Food Writer’s Diary

I knew I'd come across Dr. Romera before...

2012-01-18T08:48:00.000-08:00

The New York Times’ new restaurant critic, Pete Wells, tears Romera New York a new one in his review of the restaurant that, by most accounts that I’ve read, is way to pretentious and self-important for its own good

I don’t usually like to read the take-down of a restaurant, because restaurateurs really put their hearts into them. But Wells did have some great lines. I wanted to tweet them, but they were more than 140 characters.

Then I remembered that I have a blog.

And so, please let me share two sentences that I really enjoyed:

“Yet as much as you might admire Dr. Romera, you can’t help feeling that you will never be able to admire him quite as much as you’re supposed to.”

And:

“But to eat at Romera New York is to be told repeatedly that you are in the presence of greatness, while the evidence of your senses tells you that you are in the presence of, at best, okayness.”

Wells also did me the service of reminding me that I had met the chef, Dr. Miguel Sanchez Romera, before, in a surreal experience that itself reminded me that, when it comes to self-importance, Americans, even American artists, are wannabes compared to Europeans.

The Times critic mentioned that Romera eschewed “chemicals” used by such culinary artists as Ferran Adrià (and by now many fine dining chefs in the United States) and instead used a cassava derivative called Micri.

Micri! I remembered Micri.

I was introduced to it years ago, near the turn of the century, at an event in New York hosted by the French Culinary Institute.

It was very well attended by many of New York City's coolest chefs. I'm pretty sure Wylie Dufresne was there. I know David Burke was there because he sat next to me and began thinking about what to do with Micri — instant shake-it-up-yourself milkshakes was one idea, but I'm pretty sure nothing came of it.

On stage, David Bouley made fascinating dishes displaying Micri's seemingly endless capacity for soaking up liquids, and Dr. Romera gave a lecture that seemed to last for at least three hours, but that was probably about 35 mintues, about his gastronomical philosophy, his own epistemological notions of how we perceive taste, I think from some sort of gastro-historical perspective, but I don’t really remember and couldn't possibly find my notes on the subject.

It was all in Spanish and I don’t know whether it was translated badly or if it simply didn’t make sense, but the charts describing Dr. Romera’s thought process were equally obtuse and absurd. And it was without a doubt a display of the sort of colossal self-importance that Wells indicated was on display at Romera, and I don't doubt it.

At the time of the demonstration, I was not only awestruck by the ridiculous way that Micri was presented, but also by its seemingly magical properties. But I was young.

Since then I've seen lots of those ingredients and was more intrigued by the scallop quenelles Josh DeChellis made with a slimy Japanese tuber called nagaimo than anything I saw the Micri do, and I didn't have to endure a lecture.

Why they served French wine at an Italian luncheon

2011-11-15T14:05:00.001-08:00

November 15,

I had a fun lunch today at the David Bouley TestKitchen, which is a place that Bouley set up in Tribeca as a sort of food labfor visiting chefs to play in, but it also has become an event space.

The lunch was thrown by Legends From Europe, athree-year marketing campaign by the Italian consortia representing threeItalian cheeses — Parmigiano Reggiano, Grana Padano, and Montasio — andProsciutto di Parma and Prosciutto di San Daniele. Since those consorzi aretraditionally enemies, it’s something of a political breakthrough that they’reall working together.

The Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano peopleannounced their partnership a couple of years ago with press conferences and abig party at Madison Square Garden (Magic Johnson inexplicably walked throughthe party, causing macho Italian-American men to become giddy) followed by aVIP viewing of a basketball game in the fancy boxes at the top of the Garden(Knicks vs. Nuggets, which the Knicks inexplicably won).

Here’s what nobody ever says about those twocheeses, which come from similar parts of Italy and are part of the same familyof cheeses known as grana (hard, aged cheeses that cleave in a particular way):Parmigiano Reggiano is more expensive than Grana Padano, it’s generally agedlonger and is widely regarded as being more complex in flavor and, well,better.

That’s not bad for Grana Padano, which is suitablefor cooking or grating and serving over pasta. Parmigiano-Reggiano would bewasted if used in that way, and it’s too expensive for non-rich people to useas anything other than a special-occasion cheese.

I understand why saying that is politicallysensitive, but they really need to get over that. Parmigiano Reggiano and GranaPadano are not natural competitors. They are different products at differentprice points to be used differently and eaten on different occasions. I think they’vedecided to work together to stress that they are different from genericParmesan cheese, and consumers should know the difference.

Bringing two kinds of prosciutto into the mix justmakes it better all around. And Montasio, well, why not? It's delicious andmelts good.

