slkinsey

Timing is of the essence when one pays a visit to Shake Shack. Go at 12:30 on a work day, and you're in for a wait. It's a very popular spot, and they're just not equipped to deal with that kind of volume. Go after 2:30 or on a weekend, and it's a very different story. This is not all that unusual, frankly. A lot of places -- especially in the "cheap eats" category -- have some significant time-of-day dependencies. Some places you want to go when they're crowded (e.g., Grimaldi's at the beginning of lunch when the oven is hottest) and some when they're not (e.g., Shake Shack or White Manna at lunch time).

Well, some of the things I don't see on that list are "food" and "fashion" -- the two examples I used. I could just as easily say that "those who would deny that the works of Oscar de la Renta are serious art have probably not spent much time examining his work." And yet, high fashion does not have the kind of IP protection you are arguing should be extended into the class of culinary "works." Adria's stuff is great. But do I think it's in the same class as Faulkner or Verdi? No. Just about everything on your list, by the way, boils down to "writing" and some form of "plastic art" (e.g., drawing, sculpture, painting, etc.) -- two areas that, as I mentioned before, we as a society have determined are worthy of special protection.

To a certain extent, I do think that the question of whether "culinary works" should be entitled to copyright or similar IP protection does involve a value judgment. I think copyright and the idea of IP protection in general came out of the idea of recognizing the special nature of artistic works and giving consideration to both the moral rights of the artist as well as the economic rights of the patron and/or artist, owner of a copy, etc. This clearly started in earnest with the invention and widespread adoption of the printing press, and so it makes sense that the written word led the way. Subsequently, other classes of creative work have been added under the umbrella of this concept. As Steven points out earlier, within a given class of creative work, the system only works equitably if it is value-neutral. This is to say that anything I write is afforded the same protection as something written by, say, William Faulkner. That said, I think there has to be a certain value judgment about a class of creative work before one decides it is approproately made part of the copyright/IP protection concept. So, for example, at some point we decide that the works of Faulkner, Stravinski and Picasso are so important and so clearly artistic and so clearly deserving of this moral/economic protection that we are willing to make writing, music and painting part of the copyright/IP protection concept even though the value-neutral nature of the system means that anything written, composed, painted by, say, me would be afforded the same protection despite the vastly lower inherrent value of such work. But, clearly there is a point beyond which kind of protection is less well and properly applied, and the decision has gone the other way with respect to other classes of creative work. We simply do not have a workable system if everything that might possibly be deemed creative is afforded this level of protection. So, as others have pointed out, the fashion industry does not have copyright/IP protection. To a certain extent this involves a value judgment. This is saying that we, as a society, do not think the creative work of Oscar de la Renta and Jean Paul Gauthier is as much "art" as the creative work of William Faulkner, Igor Stravinski and Pablo Picasso. More to the point, we have decided that fashion is not "art enough" as a class of creative work for us to afford such extraordinary value-neutral protection to this class such that the sweater your grandmother knit for you is just a protected as Calvin Klein's Spring line. For me, while I can accept the argument that the body of work from, say, Ferran Adria is pushing the envelope more towards art than artifice, I'm unconvinced that his creative work belongs on the same pedestal with the works of Faulkner, Stravinski and Picasso. I am rather more inclined to think it belongs alongside the creative work of Oscar de la Renta. And if this leading light in the "food as art" movement does not quite equal the same standard as Faulkner, et al, and if indeed I am not convinced I see the possibility of any "creative work in the culinary medium" aspiring to that pedestal -- then I am not sure I believe the "culinary arts" should be afforded this kind of extraordinary IP protection, with the wide-reaching implications it must have in the value-neutral system. I guess I simply don't feel that Adria's work, as brilliant as it may be, and perhaps more importantly, the medium of food, are quite important enough and "art enough" for me to have automatic IP protection for every new cocktail I might invent.

Awesome. I have to check that place out!

There are a few things here. . . First off, as a general rule bad espresso is a lot worse than bad or indifferent coffee. This is why hardly anyone in America drinks espresso -- because 99.9% of it is too bad to qualify as swill. Due to the overall bad quality of espresso, most Americans have trained themselves to drink cappuccino instead so that the milk serves to obscure the poor quality of the coffee. Unfortunately for people in Mussina's position, steaming power and longevity are two of the things that are affected most by cost. It's hard to find a machine that can steam, say, ten cappuccini in a row for under around fifteen hundred bucks. Now, I do agree with the premise that many Americans are used to not-very-good coffee, and will tend to accept a mediocre cup without batting an eye. However, the American standard not-very-good cup tends to suffer mostly from being weak. A strong not-very-good coffee is harder to take than weak not-very-good coffee (another reason why no one in American drinks espresso). That said, I do think many/most Americans do have an understanding and appreciation for when they have been served a really good cup of coffee. And since it's not rocket science to make one, why not do it? Coffee is often the last thing a customer will taste at a restaurant. A last chance to make an impression, if you will. Serving a great cup of French press coffee can go a long way towards creating satisfied customers and repeat business. Depending on the size of the restaurant, it might even make sense to purchase green beans and roast on a daily or weekly basis, for truly mindblowing coffee at practically zero extra cost once the lower price and decreased perishability of green beans is factored in.

