Busboy

Two corrections and a couple of additions to Joe H's excellent recco's. As a ex-Maryland Boy Scout I know well that the C&O Canal is 184 miles ("of adventure") and, as a former GWU oarsman, I know that there are only about 80 "Exorcist Steps," though that is plenty if you're sprinting up them 20 or 30 times. During the crowded tourist season, the Lincoln, Jeff, Vietnam Vets and FDR memorials are best viewed at night. Hell, they're probably best viewed at night any time. If you are at the Lincoln at sunset, walk behind the memorial (if they still allow that) and watch the sunset over the river. The balcony of the Kennedy Center is another good place to do that. And, again near the lincoln, let the kids climb on Einstein's statue, just across Constituion Avenue.

A "tactile presence" is what you feel the moment before you open your eyes and the fuzzy details of the previous night's debauch come back to you. It's called a "tactile presence" because you usually can't remember their name. This phenomena is generally the result of drinking enough to feel "flirtatious, buoyant, vinous, stealthy, intrepid or sprightly" even though you can barely walk.

Sycophant!

If you're hoping to schedule decent lunch around sightseeing, you have to do a little planning ahead, especially if you are looking for for ethnic, as many "sights" are far from decent food. The museums at the south side of the Mall (Hirschorn, Air & Space, American Indian, among others) are far, far from anything good, save CityZen and Mozu. I can't speak from experience, but if the cafeteria in the Indian Museum is any good, it will be the first time in DC history that a museum cafeteria didn't suck. If you're in that 'hood and it's one of our too-common cold spring days, consider dropping into the Botanical Gardens, at the foot of the Caitol Grounds, on Independence Ave. for the warmth and the orchids. For kids, the IMAX theater at Air & Space is a great fun (I speak from experience). Get there early. Spring is tourist season and A&S is a top draw. The north side of the Mall (National Gallery, American History, Archives) puts you near Jaleo (tapas), Cafe Atlantico (Nuevo Latino) and Andale (Mexican). You can walk to Chinatown, but it's something of a hike and mostly sucks these days, except for Full Kee. If you have any desire to see the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence etc, at the Archives, consider making that your first stop of the day, as the lines get long. My kids were very fond of the dinosaur room at Natural History, if you're in that section of town. Capitol Hill is a well-known restaurant wasteland, with few exceptions. If necessary, you can do the food court in Union Station. All other restaurants in that structure are mediocre, at best. Near Union Station is Bistro Bis; on the other side of the Hill -- and a few blocks away, but next to Eastern Market -- is Montmartre. Both are well-regarded and located close to the subway. The new Belgium joint on the House (south) side, on Pennsylvania Ave is supposed to be pretty decent, but the name escapes me. The Bread Line, mentioned above, is near the White House. Also, Bombay Club, which offers very good food and a gracious atmosphere, but may be a little formal for a day spent galavanting around town. The Old Ebbit Grill is a fine place for a decent luch -- nothing exceptional, except their raw bar, but you can get steaks, burgers, pasta and decent wine by the glass. Linen tablecloths, but an informal atmosphere. If you get a warm day or evening, get to the balcony on the Hotel Washington for a martini and a great view. For ethnic, you might want to consider pairing lunch with a visit to the Phillips Collection, which is offering a Modigliani retrospective I am eager to see. Also, consider the Textile Museum, which is more interesting than you'd think (depending on what they're showing.) From there it's a 15-minute stroll through a lovely neighborhood to Adams-Morgan and all the Latin and Ethiopian you can eat. My favorite Thai (Sala Thai), and two great seafood places (Pesce, Johnny's Half Shell) are on P Street, two blocks from the Museum. And the famed Bistro du Coin (where DC's largest and best French Chef, Michel Richard of Citronelle, followed my lead and took his family to dinner last Sunday) and the less-famed but very good Sette Osteria are hardly further off. Have fun. When are you coming?

I believe that the limited reservation springs from Ray's small staff and desire to keep overhead low -- hiring a full-time reservationist would be prohibitively expensive.

My Keller cookbooks -- and others of similar dimension -- are covered with stains and the dried detritus of meals long past, because they're so damn big I have to set things on them while I cook, in my counterspace-deprived kitchen. You can always tell the recipes I like best, because of the built-up scunge on the pages. Bouchon makes a great trivet; you can stack two medium bowls of chopped vegetables on on on The French Laundry Cookbook and still read the recipe below.

