jogoode

Good choice of words. "Balanced and correct" is better than hotter than it's supposed to be just for the sake of spiciness. I occasionally like food that is very hot -- blistering, I mean. I used to complain when the red curry at Sri wasn't scalding; then I was told that it wasn't supposed to be. Green curries and jungle curries are typically spicier, so if you want hotter, I'm told, choose a different dish. But don't play some macho game and ask the waiter to deface your curry, which is, I suppose, what I was doing. It would be like dumping red pepper flakes on spaghetti and tomato sauce, instead of just ordering arrabbiata.

Are you calling me a boy scout camp counselor, Bux? Don't make me take on both you and Steven. Seriously, the prospect of a good Thai restaurant in Manhattan is exciting. I'd like to hear someone compare it to Pam's Real Thai, which I've heard is the only other Thai place in Manhattan worth trying. Steven, were you happy with the level of spiciness?

Jeez, what'd I ever do to you? Oh yeah, I've eaten you out of house and home at least twice. Get an appetite, Steven.

Definitely worth a shot. They have a cheap lunch special that allows you to order among other items panaeng or red curry. The quality of those two dishes can often foretell the quality of the rest of the food. But at lunch I can't try that fried snapper. Steven, is that dish big enough for two people?

What an enormous kitchen!

I don't know, doc. When I make potato with leak ash it turns out much prettier than Elena's version. Seriously, though...Thank you so much for these photos. What a vacation you had!

In Japan, I learned that cold green tea was an excellent accompaniment to Pocky. Great blog, Kristin!

It seemed as though most of the fish sold by vendors in the main market was only available to buy in bulk. For example, I wanted to buy some uni, so I picked up a tray from a box containing about 15 other trays. Turned out that I could only buy the whole box. But I'm sure this doesn't apply to every item in the market. Outside of the main area, I found some beautiful wasabi available in small amounts. I was searching for the famous tuna auction when I came upon the room filled with giant frozen tuna. I think these tuna were being prepared for auction, but I never saw scenes like these. There have been many articles written about the intracacies of buying tuna at auction, about the codes and gestures that vendors and buyers use to negotiate. I'm almost positive it isn't open to the public.

Nice, Jason! It's great to see my hometown in the news. (I used to play soccer with Andre's son.)

Amazing! Thanks, Hiroyuki! From my Japanese food dictionary (by Richard Hosking): It goes on to say that they're best in July and August. I should have bought the box! They are skinned and eaten raw. Their intestines are often served as sunomono.

I took my first trip to Japan in August, and spent four days of my 18-day trip in Tokyo. A visit to Tsukiji was, of course, at the top of my list of things to do. My friend and I woke up at 3:00 am on Sunday morning. The people at the desk of my hotel, who we had asked about Tsukiji the night before, didn't mention it was closed on Sundays; our taxi driver happily dropped us off at an empty market. Being a good sport, my friend agreed to go again the next day. This time, we made sure it was open. I'm not sure why, but I had imagined Tsukiji would be hundreds of kempt stalls with fish spread out on ice. Instead, I spent a lot of my time there dodging carts and avoiding stacks of boxes. I strolled through the market, wishing I were with someone who was knowledgeable about Japanese seafood, who could tell me from what waters these shrimp came; how to choose the finest mirugai (geoduck); and how to identify the many aquatic oddities. (Anyone know what these are?) I was happy we had woken early to watch vendors prepare their stalls, lay out their wares and disassemble their fish. We explored every corner of the vast market, and stumbled into a room of flash frozen tunas. Men with axes tried to chase us out. But they gave up easily, and we watched them hack at the fish. Frozen whole tunas are broken down into blocks, which look like chunks of exotic wood. After we had seen our fill, we walked to Daiwa, said to be the best of the Tsukiji sushi stalls. It opens at 5:30 a.m. Customers are either hungry market workers eating breakfast, or young men having a snack after a night of heavy drinking. It was easily one of the best days of the trip, and it happened before 7 a.m.

Great piece about this called "Lining Up" in Steingarten's It Must've Been Something I Ate.

I'm happy to recognize so many of Devi's dishes from Amma's menu -- I was afraid I'd never get to eat those tandoori lamb chops again! I'm looking forward to trying the new ones, too.

