Food Writer’s Diary

I take it that means, “no”

2009-11-06T13:47:00.000-08:00

November 6

Well, my latest poll was a dud. I asked readers of this blog if they or their customers had changed their food-sharing habits due to fears of the H1N1 virus. Only seven people responded. Five said no, two said yes, everyone else, by their lack of response, I guess were indicating that they hadn’t thought about it or weren’t interested in the question.

That’s fair.

Here’s another one for you, from another of my colleagues, about restaurants’ moves to engage in more environmentally sound practices.
As always, feel free to comment below.

erratum

2009-11-03T13:29:00.000-08:00

November 3

Clark Mitchell does not, I repeat does not, drink vodka Martinis. I’m not sure why I thought he did, or why I said he did in this recent blog entry, but I have fixed the mistake and thought I should let you know.
Normally I’d just fix the mistake and go on with my life, and Clark certainly didn't grouse about my error, but, well, vodka and gin Martinis illustrate people in very different ways.

Books, Southeast Asian food and what not to say at dinner

2009-11-02T13:10:00.000-08:00

November 2

I went to some good parties last week, including two book parties.

I don’t go to book parties much, because we don’t have much use for cookbooks at NRN — occasionally we can use art from them, but that’s about it — and I personally like to cook based on what’s on hand. If I have questions about specific technique I just grab my battered copy of The Joy of Cooking.

But on Wednesday, after going to the see-and-be-seen party at The Four Seasons to welcome its new chef, Fabio Trabocchi (the most interesting person I met was a writer and publicist with the unlikely name of Paxton Quigley, author of Armed and Female, a self-help book instructing women how to use guns to protect themselves), I went to the East Village for the launch of the Veselka cookbook. So I went from really lovely Champagne and foie gras and truffles to cheap red wine and pierogis, but I like pierogis and haven’t met many wines I can’t drink (I do remember one, boasting that it was made from 100 percent grapes! that was kind of hard to get down). So I chowed down on pierogies and borscht and meatballs and ran into my old colleague Craig Waters (his byline is C. Dickinson Waters, in case you want to look for it), who now works on the business end of Macmillan, which published the Veselka book.

Then yesterday I went to a packed event celebrating Marcus Samuelsson’s new book, New American Table. The party was sponsored and thrown by HSBC bank, which I remember from back when it went by its full name, Hongkong Shanghai Banking Corporation. Now, of course, it’s going for more universal appeal.

A lot of bankers were at the party, including a nice one with whom I spoke about travel to Southeast Asia. But some chefs were there, too, including Alfred Portale from Gotham Bar & Grill and Nils Noren from the French Culinary Institute, who for many years was Marcus' executive chef at Aquavit. Anita Lo, of the once and perhaps future Annisa and the current Rickshaw Dumpling Bar, was there, too, and I had a long chat with chef, consultant, writer, etc. Robert Danhi, who moderated a panel I was on a couple of years ago at the National Restaurant Show. It was about Asian food trends. Robert, who's based in Southern California, is married to a Malaysian woman and travels back and forth to Southeast Asia a lot. So we talked about his love for durian, my inability to appreciate it so far, the joy of a good mangosteen, and other things.

Marcus came by and ripped off my nametag in disgust, wondering why a bank would make us wear such things. He did it in a really friendly way, though. Marcus is good people.

I wasn’t so sure about people I’d met earlier in the week. At one dinner I sat next to a woman who expressed shock and almost disgust that I would admit to liking science fiction. She liked realistic things, she said, because she was a Virgo. I asked her, then, about her belief in astrology, and she readily acknowledged the contradiction, so maybe she wasn’t so bad. But still, who at a civilized dinner would show disgust for someone else’s taste? It’s not nice.

But speaking of Robert Danhi, I did have good Southeast Asian food at the Beard House last week, where Mohan Ismail, the chef of Rock Sugar, was cooking.

Rock Sugar’s a Southeast Asian restaurant in Los Angeles that’s the little brother of Cheesecake Factory. Ismail, who’s originally from Singapore — click here if you’d like to read a whole profile and interview of the guy, written by my colleague Lisa Jennings — but the salient point for this story is that he was on the opening team of Spice Market in New York’s Meatpacking District, and so was Pichet Ong, who was also at the Beard House, helping Mohan.

Pichet told me a little about his new dessert shop that’s opening soon on St. Mark's Place. He said it would be a masculine dessert shop, rather than all the frilly and feminine ones that are out there.

He said the only other masculine dessert place in town was Max Brenner’s, but Pichet’s consulting with Max these days, so he’s biased.

What I ate at the Beard House:

Hors d’oeuvre:

Crispy imperial rolls with pork, shrimp and shiitake mushrooms
Raw hamachi with sesame and tobiko
Crispy chicken samosas with cilantro yogurt
Stuffed naan with spicy ketchup
Champagne Nicolas Feuillatte Brut Rosé NV

Dinner:

Green mango and papaya salad with crushed peanuts and crispy shallots
Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc 2006

Indonesian-grilled cilantro shrimp with corn, sweet potatoes, peas, coconut milk and chiles
L’Aventure Rousanne 2007

Tai snapper with gai lan, shiitakes, and padifield sauce (a rich chile sauce reminiscent of many chile sauces that top whole in Thailand, although this fish was filleted)
Side dishes for the table: Coconut rice with lemon grass, pandan leaves and cashews, and nonya sambal eggplant with sweet soy and chiles (“Nonya” is a Malaysian word for “grandmother” and also refers to the Peranakan cuisine of what are known as the Straits Chinese of Peninsular Malaysia, and Singapore, who are the descendants mostly of Chinese immigrant men who were imported by the British to work in the tin mines and married Malay women; the food is those women’s attempts to make Chinese food, which naturally included incorporating local ingredients, techniques and sensibilities).
Robert Sinskey Vineyards Los Carneros Napa Valley Merlot 2005

Singapore black pepper filet mignon with asparagus and shiitakes (you might think of shiitakes as Japanese — I know I do — but I once visited a shiitake farm in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands)
Roth Cabernet Estate Bottled Sauvignon 2006

Caramelized banana custard cake with milk chocolate ice cream, malted crème Anglaise and praline nut brittle
Saracco Moscato d’Asti 2007

Two gay guys walk into a strip club...

2009-10-30T13:34:00.000-07:00

October 30

Undulating. That's a good word, and one that comes to mind when I think of “gentlemen’s clubs.”

Gentlemen’s clubs are, of course, places where men, gentlemanly or otherwise, get to spend time with scantily clad, often undulating women who are paid to be there. They are usually dark places that serve expensive but ill-prepared drinks and food you might not want to eat.

There are exceptions, of course, when it comes to the food. The Diamond Cabaret, a topless bar in Denver, was for years known as having some of the best steak in town. I don’t know whether it still is, but it might be.

And here in New York Robert's, developed with the help of chef Adam Perry Lang, was opened a couple of years ago at the Penthouse Executive Club and got a positive one-star review from New York Times critic Frank Bruni. The critic also took the opportunity of the review to go ahead and more-or-less come out as a gay man.

Many people in New York tittered with glee, which, it being 2007, I thought was, well, I’m pretty sure I’ve never used the word “puerile” before, but I think this is the right place for it. News that a food writer in New York City was more-or-less openly gay in 2007 shouldn't have been worth a single titter, but there you had it.

Anyway, there’s a new Robert’s in town. The owners of the Penthouse Executive Club bought the former Scores location in west Chelsea and reopened it with a Robert's inside. In charge of the food: Will Savarese, an alumnus of Le Cirque, Aureole, La Côte Basque and Westchester County institution La Crémaillère. He was executive chef at The Tap House, too.

I ate at the new Robert’s last week and, for a laugh, I invited my friend Clark Mitchell to dine with me. We both appreciated the irony of two gay men having steak at a girly bar, especially at one just a few doors down from The Eagle, arguably the most skeevy gay leather bar in all of New York City.

General manager Ed Norwick sat down with us over Martinis (mine: gin — Hendrick's at the waiter's suggestion — with olives; Clark's: gin — Beefeater — with a twist, because they didn’t have cocktail onions) and talked about plans to open more Robert's at gentlemen's clubs across the country. He explained that strip clubs and similar venues aren’t typically the first stop in an evening, and sometimes life (traffic, a phone call from the wife, what have you) gets in the way in the middle of an evening out. If guests start the night at a place with undulating women, well, there’s a good chance that they’ll stay.

For dinner, Clark and I split a porterhouse for two and drank a big Cabernet. He had an iceberg-and-blue-cheese salad — not, to his minor dismay, in wedge form — and I tried a nightly special of field greens, balsamic vinegar etc. Dessert was a sort of chocolate brownie cake.

Clark’s an editor at Travel + Leisure, and so while the guys at the table next to us bought dinner and drinks for their undulating women, we were left alone and spoke with concern and sadness about the demise of Gourmet magazine, and shared stories of our own publications’ adjustments in these difficult times.

Here at Nation’s Restaurant News, those adjustments are big. Next year the print magazine will be bi-weekly instead of weekly, and the content will be less news and more awesome analytical stuff — not too long, but smart — as well as an easy-to-use news synopsis in the front of the book (that’s what we in the magazine business call a magazine — a book).