FWIW, Little Branch is indeed open again. And a great choice for drinks.

I recently spent some time in Spain, including several days in Asturias, and was privileged to have a lunch of Fabada Asturiana at the restaurant La Maquina in Lugones, which specializes in this wonderful dish. Always nice to start at the top. For the edification of those who may not be familiar with fabada -- sadly, most Americans have never heard of it -- it is a deceptively simple dish. In the most classic version, white beans (fabes in Asturiano) are cooked low and slow with saffron, black morcilla, chorizo and lacón (the salt-cured foreleg of a pig). A large bowl of beans in liquid comes to the table and a plate with a few small pieces of each of the three meats. That's it. But that's only really the beginning. The white beans I had were of a wonderful local variety (granja variety?) -- similar in appearance to the familiar Italian cannellini, but significantly longer and creamier in texture. The beans were all whole. Not one single one was split or broken, nor did they break apart on the way to our bowls or up to our lips. And yet, upon the slightest pressure from the teeth it was as though they immediately transformed into creamy softness. Some of this was the quality and variety of the beans, no doubt, but I can only assume that some of it was also the result of many decades of experience and expertise. This fabada was by no means a light dish, and yet it was certainly less rich (and less meaty) than other well-known bean dishes such as cassoulet. Really, it was all about the beans. The few small bits of meat that came along with the beans seemed more like condiments for the beans than fundamental structural elements of the dish. Since that eye-opening lunch, I have come to understand that there are many different versions and styles of fabada. I have heard good things about fabadas with clams and also what sounded like a very interesting fabada with centollo (giant spider crab). As will be apparent to our Spanish members, and those more familiar with Spain than I, my knowledge and experience in this area is very meager at this point. But I'd like to learn more! What can you tell me about fabada? Is there any possibility of approximating this dish back here in NYC? What are some favorite recipes and variations?

Eben Freeman, the prodigiously talented bartender formerly of wd-50, did a Pim's Cup riff at wd-50 with cucumber foam.

It's not really sanitary for them to keep them or do anything with them in that context.

The "Original db Burger" is a sirloin burger filled with braised short ribs, foie gras, and black truffles topped with tomato chutney and served on a parmesan bun with pommes soufflées or pommes frites. It normally goes for twenty-nine bucks, and to the best of my knowledge the reviews have all been fairly positive. Now, that does sound pretty expensive for a burger. But I wouldn't say it's a "hamburger" so much as it's a fancy dish riffing on the concept of a burger. There is also the point to be made that this burger costs as much as it does simply because of the ingredients it contains, which were chosen for their gustatory contributions rather than their cost or supposed luxury status. Unfortunately, since that time there have been myriad imitators who have latched on to the idea of a "really expensive hamburger" and created absurdely overpriced sandwiches with what I feel are often extremely inappropriate ingredients (Kobe/Waygu beef, for example, is just a stupid idea for a hamburger). Most of these have been reviewed as just this side of "terrible" -- but that's to be expected when one is creating a dish more for the purpose of inflating the cost than inflating the taste. That, I think, is a bit of the case with Selfridge's sandwich, which doesn't sound all that good to me. If you do ever make your way into db Bistro Moderne, I definitely recommend you try the dB Burger. It's well worth it. Really what I'd like to see is reastaurants taking this concept in the opposite price direction. . . a tiny bit of foie tucked inside a burger would be delicious, and need not cost a zillion dollars. I could easily conceive of a burger that was made of, say, ground chuck filled with braised short rib meat, a touch of foie and some rehydrated porcini that went for $15 instead of $29.

The general feeling is that the lowest-priced home machine/grinder setup of quality is the Rancilio Silvia/Rocky combination. That will cost you around $750 (~$500 for the machine and ~$250 for the grinder). I wouldn't use anything less in a restaurant setting, and even that will have serious limitations (e.g., you can't steam too many cappuccini in a row before it will lose power and need to heat back up, it is a single boiler design so you can't go directly between pulling the shot and steaming milk without a period of heat up or cool down time, etc.). If you can't spend more than $250 for an espresso machine, you're much, much better off simply trying to have a good regular coffee program. A $250 espresso setup won't just produce espresso that isn't mind blowing -- it will produce espresso that flat out sucks. Espresso is one of those things that is fundamentally dependent on the quality of the equipment. A sufficiently skilled cook doesn't need great cookware. He can still produce a mind blowing piece of fish with crappy stainless cookware. This is to say that a $250 saute pan doesn't necessarily lead to better food than a $2.50 saute pan. On the other hand, not only is is impossible to produce good espresso with a $100 machine, it is also more or less the fact that a $1,500 setup will produce better espresso than a $750 setup, all other things being equal.

