slkinsey

Moderator's note: I have moved all the posts from this thread that dealt primarily with the question of "whether it can be worth the money" to a more appropriate thread. Please continue this fork of the conversation in the thread entitled Can Masa Really Be Worth THAT Much $? -- $350/Person for Sushi?! Let's keep this thread for discussion that bears directly on Masa and Bar Masa.

Still haven't seen any in NYC.

I think there may be a little bit of misunderstanding here. When people speak of the NYC neo-Neapolitan coal-fired pizza style and the pizze that can cook in "only 2-3 minutes" they are talking about a much larger and copiously topped pizza than the Neapolitan style pizze you mention that can cook in 30-90 seconds. So it's comparing apples to oranges, really.

I have a friend who lives practically across the street from Compass, and one thing he has observed is that they close the restaurant somewhat frequently for private functions.

Let's remember that this is a thread about The Modern restaurant at the MoMA, not about the museum.

The recipe calls for "Virgin Islands rum." Both Cruzan rum and Pusser's rum are made in the Virgin Islands. Generically, as far as I know, "Virgin Islands rum" means a light rum, so you can probably substitute your house light rum of preference without too much difference.

As I suspect we all know, there is no cure for a hangover once you have one. The only solution is to take prophylactic measures before you get a hangover: Dehydration is a major cause of hangover symptoms. Drink lots of water. JAZ's recommendation to alternate drinks with water is a very good one, as is glossyp's recommendation for a big glass of water before bed. Give your body the best chance to break down the alcohol before it gets into your bloodstream. There is an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase that breaks down alcohol. Some people have more of this than other people, which is one reason some people have a greater alcohol tolerance than other similar people. The best way to give your alcohol dehydrogenase a chance to break down the alcohol before it gets into your bloodstream is to dilute it. Water is a good idea, but food is even better. When JAZ and I went on a NYC bar crawl a while back we consumed an incredible number of cocktails with no ill effects, a stop at the burger joint in the Parker Meridien was crucial. Take a vitamin before bed. Alcohol depletes the body of certain vitamins, so making sure the tank is full is always a good idea. If you're going to get falling-down drunk (something I don't recommend) there may be some minor benefit to consuming low congener alcohols like vodka instead of high congener alcohols like bourbon. Once you have a hangover, though... just take some analgesics, drink plenty of water, maybe eat some food, if you can hold it down, and wait until you feel better.

At various times and depending on the potency of the critic, the reviews in Gourmet, New York Magazine and the International Herald Tribune have probably come the closest. There may be others, not in English, that also qualify. Right... these were viewed as good, quality reviews. But do you think they had the influence and cachet of comparable reviews associated with numerical ratings (e.g., the NYT)? Part of what I am getting at is that it would seem good strategy on the part of the reviewer or publication to assign star ratings or numerical values if such reviewer or publication would like to have the greatest possible influence and impact.

I wonder if there is any restaurant reviewer, reviewing body or publication of reviews that is widely considered to have major influence that does not include a star rating or other numerical indication.

Gary's latest in the SF Chron shows how an interesting and uniquely different drink can be made when you add just as few changes to an old classic. In this case, it's a Manhattan plus a touch of Elisir M.P. Roux (a herbal liqueur with anise and a bunch of other botanicals) served on the rocks with a lemon wedge. He calls the drink Organized Chaos: 2.0 oz : bourbon (Wild Turkey 101 specified) 1.5 oz : sweet vermouth (Noilly Prat specified) 0.5 oz : Elisir M.P. Roux 1 lemon wedge Build in an ice-filled wine goblet. Squeeze lemon into drink and add for garnish.

Belvedere vodka is having a cocktail competition. If you're a professional bartender from New York City, Las Vegas, San Francisco or South Florida, go here and submit your best original cocktail recipe that uses uses Belvedere Vodka, Belvedere Cytrus Vodka or Belvedere Pomarancza Vodka as its base. Submissions are due by Wednesday, January 5, 2005.

You can do freeform tartlets, provided you don't fill them too much.