For breaking news, of course, you can turn to our fact-packed web site, but you might as well go ahead and subscribe to the print version. Come on, all the cool people are doing it.

H1N1

2009-10-29T11:06:00.001-07:00

October 29

I'm working on some new blog entries that I hope you’ll find fascinating, but in the meantime, I’d like to pass on to you, dear reader, a question from one of my colleagues: Has H1N1 affected the shared-plates fad (or trend, if you prefer) in restaurants?
Click on the poll to the right, and if you feel like being more detailed, please feel free to comment below.
Thank you.

On rugby, service, and Bloomberg at Bill's Bar & Burger

2009-10-20T13:48:00.000-07:00

October 20

Blain Howard played rugby in college.

That explains a lot about Blain, because Americans who play rugby are a little bit weird.

Normal people, mainstream people, play football or baseball or basketball. If they just want some exercise they play soccer or tennis, or they might swim. Hockey's fine in the northern states, Lacrosse is cool if you're a particular breed of white, upper-middle-class future doctor, lawyer or investment banker, or the future spouse of one.

But rugby?

Rugby players have chosen a sport that no one (in the United States) cares about but them, but it requires serious physical conditioning and is an intense, full-contact sport played without the sissy padding of football. Rugby games, I’m told, are played with brutal aggression, followed by pretty much mandatory consumption of alcohol with the other team.

In American Rugby, from what I gather, it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how much you can drink.

But unlike other niche tribes — the computer geeks, the science fiction nerds, the comic book dorks, Red Sox Nation — rugby players are diverse and have many interests. Sure, they use their bodies as weapons and shields and then drink until they fall down, but then they’re in punk rock bands or lock themselves in their rooms to play with their new computers, or go out and socialize like mainstream people might. I met a rugby player in culinary school, I knew a few in college.

My parents were friends with one who was a special ops military guy in Cambodia in the early 1970s. His wife introduced me to the Maryland crab boil, which is still probably my favorite way to eat anything, ever.

I’ve never met one who was boring or predictable.

Which explains Blain, who used to do mixed martial arts — he's 6'4", slim but solid — and now is a publicist for video games. He thinks he's a nerd because he likes comic books (excuse me, graphic novels) and science fiction and video games. His boss told him he wasn't smart enough to be a geek.

Or maybe he thinks he’s a dork because he’s not smart enough to be a nerd. I forget.

But he’s also friends with the Los Angeles reality TV star set and socializes and dates women and knows how to carry on a conversation at a dinner table.

He’s also smart as a whip, by the way.

And he’s a willing dinner companion, and someone with whom I can have serious discussions about zombie literature (he mentioned Socrates in there at some point — something about mankind's most raw desires and how zombies exemplify them).

Blain and I have broken bread twice in the past week-and-a-half, once at 48 and, last night, at Steve Hanson’s newest restaurant, Bill’s Bar & Burger.

Forty-Eight’s a new lounge on the ground floor of the McGraw Hill Building. That’s 6th Avenue and 48th Street, which is sort of no man's land for nightlife. West of Rockefeller Center, East of Times Square, where tourists fear to tread and locals wouldn’t bother. But many New Yorkers work there, and they could use a place to drink, and 48’s open until 2 a.m. during the week and 4 a.m. on weekends — something to remember if you ever need a nightcap after partying with a bunch of Midtown investment bankers.

Its owners had invited me in to check it out.

We had a terrific waitress — professionally chatty and alert, but she didn’t hover — and then we had all of the owners and management.

Individually, they were lovely, nice people who wanted to make sure we enjoyed ourselves, but as a group it seemed like one of them came by every 45 seconds to ask us something.

“Would you like a drink?”
“I just ordered one."

"Something to eat?”
“Yes, let me take a look at the menu.”

“How’s your drink?”
“I just got it, but it looks great.”

“How's the pizza?”
“I'm in the middle of my first bite right now, but I’ll keep you posted.”

Really, that’s the main theme of this entire blog — isn’t it? — where I eat and how I’m treated differently from the average diner. But it’s usually not quite as intense as that. Usually Blain and I have time to finish our reminiscences about Firefly or to assess the development of the Starbuck character in the last episodes of Battlestar Galactica without being interrupted with questions about how our bourbon is.

So I thought it was just an unusual fluke from overenthusiastic management on a relatively quiet Wednesday night in a lounge in a paradoxically remote part of central Midtown Manhattan.

And then we went to Bill’s Bar & Burger.
Bill's is in a very accessible part of the Meatpacking District and, although it just officially opened last Thursday, has already been the subject of much adulation.

A word about Steve Hanson and the restaurants in his BR Guest group: These are places like Blue Fin and Dos Caminos and Ruby Foo's — places that are good, but you don’t go there for the food (Fiamma, now closed, was an exception). You go because of the service and the drinks and the general vibe of the place. I think it was in one of Steve Hanson’s places that I realized what’s important to most guests in a restaurant. The most important part of a meal is who you eat with, next most important is the Steve Hanson stuff — service, ambience, vibe. Then, as long as the food is good enough, as long as it meets expectations, the customers will have a good time.

That’s not to say that BR Guest food isn’t good — and some of it’s terrific — it’s just not the point of those restaurants. Service and vibe are paramount.

So Blain and I were at a crowded but not packed BR Guest restaurant at 8 p.m. I was there a few minutes earlier and had already decided what I wanted, but the minute Blain sat down we were beset with questions about our drink order, which is, you know, reasonable and even desirable in a restaurant, and Blain, being a grown man and rugby player and thus capable of quickly scanning a beer menu, settled on the Ommegang, and I ordered an IPA.

“Are you ready to order your food?” our server asked.

I suggested that we might take a couple of minutes to do that.

Our server was great, and just like at 48, everyone else was gracious, but we had at least two managers covering for our server, who seemed perfectly capable of doing it himself.

I started to think maybe they just wanted to hang out with Blain, too, or perhaps they wanted to have an intellectual conversation about zombies as well. I mean, who doesn’t?

Or maybe they were particularly attentive because the man, Steve Hanson, was in the restaurant.
I didn’t notice him at first, or maybe he arrived later. But he was pretty low-key. I think I'd only seen him in a sharp business suit before. But he was casual last night, wandering around, fiddling with thermostats and such.

And then Michael Bloomberg walked in.

I’m usually not taken aback when celebrities walk into a restaurant. Well, okay, I’m a little taken aback, but there’s something thrilling and odd about having the mayor of New York come into the burger bar where you’re eating. He and Steve Hanson hugged and sat down to talk, and everyone else, being New Yorkers, went on enjoying their meal.
Although I couldn't help but tweet about it. Nor could this kid.

Blain, being a rugby player, had the good sense to take a picture

The mayor is the gray-haired guy in the window. Steve Hanson's to the left. The people in the foreground are probably perfectly nice people, but not germane to this blog entry.

What we ate and drank:

at 48,
meatballs with honey and pineapple glaze
seared skirt steak skewers with roasted red onion, grilled portobello, romaine lettuce and goat cheese vinaigrette
mini Cuban sandwiches (roasted pork, fontina, cotto ham, pickles, mustard and mayonnaise)
mini grilled cheese sandwiches (fontina and manchego with tomato and roasted tomato mayonnaise on challah)
mini pesto pizza with fresh mozzarella and Roma tomato
Bread pudding with almonds and cranberries
French Forty Eight (Hendrick's Gin, Canton ginger liqueur, lemon juice, sparkling wine, rosewater and strawberries)
St. Zipang (St. Germain elderflower liqueur, sparkling sake and yuzu)
Steve Collins (a sugar-free Tom Collins made with Bombay Sapphire, stevia, lemon juice, lime juice and ginger)
assorted whiskys

At Bill's,
French fries
Disco fries (smothered with gravy and melted cheese)
beer battered onion rings
The Bobcat (Bill's classic burger topped with New Mexico green chile and jack cheese)
The Fat Cat (a hamburger with caramelized onion and American cheese on an English muffin with lettuce, tomato and pickles on the side)
Key Lime Pie
assorted beers
Oreo (a milkshake of vanilla ice cream with Oreos chocolate syrup and a shot of Amaretto)
Peanut Butter Fluff (a milkshake of vanilla ice cream, peanut butter and banana with a shot of Frangelico)

Lying low, in public

2009-10-16T12:34:00.000-07:00

October 16

Sometimes it’s simply more work than I want it to be to find someone to join me for dinner. Maybe I’ve been invited to something at the last minute, maybe I can’t figure out which of my friends would be most suitable to join me at a particular restaurant, maybe I don’t feel like strong-arming someone into joining me in Queens. But twice this week I’ve dined solo.

I have no qualms about eating alone. I enjoy my own company, and it let’s me focus on the food or my surroundings, or to stare out the window and watch the people go by.

Actually, yesterday I didn’t watch people go by, I tried to piece together the drama that seemed to be unfolding across the street from ’wichcraft on 20th St.

That unit of Tom Colicchio’s fast-casual sandwich chain has been serving dinner, full-on dinner with servers and beer and wine and cloth napkins, since April — quietly, for regular customers, to see if it would work.

