Busboy

Keep in mind, though, that when people are passionate, things are going to get said in its heat -- things people may disagree with and do not like at all. That's the way passion goes, that helps to keep this sight interesting. Kim's observation is a good one. And it is a measure of how important food is, beyond its role as sustenance, that it evokes such passion and sometimes such hurt. You can tell someone all day and night that their favorite football team sucks or their car is a piece of junk, and they may disagree -- even angrily. But rarely will they have to talk about it with their mental health care professional. Tell them that they cook their spaghetti wrong, though, and you risk inflicting significant psychic trauma. I suggest that, if someone insults your pozole, you smack down their steak tartar. If someone disses your boiled greens, dismiss their hand-harvested organic petit pois with a sneer and the back of your hand. And if they try to foist sweetbreads on you, tell them that if God had meant sweetbreads to be eaten, he would have put them in scrapple where they belong (or give them to me, I love the little guys). What the heck -- it's only dinner.

And, just in case you lose sight of it with all the other great suggestions, The Rainbow Room is a fantastic place for dress-up cocktails, some credit a bartender there with starting the new cocktail trend and, unless they've changed it since I was there, the window behind the bar looks over all of lower Manhatten.

A relevant article from today's Washington Post. Still, the kosher life has its challenges. Gourmet cooking is one of them, says Laurie Moskowitz, a political consultant who lives in Northwest Washington with her husband, their toddler, and a baby on the way. "I try to put together menus that are tasty and elegant, but sometimes it's hard to make substitutions," she says. "Like for sauces, can you use soy milk? That's under debate."

We went in November -- not that recently but well after tomato season -- and noticed that the tomato courses seemed surprisingly tasty given the season. If I have any wisdom to add to what has been written already, I would say 1) I think the food succeeds better as an intelligent, fun, meal than as an epochal revision of the dining experience -- I'm not buying "foams" and "airs" as the wave of the future, but I had a great time. 2) The best wine we had to drink with the food all night was the New Mexican sparkling wine they offer. Everything else was too heavy for the food. Have fun!

On the other hand, the occasional dust-up adds a little spice to the site. It's a difficult line to draw and it's hard to guage sensitivities on line. A little insensitivity on the receiving end can be a good thing, too.

There's no question that there's a touch of New York-centrism to eGullet, or maybe (to include myself) East Coast-centrism, but I don't think it's malignant or (usually) snotty. Keeping in mind that there are regional differences is manners and that a medium like this invites rapid response over deep thought, it's a pretty polite board. I'd say that the more passionate and critical posts, as a rule, tend to come when the discussion veers into politics, economics, philosophy or criticizing Charlie Trotter. You're a hundred time more likely to draw a heated response if you discuss smoking, food stamps, or the "broader effects" of "bad food" than you are if you just say that you like the occassional Velveeta and taco sauce nacho orgy.

In the introduction to "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" Julia Child wrote that, with experience, the home cook she was trying to reach would stop seeing recipes as strict prescriptions regarding the preparation of individual dishes, and begin using them as a starting point to express their own taste and preferences. I think it's odd to see people stress over the percentage of their cooking that comes from recipes. I don't find it any easier to cook either from a recipe or improvisationally and besides, the test is whether the food taste good when it gets to the table, not whether it originate in your brain or Escoffier's. Besides, the accounting gets tough. If I cook scallops with a lime beurre blanc, but didn't open a cookbook, does that count as with or without a recipe. I didn't use a recipe this time, but the first time I made a buerre blanc I was surely getting direction from somewhere. What if I spike the buerre blanc with ginger and make it with rice vinegar and wine vinegar, and call it "asian buerre blanc"? (I know, purists would be aghast, but it's tasty) Maybe 90% of what I cook has its genesis in some recipe or another, but by now many of the dishes have evolved dramatically from the version first written down. I think that's the great fun of cookbooks -- they teach new skills and flavors that can be used as is, or thrown around promiscuously in search of some greater thrill. (Eating your mistakes is a learning experience.) Drawing a line between recipe cooking and individual cooking seems artificial and unnecessary.

It's kind of a bummer. Like discovering a good, cheap wine and then somke damn wine critic rights it up and you can't affor it any more. Onglet was destined to become hip it's just soooo French -- but short rib inflation caught me by surprise.

A scurrilous slander. One martini before dinner puts a pleasant edge on the appetite and the alleged "numbing" effects are insignificant. Not that you can get a decent martini in Europe. Cheese before. So you can enjoy it with the last of the red wine.

