mags

A business banquet in Shanghai in the mid-90s. In retrospect, the food wasn't even knock-your-socks-off spectacular, but it gave me a very fast lesson into how different Chinese food can be from the stuff I had grown up eating in NYC. Though after umpteen banquets on that trip and others, I'll be perfectly happy to live the rest of my life without ever again eating jellyfish.

Just what I was thinking

I guess this goes to the heart of my objections to your piece, Adam. There are plenty of things -- musical, culinary and otherwise -- that I don't enjoy. But I don't see any reason to "fault" either myself or the creator. I don't much like Phillip Glass' music, but I sure as hell don't "resent" him for composing it, as you say you used to resent Sondheim. I don't like Rocco DiSpirito's food, either, but I don't resent him for dreaming it up. Trotter's offers a particular kind of experience. You don't like it, that's fine. But that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it, anything to resent. If you elect to buy a specific experience -- whether it's dinner at a particular restaurant or tickets to a particular show, or whatever -- the "value" lies in whether the experience lives up to its billing, in how well the experience fulfills the promises it has made. You wanted Trotter's to be an entirely different kind of experience; you're faulting it because it wasn't Babbo. But it never claimed to be. And by your own admission, you don't have the experience to evaluate Trotter's in terms of what it DOES promise. At the risk of reading way too much into your posts, you seem to think that your tastes -- in music, in restaurants -- should define what's offered, and that anything on offer that doesn't conform to your tastes is worthy of resentment. That strikes me as kind of stunningly self-absorbed. I think your missing his point. He's fessing up to initially resenting Sondheim but now he thinks he's the greatest. My take is that he is admitting that the temptation is there to fault CT but he learned his lesson with Sondheim so he won't. Also, I think some of us are taking this site a little to seriously. It's a food site. Comparing it to religion in any way gives me the creeps. No, I think you're missing my point. Whether Adam has or hasn't learned to appreciate Sondheim isn't the question (for me at least). What's at issue is why he felt entitled to resent Sondheim for composing music that he didn't like. And -- as Bux has already pointed out -- it was Adam who brought religion into this thread in the first place.

I guess this goes to the heart of my objections to your piece, Adam. There are plenty of things -- musical, culinary and otherwise -- that I don't enjoy. But I don't see any reason to "fault" either myself or the creator. I don't much like Phillip Glass' music, but I sure as hell don't "resent" him for composing it, as you say you used to resent Sondheim. I don't like Rocco DiSpirito's food, either, but I don't resent him for dreaming it up. Trotter's offers a particular kind of experience. You don't like it, that's fine. But that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it, anything to resent. If you elect to buy a specific experience -- whether it's dinner at a particular restaurant or tickets to a particular show, or whatever -- the "value" lies in whether the experience lives up to its billing, in how well the experience fulfills the promises it has made. You wanted Trotter's to be an entirely different kind of experience; you're faulting it because it wasn't Babbo. But it never claimed to be. And by your own admission, you don't have the experience to evaluate Trotter's in terms of what it DOES promise. At the risk of reading way too much into your posts, you seem to think that your tastes -- in music, in restaurants -- should define what's offered, and that anything on offer that doesn't conform to your tastes is worthy of resentment. That strikes me as kind of stunningly self-absorbed.

Most things wrapped in bacon are... Yeah, in fact, I'd probably go for grilled mango wrapped in bacon. Or just, you know, wrap the grill in bacon and fire that sucker up.

You know, I re-read Adam's piece with the reminder that he felt he was being "pushed" to order wine. And what I saw was that he and his friend were offered a drink when they walked in, were offered a wine-list with the menu, and were offered a digestif. None of this seems remotely pushy to me. I guess it's possible that the waiter said "You're not ordering wine? But our menus are specifically designed to compliment our wine selections. We strongly recommend that you order blah blah blah." But there's nothing like that in Adam's write-up. Whence commeth the notion that he was being given a hard sell? Okok, the offering of the digestif may have been a LITTLE OTT, but few restaurants have them, so I see nothing pushy about Trotters' offering it, even to a couple that had refrained from wine with dinner. In fact, I don't see anything in his piece that bolsters his allusions to supercilious servers, etc. Sure, being hand-delivered to the bathroom might be a bit fussier than I'd like service to be, but it's not insane, particularly if it includes the request that the bathroom-user put used towels in the hamper. I'd be a LOT less comfortable if they had a bathroom-attendant waiting to listen to me piddle and then dump the towel for me. So all in all, I'm entirely on board with Bux's response. Leaving questions about the food aside (and FWIW, I enjoyed -- but didn't adore -- dinner at Trotter's, but actively hated the food at Union Pacific), bitching about formal service and being offered wine at Trotter's is like bitching about the lack of ritzy china at a hot-dog stand. Or bitching because your glass of milk doesn't taste like orange juice. If you don't want fairly formal service, don't go to Trotter's. And if the level of formality bothers you -- as it evidently bothered Adam -- then research the vibe of the place before you make the reservation.

