Pan

That brings to my mind the question of whether, if something is commonly done, it is ipso facto OK, and can't be unscrupulous. Do you personally feel the non-listing of ingredients is OK? By the way, I thought US regulations required the listing of ingredients.

Yeah. The first word I thought of to complete the sentence would be "rice." I don't have rice every day, but almost. I certainly have more rice than bread.

Another great meal! It's great to be friends with chefs, isn't it? How many people were eating all that food? Were you in Florence on a Fulbright? It's interesting; Italy is part of my family heritage, even though it's a country where I have no ancestry or relatives, because my father, who's a painter, spent a year in Florence on a Fulbright before I was born. So my mother and father cooked a lot of Italian food when I was a child, and I grew up reading Il Capucetto Rosso in Italian, instead of Little Red Riding Hood in English. Eventually, I was able to use my own grant money to go to Italy for two summers when I was in graduate school and have my own love affair with that wonderful country, its wonderful people and culture (and of course, food and wine). (Off-topic, but I salute you for your opinion of Gehry.)

Having spent some time in Italy, I understand this. In my experience, Italians generally refuse to compromise on quality, when it comes to foodstuffs. You may live in small dwellings and drive small cars, but no way will you get produce that's less than high-quality, crappy bologna instead of tasty mortadella, and American "cheese" instead of real aged cheese. And I salute you for that.

Went back for dinner again tonight. Get the Roti Telur, it's really good.

I was just about to post that she's a woman after my own heart! I also think it's pretty hard to max out on garlic.

All he is facing is opprobrium. I feel that's warranted, because it takes a lot of chutzpah to not only copy other chefs' dishes without attribution but post photos of those dishes on your website. To get back to my question earlier in this thread, I don't think that not posting the photos would make this kind of culinary plagiarism alright, but I do think that posting the photos made it worse. And many of us who are taking strong exception to his actions are not personally injured in any way, so it's hardly fair to generalize this as "retribution." Anyway, you know what they say: If you can't stand the heat...

How long is a seder anyway? How much can wine evaporate in 2 hours?? ← Two hours? Is that how long your seders last? Anyway, the answer is, enough for a child to notice.

Of course it is!

Great first post, Miriam. I was the one who had the pleasure of approving your membership application, so I'm happy to see you posting. As kids, my brother and I always noted that the level of wine in the goblet for Eliyahu had lowered by the end of the Seder. As I grew older, I realized that that was because of evaporation. I will be going to my modern Orthodox godmother's place for the 2nd seder, but it looks like I may not be going to a first seder, as my cousins are going up to New Haven instead of doing their usual seder in Teaneck, and my father's cousin uptown isn't doing a 1st seder because one of his daughters can't make it until the 2nd night.

I doubt we'd be having this conversation if the imitated dishes in question hadn't been posted on a website. So one thing I'd like all of you to consider is whether the true offense wasn't so much presenting the dishes without attribution in one restaurant but broadcasting them to the world as if they were originals. Do any of you think it would be OK to present copies of dishes without explicit attribution on the menu, as long as they weren't web-posted and, let's say their origins would be admitted in response to a question by a knowledgeable diner? I would argue in favor of, when in doubt, disclose explicitly, but I'd like to read your views.

Going to Italy is rather more expensive and time-consuming than going to an Italian restaurant in New York. And if we extrapolated that advice, we'd be going to Japan for our Japanese meals, Chengdu for Sichuan, Palestine for felafel... Sure, it's a great idea if you have the time and money. Otherwise, let's stick to what's best here.

Snoot (as they call it) is a specialty Saint Louis barbecue item.

Chocolate or/and dulce de leche ice cream, sometimes cheese danishes or poppy or nut strudel. Truth be told, Orange Milanos or Bahlsen's Afrika cookies. Malaysian food (curry beef stew noodles, roti canai, asam laksa, bubur cha cha, etc.). Alright, perhaps a Katz's pastrami sandwich. Do I have to turn in my male ID card at the door?

