America v. France: The foodly state of play

Before getting bogged down in descriptions of individual restaurants and foods, I wanted to write a quick description of where I think the US/France balance stands in terms of food (and by US/France balance, I really mean France/New York balance, since I am deeply familiar with the food scene here, which is also reputed among the best in the country) . For reference, I'll note that I cooked at least one meal a day at home every day during the vacation, in both Paris and Cassis in the south. We also ate at two 1-star michelin restaurants, and a couple of others listed in the guide, including one "bib gourmand" (good value food).   

High Cuisine - Admittedly, my impressions are based on a limited sample. We had a full dinner at Hostellerie Berard in La Cadiere D'Azur, and one smaller meal at Les Fables De la Fontaine in Paris (both blessed with one star). I enjoyed Berard more than our tasting menu at Le Bernardin (my clear favorite in New York), which cost twice as much and boasts 3 Michelin stars in the American guide. Our meal at Berard was simply flawless and served with extraordinary grace.   

Casual high cuisine  - by this I mean the new breed of restaurants that prize cooking over service or setting.  Gastropubs in England, Ko (my thoughts) and Little Owl and Peasant (my thoughts) and the Spotted Pig in New York, or Cafe Constant or Le Comptoir in Paris.  Our efforts in New York in this genre are excellent, in their own ways - I still remember a truly great beet and smoked trout salad at the Spotted Pig, but the de-boned, braised, rolled, and then fried pig's foot at Le Comptoir is one of the greatest dishes I've ever had, and my fiance's tandoori spiced veal breast was close behind.  I still think we have space to improve here. 

Diversity - France has none of any note (please, spare me traiteurs chinois, and kebab stands, and the occasional tagine specialists - I've eaten at all of them, and they're not like New York).  New York is one of the great culinary melting pots. A New Yorker craves sushi and thai when in Paris, even while gorging him or herself on the best of France. 

Bread - France continues a slow decline, but there is still bread that makes the best in New York pale. A "pain de campagne" of wild sourdough from the Cassis market stands out especially. My fiance says it was the best bread she's ever had. I think it's damned close, but then I've eaten a lot of bread.

Vienoisserie (croissants, brioche, pain au chocolat, etc) - I'm not even sure this is worth describing. In short - every bakery in France is as good or better than La Bergamote, which is the best croissant bakery in New York. Yes, some in France are using frozen product, but even so do a better job of getting it to rise properly than their American counterparts. But when you get hold of someone making their own - oh gosh.   I had numerous extraordinary croissants, but right now I remember that at Boulanger Julien. 

Chicken, poultry - The quality of French chickens is unsurpassed (I had an amazing farm raised bird in the south, which delighted even though cooked in a convection oven I knew nothing about). Having said that, some of the best Pennsylvania chickens are very good. I wouldn't move to France for chickens alone.

Cakes - Like croissants, this isn't a fair competition. I had an eclair at Le Moulin de la Vierge the first day which laid to rest any doubts I had about my palate memories when I whine about New York cakes.  Every cake I had in Paris was better than its equivalent here. 

Fruits, Eggs, Vegetables - I buy the most expensive fruits and vegetables here in New York, from both Whole Foods and, more important, from the Union Square Greenmarket, in season and local.  Nothing could have prepared me for the first peche blanches I had in Paris, nor for the raspberries, nor for the wild strawberries, nor for anything else I bought at the market or fruitier.  We are doing something very very wrong when it comes to produce.  

As for eggs, we had two weeks of the best omelettes I've ever had, with good butter and eggs from the cheesemaker and the market. 

Ice cream - New York newcomer Grom is excellent (my thoughts) and their pistachio flavor remains my favorite, but we were utterly startled by the ice cream in the gardens of Versailles.  The best fruit flavored ice cream I have ever had - the apricot especially was revelatory.  

Cheese - Again, I realize that Americans have been doing some great work recently, but French cheese making is hugely diverse and blessed by some of the best raw product (and really raw, since French cheesemakers are unhampered by stupid laws) in the world. What to do at home? I recommend sticking with young goat's cheeses (which we do well with) and our own cheddars and similar. Leave young, soft, cheeses like camembert for France.  

Back from France

I'm back from France, where I had a truly great time. Much food and culture related blogging will ensue.

Till then, my aphorism for the trip - "the difference between New York and Paris is that in Paris, the people smell worse than the city."

France

I've been silent because I've been getting ready to go to France. Preparations have been long, but now most everything is set. We have rented apartments in Paris and in Cassis, and and several restaurants have been booked, a car reserved, TGV tickets ready, and thoughts about activities noted down. The one interesting thing is that while many of the top Parisian restaurants are closed for the holiday month, everything in the south is open. Full reports from my iphone, to the extent I have Wifi, will be forthcoming.

Laminated Doughs

Aran says something very important:

To this day, I believe a good pastry shop distinguishes itself by the quality of their laminated doughs such as mille-feuilles and croissants.

This has always been my view. A good croissant is something special. And rare, these days, as more and more bakers (even French bakers) buy frozen.

How much chefs earn

I think that people get caught up in the glamor of professional cooking without realizing that there are far easier ways of earning big bucks than slaving away in a hot kitchen. For the average chef, of course, life is a fairly unrewarding grind, from a financial point of view - they may get to do what they love, but what they love doesn't pay. But even the biggest chefs are a little less well-off than you might imagine. Here, for example, is an article from Forbes estimating the earning power of some of the culinary world's biggest stars.

Most striking? People like Mario Batali, owner of 13 restaurants and an endless parade of marketing opportunities, pulls in $3 million. Is that a lot of money? Of course. But Batali is probably the single most famous American chef. He is literally at the pinnacle of his profession, and his financial peers can be counted on two hands. By contrast, my guess is that there are at least 500 law partners in New York who do as well or better, with a career arc at that earning level of at least 20 years (which may not be true of Batali).

Which would I rather be doing? Obviously, I'd rather cook. But the disparity signals that either lawyers are a lot better at extracting money from the people who need them, or chefs are really bad at it. From conversations with people in the industry, I suspect a lot of it is the latter.

The vanished gourmet

The biggest story in the food world right now has got to be the disappearance of Pascal Henry, who was attempting to eat in all 62 3-Michelin starred restaurants in the world. He vanished after a 32 course effort at El Bulli.

The most interesting detail to me? Le Monde reported yesterday that he had gained 7-8 kilos on the trip. Frankly, I'm surprised it was so little.

joe's noodle house

" You don't want the salted fish" said the friendly woman manning the counter at Joe's noodle house, tucked in a grim strip mall in Rockville, MD. "Basil. You get basil."

"But I want salted fish", I bleated.

"No. It's for Chinese. Too strong".

I should have insisted. Without the pungent flavor of the mysterious salted fish, my hot pot with chicken and eggplant wasn't near as flavorful as I imagined when I saw it on the specials board. It was too bad, because my soft tofu was promising in it's fiery sauce.

Next time, I won't be so easily put. Spicy tripe, here I come.

Jamon Iberico

I recently had the opportunity to nibble on a few pieces of Jamon Iberico, which Wegman's (clearly the best supermarket on the East Coast) is selling for $70 a pound. I'm not a Spanish food expert, but my understanding is that the ham comes from a breed of rare, acorn eating, pigs. If I'm wrong, they sure do somehow taste like acorn - a sort of deep, piggy, acorn.

Still, I suspect this has to be eaten in slightly greater quantity to truly appreciate it. My nibbles were too small, and I was too greedy, to get the most out of it, to work the fat around in my mouth, to feel it melt. Aah. Next time.

Wendy's salad? Never. But Potacho!

To continue pounding away at the idiots in Los Angeles, who are putting a moratorium on new fast food construction in certain impoverished areas, I present the Potacho, the kind of food one can get at the type of sit-down restaurants that are likely to show up in the places they're worried about.

Bob's 66 Noodle Bistro

A much lauded restaurant in suburban Maryland (Cowen here, but he links to all reviews), the clientele of Bob's 66 Noodle Bistro bears witness to its status as the best (or at least most authentically good) Chinese food in the area. The menu's unusual, and packed with spices and offal. To celebrate, I ordered a cold pig's ear salad to start. It was crunchy, and gelatinous, and meaty all at the same time, the potentially overbearing pork wonderfully offset by a searing spice. While I was nibbling at that (and half is with me today for lunch), my thick noodle soup with squid and mushrooms arrived. I could have done without either the tough squid or the relatively flavorless mushroom, and with more of the tasty noodle and broth. In fact, I just turned it into a noodle soup with my spicy fried squid balls, which arrived shortly later and tasted wonderful dunked in the soup (I'm not sure how much I insulted people by doing this, but then, it's not that kind of place).

I'll be back. There's a duck tongue dish on the menu, and I saw an even thicker noodle in someone's plate that I'm going to have to locate. My only problem with restaurants like this is that one is always suspicious that everyone else has a menu you have to make an effort to extract. Even so, the public menu's pretty good.