The worst dining companion I ever had was a blind date, about 12 years ago. He showed up 40 minutes late, looking like the "before" picture in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy -- pants too long and dragging on the ground, tie up under one ear, shirt half untucked...not Love's Young Dream, but he had been very funny on the phone, so who cares. Without looking at the menu, he ordered a burger with "the works," carefully instructing the server that he wanted pretty much everything the kitchen had lying around to be piled on top of his burger. When it arrived, it was about six inches thick, piled with cheese and onions and mushrooms and bacon and guacamole and salsa and god only knows what else. He took an enormous bite, and -- with his mouth full -- started enthusing wildly about the burger. "MMMMM! MMMMM! THIS IS THE BEST BURGER IN THE WORLD!!!" Little bits of semi-chewed mushroom and guacamole went flying across the table at my white silk blouse. Then he shoved this enormous, dripping hunk of stuff under my nose, and commanded me to take a bite. Too dumbstruck to do anything else, I took a tiny nibble and said "Mmm, delicious." THEN he picked the burger up, and went over to several tables of -- I assume -- perfect strangers, shoving it in their faces and telling them it was the best burger in the world and they just had to try it, "Here, take a bite, yeah, get some of that bacon in there, isn't that great? Here, you try some." I wanted to fall through the floor. My memory is that he finished this performance by slinging a meaty arm around the waitress, bellowing to the restaurant that she was the best waitress in the world, and then saying "And how about them boobies, hunh?" But I may just be embellishing.

Actually, the apostrophe was a mistake. I should have written "Wadso Cash" -- the late and sainted Johnny's younger brother.

Adam, with all due respect, I think you ARE perpetuating stereotypes here. The biggest value-hound (uhhh......we called it a "cheapskate") I've ever known was my ex-boss, a good Irish Catholic boy, who was happy to splash out on booze but once ordered a single pizza for a staff of 15. And one of the happiest big spenders I know -- at least on food -- is my father, who's Jewish to the core. I think what you're talking about are people whose childhoods -- or, at least, whose parents' childhoods -- were marked by deprivation. That's not at all an experience confined to Jewish culture. In many cases, that kind of experience produces adults who are, indeed, value mavens. But it can sometimes produce adults who resent depriving themselves of anything, and get great satisfaction out of dropping wads o'cash. Judging by your age, your grandmother was probably a Depression kid, right? I suspect that has a lot more to do with her bargain-mindedness than her being Jewish does.

$125 for bellinis, water, Ame, coffee (?) and service. I'd be shocked. Ooops, sorry, Andy. You already retracted.

I love multi-culti food information. For example, it would be pretty much impossible to overstate the extent to which beets are not part of your standard American burger experience. Oooh, and still dying to know about the lamb flaps.

Of course they'll keep dancing with them what brung'em. That's what all companies -- giant and tiny -- do, they play to their audience. If they fail to do that, they tend to stop being companies pretty quick. It seems to me that it's been pretty definitively proven in this thread that the new sandwich is "healthier" at least in terms of its fat content. (I see the sodium argument as something of a straw man, though it should be pointed out that the new sandwich is apparently lower in sodium than some of BK's other, older menu items.) If BK's customers make menu choices based on health -- or at least on fat content -- they'll opt for the new sandwich. If they don't, the sandwich will fail (it will not have played to the audience), and it will, indeed, disappear from the menu. And yeah, if that happens, BK will probably not be trying any more "healthy" alternatives in the near future, since that marketing ploy will have been shown to be a dog. But if the sandwich fails (and BK thus bails on the "health" angle), the blame, such as it is, will lie primarily with the customers. Now, that's not entirely fair: BK could serve up toasted fiberboard that would, in theory, be "healthier" (lower in fat) than your standard BK burger; if customers failed to order it, that wouldn't necessarily prove that they were uninterested in "healthier" food, it would only prove that they wanted their lunch to taste ok. But assuming the sandwich does indeed taste ok -- and several people here say it does, even if others disagree -- then it will succeed or fail based on whether the customers want it, and whether they want a lower-fat item at the expense of a certain amount of deliciousness. Long-winded, and I apologize. My primary point, though, is that your real beef seems to be with BK's customers. You want them to want "better" food. BK, it seems to me, is betting that they do, and attempting, in some small but real way, to accommodate that desire.

