TDG: Fat Guy World Tour 2002 redux

[Jinmyo]

The Fat Guy World Tour 2002 Encore Presentation is here

In light of Fat Guy and eGullet's 2003 James Beard Journalism Award nomination for the "Hungary on the Redneck Riviera" portion of his cross-continent Weblog, and the resulting spike in interest in all the Weblog pieces, we've assembled them all here together in one place, including reformatted versions of the entries that were first published in the Fat Guy World Tour forum.

Ellen Shapiro's photographs and her new essay complete the package.

And don't miss Brad Hughes on FG in Winnepeg.

[Jason Perlow]

What the heck is this?

[Fat Guy]

Salmon and tuna together in a maki-style roll, sans rice, breaded and flash-fried.

[elyse]

How pretty!

[Jason Perlow]

Did they add food coloring to make it purple?

[Fat Guy]

It was special tuna made from grape jelly.

[elyse]

You almost made me spit my water onto the computer.

[Fat Guy]

Seriously, though, the quality of ingredients at Napa Rose is truly exceptional. The restaurant's financial leverage, knowledgeable management, and commitment to quality combine to create a Ducasse/Craft/Chez-Panisse-like effect wherein even the garnishes are coming from the best sources. Color alone is not indicative of quality, and who knows what kind of illumination was causing spikes in what part of the spectrum, but I do recall the salmon and tuna being extremely deep in color and as good as can be. I'm not fully versed in the LA dining scene, but I can say that my meal at Napa Rose was far superior on every level -- ingredients, creativity, skill in preparation (aided by a no-expense-spared gorgeous open kitchen with all the best equipment), service (this guy Rodney who waited on us was really impressive, as is Michael Jordan not the basketball player the wine guy), wines, and decor (the multimillion-dollar arts-and-crafts theme extends through the hotel's lobby as well) -- to an earlier, unremarkable meal at Patina.

[nerissa]

Can we have more pictures of Momo, please?

Congratulations on the nomination.

[Ellen Shapiro]

I'm reluctant to post photos that are merely for the purpose of admiring the Mo', because those would be more appropriate to a pet message board (hint: you can find a lot of photos of Momo if you join greatpets.com). However, here are a few that are food-related:

Steven and Momo were the center of attention at the Regina farmer's market.

What you can't see in that photo is that there was a film crew following them around, making them appear even more unusual. The following image graces the wall of the local TV station.

In Vancouver, the Mo' was the recipient of VIP (Very Important Pet) treatment at the Sutton Place Hotel. This included not only a rib-eye steak, brown rice, and organic baby vegetables, but also bottled water and -- after dinner -- petits fours made from liver. A book was also supplied for reading of bedtime stories.

[awbrig]

That Dog Food looks great! Next time at a hotel Im checking in as a dog...

[TrishCT]

Steven, a/k/a FG:

I particularly enjoyed reading about your excursion into Montreal. A friend up there told me I had to try Schwartz's for smoked meat, and once I did, I swooned. After the initial visit, I didn't mind waiting in line, didn't mind communal tables... ANYTHING for the smoked meat...

My questions for you today, therefore, are about smoked meat.

1. What the heck is it? It tastes kinda like pastrami...a tiny hint of corned beef....

2. Why doesn't some bright entrepreneur(se) open a smoked meat Schwartz's like deli in NYC... it would make a fortune...

3. In the article you say pastrami is better.... which pastrami? Not Connecticut pastrami, I can assure you of that ...

4. Hmmm...can you buy smoked meat around here....?

By the way, I was last in Montreal about 4 years ago, and had a charming dinner at Gibby's in the Youville Stables...Did you ever dine there?

Thanks!

Trish

[nerissa]

Ellen, great photos! And, I have to agree with awbrig, next time I am checking in as dog. Interesting thing about the Evian, though. My parents draw their water from a well and it tastes fantastics...our dogs won't drink normal tap water, so when we travel, we have to give them bottled water. I have tried giving them tap water, and they sort of look like me as to say "You expect me to drink that?"

Edited March 25, 2003 by nerissa (log)

[Jinmyo]

Ellen, great photos. Not only here but throughout the articles.

[Fat Guy]

1. What the heck is it?  It tastes kinda like pastrami...a tiny hint of corned beef....

It's essentially pastrami: beef that has been cured and then smoked. There are variants on the exact spicing formulas from producer to producer, but conceptually the two are the same. Corned beef is not smoked; it's a different animal.