It seems to have worked, because they’ve decided to go public with it and will likely be offering dinner at some other ’wichcraft units soon.

They got a good turnout for their press dinner. I arrived early, at 6, because I was tardy in RSVPing to the invitation to dine there and was told that all the prime time tables were booked.

Dinner is being served upstairs at that ’wichcraft, and I was seated at the window. I had a micro-brew pale ale from Maine and sampled an avocado-and-radish salad as the sun set. It was getting pretty dark by the time I was having my anchovies and gruyère on grilled bread, and by the time my pork and pickle had arrived (pulled pork with slightly sweet dill pickles and brown grainy mustard on thick bread), I had become fascinated by the activity in the building across the street, where everyone apparently belongs to a religion whose practitioners don’t believe in curtains or window shades of any kind.

One window was the locker room for the Equinox gym, so that was fun, and the other seemed to be some sort of office, but with bookcases and a couch. Not only was it lighted as though it were a stage, but everyone in there gesticulated like they were on stage. One woman walked in and dramatically plopped herself in a chair that looked like it was at a desk with a computer, although I couldn't be sure. A guy walked in and spoke using grand gestures, and laughed big laughs, leaning back for dramatic effect. Another guy walked in and got the first guy briefly in a playful fake headlock in the way that they do in TV and movies but not very often at all in real life.

I was fascinated, and continued to watch as eye ate my walnut-apple crumble with vanilla ice cream and drank my espresso.

I was sorry to leave, but I imagined my table was reserved for someone else soon, so I got up and chatted briefly with Matt Lee, who was two tables away with his wife and five-week-old son, Arthur, who was resting peacefully in his stroller in the way that babies usually don’t.

My colleagues Elissa Elan and Ellen Koteff had RSVPed earlier, and so they had just recently sat down and were snacking on shishito peppers as I was leaving. I joined them briefly to give them ordering advice and to discuss Balloon Boy Falcon Heene (or I guess, really, Non-Balloon Boy, since the kid was never in the runaway balloon to begin with).

Two nights before that I went to Cávo, a 10-year-old restaurant in Queens (Astoria, to be more precise) that had recently hired a pretty big gun to be its chef, Richard Farnabe.

Farnabe was the chef of a restaurant that Drew Nieporent opened in Midtown about 10 years ago called Berkeley — serving California cuisine and playing music from the 1960s. It only lasted for about 10 minutes. But Farnabe landed on his feet as chef of Lotus, which was one of the hottest tickets in town in the pre-9/11 era. He then worked at Bruno Jamais, and was also corporate chef for Milos.

I hadn’t heard about him in awhile when I was told he was at Cávo, and it seemed reasonable to check him out on a quiet Tuesday night.

Cávo’s big and beautiful, with a lounge that’s like a glamorous cavern and a spacious, dark-colored, big-shouldered dining room in the back. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when I find grand and beautiful places in Queens, and it just shows that I am a parochial boob of a Brooklynite, because I was surprised.

Manager Jesse Normand entertained me between courses of fried stuffed zuchinni blossoms, a chicken-and-leek pie that was Farnabe's take on Spanakopita, and a grilled, pepper-crusted tuna loin that tasted just like steak au poivre.

Dessert was cheesecake with sour cherries.

I noticed sour cherries were served with the chocolate dessert on ’wichcraft's dinner menu, too. I think that just might be the fruit of this autumn.

Organika, and the fact that I look like Jason Alexander

2009-10-06T12:45:00.000-07:00

October 6

My friend Kenyon Phillips is many things — actor, copy writer, singer, musician. He's also a historian of music, film, pop culture and anything related to sex.
I have, for example, learned from him that Mussolini liked strong-smelling women, and that while it was considered normal in ancient Greece for men to take boys aged 12 and up as, um, companions, if the men were seen at schools where children under the age of 12 were present, they could be beheaded.
Kenyon’s also a vegetarian, so I must choose carefully when dining with him. He’s an easygoing guy, so he’d find something to eat anywhere we went, but I want him to truly enjoy his food, and I want the restaurant to be one that embraces vegetarians and can show their talent without using animal protein.
So we went to Organika, a new little Italian restaurant that opened in July in the West Village, right next door to SushiSamba 7.
We spoke of many things, as friends do, including the fact that I am frequently told that I look like actors who are popular, but not for their looks. Wallace Shawn is one example, and when The Princess Bride was a popular movie I was frequently asked to say “inconceivable.”
I am glad that I lived in Thailand during much of the run of Seinfeld, because when I was in the United States I couldn’t be outside for 20 minutes without somebody shouting “George!” or at the very least pointing out that I look like Jason Alexander.
Observations that I resembled these actors were not, I would insist, with all due respect to Wallace Shawn and Jason Alexander, compliments.
I would be told that Wallace Shawn was in fact a great actor and that Jason Alexander was not only popular, but he could sing and dance, too. All true, but no one said I acted like Wallace Shawn or danced like Jason Alexander, they said I looked like them. And while they might be cute in a cuddly sort of way, like a teddy bear or a duck, they were not sex symbols, and that’s something that I think we all would like to be on some level. I certainly would.
Au contraire, Kenyon told me — not about people wanting to be sex symbols, but about Jason Alexander not being one (Kenyon looks like a rugged Jared Leto, by the way, and is possibly the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen in real life).
Jason Alexander was, in fact, the romantic lead in a McDonald’s ad in the mid-1980s, Kenyon said.
And he was good enough to forward the link to me.
You must click on it. Oh, you must.

What we ate:
Sfornato di Melanzane (baked eggplant, Parmesan, basil, tomato purée)
Torre Caprese (stacked mozzarella, tomato, basil sprouts, roasted peppers and basil oil)
A pizza with mushrooms, arugula and truffle oil
Tagliatelle Bosco (ribbon pasta with garlic, zucchini, wild mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, basil and cream)

Sad that Gourmet’s closing

2009-10-05T13:34:00.000-07:00

October 5

“I can’t believe it!” everyone keeps saying when hearing the news that Condé Nast has decided to cease publication of Gourmet magazine.
But then they admit that they can, in fact, believe it, because these are awful times in the world of publishing. Gourmet is not the first big title to say good-bye, and I doubt that it will be the last.
But still, it’s a sad day in the food-writing world and it didn’t seem quite right to let it to go by without acknowledging it.
I had a couple of groups of visitors to the office today.
One group came from Lemaire, an old-school fine dining restaurant in Richmond, Va., that, like so many fine dining restaurants, has reconcepted itself to make it more accessible to a wider variety of guests and occasions, offering things like braised rabbit sliders on jalapeño cornbread and specialty cocktails using local herbs and such (restaurant director Ben Eubanks is trying to coin the term “farm to glass”).
They brought me a gift basket of Virginia ham and Virginia peanuts and some little chocolates and an alligator Christmas tree ornament (the alligator is an important symbol of Lemaire dating back to an earlier time, when it was fashionable for Virginia ladies to wear baby alligators on short chains, sort of as brooches — I couldn’t make this stuff up) and a trivet with a recipe for spoonbread on it.
They’d tried to drop off a similar basket to someone at Gourmet on the way to meet with someone at Bon Appétit, and were told the bad news and that they probably shouldn’t leave the basket.
I think they said they couldn’t believe it.
My other visitor was a representative from Sonic Drive-In, who came in just to touch base and talk about flavor trends. She said the mango drinks they sold as limited time offerings this summer did well — probably not well enough to be brought back full-time, but they got a lot of anecdotal feedback asking when it would come back.
She also said that cranberry Diet Dr. Pepper is delicious. So that’s good to know.
She said she was sad that Gourmet was closing, too.

Live blogging from MUFSO

2009-10-05T09:53:00.000-07:00

October 5,

I’m not attending our big annual Multi-Unit Foodservice Operators conference, because someone has to man the fort here in New York, feeding the hungry beasts that are a weekly magazine, live web site etc., so I'm doing the next best thing and reading the blog of my colleagues who are there. I think you should, too.