Maggie Moo's

That's it. I apologize for everything bad I ever said about Pinkberry. Because yesterday, I got a cone at the worst ice cream store I've ever seen. I don't mean just the chain it was part of, though the ice cream itself was milky treacle and little more (is there any excuse these days for ice cream this bad?) I mean the particular store. Specifically, Maggie Moo's in Gaithersburg, Maryland, in the Washingtonian Center, where the manager looked at the line forming due to his own horrible service, blew out his cheeks, and then ambled to the back for a good fifteen minutes, at which point he returned, told a customer they couldn't have a marshmallow "mix-in" effectively because he didn't like mixing in marshmallows, and then wandered off again, leaving in place two even more junior people who would see to the occasional customer in intervals between chatting to their visiting friends, who kept bragging loudly about the 10% discount they were getting. Why didn't I leave? At some point, it's worth staying, just for the scene.

Chicken Out Rotisserie

I felt like some roasted chicken yesterday (too long away from home, I guess), so I visited a successful DC area chain, Chicken Out Rotisserie. The one good thing to say is that the chickens are, as a matter of theory, promising - no antibiotics, no hormones, and so on. In reality, the chicken was a fairly tasteless mass, rendered grainy by a stint in some kind of steam closet, only halfway saved by an attempt at an enthusiastic spice rub tempered heavily by the fear that people don't like spices. Side dishes were similarly lame. However, I did enjoy my cashier's over-the-top enthusiasm. "I hope the gentleman enjoys his soda", he said. "I wish the gentleman a fantastic evening", he added. I did. As soon as I left his restaurant.

LA continued

PG helpfully points me to an LA Times article which discusses the LA fast-food ban. Here's the definition of fast food:

"any establishment which dispenses food for consumption on or off the premises, and which has the following characteristics: a limited menu, items prepared in advance or prepared or heated quickly, no table orders and food served in disposable wrapping or containers."

I can't help but point out the number of problems with this definition. To take a few: Burger King makes its burgers to order (something that supposedly exempts Subway, mentioned later in the article), as does Wendy's. I think the definition is supposed to exempt burrito shops, which are unquestionably just as unhealthy as any of city council's bug bears. Limited menu (as the article mentions) has no definition. It allows me to open any number of restaurants serving fat burgers piled high with bacon so long as I make them to order. It would theoretically ban a fast food low fat vegan restaurant that relies on tofu. Artichoke Pizzeria would be a no go. Etc, etc.

Honestly, wouldn't it be nice if the government could just restrict who it meant to restrict? If you're going to adopt such a paternalistic regulation, just say it applies to McDonald's, Wendy's, KFC, whoever. I'm not a fan of these definitions that try to appear generally applicable, but are actually just efforts to capture some company without naming them.

Sushi bowl

Can someone explain to me in what sense this "sushi bowl" (cited approvingly by the ever clueless Ezra Klein) has anything to do with sushi, either in the American or Japanese sense? Also, didn't the Japanese think of a version of this that has something to do with sushi a really long time ago? I mean, they gave it a name and everything.

Los Angeles

I see that Los Angeles has put a moratorium on new construction of fast food restaurants in certain neigborhoods of the city. I've been looking for the regulation, and have had no luck.

The reason I'm looking for it is that I can't understand (a) how they plan to differentiate fast food restaurants from any other kind of restaurant. (b) why they think having a bunch of fast food restaurant is less healthy than a bunch of sit-down restaurants and (c) what they want people who live in these places to eat.

On (a), I rather suspect that if you were to open a little burger chain in Los Angeles, the regulation wouldn't apply to you (though, prove me wrong). But why not? Mcdonald's offers much healthier options than, say, Five Napkin Burger. As for (b), substituting Bennigan's (well, perhaps not Bennigan's) in place of McDonald's doesn't strike me as having any particular health benefits, unless the benefit consists of culling everything affordable out of the neighborhood, leaving residents to mill pathetically around places they can't pay for before heading home to cook with ingredients they can't buy in their neighborhood for lack of grocery stores. This doesn't strike me as a policy likely to improve outcomes.

Les Delices

In my long-running quest to find cake of any quality in America, (rare, other than apparently in Aran's home), I stopped by Les Delices bakery on East Gude Street in Rockville, MD, last night. (full disclosure, it's owned by a family friend).

The fruit tart was clearly a sideshow. Although I prefer bakers to underplay sweetness, the pastry cream was unsettlingly neutral, and the pie crust both too thick and a little burnt. Nor was I totally impressed with what the almond croissants looked like - (why were they sliced in half? ).

But these are minor gripes, because the chocolate cake (what in France would be called something like a pave au chocolat, or effectively, an opera without the coffee layers) was very good. A crisp, flavorful biscuit at the bottom was a terrific setting for chocolate buttercream of real quality (the Washington DC area is positively rife with truly appalling "French" bakeries, and the most appalling part of most of them is the wretched, stinking, canned whipped cream, chemical gunk-tasting sludge they claim is cream). Most important, the cake avoided many of the pitfalls of the usual American attempt to do French pastry -it wasn't too big, or too sweet, or cloying, or too complicated, or too refrigerated, or stale. At $3.50, the small slice is expensive for around here. But it's the equal of anything I've had in New York, except for Payard's opera, which I judge to be a little more refined (as well as a full dollar more expensive).

Gifford's

Do you want to know what (food) injustice is? That places like Gifford's, a stunningly good ice cream chain in Maryland, are flat out empty on Monday night, at the same time that silly frauds like Pinkberry are printing money in New York.

The almonds on my $3(!) (on Monday only) Sundae were fresh, the chocolate obviously melted quality stuff rather than some sugary gloop, and the ice cream itself creamy and fresh tasting. I'll be back.

Tapei Tokyo

A confused mess of a restaurant in Rockville, Maryland, mixing Thai, Chinese, Japanese and Korean food. I flipped to the narrative story at the front of the menu to try to figure out which of the parade of food they might know something about, and it turned out that it started life out as a noodle bar. So, after nibbling through some fried tofu (I peeled off the batter, which I found extremely unnecessary) I ordered a thai style soup with shrimp. Not that I expected so much, but the shrimp were undistinguished (obviously just standard issue frozen shrimp), and there were none of the promised vegetables. I poured in soy to add some flavor. Near the bottom of the bowl, my mouth did start picking up some heat, but, to quote the 300, this is Thailand! No Thai soup should be so tame. On the other hand, the owner or manager was wandering around being solicitous, and the service was friendly. I have come to realize that the latter of those two things can turn a mediocre restaurant into someplace you might become a regular.

The underlying thought I had while sitting at Tapei Tokyo was more interesting than the food. Are we now at the point where every major world cuisine has been introduced to the market? Thirty years ago, say, one could reasonably say that there was this enormous country, called Japan, about which people knew nothing from a culinary perspective. Same with Thailand. Perhaps the same with India, although my impression is that Indian food penetrated major US markets first. But is there anything out there right now that can do what sushi did? My nomination is for Chinese food. Of course, we all think we know Chinese food. But it must be in a state of flux, and I cannot believe that a country whose wealth has undergone such an extreme revolution in the past couple of decades will not eventually produce something exportable that isn't moo shu chicken.


(Tyler Cowen's thoughts on a different branch, here)

Ambrosia Grille

A family run, Greek restaurant in Rockville, which I chose as a sort of ironic joke (I live in Astoria, but I'm having Greek food here - ahem). Appetizers were a little disappointing, though huge - somewhat insipid taramasalata, and tzatziki with too little garlic. But the herby lemon chicken was terrific, and the inevitable accompanying potatoes would find themselves welcome back home. A very good rendition of mousaka was also on the menu.

Bonus tip: There is a frozen custard stand nearby called "Splurge". It was not the best frozen custard I have ever had (there's a good argument that frozen custard is better than either frozen yogurt or soft serve), but it was good. My choice of peanut butter was especially flavorful.

Afghan Grill

I had dinner with a friend last night at Afghan Grill, in Adams Morgan.

Pros: The surprising pumpkin with meat sauce (yes, yes, I know, it's summer. The pumpkin was good anyway). Terrific meat dumplings in yogurt, which were fully the match of Armenian/Lebanese manti, though much bigger. Tasty, highly spiced, rice, and a delicous ground beef kebab. Friendly service.

Cons: Indifferent bread, puzzlingly sliced into nibbles (how could you not take advantage of the drama of a whole Afghan bread arriving at the table?) Very high pricing ($16 for a platter? Really?). A home made baklava which betrayed its home-madeness by the paucity of its syrup. Parsimonious portions (it's a kebab place. Two skewers at least, please, especially for $16). And also, though it doesn't bother me much, we were seated in the darkest recesses of the corner next to the kitchen - I didn't think I looked quite that disreputable.

Moby Dick

When I first began eating at Moby Dick, it was a very small chain of fairly ramshakle kebab restaurants in suburban Virginia and Maryland. And it was super good - great bread, amazing kebab. Now, it's expanded, and it's gleaming, and shiny, and could be mistaken for a Mcdonald's, except that the "#1" is a kebab rather than a Big Mac.

The kebabs are still good, but the bread has suffered, and one worries that the expansion has taken a bit of the soul out of the place. These days, I prefer Duke Kebab. On the other hand, one needs not have that long a memory to recall when excellent kebabs weren't strewn around the DC landscape. In that context, overloud complaints seem a little bit spoiled.