2.  Why doesn't some bright entrepreneur(se) open a smoked meat Schwartz's like deli in NYC...  it would make a fortune...

That's basically what Katz's is.

3.  In the article you say pastrami is better....  which pastrami?  Not Connecticut pastrami, I can assure you of that ...

The commercially produced pastrami that you get in a typical deli or supermarket isn't really smoked -- it's just injected with artificial smoke flavor. It's also just sliced and served cold, whereas at Schwartz's, Katz's, or any other traditional deli the meat is steamed for several hours before being sliced and served warm.

[Pan]

That photo-essay was a good look and read.

Was that thing that looks like chocolate cake with chocolate sauce that was a side on a salad plate at the Jim Palmer House restaurant in Dayton, OR actually savory, or was it in fact a chocolate cake with chocolate sauce as one normally thinks about such things? If so, how did it go with the salad?

[Fat Guy]

That's the three-mushroom tart.

[Pan]

Mmmmmmmm! Mushrooms!

[Fat Guy]

If you're into mushrooms, this place is a destination. I don't really know of a restaurant that takes mushrooms more seriously. It's not just that there are a lot of mushrooms served there; it's that they do a lot with them. Most restaurants that serve mushrooms don't do enough mushroom dishes so as to be able to start working the permutations. You almost never see a mushroom in a regular restaurant in anything but its whole form, sauteed. Like the pasta dish we had, that was your basic pasta with really good mushrooms that you might have seen at any restaurant -- except the Palmer House's mushrooms were extremely good specimens. But the tart contains a variety of mushrooms kind of ground up into a filling. You just don't see much cooking like that in the restaurant world at large. And there are Oregon gray truffles in the mix in some of the dishes as well. I want to go back for the "Jack's Mushroom Madness" tasting menu.

http://www.joelpalmerhouse.com/welcome.html

[jhlurie]

Great compilation. Its nice to see this stuff in one place.

Edited March 25, 2003 by jhlurie (log)

[Fat Guy]

I'm amazed at how many usable photos we got, given our equipment limitations and other challenges. The plan was to shoot everything as slides, especially the Canadian newspaper series, and Ellen had primarily shot film for all professional purposes in the past. So we filled the van with camera bodies, lenses, strobes, and various tripods, stands, and other equipment -- not to mention about a hundred rolls of Provia. But we found that film wasn't able to provide us with the immediacy we needed for the eGullet reports (you can get print film developed in an hour and burned on to CD-ROM almost anywhere now, but in the smaller towns there are no minilabs that can handle slides), and in Canada the newspaper company wasn't really capable of turning the slides around quickly enough to make film an effective medium (at this point, the newspaper business is pretty much 100% digital). So, after attempting to shoot the first story on film, Ellen had to regroup and reshoot the story -- and all subsequent ones -- with this rinky-dink point-and-shoot digital camera; it was our fifth-string backup camera and it wound up doing all the work (which just goes to show you, you need a good fifth string). Not that the DC4800 is a bad camera, but nobody would think to call it a professional camera. I would hazard a guess that this was the first time in history that a DC4800 was used to shoot multiple front-page newspaper photos.

Using the DC4800 was like a game or a puzzle, because of course it wasn't compatible with any of the lighting equipment from the film camera (all it has is a little built-in flash that often does more harm than good), it's very difficult to control the camera's settings manually (if you have any time constraints at all, you really need to shoot on full automatic), and of course there is no choice of lenses. So we were always figuring out ways to improvise tripods out of shelves, bring plates of food outside into the sunlight, and use other available light to make the photos not look like grandpa's vacation snapshots.

At the same time, every time we would get to a local market that had an affiliated newspaper (the syndicate we were doing this for has newspapers in almost every Canadian city), they would send a photographer out to meet us armed with real professional digital equipment -- a Canon 1D or the Nikon equivalent, like what Ellen uses to shoot the Flaming Orange Gully or the grill at Beacon; you just can't get those shots without a certain level of camera. So there was always this sort of competition. It was all about prestige -- it's not like we were getting paid more or less based on how many of Ellen's photos got published (we got a lump sum for the whole project), but obviously there was pride involved. To the Canadians, it was a combination of not wanting to believe a freelancer could do a better job than their own people, and also this general Canadian sense (which we encountered all the time) that we were Americans stealing work from them. For us it was about ownership of the project, which we had (with our editor in Montreal) conceptualized and which, we felt, we understood better than anybody else.