Since when is "stepping in the right direction" synonymous with giving "a damn about serving anything that might compromise their bottom line"? Is the goal here to turn Burger King into a less profit-minded corporation? I thought the goal was to prompt Burger King into serving food that was "healthier" (by whatever standards one wishes to use), less damaging to the environment, and less damaging to people's taste buds than BK's other menu items. The company will only do this if it can be accomplished without compromising the bottom line. If your goal is to promote less focus on profitability than what you're talking about is politics, not food. And while that's a perfectly good thing to talk about, it would seem that the actual sandwich -- whether it tastes good, whether it is or isn't "healthy," etc. -- is just a screen, a cover for the real argument.

Hell, Tana, Seabiscuit's on the bestseller list, or was until recently. And besides, this is the season when the dead rise. As for your dinging Mario, yes, you did. But nobody picked up on it -- not meaning to diss you, meaning only that your point didn't seem to make a dent in the general group pile-on on Bayless. As it happens, I do see a disconnect between Bayless' work for Chefs' Collaborative and his decision to pitch for Burger King. But I'm willing to believe he regards this sandwich as a step in the right direction, and what I see here is people twisting themselves in knots to avoid seeing it that way.

Celebrity is to a very large extent a function of a created persona. And these days -- and maybe forever -- the public demands a relatively simplistic persona. We're not interested in complexities, seeming contraditions....you know, the stuff that all of us real people have. Nope, we want our celebrities to be two-dimensional cutouts, capable of being summed up in no more than a sentence or two. Furthermore, we the people seem to have a (to me, at least) peculiar habit of investing a lot of emotional capital in these simplistic personas. It seems to matter to us -- in a way I honestly don't understand -- that Meg Ryan be eternally perky, that Al Roker be eternally a jolly lover of big portions, that sports stars be not only good at sinking baskets or hitting homers but also at representing Good Wholesome Value, that Keith Richards be a permanent poster-boy for All Hedonism All the Time. And we get really pissed when they deviate from these simplistic personae. We don't want to know that Keith coaches Little League and listens to Celine Dion in his spare time. For some reason -- and again, I really don't get this, but it seems to be true -- we regard this kind of deviation as a personal betrayal. You want to talk about hypocrisy? Al Roker has been so damaged by his love of big portions that he had gastric bypass surgery and cannot now eat fatty food or indeed any food in portions more than about a quarter-cup. And yet he still shows up on the Food Network gladhanding the winners of pie-eating contests, and rubbing his (now all but nonexistent) tummy at the sight of grease-dripping ribs. The very stuff he's shilling for ruined his health to the point where he required radical, highly invasive surgery. Why aren't you dinging him? For that matter, why aren't you dinging Mario, for his apparently horrible sauce? Jinmyo aside I don't think any of us could live up to the standards of moral austerity that we're demanding of our celebrities. That's one problem I have. Another is our failure to understand that their personae are PERSONAE, packages designed to make a particular product alluring to consumers. You want to feel like a jerk for buying into the packaging -- fine, I'll join you. You want to throw up on the system that puts dollars into marketing rather than into finding and cultivating the best possible products -- the system that promotes Brittney Spears rather than, say, some fat black middle-aged chick with an amazing set of pipes and exquisite musical sense (Phoebe Snow, are you listening?)? I'll join you there, too. But blaming the product -- Bayless, in this case -- because he turned out to be more complex than the persona you bought into...that I don't go along with, and I don't understand. You know, I didn't know anything about Rick Bayless before this started, beyond having read reviews of his restaurants and cookbooks, and having occasionally bought his bottled salsa (which I like). His success, for me, was entirely a function of his ability to cook well. And the demand that he do more than that, that he somehow represent our highest moral aspirations ...well, all I can think of his Charles Barkley pointing out that we hire ball-players to PLAY BALL, not to be role models for our children. I think we hired Bayless to cook. The rest, as they say, is commentary.