Hell week

2009-09-25T13:50:00.000-07:00

September 25

This week is always a difficult one at Nation’s Restaurant News, because we lay out our special MUFSO issue.
MUFSO is, of course, our annual conference for chain restaurant operators (this year it’s October 4-6 at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas), and if you’re a restaurant operator and haven’t registered yet, well, I don’t know what to say. I could ask what’s wrong with you, but that would be impolitic, so instead, I’ll just give you this link, allowing you to register for half price. Because I’m that nice.
So for the first half of the week I’m always scrambling to finish the stories that I have to write for the issue.
Our focus this year, by the way, is an examination of the likely restaurant landscape in the aftermath of the recession. It’s a good read, trust me.
This week is also when Star Chefs chooses to hold its International Chef Congress. I haven't managed to make it there in the past two years, but on Monday afternoon, with Blackberry in-hand so I’d know when I needed to go back to the office to interview people, I did manage at least to stop by the congress trade show, where I caught up with people from Pork Board and some nice folks from New Zealand. I sampled a new variety of New Zealand apple called the Envy, which, like the Jazz apple that I love, is a cross between the Braeburn and the Royal Gala. It had almost pear-like qualities because of its very floral aroma.
Then I went back to the office, finished my story on the future of fine dining (in a nutshell, recovery will be slow and fine dining restaurants have adjusted by expanding their bars and giving their customers more control over how much money they spend and also how much time they spend in the restaurant — it's now okay to have a cocktail and a snack in most fine dining establishments, not just a full-on multi-course meal).
Then I went to the James Beard House for a full-on multi-course meal sponsored by the O‘ahu Visitors Bureau, which, you may recall, brought me to that fine island earlier this year.
That was Monday night. Tuesday I mostly lay low; I just went to a little party at Bar Boulud introducing a new program called Perfect Pairings, in which liquor companies sponsor cocktails and other beverages to go with specific foods. It's a good way to encourage the upsell of a tasty beverage. My friend St. John Frizell was there, shaking a grapefruity gin cocktail. Most of the time he's at his new restaurant in Red Hook, Fort Defiance. He got after me to stop by, which of course I should do.
Wednesday found me at MAD46, the rooftop venue of the Roosevelt Hotel. I was there for the launch of Kolache Mama, a new chain that wants to popularize the East European pastry by stuffing it with all sorts of non-East European things like hot dogs and scrambled eggs and whatever else people might want inside of them.
It was a weird party. Pretty young women in pink T-shirts pointed us to the check-in table where we were handed check-in cards with our initials on them. Then a humorless bouncer showed us to an elevator where another humorless bouncer took us to the rooftop, where we handed in the check-in cards we were just given and then we were let into the party. I guess that was supposed to make the party seem exclusive, I dont know.
I tried a couple of kolaches and ran into my friend Sara Bonisteel of AOL, and we headed to the next party of the evening -- the launch of John Besh's cookbook.
Now that party really did seem exclusive. It was also on a rooftop, but it was a private penthouse residence on the corner of 93rd Street and Park Avenue, thank you very much.
A bartender handed me a Sazerac and I went outside to enjoy a buffet of shrimp & grits and rich pastas and other goodies while hanging out with John Besh and his famous chef friends like Gavin Kaysen of Cafe Boulud and Anita Lo, whos working on renovations of her restaurant Annisa while doing the food for Rickshaw Dumpling Bar.
It was at that party, with all the smart people to there, that the mystery of the previous week's Beard House dinner was explained to me.
What, I had wondered, were people from the big network morning shows doing eating the cuisine of Dante de Magistris?
Grub Street Boston was kind enough to find out that Dante's publicist wanted him to be on TV so the restaurant would get more destination dining.
But the question to me wasn't why a restaurateur might want morning show producers to eat his food, but how to get them to show up at the Beard House, and past their bedtime to boot.
Bret, silly, it was explained to me, Dante's publicist also represents celebrity chef Todd English.
Ah. Solutions to mysteries are so obvious once you know them.
I actually had Thursday night off, and on Friday went to an odd but charming event called Le Fooding, a French-organized tasting event to benefit hunger-relief organizations.
I took the subway to Long Island City and almost turned around and left once I saw the line to the event. I wondered what would be more rude, not going to an event that I said I would go to, or announcing the fact that I was a member of the press and wondering aloud if there might be a special line for powerful and influential people like me.
Instead I took option three, which was to follow Gael Greene around the corner to the VIP line and get ushered inside, past the actual proper paying guests.
I'm not sure why the line was so long -- you check off a person's name and let him or her in; it should take maybe six seconds -- but my embarrassment at my priveleged status didn't keep me from taking advantage of it, and soon I was in a pretty garden listening to jazz and eating chicken necks made by Wylie Dufresne and the spicy pork lettuce wraps of David Chang.
There was even a special VIP room for non-paying guests, where we could sip gin punch from bowls of steaming-cold punch (steaming from dry ice, you see), and more Champagne. I mostly hung out with people from d'Artagnan, whom I understand were later escorted from the party due to rowdiness. But I had already taken my leave at that point.
Also at the party were Andrew Knowlton from Bon Appetit, whom I hadn't seen in a very long time. Kate Krader of Food & Wine was coming as I was going.

Patrick Swayze, Wolfgang Puck and the mystery of the Morning-Show TV producers

2009-09-24T14:29:00.000-07:00

September 24

You’d think that this Great Recession of ours would take the wind out of the sails of party planners — and restaurant operators and others who host parties will tell you that, indeed, it has. But considering the events I’ve been invited to lately, you’d have no idea that we were struggling through an economic crisis. I’m sorry that the general autumnal mishigas of my job, exacerbated by more staff cutbacks, has kept me from keeping you as abreast of my activities as I’d like, because it’s all been pretty intense.

Last Wednesday found me at lunch at Gramercy Tavern with a couple of people from Pali Wine Co., a new operation based near Santa Barbara that focuses on buying undervalued or over-produced Pinot Noir grapes and making them into affordable but delicious wine.

So there we sat — me, the winemaker, his publicist and Time editor-at-large Justin Fox (you might have seen him promoting his book, The Myth of the Rational Market, in recent weeks), with four glasses each on our table, sampling wines from Santa Barbara, the Russian River Valley, the Sonoma Coast and Willamette Valley, while munching away on chef Michael Anthony's food (I had chilled corn soup with crispy oysters and shishito peppers, followed by halibut with romano beans, wild rice and American caviar). We spoke of many things, including the passing of Patrick Swayze and the fact that most of his obituaries failed to mention his role in the movie Red Dawn.

Patrick Swayze came up again the following night, when I had dinner at the James Beard House, where Boston chef Dante de Magistris was cooking.

It was an unusual dinner, not because of the food, which was every bit as creative and tasty as you’d expect, but because the press table was dominated by media from television — and from morning shows. Those people have to get up at, like, 4 a.m. They can’t be boozing it up at the Beard House on a work night.

But indeed, there they were — two producers from The View, one from the Today Show, I think three from Good Morning America, and a young fella from CBS Early Show.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Dante seems personable and good natured. He’s probably just fine on television, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why the entire morning television world was there to eat his food.

I was in a bit of a grumpy mood that night (“Why?” I bet you’re wondering, “because you had to buy your own lunch, you spoiled brat?”) and in general I have a fair amount of hostility toward television news, because I think it’s unbearably shallow and a detriment to the spread of knowledge or the creation of useful, interesting dialogue in this country — that indeed one reason why mainstream media is in crisis right now is because it has failed its public, which eagerly seeks other sources of information on the Internet.

So I surmised, based partly on my observations of the evening but probably mostly on my dislike for television news and no-doubt jealousy that they can actually exert broad influence on public opinion, that all of those TV people also were just what you’d expect, quick-witted and shallow. But I’m sure it’s not really true. I’ve met a number of TV people, and like in any field, their personalities and cognitive abilities come in all shapes and sizes.

But the topic of how people get their news came up, and I said that I don’t watch TV news (except for NY1 in the morning to tell me if the world ended the night before, what the weather’s like and if my train’s running), nor do I read daily newspapers, but somehow I keep abreast of what’s going on. And if I don’t know immediately about breaking news all the time, that’s fine. I’d rather read the third-day story, anyway, because by then most of the gross inaccuracies are usually weeded out.

But I did admit that I had gone two days without knowing that Patrick Swayze had died (lunch at Gramercy Tavern was the first I’d heard of it).

I’m pretty sure that Sue Solomon, hard-nosed, platinum-blonde producer of The View, at that point determined that I was a ridiculous human being and was done with me. She did say that she occasionally liked watching News Hour on PBS, because they actually take the time to explain the stories, but that as a general rule it’s too slow for her.

One of the TV producers referred to News Hour as MacNeil/Lehrer, which is funny because Robert MacNeil retired 14 years ago, in 1995. You’d think news hounds would know that.

That lunch at Gramercy Tavern the day before actually had just been the beginning of my eating and drinking for the day. Late in the afternoon I stopped by the Calvisius Caviar shop at The Four Seasons hotel, which was having an open house for the media, and had a couple blinis with caviar (one osetra, one white sturgeon) and a glass of Champagne, before finishing up at work and going to the 50th anniversary party of Brasserie.

Cocktails from each of the five decades were being served. I narrowed in on the Kir Royale of the 1970s and caught up with the entire food-writing world (I can say that, because Regina Schrambling was there; she gets cross when I say that everyone was there when she wasn’t). At one point I was actually in a circle with Bob Lape, Gael Greene, Glenn Colins (from the Times) and Sara Moulton. I felt like I was standing in the shadows of giants.

And from there I went to a multicourse meal at Beppe, promoting chef Marc Taxiera’s new fall menu.
So that takes care of Wednesday and Thursday.

On Friday I had lunch at Le Bernardin with Judy Shertzer, who sells spices and flavorings to restaurants and other people. That meant I was overdressed for the Mets game that I went to, organized by my friend Ray Garcia, the coolest computer geek in the world.

The Mets, as you may know, are completely, 100 percent out of the running for the playoffs this year, and that really took the pressure off. It was a really mellow evening, and I ate a sausage-and-pepper hero (the bread was a little dry) and drank several Brooklyn lagers while watching the Mets lose.