So, we had five food products, all fromNortheastern Italy. So what wines did they serve during the pre-lunchreception? Two sparkling German wines. At lunch, the wine was French — a whiteBordeaux and a red Burgundy.

We asked the Test Kitchen's manager why he didthat, and he said he was instructed that he should by no means not use anyItalian wine, because members of the different consorzi would neveragree on which wines were suitable to be drunk with all of their products. TheMontasio and Prosciutto di San Daniele people would likely have been happy witha Tokai Friuliano, but the other three groups might have been irked by such achoice. And I can't imagine the Friulians do anything but smirk if they wereserved a Lambrusco from Emilia Romagna.

What I ate:

Slow-poached Connecticut farm egg with Prosciuttodi Parma and a Parmigiano Reggiano cloud

Fresh sardine with tomato-saffron broth, fingerlingpotatoes, Prosciutto di San Daniele, Grana Padano crisp

Melon soup with ricotta ice cream

Hot caramelized Anjou pear with chocolate, biscuit Breton, hot trufflesauce, lemon verbena and Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream.

On pizza, authenticity and fire

2011-10-28T14:45:00.000-07:00

“Oh, uh, hey, you're on fire there,” I said.

Nonchalance probably isn’t the best approach to take when you see flames start to spread behind a person, but the guy standing next to the woman whose coat and bag had drifted too close to a candle was on top of it. He let out a sort of masculine scream, grabbed the bag and coat, threw them to the floor and beat out the flames.

“Sorry,” he said.

People say New Yorkers are rude and uncaring, but we’ll totally let you know if you catch fire, help you to extinguish yourself and apologize for making a commotion. What more do you want?

I was at the opening of Forcella, one of a growing number of Neapolitan-style pizzerias popping up in New York City.

Really, there are a lot of them: Chipp in Sheapshead Bay, Capizzi in Hell's Kitchen, Donatella in Chelsea, Keste in the Village. I could go on and on. That’s kind of strange considering New York has a delicious type of pizza that the locals love and that has little in common with its Neapolitan cousins. I wonder why we’re seeking out some sort of authenticity from Naples when we have our own kind of authenticity right here.

It's not like people in Georgia are clamoring for St. Louis barbecue.

Then again, authenticity is a weird and slippery notion. Last night I had dinner at the James Beard House, because Frank McClelland from L'Espalier in Boston was cooking, and I was sitting next to journalist Charles Passy, a New York native who recently returned home after a prolonged sojourn in West Palm Beach, Fla.

He said he had encountered a visitor to New York who had heard that the Big Apple was a great bagel city, and so she was disappointed and outraged that you can't find asiago cheese bagels here.

Which of course you can’t because we have real bagels here.

Anyway, the Forcella opening was a good party. Kind of weird — one of the owners decided an opening party also would be a good occasion for Open Keyboard Night — but good.

Margherita pizza and pizza with arugula and truffle oil were passed around, along with the restaurant’s signature deep-fried pizza and little arancini. I also had a slice of a dessert pizza stuffed with a chocolate-hazelnut spread that shall remain nameless and whose charms elude me.

It went well with the Lambrusco I was drinking, though.

The crowd was good, too: Many well-dressed Italians with great bone structure who seemed to be talking about important things and didn’t seem to know that, at crowded restaurant openings, you’re supposed to get your drink at the bar and then move away so other people can get to it.

Still, good bone structure. And editors from Travel + Leisure, Food + Wine, Every Day with Rachael Ray and so on were there, too.

As I was heading out, actress Stephanie March arrived with her husband Bobby Flay in tow. And as far as I know nobody else caught fire.

Chain restaurant workers really can cook

2011-09-30T08:48:00.001-07:00

I’ve spent the past four days or so at two conferences thrown by Nation’s Restaurant News. The first was the Multi-Unit Foodservice Operators conference, better known as MUFSO (rhymes with STUFF-so, not GOOF-so).

The second was Menu Trends & Directions, which I don’t think is better known as anything — possibly as “the one where Nancy Kruse drops a bunch of knowledge about food trends on your head.”

They’re terrific conferences where people who know a lot about what they’re talking about enlighten the audience with ways to run their businesses better.

The conferences have to be great to get people to show up, but, like pretty much any convention, people really go to them to network.

Where else can the owner of a fledgling grilled cheese sandwich chain pick the brains of the CEOs of Domino’s and Panera Bread? Where else can marketers responsible for naming new ice cream treats share ides with the head of culinary development for Baskin-Robbins?

And where else can I hang out with the country’s corporate chefs and figure out the next thing that’s going to transform eating in America?

