slkinsey

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)?

I would say that is not a correct assumption under most circumstances. If, for example, you are roasting something on a rack, the thermal properties of the roasting pan are nearly irrelevant. Roasting is not about the pan cooking the food; it's about the air in the oven cooking the food and the pan is there mostly to secure whatever is roasting and to catch drippings. I agree with this for the most part. It's true that the thermal properties of the roasting pan make very little difference when one is roasting. It's not quite accurate to say that it makes no difference, because tests (and my own personal experience) have shown that dark colored anodized aluminum roasting pans provide more browning than light colored stainless roasting pans. But it's a minute difference. Mostly what you want is something reasonably sturdy and heavy. I wouldn't worry too much about whether it is clad aluminum or anything like that. All-Clad no doubt stopped using fully clad aluminum for its roasting pans because they realized they could charge the same for just stainless and it didn't affect the performance at all. The reason you want something reasonably heavy and sturdy is simply so it doesn't bend or warp when you lift the roast our of the oven. It also helps the pan's versatility, because you can use the pan as a bain marie while cooking a bunch of miniature soufflés, you can use it as a pan for lasagne al forno, and so on. As others have pointed out upthread, you're really better off using a copiously preheated heavy frypan for those instances when you are roasting a fairly small food item (say, 3-4 pound spatchcocked chicken) and you want to take advantage of convection heat from the pan as well as radiant heat from the oven.

Sounds great. If only I knew someplace in NYC or Houston to find Torani Amer...

Right. The one with calvados is called Fallen Leaves, and is credited to Charles Schumann in 1982. The one with reisling is called Falling Leaves, and was created by Audrey Saunders not long ago. This thread is cross-polinated into Drinkboy's forums in this thread by Myers.

Funny. The thread on Drinkboy's (very good) forums references this very thread for info on the Falling Leaves Cocktail.

More specifically, it is an article by someone who sells gas pizza ovens for a living, and has a vested interest in making it seem like gas can compete with wood and coal. It is also worthy of note that he is not talking about regular gas deck pizza ovens. These are special (and very expensive) ovens specifically designed to mimic wood burning pizza ovens. The one argument he makes for gas with which I completely agree is that "you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to master a wood-burning oven, but getting things right does require a bit of training and labor, which many employers are reluctant to provide." A lack of training does go a long way to explain the mediocre pizza some of the wood and coal places serve. But the bulk of his argument seems to be that wood fired ovens are the best, but these special gas fired "faux wood" ovens are almost as good and a lot simpler to use. The bottom line is this: standard gas-fired pizza ovens go up to a maximum of 550F, whereas a properly fired coal- or wood-fired masonry pizza oven will be between 750F and 840F. This is a huge and significant difference, and as a result there are things that are possible with a coal- or wood-fired masonry pizza oven that are simply not possible with a gas-fired oven. This fact alone suggests that that the assertion "ovens are basically ovens" cannot possibly be true unless one believes that there is no difference between 550F and 750F when it comes to making pizza. Now... different does not necessarily mean better, depending on one's tastes. A medium thick, "Ray's style" pizza cannot be made well in a hot coal- or wood-fired oven. So, for someone for whom pizza is mostly about the toppings and lots of them, the oven makes much less difference since they're all going to be using standard gas-fired deck pizza ovens at right around the same temperature.

Cool. What copper pieces did you get? The Calphalon, btw, is not "real" copper. It's a thin outer layer of copper, an internal core of aluminum, and an inner layer of stainless.

Hmmm... I was almost sure you had a regular NYC recirculating hood. Anyway, if you put it next to an open window when you roast, it makes a big difference in terms of smoke,

aliénor, E. Dehillerin can provide great deals but for people in the US it's only really worth it if they are able to bring it back to the US themselves. For example, Falk's eleven inch sauté pan sells in the US for $235. E. Dehillerin sells one for €113.88, which comes out to about $155 with today's credit card exchange rate. So far, so good. It's a savings of 80 dollars. But, you have to ship it over to the US and you have to pay tax. The cost of shipping a 4.08 kg pan from Paris to New York, plus tax, is more than 80 dollars.

This is not true, despite what he may have said. While it is true that a coal or wood burning oven doesn't necessarily produce a better result than a regular gas oven, it is also a fact that there are some things one can do with a superhot coal or wood oven that is impossible with gas. Think about it: in order to produce that crisp crust, places like Di Fara have to bake the pizza for around ten times longer than places like Patsy's East Harlem. That means that the toppings will be much more cooked and substantially more water will have evaporated from the crust of the gas oven pizza. This is one reason why the crust of a gas oven pizza can never have that ethereal, soft, extensible light inner layer between the crisp bottom and the toppings, and also why the gat oven pizza can never compete with coal or wood on oven spring. That some places are able to produce crusts that compete with some of the coal oven pizza in NYC speaks more of the skills of the pizzaioli in the respective pizzerie than it does the potential of the respective technologies they employ. Without a doubt this is the single most important variable.

Totally different experience, atmosphere and price point. Bianca is very good, but it's not really a "destination" restaurant. It's a very good neighborhood restaurant.