Mama's Dumplings

A tiny whole in the wall famed for its pork dumplings. I was laughed at by the entirely Chinese clientele when I put one of the newly steamed dumplings in my mouth, burning everything it touched, but I think they warmed up to me when I chewed through regardless. The dough is a little less delicate than at the best New York "soup" dumpling houses (though that may be intentional - I'll have to eat more of this genre of dumpling), but my pork and celery dumplings were excellent. I also had a scallion pancake, but from all indications, one ought to skip anything on the menu that isn't a dumpling.

Business Trip

As might be guessed from my silence, I'm on a business trip. I find that when I'm forced to eat out all the time, my inspiration for writing dries up. Cooking is my lubricant.

Nonetheless, I'll be posting little capsule reviews of the DC dining scene, to the extent I experience it.

Is that ok?

Just walking around New York today eavesdropping, and I overheard someone ask whether their dining companion liked fish. What struck me is the changing patters of which foods I ask that question about. For example, it still seems clear to me that politeness requires asking whether your companion likes sushi. Same, probably, with Korean and Thai, but I'm not sure I would ask about chinese. Certainly Indian food, I'd ask. But not pizza or pasta, and not "mexican" or steak (oddly, since for a non-steak lover, a steak house is every bit as exclusive as a sushi bar). I suppose, in the end, that this is all a complicated matrix of social expectations and relationships, that foods enter the realm of presumed acceptability over time. I wouldn't be surprised if sushi were firmly planted in that world, in New York at least, in the next ten years. But what's next? I'm not sure.

Peasant

On Friday night we had the chance to dine at Peasant, a wood burning Italian restaurant that's been a chef's favorite in New York for years now. I present my thoughts in the form of a vignette.

---

We settle down, at a cramped table for two in full view of the open kitchen, wood fire burning satisfyingly. Two older gentlemen (TOG 1 and TOG 2) are to our right, sopping up the last bits of their ricotta spread with warm bread from the fire.

TOG 1: There are some big gays over at that table, no? (loudly)

We looked at our menus, to find everything in Italian (as I had been warned). The waitress shimmies over to explain. After a couple of iterations (I cannot remember menus in different languages, or long lists of specials) we order a razor clam appetizer, roasted baby pig, and pasta with bottarga.

TOG 2's roasted quail arrives. He begins sawing at it ineffectually.

TOG 1: Let me do it, let me do it. You can't do nothin'. He hacks manfully at the quail, tearing it asunder. Small pieces of quail now litter TOG 2's large (ceramic?) plate.

TOG 2: What you doin'? Stop. I can cut my own chicken.

TOG 1: That's how you do chicken (gesturing at the hacked quail). I used to cook da chickens, you know.

My girlfriend and I dive into the fresh razor clams, which taste of the sea, sopping up the sharp wine sauce with the fantastic bread. The wine is pleasing and fruity. If these people would just stop acting the fool, all would be well with the world.

TOG 1: I got 5 million dollars last night, you hear?

TOG 2: Five million? That'll change your life.

TOG 1: Eh, I'm only getting a hundred grand. It's an inheritance you see. And other people are getting more.

TOG 2: So why you tell me you gettin' five million for?

TOG 1: Just eat your chicken.

Main courses arrive. The roasted pig is rich, succulent. A crispy rind adorns the plate, which, though delicious, is very wintry, with buttery potatoes (not mentioned on the menu) only making things heavier. I prefer the pasta, the salt of the bottarga cutting through the butter and cream sauce. But aren't those shells a little too al dente, my girlfriend says? I nibble, and agree. It's not that they're too al dente. It's that they're uneven. This one is well cooked. That one isn't.

TOG 2: I wouldn't get this again. It's just a chicken. I had some diver scallops at Jake's (?) in Jersey, and they gave me three vegetables. I don't see no vegetables here.

TOG 1: Makes me sick. 25 bucks for a chicken.

We finish, and debate dessert. The wood baked peach tart with hazelnut ice cream (priced at an attractive, for Manhattan, $8) is extremely tempting. We decide to share one, and put in the order.

TOG 1, now working on a fruit plate: This here is a fig. You know figs?

TOG 2: Of course I know figs. They're like dates.

TOG 1: They're not dates. They're figs. Sure, they're both sweet, but that's where the similarity ends.

To Waitress: These figs are amazing. I usually have them in, you know, newtons. But here, they're not like dates at all.

Waitress: Er, yes, sir, these are fresh.

TOG 1: So are the dates I eat. Fresh!

The tart is brought to our table literally two minutes after we order. Alarm bells ring. When, precisely, was this thing wood baked? I taste. Parts of the crust are tasty, fresh tasting. Most of it tastes exactly of having sat on a counter all night, already baked and suffering (or maybe in the fridge?) Why can't they simply have prebaked the bottom, topped it freshly, and thrown it in the oven for a couple of minutes? Just to humor me? A terribly disappointing end to our meal. Sloppy, thrown together. Was it bad objectively? No. But it costs $8 at a famous, among people who matter, restaurant. In that context, what is only a pleasant mediocre suddenly becomes appalling.

TOG 1: I can't believe it. A hundred bucks for a chicken and some figs.

TOG 2: Jake's is a better deal. Three vegetables, you get (turning) At least the gays left.

TOG 1, to waitress, loudly: You make this night really, really special. So special.

Exit.

Involtini of swordish

I wanted something comforting and simple this weekend, so I decided on a sort of rolled fish dish, stolen from Mario Batali. I made a quick tomato sauce with canned tomatoes, onions, garlic and basil, and added toasted pine nuts, olives and raisins. Then the swordfish, cut into thin slices and then pounded in between plastic wrap and stuffed with bread crumbs, olive oil, and basil chiffonade. The fish goes on top of the tomato sauce, and then into the oven for about 15 minutes. I added some cooked and cooled polenta to give some body to the meal.

Five Napkin Burger

5 Napkin Burger, a new haute burger restaurant on the west side, has been getting a lot of press early in its life here in New York (see here and here for a round-up). Short story is that the titular "5 Napkin Burger" used to be on the menu elsewhere, and was thought compelling enough to deserve a spin-off into its own restaurant.

There is nothing bad to say about the burger. Deep chuck-y flavor, perfectly cooked at medium rare, caremlized onions, a rosemary aioli. All delicious, though overwhelming - I ate only half and brought half home to nibble on tomorrow (why not have a six ounce burger on the menu, rather than only the 10 oz monster?). The fries, on the other hand, were a bit embarassing. In fact, had I known about the crunchy little nuggets of broken up potato I was going to get, I'd just have run up the street to the Mcdonald's a few blocks away. No matter, in any case. The burger is fantastic.

The rest of the menu, incidentally, is a total puzzle, and most especially the sushi that the waiter was aggresively pushing to me. I'm there for burger. Sushi is the enemy of burger. What gives?

Duke Kebab

I have nothing but good things to say about Duke Kebab, in Alexandria VA. Properly charred, flavorful meat (I recommend the spicy chicken thighs), wonderful afghan bread, and a super spicey green sauce. Tyler Cowen likes it too.

Pork

I love pork. I do. But I really am getting very sick of the bacon/pork fetish that has been sweeping both the New York and the international food scene in the past several years. Latest exhibit? Salon's "bacon week". What's especially funny is that unless you eat great piles of it, bacon's not even that bad for you. Eaten as italians might eat it, as a flavoring, it's positively healthy, transforming a bit of pasta into a tasty, meaty, mess without needing to bother with a lot of meat. But the food fashion police have apparently all decided that it's a sort of rebellious splurge - decadence personified. The result? Trendy models eating bacon ironically in trendy New York restaurants. Eh.

Bits and Bobs

I'm leaving shortly to visit Washington for the weekend. We have a slap up barbecue tomorrow with family, for which I'm going to make crumble, probably peach.

Also, I realize I haven't yet posted about this, but we are going to France for much of August, with Paris and somewhere obscure on the Riviera on the agenda. Great mounds of food will be consumed. The tricky bit will be to balance restaurant eating (Gagnaire, for sure, L'Astrance maybe, but how about flying to Barcelona on a budget airline and sitting desperately outside El Bulli? Or to London and then "training" out to the countryside for the Fat Duck? Or trying to get into Mugaritz? And how extraordinary is it exactly that I'm thinking of punctuating a visit to France with trips to Spain or England (England?!?) to eat?) with cooking at home. I am, of course, renting apartments rather than staying at hotels, as I mean to cuisiner up a storm. I don't know if poulets de Bresse have a season, but they had better be around - I'm still haunted by a leg I had six years ago. And rillettes. And cheese. Cheese! Bread. Pastries. Arghflagh.

Chef's Ripert's "focus" on seasoning

Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin has been faithfully continuing his excellent series on cooking with a toaster oven. Though I recommend watching, I'm really interested by what is clearly something of a bugbear for Ripert - being properly "focused" when seasoning. The snippets below, from each of his episodes other than the one involving a mango dessert, illustrate the point. The questions they raise are clear - is focused salting that important to food of the quality that Ripert produces in his restaurant? And second, is it as significant a question for the home cook as Ripert suggests?