Of course we had extended panel discussions on that topic for all to see, but one interesting fact emerged as I talked to these chefs between sessions: You know those kitchen workers at chain restaurant that no one thinks about? The ones who are occasionally mentioned as data points when calculating turnover, or the nameless mass for which restaurants must decide how much medical insurance they can afford?

It turns out that many of them are really good cooks.

Some of the corporate chefs charged with developing menu items at their chains’ headquarters told me that the cooks who have to actually prepare those items are being underutilized. Many of them cook at casual-dining chains for one shift and fine-dining restaurants for the next — and they say if you can successfully work the line during a lunch rush at Chili’s, you can jam during dinner at a white tablecloth establishment.

One corporate chef at a big casual-dining chain said he thought the next frontier for his segment was unleashing the skills of their cooks. Not only would they make better food, but by handing more responsibility to their cooks they would improve morale in the kitchen and possibly clean up the foodservice industry’s reputation as a place loaded with dead-end jobs.

Food for thought (sorry, but it is).

Times Square kiosk awardees come forward

2011-08-25T12:55:00.000-07:00

August 25

I just got off the phone with my friends at Rickshaw Dumpling Bar, who I think were bursting with desire to share the news that they’re one of four restaurants that have been granted the right to set up a kiosk in the unbelievably high-traffic area of Times Square.

The other three are international empanada stand Nuchas; Snack Box, a creation of Jonathan Morr of Republic and Bond St., which will be serving espresso, milk shakes and gourmet hot dogs; and panini stand Salumè.

They told me Salumè would open this week, and the rest will open in the coming weeks. Rickshaw's targeted opening date is late September or early October.

All of the kiosks will be opening on Broadway Plaza, the pedestrian zone that Broadway has become.

A press release the Rickshaw folks forwarded to me from the Times Square Alliance said construction of the Salumè stand would start tomorrow, between 46th and 47th streets, and that it would open by mid-September.

But of course a restaurant’s not open until it’s open.

And once these particular spots are open, I suspect they’ll be mobbed.

So, congratulations all around.

Family & Friends night at Frankies 570 Spuntino

2011-08-19T09:09:00.000-07:00

August 19

That picture on the left is what the outside of Frankies 570 Spuntino looked like last night. You really need to be confident that you’re in the right place to open that door.

It struck me as being very much in the style of Franks Castronovo and Falcinelli, who own and run the restaurant and who, if they didn’t invent the current fashion of Brooklyn grunge chic that dominates large chunks of that borough (and maybe they did), they’re certainly the poster boys for it in the food world.

They have that we’re-so-cool-we-don't-need-to-shave-or-even-trim-our-beards-and-we’re-certainly-not-going-to-try-to-impress-you-because-we-don’t-care-what-you-think vibe that, damn it, is quite alluring.

I was invited to family-and-friends night at their new West Village restaurant, which isn’t even slated to open for another month, hence all the construction materials and building permits and hidden entrance. Eventually it will have a perfectly nice and conventional entrance with big windows letting natural light into the restaurant.

But last night, with the walls boarded up, it was dark, and I could barely see the food at my candle-lit table.

But the cool insider people were there. Life and Style reporter Juliet Izon swung by my table to say hello (we periodically eat together on expeditions organized by New York Post reporter Max Gross to iconic or merely awesome restaurants in the outer boroughs, such as Pirosmani in Brookly and Hunan Kitchen of Grand Sichuan in Queens).

I ran into Food & Wine editor in chief Dana Cowin on my way to the bathroom. Andrew Knowlton of Bon Appétit, who I never see anymore, sat down at my table and snacked on the cheese from my antipasti plate while we mused about changes in the food scene. His two-year-old daughter Julep snacked on my salumi, which is fine. There was plenty to eat.

What I ate:

three crostini: sungold tomato and basil; white anchovy, avocado and setti anni peppers; and rocotta with speck and honey

saffron arancini stuffed with bolognese sauce

vegetable antipasti including broccoli raab and a variety of olives

farmhouse cheeses

cured meats including capicola and two types of sopressata.

baked clams

heirloom tomatoes and pickled market beans

fennel, celery root and parsley salad

grilled squid with pickled peppers

cavatelli with hot sausage

meatballs with pine nuts and raisins

egg yolk & cauliflower ravioli with brown butter, almonds and anchovy

Mast Brothers chocolate ganache tart

red wine prunes and mascarpone

What to do with an oversized zucchini

2011-08-12T16:01:00.000-07:00

August 12

I've spent the week visiting family in Denver, which is always fun. I've played Guitar Hero and run around at Chuck E. Cheese's, had my breakfast burrito at Pete's Kitchen and calmed my stomach with a Colorado Smashburger after indulging in the rides at Elitch's. I've examined the local beer just to make sure it's still awesome. I'm somewhat despondent that the peaches are not yet in their prime, but I'm working through that heartache.