A tragedy that I suspect is somewhat related to the decline in bagel quality is the ubiquitousness of pre-sliced lox. Can't anybody use a salmon knife any more? Pre-sliced lox is too thick, dries out quickly and just looks wrong drapped over a red onion and dotted with capers. I think one of the Kashruth councils needs to step in and put an end to this suspect practice, before it spreads to the bagels themselves.

There's a hip new cafe at MoMA that might be worth dropping into, but when my wife and I dropped in at 11:30 AM for a couple of small plates and a glass of wine it was filling up fast. It's also kind of the polar opposite of a good sandwich place: small, tasty, well-presented and expensive portions of alarmigly hip food: raw char, potatoes with tongue, etc. I like the 2nd Avenue Deli on 2nd and 9th in the Village, in part because I loathe Midtown, but on one trip to NYC I ate a Carnegie Pastrami sandwich (A "pistol")every night for four days. You can always take the youngsters for a pizza. I like Lombardi's, but the locals on this board maintain that the place has gone downhill. Detailed discussion here. A fun tourist thing to do is to walk across the Brookly Bridge and get a pie at Grimaldi's. Babbo is likely booked, but they do hold tables for walk-ins. If you show up unfashionably early (like, when they open) you may be able to score one. The wife and I got a table before we'd finished our first glass of wine at the bar when we walked in. (Waiting for Pan, Soba, Bux and Sam to make fun of my provincial tastes...)

My guests are worried about what to do with a habitually late host -- and dinner that inevitably goes on the table long after the appointed hour. When my guests are on time, it throws off the whole night. Funny, that was one of the weird cultural differences I noticed when we moved to Denver for a couple of years: people showing up for dinner on time! It drove me nuts.

I'm a cynic, but I assuem that the reason cookbooks are so huge, lavish and impractical these days -- Bouchon among them, the fucking binding of my copy ripped out last night after three months of use -- is that 1) most people buy them to display, as oppose to cook from and 2) the chef and publisher make a boatload more money from a $50 book than a $20 book. It's no longer about cooking, it's about food porn.

I had the opportunity to work for, as a waiter, in two restaurants with talented and dedicated chefs here in DC: Le Pavillon, with Yannik Cam, and Restaurant Nora, with Nora Pouillon (and a great sous, whose name I forget). Both of them were spectacularly more talented than some of the chefs around DC who have a reputation for being prima donnas, both of them would do anything within reason to make a diner happy. When I hear of a chef who refuses to make a modest substitution because it interferes with their "artistic vision," I assume that this is a person who, by definition, has allowed theire ego to eclipse their talent.

Be our guest. (The forum is run by two persons, a Swiss chef and I.) Anybody else is welcome too, but French is the lingua franca there... Beware though — as I wrote above, I kid you not, the two evil words are booby-trapped ← I doubt I'll be doing much posting until my French dramatically improves. Look for something around 2007.

Une vrai tartiflette must have cured savoyard ham or it is a cheap shadow of real Alpine cuisine! (Is that they one does it on the French boards, P'titPois?) ← Sorry — some time ago I decided that I would never discuss about tartiflette anymore, and you can see that I have made a tremendous effort with clafoutis. On my food forum (in French), both words are booby-trapped! Only those two words. Seriously, I can tell you about the pela des Aravis, a traditional recipe that evolved recently into a touristy dish called "tartiflette", but AFAIK there is no such thing as a "vraie tartiflette". : creamy and soft, crusty and pungent, and lightly browned and crunchy. ← What's your French food forum? Probably a more fun way to practice my French in between class days than reading LeMonde online.All I know about tartiflet is the one I ate while skiing in Les Trois Vallees last spring, which had ham. So I'm in no position to really argue. I guess I should have bought the souvenir tartiflette dish with the "authentic" recipe on the bottom, so I could compare it to yours.

Though I can't prove it, I've long thought that French cheap wine tastes better than American cheap wine, perhaps because it's less heavily processed and less systematically denuded of personality, however rustic that personality might be. A couple years back, my wife and I had an unexpected opportunity to spend three days in Nice, sans kids, one somebody else's dime. With the exception of dinner at a one-star, we lived largely on caraffe wine (and 51 pastisse) for 72 hours. Back in the U.S., and not wanting to let the weekend go, we decided to stop in the airport bar for one last glass of wine. We sat at the bar, fingers interlaced; eys locked lovey-dovily. The bartender set the wine down. We smiled, raised our glasses -- "to Nice" -- took a sip...and goddam near spit the stuff back on the bar. Jeezus -- nothing ever said "vacation over, take care of the kids" like that glass of American boxwine swill. And the taste stayed in my mouth the whole cabride home, like having a bad dessert after a perfect dinner. So, Chef, while I'm sure the cooks in France are not pouring Charmes-Chambertin into their Boeuf Bourguignon, their plonk may well be better than ours, and we may have to go beyond Gallo to get a reasonable meal on the table.