Yes, the new BK sandwich is relatively high in salt. So are all processed foods. By way of comparison, one table I saw indicated that both a cup of cottage cheese and a can of salmon have more than 1800 mg of sodium, and a cup of prepared macaroni and cheese has more than 1300. All of which is to say that there are any number of ways to designate a given food as healthy or otherwise. Angelfood cake, that darling of the low-fat era, is a sugar bomb. Likewise raisins and orange juice. All of which is further to say that it seems to me that people here are looking for reasons to blast Bayless. This sandwich he's shilling IS in fact lower in fat than competing products? Yeah, well, it's high in sodium, so he's still evil for promoting it. He's giving the money away to promote sustainable agriculture? Yeah, well, he must have decided to do that after he figured out that people were pissed, so it's just a sleazy PR move. He's even evil-er for promoting the damn thing. Mario Batalli slaps his name on commercial tomato sauce that -- according to at least one poster here -- taste like crap? Shut up, it's Bayless we're interested in pilloring. HIS sandwich tastes REALLY lousy, and did we mention it's high in sodium? Without meaning to open a political can of worms, this kind of non-logic reminds me rather strongly of ...nope, let's not go there. Let's say it reminds me of 1984. Bayless is our enemy. Bayless has always been our enemy. Bayless is wholly evil and nothing he does or says is un-evil in any way. The combination of self-righteousness and blood-lust is just a little daunting.

The fairygodmother who was taking us to Ducasse opted to stay home, so my designer and I took ourselves to Matsuri, which is the new, much-hyped place in the Maritime Hotel. Basically, we loved it. Loved first the decor, which is a clever riff on sushi-bar cliche combined with Asian post-modern, all in vast, cathedral-ceilinged room with yummy comfy banquettes, a giant wall-o-sake, and a very good (and perfectly modulated, to our ears) sound-system pumping out....yes, that's right, Clifton Chenier, the King of Zydeco. Ok, it's not what you expect to hear while nibbling raw hamachi, but hey, it beats the heck outa Japanese pop. All in all, a very nice vibe, helped along by very pleasant and enthusiastic (if not wildly competent) servers and terrific people-watching. Oh-so-tasty kitschy cocktails (a shiso mojito, anyone?) kicked things off nicely, along with a snack of extremely delicious lotus root with hot pepper, soy, and sesame. That's one recipe I want. Very good and well presented sushi/sashimi platter for two -- no surprises, but top-notch quality and nice presentation. Dull duck with wasabi sauce, delicious miso-grilled black cod (same dish that everybody stole from Nobu, but nicely done), pleasant if slightly odd dessert-platter (great creme brulee and ginger ice cream, but what WAS that odd green goo?). Summing up: Loved the vibe, the cocktails, the lotus-root, and certainly liked the sushi and the cod well enough to go back.

Don't mean to repeat myself, BUT I've had very good success by combining Splenda with Erythritol. They seem to cancel out each other's downsides.

You know how I said my mother was a terrible cook? She LOVES canned peas and canned asparagus.

Pumpkin cheesecake never made sense to me. To my tongue, pumpkin is all about warm, autumn flavors, and cheesecake -- like lemon and fresh mint and berries -- is all about light, juicy spring/summer flavors. Putting the two together just seems to muddy things, for me. But then, I don't like chocolate cheesecake (REALLY don't like it) or hazelnut cheesecake, either, for pretty much the same reasons.

>>Why would someone have to pay you 500k to carry a book?<< Cause I think some books are actively destructive, the literary equivalent of a cholesterol bomb, and I don't want to pimp for them. But there are very very few books on my "won't carry" list. >>We're not talking about people who need help to pay the ConEd bill by doing commercials, are we?<< (shrug) I think everybody's definition of "needing money" is different. And it changes over time. >>My life has ( and has had) plenty of downsides, working and otherwise. What does that have to do with this?<< Speaking purely to the working-life downsides, any time you devote your time and energies and talents to a project (even if it's a ten-minute project) that doesn't embody everything you view as noble and desirable and hot-shit, you're selling those energies and talents for money. You're whoring your talents. But understand, I think we all do it to some extent. In fact, I think recognizing that we have to do it is part of uhhh.....growing up. Fifteen-year-olds can get away with whining that Authenticity is All. Once we hit 25, it's less attractive. >>Don't you think Bayless ( and Rachel Ray, to a certain extent) look kind of silly doing these ads?<< Hey, doll, I think Rachel Ray looks silly in her TV shows. I don't think she looks any sillier in the ads. Though, to be fair, I haven't seen the ads. Does she wear a funny hat?