Integrate the strange and wondeful ingredients from the four bodegas and two Vietnamese groceries within walking distance into my repertoire, both by cooking more "pure" Latin and Asian dishes, and by integrating them into my standard French/New American stuff. Onglet with tamarind sauce and black beans, anyone?

Long nice posts are the best kind. Rants are always more effective when they're short. I love Pesce and had a wonderful lunch there just before Christmas. Unless I'm in the mood to hanf at the bar, I frankly prefer both the cooking and the atmosphere to the much-hyped Jonny's Half Shell three doors down. Why wait in line and pay all that for those small portions (anddubious service)? Get thee to Pesce.

The Grateful dead requested a bottle of ripple, a box of rain, and a carton of rollaids - to prevent acid indigestion.

I'm not a religious individual, but I think this statement is a little bizarre. It's the exactly the centrality of food to one's basic needs and happiness that makes food an important part of religious belief, and I believe that there are few major religions that don't include food at some significant level as part of its practice -- from Jewish/Muslim dietary laws to Catholic feast days (not to mention transubstantiation and consuming the Host) to Buddhist vegetarianism. Even secular quasi-religious movements embrace dietary restrictions. Find me an anti-globalist who doesn't believe Big Mac's are evil.

Did the franfurter come from Frankfort? I like American "cheese" on my hamburger.

Danish Pastries. Interestingly, in Denmark, Danishes are known as wienerbrod -- Vienna bread. I've always wondered what they call them in Vienna.

Chili; onion soup; and chicken with 40 cloves of garlic, over warm polenta. Not necessarily all at the same meal. Big red wines.

I think of Meiwah as quality basic Chinese -- the equivalent of a good steakhouse. It's a significant step up from streetcorner chop suey, but not quite "best of New York" level. I like the crispy whole fish and the kung-pao. The noodles are OK. The ribs are lousy, btw. DC's Chinatown has been in decline for many years, it hasn't actually been a destination for new immigrants for several decades, and the biggest source of Chinese residents has been a retirement home which, as you might suspect, is losing population. When I went through a Chinese cooking phase about 15 years ago there were three or four great grocery stores there. One had no one inside who spoke a word of English -- it always seemed like the kind of place that had tiger gall bladder or other traditional Chinese medicines stashed behind the counter. Illuminated by dim light bulbs and whatever sun could find its way through the high windows, smelling of Chinese spice and dust, delineated by old wooden shelves and endless drawers of obscure herbs and medicines behind the counter -- it felt like being in an 1880 apothecary's or maybe 1940 Guangjou. It's a Starbucks now. Another store sold 5-pound bags of tiger-lilley blossom, and we made a lot of mu-shi that year, pork and vegetarian. It was great, most restaurants don't add that to the mix and it makes all the difference. That store's gone, too.

Luigi's or the Orleans House? From DC's 100 best restaurants...1969. You need new friends. Peking Gourment is pretty good, but the best in-town DC Chinese is actually not in Chinatown, which is more or less dying out, although Eat First for basic flourescent light, low cost dining is popular, and the New Big Wong is supposed to be very good. Yanyu and Meiwah may be our two best spots, the one uptown in Cleveland Park, the other down in Foggy Bottom/Dupont (if you get a chance to subway in from Crystal City). I went to the Peking Gourmet Inn, once, for their signature Peking Duck. Bush 1 liked the place so much (as you hinted) that they installed bulletproof glass in the place glass window for securtity reasons.

Patricia Well's "Bistro Cuisine" is a great guide to basic French cooking -- almost a primer and, I think, perfect for a 21-year-old student. Inexpensive recipes and solid techniques that you'll use again and again. Maybe I missed it but nobody seems to have mentioned Keller and "The French Laundry Cookbook." At one level the book may be so complicated that it's unusable -- I've never tried to cook more than 2 Keller dishes in the same day (same week!). But there is incredible basic advice on things like stock, braising, the difference between a "baton" and a "mirepoix", and it promotes an overall approach to cooking that can't be learned too young or too early. I learn something important every time I try a new recipe from that book.

Every Halloween my mom used to put blue food coloring in scrambled eggs, turning them green. You can get the green ham from the back of my fridge.