Then on Saturday it was off to Atlantic City, where I had dinner at the new Wolfgang Puck American Grille at the Borgata (I call it "the Borgata," its official name is just "Borgata," but that sounds awkward to me; sometimes you need a definite article).
A number of interesting people were there, including good old (well, young, actually) Joshua David Stein and his wife Anna.
Josh's shaggy beard is long-gone and now he’s working on growing a moustache. He also had his hair relaxed, giving him a look from another era. If it weren’t for the tattoos, I think he would have fit in well in the 1920s. I think it’s a good look for him.

Wolfgang Puck was there, and Josh spoke to him of boxing and I scheduled a more in-depth interview with him later on.

Also at the table were Jill and Andy Freedman, the nice lawyer couple who do the blog Wined & Dined.
The following day, as we rode the ACES train back to New York, Andy asked me if, given my job, I could go out to food events as often as two nights a week.

Oh, if he only knew.

But why, perhaps you’re wondering, were all those TV people at Dante de Magistris’ Beard House dinner?
I had to wait until this week to learn the answer, so stay tuned, and once I get to recounting this weeks’ adventures, you’ll learn the answer to the mystery of the Night of the Morning-Show TV producers.

What I ate at The Beard House:

Stuzzichini:
Oxtail raviolini with ovoli mushrooms
chicken liver bruschetta
pomodorini, burrata, Sicilian oregonal and pistachios
baccala polpettine
NV Prosecco di conegliano, Tofoli, Veneto

Mocardini:
baby octopus affogato, potato gnocchi, guanciale, garlic chives
2007 Vermentino ‘Solosole’ Poggio al Tesoro, Tuscany

Minestra:
“pizza” gialla, braised greens, pig's feet and tail
2008 Lacrimosa rosé, Masterberardino, Campania

Faraona:
Guinea hen “spezzatino,” potatoes and kale
Slow-roasted Guinea hen, porcini crema, buckwheat orzo and grapes
2006 Grilli di Testamatta, Bibi Graetz, Tuscany

Vitello:
veal braciolettine, tomato, pine nuts, raisins and escarole
Veal loin tonnato, giardiniera, rughetta
2003 Negroamaro ‘notarpanaro”, Taurino, Puglia

Dolci:
Chocolate hazelnut torta della nonna
Poached peach, panna cotta, almond and moscto broth
2006 Brachetto d’acqui ‘passione,’ Coppa, Piedmont

Katz's v Schwartz's

2009-09-16T07:57:00.000-07:00

September 16

I spent early Monday evening with a nice Quebecoise woman named Katerine Rollet, who does a food blog for Montréal’s tourism board. She, or her bosses, or a combination thereof, wanted to find food connections between New York and Montréal.

You’d think that would be fairly easy. Montréal's just an hour flight or an easy six-hour drive away (go up the thruway, turn left at Montréal), but apart from Milos, which also has a restaurant, older than the one in New York, in Montréal, and Riad Nasr of Minetta Tavern, who is from Montréal, the only other connection we could find was T Poutine, a restaurant on the Lower East Side that specializes in the Québecois dish poutine, which is French fries covered with cheese curds and gravy (think nachos, only with French fries, cheese curds and gravy instead of chips, melted cheese and salsa), there's not much cultural culinary dialogue between what are arguably the two best food cities in the Northeast. Top Chef alumnus Spike Mendelsohn would have been good, as he’s from Montréal, but he’s not in New York anymore.

As far as Tourisme Montréal was concerned, Milos was too high-end for Katerine’s audience, and as far as I was concerned Kieth McNally’s restaurant empire, which includes Minetta Tavern, were too difficult to work with.

So I made reservations at T Poutine and the authorities in Montréal decided that it would be a good idea to compare New York and Montréal bagels.

New York is more famous for its bagels than Montréal, but the Montréalais are adamant about their product's superiority.
So we met at the original H&H Bagels in the remote, industrial reaches of 46th St. and 12th Ave.

Katerine was not impressed. But from what I understand a Montréal bagel is a different animal from a New York one — crustier and more pretzel-like.

She was nice about it, though, and expressed enthusiasm for the everything bagel, which does not exist in her hometown.

From there we were supposed to eat at T Poutine, but despite my having made a reservation there, it turns out that the restaurant is closed on Monday. This could have been a disaster, but Katz's Deli is just down the street from T Poutine, and is a worthy comparison to Schwartz's, a Montréal restaurant known fro its smoked meat, which is similar to corned beef.

Technically, that means Carnegie Deli would have been a better comparison, as Katz's is better known for its pastrami, but it was nearby, and a deli institution of similar gravitas, so we went there.

Not surprisingly, Katerine preferred Schwartz's smoked meat to Katz's corned beef, but, quite apart from the fact that she works for Tourisme Montréal, because I wouldn’t accuse her of being biased because that would be rude, she was raised on Schwartz's.

Also, this was her first time having pastrami, and she didn't take to it readily. To her, the taste seemed artificial.
What can I say? New York is a big, grown-up city. It can take a lump or two from time to time.

Katerine’s colleague, who has the great name of Tanya Churchmuch, recorded our experience at Schwartz's on video, which you can enjoy by clicking here.

Tribes

2009-09-10T15:03:00.001-07:00

September 10

“That’s Duff Goldman,” said Metromix’s Matt Rodbard.

“I don’t know who that is,” I said.

“You know, from Ace of Cakes.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“You know, it’s, like, the Food Network’s biggest show.”

“I don’t watch it.”

“Ace of Cakes!”

“Don’t know it. I don’t watch food TV.”

“It’s, like, a huge show.”

I don’t think Matt was being obtuse, he was just having fun. And I was being a curmudgeon who doesn’t watch food TV — like lawyers don’t watch law shows and doctors don’t watch medical dramas — because there’s already enough food and food-related things in my work life. I don’t want to sit in front of the TV at home and watch more of it.

Being in the presence of a celebrity you don’t care about can be awkward, because the fawning fans look so pathetic and I feel embarrassed for them.

We were at the James Beard House, at a Greens event. That’s what the Beard Foundation calls events targeting people younger than 40. I think it’s an attempt to create a tribe of young food enthusiasts who are loyal to the Beard Foundation, and I’m not sure how well it’s working. Greens have been around for as long as I’ve been in New York, but I don’t hear about them much.

This particular party was in celebration of Jack Daniels’ birthday, which is celebrated for the entire month of September as no one knows the exact day on which the whiskey’s namesake was born. I don’t expect that anyone has tried too hard to find out, either, as not knowing gives Jack Daniels, the company, an excuse to celebrate and promote the brand for an entire month.

Duff Goldman had made a 150-pound human-shaped cake that looked like Jack Daniels. It was pretty cool. My friend Andy Battaglia of The Onion was appropriately impressed.

I was more interested in checking in with Dave Wondrich, the cocktail historian, drink maven and delightful person who had developed the cocktails for the evening — the Monkey Nut and the Little Ricky.

The monkey nut was a type of Manhattan with orange bitters. I asked if he was using Regan’s orange bitters. Their creator, Gary Regan, was Nation’s Restaurant News’ beverage columnist, and thus we are forever inextricably bound.

In fact, Dave said, he was using a blend of Regan’s bitters and another company’s orange bitters. He said the New York tribe of cocktail makers had all decided pretty much simultaneously that one of those bitters was too orangey and the other was too bitter, so now it’s common practice here to combine the two.

Tribe’s my word, not Dave’s, because tribes are the theme of this blog entry. But Gotham’s mixologist community really is a tribe. It is.

Anyway, the Little Rickey was exactly that.

Not to say it was Desi Arnaz Jr.

Dave explains: Jo Rickey, of Fulton County, Mo., was a prominent Democratic lobbyist at the end of the 19th century. His signature drink was bourbon with soda water and lime juice; later, people made it with gin.

So a Rickey can be any cocktail of booze, citrus and soda water. This one was made with a fancy small-batch bottle of Jack Daniels, a little honey syrup — an addition of which Jo Rickey would not have approved, as he believed sugar heated the blood, Dave said — and lemon juice, shaken, poured into cylindrical shot glasses and topped with sparkling water. Little Rickeys.

I didn’t meet Duff Goldman, and during all the speeches in honor of Jack Daniels I hung back and let the gawkers gawk, but he sounded like a smart, good-natured guy.

“Let them eat cake!” declared Beard Foundation president Susan Ungaro, which was silly of her, because, as Duff pointed out, the person who originally said that was beheaded.

As you may know, that sentence was supposedly uttered by Marie Antoinette, Queen of France and wife of King Louis XVI, when she heard that the peasants had no bread to eat.

In fact, I believe what she was supposed to have said was “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,” or, “they should eat brioche.” It displayed her failure to comprehend the fact that her peasantry was so poor that it had nothing to eat — that their caloric shortfall caused by the lack of ordinary bread could not be alleviated by switching to richer, egg-enriched bread, because they didn’t have that either. Ignorance is not a crime, but it’s no excuse, either, and perhaps her executioners decided that it should, in fact, be a crime.

