jogoode

I'm sold! Kai's Website

See who won here. Pasternak got best NYC chef and Allison Vines-Rushing, of Jack's Luxury Oyster Bar, won for Rising Star Chef.

Employee X shows us how an incompetent restaurant runs, from its accountant's perspective. Tony Bourdain wrote the intro and called the series a samizdat Kitchen Confidential. I can't wait for part 2. * * * Be sure to check The Daily Gullet home page daily for new articles (most every weekday), hot topics, site announcements, and more.

My eyes stung from the eucalyptus when I stepped into the men's room. And it took me five minutes to figure out how to turn of the water in the sink. We each had a glass of an excellent daiginjo -- a sake for which rice grains are polished until they're something like 40-50% of their original size. They served it in beautiful handmade glasses with big coasters that looked like thick slices of the trunk of a small tree. The "conch" was listed on the menu as Princess sazae conch. Sazae, as I understand is a sea snail which I've also seen referred to as "top shell'. I've only seen it at one other Japanese place in the city and it was done better there. For about $20, you get 6 sazae shells, each of which, yield two tiny bites of snail overwhelmed by panko and "soy butter". And garlic, a strong taste of garlic. I ordered two skewers of meat from the "grilled over bincho tan section", chicken with fresh wasabi and Oregon Kobe beef with miso. (Bincho tan is a type of Japanese charcoal; incidentally it is used at Sushi Yasuda to purify water.) The chicken needed salt badly and was a bit dry; the fresh wasabi tasted diluted. The beef was amazingly tender, and sweet from the miso. All it was missing was a strong beefy taste. The beef skewer -- about six small hunks -- was $15. The chicken was $4. Sushi "for two" came next. As Bond Girl said, for $120 we got 15 pieces of somewhat sloppily-made nigiri sushi and a crispy tuna roll. The rice and some of the fish (chu toro, snapper), I thought, was very good but the fish was too large and the rice was hardly warm when our platter came to the table. The uni had the deep flavor I love but none of the sweetness. The shrimp was sweeter than most ebi at sushi bars but was a bit dry. A strange thing about the sushi: I suspect we could have ordered the same pieces of sushi a la carte and got it for the same price as the platter, or maybe less. The a la carte sushi went from about $5-10, with most items around $6. If we assume the tiny, crappy roll was an expensive $10, then the average price of each piece of fish on our platter was $7.33. The crispy tuna roll came after we had finished the nigiri and further proved to me that nothing fried should be wrapped in sushi rice and nori. The oily taste is almost always too strong for the rice. Since we were still hungry after our sushi, we ordered the rice dish Bond Girl described. I wasn't as bored with it as she was -- I kept finding in each bite different bits of kim chee, some salty and spicy, some sweet and vinegary. Pretty good dish. The room is beautiful and deserves a look. And the menu is so large that we didn't scratch the service. If I go again, I'd try more of the items that are explicitly sourced from Japan, like the wild Mutsu Bay scallops or the squid from Hotaru. I still love the concept of being devoted to procuring obscure ingredients from Japan -- and the US -- but I wish Megu seemed committed to this concept's execution. Instead hip-hop musak played loudly and more and more decked-out couples rolled in, and girls with $1000 handbags. Megu seemed like it was all show. When a dish comes to your table, expect everyone at the surrounding tables to stare, partly because your dish looks wild -- like raw oysters served on a bed of crushed ice that glowed purple -- and partly because they're hungry and haven't yet gotten their food because the kitchen takes so long. I saw the famous edamame, which came attached to whatever it is edamame grows from. To me they looked like they were attached to long green stalks and they were propped up and posed until they stood high above the plate. It all looked silly. The plate, for some aesthetic purpose, sloped and resembled a ramp, albeit a ramp imported from Japan.

My strawberry rhubarb gratin with a black sesame crisp and white asparagus ice cream was a wild-sounding dish that ended up just being damn good. It wasn't until the asparagus ice cream had dissolved in my mouth that the vegetal flavor came through -- clear, vivid, white asparagus!

Lord knows I love ADNY, but it has not resonated with the New York fine-dining population at large. Nor is it selling out every night. I've heard rumors that it's in real trouble, doing only 10 covers a night. (Can anyone confirm that?)

Even through opentable.com, which does not represent all available tables in each restaurant on a given day, you can get an 8pm Friday or Saturday reservation at many excellent restaurants, among them Cafe Boulud, Aquavit, Danube, Oceana, Picholine, and Le Bernardin. And is it really that terrible to start a 3-hour meal at 6pm?

I'm sorry..but what does FOH mean? Front of the house .

Actually, JJ is right: this was avocado topped with crab meat (with the slightest bit of chives) topped with lime sorbet, on a pool of what tasted to me like cucumber water. I know the menu said coconut, but I tasted cucumber. In any case, this was sublime. For some reason, I choose to trust Suzanne over the menu. Oh, maybe I trust her because all night she was naming the herbs and flavors in every dish. What a palate! Good call. They certainly had the texture of zeppole. But I can't say I didn't like them. Suzanne, can you describe a financier to me?