My experience is that salting enough is extremely important, but that patchiness in salting across a piece of fish or meat is less so. In the pantheon of home cooking problems, I would put inconsistent salting across surfaces somewhere below inadequate seasoning, failure to brown, and cooking to just done (and not overdone) as the most significant cook's "craft" problems faced by the home cook. But I wonder if people disagree. (I'll see if I can get the Chef himself to address this through a comment, but barring that, I'll ask the question here).

Broiled Red Snapper Fillet: 1:12 "You can see the way I'm seasoning. I'm not too far, I'm not too close to the fish. I'm maybe five inches on top of the fish, and I'm very focused on it."

Salt and Pepper: (a written post only): To season, hold your hands six to eight inches above the food and sprinkle a fine coating of salt and pepper all over the surface before cooking. Be methodical about seasoning evenly–if you have uneven fillets, use more salt and pepper on the thicker portions.

Parmesan Zucchini with Balsamic: 1:38 Then some fine sea salt, and I make sure I'm very focused when I'm doing the seasoning, because the zucchini is so thin, if you are not concentrated in putting the salt and pepper, you may have something extremely spicy or extremely salty.

Herb Roasted Chicken Tenders: 1:00 Making sure at all times to have your fingers very dry, so that way you can season very precisely.

The sugar buy-out

I recently read that Florida was going to purchase all the assets of Florida's largest sugarcane producer. The decision was haled as a major environmental victory, returning near 200,000 acres to the Everglades. I have no reason to doubt this justification for the deal, but I have to wonder whether this has something to do with the sugar lobby in Florida, which explains the lack of sugar in American Coca-Cola, for example.

Ko Auction

An auction for a reservation at Momofuku Ko has closed at $2,870. Over at eGullet, there has been some suggestion following the recent price hike from $85 for the tasting menu (when we had our meal) to $100, how high the ceiling of Ko pricing might be. My guess is that the auction is, in some ways, an extremely clever way to figure that out. I suspect, of course, that there's a little fluff in the price, because people are motivated to give to charity, but I'd also guess that pricing near the astronomical level of Masa (1200-1600 for a full meal for two with wine) would fill the 12 seats.

2007 Dominique Roger (Domaine de Carrou)

We had a splendid Sancerre from Bue over the weekend, a 2007 Dominique Roger (Domaine de Carrou), which I wanted to briefly write about today. We were able to detect some wonderful fruit aromas, and the wine tasted delicately of what I think of as pear in the mouth. The tiniest bit sweeter than the kinds of austere Alsatian wines I usually prefer on the white side, the wine was a delightful choice with the artichoke and shrimp dish I prepared.

It blinks reality

From the Supreme Court's decision in the campaign finance case, I found this interesting phrasing I have never seen before. Doing a quick google search, it seems fairly common, but I am surprised nonetheless:

"It blinks reality to contend that the millionaire candidate is situated identically to a nonmillionaire opponent".

I'll have to look up the background of this at some point. Huh.

UPDATE: I've had a couple of thoughts about the gun case, as well. As others much smarter than me have observed, Scalia's opinion is remarkably narrow and circumspect. Not only is it fairly moderate, but it leaves much to be decided; the standard of review, the applicability (or not) of the Second Amendment to the states, the reasons why particular restrictions on gun rights are permissible, and others are not, which gun restrictions might be ok in the future. This does not strike me as typical for Scalia, who, to my mind at least, prefers to write broader opinions. I wonder whether the narrowness of his ruling, in the context, had anything to do with Chief Justice Roberts and his commitment to deciding cases on the narrowest basis. While this is entirely speculation, it strikes me that a Scalia-n opinion on the Second Amendment under Chief Justice Rehnquist might well have been a more strident document, or at least one that left less for the "inferior" courts to gnaw at.

Kennedy v. Louisiana

The Supreme Court today strikes down the death penalty for the rape of a child that was not meant to nor resulted in death.

I've read the opinions quickly. I'm obviously not the person to give real expert opinion, but I'm writing to note that PG's recent praise of Justice Alito is fully borne out in his dissent today. As I noted briefly on the Volokh blog comments, I think the newest Justice's dissent does serious damage to what I think is an unprincipled majority opinion. I suspect in its calm disection of the majority, it will have greater long term resonance than would a more fiery opinion by someone else.

Japanese Food is French food, really

Tyler Cowen, an economist whose thinking I respect very much, has been making the argument for some time that Japan (and specifically Tokyo) is the best food destination in the world. Most strikingly, he recently said;

"That Tokyo is the best food city in the world? That's by an order of magnitude; Paris and others aren't close. At this point my best guess is that Osaka is number two."

But that claim is almost matched by the idea that "Japan has arguably the world's best baked desserts." And just yesterday, I listened to Professor Cowen say, in a Bloggingheads video with Will Wilkinson, (approximately, since I'm transcribing quickly),

"What they've done in French and Italian food is what Toyota did to General Motors twenty years ago, so that food of many different kinds is much better in Japan than anywhere else in the world".

To be frank, I really don't believe him, or at least as I understand his claim (that French and Italian food in Japan is better than French or Italian food in France or Italy, respectively - the claim that the Japanese have the most number of cuisines at the highest level in one city is much more plausible to me, especially since New York is probably its closest rival). I particularly don't believe his claim as to desserts, when dealing with a culture that traditionally did not rely on dairy products, but I don't believe him as to savory foods either. And if he was right, would not Japanese style French food be slowly defeating French style french food, especially in neutral battlegrounds like New York, much like Toyota defeated General Motors?

I haven't been to Japan, so I'm in a weak position to judge, really. But I'd love to hear (a) what exactly Cowen's claim is as to Japan and (b) why he thinks what he thinks, as I'm deeply unconvinced.

Astoria-Ditmars

I moved to Astoria Ditmars for personal reasons, but having lived here for a while, I should have moved anyway. For the reasons, read this largely on-point New York Times article. (HT: Phoebe)

Shrimp with artichokes and tomato

I nabbed this recipe this weekend from Bernard Loiseau's home cookbook. (Loiseau, of course, is famous as the chef who commited suicide when rumours emerged of his losing a Michelin star). It's adapted somewhat from Loiseau's original langoustines, but still, I'm in his spirit.

In short, you get some shrimp, and make a stock of their shells, an exercise which differs from meat stocks in that it takes only a few minutes. While you're doing that, cook the artichoke hearts in olive oil, with onion. Just as they start getting tender (at about 5 minutes), pour the shrimp stock into the artichokes. This result in vegetables that taste subtly, but unmistakably, of shellfish. The tomato sauce is served cold - it's nothing more than the simplest tomato and onion mixture, pureed, and the shrimp were cooked for the least possible time on a griddle.

The dish is a playful experiment in contrast. Hot shrimp, cold tomato sauce, hot artichokes. As Loiseau points out, the creaminess of the shrimp against the acidity of the tomato. I served with a Sancerre, which I'll describe later. A wonderful summer dish.

Two ways of food

The juxtaposition of two pictures from an important Time magazine photo essay tells us a lot of what we need to know about the state of American unhealth. First, an italian family's typical week of food. Second, a family from Atlanta.

Obviously, these families may not necessarily be typical. But the differences are startling.

Just to start with, mind playing "Where's Waldo" with the vegetables on the Revis family table?

UPDATE: See also the Mexicans they've chosen. What I find particularly striking is what each family chose to put front and center.

Some pictures from my weekend meal

I posted a couple of days ago about my weekend meal to celebrate my deck furniture. I've finally rescued some pictures from the camera, so I thought I'd share them.

One of the things I loved especially from Richard Olney's Reflexions (posts here and here) was his idea of writing down and keeping the menus from even fairly mundane meals. I tried my own hand this weekend, with the results you see here. I especially like my pathetic effort to draw an asparagus, which wasn't even on the menu, now that I think of it. To return briefly to the wine, which you see to the left, I bought a Bordeaux yesterday to remind myself of what that tasted like, and the sheer classic-ness of the Burgundy's flavor of terroir really came through as I sipped at the merlot based Bordeaux, which tasted deeply of fruit. It is startling, in the context of fruity Bordeaux, how perfectly La Pretiere tasted of the most exquisite dirt.

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I like this shot of the semifreddo. As you can see, I served it in slices, which is how I like it (I've seen people recommend it served scooped, as here, but I think the slices are nice to remind people it's not ice cream). If I had found any good berries, that would have been served along side, since I've had semifreddos that need the tang of fruit, but frankly, this one was mostly egg white, and not that cloying.

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As you can see, I somewhat overstuffed my cornish hens, and the rice and raisin mix began to leak out. Nonetheless, the combination remained delicious. I think one of the deeply underappreciated benefits of boning and rolling a chicken (or making a piece of pork or beef into a roulade) is that one gets to redistribute the muscles.
Previously dry breast (and breast meat does get dry, even with the best of intentions) gets a little dark meat cut into it for extra flavor, and the dark meat might get a few flecks of breast left on the carcass to leaven its unctuousness. Roulade - the technique of the year, for me.

Dada v. Mukasey (No Food!)