Anyway, they killed her, and uttering her infamous declaration at an event of well-heeled young New Yorkers who have been spending the evening gorging themselves on ribs and little mac & cheese tartlets is weird at best. It was nice that Duff knew that.

Also, incidentally, his cake was delicious.

Anyway, tribes. Legitimate tribes of cocktail makers, an attempt to invent a tribe of young Beard Foundation devotees.

In recent weeks over at the listserv of the Association for the Study of Food and Society , in which I participate, there was quite a kerfuffle that started with a discussion of the meaning and sociological implications of the word “gastronomy,” and that ended with the departure from the list of a person who felt completely justified to hurl ignorant, baseless and personal insults at the gastronomy program of Boston University simply because she felt like doing so.

Other members of the listserv disagreed. She left in a somewhat self-righteous huff, and some of those who remained began a navel-gazing exercise into what the ASFS was. It is, Ken Albala suggested, a tribe.

“ Our interactions work nothing like a business or even a department within a college, because we're not in competition. We all work in different places, and if one of us benefits, the whole group and discipline benefits. And it's why we rose to the defense of our members, and it's why everyone here is so generous with time and ideas — a common enterprise and common goals.”

A tribe. Why not?

I had been at another tribal event the night before. It was the second anniversary party of Bobo, Carlos Suarez’s plaything of a restaurant in the West Village.

I don’t mean “plaything” in a bad way. I mean that it has very personal touches appropriate for his intention, which was to make his restaurant like a private home where he was throwing a dinner party, only you had to pay to eat there. Only recently did he relent and put a sign bearing the restaurant’s name outside the house, on 7th Avenue South and West 10th Street, where the restaurant’s located.

He has a top-shelf cocktail developer in Naren Young and a well pedigreed chef in Patrick Connolly, and a dining room that I find enchanting.

And he has style. He has a turntable and a collection of vinyl. At the party he served Champagne in classic tulips rather than modern flutes.

Tulips do cause a drink to slosh, but there is something extra-celebratory in being drenched in Champagne, even if inadvertently.

Usually parties like that are inhabited by fellow members of my own food-writing tribe, but I was an alien at this gathering which seemed otherwise to be populated by Carlos’s well-groomed, not-quite-lock-jawed Upper East Side friends whom I suspect might otherwise been eating at the Waverly Inn.

At least that’s what I surmised. I don’t know, as I don’t read the society pages. It seemed like some of the people there would have been mentioned in them, though.

They all seemed to know each other from the monosyllabic prep schools they had attended together.

I ended up chatting with young Diana Foote, of the Memphis Footes. I don’t know if there really are Memphis Footes, but Diana was from Memphis, and she vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard (“not Nantuckett?” I thought), although her current visit to New York was making her consider visiting the city more often.

They were gracious and lovely people. Many of them actually brought birthday gifts for the restaurant.

There was an unusually large percentage of very tall blond women there.

There was also an unusually large percentage of very tall blond women at my next party of the evening, the opening of Le Souk Harem.

We all know what a harem is. Souk is Arabic for “market.” So I can think of no other way to translate the name other than “whore house.”

I was invited by the Hall Company, who were doing PR for the restaurant’s food (the chef consultant is Doug Psaltis), but the party was really by Lizzie Grubman, whom you might remember as the society publicist who faced criminal prosecution some years ago when, in a fit of pique, she ploughed her SUV into a bunch pedestrians who were in her way when she was leaving a party.

This scenester tribe also has a bunch of tall blonde women, but rather than being gracious and elegant they’re tacky and boorish. One physically moved me out of her way so she could walk down the stairs.

The restaurant itself had hookahs and belly dancers (dancing to, among other things, Rockin’ the Casbah by The Clash — oh yes, they went there). It all seemed oddly out of place in these dour times.

Anyway, it wasn’t my scene, but I did have a tasty Caipirinha there.

So I was at Bobo and Le Souk Harem on Tuesday, and then took Andy to the Beard House on Wednesday. And then Andy took me to Le Poisson Rouge, a music venue on Bleecker Street that I remembered as Life, a loud nightclub catering to the same tribe as Le Souk Harem.

But Poisson Rouge is a dark and arty spot, and performing there was Circulatory System, and they are members of Andy’s tribe.

Andy is a music writer who went to the University of Georgia, and Circulatory System is a group of psychedelic musicians based in Athens, Ga. When Andy was in college they were Olivia Tremor Control, and he said they had tremendous influence on him.

I don’t think I knew what psychedelic music was, really, but I have an idea, now, and I think it has given me insight into electronica that might help me appreciate it more the next time Andy takes me to one of those shows.

I tend to focus on lyrics and melody and harmony when I listen to music, but Circulatory System was really creating an entire atmosphere of sound that had nothing to do with those things. They just kind of created a music bubble that filled the room, so I just let it wash over me and it was a lot of fun. Sounded pretty, too.

We went back stage after the show, and Andy was greeted with hugs and happy noises of greeting that pleased him. He was clearly glad to reconnect.

“Capturing a moment in time”

2009-08-31T10:57:00.000-07:00

August 31

About a month ago, Ben Leventhal was tasked by Grub Street with polling what he called the “most important and aware food writers in the country" with the goal of “capturing a moment in time in the restaurant business.” They might do it annually, he told me.
Since I am easily flattered, I readily answered his questions. These are the results.

Cornish pasties, coming to a bakery near you?

2009-08-28T13:35:00.000-07:00

August 28

Last year I wrote a kind of disjointed article about hand-held food in different cultures. One item I mentioned was the Cornish pasty, an English meat pie that has long been popular in Minnesota and on Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

You’d think you could find them in Wisconsin, too, but I can't say for sure.

Well, I got an e-mail the other day from The Pasty Oven, a manufacturer in the town of Quinnesec, Mich., an Upper Peninsula town on the Wisconsin border, and one of my sources for the story.

To wit: “Dear Bret, This interesting thing is happening, we are getting 2-3 messages a week from small shops, bakerys & restaurants a week asking if they can sell our pastys. Is this news worthy? Shops in TN,WA, FL, AL, NC, AZ, OH, PA”

I think it is kind of newsworthy, or noteworthy at the very least.

Read on for more information about pasties. Below is excerpted, with my permission, from the May 19, 2008, issue of Nation’s Restaurant News.

By the way, the people at the Pasty Oven make pasties for a living, so spelling doesn't need to be a priority for them. Get off their backs.

A regional delicacy that flourishes in northern Minnesota and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the Cornish pasty.

Pronounced pass-tee, the item originated in the British county of Cornwall.

Tim Tikkanen, executive director of Main Street Calumet, which promotes events in that Upper Peninsula town, including the annual PastyFest, says the hand-held pastries were brought to the area in the 1840s, following the discovery of copper in the area. Skilled miners from Cornwall arrived to ply their craft.

“Every ethnic group brought their foods with them,” says Tikkanen. “Over the generations, with the intermingling of the ethnic groups and cultures, they adopted each other’s foods and said, ‘Hey, that’s pretty good stuff.’”

Upper Peninsula native Patty Tyler makes the pasties at Cherokee, a restaurant owned by her son and daughter-in-law Aaron and Lisa Tyler in Muskegon, Mich., which is not in the Upper Peninsula.

She mixes ground beef with potato, onion and rutabaga.

“You definitely have to have some rutabagas in there,” she insists. “If you don’t have a rutabaga, then it’s not a real original pasty.” The uncooked items are wrapped in a dough that’s somewhat more substantial than a piecrust, and then baked. They’re eaten with brown gravy or ketchup, or occasionally mayonnaise. “But they’re fine all by themselves,” she says.

“There’s different ways to make them,” she says. “Some people use cut up chuck meat, but I like the meat to be evenly distributed with the potatoes. It makes a nice, solid meat pie,” she says.

Tyler also makes what she calls a Celtic or Scottish pie, which is made with sausage instead of beef—although she says some sausage can be added to a Cornish pasty—and cabbage instead of rutabaga.

Tikkanen says that turnips are a common addition to the local pasties.

“Some people have stronger sentiments than others,” he says, “but the Cornish people will kind of bristle if you add carrots to them.… Some of them will say that’s a Scandinavian additive.”

The fifth PastyFest, which started in 2004, will be held June 27-28. It includes a pasty bake-off in three categories—individual, commercial and nontraditional. In that last category, contestants have made breakfast pasties, Mexican pasties and others.

One year a turkey dinner pasty won, Tikkanen says.

