slkinsey

For what it's worth, one should note that the tenders at D&C are some of the most expert in the business at banging out specialty cocktails quickly at volume. These guys cut their teeth at places like Pegu and, more to the point when thinking about speed and volume, Flatiron Lounge. They're not "taking their own sweet time, and you'll get it when it's ready" like a cocktail equivalent of Dom at Di Fara. This is not to say that Dom is thumbing his nose at customers, but rather that we're not talking about bartenders who aren't concerned with speed. However, as noted, it takes longer to make a Jersey Tenor than it takes to make a vodka soda. So if some customers who are there for the buzz are complaining about the wait, well... that's part of the price to be paid for a location in hipster central. Once the "new bar buzz" wears off and D&C finds its real clientelle, no on will say anything about waiting 90 seconds for a proper drink.

Per my post <a href=http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=4059&view=findpost&p=939190>upthread</a>, I think Oppenheimer Prime Meats strikes a great balance between quality and price. I also love the fact that you're not just pointing at a pre-cut piece of meat under glass. They cut to order.

I've tried samples of two different iterations from Angostura, as have several people around NYC. Good stuff. I hope they'll get off the pot and start production.

By all accounts, Bruni was well known at the Times as a huge restaurant fan. Whenever people visited Rome, Bruni was (allegedly) like a walking Zagat Guide, so encyclopedic was his knowledge. I suspect that, having made his chops at more serious reporting, he wanted to do something fun. Johnny Apple is evidence that it is possible to be an entertaining food writer without having been trained for it. This is not all that surprising, really. And maybe he could have been an amazing food writer about Roman restaurants. Here's the thing: Almost all of the restaurants worth knowing in Rome are making Italian food. More to the point, most of them are making Roman food. This is a significantly narrower field in which to operate compared to the NYC restaurant scene.

Not exactly. According to my understanding, single malt whiskey comes from a single distillery and is produced from a single type of malted grain (in practice this almost always means barley). Since bourbon is produced from mixed grains by law (corn, barley with wheat and/or rye), and not all of these are malted, it is not a "single malt." Anchor Distilling makes several bottlings which are produced from 100% malted rye. These would qualify as "single malt whiskies."

Steven: Any truth to the persistent rumor that you and Bruni were both offered the job, which Bruni eventually won by defeating you in a hot-dog eating contest at Katz's?

"Single barrel" whiskey is also often, although not always, at barrel proof.

Here is an old Daily Gullet article by Nina Planck: The Billion-Dollar Myth : How did soy get its reputation as a cure-all for modern ailments? Follow the money . . . For what it's worth, I'm not entirely sure I'd take Nina's word for everything here. She certainly has her viewpoint, but I don't buy some of the stuff she says about glutamate, which she characterizes as a "brain poison."

I reported on an initial tasting back upthread and wasn't impressed. Too much citrus, I thought, to the extent that it seemed a little artificial. Of course, it might be different in a drink.

THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the many things that are so cool about Gary.

How do you mean "manual" meat grinder? You want to grind your meat by hand?

I think the squirt of seltzer was used to help melt the sugar in the beginning, not to add dilution and fizz at the end.

We used to keep bees when I was a kid. I'll never forget the sound of opening a hive: <hhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm> (puff puff puff with the smoker) <hhhhmmmmmmmMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!>

Sorry! My life has been exceptionally busy of late. There is unfortunately really no way to know what the pan is really made of short of buying one and cutting it in half with a band saw (something I would very much like to do to all cookware as part of writing a book on the subject!). Commonsense weight comparisons, however, do seem to indicate that it isn't copper. The price makes a lot more sense now, although as you say it's still a pretty great bargain despite the maintenance hassle of the outer cladding. WRT the catalog descriptions, I am forever finding items of cookware sold with specifications that are not the true specifications -- although it is not usual for the misleading specs to come from the manufacturer (it is more usual for companies with something to hide to simply refuse to give specifications, like All-Clad now does). But I have seen plenty of 2.0 mm cookware sold as 2.5 mm.