In answer to your first question, Mamster, no, I don't recommend books that I think are lousy. And in some -- relatively rare -- situations I will steer people away from lousy books, even if they haven't asked my advice. But most of the time, if they walk up to my register carrying the latest "and then I put electrodes on her nipples" opus from James Patterson, I'll just ring up the sale and say "Would you like a bag for that?" But -- and here's where the gray area comes in -- I will absolutely make recommendations within a genre that I think is essentially crap. I think most serial-killer books are lousy. (Bear in mind that I sell only mysteries, though we use a very broad definition.) However, I have lots of customers who like them. So I'll recommend John Connelly or A.J. Holt or even Philip Margolin, rather than Patterson. I don't necessarily think they're good books. (Actually, I think Connelly and Holt are terrific.) But I think they're a....step in the right direction, to quote Mr. Bayless. They're better, perhaps a lot better, than the literary equivalent of McNuggets, even if they're a pretty fur piece from the grilled Thai chicken that I -- a book AND a food snob -- think my customers should be buying. I've also made "sins" of commission. I spent several years living fairly well off the proceeds of a series of hideous radio spots for a chain of TRULY hideous Long Island furniture stores, and I did another series of ads for some god-awful gym where the marketing gimmic was to make people feel as lousy about themselves as possible. That one I'm not sure I'd do again. My personal line in the sand came, oddly enough, with one of the classiest offers I ever got, the U.S. debut of an Alan Ayckbourn play. I turned down the role because I found it incredibly offensive and mysogynistic, though at the time I was ravenous for both money and acting work. Actually, though, my objection wasn't a matter of principle: I simply felt that if I spent six months playing that particular character, I would put on 60 pounds and start making passes at my wrists with sharp objects. And no, I don't see Bayless' commercials as any "worse" than Puck's soups and frozen pizzas. More to the point, though, I don't really see that I have the right to judge Bayless' moral standing. And that's really the heart of my issue here.

Mags, not true at all. I'm not. And many cooks and chefs would say the same. I can even say that now, adter many years, there is not a minute of my working life that is devoted to activities to which I see a downside. But I'm not Gunga Din 'cause I'm not a man. Yeah, but Jinmyo, you think people are depraved for eating dessert. And you said at one point that you had no problem turning down $350K because you didn't need the dough. More seriously, I'm not sure what kind of cooking you do -- and forgive me, I don't at all mean to cause offense through ignorance -- but one of the things I've heard a lot of chefs on this board bitch about is having to have such-and-such an item -- crab cakes or molten chocolate cake or whatever -- on the menu because customers demand it. If that's not true of you, you must be in a very fortunate position. But it seems as though a lot of the chefs and professional cooks here do indeed need to spend a fair amount of time churning out food that they don't adore, because those crabcakes pay the damn rent.

Ohhh yeesh, we are ALL whores for dollars. That's what working for a living means: Doing stuff you wouldn't absolutely choose to be doing, in which you don't necessarily believe with all your heart, in order to collect a paycheck. Life is trade-offs. Sure, most of us have lines in the sand, stuff we wouldn't do no matter how many zeros were attached, but beyond that line...the sands get real shifty. So many of the posts here seem to assume that there are only two options available: Sainthood or consignment to the ninth circle of hell. Most of is live in the vast gray area in between, and I don't understand the demand that people we've annointed as heroes -- whether it's Jimmy Page or Rick Bayless or IMAN, fer chrissake -- adhere to a stricter moral code. Somebody is going to come along and say "Speak for yourself," and I very definitely am. When I was acting, I made heaps of commercials for stuff I thought was mediocre at best. As a bookseller, I refuse to carry certain books; as a reporter, I refuse to write or put my name to things I don't believe to be true. But I sell plenty of books I think are crap. I write plenty of stories that bore me or don't strike me as the most important thing for people to think about. And the magazine gets published every month and the ConEd bill gets paid, and that's the way it goes. And yeah, if someone came to me now and said "Look, here's a check for $500K, and it's yours if you'll carry 'American Psycho' and 'The Prophecies of Nostradamus,'" I'd be on the phone to my book-distributor faster than you can say "Ain't nothin goin on but the rent." If you can honestly say that every minute of your working life is devoted to activities to which you see no downside, activities every second of which is simultaneously noble and fascinating....then you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

The potatoes sound fabulous, Jinmyo. I love buttermilk.