going up fast. We'll be at 25% before too long. Look, what I am telling you is that you are looking at the entire situation the wrong way. You have a perspective on it, and you aren't letting in other possibilities. To you it is all about good people and bad people, those who care and those who do not, and there are assumptions implicit in your citation of $2.13 that really aren't tenable. I am going to try to explain through another example what I mean. When I was in college, I had a job valet parking at the Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills. I received no formal pay for my work. I showed up, parked cars, took tips and went home. Customers were not required to tip. Using your logic, Neiman Marcus didn't pay me for my work. But is that really true? No. If they hadn't paid me, I wouldn't have had any incentive to work there at all. Letting go of your untenable assumption, that all compensation is exclusively monetary, lets you understand quite clearly that Neiman Marcus paid me well for my service. In allowing me to function as a valet under their official imprimatur on their property, they traded me a valuable commodity in return for my hours. I used their property to receive tips from the clients. Since our social norms state that valets in free parks get tips and valets in paid parks do not, there was a reasonable and quantifiable benefit to what they traded me, even if there was no check. My wages were not zero, as you would have us believe, but my wages were the average amount I could be expected to earn from their property in the allotted time. In effect, I moved from being an employee to being the owner of my own small industry using their rented property. The economics of table waiting are much the same. The wage is the reasonably expected amount of tips given the average check and normal tip, plus whatever small wage is given. The owner is allowing the server to use the auspices of the restaurant to earn a percentage on their sales. There is a reasonably high expected value to this. The second untenable assumption is that in tipping the customer is paying you and under hourly the owner is. It is all the same money, and since it is very reasonable to expect that the demand curve for restaurant meals includes tip in price, the owner is in fact giving up revenue, but not profit, by not having service included, but the net is the same. It isn't through the grace of others that waiters are tipped, it is through the workings of culture, and a note about Jesus, a stingy European or otherwise bad tipper doesn't affect the mean enough to make it otherwise. Also, good service likely will earn an excess gratuity similar to what good service will receive as a pour boire in other cultures. It's all pretty efficient. I hope that helps. You just need to be more flexible and nuanced in your thinking, and to try to understand why a system works rather than to look at it only on its face.

They aren't really being paid $2.13 an hour, though, so I don't know why you are focusing on that. They are being paid, by common convention, $2.13 an hour plus about 17% of the price of what they are serving. Those are two different things entirely. I am left to wonder whether anybody in this thread has ever even taken Econ 101.

It looks like you learned a ton from your experience at the competition. And quickly. Well done.

Try separating the eggs, using the yolks in the first step, beating the whites and folding them into the batter before baking. For more lemony, use more lemon zest.

Because you often aren't getting dishes that are well rounded, and you don't get the same nuanced harmonies when everything is a bite and a half. I don't hate them, but there is a lot to question about how and what they really display about the food. Of course, a bigger problem is that they are a main component of the shift in fine dining away from the enjoyment of your friends and family accompanied by excellent food toward the wow factor presented by a prima donna chef while you are accompanied by your iPhone or table tripod. Wine pairings are even worse, with all of that "service" who has time to enjoy their fellow diners.

They suck is a blanket statement, and a true one. Ruth's Chris is in a dismal apartment building on Van Ness and survives on prom and birthday from the near east bay and "hey honey let's go to the big city" from further out. I have been a few times, never my choice, and they have "fucked up" my steak, as you say they wouldn't, each time. I have been to other Ruth's Chris, this one is far worse, and far more dismal, that any of the others. Harris' is also awful. There are a lot of drunk old men at the bar, if you want your leg touched or something like that, and the dining room is infected with plug ugly floral patterns. The steak is generally of mediocre quality, and often "fucked up." 5A5 is, as I said, for the nouveau not quite so rich on the weekends they can't squeeze themselves into too tight skirts and head off to Vegas. I think it even has a neon screen flashing above the bar. The others, maybe? Alfred's was passable up until eight or so years ago, but they gave up, burdened by having to run a business in San Francisco as a family. They will tell you so, too. Mortons is a joke, and not a good one. I am sure there are more. For a while there was a "steakhouse" in a Holiday Inn in the Marina. I never went. The joke is that the area has fantastic beef, perhaps the best in the country. And you can find it at a lot of good restaurants. But that isn't what Toots wants. So yeah, they all suck, and now you know why. Now, since you decided that it was necessary for me to explain to you exactly why these places you suggested are awful, and to explain that without full descriptions my opinion was worthless, why don't you explain to us why exactly you should be taken seriously. I mean, you apparently have multiple blog posts about San Francisco, and that is very important in the credentialing process, and you once ate at a Ruth's Chris three thousand miles from here, but apparently have no experience with any of the places you recommend, and assure Toots and the Maytal that their steak will be cooked well, but you just kind of know, right?

