Busboy

That's the kind of confusion I can handle -- I take you've experience with this?

We have a Kitchen Aid now and we loathe it. Obviously, you've had a different experience with yours but on ours the the electronics have never worked well; if you boil over milk -- or sometimes, just wipe the stove top off -- the oven shuts down; and the hinges on the door got themselves bent out of shape and cost $180 per to replace. I almost wept with joy the day the thing was installed, and it has broken my heart ever since. It's worse than the damn kids. Edited to add: Thanks for your suggestion. I am bitter, but I appreciate your time and will take one more guarded look at KA before we buy.

How far is walking distance? Nectar and Marcel's are about a 15-minute hike from the Mayflower and offer excellent but very different options: Marcel's for more elegant/French (without being off-putting) and Nectar more stylish/modern American. I don't know why I assume they're after something with a little swank to it, but Pesce struck me as off-key; though I love the place it's not ideal for a nice 3-hour celebratory meal. Firefly is a great place, loud and energetic. The Tabard Inn is right around the corner and it is well worth sitting on a couch in front of the fire before or after dinner, and you might get a decent meal there, too. Haven't heard anything about the Mayflower's restaurants since they were briefly trying to get a destination restaurant up and running in the mid-80s. It's probably a better place for a great brunch than for a serious dinner.

We made it through the summer without a working oven, but now it's time to start baking and roasting again. Tthe repairman has explained that it will run at least $800 to get our current oven fixed (rants availble on request), so we've decided to get a new one and are looking seiously at the lower-end GE Profiles. We would appreciate hearing from anyone who has experience with this product, or any other suggestions. We cook quite a bit and occassionally fairly elaborately. The stove top will be used most often -- we're looking for one mega-burner for boiling at lightning speed and searing meat -- but the oven will likely see substantial use, everything from roasting chicken to making profiteroles. Space on the stovetop is important as well; we've learned the hard way that the extra inch or two lost when the display is mounted parallel to the ground for easy reading, as opposed to being stuck on the front of the thing, is a very useful bit of real estate. We are hard on equipment -- any oven/stove top can expect top get banged about, boiled-over on and smoked, so reliability is a significant consideration. We have little interest in computerized bells and whistles; we're looking for something that, when you turn the knob, provides reliable, even heat at roughly the level it's supposed to -- ie, when the dial says 350, the oven is at 350. Price is definitley a consideration. Thanks.

Of course there are many ways to write a review and many of them are legitimate. A reviewer needs to find one he’s comfortable with and one that communicates with a great number of readers. Just as we all don’t have the same taste in food or restaurants, we won’t all prefer the same reviewer. I see no problem in including comments made at the table by others. If I were writing reviews I might even include remarks overheard at other tables if I weren’t afraid of appearing to be ill mannered. Paying attention to one’s companions at the table however, is good manners. Anyway, Bruni included one person’s comments on one dish in the Pace review and it appeared he agreed with the comments which meant that the use of the comments was not to round out the review and make it a review by committee. I read it as a convention to liven up the text. As you say, YMMV. Tastes in eating and reading are very subjective, but the differences are very interesting to discuss. ← Most of the reviews thus far include either direct quotes from his friends or commentary that includes his friends. I could be wrong but I thought it's the job of a restaurant reviewer to evaluate a restaurant based mostly on his or her experiences. I wonder what his friends thought of Per Se? Didn't see any commentary there....maybe I should consider going? to illustrate: the piece on Indochine -- and the piece on LCB Brasserie Rachou -- 71 Clinton Fresh Food -- Convivium Osteria -- Soba ← Sometimes a good line -- "this is like an antidepressant," "this is a pu-pu platter that's lost ot's way" -- says a lot about a dish or a place. After layers of adjectives and lists of ingredients and preparations, they serve as a fresh, tart summary. Bruni is just giving his companions credit to his witty companions, rather than stealing their lines outright, not writing reviews by committee. Why this should be found disturbing is beyond me.

