dr_memory
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Posts posted by dr_memory
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At the risk of adding what's basically a "me too" to this thread, I caught a quick dinner at NYBC last night, and was a little peeved by the near-missness of it all.
As noted above, the condiments, bun and extras are all top-notch. The egg glaze on the bun and its general texture reminded me of the roasted pork buns at the better dim sum joints in Chinatown, and the store-made ketchup and bbq sauces were good enough that if they bottled them, I'd buy them.
...so it was kind of exasperating that the burger that I ordered "medium" came out on the charred side of well done, and the fries were limp and soggy.
I'm willing to give it another shot on the burger: I'll just order it rare next time and hope that translates to "medium" in the local argot. But the fries were just inexcusable: making crisp french fries isn't exactly rocket science: all you need is two fryolaters and a working digital timer. For all the money they've obviously invested in the place, you'd think this would be a no-brainer...
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At the risk of asking a relatively straightforward question in the midst of all of the more metaphysical hand-wringing on this thread... does anyone here remember offhand whether Per Se's confirmation policy is 2 or 3 days prior to the reservation? Like an idiot, I have lost the piece of paper on which I jotted it down, and their website is singularly unhelpful on the topic.
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What an utterly lovely evening. My thanks to all of you.
Easily the highlight for me: The tea duck. Words fail. Going back for this, and soon.
Biggest surprise: the ox tongue. Ever-so-slightly gristly, but my god the flavor... meaty, meaty, meaty goodness, plus that wonderful sichuan burn. Not something I'd ever have ordered under my own power, but I'll be getting it again.
When I got home and described the evening to my SO, her first question was: do they do hotpot? She worked in sichuan province for a year and has been craving proper hotpot ever since she got back.
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There's a ritual in Greenland where they capture a certain type of shark and prepare it by having it rot, buried in sand for six months, continually decomposing. They do that to leech out toxins. Then they air dry it. It's called hakarl and is heavily ammoniated and smells of urine.
I don't think I could eat shark that heavily smells of urine.
They sell tiny jars of cubed hakarl in the duty-free shop in Keflavik Airport in Iceland.
It even looks nasty.
Luckily for all concerned, it is sold in airtight (if sadly transparent) cannisters.
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Eggs. I'll eat them mixed up in a batter such as cake, custard, sweet souffle or bread pudding. I'll even eat french toast if the batter isn't too eggy. I've tried caviar and I don't have a problem with that. But eggs alone--scrambled, omelet, poached--no way. Hard boiled or egg salad---SHUDDER....
I cannot tell you how happy I am to find that I am not the only egulleter with this aversion.
They are satan's snot. Sulfurous, congealed, quivering mucous. Not food. No way. Non serviam. I disbelieve.
Needless to say, I will not be trying the fetal duck eggs any time soon!
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I hope he knows what he's done here... He's going to wake up next to a severed horse's head if a bunch of eGulleters drop 450 bucks a person at Masa and aren't transported into flights of gustatory ecstasy.
This is Bourdain. He'd just eat it. :)
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Yow. Okay, I'm sold. Maybe not this week, maybe not this year, but before my 35th birthday, sold sold sold.
Tony -- I'd be very curious to hear your impressions of the food at Bar Masa by way of comparison. Obviously the allover experience isn't going to be even close, but realistically it's going to be what a lot more mere mortals experience.
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Dueling falafel carts on either side of Liberty Square in the financial district. Both are good.
They're back?
Cool. I'd stopped working in the financial district a few months before 9/11, and I always kinda wondered what happened to those guys.
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Where not to go: the food truck in Inwood, at the north exit of the 1 train stop at 207. Once here was enough for me. I've eaten plenty of good chitlins, but they never tasted like the pig smelled
Yike. Thanks for the pointer -- I would probably have gotten around to trying that cart in the near future.
Hm. Time to dig up and bump the Inwood thread.
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I worked on 30th street between 7th and 8th for about a year in 2000. Gotta say: the immediate 2-block radius around MSG is as close to a complete culinary black hole as this city possesses. About the only palatable food I ever found within those boundaries was the Bagel Maven cafe on 30th and 7th, and even that was no more or less than "decent bagels." Beyond that: at best, places like Mustang Sallys that serve undistinguished bar/pub food at 3X the normal price.