Heh. Liquid yeast. Liquid yeast is what you want. The wild stuff you definitely do not want.

I may be wrong, but I think they've been doing Pisco Punch recently.

I beleive that was probably the Dreamy Doritiny(maybe) made with an Islay. Proper full name of the drink would be: Dreamy Dorini Smokin' Martini. I think it's the glass rinse of Ardbeg scotch that provides the Liqiud Smoke flavoring equivalent in that particular drink. It's been around for a while & appears in Gary's 2003 book:

They had a very nice Pineapple Pisco Sour at Pegu when it opened. Just pineapple-infused pisco in the regular formula.

Interesting stuff, Rob. Keep it coming.

Okay, but isn't part of the point that if you write a sucky detective novel that isn't all that different from a thousand other sucky detective novels, you still have copyright protection?

Yep. And there are many castings of Rodin's "The Thinker."

Well... not exactly. It was once commonplace for operatic composers to rewrite, rescore or reconfigure their operas in order to suit the singers and orchestral players who would be performing them. Mozart's Don Giovanni, for example, actually exists as two discrete versions of the opera -- the original version for performance in Prague with a strong tenor, and an adjusted version for performance in Vienna with a weak tenor and a strong seconda donna (interestingly, the currently performed "standard edition" is a combination of both versions, which was never contemplated by the composer). This is roughly akin to your example of deciding to use a little fennel one day because it is so fragrant (or to not use any fennel one day because it isn't very good). Right, but that's what we're saying here. In the other thread, I brought up the example of Outback Steakhouse's "Bloomin' Onion" which has been widely copied and never credited (if indeed theirs is the original). People seemed to feel that the Bloomin' Onion is not deserving of the same legal or ethical considerations as Dufresne's prawn pasta. You're saying here (and I have been saying) that, given a value-neutral approach, it is.

Heh... I forgot about your vast library of Spearsiana. Steven, I absolutely agree on that point. But I have some question as to whether the works of Brittney Spears deserve the same kind of IP protection as the works of Giuseppe Verdi (which, ironicaly, do not have any such protection). And, that's part of what I have been trying to say: People are arguing that Adria and Dufresne ought to have legal IP protection for their "artistic works" and yet, as you say, "no matter how bad your work sucks, it's protected just as much as the Mona Lisa and the Ode to Joy" (again ironically, both works for which I doubt any IP protection exists). So, here's the deal: You want to give Adria and Dufresne IP protection after they "publish their artistic works" by serving them in their restaurants. . . you had better be prepared to do the exact same thing for the guy who figures out a way to make cheese-stuffed hot wings.

If you think the work of Britney Spears has more artistic merit than the work of Ferran Adria, you're certainly entitled to that opinion. But you're wrong. Not to mention, if you're visiting El Bulli because you're hungry . . . . First of all, to the best of my knowledge Brittney Spears is a performer, not a composer. Therefore it is more appropriate to compare her to a line cook at El Bulli rather than Ferran Adria (or perhaps a cook at Olive Garden?). But here, as you have pointed out many times, we're talking about ethics and not law. Brittney Spears recordings have certain IP protections because of copyright law, but I for one don't feel that there is a great ethical obligation there. If you're asking whether I think the work of Giuseppe Verdi and Pablo Picasso have more artistic merit than the work of Ferran Adria, if I feel that Otello and Guernica are far greater artistic expressions than melon caviar and carrot air. . . Yes. Yes, I do. And this is not taking anything away from Adria's brilliance.

Uhhh, no it isn't. There is no copyright on "that first performance" of a piece of music. There is only a copyright on the score of the music. The only time a performance can sort-of be copyrighted is when it is recorded. And, even then, the performance isn't copyrighted -- the recording of the performance is.

Tomatoes had some trouble gaining acceptance in Italy, but were widely consumed by the 1700s. That's a couple hundred years of culinary use -- plenty of time for them to be considered firmly traditional. But why stop there? Consider that the spicy chili peppers featured so prominently in Thai and Chinese cooking also came from the New World.

Well, here's the thing about IP rights: they apply to everyone irrespective of perceived "level." Danielle Steel's copyrights -- or mine for that matter -- are just as valid as Philip Roth's.

Very well stated, Pedro. Makes some good sense.