Go to a bookstore (or look in your kitchen) and copy the recipe from Keller's French Laundry Cookbook. Oh, hell, just buy the book if you don't have it, it's incredible. Anyway, Keller's is the only recipe I have ever used and they have turned our deliriously good every time -- which I credit to Keller, not to my own modest skills. In fact, I never order gnocchis out any more, because even the best restaurants can't compete with gnocchis that you've rolled out yourself 30 minutes before boiling. Keller, btw, bakes baking potatoes and used egg to bind. The resulting gnocchis are light as clouds. When rolling them out, I look for a texture roughly the same as Play-do "lite".

BTW, that's named after my wife's Nana.

We went to Ella's once and the pizza was awful. Undercooked, underspiced and undertopped. I don't know if we went on a bad night, but of all the "authentic" places in town, they were the worst.

I'm not sure it's so much a devotion to "Seasonal Cooking" -- something of a religion in some quarters -- as it is a dedication to cooking whatever looks best at the market or the store. I don't boycott December tomatoes because they are out of season; so are the green beans I buy. I ignore them because they suck. Same with Chilean peaches, or California strawberries in February. At the same time, my cooking is affected by the weather, so those light summer meals seem less compelling than something braised and served with roasted root vegetables. So I stay seasonal not because I have to, but because it feels right. I think it's a little silly to adopt rules and force oneself to stick to them. God knows, no one needs another source of angst over the course of a long winter night. ("I knew it was hothouse lettuce and a Mexican tomato, but I needed that BLT. How will I ever face the farmer's market again?"). And, over the long run, any cook worth his or her salt will spend enough money on quality food to support local growers and sellers.

Competence and consistency.

Rule #876 - Friends don't let friends drink beer out of cans (unless 100% unavoidable) ← You have to remember the days when you were young and poor. When that $5.99 case of Iron City -- as opposed to the $5.99 6-pack of Heiniken -- was all you can afford. Never forget the lessons of poverty...lest you have to learn over again.

You're doing it wrong! Drink it out of the glass, not her navel!

If you're not getting comped, you're probably not drinking enough.

Ugh! A lesson learned the hard way! ← I wish I could say that all it takes is once to learn that one. --DW ← The only way to avoid it is to train yourself and your friends to reflexively crush (OK, dent, I could never crush them) the can as soon as they finish off the beer, and drink only from the unmolested cans. And check anyway.

#973: Drinking the next morning doesn't cure the hangover, it only postpones it. #974: Make sure the beer can is empty before you put your cigarette out in it. Someone (you!) may still be drinking it.

Just thought I'd throw this in for the hell of it, from another thread. I've been watching this debate unfold without throwing in, lately, cause it's moving forward well without my help. I would suggest, however, that everyone agree that "great" means astounding and influential cooking, not economic success (though the two can certainly overlap. And by influential, I don't mean selling a lot of cookbooks, (Rachel Ray, Emirel, Bourdain ) but influencing the direction and style of other top chefs.

My trusty LaRousse Gastronomique has three versions of the classic drawing of the subdivided cow carcasse showing the origin of each cut, one each for British, American and French butchers. It's not entirely illuminating but: 1) Contre filet and faux filet are the same thing, according to LaRousse. It appears that they are the fat side of the T-Bone which, as we all know are opposite (contre) the filet, or small side of the T-Bone. Sliced, the contre filet becomes a New York strip, or, according to LaRousse, entrecote. 2) Although I once had a French butcher (in the US) try to tell me that bavette and onglet are the same, my experience and LaRousse say no, bavette is a flank steak. 3) Hamp and Flachette are both drawn from the same section of the cow marked "flank" on the American cow. The maps are a little murky on this point, but my guess is that they are both more or less skirt steaks (which are not marked on the LaRousse chart). One thing that the diagrams drive home is that not only do French and American butchers give different sections different names, but they cut the beast up differently to begin with, so a lot of times there are no exact translations. Steak frites is not traditionally made with what Americans think of as a "steak cut," but with, I believe, a round or rump steak. (someone with the new Bourdaine cookbook can probably clarify this, I believe he comments on it.)

Yes. Absolutely. By definition. One can be a great manager without being a great cook. One cannot be a great chef without being one. One can probably be a great chef and be a shitty manager -- great chef's lose their restaurants all the time. In DC, Yannick Cam has lost, what, three? Roberto Donna is struggling to keep his place out of the clutches of the tax man, and Carole Greenwood is on attempt number three.