Thank you so much for being with us, Mrs. Sheraton. There are many reputable books to guide you through a trip to France, Spain, Italy and the US. But when it comes to Asian countries, I've found a dearth of accessible and reliable information on eating. I just came back from a trip to Japan, during which I was occasionally successful in finding restaurants recommended to me by friends. But more often I was either in an area for which I had no recommendations or had such a hard time navigating that I couldn't find restaurants that had been recommended. All this trouble while traveling with a friend who spoken decent Japanese! For Thailand and Vietnam, I'd expect even less information on where to eat. My question, in light of your extensive travels to Southeast Asia -- where if I visit I would not be with someone who speaks the language -- is how did you make sure your trips included good food. And more important, how did you learn about each country's food while you were there (aside from reading books in English before and during the trip)? I'm not sure if I've left you much room for an answer -- aside from reading as much as you can beforehand and trying to travel with someone who knows the country, there might not be anything else to do -- so tell me if that's the case.

I'm not sure if the bar takes reservations, but you can certainly sit in the front room and order a glass of wine, some crudo, and a pasta. The restaurant is more casual than it looks, and more casual than its clientele might lead you to believe. Despite the suits you see on customers, the amazing wine list and the menu pricing, you don't need a jacket or a tie or even a button-down.

It’s getting harder to get a table. After an intriguing meal at Cru with Bond Girl I decided to get to know the place and set up a meeting with Shea Gallante, the chef and one of the three owners. I got there around 10:30 a.m., and the phone was ringing. “I’m sorry, we are full this evening. Another night, perhaps?” says the reservationist. Then she held the phone away from her head and looked at it, confused. “That was odd,” she says. “I told a woman that there were no tables available tonight, and she said, ‘My son lives nearby and has already been there three times. Now I’ll see that he doesn’t come back.’” Frustrated diners aside, between Gallante’s ambitious cooking and fanfare about the wine list, people want to eat at Cru. Though Cru has been open for a little more than a month, it has only been letting the dining room fill to capacity for a few weeks. The small dining room – about 17 tables – and the bar area have been full almost every night since, with people ordering three or four courses at the bar, and customers with 9:30 reservations, like Bond Girl and I, still eating at 1:00 a.m. Because Cru opened during the Time Warner Epoch, Gallante has heard it compared to Per Se and yet-to-open Café Gray. But Gallante has a clear idea of Cru’s place among them. “I’m not some uberchef; I feel like I’m just a 31-year-old cook who’s opening a restaurant,” he says. Gallante’s first culinary job was at a Poughkeepsie pizzeria, but after graduating from the CIA he graduated to more elaborate Italian cooking, first at Pino Luongo’s Coco Opera and then at three-star Felidia. After about two years at the latter, Gallante went to Bouley and shot up the kitchen ladder to become chef de cuisine. At Cru, for the first time, Gallante is running a kitchen while serving his own food, and the results so far are impressive. But despite his ambitions and his skill, it is inappropriate to compare him with chefs who have run their own kitchens for years. Gallante owns Cru along with its wine director, Robert Bohr, and Roy Welland, who used to be an owner of Washington Park, in whose space Cru now resides. Only the stove is left from Wash Park’s kitchen; everything else was designed and built for Gallante. Some of the gadgets in the kitchen – a Hold-O-Mat, made by Hugentobler, a German company, and not available to purchase in the US, which Gallante uses to cook lobster – might suggest that Gallante is focused on innovation or bent on showiness. But he says that he's most interested in consistency and precision. He doesn't cook veal sous-vide so he can flaunt the technique on his menu, he says, but because it ensures that the veal is cooked exactly the way he wants it, every time. He leads seven cooks in the kitchen, including his two sous-chefs. Many among the kitchen staff have already worked under Gallante, either at Felidia or Bouley. His “pasta guy” made pasta for 14 years at Felidia. Everything at Cru is made in house, except for the bread (which will change once Cru is completely on its feet). I watched one of the sous-chefs cube rabbit and pork belly, and grind it for Cru’s cotechino. The restaurant is still evolving. To Gallante, the dining room still feels new, like he’s “moving in to a new house.” Three items on the menu will change in the coming weeks. Gallante is taking his heirloom tomato salad off the menu, as tomatoes fade with the approach of fall. His foie gras with spring onion ice cream will also be adjusted. Foie is now served roasted on quince puree with yogurt, almond and black truffle ice cream, which he and Goldfarb are collaborating on and, as of last Friday, still tweaking. Gallante says that yogurt and truffle is a classic combination that he learned to love at Bouley. I tasted the ice cream without the addition of truffle -- if Goldfarb serves ice cream of that texture and concentration of flavor for dessert, I’ll be at Cru every night. They were working to make sure that the ice cream wouldn’t be too rich. If it is, Gallante says, it’ll be like serving foie gras with a butter sauce. On the plate with the liver will be a playful touch: roasted quince with a foie gras emulsion sauce. The sous vide veal will be replaced by roasted venison (Gallante admits to being obsessed with balancing his menu; for example, offering four seafood dishes and four meat dishes as mains) with a prune glaze served with wild rice and baby beets stewed with black truffle. Though he’d love to change his entire menu with the change of the season, he knows he has to find a balance – he expects he’ll soon be reviewed and changing his entire menu at this point would be suicide. Since Bohr wasn’t there when I visited, Gallante showed me the wine cellars, after warning me that his talking about Bohr’s wine would be like Bohr’s talking about Gallante’s food – neither is entirely reliable. He also warned me not to expect an elegant cellar, like, say, those honeycombed shelves at La Pergola, in Rome. (This is New York, he says, and space is tight.) There are three “cellars,” modest, temperature controlled rooms of sturdy racks that hold some of the restaurant’s 65,000 bottles. Many are, of course, stored offsite – or else the cellar would have to be as big as the dining room -- and there are regular deliveries that allow Cru’s pairings and wines by the glass to rotate. Before Washington Park opened, Welland, a private client of Bohr, asked Bohr to build a wine collection that would serve as the foundation for Washington Park’s wine program. Cru’s wine program is Welland’s expanded collection with around 25,000 new bottles purchased specifically for Cru. The list is especially deep in Burgundy, but Bohr has also amassed a singular collection of German and Austrian wines, some of which are not offered by any other restaurant in the country. In the first cellar I saw, which was mostly red Burgundy, Gallante guessed there were 13,000 bottles. We pulled bottles off the shelves more or less at random: Chateauneuf du Pape 1962, 1970 Musigny, 1969 Echezeaux, 1964 Richebourg, 1976 Clos St. Denis, all from great winemakers. And if you download the wine list you’ll see that those bottles are just saplings in a forest of redwoods. Cru’s 3,500-bottle wine list comes to customers as two books, one about white and one about red. There are at least fifty wines by the glass, and many if not all are available in full and half glasses. (As a lightweight drinker I’m very happy about this.) Since it opened, Gallante has been getting to Cru at 8 or 9 a.m. every day but Sunday, and leaving around 1 a.m. His kitchen staff works similar hours. Just wait until they start serving lunch. The Red Cellar The White Cellar The Kitchen: It looks bigger than it is – note in the foreground the dead space Cru inherited. Gallante at work in the downstairs kitchen. You open a restaurant and all you want to do is cook, but you spend much of your time on the phone, or talking to twits like me.