While we're on the subject -- one dear to my heart as my oven was broken last spring and there were no clafoutis in my house -- Julia Child uses almond flour in her recipe, something I have not seen elsewhere. Acceptable, or apostacy? I always pit because by dessert we've all had too much wine to be wary of pits. Besides, who wants to work hard for dessert?

Une vrai tartiflette must have cured savoyard ham or it is a cheap shadow of real Alpine cuisine! (Is that they one does it on the French boards, P'titPois?)

Heck, some of our best stocks are made with bones from a chicken roasted for dinner. Generally speaking, I'd just as soon use it as something crystal clear from a fresh chicken. It adds a little personality to the dish which, admittedly, makes things a little more variable than a pro would appreciate. It wasn't a chicken stock, but one time I surrepticiously gathered all the bones from a prime rib that had been dry-rubbed with salt, black pepper, garlic and onions and made a stock, and then clarified it into a spectacular consumee. Escoffier may not have approved, but the rest of us had a damn good time.

Aren't the British names on port because they were the ones to institutionalize the making of port, create a market, and bottle and export the stuff? Also, because of the quality of the grapes, the blending, the fortification etc., the bottler and his style becomes more important -- to the buyer -- than the grower and his vinyard?They may have been drinking port for centuries in Portugal, but no one got around to branding it until somebody in England invented Stilton and they had to start importing the stuff by the barrelful.

I have been wrong before, but my understanding is that France became a refuge for many in the Irish gentry when they were being oppressed by the English, with some of them getting out with enough money to go into the wine and spirits business.

I own and use both of these. I particularly recommend Kamman, in light of the French Regional Cooking thread currently going on. An excellent introduction to the similarities and differences among France's regions, and the kinds of women who brought (and bring) French cooking to life.

I'd like my eGullet without extra snark, please. ← oooh oooh OOOOH! If you don't want yours, I'll take it. I LOVE snark!!!!!! ← Wait until Peanut's 12.

Is this another epiphany?

What would be the point? Isn't vanilla all about flavour? ← Yes, exactly. How do you make a recipe that calls for vanilla to not have that vanilla flavor? Beats the hell out of me. ← You're a very bad person.

Well, Bleudauvergne agreed with you (as do I) and she's got total cred, so you must have been right. And, to your second comment, a little too seriously. I threw the fork comment in as a jest aimed at the metastacizing French chauvanism (apt word, non?) emerging on that thread and was a little amused at how seriously it was taken. ← Sorry I must use more emoticons. For the record, please mentally insert "ironic 30-something post-modern cynical self-absorbtion" emoticon after any comment that I make. ← My coffee hadn't kicked in yet, or I would have noticed. I promise never to take you (too) seriously again. (Should I insert an emoticon here?) FB -- if the Brits will show a little more fight than the Italians have, throw me into the lions' den, just for the hell of it.

I suppose that your tongue was also wholly in cheek when you exported some of the discussion here to the Italian forum with a few quotes of Ivan's and mine, ending with "you're not going to take that, are you?" Isn't that some sort of trolling? It is at least very rude. As I think your efforts to bring the wide and complex phenomenon of French cooking down to a simple matter of royal alliances are somewhat misplaced. Again, I have much admiration for Italian cooking, and I don't mean to minimize it, much less to engage in a discussion like the one you're trying to start somewhere else. I only have trouble understanding why it it so hyped these days, outside of Italy (and especially in Britain), when the rave is sometimes only over Parma ham, pasta, roasted vegetables and olive oil, which are not really cooking after all. ← If you found it rude, I apologize. I just thought that having partisans of French and Italian food, two wonderful cuisines, going at it would be interesting and illuminating. I also thought that when I began speaking of forks and dynasties -- and "disses" --that people would understand that I was being facetious. I mean, come on, do I have to use a smilie every time? Do you think I really thought that The Hague could have been the culinary City of Light? Ilove the Dutch, but please.... Finally, if you're going to say that Italian food is "not really cooking after all," you're going to have to expect someone to challenge you. That's the fun right? To be challenged, to think and to respond.