I've even done some cooking.

We had some family over for dinner and mostly had it catered: We drove to Tacos y Salsas and bought 30 assorted tacos. But I thought some sort of vegetable was in order. So I looked in my mother's refrigerator and was confronted with a giant zucchini from the garden.

My eyes narrowed. When I was growing up, the family custom was to slice zucchini into rounds and saute them with onions, peppers and tomatoes. The mushy centers of those rounds still haunt me.

So I started by peeling the thing, slicing it into quarters and scraping out that damn mushy middle. Looking at the seeds that came out with the gunk I was instantly reminded of making Jack o'Lanterns, and the side activity of toasting pumpkin seeds.

I'd never heard of toasting a zucchini seed. But I separated them out and set them on a cookie sheet to dry.

I decided to dice the zucchini flesh and blanch it in salted water, mostly as a delaying tactic while I thought of what else to do. But actually it blached beautifully. I dropped it into salted boiling water and then drained it and rinsed it in cold water as soon as the water started boiling again.

The zucchini was tender, but still had body. And it tasted fresh and green, like an August evening.

I had thought of making a salad out of it, but I didn't think it needed to be buried in vinegar and olive oil, so instead I just picked some basil from the garden, tore it and added it to the zucchini, along with black pepper and some salt. Then I stuck it in the fridge because it seemed like something that should be served ice cold.

I had dried the seeds in a 200 degree (Fahrenheit) oven, and they already started to get crunchy and nutty. I heated the oven to 400 and promptly burned most of them. But the ones that survived were very much like smaller versions of the pumpkin seeds of my childhood and would have been a great addition to my zucchini dish, but we ate them beforehand.

Anyway, the zucchini was a hit. Next time I'll add some blanched, diced garlic, as well as toasted seeds, which I'll toss in a dry wok instead of trying to toast them in an oven. They cook really fast.

Bluefin jerky

2011-08-08T17:41:00.000-07:00

August 8

Not everything I learned about bluefin tuna could fit into the feature aboout that fish that appear's in this week's issue of Nation's Restaurant News. Feel free to e-mail me if you'd like to talk more about the different bluefin fisheries or the different farms and ranches that are raising the fish.

One thing I wanted to share was what Troy Guard, chef-owner of TAG in Denver, learned to do in Hawaii, where he trained under chef and restaurateur Roy Yamaguchi.

There the chefs would save the blood line of the tuna that runs along the fish's spine.

They'd sprinke it with local salt and dry it in the sun. They's serve it as a type of jerky.

"We called it something coo and crazy, like 'sun-dried tuna blood,'" Guard told me.

Guard orders a ranched bluefin tuna to cook at TAG most weeks, but he hasn't tried serving the bloodline there yet.

Cheesecake war

2011-07-30T08:30:00.000-07:00

July 30

Davio’s, a northern Italian steakhouse in Philadelphia, wanted to prove to the world that the City of Brotherly Love had better cheesecake than New York City.

So its owners threw down the gauntlet in front of ’Cesca, an Italian restaurant on New York’s Upper West Side. ’Cesca picked up that gauntlet, and a cheesecake war was declared.

It was a reasonably friendly war. Both restaurants exchanged recipes and worked with each other to replicate the desserts in each other’s restaurants, with the crew at ’Cesca learning to make Davio’s vanilla bean cheesecake with blueberry compote, and Davio’s staff whipping up ’Cesca’s mascarpone cheesecake with orange cream and orange brittle.

The two restaurants served half portions of both cheesecake’s side by side from Tuesday, July 26, through Thursday, July 28. The Cheesecake War Dessert special was offered at both restaurants for $10, and customers were asked to pick their favorite.

The loser of the war will have to post a photo of themselves eating the winner’s cheesecake in the the winning city's baseball jersey.

Above is a picture of the two desserts as they were plated at Davio’s.

I was asked as a neutral party to post the results today, which I'm told is National Cheesecake Day.

They are, well, actually they're mixed:

Votes from Davio’s customers

196- Davio's
42- Cesca

Votes from 'Cesca customers
65- ’Cesca
11- Davio's

Total:
Davios: 207
’Cesca: 107

That’s to say that customers in both cities preferred the hometown cheesecake by a wide margin. Although Davio’s sold more cheesecake overall and got more votes, a larger percentage of ’Cesca’s customers preferred that restaurant’s cheesecake, voting 6 to 1 in favor of the local dessert, compared to 4.7 to 1 from Davio’s customers.

Maybe Davio’s wait staff should be given an award for selling 238 orders of cheesecake in three days.