It was like Ellen was this old veteran sheriff, and in every town the aspiring young-turk gunfighter would come out to challenge her. And, in spite of inferior equipment, ridiculous time constraints, and an ongoing battle with exhaustion, she would defeat each of them thanks to experience and superior technique. Of course it was also a big advantage that Ellen had continuity of knowledge and style throughout the project, and was always present to get candid shots. I've got to think that Mike Shenker's brilliant "High Noon at Willensky's" metaphor was at least partly inspired by the stories he had heard about how the local photographers (not to mention -- oh, my -- the local food writers) would constantly try to unseat us. (Mike was the uber-editor on the project from start to finish.)

Some of these photographers, the stuff they would do, it was just hilariously dumb -- and I really did try in the utmost good faith to be a good subject. But they rarely understood the project, and they of course would never listen to me, so they would ask me to do things like hold a pineapple or juggle oranges or do something else that was generically food-related but had nothing to do with the story or with Canada. Then all the photos would go out on the wire, and each local newspaper editor would make a selection. And in something like 95% of the cases, all the newspapers would choose all photos by Ellen and none by the local photographer, and the local newspaper photo editor from wherever the photographer actually worked would be forced by political considerations to choose the photo with the pineapple.

[SteveW]

Regarding your 'Fat Guy Across Canada' newspaper series. Anything you really regretted doing, or would of changed if you had to do over again?

-------------

Steve

[Fat Guy]

I regret trying to be too political on the first two pieces, before I learned that I was going to get the best results by just being myself. In BC and Alberta, what I wrote was relatively predetermined and scripted, I was trying too hard to include mentions of every constituency, to take the opinions of the local food writers and newspaper editors into consideration, and to be all things to all people. I was happy enough with the factual content of those pieces, but I didn't think they reflected really good, energetic writing of the kind I had imagined when we proposed the series in the first place. It took until the third part of the series for me to come to grips with the reality that I wasn't going to be able to be a food writer in every city; in other words, that there was no way for me in the space of two months to make myself a local restaurant reviewer and food critic in each of a dozen local markets and all the markets in between. At the same time, the scope of my project gave me a perspective that very few (if any) writers have ever had on the Canadian food scene. So, when I made peace with the fact that what I needed to do was write impressionistic, big-picture, overarching, personality-driven stuff, it started to come together. In part, this evolution was the natural course of things: I developed more perspective as we traveled across Canada. Also the whole phenomenon of me as a minor Canadian celebrity didn't build until we were well into the prairies. I was also somewhat misdirected by my foreknowledge of Vancouver. Unlike most cities in Canada, I've been to Vancouver six or seven times, I had already covered the Vancouver scene the previous year for the National Post, and my chef contacts (like David Hawksworth and Brian Fowke) and media connections (like Steve Wong -- the other SteveW) in Vancouver were quite strong already -- so I was relying on expertise I had with regard to Vancouver that I wasn't going to have in other cities. That triggered a few strategic errors that took awhile to correct. The other thing that made life difficult was that we didn't really get final approval on the Canada project until we were heading up I-5 from Seattle towards the border. We were literally minutes away from shutting off our cell phone when two calls came in: one from Mike Shenker saying the higher-ups at CanWest/Global had approved the TV/Web/print-multimedia campaign, and one from Steve Klc saying I had won a Beard Award for the Gramercy Tavern piece (Steve K was at the dinner and accepted the award on my behalf). So it was a good day, but also the start of an exhausting week. We had to go from approval of the project to delivery of photographs and copy in something like 10 days -- plus we had to make all the travel plans (if the project hadn't come through, we might not have even driven home through Canada).

[crumbs]

I had looked and looked for a copy of the article you wrote on my part of the world--Pensacola--so this was just great! Jim Shirley of the Fish House is one of our closest friends and was thrilled when he was included in The Tour. I'm most impressed that you were able to get a real flavor (pun not completely intended) of our community in such a short stay.

Head back to the Emerald Coast again soon!

Cheers!!

Debi

[Fat Guy]

I was really impressed with Jim and would have liked to spend more time with him. We were back in Pensacola quite recently but, again, we were only there for a couple of days and this time Ellen was on assignment and needed to cover the aviation museum and all that stuff -- so we had virtually no time for repeats, though we did make it to Hopkins House, where we sat next to someone who was there because of my article about the region in Food & Wine! We also had a blowout meal at Jackson's -- very impressive.