Hawaii epilogue: My airplane neighbors

2009-08-25T10:59:00.000-07:00

August 25

I had a smooth flight back to New York from Denver yesterday. A window seat, just a slight delay in our departure, and a polite, tiny young woman in the middle seat who curled up and went to sleep right after takeoff and pretty much stayed that way.
It reminded me that I had one blog entry left to do about my recent trip to Hawaii.
My journey started in Newark, where rain storms delayed the flight enough to put the possibility of my connection in Phoenix very much in doubt. Worse, it gave my neighbor a chance to strike up a conversation with me.
Because people rarely start talking to each other in the air. It's on the ground, during a delay in takeoff, that the camaraderie of perceived mutual misfortune helps people to form a bond that risks keeping them inextricably linked for many hours.
Also, I had a middle seat.
In the window seat was a nurse from California in late middle age who had lived on the East Coast for many years but still thought that California was better in every way. Why she thought she should share that with me, a willing immigrant to New York from the mountain states, I don't know. Why anyone thinks that it's friendly conversation to say that where they're from — geographically, culturally, psychologically — is better than where the person they're talking to is from, or lives, or likes to be, is beyond me.
But she came from the Bay Area in the 1960s and was under the misapprehension that California is a relaxed, mellow, laissez-faire kind of place where people can do whatever they like without judgment from others. I pointed out that her native land currently has a very arch, politically correct culture that does not, in fact, encourage people to do whatever they like, whether it's drink bottled water, eat eggs that don't come from free range chickens or smoke tobacco cigarettes in public.
She had lived in Hawaii, though, and gave me the same advice that many people gave me when I told them I was going to O‘ahu.
“You should go to the Big Island!”
Well, okay, but I was only going to be in Hawaii for a few days and was, in fact, a guest of the island of O‘ahu. And, in fact, since I am a city person who enjoys exploring the cultural culinary diversity that is bred in urban cultures, Honolulu was the place for me.
Still, I thought her advice might be sound until she told me about the kukui nut lei that she bought from a merchant. It was so special to her, she said, because the merchant blessed it. Well, why wouldn’t she bless it? I’d bless it, too, if it meant you’d buy it from me, and I’d send a whole lot of aloha to go with it.
But I didn’t tell her that. Let her enjoy her kukui nut lei. I enjoy mine (not the faux one mentioned earlier, which didn't make it back to the mainland with me, but the hefty one I'd gotten some years before and lurks somewhere in my apartment).
I made my flight from Phoenix to Honolulu with minutes to spare and found myself in a middle seat, which I shared with a tremendously fat woman who had the aisle seat.
In the window was a young man who wore those little ear buds to listen to music. I didn't know they could be turned up so loud that the people around you can hear your music, but, indeed, they can be.
So that was a long flight.
The first half of the return leg was a snap, really, I had a window seat, and in the middle was an extremely limber woman from a German-speaking country. I assume that from her English-German dictionary; we didn't speak.
How did I know she was limber, then? To try to sleep better she simply folded herself in half, at the waist. This seemed to alarm the woman in the aisle seat, who would periodically interrupt her attempted repose whenever a flight attendant came by to see if she wanted anything to drink. But if she did want anything, she would merely unfold herself and ask for it.
We were delayed in Phoenix again, giving entrée for my neighbor in the middle seat (I had the window) to befriend me, which he would have done anyway as he was a very jocular conspiracy theorist of a Jehovah's Witness.
And I have to say, living as I do in a world of food writers, it was actually kind of refreshing to have someone tell me that the devil was the devil instead of high fructose corn syrup.

Emeril to jump on the burger bandwagon

2009-08-19T14:04:00.000-07:00

My colleague Elissa Elan reports in Nation’s Restaurant News that Emeril Lagasse plans to open a burger joint at the Sands Casino Resort in Bethlehem, Pa., where he also has a steakhouse, called Emeril’s Chophouse.
For more details, you should obviously click on the link.

What’s the (Aaron) Deal?

2009-08-14T09:23:00.000-07:00

August 14

A couple of points of clarification about my my recent blog entry about Aaron Deal, who is quitting his job as executive chef at Tristan, in Charleston, S.C., at the end of the month and moving to Chicago.
First, at some point between the 2nd and 13th of September, he’ll be doing a stage at Gramercy Tavern. A stage is basically an internship, so it won’t likely have much of an effect on the overall operations at Gramercy Tavern, but New York diners do like to be in the know, so there you have it, New York diners.
Chicagoans, Aaron says his job at Custom House will be executive chef, but I’m still not sure whether that means Shawn McClain’s leaving or if he’s just going to take the title of chef-owner or some such thing. I'm sure the good people at Grub Street are on the case..
Update: I just learned that Aaron will be replacing Richard Camarota.

MorouWatch

2009-08-11T13:23:00.000-07:00

August 11

Last time we heard from my friend Morou Ouattara, he was working on opening an Italian restaurant in Crystal City, Va., in July. Well, that didn’t quite happen, but a restaurant not opening on time is hardly a shock.
But today he tweets: we have all our required licenses. we will do a very slow opening tomorrow night."

Chicago, say hello to Aaron Deal

2009-08-11T08:55:00.000-07:00

August 11

I think you’ll like Aaron. He's a nice guy who has established a good name for himself as executive chef of Tristan, in Charleston, S.C., where he has worked for the past four years.
But he's leaving that job at the end of the month and, after a stage at Gramercy Tavern (New Yorkers, I hope to have the details about that shortly), he’ll be moving to Chicago to work on the relaunching of Custom House.
This is great news for everyone except Charlestonians, and they’re tough (the Lee brothers and Stephen Colbert are Charlestonians, after all). I’m sure they’ll manage.

Where I am

2009-08-09T13:31:00.000-07:00

August 9

My father is dying.

I was going to start this blog entry with some witty quips about why I wouldn’t be seen at the New York food world’s parties this month, but it’s better to cut to the chase with these things.

He has pancreatic cancer, and that kills you.

So I’m with him in Denver, helping my mother look after him, changing his chux — sort of a bed diaper, a plastic sheet covered with an absorbent, cotton-like material — moving him to try to alleviate bed sores, giving him what love and support I can to help ease him to rest.

It’s not satisfying or fulfilling, but I’m glad that I’m here. Well, maybe not glad, but I think I’m doing what’s right, or as right as possible. He’s spent the past 42 years looking after me, so this is the least I can do.
And in this digital age I can work from here, too, so I’ve been interviewing people about food-safety regulations and interesting potato dishes and White Castle’s new charity award program, pausing periodically to give my dad his pain medication.

If you like my sweet, good-natured friendliness, I got that from my dad. And my work ethic, and my sense of loyalty. You should have seen him flirting with the health-care workers back when he could do that – not in a gross old man way, but in the sort of nice, non-threatening manner that makes people feel appreciated. He wanted to be so accommodating that when they asked him if he was in pain, he’d say that he wasn’t, I think instinctively, because he didn’t want to trouble them. We had to remind him that, in fact, he’d told us that the blood clots in his legs hurt quite a bit.

He stopped swallowing today, so we’re swabbing his mouth with a moist lemony cloth made just for that purpose.

We’ve been playing videos and music we think he’d like. He’s a big Bill Cosby fan, and so I was raised listening to the comedian on a four-hour-long reel-to-reel tape that Dad has of him. Watching “Bill Cosby: 49,” the other day, I realized how much my sense of humor had been influenced by his.

And we watched Fantasia, a favorite movie of his, and movies with music from the Big Band era. Dad, who played the drums, had a big band when he was a teenager in Baltimore, called Bill Thorn and The Socialaires. They even had a television show that was eventually beaten in a ratings battle with American Bandstand, so I’m told.

He lived in New York for a couple of years in the 1950s, after ending his tour of duty in the Navy and getting a degree in communications. He worked as an editor for NBC, among other things, but eventually he moved to Denver to find a wife, get married and start a family, and his family has been his only priority ever since.

He retired 14 years ago as the head of public information at KRMA-TV, Denver’s first public television station (Channel 6), so when I complain about idiotic publicists, it’s not the profession I dislike, it’s the idiocy.

I got my fascination with food from my dad, too, and one of my earliest memories is watching him fry bacon.

He’d done all of the cooking for himself and my mom since he retired, so I’ve taken over those duties. Mom’s an easy diner, and would likely be content with nothing but turkey sandwiches, but I like cooking.

Lately I’ve done mostly simple stuff involving dressing up leftovers and using up things that had overstayed their welcome in the fridge. I did my own interpretation of Cubano sandwiches from some pork tenderloin and French bread that my brother dropped off, and pickles and cheese from the fridge. I did buy a whole chicken, which I cut up, made stock and a garlic-and-pepper-chicken stir-fry. I saved the wings, though, which I also marinated in garlic and pepper, dusted in flour and deep-fried, because Mom and I like wings.

I rendered the chicken fat and used it to make bread.

I bake like a cook, not a baker, without precise measurements, and so my bread is different every time, but it’s always good, because unless you burn it, homemade bread is good. Even if you kill the yeast, you can still make some tasty crackers.

Many people are intimidated by bread, but honestly, it’s a snap if you don’t take it too seriously (don’t tell Rose Levy-Beranbaum I said that).

Take a tablespoon or so of dry yeast (that’s one packet), toss in about the same amount of sugar (maybe a little more, depending on your mood), a little less salt than that, a quarter cup or so of whatever fat you like (melted if it’s butter or shortening or lard) and about half a cup of water that’s hot enough to activate the yeast. Add flour, any flour, whatever flour you like, although a fair amount of it should be wheat flour because you need wheat’s elasticky gluten if you want the bread to rise. Whisk in the flour until it becomes too thick to do that easily. Then switch to a wooden spoon or other mixing implement of your choice. Work in the flour as you kneed the dough (you can even do it in the bowl you mixed it in if you don’t want to get flour all over a work surface), until the dough is springy and smooth. I don’t know how much flour to add. It depends. Aim for around three cups.

