docsconz

It has been awhile since I've been, but it was pretty good and a good value. Cambridge, N.Y. is a beautiful area. What are your other options?

If they do not say so they aren't. I didn't see any indication on the website that the tomatoes are DOP.

What were the problems?

Nice fatcap on that pork too. I am very jealous. I can't help but comment that the Cathedral was very reminiscent of the Cathedral in Siena.

I am glad and not at all surprised that you had what sounds like a lovely evening. What did you think of the lobster? I don't think anyone does lobster better than Chef Secich. I've had the kimchee ice cream before. In what context did you have it? The restaurant is serious about food and creativity, but I also don't find it in the least bit pretentious. That the owners and the Seciches have brought this quality of food to the Lake George/Adirondack region, I feel is a wonderful thing. I feel blessed to have it in my backyard.

This is no doubt true, but the interesting thing is what I find amazingly good and what my parents found amazingly good were, despite considerable overlap, very, very different. I have been exposed to and thus enjoy so much more than they did. This includes not only ethnic cuisines outside of their own sphere of ethnicity, but avant-garde cuisines as well. My parents, although world travelers, would never have conceived of traveling anywhere just to experience the food - no matter who cooked it. It is not that they didn't appreciate good food. They did. It was just that what they considered "good" food was relatively limited.

I have had and like both, but I love the square more. When I was growing up in Brooklyn, a nearby deli would take a hot square knish, slice it down the middle and fill it with lunchmeat and call it a knishwich. I loved them with roast beef and mustard.

Posterity. Many of the greatest innovators and artists are not really recognized as such during their lifetimes or at least during their peak creativity. Picasso and Adria are examples of innovators who were and are recognized as such during their lives.

I actually wonder if the salt varieties might have hurt him in the judging? Steingarten has a piece in one of his books debunking gourmet salts.

I don't think Michael got screwed by that rule at all. If it went the other way, Mario would have been ata huge disadvantage since he doesn't really do pastry at all. Michael has a strong background in savory cooking. In fact some of the most interesting threads I've read on eGullet stem from Michael discussing mixing of sweet and savory boundaries. I think it was a fair battle with a debatable outcome. Michael acquitted himself very well, but then so did Mario.

Alice Waters is not just any American Chef/Restauranteur and is certainly well known and respected at least in parts of Europe. While France is not Italy, Alice is cetainly well known and respected there. She has been a major cog in the Slow Food Movement there as well as in the U.S.

Makes sense. A recipe is important.

I must disagree, Wendy. I think what advances any profession's respectability is the quality of the work produced, otherwise it is window dressing. I don't care how a person dresses so long as the dress does not directly effect the quality of the work. If Mario is more comfortable wearing shorts and he cooks better as a result than I say, let him wear shorts!

Wendy, thanks for the suggestions. I think adding the zest with the sugar or some citrus oil would improve the product. I am not so sure that we added too much fruit, however. The recipe was very imprecise as to how much fruit was actually called for. It asked for two navel oranges, but did not suggest size. The fruit we used was small and we did leave it out to dry for about 14 hours as the recipe called for. The custard quality was actually excellent. The problem was that the tart was imbalanced towards sweetness with little citrus essence despite the fruit. Thinking about it, I guess this is fairly common with a lot of fruit tarts, which may be why they don't generally appeal to me more than they do. I figured that a citrus tart would be more, well...tart.

Avant-garde is all about stretching boundaries. Yesterday's avant-garde is today's mainstream. The impressionists were initially reviled by the mainstream. Rock and Roll was considered subversive (maybe it is ) and nouvelle cuisine a flash in the pan! While the example of presenting empty plates is put forth as such an obvious disparagement of the concept taken to an extreme with cuisine, I am not so sure that it is so obvious. The assumption is that one eats nothing when given an empty plate. Why not eat the plate? The utensils? The menu? That's right, the menu at Moto is edible! Will it be good? Perhaps in the right creative hands.

How is the resultant ice cream not frozen solid? I like my ice cream soft and pliable, though not melted.

If it doesn't say DOP on the label it isn't. That does not mean that they aren't good tomatoes, but true DOP San Marzanos are at least a step up from most of the canned competition and even compare favorably to most fresh tomatoes.

They may also contain enzymes that effect the quality.

As they say, "Money talks". It just seems to be as far from Sicily as one can get climatically, but then I have never been there. I would have thought he could have had decent money elsewhere.

They do appear to be seeds of some sort...or insect larvae The availability of all those ethnic products is enviable. I live in an area that has some very good food, just not terribly diverse ethnically.

It wasn't so disappointing that it resisted the predations of my family and our guests!

I just bought some this weekend at Putnam Market in Saratoga. They were about the same price. They aren't cheap! I wonder if this summer's crop are starting to hit the stores?

Mario did a great job, although he barely used any of the ingredients in a few of his dishes. At least the judges said they couldn't taste them. My issue is not so much that Mario won. It is that there was such a wide margin based on originality. So what if he doesn't typically make dishes like that? It doesn't mean they were original. I think Michael's problem was that his dishes were perhaps a little too spare on the plate. All I know is that I think I would have preferred to eat his dishes, myself.

We had a team effort make the Merliton Tart from the Dessert book. We did it with a few variations. The recipe called for two navel oranges. We used two heirloom navels, a pink grapefruit and a blood orange. In addition, since we didn't have almonds, but did have crushed Sicilian Pistachio, we used that. This was the fruit layed out in the crust prior to inclusion of the custard. The custard added, but not yet baked. The final product. I don't know if our substitutions had a significant impact or not on the final product, although it was slightly disappointing. The crust was superb, but the overall tart was too sweet without enough citrus presence in the flavor. The fruit itself was topnotch. I wonder if some zest added to the custard would have helped? It could have stood to have had a little more acid for better balance. Interestingly, we had a 2000 reisling ice wine from Thirty Bench (Niagara Peninsula, Ontario) with this that was the epitome of sweetness balanced by acid.

Congratulations to eGullet's own Michael Laiskonis for a job well done in his "battle" with Mario Batali. It ws a very interesting episode. While Batali did well, to say that he was more "original" than Laiskonis is ridiculous.