I'm not sure that this is, strictly speaking, true. We just don't know. There are a lot of things at play. Who knows, she might have been told not to assign a star rating precisely because the NYT wanted Bruni assigning all the stars for the big TWC places. Certainly the assumption all of us had was that the big TWC places were reserved for Bruni. My point was rather that she managed to do something interesting with the column that she would not otherwise have been able to do with the only other option available to her: picking out an obscure one-star bistrattoria to write up.

To clarify Ya-Roo's post a bit, there are two spaces at The Modern, the Dining Room and the Bar Room. The Modern’s Dining Room, which is the more formal space overlooking the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, is set to open later in the winter. It will feature the dishes Ya-Roo detailed above. On January 5, The Modern's Bar Room will open to the public with it's full menu (it has been open since November 20 with a limited lunch menu for museum visitors only). This is a less formal space designed for walk-in business. The Bar Room will focus on Chef Kreuther’s Alsatian roots and will feature over 25 savory dishes served as small plates to give guests the freedom to enjoy a light meal or to create a multi-course tasting. Dishes will include Fines Herbes Salad with roasted bacon-wrapped goat cheese, Arctic Char Tartare with daikon and trout caviar, Steak Tartare with quail egg, Tarte Flambée, Wild Mushroom Soup with toasted chorizo ravioli, Diver Scallops with poppy seeds, arugula juice and parmesan, and Grilled Quail with chive späetzle and lentils. Desserts by Marc Aumont include Pineapple Carpaccio, Ricotta Crepe Flan, Ten-Hour Cooked Apples and Hazelnut Dacquoise. Guests may bring their own wine to The Modern's Bar Room from January 5-19 with no corkage fee. The Modern has a separate entrance on West 53rd Street.

White Godiva isn't the same thing as crème de cacao, afaik. In general, I think the Marie Brizard crème liqueurs are very high quality, and would tend to turn to those first. My memories of Hiram Walker are not good, and I don't tend to buy that brand.

The right questions are: what were her options, and what could she have done better given the hand she was dealt? I actually think her Masa review was one of the more interesting pieces of writing to appear in that space; far more so than a forced one star review of some obscure bistrattoria she had to dig up in the boroughs would have been.

I don't think she had mush choice. She was treading water and holding a slot for someone else, and everyone knew Bruni would be reviewing Masa eventually. Rather than devoting space to the review of an unimportant restaurant, I thought she actually managed to say something fairly interesting and revealing in her review of Masa -- not only about Masa but about NYT restaurant reviewing in general. But it's not as though she had a lot of options.

Actually, I think Rocks is arguing exactly the opposite. He's arguing for better written reviews and better consumers who take the time to read well-written reviews rather than relying on the number of stars assigned (or a two-word snippet from a review pasted into a newspaper ad for a movie). What I got out of it was that he was taking Don's implication that it is unfair "for one single person's whim in assigning stars to have such a dominant influence" to its logical conclusion. This is something with which those of us in the performance arts are intimately familiar. There are two NYC music reviewers for opera, and they never review the same show. Their reviews are based on attendance at one single performance (opening night) and, at the very, very best, perhaps a dress rehearsal. Similar things may be said about the reviewing scene with respect to musical theater. The NYT is "the paper of record" when it comes to opera and musical theater performances, and these reviewers wield tremendous influence not only over the success of the individual productions (which, in the case of opera, are scheduled for limited run anyway) but can follow the individual performers throughout their careers -- usually in the form of short blurbs, either positive or negative. "slkinsey had an outstanding high C in the big aria" (whether I did or not -- and believe me, I have read plenty of things in NYT opera reviews that were patently untrue) is like getting three stars when I expected three; "slkinsey's top C in the big aria was tight and strident" (again, whether it was or not) is like getting two stars when I expected three. Frequently, this one sentence is all a performer can expect to get in an NYT review. Not too different IMO. To a certain extent, the argument that a review of limited depth based on a limited number of visits to a restaurant and summarized in a short blurb or star rating, is in fact an argument that can easily be extended to all reviewing of this kind. One could say the following and make more or less the same argument: Pull aside any opera singer/musical theater performer/dancer/pianist/conductor/etc. in the country. Ask him or her whether it's fair for one single person's whim in reviewing one performance to have such a dominant influence. Pull aside any movie maker in the country. Ask him or her whether it's fair for one pair's whim in assigning "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" to have such a dominant influence. Etc. In this sense, the argument that "one person's (or a few people's) review shouldn't have such a dominant influence" be that via a single blurb, a star rating or a "thumbs up/down" is more or less an agrument against all reviewing as we know it today. Because the fact is that certain reviews by certain reviewers in certain media outlets do, for better or worse, have a dominant influence. Now, I'll be the first person to say that I think there are things wrong with this system. But, as a performer myself, I also want to be able to take advantage of that system because it's the only way to reach a lot of people. So, I might want to get rid of the people who are currently in this position of influence, but that doesn't mean I don't want someone there. I think you will find that this attitude is shared by most performers, producers, directors, restauranters, etc. The vast majority of the public simply doesn't want to read twenty in depth, thousand word reviews from different critics. Sure you roll the dice, but that's part of playing the game.