Nice to meet you, Henry! I'm impressed by how organized you are! Your architecture is intriguing, and I look forward to being able to see more pictures of your work when you put them up. The rest of your schedule promises to make for great reading. A question -- or, rather, a few related questions -- come to mind: Are you a native of Seattle? If not, how did you end up there? And if you had to move somewhere else, which other places would you most like to live in? I have been to Seattle for a visit a few years ago and really liked it. I thought Seattle was beautiful, and I ate very well while I was there and enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere (to me, as a New Yorker), so I'm not asking any of these questions with the thought of speaking ill of your city.

I definitely recognize a California cuisine, but I'm not experienced enough, perhaps, to distinguish between Northern and Southern California cuisine. LA is an outie. So is New York. I suppose that's something fairly common in cosmopolitan port cities.

I would definitely try pig uterus jook if it were available.

As I was eating a new vegetable dish from my favorite Cantonese restaurant in town, Congee Village, it occurred to me that Cantonese dishes often include cooked lettuce, that they do a good job cooking it, and that I like lettuce as a cooked vegetable. Indeed, I probably like it better cooked than raw. Many cuisines are known for cooked cabbage, but cooked lettuce seems to me to be less common. Do you cook lettuce? If so, how, and what do you find goes well with it?

akwa, I may be dense at this hour, but what is "haccp"?

Their portions are that small?

I ordered takeout from Congee Village for dinner with my parents tonight plus plenty of leftovers. I got Chicken with Black Mushroom Congee, a whole House Special Chicken, Lamb Chops with Onions, and a great vegetable dish that was new to me -- Eggplants Vegetables [sic] with Bean Curd. It had excellent puffy bean curd which constituted most of the dish, Chinese eggplants including peel, a good deal of lettuce, bamboo pith, scallions, and I believe a little ginger. My father thought that one of the ingredients in the sauce was the remains of some kind of liqueur whose alcohol had been burned off, but I'm not sure. What I would say is that the sauce had a complex and very satisfying taste that I couldn't pin down. I definitely recommend this dish.

A couple of cousins and I started out on an orange beef quest today. Stop number 1 (for me, anyway -- he went somewhere else a few weeks ago but can't remember its name or location ) was Sweet 'n Tart. I expected their Orange Flavor Beef to be great, because their Orange Flavor Chicken and Shrimp have been really excellent. As you've already guessed, our experience was disappointing. The beef was good meat and had a good texture, but the dish was too sweet and had a kind of off taste. It seemed like they might have used marmalade, which could be a good thing except that the sauce, though present in a moderate amount, was somehow gloppy and just kind of weird. The other dish we got, mock chicken with various vegetables, was quite good, but our quest for a fully satisfying dish of orange flavor beef will continue. I've proposed Wu Liang Ye next, so stay tuned for another exciting episode of the Orange Flavor Beef Quest.

I think that anywhere where the way you eat a chicken is to pick up one of the chickens in your yard and have it slaughtered (or slaughter it yourself), you will eat the feet. Why throw away any edible part of a creature you owned? It's valuable stuff. Needless to say, when I was living in rural Malaysia (among Malays, not Chinese Malaysians), I had plenty of chances to eat chicken feet in soups, etc. Ditto in regard to the brains, et al. Many, many places serve brains; in fact, the last place I had a dish of them was in Hungary. I think eje basically nailed it in his post upthread.

Hearth should be mentioned in a thread like this, though overall, I'd probably recommend Lupa first. I haven't been to Babbo, Del Posto, Alto, or some of the other places recommended above, though.

I do see what you're saying, but while not everyone who eats cooks, everyone who cooks surely eats, too! Besides, there are at least a few people here who are like me. I very seldom cook and have restaurant food almost every day. I can think of some other New York-area members who eat restaurant food about as much as I do, and post about it.