Davio’s has about 150 seats in its dining room, ’Cesca seats around 125.

In any case, it seems like it was a pretty smart promotion, and a great way to sell more dessert in the middle of the week during a slow, hot summery month.

How to get rid of invasive species: eat them!

2011-07-06T16:29:00.000-07:00

July 6

Don’t want invaders in your home Why not kill them and eat them?

That’s the approach that consumer activist group Food & Water Watch is taking with three species of fish and a crustacean that have encroached on American waters.

In the picture are, from top to bottom, Asian carp, blue tilapia and lionfish, as well as green crabs.

Lionfish actually look much more sexy before their exotic and poisonous spines have been removed, but Kerry Heffernan, the executive chef of Southgate in New York, had already removed them by the time I got to the James Beard House, where Food & Water Watch was doing a presentation on ”exotic invasive species” and how to eat them.

I don't think their point was actually to eradicate the invaders. Indeed local sport fishermen in the Northeast like green crab, because it's good bait for blackfish.

I think what they really wanted to point out was that there’s lots of tasty seafood in our waters, and it would make sense if we stopped overfishing the popular ones and to rely less on imports — which Food & Water Watch said accounted form more than 80 percent of the seafood we eat — and instead chow down on the stuff we have in surplus.

Ironically, the fish wasn't easy to procure and Heffernan had roughly 27 hours to figure out what to do with what they gave him.

They had to charter a boat in North Carolina to catch the lionfish. A seafood supplier actually told them that wild, or blue, tilapia wasn't available in the U.S., but they managed to find it at Fulton Fish Market for $1.75 a pound.

The green crab was provided by New England fisherman after they finished scratching their heads wondering why anyone would want them.

But the results were good. Heffernan used the carp to make a tasty escabeche, pictured here. It was a labor-intensive preparation, though, because, as Heffernan said, “It's almost like the fish was designed not to be able to get at the meat.”

Loopy bones arched out from the spine into the flesh, and then looped off in other directions, making for a labor-intensive process. I asked Heffernan if the labor in preparing the fish would make it cost-prohibitive in restaurants, and he said that if the fish itself were inexpensive enough, it might be worth it.

My favorite was the green crab, which Heffernan made into a light bisque. He was impressed with the flavor of the meat, which to him tasted crabbier than blue crab. There was a preparation challenge for that animal, too, as there’s not a lot of meat per crab, so picking out the meat is a time-consuming process.

There was no problem with the lionfish, as long as you remove the poisonous parts.

But Heffernan’s favorite was the tilapia, which was firm enough that you could slice it after cooking it, and it had great body and flavor.

Eating under-utilized fish isn’t a new concept, but it is catching on. At the International Corporate Chefs Association summit that I went to in Seattle last week, one of the speakers was John Sackton, editor and publisher of seafood.com. In the face of rising seafood prices and less-than-stable supply, he recommended to the chefs at chain restaurants and onsite operations who attended the summit that they be flexible in the choice of seafood they put on the menu, changing those choices as supply and price demanded.

He wasn’t talking about Asian carp or lionfish, but he was advocating for a flexibility to which chain restaurants are becoming increasingly accustomed.

Skeptics might want to remember that monkfish used to be considered unfit for consumption, and that, decades ago, North Atlantic fisherman threw away bluefin tuna as useless until the Japanese pointed out that they actually enjoy eating them, possibly more than anything else.

Of course, now bluefin appears to be on the verge of extinction. But that's another story.

Aspen: Day 1

2011-06-17T17:03:00.000-07:00

June 17
I’m in Aspen for the 29th annual Food & Wine magazine Classic. It used to be the classic AT Aspen, but they changed the name a few years ago to make it less pretentious.

I’m not sure it worked, but despite the need to periodically run the gauntlet of celebrity chef groupies to do the networking I’m here to do, it’s a fun event — basically a three-day party, sponsored by many beer, wine and spirits companies, interspersed with cooking demonstrations and panel discussions.

During the kickoff reception on Friday night I ran into Belinda Chang, whom I’d just met during the James Beard Foundation Awards last month. She won the award for best wine service as sommelier of The Modern in New York, and then, her mission accomplished, she quit.

“I’m a sprinter, not a marathon runner,” she told me last night.

I ended up hanging out with her and her friend Justin Warner, who was a captain at The Modern and left to open his own place, Do or Dine, in the decidedly ungentrified Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Justin says his new place is a dive American izakaya, which is to say a bar with great bar food (as opposed to a gastropub, which is a bar with good food that’s not necessarily intended to facilitate drinking).

