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.