* Non-Food content *

I'm writing to explore an ambiguity in the Supreme Court's very recent opinion, Dada v. Mukasey (June 16, 2008). It may be that I have misunderstood what is a complex statutory framework. But if I have, I can at least take some comfort in the fact that I don't think the Court has adequately explained itself. I have two specific questions, which I explore a bit below: (a) does the rule pronounced in Dada apply to aliens facing inadmissibility proceedings, or only to aliens, like Dada, subject to removal on deportation grounds and (b) If the rule does apply equally to both cases, why?

Just to recap, at the center of Dada is a fairly simple statutory problem. 8 USC Section 1229c allows aliens, subject to certain restrictions, to accept "voluntary departure" rather than removal under 8 USC 1229a. Choosing voluntary departure has many positive benefits for the alien - as the Supreme Court observes, the alien avoids extended detention pending completion of travel arrangement, is allowed to choose when to depart, and can select the country of destination (slip opinion, p. 8). In addition, the alien avoids certain statutory consequences of removal, such as not being allowed back into the country. In exchange, the alien has to leave the country within 60 (or 120, in some cases) days.

Alternatively, Congress has allowed aliens the right to make a motion to reopen removal proceedings after a negative result. 8 USC Section 1229a(c)(7). The problem that Dada, the alien in this case, ran into is that if one makes a motion to reopen, the Board of Immigration Appeals may not reach a decision on your motion until the 60 or 120 day period for voluntary departure has passed. Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to voluntarily depart are high. For the next ten years, an alien is ineligible for a wide range of immigration benefits. Thus, the alien is stuck between leaving the country, and letting his motion to reopen lapse, and staying, and suffering the consequences of violating an agreement to voluntarily depart. As the Supreme Court puts it, dramatically, the alien is "between Scylla and Charybdis". In view of that mythological bind, the Court majority decided to reinterpret the statute to allow the alien to withdraw his agreement to depart while staying and pursuing his motion to reopen, thus avoiding the consequences of violating 8 USC 1229(c).

The ambiguity I'm interested in arises from a certain looseness in how the Court used what I believe to be immigration terms of art. As I understand it, Section 1229(a), the removal statute, is actually a hybrid of two, distinct, concepts. First, 1229(a) handles what used to be deportation matters. In other words, matters concerning an alien who was once legally in the United States, but is now illegal. But 1229(a) also handles removals for something called inadmissability - in other words, proceedings to remove aliens from the United States who never should have been here.

The Court, however, uses the concepts of inadmissibility and deportation interchangeably. While Dada was fighting a deportation order, for example, the Court cites to consequences he would suffer if he were finally judged inadmissible ("An alien who has been ordered removed under . . . Section 1229(a) of this title (i.e, removal) and who again seeks admission within 5 years of the date of such removal is inadmissible", slip opinion 9, citing 8 USC 1182, the inadmissibility provisions). Similarly, the Court cites INS v. St. Cyr, 538 U.S. 289, 320 (2001) for the proposition that ambiguities in deportation statutes should be construed in favor of the alien, without noting that St. Cyr says nothing about inadmissability, and relatedly observes of Dada that "we must be reluctant to assume that the voluntary departure statute was designed to remove this important safeguard (a motion to reopen) for the distinct class of deportable aliens most favored by the same law." It seems to me that the most natural way to read the opinion is to assume that the Court meant for its rule of lenity to apply to both deportable and inadmissible aliens. Am I wrong?

But unless I've dramatically missed the mark, there are significant differences between deportable and inadmissible aliens, or at least there ought to be. Most fundamentally, deportation has, I think, long been understood to have been a much graver consequence than inadmissibility, even if the real world consequences both consist of removing an alien from the country. The deportee is being expelled from a place they were legally, at one point. In that context, it makes sense that some lenity be applied, because they may have been operating on settled expectations of being residents. Following the trail of St. Cyr's interpretive rule back in time, the centrality of deportation to the idea that removal statutes ought to be interpreted with some consideration for the individual becomes clearer. In Delgadillo v. Carmichael, 332 US 388 (1947), for example, the Court observed that "[d]eportation can be the equivalent of banishment or exile. The stakes are indeed high and momentous for the alien who has acquired his residence here". Or, as the Court noted equally in Fong Haw Taw v. Phelan, 333 U.S. 6 (1948), "[deportation] is the forfeiture for misconduct of a residence in this country".

An inadmissible alien who has the right to choose voluntary departure, however, is in a different position. Even with long tenure living here, I don't see how they can really be said to have "acquired a residence", nor can they plausibly said to have been exiled or banished when removed. Indeed, DHS itself notes that the vast majority of those choosing voluntary departure are Mexicans turned back by the Border Patrol. It doesn't seem obvious as a matter of statutory interpretation that those aliens should be treated in the same way as someone, like Dada, who had once entered legally. Just as important, different rules may be necessary to take into account the different consequences of being removed under an order of deportation as opposed to removal for inadmissability. Even the Department of Justice rule proposal on which the Court relies, for example, asks for input on whether a rule might be crafted allowing an alien to accept a voluntary departure, actually physically leave the country, file a losing petition for review anyway and still be allowed to escape the consequences of having challenged the immigration ruling (72 Fed. Reg. 67682). That alternative, I think, is unavailable under the Court's ruling in Dada, because the Court has provided that aliens fighting inadmissibility charges can stay in the country without suffering the penalties for violating their voluntary departure agreement.

The right answer here may be that deportation removals and inadmissability removals should be treated the same under the statutes I've been discussing. But I am confused by the fact that the Court seemed not to grapple with the subject. To some extent, it may be because I've got the law wrong. I am not an immigration law specialist. But the sheer complexity of the subject suggests to me that Justice Scalia's inclination to allow the regulators to use their discretion to blunt the harshness of the statutory rule is the best answer, (Scalia dissent, p. 8) because that discretion could take into account the different positions of different aliens subject to Section 1229a.

The two worlds of sweet and savory

Watching the Top Chef finale last week, it became painfully obvious that none of the contestants had the slightest idea how to make dessert. Richard, a molecular gastronomist from Atlanta, managed to cut bananas into pseudo-"scallops" for about the fourth time, and serve them with bacon (actually, pork belly) ice cream. The winner, Stephanie, made what was obviously a mediocre ricotta pound cake. And Lisa who shouldn't have been anywhere near the last round, made a sort of rice pudding that had the virtue of (apparently) being tasty.

I am surprised about the apparent chasm between sweet and savory cooking. I understand that someone who has been cooking meat on the line since they were 15 is likely to be much better at savory dishes. But why the utter incapacity at baking on display during the show? No one made bread, nor even a barely acceptable cake. Even for the ultimate episode, when the contestants had two months to prepare, knowing that they might be asked to make a dessert, the results were still underwhelming. Although, compared to other seasons, they still did well - Hung, the winner of Season Three, served a molten chocolate cake for his dessert. Un-ironically, I mean.

I know, fundamentally, that if I was given two months to prepare, I would have a dessert that would knock people's socks off ready. Frankly, with some tweaking, even my almond semi-freddo of the weekend is flatly better than anything the contestants made. With a week of thought, I would have a restaurant style dessert that would take me all of 45 minutes of prep time and would look perfectly creditable. Yet, three different professional chefs, and countless others throughout the show, seem utterly incapable of making anything sweet.

I can only assume that as one advances in cooking, the temptation to jettison anything that isn't one's speciality becomes overwhelmingly strong. Even so, it strikes me that a chef who is completely incapable of making a cake is missing something fairly significant. But then, perhaps that's why I'm not a professional cook.

Breaking News

In yet another boring article about how increasing food prices are challenging restaurants, the Washington Post has the following gem:

"At Equinox, a D.C. fine-dining restaurant where business is down around 5 percent, one strategy is to get as much out of a chicken as possible. That means that in addition to using the breast meat for a light chicken salad, the legs feed staff and the bones help create chicken stock."

And what were the people at Equinox doing before? Throwing chicken carcasses and legs to the dogs? Cutting the filet off a porterhouse and getting rid of the rest? In all seriousness, does any restaurant not do the things above, even in good times?

A meal to celebrate my deck furniture

The weather cooperated on Sunday to let me show off my new deck furniture. The menu (pictures to follow) was as much as I could manage on the no-air conditioning basis that I'm going to be living on until I actually manage to get to a store.

Crostini with artichoke - (I sauteed artichoke in olive oil until tender, then whizzed with a little cream and lots of lemon. The crostini (more accurately bruschetta, I guess) were soaked in olive oil and then toasted on top of a naked gas flame from my range).

Cornish hen stuffed with rice - (Boned cornish game hen, stuffed with rice flavored with raisins and cinammon, tied en saucisse, and then roasted).

Green salad with arugula, lemon and oil, with sauteed mushrooms, and an egg cooked starting with cold water to just set.

Almond Semifreddo - (My favorite ice cream substitute. Egg whites whipped to hard peaks with sugar, mixed with cream and almonds, and then frozen. It needed overnight to really set (as the leftovers in my freezer demonstrate) but it is still delicious).

2003 Olivier Rion Cote de Nuits Villages La Pretiere - An inky, deep, Burgundy. We detected a lot of earthy flavor, though not much of the cherry advertised. I'm still not convinced of my ability to pick out flavors.

