[Tales of the Cocktail in NOLA]

I hope you three understand that we're expecting detailed reports of the fun upon your return...

[Lime Juice & Lime Cordials]

Very interesting stuff, David. Thanks.

[All About Gin, Generally]

I have to confess that using something relatively delicate like Plymouth in a G&T seems like a waste of premium booze to me. If I were going to use an expensive gin, I'd want something like Junipero, which has an assertive flavor that's heavy on the juniper.

[PNW versus NY]

To follow up a bit on Bux's comments, I think it depends a little on what you're looking for.

Certainly, if you're looking for top-end fine dining, I don't think any other American city comes close to competing with NYC. Assuming from your list of NY places you visited, though, I gather that this is not the case for you.

So... let's look at the places you went:

• Lupa: Seems like your main criticism here is that the bucatini all'amatriciana was oversauced. Everything else you described as "outstanding." Lupa is a good restaurant, I think, but I think it is fundamentally a neighborhood osteria that has come to much greater attention due to Mario Batali's involvement. This is to say that I wouldn't expect a "peak Italian experience" at Lupa so much as I would expect competently-executed Roman-style osteria food. And I think that's what you get. As Bux points out, Lupa is no substitute for Babbo and it's not designed to be.
  
• Gray's Papaya: The thing about Grays' Papaya and similar places is that it's not about outstanding high quality, not really. I mean, they deliver a quality product... but the deal at Gray's is that you get an incredibly large amount of food for a pittance. It's reasonable that you wouldn't be blowin away by the hot dogs there. I think your NY experience would have been better had you gone to Katz's instead for a pastrami on rye.
  
• Les Halles: A nice place, but by no means standing above a large crowd of similar places. I'm guesing you probably wouldn't have gone here had it not been for the attention Tony Bourdain's celebrity brought to Les Halles. Not a place too many of us would have recommended as a "must try place."
  
• Lombardi's: Yea, well no wonder you weren't impressed. Lombardi's has seriously slipped and is generally considered the worst, by a large margin, of all the old-school coal-fired NYC pizzerie. A much better choice would have been Patsy's in East Harlem or Grimaldi's under the Brooklyn Bridge or, for a less NYC-centric wood-fired pizzeria, Franny's out in Prospect Heights.
  

As for the prices... there is no getting around the fact that NYC is expensive. A dollar will certainly go farther in Seattle than it will in NYC. On the other hand, for every dollar someone earns in Seattle, the same job is paying a dollar fifty in NYC. In terms of "food bought for hours worked at the same job" NYC is no more or less expensive.

[Espresso Comes After....]

That's very odd as I've always thought Americans take their coffee with dessert--that is those who don't drink coffee straight through the meal.

Interesting. I wonder if this isn't reflective primarily of Americans of a certain generation. I've heard about it, generally from people roughly in my parents' generation, but have never known anyone to drink coffee throughout dinner.

[Cocktail Porn]

CS,

AFAIK, the smoking martini is an Audrey Saunders special. Not terribly difficult to spell out, though. You're right that it's a strong drink, but fundamentally no more strong than a martini. Part of the trick is not to make a 5 ounce drink. The one I made had only 2 ounces of vodka.

[Houston's instituting a dress-and-etiquette code]

Is Houston's strictly a Texan chain?

Dude, there's a Houston's in Citicorp -- excuse me, Citigroup -- center.

[Is Smirnoff better now than it was then?]

To conclude: Smirnoff is muck as a product. On a cost basis alone, I prefer to serve Finlandia. As emblematic of the dangerous and repercussive effects of market dominance, I also find it repellant. Thankfully, the tide is slowly turning, as market dominance dissipates and discerning palates develop. Who knows, in 2 years thyme, we may have Zubrowka and Luksusowa in our wells. Bring the revolution kumrads!

This is interesting, because I don't gather that Smirnoff is all that less expensive than Luksusowa and, IMO, Luksusowa is a far superior product. Just looking at NYC retail prices, Smirnoff is around $16/liter while Luksusowa is $17/liter. Finlandia, on the other hand, is $16 for only 750ml (also not as good as Luksusowa, IMO).

(Prices from Sherry-Lehmann.com)

[Vermouth in Martinis]

Out of curiosity, what do we know about Old Tom gin other than it was sweet? Would it be possible to make a reasonable Old Tom facsimile just by adding a little sugar? I have always understood that people who have tasted examples of Old Ton Gin found it more or less indistinguishable from London gin mixed with sugar. Weren't there, at least as of a few years ago, some brands of Old Tom for sale? Boord's comes to mind.

[Bridge Kitchenware]

Actually, responding to both Curlz and Tommy, I have always found their prices very reasonable... for what you get. And what you get, mostly, is high-end professional stuff. High-end restaurant stuff is not, as a rule of thumb, particularly inexpensive.

[Otafuku]

Here is a little page of information on New York Metro.

The Village Voice singled them out for "gooiest okonomiyaki" in their 2000 "Best of NYC."