Find a bowl that can contain about twice the volume of your dough. Coat it in oil — any edible oil. Drop the ball of dough in it, flip it over to coat it in oil, cover it with plastic wrap or a moist cloth and leave it in a warm place until the dough doubles in volume, which will take an hour or two or six depending on the flour you used and the quality of your yeast. Punch it down and let it rise again if you want. If you don’t, skip that step.

Shape your dough into whatever size loaf you want. If you want to put it in a greased loaf pan, do that. Yesterday I rolled the dough into little balls to make them into rolls and put them on a baking sheet that I’d sprinkled with cornmeal to keep the dough from sticking to it (although I could have greased it).

I let the rolls double in volume, more or less, brushed them with an egg mixed with a splash of milk, and baked them at 425° until they were brown (to see if bread is done, tap it on the bottom; it should sound hollow).

I’ve learned a lot going through all of this — ranging from how grief works to techniques for moving people who can’t move themselves to the amazing efficacy of a beer or two at Wyman’s, the sports bar a block away, to help me decompress — and I’m still processing much of it.

Stay tuned.

August 11 update:

Thank you for your kind comments, and your e-mail messages and Facebook notes and tweets. I appreciate it all very much.

My dad died yesterday.

I had made breakfast for my mom and me (egg sandwiches on homemade rolls with cheddar cheese) and was heating water in the kitchen for another bread venture.

My parents were in the dining room, next to the kitchen, where Dad’s hospital bed had been set up. Mom called me and asked if I thought maybe Dad was dead.

His breathing had become shallow and raspy the night before, so we did what Polly, the hospice nurse, had told us to do to help make him comfortable. We gave him a bit more of the synthetic morphine he was being treated with and turned up his oxygen. Morphine expands blood vessels, you see, and more oxygen might make it easier for him to breathe, and it wouldn’t hurt.

We turned on Fantasia.

He slept through the night and was sleeping in the morning, too, and then Mom noticed his breathing seemed to have stopped. I felt his neck for a pulse, but since I don’t know how to feel for a pulse I didn’t know whether my inability to feel it was my own fault or not. I shrugged my shoulders.

His jaw was slack, and when Mom closed it it just dropped open again. She decided to wait ten minutes and then call the hospice, and I went back to making bread. The last rolls were kind of tough, but fresh out of the oven they still made good sandwiches. Perhaps, I thought, I should use more of the user-friendly all-purpose flour, and maybe make looser dough, with a higher water-to-flour ratio.

Polly came over and confirmed Dad’s death and we started making phone calls. Mom handed me a pretty flowerpot adorned with dragons and asked me to wash it out. She’d called the crematorium that morning and found out that the urn she’d chosen for Dad had too narrow an opening. It needed to have a mouth at least four inches wide.

My immediate family and some cousins and family friends came over, and I realized that I, and I think Mom, weren’t on the same part of the grief continuum that they’d expected us to be on.

I had done the initial freaking out a couple of weeks before, when Dad was diagnosed. At that time I wondered how anyone coped with such grief. I took the day off and went to the Five Guys in my neighborhood in Brooklyn and ate a hamburger and too many French fries. The next day I woke up and realized how people cope with such grief — they just do, one day at a time.

By the time Dad died I’d already processed the new reality. I’m sure I’ll have other waves of grief washing over me soon, but the first wave had passed before I arrived in Denver. Mom was over it, too.

So we took care of the business that it was necessary to take care of, hosted the family and friends who stopped by, and opened a bottle of wine.

I finished making the bread dough, but had to fudge it as I realized I’d forgotten to add the fat.

Still, I thought I was perfectly fine, so it’s a good thing that I did some work that evening, because I realized that I wasn’t perfectly fine. My e-reactions to publicists were unnecessarily testy, because their e-mails seemed unnecessarily frivolous. I did have the good sense not to respond to the ridiculous and pointless comment that accompanied every pitch: “Hope all’s well.”

What a silly, silly thing to put in an e-mail. What if all was not well? Should I tell you so? What would be the point of that?
A telemarketer called Mom and asked for Dad. She told him he’d just died that morning and we had a good laugh when the telemarketer hung up, wondering how long we should work that angle.

After Mom went to sleep and I’d cleaned out my e-mail box and written up Steak n Shake’s third quarter earnings (you’ll be glad to know that they’re up, and so is restaurant traffic, although check averages are down) I went to Wyman’s for a quiet beer.

“How was your weekend?” The bartender asked.

I didn’t know how to answer that.

Maloney & Porcelli

2009-08-09T10:43:00.001-07:00

August 9

I hadn’t been to Maloney & Porcelli in years and years, since we had a going-away party for Bill Carlino when he abandoned Nation’s Restaurant News to become editor-in-chief of Accounting Today. That was a long time ago, before 9/11, back when the economy was good and managing editors got hired away by other magazines to be their editors-in-chief and the whole editorial staff went out to fancy dinners to give them a royal send-off. Can you imagine?

If I remember correctly, I had the restaurant’s signature crispy pork shank. I also had a version of that dish at Hawaiian Tropic Zone when it opened.

What does an old-school steakhouse and a sun-tan-lotion themed restaurant with scantily clad waitresses that wear numbers so you can vote for them during the floor show have in common? The menus were both developed by David Burke. Back when Bill Carlino quit, David was corporate chef of the Smith & Wollensky group, which included Maloney & Porcelli and assorted other steakhouses, and the Manhattan Ocean Club.

Smith & Wollensky founder Alan Stillman (who also founded TGI Friday's, by the way) spun off the single-unit restaurants from the steakhouse chain a few years back, but he’s still the boss of all of them.

And of course just because I hadn’t been to Maloney & Porcelli since King Arthur ruled in Camelot and it didn’t rain during the day, that didn’t mean the restaurant had been stuck in time, so when my friend Steve Remming suggested we have dinner there, I thought it was a good idea.

Steve’s a manager and sommelier at Maloney & Porcelli, and he sort of continued to manage and be sommelier during dinner. Waiters came by to consult with him about wines, and of course he kept surveying the place during the course of the meal, because you can’t turn that kind of thing off.

And business was good. The restaurant was mostly full and people looked like they were having a good time. And it was a Wednesday.

Had it been a weekend we could have taken advantage of the $75 three-course weekend wine dinner that the restaurant offers. That's three-courses of your choice from the regular menu, plus all-you-can-drink wine — not any wine, of course, but good stuff, nonetheless. Alan Stillman knows a lot about wine; he even had a vineyard on Long Island for awhile. And of course Steve’s no slouch either.

Since I was eating with Steve, we didn’t have to take advantage of any deal, because employees at Stillman’s restaurants get good benefits, including nice meal privileges.

Chef James Jermyn did a tasting menu for us, and this is what we ate:

Buffalo mozzarella wrapped in Lucky tomatoes with aged balsamic and micro cilantro
Maine Lobster ravioli with barbecue pan sauce and jícama
Caramelized sea scallop with sunchoke purée and summer-vegetable brunoise
Sauteed branzino with roasted tomatoes
Lamb chops with crispy figs
32-ounce Prime bone-in ribeye
Local corn cooked al dente and served in a sauce of cream and "corn milk."
And we drank half-bottles of Pouilly Fuissé and Crozes Hermitage.

And of course James also sent out a bunch of dessert:
Strawberry shortcake
Green apple sorbet
A Guinness Float (like a root beer float, but with Guinness)
Summer berry crumble
Jalapeño-Ice cream

Wanted: Chicago bartenders

2009-08-09T10:42:00.000-07:00

August 9

I got this e-mail from The Tippling Bros., the beverage consulting firm of Tad Carducci and Paul Tanguay. Nice chaps, and creative drink makers:
“The time has come. Mercadito Chicago is mere weeks away from opening its doors, with Double A soon to follow. We are in need of a handful of Chicago's brightest and most talented drinkslingers to join our team. Interested parties can contact Tad Carducci at tad@tipplingbros.com for more information or submit a resume online at www.mercaditorestaurants.com.”

Cheers!

Cornelius Gallagher, working in Long Island

2009-07-31T08:34:00.000-07:00

July 31

Remember Cornelius Gallagher, the former chef of Oceana and a Food & Wine Best New Chef (class of 2003)? He left Oceana in 2006 and took a good job at a catering company to start raising funds for his own restaurant.
Well, I ran into him recently at an Australian beef luncheon, and he now is corporate chef for a Long Island company called the Bohlsen Restaurant Group, which owns Prime in Huntington, H₂O in Smithtown, Tellers in Islip and Beachtree in East Islip.
He says they’re now working on opening an Italian place called Verace, in East Islip, slated to open this November or December, and one of those big-box Asian restaurants (you know, like Buddakan, Tao, Buddha Bar etc.) in Babylon, which they hope to open by the end of next year. They haven't picked a name for it yet.
He looked well.
The picture in this blog entry is a screen capture from an article I wrote about Neal in 2006. This link ought to work if you’d like to read it. If it doesn’t, let me know.