Erawan

We had lunch at Erawan in Bayside on Saturday, a Thai restaurant that gets fairly good reviews in places like Zagat's. Although the food tasted ok, one gets the impression that they have tamed the spice much overmuch for the western taste. Unlike our own better priced and fiery Bangkok Tasty, Erawan somehow turns Thai food insipid, a bland curried noodles and an eggplant stew that hardly set the mouth afire. Of course, one ought really not trust Zagat's for much of anything, but we were still surprised by the blandness of it all.

Reflexions

I just finished Richard Olney's Reflexions. It is a puzzling, difficult book of a great man, but I enjoyed it very much. Most interesting to me is how important Olney felt his Time Life series, The Good Cook, was as a legacy. I picked up the collection a few years ago at a rummage sale, completely unaware that it was edited by Olney, and was more and more surprised as I leafed through it at its sophistication and depth. I now understand why.

NY State judges decision

Unrelated to food, but very interesting, a New York judge today ordered the state legislature to raise judicial pay. Of course, New York judges should get much higher salaries (they should be paid sufficently, I would think, such that working as a temp in a law firm is actually a losing proposition) , but I really have to wonder about the wisdom of a judge siding with a lawsuit filed by judges in order to raise judges' pay. I'll have to read the opinion, but this should at the very least make the person sitting in judgment just the tiniest bit queasy.

A hobby as job

From an article about a star-chef booker in this morning's New York Times

“The thing that’s amazing about Lee is you can’t distinguish what’s his hobby and what’s his job,” said Christina Grdovic, publisher of Food & Wine. “It’s all a big blur.”

May we all be so lucky.

The tomato problem

The only positive coming out of the tomato salmonella problem that has the country in an uproar is that it happened in June and not August or late July. If I was kept from tomatoes at the height of tomato season because someone all the way across the country had discovered some bacteria on tomatoes that had about as much to do with the tomatoes I was planning to eat as, say, my firm has to do with a public defender's office, I would be really, super, duper annoyed. It is, though, fairly astounding that our food network is so intertwined that salmonella there is causing tomato-less salsa here. Depressing, to say the least.

The industrial food machine and change

A good post from Paul here. I'm especially in agreement with the last paragraph. Simply put, if there are ever going to be major advances in how we treat animals, Mcdonald's is going to lead the way.

Top chef thoughts

I've taken to watching the TV show, "Top Chef". All good fun, but I've begun wondering whether people are begining to mistake the usual judge's pet criticisms of the food for actual food criticism. Especially irritating is the repeated claim that dishes "don't sing". It's a nice enough turn of phrase once, but not every time that one encounters a disappointing dish, I'd think. More on this later, hopefully.

The Senate dining room

An amazing story here about the Senate's sub par dining room.

It always amazes me how poorly extremely powerful and rich men and women eat at their jobs in this country. Speaking from personal experience from spending a lot of time around a certain kind of the species above, it's really very startling.

1000 AD

There's a great thread at Marginal Revolution going on right now. The premise:

I wanted to ask for survival tips in case I am unexpectedly transported to a random location in Europe (say for instance current France/Benelux/Germany) in the year 1000 AD (plus or minus 200 years). I assume that such transportation would leave me with what I am wearing, what I know, and nothing else. Any advice would help.

As I note in the comments, I'd head for the nearest kitchen. Modern kitchen technique, even dumbed down due to lack of equipment, is so superior to what was available in 1000 AD that you could possibly get yourself installed as a sort of mascot in some noble's courtly apparatus.

Some people are assuming that because a modern professor (which is what the original questioner is) is more intelligent and highly educated than even a medieval intellectual, he'd be able to make his way into the church. The problem from an immediate survival perspective is that the modern marketing professor isn't more educated at the only things that matter from the church's perspective - Latin and religion. Unless you're supremely handy with tools, I don't think you'll be able to make anything modern to sell either. I think being a sort of travelling doctor might work, since you at least know about germs, but I think this sort of underestimates the problem of being a person with no place in a feudal world which is governed by a hierarchy in which everyone has their place.

Frankly, I think you'd do very well to end up as a serf, and would most likely die very soon. A great thought experiment, though.

UPDATE: Obviously, all bets are off if you happen to be a modern expert in, say, metallurgy. Medievals weren't dumb. If some guy showed up with steel, it wouldn't take long for someone to notice them.

Avec Eric

The mighty Eric Ripert, of Le Bernardin, has a blog. One gets the sense of Ripert that he is a fundamentally decent fellow, and oh, what a cook. My only beef with the great man is that it can sometimes feel as if plans on performing surgery with his food, so antiseptic is his approach, but his food remains delicious for all that.

His entries so far consist of a video recipe for broiling red snapper in a toaster oven. Looks delicious, but if you're wondering about what I mean by antiseptic, watch the video.

More on Blue Hill

I have a moment now to speak a little more freely on Blue Hill, so some further tasting notes.

I'm not sure one can approach Blue Hill without conceding the centrality of its location. Of course, the farm is the source of much (though clearly not all) of the food you're going to eat. But there is something special, to my mind, in driving to a place with the sole intention of eating, and luxuriating in the experience. Perhaps a stroll before the meal, perhaps a melancholy wander afterwards, as you realize the meal is over. When I lived in Scotland, I had the same fundamental feeling about the Peat Inn, a similar countryside oasis, though I doubt I had pinpointed what exactly I found so alluring. Even were Blue Hill to serve middling food, the fact that it is on a farm, with geese, and butter, and eggs, and nature would make it worth a quick trip.

Thankfully, however, Blue Hill's food is hard to describe as middling. Lacking a lot of the technological sizzle of a WD-50 (although Dan Barber, Blue Hill's chef, is said to admire Ferran Adria), or the pork sodden, sometimes flailing, virtuosity of Momofuku Ko, this is Chez Panisse for the east coast, food coaxed gently from the landscape. It is rhubarb season here, and hence, a rhubarb jus surrounding a light, delicate island of Maine Crab. Asparagus is fresh, and it is that fresh asparagus that is nestled next to the delightfully runny egg, breaded and deep fried to a crusty, golden, crunch. It's spring, and there's spring lamb, cooked to a boggling tenderness, sitting delicately atop literally nothing but the freshest possible carrots wading in their own clever "butter". One detects only a few notes of dissonance - the (nonetheless delicious) chocolate bread pudding rather than something fruity, while wonderful looking strawberry layer cakes streamed by to some other tables (why chocolate at all? The season demands clafouti). The fact that our table was graced with the beet burger amuse bouche (masterful), but not, oddly, the light herby spritzer others received in addition. And, above all, the dainty portions, which are perfect for my taste, but probably stand right on the precipice of seeming like a bit of a mockery to others (we thought, laughing, of what exactly our respective parents would say, or do, with the plates of food we were presented).

But these are quibbles. The meal was well priced. It was delicious. The settings were a relaxing escape from the concrete canyon of New York city. Blue Hill should continue to be a success.

Blue Hill at Stone Barns

Much has been said about Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a farm driven restaurant situated in working agricultural park. Ruhlman, for example, recently called Dan Barber (Blue Hill's chef) "one of the most important voices in the chef world".

I think I'll have more to say about our excellent lunch at Blue Hill last Saturday later, when my work allows me. For now, let me reproduce our lunch, which was served sans menu based on a quick chat with our server at the beginning of the meal:

Maine crab with a rhubarb jus and tapioca pearls

soft boiled farm fresh egg, bread crumbed and fried, served with spring vegetables (it looked like the egg in the link)

Grass fed, pastured, lamb (almost certainly cooked sous vide) with carrots and carrot butter

Chocolate bread pudding with caramel ice cream

Milos

I had a pleasant lunch today with some of our summer interns at Milos Estiatorio, a high end greek restaurant in New York. Delicious octopus, and a well grilled dorade with plump, juicy, capers.

I also got the opportunity to eat the single most overpriced course I have ever seen or heard of in any restaurant anywhere on the planet in my life.


Milos Special - Paper-thin zucchini, eggplant and saganaki cheese, lightly fried. $27.75

Is it a giant tub of vegetables? Or a huge, table sized plate? Ooh no. It's a single, little pile of vegetables with about two tablespoons of yogurt sauce in the middle, flanked by three miniscule saganaki rolls. $28. Seriously. On my own dime, I would beat a path to the similarly good Agnanti every time, for a quarter of the price.

Jump For Heart

I spent great swathes of my childhood trying to poison my elementary school classmates against the Jump for Heart program. (I remember theatrically throwing the sign up sheet on the ground). I can't say I had a reason for my intransigence based on economics, though. More likely, it was my usual antipathy for group activities into which one is guilted, or, perhaps, an effort to keep my classmates from realizing that I was very fat, and so unlikely to do much jumping for my heart or anyone else's.

The Great Cork Debacle of 2008

I mentioned, in my post on Montauk, a little trouble I had with a cork. We had innocently enough bought a Long Island Viognier to sip with a little cheese and salami, and the day before, had purchased a $1 corkscrew from a Montauk town vineshop. Grabbing the wine cold out of the fridge, I inserted the corkscrew, and started pulling at it to remove the cork. A few second later, I had the plastic base of the corkscrew in my left hand, and a wine bottle including this cork in my right. A little tugging quickly convinced me that the broken metal screw wasn't about to come out of the plastic cork, or at least not without a lot of help.