These are good people, whom I believe are formerly the American side of Esperya before the management changed. I haven't bought anything from them (although I have bought from Esperya), but people I trust recommend them quite highly. That said, I have had the Tre Torri ventresca and tarantello di tonno they sell. It is as good as it gets, especially the ventresca. But don't take my word for it. David Rosengarten says: Read the rest of his review, and you'll finish wanting to order some immediately.

I'm curious... what non-French types other than Japanese and Chinese? More to the point, what European types other than French?

A little goes a long way, though.

Greg, if you're looking for "bottarga tonnato" that might be why you are not having much luck finding anything. That means, more or less, "tuna-ed bottarga." Bottarga is dried and salted fish roe. There are two kinds of bottarga, bottarga di tonno (tuna roe, from Sicilia) and bottarga di muggine (grey mullet roe, from Sardegna). Bottarga di muggine is, in my opinion, far superior to bottarga di tonno. When you buy bottarga, it's important to buy whole bottarga and not pre-grated bottarga (which tends to taste like cat food). Gustiamo.com sells whole bottarga di muggine and also pre-grated bottarga di tonno, both for a reasonable price. Bottarga is a wonderful product, and adds a mysterious funky flavor to many dishes. One good and almost foolproof dish to try at home is maccheroni alla chitarra with oven dried tomatoes, red chiles and bottarga di muggine from Mario Batali's The Babbo Cookbook.

Everyone loves a good rack, that's for sure. They also make adjustable racks where one can vary the angle from 180 degrees to something fairly acute. But I don't think any of those have a nonstick coating.

The reason most people have given for prefering the old A-C tri-clad roasters have been their performance on the stove top after roasting for making sauces, citing the even heating with the aluminum core. Do heavy all steel pans do the same? Well... I think there are a few things at play here: First, one shouldn't discount people's ability to convince themselves that this is actually happening. As we know, many people who have remarked on the"even heating" of All-Clad's roasting pans were actually using regular stainless with no thermal core. Second, it's not clear to me that one even needs particularly even heating to make a pan sauce in a roasting pan. A roasting pan with a thermal core will provide more even heat, but so what? To make a pan sauce, we're talking about a few seconds on the stove, maybe make a little roux, splash in some liquid to deglaze, whisk it around, pour it out. Anything more than that (simmering, reduction, etc.) should really be done in a saucepan. During the brief moments the pan is on the burners, a little unevenness of heat won't hurt anyone. Certainly not to the tune of a 1100% markup over Steven's example (All-Clad's 16 by 13 roasting pan retails for $275 USD). I'd rather have the 25 dollar stainless steel pan, spend $165 on a 3.4 quart Falk Culinair stainless lined heavy copper saucepan and use the rest on a couple of prime beef tenderloins which I could roast in the roasting pan and sauce with a sauce from the saucepan. Ultimately, I think that's a better expenditure of money.

And when am I going to get a sample of these beans? Hmm? Some questions: what beans are you roasting, and what are you roastng for (drip, presspot, espresso)?