Do or Dine doesn’t have a liquor license yet, so for now it’s BYO, but Justin, whose beverage people come from PDT and Pegu Club, plans to offer delicious cocktails priced at less than $10.

So that should be fun.

The big post-reception party in Aspen is a barbecue sponsored by Wines from Spain and hosted by José Andrés, but Belinda, Justin and I instead went to Isis, where there also was a barbecue but with fancy American wines and the added appeal — always desirable at Aspen — of not being where the masses were.

It’s probably obvious, but Belinda and Justin are in the picture that accompanies this blog entry.

A Matter of Taste

2011-06-13T14:45:00.000-07:00

June 13

Oh shoot! The people at HBO were nice enough to send me a copy of A Matter of Taste, a documentary on Paul Liebrandt that I wanted to watch, and I’m late.

The film airs on HBO tonight (9pm EST), and I'm on the road, visiting family in Denver, while the DVD is sitting on my desk in New York.

So, what can I say? Paul Liebrandt’s a hell of an interesting chef. I’ve always found his food simultaneously weird, delicious and incredibly well-balanced. Most striking: Each component of each dish seems to express itself with intriguing clarity and precision.

The Bouley alumnus had a brief and critically tumultuous tenure some years ago, back in 2000, at Atlas, where then-Times critic William Grimes gave him a glowing three-star review, placing him squarely on the map as one of New York’s most avant-garde chefs. Then a review in Gourmet skewered him, uncharacteristic behavior for that magazine.

At the time, some people wondered if the review had anything to do with the fact that Gourmet’s editor-in-chief, Ruth Reichl, was Grimes’s predecessor.

Liebrandt, who was something like 24 years old, left the restaurant shortly thereafter.

But that’s ancient history.

Liebrandt went on to run the kitchens at a genuine variety of New York City restaurants — Papillon, One Little West 12th (I kid you not), and Gilt — before finding a home partnering with Drew Nieporent at Corton, where he has once again received adulation from critics and customers.

And also a documentary on HBO, airing tonight.

That network was nice enough to provide me with the pictures in this blog entry, which were taken by Sally Rowe.

In the foothills with the food scholars

2011-06-10T22:50:00.000-07:00

June 11

Montanans apparently like to put letters on their mountains. That’s what I’m told. The M in the picture is in the city of Missoula, but it stands for Montana — not the state, the university, where I’m attending the joint annual meetings of the Agriculture Food and Human Values Society, the Association for the Study of Food and Society, and the Society for Anthropology of Food and Nutrition.

There’s a big concrete L on the next mountain over, which might lead you to believe that Montana has alphabetized its mountains, but a server at the reception last night told me that the L stands for Loyola Sacred Heart High School, which also is in Missoula.

There’s a concrete B on one of the Mountains near Butte, she said.

I’m at the conference because I was asked to participate on a panel about possible careers for people with graduate degrees.

I don't actually have a graduate degree, but they wanted a journalist on the panel, I guess so I can tell them how to be a journalist with their graduate degrees, which I don’t really know. But I do have some thoughts on the topic which I’ll share. It should be a good panel.

The first day of the conference was fun. I sat in on four sessions in which people presented papers or updates on their research or similar academic things.

I spent the morning mostly listening to people talk in some way or another about animal welfare, except for one presenter who talked about using sheep to clear “noxious weeds,” which, believe it or not, is a technical term for non-indigenous vegetation that’s a threat to other plants.

Sheep will eat them in some cases, to very good effect, she said.

Three vegetarians, one whose first name was actually Seven, discussed their research into the “caring-killing paradox” that they experienced and researched as student volunteers on a university’s experimental organic pig farm. It was actually a very interesting presentation.

Then some other sociologists discussed, through narrative, the notion of using a narrative approach to develop a greater understanding of the complexities of animal husbandry — in this case once again involving pigs.

A third sociologist in their group was asked if she ate the meat of the pigs once she witnessed them being slaughtered, and she said “yes, but not without gratitude.”

I don’t think anyone was accusing her of ingratitude, but maybe they were. I can’t say for sure.

In the afternoon I watched people present papers mostly on studies of obesity or eating habits, although I also attended one on how the Philippine delicacy balut — unhatched baby ducklings still in their eggs — was being co-opted by the Western media as an extreme food, simplifying it and presenting it out of context.

I asked him how it tasted, and he said it was sort of like a gristly hard-boiled egg, except the part that's liquid. You drink that first and it tastes kind of like egg drop soup, he said.

One group of researchers found indications that if you use menu-design techniques commonly used for marketing specific items — putting the items in colored boxes, or placing them at one of several key places on the menu where the eye tends to linger, or by using appealing-sounding jargon (hand-picked, chef's special, etc.) they could get senior citizens to order more healthful items.