I was, of course, too embarassed by all this to take up my girlfriend's idea of asking the hotel people for a pair of pliers, so I started trying a few much less logical methods that had the chief benefit of not having to talk to anyone. Unfortunately, they were mostly pretty stupid. It turns out, for example, that trying to stab through a plastic cork with a knife doesn't work. Nor, apparently, does trying to slip corn on the cob holders on the sides of the cork to try to imitate a double pronged cork remover work especially well. In fact, what it actually does is scratch the glass, leading to the hilarious possibility that you may now have glass shards in your white wine.

Finally, my girlfriend hit on the solution. Go buy a new corkscrew, and hook the new corkscrew's cork around the broken screw. Once it's attached, pull it out. Although I almost broke the new corkscrew in the process, it worked, coming out with a satisfying pop. As for what to do about the glass shards, I filtered the wine through a very fine coffee filter, after having discarded the idea of decanting the whole thing into a bowl and skimming the top (the logic being that the glass might sink) after deciding that the bowl was probably too shallow for that ploy even if the glass played along.

Given that we both feel fine a week later, I guess nothing bad happened. But the whole episode definitely delayed dinner.

Grilled blackfish and potatoes

As I mentioned here, I made a dish of pan sauteed fish in Montauk last weekend. Here's the picture. As you can see, I got nice, crunchy caremelized color on the potatoes by boiling first and then pan frying, and added the fish to the skillet at the last minute. I served with mesclun salad and a Long Island Riesling.

A note on stewed fruit

I'm not sure why I hadn't discovered stewed fruit before, but apparently, any summer fruit baked at about 300 degrees with a little sugar, cinnamon, and corn starch (if it's very watery) becomes delicious, with or without an added crumble. Last night was stewed Georgia peaches, with a little mint chocolate chip ice cream.

Bad Bread

We walked into the Montauk Bake Shop last weekend, looking for some bread to eat for breakfast. They had a pumpernickel loaf that looked suspiciously identical to the white loaf, just brown, but I bought it anyway. At least it's made by a bakery, I thought.

It turned out to be a truly wretched loaf. Tough, flavorless, and unappetizing. So much so that we bought an industrial rye bread the next day, and resolved to think about what to do with the pumpernickel later. I am trying to find a way to use it. The rye bread wasn't any good, of course, but it was a perfectly acceptable vehicle for apricot jam.

The whole episode made me think about one of the truths underlying the current power of our large food conglomerates. Simply put, on average they provide tastier food for lower prices than single proprietors. Am I saying that your local bakery isn't as good as Wonder Bread? No, of course not. Many local bakeries are much better, and some transcendent. But what people sometimes forget is that for a long time, local meant unpredictable, unhygienic, and just plain old bad. Ben & Jerry's isn't better than Grom, but it is better than the bad "artisan gelato" we had in Montauk. IHOP, sad to say, beats up on many local diners. McDonald's, yes McDonald's, does what it does better than some local burger joints. The alternative, in other words, to industrial food from some heartless factory is often terrible food from a local scoundrel.

Of course, here in New York we're insulated from that to a large extent by what has become an extraordinarily ruthless food market. But that wasn't always the case, and one need not think back too far to remember a New York where Starbucks was a dramatic, world changing improvement to the coffee scene. Yes, yes, local, local local. But let's remember what our industrial friends have bought us.

Molecular Gastronomy

Combining Michael Ruhlman's post on the meaning of molecular gastronomy with Jeremy's post about miracle fruit brings me to an interesting problem. How can we be living in a moment where both haute barnyard (earthy, back to the farm, fresh, local) and "molecular gastronomy" (chemical, forward looking, industrial) are the two dominant food paradigms? A world where one can get reservations to neither WD-50 (Wylie Dufresne's molecular gastronomy mecca) or Blue Hill at Stone Barns (Dan Barber's fanatically farm driven simplicity)? To me, they are nemesis, and yet people talk about both phenomena as if they are part of the same world.

I don't discount Adria, Dufresne, Achatz, and the rest of the molecular gastronomers, by the way. Assuredly, many of their methods will fade away, because they are flawed. But to the extent what they are doing is using modern cooking methods on traditional foods, like all innovators, other novelties are going to stand the test of time. I don't doubt that there is a place in this world for agar as a stabilizer, especially in dessert, for example. But I am willing to put my money on haute barnyard as the more lasting trend, because, fundamentally, it's not a trend. It's how everyone used to eat, and hopefully will eat once more.

Gum Arabic

A few years ago in college, the ice cream maker of the wonderful Jannetta's ice cream in St. Andrews, Scotland, came to give a talk to the university's wine and cheese club. I stood up, and asked a question about the gooey, oozy, ice cream I used to eat in Syria, which we called booza. Since I loved it, I proudly asked the man how they did it, expecting to hear some kind of exotic, interesting ingredient.

He wrinkled his nose, and told me that it was gum arabic, and that its job was to be a filler and to keep ice cream from melting as quickly. Since then, I've been quick to pick it out.

So as soon as we got our "artisan gelato" at 668 , I knew what was up. It oozed like a Twix in the commercials, or like Bubble Yum pulled by a kid out of his mouths. The dull, un-fresh flavors were no more promising, and for $4 a scoop, we were really disappointed. We left yearning for Ben & Jerry's (which leads me into another topic, which is the technical superiority of industrial food over most food, which I'll get to), and wondering why no one else is doing something better in a town that is almost exclusively a sea-side resort. Puzzled, we stumbled on to dinner, unsatisfied.

Montauk

We spent the long weekend in Montauk, New York, a sea side community at the very tip of Long Island. To get to Montauk, you have to pass the heart of what people call the Hamptons. I had not appreciated quite how ritzy those places were until I saw the Tiffany & Co. in the middle of what was clearly otherwise just a series of small fishing villages. Why, precisely, anyone needs a Tiffany's in a fishing village is unclear to me, but there it is.

I'm going to post a number of more specific observations and notes, but I'll first reprise generally for reference. We arrived on Friday, settled in at the perfectly adequate Sun N' Sound hotel, and then headed to the Montauk Harbor area in search of food. My research (i.e, trolling Chowhound for 15 minutes before I left) had told me that Gosman's Dock was a good place to start, so we hit the main restaurant for an excellent lobster roll and lobster salad, served overlooking the sea. We then went off to explore the area, stopping at an Edy's for a nostalgic (but bad) mint ice cream, and on the way (due to my urging) hit up Gosman's fish market for supplies for the evening. A while later, and with a bottle of local Long Island Reisling, we headed back to the hotel, and I cooked up a skillet dinner of pan roasted potatoes, Long Island wild blackfish, and baby carrots with a local mesclun salad (picture forthcoming). The next day, breakfast was organic eggs with some perfectly bad pumpernickel bread from the Montauk Bake Shop (more on this later) and coffee. We visited the Montauk Point Lighthouse Park for some delightful wandering (except for rude employees at the snack bar, and some party pooping visiters who mocked the lighthouse) and ended up on Duryea's Lobster Deck for some mussels (delicious) and another lobster roll (also delicious). Were it not for the swarms of odd, throughly disgusting flies plaguing the sea air, it would have been a truly wonderful meal. Then it was off to Nick's beach for some further wanderin', and diverted ourselved to Gig 668 for what they claimed was "artisan gelato". Chewing through the gummy, flavorless roasted pistachio and coffee flavors, we decided it was neither. Why there isn't anyone making ice cream at a sea side resort town is beyond me. Later we bought another bottle of wine from the good people at Finest Kind Wine shop, which we took back home with some snacks to nibble before heading out for dinner.

That set the stage for the great wine debacle of 2008, about which more later. All I'll say now is that it involved buying another corkscrew, coffee filters, lots of pulling, and a much delayed meal.

When we did eventually eat, it was at Gosman's again, but this time we tackled the pure lobster itself. Delicious, except that we much preferred the boiled to the broiled article. As wonderful as the seafood was, we spent the next twenty minutes stewing jokingly that the waitress stole my girlfriend's coleslaw from under her nose. I realize you want to go home. But it was good. Why take it?

We headed home the next morning, sated and a little more tan, except for a minor detour about which I WILL NOT talk about. As I say, more detailed thoughts and pictures will follow.

Reflexions, Richard Olney

I've loved Richard Olney's writing ever since I first opened up Simple French Food. His food, to me, is the acme of cooking. His Ten Vineyard Lunches is my candidate for most overlooked cookbook on the planet. Concise, but masterful. So when I picked up his autobiography, Reflexions, I was ready to be entranced.

I'm still reading, so no conclusions yet. My first impressions? One does not think of sex when thinking about Richard Olney, but there is an awful lot of it in this book.

Second, I found this delightful passage, which it pays to meditate on in the wake of our over-the-top dinner at Ko:

It (a restaurant in Piraeus, Greece) was an odd place. Except for the staff, there were no Greeks present. The food was banal, but they had created the formula, a quarter of a century before the nouvelle-cuisine loonies launched le menu degustation, of the non-meal - fifteen or twenty little dabs of unrelated foods, served in interminable succession, one after the other . . . .