I am sure you and Toots will enjoy yourselves wherever you go. You should really listen to weinoo. I mean, he has a blog and everything, and he likes San Francisco. He even blogged about it once. All I can tell you is that the steakhouses around here are not very good. They generally cook the meat poorly and emphasize quantity over quality. They tend to have atrocious decor, and the crowd is made up of non-locals, men with noses swollen from alcohol abuse and people on sales dinners. Fun, fun, fun. If I were to avoid one over the others it would be A5. It is like eating in a class teaching people who made their first money how to be kla$$y. Maybe that is the level at which this place operates, though. I have no idea.

And why is that? Because they pretty much suck. If you want a good steak, go to Kokkari, but not one of the steakhouses. Kokkari only has one steak on its menu, though it is an allegedly dry-aged rib eye. I doubt it's a better product than the steak houses I mentioned above are getting, though. OK.

And why is that? Because they pretty much suck. If you want a good steak, go to Kokkari, but not one of the steakhouses.

I cannot recommend any of the local steakhouses.

What is one to do?

If you are cooking it for 18 minutes sous vide then sauteeing it for several minutes, then it might be fine, but at that point it really isn't cooked sous vide, the roll is just set by putting it in a water bath. Cooked sous vide at a temp just above target rabbit becomes unacceptably mushy. There are several meats which react this way.

Sous vide rabbit saddle is not good.

But - you still haven't told us what the really great secret to roast chicken is - and that's what kind of bird you're roasting. So please - let us in on that. This is true, but I am not sure it means what you think it does, at least if you are using it in conjunction with your recommended brand. While the way a chicken is raised, pasture, free range, in a little pen, has something to do with it, and the feed also has something to do with it, they give rather marginal improvements over supermarket chicken. Processing can also vary, and can add a bit better flavor and much better texture. Still, what is more important, and virtually overlooked, is the breeding stock. We don't overlook it w/r/t other animals, but with chickens the vast majority of expensive, hipster, pastured chickens are still Cornish Cross, which means fat breasts, skinny legs and not a lot of flavor. You can see that in the pictures in this thread, and in almost every other picture you see of an egullet chicken. What you want to look for is Freedom Ranger stock, which is what the Label Rouge producers in France use. It gives a very different chicken. They grow much more slowly, so they are mature at slaughter and developed in taste. The breasts are skinny, the French woman as compared to the busty American archetype. So yeah, chicken matters, but you have to choose the differences that matter for flavor.

You really don't need to know the temp of your oven, you just need to be able to cook in it.

I peel in both directions simultaneously. You guys don't?

lol. maybe merroir.

Just to clarify, if I were doing it I would do the interior steps just as stated by iif, and freeze. Then I would make a separate exterior solution infusing banana in something like milk or whatever, add a little creme de banane, perhaps, and then bind that with the kappa and use for dipping. Two things seem wrong about their recipe. First, the original agar gel is too thick when reheated to be a good coating medium, and second, agar, because of its properties, does not set as quickly as kappa does, and therefore it isn't as good in setting around a frozen sphere. You have to keep the sphere in the solution longer, and then it gets even gloppier. It seems elegant to be able to use the original solution in three ways, but it really isn't the best way.

agar is not fast setting enough to be effective in that recipe in my opinion. Coating frozen foods is best done with kappa.

agar is not a particularly good gelling agent for the dipping technique. kappa is a lot better.

One should get handy with chamber vacuum bags and a $40 impulse sealer before considering any other options. The Cyclones, like FoodSavers and many but not all clamp machines, have a drip tray so a bit of liquid won't hurt. One hangs the bag off the counter, and hits seal when the stream reaches the top of the bag, before any significant quantity reaches the tray. Water is incompressible; the Kpa or whatever readings are totally irrelevant. Once liquid replaces air, the bag is ready to be sealed. Period. With more liquid, any vacuum machine is way overkill. Would you pull out a food processor to mince one garlic clove? No. You'd pull out a knife. It is utterly trivial to jiggle a bag of liquid over the impulse sealer seal bar, so the liquid is on one side, and the air is on the other. Perhaps there will be a 1/4 tsp air bubble if you hurry. Who cares? I put away stock, or tomatoes this way. I couldn't be bothered to involve a more sophisticated machine. This is dead simple. Anyone who hasn't tried it just doesn't know. I wanted a clamp machine for storing or freezing dry foods, and trying dry sous vide techniques. One only needs a little liquid in a pouch with an impulse sealer, if one is willing to immerse the pouch in water (like people do with ziplock bags) to get the air out. The technique is to seal once, snip a corner, tease out the air, seal again. I got this to work well because I'm stubborn. It hasn't caught on, but it does work well. The Cyclone is far easier. Chamber machines have the corresponding restriction that you can't seal hot foods. Huh. To me that was as much a deal breaker as the "liquid limitation." In short, I use this clamp machine for dry jobs, and the impulse sealer for wet jobs, hot or not. This really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There is no reason to learn how to do every possible workaround before doing something right. FWIW, I have an MVS31 and have had for several years. I use it as much as anything in my kitchen other than knives and range, and not mostly for sous vide.

ojfc.