Star ratings wouldn't make sense in the context of opera, where casts tend to be together for maybe a half-dozen performances and the reviews primarily focus on the individuals executing a known score of generally acknowledged worth (as well as the staging and set design, if a new production). On the other hand, in musical theater where casts and productions run for years at 8 performances a week, it might make some sense to give, say, 3 stars to Spamelot and 1 star to Cats (or whatever). Just like with restaurant reviews, the star ratings would begin to become stale after a while and those shows that were still running would merit a re-review and a new rating.

Hmm. Not sure I agree, there. It doesn't make any less sense than arguing that the "chilled vodka served in V-glass" served in most of the bars in the US isn't really a Martini.

That's it! I must have combined that in my mind at some point. Thanks for the clarification, Eric.

I actually prefer a Snapper (using gin) to a Bloody Mary.

Seriously. What's the point of a tiny splash of soda? If it's truly tiny (I assume we're talking about maybe half-ounce?) the carbonation will be gone in very short order. It will provide dilution, of course, but I can get that by swirling the glass in the ice -- and, besides, I like the progression of flavors as the melting ice dilutes the spirit. Personally, I find the idea of a vodka OF less problematic than the addition of cherries and orange slices and the like (especially if muddled!). The only problem with the vodka version is that vodka has no flavor. The Old Fashioned is such a simple and elemental preparation, that I think anything more than bitters and a twist make it into a different drink. After all, if we're going to call a drink with whiskey, sugar, bitters, a lemon twist, a splash of soda, muddled cherry, muddled orange and a pineapple spear an "Old Fashioned" -- why draw the line at Lucinda's mint? Why not "allow" a dash of maraschino? Or how about a dash of absinthe? A Sazerac seems a lot closer to the simple 3-ingredient Old Fashioned than the muddled-fruit-and-soda version, and it gets a different name...

There are a few issues you bring up here. First, I don't think that "vodka-hating," as you put it, is generally done with respect to drinking unmixed chilled vodka. This is a misunderstanding. Some of us might find that boring as a general practice, but I think even the most vodkaphobic among us would say that if you are going to drink vodka, that's the way to do it. I think most would also concede that vodka can be a good accompaniment to things like caviar. I'm certainly not a proponent of vodka, and yet I'd definitely pull a bottle out of the freezer to drink with caviar. "Vodka-hating" has its roots with respect to its use as a component in cocktails. By and large, vodka adds nothing to a cocktail but dilution and alcoholic kick. Orange juice mixed with vodka tastes like slightly diluted, alcoholic orange juice. This can be interesting and useful in a few cocktails like Audrey's Dreamy Dorini Smoking Martini, where vodka dilutes the strong flavor of Laphroaig single malt Scotch, but by and large it brings nothing to the table and is used to make easy-drinking alcopop anti-cocktails -- the White Zinfandel of the cocktail world. We have the same feelings towards these cocktails that oenophiles have towards overoaked, sweet-buttery mass-market Chardonnay. The mixological craft is one of combining spirits and flavors. As a result, vodka plays a very limited role in the cocktailian's palette. As I recall, Pegu Club didn't even crack the seal on a bottle of vodka for the first few days of "friends and family" pre-opening. The second point is a valid one. I think that many cocktailians are suspicious of the whole superpreimum vodka trend. This is because, like yourself, we understand that the vodka business is primarily one of image, packaging and marketing. When you're talking about a spirit with virtually no flavor in any meaningful sense, something else has to differentiate that $13 liter from that $40 liter of vodka. This is image, packaging and marketing. Without getting too deep into it, one could say that the history of vodka in the United States is one of marketing. It was Smirnoff's advertising that brought vodka into the American consciousness in a major way, and I think it was probably Absolut's discovery that a fancy, distinctive bottle conveyed prestige and made possible higher prices that led to the image-driven superpremium market we see today. There's a reason the most expensive vodkas come in the fanciest, most distinctive bottles. To be sure, there are differences among vodka brands -- albeit, primarily from the water used to dilute the spirits to bottle proof, as well as the various "add-ins" such as sugar, glycerin and flavoring agents that are allowed in "unflavored" vodka so long as they remain below a certain concentration. But it does not necessarily follow that the expensive vodka brands are "better" than the less expensive ones. If Smirnoff and Luksusowa were secretly rebranded and put into fancy bottles, I have no doubt that plenty of people would choose them over Ciroc and Belvedere, etc. In the end, if you combine these two points, you end up with the "vodka-hating" idea among cocktail enthusiasts: For the reasons outlined above, I do think there is a certain amount of bemusement and contempt for the use of expensive superpremium vodka as a mixing spirit. Vodka definitely has its uses. It's also useful for making flavored infusions, preserving simple syrup, cleaning off the sticky residue those stupid price stickers leave on new glassware, etc. You'll be happy to know that if I ever have to give you an emergency tracheotomy in my dining room, I've got plenty of 100 proof vodka around to use as a disinfectant. In all these uses, of course, we're really not using "vodka" as an ingredient per se, but rather just using "alcohol" for its chemical properties like we might use table salt or baking soda. Yet another reason to avoid using an expensive brand. "Flavored vodka" is something entirely different. It's not clear to me that it really makes logical sense to call these "vodka." After all, what are gin, aquavit, even absinthe but neutral spirits (aka "vodka") into which other flavorings have been infused (albeit sometimes with post-infusion redistillation)? The main difference is one of complexity: gin, aquavit, etc. all have complex, multilayered flavor profiles whereas flavored vodkas tend to be entirely one-note. For this reason, many of us feel that it makes little sense to buy a flavored vodka when it isn't rocket science to make one at home for 1/10th the price. I'll never bother buying lemon or lime vodka, for example, because I can make my own to order by microplane-grating some lemon zest into a vew ounces of vodka and letting it infuse for a few minutes before straining and using it.