Oh, math

There are about fifty million things wrong with this student article published by the law review of my old law school (HT: Amber and Abovethelaw), but possibly my favorite is the following stupidity:

"But the point about debt is merely another
version of the argument for making lots of money. Debt is nothing
more than a monthly payment — it can thus be thought of as a portion
out of your salary. Suppose you choose a public interest job that
pays $4,800 per month. If your debt payments are $500 per month,
then your monthly earnings become $4,300. On an annual scale, that
debt turns a $57,000 yearly salary into a $51,000 yearly salary. The
desire to make a higher wage is no different than before — the fact of
debt does not change the moral calculation because it is simply another
example of the urge to earn more money"

Apparently, our author has not heard that there is such a thing as government, and the government exacts (a lot of) taxes, and student loans are paid out of after tax salary. Whoops.

PS: By the way, how did the Harvard Law Review staff miss such a preposterous mistake? Yes, so the author's (stupid and unconvincing) point isn't necessarily obscured (even relatively impoverished elite laywers still make enough to support their families, and debt obligations are just a monthly payment) but it's like adding that point to a sentence that suggests the moon is made of wasabi dusting, and then not suggesting that the author perhaps fix that part of it.

Also, our friendly writer might be lucky enough to have had a $500 student loan payment, but if I hadn't paid mine off, the monthly bill was four times that. The plucking of some plausible figure the poor devils with debt might have to pay back strikes me a bit like when the old President Bush hadn't the slightest idea what milk cost.

Faux pain au levain

I had a chance to make my faux pain au levain over the last few days. (I call it a faux levain because it's made with yeast rather than wild sourdough, as it ought).

I've been perfecting my technique over about four years, and it's really my signature bread. Roughly, it's equal parts white and wheat flour, kneaded, and then slowly ripened in the fridge for at least 24 hours. Then I place it in a brotform (actually, a plastic colander with a clean towel) for its second proof, and slide it onto a baking stone or tray in a 450 degree oven, in which I've left a tray of water evaporating for moisture during the entire preheating period, for slowish baking.

As you can see, the result is really a nice bread, with great distribution of holes (large, medium and small), a thick crust, and a subtle, yeasty aroma and flavor.

A detox spinach sandwich

In a continuing effort to detox post Ko, I've been keeping fish-o-vegetarian for the week. Dinner last night was this super simple spinach sandwich - some fresh spinach blanched, drained, and then sauteed in olive oil with garlic, flaked red pepper, salt, and pepper, all stuffed into a Sullivan St. ciabatta piccolo with some grated cheese.

Momofuku Ko dish ranking

Instead of writing a classic review of our meal at Momofuku Ko, I've decided to rank the dishes instead. Note that it's really an 8-10 course tasting menu, but at points they serve different dishes to each member of a couple or group, so you end up with rather more, if you assiduously taste each other's food. NB: This meal was accompanied by the $50 drinks tasting menu, which included a number of wonderful wines (sparkling and otherwise) , sake, beer, and sweet sherry.

To comment globally before embarking on the parade below, Ko is a valuable, interactive experience. Valuable because one sees a modern commercial kitchen at work. Much of the food is pre-prepared, and needs only warming, or dressing. What is cooked is cooked in ways that you wouldn't necessarily even care to duplicate at home (or do you enjoy pouring butter over and over on your pan seared halibut as it cooks, or deep frying enormous tubes of stuffed chicken?) Interactive because the cooks jabber, and shimmy, and twirl right in front of you, like a high class sushi bar and hibachi rolled into one.

The food? Ah. I am tempted to gush. It was good. Very good. But at some point, there must be some line where the chef says, "no more". No more fat. No more grease. I must relent before I cross the line into vulgarity. Chang mocks that line. He laughs at it while blithely crossing it. Vulgarity of this sort is apparently his badge of honor. The result is the menu below, packed full of pork fat, and other fat, at literally every turn. I reeked of pork and fat this morning, I dreamt of pork and fat last night, I woke up sweating porky and fatty bullets of sweat. As trendy it is these days to revel in bacon and smoke, this is not my ideal situation. Don't get me wrong. I have a wrought iron stomach. But I was not comfortable going home last night, and I wonder very much if everyone else is able to shake off this bachannalian excess unscathed. I do not think even the most dedicated of French carnivore chefs would inflict such a tasting menu on his audience. I leave open the possibility that I am overreacting.

1. Long Island Fluke "sashimi" with buttermilk, yuzu, and poppy seeds - I would never have thought in a million years that buttermilk on raw fish would taste even acceptably well, but this tart creation was revelatory. So simple, and so good, and yet disappointing, in a way, because it shows that Chang can cook something other than pork fat sauteed in pork fat.

2. Pork Belly and Oyster in Kimchee Consommé with Napa cabbage - I've never had such powerful flavor from a broth, though I could discern no kimchee whatever. Paired with the fatty, unctuous, pork belly, it tasted like tonkutsu gone on steroids. And the oyster was a briny treat amid all the pork. A magnificent, unexpected dish.

3. Pea Soup with crayfish and morels - Tremendous pea flavor, and crayfish deeply redolent of their home. And, wonder of wonders, a small packet of morels right in the center. They made the dish for me. As Frank Bruni (Ny Times, of course) says, "[t]here’s a Georgia pea soup with such resonant pea flavor that you wonder about the bastard pedigree of all prior peas in your life and almost fail to notice the morels and the delicate crawfish in the soup."

4. Deep fried sous vide short ribs - beef short ribs cooked in a vacumm until extraordinarily tender, and then deep fried. Bruni calls it a "miracle of tender crisp contrast", and I think that sums it up terribly well. It's served with a spring onion, two carrots, and pickled mustard seeds, which looks like a sort of yellow caviar, and is more interesting texturally than as a flavor.

5. Grilled trout with bacon puree - Terribly wonderful New York river trout, paired, astonishingly, with pureed bacon. Why? I don't know. But the combination works wonders for a fish that by definition needs a little help.

6. "Smoked" Egg with onion soubise and chips - an egg masterfully cooked to a set white and completely liquid yolk, dipped in liquid smoke, knifed open, and served with what amounts to an onion jam and tiny, cornflake-like potato chips. I've love this for brunch, perhaps with the fatty english muffin.

7. English muffin with whipped lard - I hesitate to rate this as a "dish", but I don't know what else to do. Like eating bready pig.

8. Fried apple tart with sour cream ice cream - delicious. As everyone else has said, a cool play on the McDonald's apple pie, except that the McDonald's apple pie is now baked, and this is fried, in god knows what unholy oil. I've ranked it this low only because, in the end, it's fried apple pie, wasabi dusting or not.

9. "Lasagna" with whipped ricotta, roasted ricotta salata, the flowers of broccoli rabe, burgundy snails, and mushrooms - two squares of pasta plucked delicately out of the boiling water with some kind of forceps, and then topped with the bewildering flurry of ingredients above. My verdict? More snails, less whipped ricotta, please. I loved the broccoli rabe flowers.

10. Sorbets - Mine, an "arnold palmer" sorbet (half iced tea, half lemonade). Hers, Canteloupe on a base of cashew butter. The canteloupe, given the season, was surprising but terrific.

11. Chicken stuffed with morels and ramps (?), cooked ( I think), and then deep fried until crisp - salty fried goodness, but not as good as the short ribs that were the alternative.

12. "Cereal milk" panna cotta, with avocado creme - I didn't get the avocado, I didn't get the cereal milk, I didn't get the cornflake granola accompaniment. Blurgh.

13. Frozen foie gras, white wine jelly, lychee, and pine nut brittle - a snowy blizzard of fat (i.e, foie gras grated through the small end of a box grater) on top of a Riesling jelly embedded with lychees and sticky chunks of pine nut brittle. Inventive? Yes. Tasty. Eh. There was already so much fat, so much unct, in this meal. What I wouldn't have given at this point for something lemony, to cut through the seemingly endless parade of bellies, fats, creams, and fries. Instead, we got a foie gras dish with a caramelized sugar accompaniment that works no better than the atrocious foie gras creme brulee at Jean Georges.

14. Custard with caviar, asparagus, argan oil and cashews - A sort of cold set custard topped with asparagus, poached cashews, hackleback caviar, and oil. To my mind, a waste of space. The custard wasn't delicious, and the cashews nondescript. Argan sounds great when described, but in the dish it fades away to nothing.

A rhubarb crumble

I am just back from a long (so long that I'm still remembering dishes half an hour after sitting down to write down notes) and mostly splendid meal at Momofuku Ko, and am far too full and drunk to write anything substantive at all. My only comment - does one meal really need so much pork? So much??

Instead, I'll sign off tonight with Saturday night's rhubarb crumble, and leave the Momofuku review for the morning. The secret to the crumble - bake the topping separately from the fruit, yielding a crunchy, independently tasty streusel. I'd normally top with ice cream, but I had made the rhubarb too sweet, so I compensated with tart, tangy, greek yogurt.