Displaying calorie and other nutritional information had no effect, they found.

Another study indicated that chefs live unhealthy lives that lead to overeating and excessive drinking. That seems obvious, but, you know, you do need to quantify these things.

Actually, they’re still analyzing their data and it probably won’t be ready until next year.

I haven’t decided what to attend tomorrow. "Anthropology of Wine" looks promising. So does "From Food System Assessment to Food Policy: Indicators That Make a Difference.”

Ooh, and I might start a fight in this one: “Pursuing Poultry Practicalities: Adaptation and Innovation for Sustainable Eggs and Chickens.”

I think I’ll keep my options open.

Food Writer’s Diary’s returning to the mother ship

2011-05-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

May 20

Food Writer’s Diary has a new home at NRN.com. Please visit it, so that your page views can be added to those of Nation’s Restaurant News’ other readers, helping us to impress our bosses with our awesomeness.

If you like RSS feeds, you can get Food Writer’s Diary’s here.

I’ll keep cross-posting here for awhile, and of course my 18 gajillion previous blog entries will stay here. But I think you’ll like this blog’s new home. And while you’re there, you might want to click around and see what else is on offer at NRN.com. I think you’ll particularly like the Food and Beverage section, which has all sorts of information on the latest trends and a whole lot of stories written by yours truly.

While I’m doing this shameless self-promotion, I might as well also point you to our Cool Plates feature, which showcases menu items that catch my eye and that I hope will inspire chefs’ creativity.

Beard Awards: press room or audience?

2011-05-10T02:42:00.000-07:00

Well, it could be argued that I should hang up my hat as James Beard Foundation Chef and Restaurant Award predictor. Of the 19 categories that I predicted two months ago, I got four of them right: I prected that Per Se would win for outstanding service, that Eleven Madison Park would win for outstanding restaurant, that Michael Solomonov would win for best chef in the Mid-Atlantic and that Tony Maws would win for best chef in the northeast.

I got everything else wrong.

But that’s all right. The awards were interesting. Portland, Ore., picked up two awards — for Gabriel Rucker of Le Pigeon, who won Rising Star Chef of the Year, which goes to a promising chef aged 30 years or younger; and for Andy Ricker of Pok Pok, who won for best chef in the Northwest.

For best chef in New York, Gabrielle Hamilton beat out Michael Anthony, April Bloomfield, Wylie Dufresne and Michael White.

Cynics would say that she won because she wrote a book, an argument that would have added weight because the winner for best chef in the Southeast, Andrea Reusing of Lantern in Chapel Hill, N.C., also recently had a book published.

We also saw what I think was the first tie in a chef and restaurant award, between Saipin Chutima of Lotus of Siam in Las Vegas and Tyson Cole of Uchi in Austin, Texas.

I was told that Cole was less than gracious about being part of a tie, but I wouldn't know, because I decided to spend the awards in the press room.

I had a ticket to be part of the audience, and I was told I’d have to choose where to go. I could either sit in the audience for more than three hours while awards were handed out and speeches were made, or I could be in the press room, eating meatballs and cheese and drinking cocktails and Champagne and coffee and talking with my fellow food writers while the awards played on monitors in the rooms.

It didn’t used to be like that. These were my 13th Beard Awards, and I remember when you used to be able to move back and forth between theater and press room whenever you liked, watching the ceremony, running back to the press room to interview chefs, running back to the ceremony.

Ultimately I settled for watching the proceedings from the press room, but over the years that room has taken on a life of its own.

It used to be that only about a couple dozen members of the press cared about the Beard Awards — maybe fewer. The press room was a tranquil place. The video feed broke sometimes, or they'd forget to show us the videos of the humanitarian award winner or the who's who inductees, but it wasn't that big a deal.

Now the press room has maybe a hundred people at its most crowded moments, some socializing, some live-tweeting, many asking me who just won as I scampered back to the press room's entryway, where the loudspeakers were located so I could actually hear the results of the awards over the din of the crowd.

It’s a fun party, but the Beard Awards could be on another planet. And now that the Beard Foundation is live-tweeting the results, we don't really need to be there at all.

Still, should I be hanging out with the collegial group of people in the press room, ranging from reporters from Reuters and the Wall Street Journal to representatives from web sites like Eatocracy and Eater and blogs I’ve never heard of, or should I be sitting in the audience and reporting on the Zeitgeist of the ceremony, getting a grasp on what the leaders of the Fine Dining world are thinking about and understanding with my own eyes and ears how Tyson Cole behaved?

A bunch of people don't go to the awards at all, but show up at the afterparties, of which there are many.