Yes. To be clear: ixnay on the idgebray and unneltay discussion.

Good Lord, you pantywaist! Yes. It. Will.

Reading above, although rye whiskey is my choice of spirit for an Old Fashioned, I'm not sure I agree that whiskey is the only legitimate choice for something called an Old Fashioned. I've always understood, anyway, that it was called the Whiskey Old Fashioned, implying that there could be other Old Fashioned cocktails made with other base spirits. My idea of an old fashioned is: base spirit, sugar, bitters, ice (and usually a twist or two). No soda. No muddled fruit. No cherry. I've had a few Gin Old Fashioneds I really enjoyed.

Some interesting/relevant posts I remembered from a thread on muddling: While I would perforce have to agree with this from a strictly gustatory point of view, I think that there's another perspective that some might want to take into account. The Old-Fashioned, the drink being referred to here, is the world's first retro cocktail--an 1890s reaction to the gussification of the cocktail. At the time, to make a "standard" whiskey cocktail, if there was such a thing, a bartender would've filled a large bar glass with a mess of fine ice, dashed some simple syrup and some bitters into it out of little bottles with squirt tops, added a "gigger" of liquor (most likely bourbon or rye) and as often as not a dash of absinthe, stirred the whole thing or shaken it depending upon his doctrinaire preference, strained it into a fancy stemmed glass and applied the lemon peel to it (sometimes there was also a cherry, or a pickled walnut, or what-have-you). Now, there's absolutely nothing wrong with this. But it's not the way old-timers had learned to take their cocktails, back in the days of Andrew Jackson, when the barkeeper produced a cocktail by taking a small tumbler, placing a lump of sugar in it, adding a little water and crushing the sugar with a "toddy-stick" (basically, a slimmer version of our muddler; it could be made of hardwood, silver or even--at the El Dorado, in Gold-Rush San Francisco--of solid gold). Once the sugar was crushed, he would dash in some bitters from of a bottle fitted out with a cork with a length of goose quill thrust through it, pour in a tot of liquor (as often as not, brandy) and add a large lump of ice hacked from the block behind the bar. If it was a fancy cocktail, he might splash a little "curacoa" in it, twist a swatch of lemon peel over the top and rub it around the rim. So the Old-Fashioned was an automobile-age look back to the days when railroads were a dangerous novelty; when Indians still roamed east of the Mississippi; when the best restaurants served roast bear and the passenger pigeon was a popular game bird; when barrooms were alive with "the merry raps of the toddy-stick." It's a liquid plea for a saner, quieter, slower life, one in which a gent can take a drink or two without fear that it will impair his ability to dodge a streetcar or operate a rotary press. That's why I like to muddle my sugar cube when I make an Old Fashioned.

Hmm. I wonder how that's allowed.