Here is a short piece by Cynthia Killian in the NY Post.

[OK to drink wine when hosting Mormons?]

We have some "temple recommend" LDS friends who have been over a few times. Alcohol was served at all of those meals, and they never had a problem with it. Unlike members of many other religions with dietary restrictions, who might be offended or religiously "tainted" to even be around you while you consume proscribed foods, I have not found this to be the case with Mormons and "mind altering substances" like caffeine and alcohol. I mean, I wouldn't bring a cup of coffee into an LDS church, and I wouldn't serve pork if some of my dinner guests were religious Muslims... but I wouldn't not offer coffee after a meal just because some of my guests were Mormon.

[Bridge Kitchenware]

SWEET!!!

Bridge has always been my go-to kitchenware store in the City.

[Riesling New York's best wine?]

I have to try some of these. I have to confess that I tend to stay away from Rieslings grown/produced outside its traditional geography because they don't seem to taste like Riesling to me. Do the NY ones taste anything like traditional Rieslings?

[Vegan landlord bans meat-eaters]

considering all the side effects of a purely vegetarian diet, i'll stick with omnivore myself. with the added caveat of not eating cultivated grain.

i mean if we really want to talk about natural v unnatural.

Why not cultivated grain? Humans have been eating cultivated grain for something like 10,000 years, and their closely-related wild ancestors far longer than that. I think it's a mistake, also, to assume that cultivated grain is somehow "unnatural." The process through which wild grains became domesticated grains was entirely natural (e.g., mutated wheat stalks that didn't shatter were more likely to be collected by hunter-gatherers, etc.). Other crops transitioned from wild to domesticated in a similarly native fashion (e.g., melon seeds passing through the digestive tract and later sprouting plants in latrine sites). It's as natural as, well, evolution.

[Summer Cocktails]

Are you talking about Fee Brothers bitters? If you're looking for orange bitters, I suggest you find yourself a recipe for Gary Regan's orange bitters (it's in a number of his books) and make it yourself. It's 100 times better than Fee Brothers' and should be less expensive in the long run. Fee Brothers' aromatic (similar to Angostura) bitters is also very good.

As for Regan's Orange Bitters #5 (I think it's #5)... I am thinking about making a massive quantity and offering some to the eG crowd.

[Cocktail Porn]

Depends on the single malt, really. I went around 5:1 vodka:scotch with this one, and thought that was just about right. Lagavullin is a very full-bodied scotch, though. With something lighter-bodied, like Ardberg 10, you could go 4:1. Somewhere between 5-4:1 strikes me as about right, depending on how much you want to stretch out the flavor of the malt. As long as you use an Islay malt (which is the whole point), the smokyness is going to be right there at either ratio. It mostly depends on how much of a malt backbone you want in the glass.

[Cocktail Porn]

.... I  L O V E the shaker, Sam !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Aud.

Aw, shucks.

One thing I like about it is that it's a very large shaker, so I can mix several drinks at once and still get good aeration.

And now, since I'm thinking of Audrey, here is her Dreamy Dorini Smoking Martini. It's essentially vodka with a splash of smokey single malt scotch (the original recipe calls for Laphroaig 10) and a few drops of Pernod. I used Ricard and Lagavullin with equally interesting results. The barware -- both the mixing glass and the stirring spoon -- is all ancesteral. Especially interesting is the glass. It's not a shaker. It's designed for stirred cocktails. I've never seen another one like it.

Ingredients.

In the cocktail stirrer.

Here's a top view of the stirrer. You can see it is designed to hold back the ice when pouring the drink.

Finished drinks (sans lemon twist, because I didn't have a lemon in ths house).

So... that's another few pieces of cool barware. I encourage you all to try the Smoking Martini. The dilution of the single malt by the vodka really exposes a lot of interesting flavors that are often obscured when drinking the product straight (which is always mostly an olfactory experience) and spreads them out for examination by your palate.

['Freshly Killed Chicken']

Is "freshly killed" a euphemism for "not frozen"?

Yes -- and more, I think. I gather that it also means, "not long time refrigerated."

['Freshly Killed Chicken']

I've always wanted to go to one of the live markets in metro NYC and get a couple of freshly killed chickens (well, also some freshly killed roosters plus blood for coq au vin). Perhaps I'll have to make some pan fried freshly killed chicken too...

[Vegan landlord bans meat-eaters]

fair enough, but this doesn't mean that gustatory considerations may not be important factors once they've made the choice. (consider also that no similar questionnaire can exist for meat-eaters since that's the default in the u.s.) i imagine if you asked vegetarians if they cared about whether their food tastes good almost all will say yes.

I imagine most would say this. But, my personal experience and the research results I've seen suggest that it is not the top priority for most Western vegetarians in preparing their meals -- and that the other priorities frequently get in the way of a delicious result.