Sounds great, Mike. Thank you!

That's nuts! And I assume that the staff is composed of CIA "seniors," who have limited, if any, experience in kitchens. (If you get tired of answering these questions, Michael, tell me to shut up and get your book.)

Send me a check that'll cover the pizza and wine, and I won't hold a grudge. But seriously, what might account for any difference in restaurant quality between the three main CIA restaurants, if you think it's plausible that there is any at all? Why do people consistently recommend the French restaurant, and not the American? Maybe the tableside service charms them. Do students cook under the direction of a chef/professor, or does the CIA appoint some over-achiever as chef de cuisine?

Ha! You owe me a meal, Michael. I'm not a service snob -- shit, I'm only 23! But I just felt so awkward while a kid my age tried to force scallops off a skewer and onto my plate, finally shooting one onto the table. Can't blame the student, though. I don't know why the school made him plate at the table. I might give one of the other restaurants a shot, but I still feel like there's better food I could get with the money -- Poughkeepsie has great Mexican food.

I went to college near the CIA and had two unbearable meals at the American Bounty, though I have heard better things about Escoffier, its French place. I like the concept of a student-run restaurant, but think that there should be a greater discount, like at FCI in NYC. Three courses at American Bounty costs over $40 for dinner. At FCI you can get 4-course and even a 5-course dinner for $30. (The relative discount is even greater; consider the prices of comparable meals in NYC versus the Hudson Valley.) The service at the American Bounty was also unbearable. Imagine the student who hates math class but has to take it to fulfill some school requirement; CIA waiters are students fulfilling a similar requirement, and most of them would rather be anywhere but serving you. Sorry about the rant. Avoid the American restaurant.

Prune, on 1st Ave and 1st St.

Agreed. Two stars is not appropriate. But that's for another thread... Have you ever tried either of Donguri's multicourse options? I haven't but want to. Bruni didn't mention them and that got me wondering whether they are still offered.

Thanks, Todd, for the rundown of your favorites! Has anyone eaten at Katsuhama, the tonkatsu-ya on 47th?

Good catch, Todd. I didn't notice that bit. And I'm intrigued about the restaurants you mentioned. I've never heard of either. Donguri would, I think, be an above-average Japanese restaurant in Japan, but in New York it is a gem.