I second Mark's Terasses d'Empire, he poured it for us at his restaurant and it was wonderful. Mark himself may shoot me down for this one, but I've always like Horton Vineyards Viogner, from that ancient wine-producing region of Virginia. Not is the same class as the les terrasses, but nne of the few Virginia wines I've found worth the price -- $18 or so. I don't know how widely available it is. I did once see it on the wine list at Rubicon in San Francisco.

Mrs. Busboy spoiled me for anything else. Also, Olivers Meats in Denver. I haven't had Wagyu, but I've never had a better home -cooked steak than the stuff I used to buy out there. Whenever my my wife travels there for business, she picks up a hundred dollars of strips and rib-yes for travel back to DC. In between we mostly use flanks and onglets to feee our beef jones, because all the other steaks just don't taste right.

I second (or third, or fifth) the butter poaching approach. If, as may be possible, CRUZ is unfamiliar with this technique, there is a lengthy article (from the NYT) and recipe posted here. I have personally cooked this recipe several times. It is (almost) better than sex. The key, for those who haven't done it, is to get the butter warm enough so that it melts, but does not separate -- like a buerre blanc, on a massive scale. A good thing to do with frozen lobsters -- or any lobster, for that matter -- is to whip up a Dean Fearing lobster taco, kind of a Texas lobster roll. Just roll the warm meat in soft flour tortillas with shredded spinach, jalapeno jack cheese and the salsa (preferably homemade) of your choice. This is a good use of frozen tails that might be slightly disappointing served by themselves, but are still perfectly woderful in their own right.

Your question is far from totally stupid, it's the one we had ourselves when we tried to transfer the "official recipe" to what we could get at the local Safeway (not yet on strike here in DC). I don't know if oyster grading is national or just a local tradition, but here in DC the "select" oysters are a little smaller than the premium (if that's what they're called) and tend to have more liquor per jar. In this case, the better oysters (bigger oysters, less juice) made a lesser product. As long as you feel like the oysters are relatively fresh -- even if they are in a jar -- and there's a good quantity of goop to thin out the cream with, you'll do well. Remember, though (IMHO), the liquor is more important than the oyster itself to a fine pan roast. I think that, as long as you don't curdle the cream with excessive heat, and you trust your instincts on when the oysters are cooked right, this is a hard recipe to screw up. Not that I haven't done it. PS, 2 questions: What kind of oysters do you get in SoCal? Were you the Deadhead on a previous string?

When I posted last night at 3AM I was too tired post the recipe for the pan roast I love so much -- I'd gotten on-line at 1AM when the fire trucks woke me and two hours and two beers later I was finally ready to get back to sleep. Anyway, here it is, followed by my annotations 8 freshly opened oysters 2tbsp (1/4 stick) butter 1tbsp chili sauce 1tsp worcestershire sauce 1/4 cup oyster liquor 1/2 tsp paprika dash of celery salt dash dry white wine 1/2 cup cream 1 slice dry toast place all ingredients except cream, toast and 1 tsp of butter in double boiler. stir until oysters begin to curl add cream and continue stirring briskly just to a boil. DO NOT BOIL pour pan roast into soup plate over slice of dry toast top with remainin butter and sprinkle with paprika My Annotations: I use the oysters you get in jars for this (horror) and prefer the "selects" to the highest grade because there is more liquor in the jar and, to some extent, the liquor is the key. One 8-ounce jar yields about a dozen oysters and 1/4 cup liquor, a nice quantity for making two soups instead of one. The fresh oysters don't seem to give enough juice, and since they're cooked, the freshness difference is more or less irrelevant. Increase the other ingredients by about 1/3. If you are at a gourmet shop selling oysters that have been shucked, in their liquor, ask them to pile on the liquor. They will find this strange, but be firm. When initially warming the oysters, undercook. During the warm cream stage, you can stop cooking more or less whenever the little guys feel right to your taste, no point in overdoing it in the first step. I usually crouton-ize a couple of slices of baguette rather than using sandwich toast. Whatever you think gives the best crunch. The chili sauce is the key to this dish. It is that Heinz stuff in the funny little bottle. This is the only thing I have ever seen it used for. Do not think in terms of taco sauce or anything having to do with the dish "chili con carne." Trust me. Eat (drink?) the broth first, and most of the oysters, until it is almost done. This is delicious. Leave yourself half-crunchy, half-soggy croutons at the bottom of the bowl, slide the remaining oysters and as much of the remaining broth as possible on top, and crunch into it. Life will be very, very good.