Walk east to Koreatown or south to Chelsea, and of course things change significantly. :)
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Sorry, Doc. My paper gets first dibs.
Sheesh, you people with your "jobs" and your "ethics" and your "contractual obligations"... what good are you?
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Sorry, Holly. You're right, I'm just a slip of a girl. Daisy May's, Pig Heaven, Brother Jimmy's, Amma, City Bakery, a catered lunch, Hearth, Red Flame, Biscuit, Pearson's, Blue Smoke, Virgil's and Whole Foods was as much as I could handle in three days. I'll train harder and try to do better next time.
Well, so, report? :)
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Has anyone actually gotten a call cancelling the reservation?
Yes; a very polite and apologetic young woman called me on Sunday afternoon to let me know that they wouldn't be able to honor my reservation for tonight, and promised that they would call me back to reschedule as soon as they knew when they would be re-opening.
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Arrrrrrrrrgh. So much for my Monday night reservation. I'm merely annoyed -- these things happen, after all -- but I do feel sorry for the friend who flew out from California to go with me.
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Well, think of it this way:
Would the space be more interesting to you if they chose to fill it with fetish-related DVD and videocassette stores and leather/piercing boutiques, both of which can be found in the East Village?
Speaking only for myself: much.
That said, the whole "is it suburban / is it neo-urban" argument strikes me as intrinsically silly: it's not as if this is some pristine exemplar of a noted architectural school here. Shiny vertical urban shopping centers and sprawling suburban ones have been taking design cues from each other for decades now: these are functional spaces, and if a design idea works, it's going to get replicated with wild abandon.
On the gripping hand, New York needed another J. Crew like we needed an outbreak of scabies.
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One note in re the often-complained-about noise level at Les Halles: their downtown (John St.) location, while still certainly a busy place, was entirely tolerable noise-wise the one time I ate there. My companions, both of whom were regular patrons of the uptown Les Halles, remarked that it was <i>much</i> more civilized than the other location.
Making a reservation there after 7:30pm, at which point most of the Wall Street types have swum back home, probably helps a lot.
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Marlene, there's no need for a reservation. I've always gone there without notice, always on Saturday Nights (~7:00). I typically slip the host a $10 and I'm usually seated within 45 minutes. I've done this for parties of 2, 4 & 6 (that time we gave $20). Request not to be seated upstairs - it's a dungen up there
. Okay, I'll bite.
What's the protocol on this? I'm perfectly used to tipping after the staff has done me a solid, but this edges up on proper old-world bribery/baksheesh, and I've got no idea how to approach it.
Hand the guy a 20 outright as you're asking if there's a table available? Try to casually put the bill down on his table? Hold it up and wiggle it significantly as you ask? Eye contact? No eye contact? Try to hide it from the people in line behind you? Make a big show?
Obviously, I lack proper High Rolling Bastard skillz. :)
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Another dish I forgot to mention was homemade brownies that were heavily laced with ground morning glory seeds. Really quite disgusting and barely palatable but as was the case with the rotting fresh peyote button chocolate milkshakes we had the month before... all was consumed in the spirit of... uhhhh... scientific inquiry rather than culinary adventure. Yes, it was in a previous lifetime in case you shuld be wondering.
In case anyone is wondering:
You probably don't want to try this. There are safer and much more pleasant ways to get a buzz.
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I encountered durian in the flesh for the first time quite by accident during a trip to SE asia last year; at the time I wrote:
While at the mall [Panthip Plaza in Bangkok --ed], we stopped in the local version of a food court, which was actually quite tasty, with one terrifying exception...Miranda came back to our seat with a number of things on her plate, including a fruit concoction that looked kind of like pureed greenish mango over rice. She had a few spoonfuls and said "I think this might be durian...it's not bad, want to try it?"
Tactical error number one: not running away immediately once the name of durian was invoked.
Figuring that since she'd had a few bites and was neither gagging nor clutching her throat it was probably safe, I put a very very small bit (not even a quarter of a teaspoon) on a spoon and put it in my mouth. That was tactical error number two.