Well, I wanted to tweak chefette for two reasons. First, she seems to accept the definition of "greatness" as one defined by clebrity and monetary success, not culinary achievement. Emiral being "greater" by this standard than Keller, for example. And second, that one is more likely to rise to greatness -- by this definition? -- through a bureaucratic than a culinary approach. Not that ass-kissing and shameless self-promotion haven't paid off for many people in many careers, but I'm curious which "great chefs" she would hold up as being, in effect, mediocre chefs but great manipulators. More to the point, would her advice to a rising female chef be to spend less time in the litchen and more time schmoozing?

So, ability to cook? Not a factor?

Actually, I was trying to make the point that I was so worked up by my culino-psycho-Freudian outrage at the duck fat that I was overwhelmed with desire to have it for dinner. And I just might, dammit. PS -- I didn't know that there was anything but good fats.

Wandering back over to the social-familial (if that's even a word) aspect of Euro-dining, I wonder if that's not important on a couple of levels not discussed. First, my general experience is that home cooked meals for family and guests tend, more or less naturally, to be healthy. Even if you're not trying to channel Thomas Keller, if guests are coming over, you're likely to set out something relatively wholesome and home-made, not processed and frozen -- a roast chicken or grilled pork chops, for example. There's almost always a salad and a couple of types of vegerables and some potatoes or rice. You probably have a better chance of stumbling across something particularly tasty in France or Italy than in Iowa or Wyoming, but you're likely to get a pretty good meal there, too...if nothing else, our beef still kicks French beef's butt. Even on a Tuesday night with just the family, I'd suspect that a meal would be served up sans angst and with a little freshness and variety. In other words, simply shifting the pattern from random microwaving to family dining brings almost inevitable improvements. A second thought comes from my fathe- in-law, who spends a good deal of time golfing and drinking with retirees in the Florida Panhandle, where he lives. He once said something to the effect if, "you know what kills these old geezers off: stress." Unscientific though the observation may be, it is an interesting one when you contrast the idea of dinner being two hours of delight with friends and family, versus it being a day-long stress-generator. Over time, the difference between the two approaches may be significant. Better food, less stress -- let's get the family together for dinner, and call the neighbors, too. [For the record, the Busboy family had Popeye's red beans and rice and carryout pizza in separate rooms last night, but that's just Monday. Sunday was a proper dinner for nine (kids, friends, kids' friends), braised lamb shanks and polenta, lentils, salad, the last of the cherry tomatoes, on perhaps the last night warm enough to eat at the table on the front porch. I feel healthier just thinking about the damn meal.]

This is all good and common-sense infromation for dieters, but the whole tone of the article -- as though chefs are somehow cheating by making their food taste better -- is beyond annoying. ""I was required to sauté all my vegetables and to roast my potatoes in duck fat," confesses David C. Fouts, a chef and restaurant consultant based in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, Calif..." Those bastards! Requiring him to roast potatoes in duck fat! How cruel -- and then diners forced to eat those very potatoes! What is wrong with America? [Pause rant while I call home to check how much duck fat I have stashed in the back of the freezer -- could be a change of menu tonight.] And, while diners may not expect it, it strikes me that most people can tell when their vegetables have been finished with butter or olive oil, that the clear liquid ladled into the omlette pan is some type of fat, and that salad dressing contains oil. Right?

Your post reminded me of the first time I stayed in Athens over the weekend, after several previours weekday-only trips. Since everyone in Greece eats outside whenever possible, it was impossible not to notice that all the tavernas were crammed on a Sunday afternoon, mostly with families. I couldn't help thinking, "Don't these people know there's a ballgame on somewhere? They could be sitting in dim light munching junkfood, instead, they're out here talking to each other. How terrible for them."

As all true Python fans know, the Pythons have always been interested in wine, being among the first to jump on the Australian wine bandwagon. "Another good fighting wine is Melbourne Old-and-Yellow, which is particularly heavy and should be used only for hand-to-hand combat."