For example, I have a vegetarian friend who regularly cooks what he calls "greens and beans" -- e.g., collard greens and black beans. Sometimes he'd do a fried egg instead of the beans. I asked him once why he did the beans or eggs with the greens or why he didn't sometimes do both. His answer had nothing to do with taste whatsoever, but rather had to do with making sure the dish had protein in it. In other words, the actual taste of the dish was of decidedly secondary importance to the nutritional qualities. He did his best on the flavor side, I suppose, but the fact remains that he didn't add the beans because he thought it would make the dish taste better (it's also notweorthy that he took the time to educate himself on the nutritional stuff but not on the culinary "making good-tasting food" stuff). Including/excluding "allowable" ingredients for non-gustatory reasons is a big stumbling block along the way to making food taste good. My feeling is that, when something other than "deliciousness" is the primary goal of a dish, the gustatory quality of the dish will necessarily suffer. A religious Indian vegetarian, for example, wouldn't just say "this cauliflower and potato dish needs more protein, so I'll just chuck in some dal."

This goes to my primary point. It's not the case that most Western vegetarians simply to confine their diet to certain products and proceed from there directly towards a quality gustatoty result. That's more like the religion model. Kosher cooks or religious vegetarian cooks are able to start with a restricted list of ingredients and proceed directly towards a goal of gustatory quality. This is because the restricted list of ingredients isn't the result of some other agenda -- it is the agenda. Someone who chooses to be a vegetarian for perceived health reasons, for example, has a fundamentally different outlook in their cookery. The first question is not "what can I do to make dinner taste good?" but rather "what are the health implications of dinner, and what do I have to do in order to make dinner comply with my health-related philosophy?" This is the kind of thinking that makes someone dump a can of pinto beans into a pan of collard greens purely for health reasons without considering whether the dish will taste better as a result.

there just isn't enough cooking knowledge or restaurant/frozen food choices out there yet for all american vegetarians to always have easy access to amazinly tasty food. thus for some taste can't help but get pushed down the scale, since they're not going to start eating meat just because they have a smaller range of tasty pure veg. options.

It's definitely true that Western vegetarian cuisine is still not very mature and there aren't a lot of good choices. But, until gustatory quality becomes the prime consideration, I am not sure there ever will be -- especially since the different concerns of most Western vegetarians are so fragmented and different. It's also the case that someone who restricts his/her diet for health, ethical, political, etc. kinds of reasons will inevitably end up working in a much narrower range of possibility than someone whose diet is more-or-less automatically restricted by religion, culture or environment.

we could flip all this on its head and say that many meat eaters don't *really* choose meat--they just have it presented to them from day 1 (as with your example of indian vegetarians).

Well, exactly. That's my point. And, as a result, Western omnivores have worked with the ingredients available to them with the primary purpose of making those ingredients taste good. As a result, we have a strong Western omnivore tradition of great-tasting omnivore cookery.

[Electric Meat Grinder Recommendations]

Yea. It's totally easy to clean. One of the nice things about a really heavy duty one like mine is that all the parts are stainless. We don't have a dishwasher, but I'm sure having one woud make cleaning even easier.

[Cocktail Porn]

Cool pics, Robert.

Just FYI -- for you and anyone else who may read this thread -- We actually have the capability to host digital photos for eGullet members right here on our own server. Check out http://images.egullet.com/ to see where you can upload pictures for inclusion in eGullet threads.

[Grand Sichuan International]

Thanks for your thoughts, Sethro. My take on GSIM is that, just like most Chinese restaurants in the US, you have to order the right things. In the case of your meal, the lobster and ribs are something I would never order. They're not Sichuan. As of the Dan Dan noodles, my understanding is that they're supposed to be oily from the chili oil. I'd be interested to hear what it was that you didn't like about the wontons in chili oil. They've been popular around here.

Anyway... if you like spice and you liked the ma po dofu, try the beef fillets in chili sauce. Usually the hottest thing on the meny. The freshly killed kung pao chicken is also not to be missed. We also enjoy the stir fried pea shoots and the house cured bacon with bea pods and rice cake for a mild change of pace.

[Cocktail Porn]

These days one often hears the term "food porn" to describe closeups and other pictures of delicious food. I figured that plenty of us have cool barware and/or interesting-looking cocktails, so why shouldn't we have some fun too? Please post pictures here of your cool barware (hopefully in the act) and other cool cocktail-related pictures from your home.

The pictures below I took this evening while making a Bloodhound in one of my favorite cocktail mixers that I like to tall "the big silver cock shaker" for reasons that will become apparent...

A Bloodhound is:

2.0 oz : gin

0.5 oz : white vermouth

0.5 oz : red vermouth

6-8 raspberries

Muddle raspberries in mixing glass. Add ice. Shake & strain.

Here's everything. Big cock shaker in the back there.

Berries and booze go in.

Muddle.

Add some ice.

Shake.

Finished drinks.

Closeup from the top.

This is too many pictures, really, of only one drink and only one piece of barware -- but I wanted to get the ball rolling. So, let's see what you have.