You would probably expect that nothing which people refer to as a "fruit" could smell and taste like rotting meat. A reasonable expectation, but I am sad to report an incorrect one. This stuff tasted and smelled like...well, actually it smelled EXACTLY like the meat section of the town market in Siam Reap, Cambodia. Possibly even worse, since at least in the market I could (and did) hold my breath, whereas here the offending odor was IN MY MOUTH. I'm sure you're thinking "it can't possibly be that bad." Actually, it was worse.
Wanting to get rid of this stuff as quickly as possible, I made my third, final, and worst tactical error: I swallowed. That wasn't a problem in and of itself, but about 30 seconds later, with the aid of the soda I had washed it down with, I burped. And suddenly the horror was back in full force, along with the sinking realization that it was going to keep coming back every few seconds for the next half an hour. If I could have opted for an on-the-spot execution, I would have.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Miranda insists that it wasn't that bad: she described the taste as "creamy, a bit like raisins and onions" and insists that it tastes not at all like rotting meat. She even mostly finished it. I am not 100% convinced even now that she wasn't having me on, but I can't imagine anybody voluntarily eating that much durian even for the sake of a very good joke. She maintains even now, sitting next to me, that it tastes good. I love her regardless, but I would advise approaching any strange fruits you find here in Thailand with EXTREME CAUTION.
On a happier note, we tried mangosteens earlier in the day, and they were wonderful, like a combination of lychee and tangerines. We both agree on that one.
(The full travelogue is here for the curious.)
My theory on durian: like cilantro, the ability to taste the horrific bits may be a genetically inherited trait.
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My vote for the best american-style (ie: mcdonalds-size) fries goes, hands down, to the Odeon on West Broadway. They're pretty close to my platonic ideal of the french fry: perfectly consistant crispy/chewy ratio, and not at all oil-sodden (and at >$10/plate, they'd better be).
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i thought that buddha's hand was also called citron?!
also, if you use yuzu juice, make sure you buy the bottle WITHOUT salt. the added salt is very overpowering and destroys any sort of fresh flavor you might get from a bottled product (which is usually decent).
Would that I had had egullet around to provide such advice five months ago: I could have saved myself quite a bit of work, not to mention the experience of one of the most horrible tastes I have ever encountered.
As a follow-on to this most excellent piece of advice, let me suggest tasting your yuzu juice before pouring it willy-nilly into your other ingredients, so that you can be 100% certain that you have not accidentally acquired the salted variety.
Does anyone have any idea what one does with salted yuzu juice? I still have four bottles of the damn stuff in my fridge, and at $9/per, I'm loathe to simply dump them into the sink.
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Oh yeah, and he doesn't cook with salt, because it's "bad for you." They don't even keep it in the house. ... I cannot tell you how hard I work at avoiding going to these people's house for dinner.
Salt-free cooking seems to be one of the common threads here. Thank god that fad seems to have mostly passed.
Almost all of my nastiest childhood food memories involve dinner at the house of some family friends who had apparently fallen for every moronic "healthy" food fad of the 70s and 80s save for outright Macroneuroticism: no-salt, no-sugar, no-gluten, you name it. I swear to god their 'lasagne' was made primarily with elmer's glue; our mom used to have to cook us actual food when we got back home.
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"Timeless wood furnishings fill out the natural ambience and charm of the Brooklyn Peter Luger Steakhouse."
Apparently roaring 22,000 BTU in-wall Fedders air conditioners are part of the ambience and charm. Who knew?
wd-50 2004 - 2007
in New York: Dining
Posted
Hm, I really should have typed up notes after my meals at WD-50... but lameness rules all, and the above commentators have said much the same thing about the food that I would, so I'll restrain myself to making two practical suggestions for people considering dining there:
1. Despite being nine courses, I would agree that the tasting menu is a little underfilling. If there are only one or two diners, it might be worth getting anyway (with the understanding that you're getting an overview with an eye toward further study later, not a grand meal in itself), but if you're in a group of four or more, I'd strongly recommend getting N+2 appetizers, N+1 entrees and N desserts, and then passing around: you'll be much more satisfied at the end of the night and won't have paid substantially more.
2. If you do get the tasting menu, non-regular drinkers should probably pass on the paired wine tastings, lovely though they are. The staff pours generously, and at a glass (or more) per course, you may have a great deal more difficulty standing up and walking out than you would expect.