I think there was avocado in this amuse. I took it in one mouthful and almost teared up when I realized there was no more of it. This was my second time having the avocado pre-dessert. And I still think it's awful. But after having the crab amuse, which contained the most prominent ingredients in the pre-dessert -- avo, lime sorbet -- I think all it needed was something sweet to bring it together, or at least to stop the avocado from dominating.

And they're giving out Megu DVDs at the reception desk. It's a fun ten minutes of watching fishermen drag around huge tunas and watching chefs cuts raw fish.

I popped my head into Megu tonight. Lots of young people drinking and partying -- strange crowd for a place that expends such effort sourcing exciting fish from Japan. The bar scene might be where there profit comes from. Despite the theatrics -- um, the ice buddha -- I like the concept. At the end of the long, long menu, there is a map of Japan which shows all of the areas from which their ingredients come. And there's a comprehensive glossary. Kind of cool. Oh, and the $25 edamame is meant to feed four.

I've enjoyed offal ever since I had my first taste of sweetbreads as a child, but even until a year ago, walking through a Mexican or Chinese butcher shop and glimpsing lung or staring down a plucked goose made me light-headed. I can't say what behind the butchers' glass freaked me out more: animal parts that looked like they came from an animal (I'm thinking of ears, snouts and feet) or those items that if I didn't know better could be some weird vegetable (like bright white honeycomb tripe or comparatively bedraggled-looking intestines). Sometimes it was just the name of the meat that brought on bouts of queasiness and made me grab for a table, a counter, with which to steady myself – now I'm thinking of the Chinatown butcher standby, "pork recta," the other pork butt. But yesterday, with that brain in front of me, which looked so much like a cartoon brain with its squiggly crannies, I thought about how far I've come. And I ate it casually, despite the crannies and the occasional thought about Mad Cow, like it was a piece of good old American chicken . Sam's right that it needed some textural contrast to be a dish that you'd want again, and I feel that way about a lot of offal. I could've eaten seven orders of Blue Ribbon's bone marrow on toasted bread, but it would be too rich to eat that much of it alone; the crust on our block of liver at Landmarc and the crisp fried outside of their sweetbreads make the melting meat more substantial. I have, however, had a couple of good experiences with sweetbreads without a crust when they are grilled and meaty, as at Argentine Pavillion (46th between 5th and 6th). I was genuinely excited to try the duck embryo that Herb found, though I suppose that the persistence of my excitement would have depended on the little guy's appearance. (Anyone know what a cooked duck embryo looks like?) I was relieved when Elvie's said that it was all out.

Thanks for that, Jason. The sushi fish at Megu looks way too big for my taste, dwarfing the rice despite the ideal rice to fish mentioned in the article: But this is not to say that Megu doesn't interest me.

In this month's Vogue, Steingarten writes about being a judge on Iron Chef. I was surprised to read that he thought Flay produced some of the best tasting dishes. I guess you have to eat the stuff to really judge.

If we do mixed grill at Argentine Pavillion, we'll get sweetbreads, blood sausage, skirt steak, short ribs, and kidneys.

Mayhaw Man does the Jazz Fest. New Yorkers are extremely jealous. * * * Be sure to check The Daily Gullet home page daily for new articles (most every weekday), hot topics, site announcements, and more.

Sietsema again touting the only Keralite place in New York.

I tried the pear sorbetti at Ciao Bella a while ago and thought it not only tasted like a ripe pear, but its texture was also very similar to pear. This didn't make it especially appealing to me as sorbetti -- it made it a bit heavier than I like -- but I thought it was a very interesting product. It's nice that there are so many good gelaterie in the city, and that whenever you're downtown, you know there is good stuff to be had with only a 5 minute walk. Is there any good gelato uptown? Celeste (UWS), I believe, gets their gelati from Bussola.

Laboratorio is serving malt flavored gelato and didn't have any chunks. I might be biased toward Laboratorio because they rarely use chunks -- and pieces of anything in my gelato, except for bits of nut (in the toasted almond at Lab) or seeds (in their kiwi), are unwelcome. If I want candy, I'll get candy.

I'm a big Lab fan and think it eclipses anything in the city that I've tried, even the ice creams and sorbets that I've had in shmancy restaurants. Very, very intense flavors and almost never too sweet.

Pan, have you tried the famous Laboratorio del Gelato, on Orchard Street? Easily surpasses Ciao in my opinion.

It was too busy to ask, so I snatched what I thought was a new menu which reflected the new prices. It wasn't.

Tomorrow DiFara raises prices. Won't keep me away.

Thanks for the report, Mulcahy. I've always been interested in trying a vegetarian tasting menu -- and I'm also an enthusiatic meat eater. Were the carrots and beets in the third course just roasted or was there something else going on?