After the awards and the reception that followed it, I started across the street from Lincoln Center, where Daniel Boulud's Bar Boulud has new neighbors, Boulud Sud and Epicerie Boulud, which hosted a raucous celebration for which Boulud opened a Balthazar — that's 12 liters — of 1998 Bordeaux.

There I ran into my friend Jennifer Watson, a devoted customer of Daniel’s, but also a devoted customer of The Modern, whose wine director Belinda Chang won the award for Outstanding Wine Service. So we went there next and drank Champagne while I spoke with the writers, chefs and publicists in town for the festivities.

We then took a quick swing by Eleven Madison Park and then on to ABC Kitchen before stopping in The Spotted Pig for a Pimm's Cup and commiserated with the family of Dahlia Narvaez, pastry chef of Osteria Mozza in Los Angeles, who didn’t win the award for best pastry chef. Instead, that award went to Angela Pinkerton of Eleven Madison Park, which also won the award for Outstanding Restaurant.

I think conversation got philosophical, and Jennifer wanted a hamburger, but The Spotted Pig's kitchen had closed, and so we ended the evening, as food-oriented evenings often end, at Blue Ribbon, where I spoke with Christopher Hastings, chef of Hot and Hot Fish Club in Birmingham, Ala., who had lost the award for best chef in the South to Stephen Stryjiewski of Cochon in New Orleans, about the merits of setting up a foundation for the Bocuse d’Or.

Chris Hastings was with Gavin Kaysen, you see, who quite apart from being chef of Cafe Boulud represented the U.S. in the Bocuse d'Or some years back.

But soon Jennifer and I got a table and so instead of continuing the conversation, we had fried chicken.

Then we shared a taxi, which dropped me off in the office before taking her home, and then I wrote this blog entry.

And now I'm going home, too.

Good night.

Chefs’ Night Out, 2011

2011-05-09T12:48:00.000-07:00

May 9

What can I say? Chefs are in town for the Beard Awards, last night many of them went to Chelsea Market, some of whose merchants handed out free food, and we ate, drank and were merry.

Well, there are a couple more things to say.

This year’s Chefs Night Out was much more of a James Beard Foundation-sponsored event than in previous years. As far as I could tell, Bon Appétit has stopped any sponsorship of it, which makes sense since they were holding an event on Saturday in Las Vegas. Instead, Gilt, the Food Network and the Cooking Channel were listed as sponsors, and Gilt threw the afterparty, which was also in Chelsea Market, but a different part.

Servers at the various food stations were wearing James Beard Foundation T-shirts with the word “Eat” printed vertically on them — clearly a move at more aggressive branding on the part of the foundation. Good for them, I say.

I took some pictures, which are available for your viewing pleasure at nrn.com.

Incident at the CIA

2011-05-06T15:27:00.000-07:00

May 6

Did you know that if you cut your finger at the CIA, it’s an incident?

I don't mean the Central Intelligence Agency. Obviously if you cut your finger there it would be an incident. I mean the Culinary Institute of America, where practically everyone is wielding knives, and a lot of them don’t have much experience doing it.

I figured I’d just grab a band-aid, apply it to my left index finger and get back to work.

But no. I had to sit there with a paper towel wrapped around my finger while a security officer named James came and applied first aid.

“Apply pressure and hold the finger over your head to control the bleeding,” an administrator told me. She seemed concerned that I would bleed out.

All I had done was bring the knife down hard enough on my left index’s fingernail to break it and draw a little blood. I hadn't severed anything. I’d cut myself worse when I was in culinary school. Since that was in France in the 1980s, my chef-instructor wondered why I had stopped chopping apples.

“Because I’m getting blood in them,” I said.

Chef Pétrof agreed that I could wash my finger and apply a bandage to it if I wanted to. Which I did and then finished chopping my apples.

I think I was making a charlotte aux pommes, but I don’t really remember. It was 1986.

Last weekend I was at the CIA's Greystone campus in St. Helena, Calif., for the inaugural Pork Summit.

That event replaces the Taste of Elegance, a the finals of a national competition among chefs to make delicious pork dishes.

In the past, winners of regional competitions would be flown to the semi-finals for a second round of competition, and then the top eight performers in that contest would have to get back into the kitchen to do it again.

Members of the trade press like me were invited to hang out, meet the chefs and learn more about pork.

I guess the National Pork Board decided that it was the hanging out, meeting and learning that was valuable, because they got rid of the national competition. Instead they flew all the regional winners to the Napa Valley for a demonstration on how to butcher half a pig, followed by cooking demonstrations by celebrity chefs.

The next day we were all split into teams to butcher and cook half a pig.

I’m not sure why they decided to have the journalists cook, too, but hey, I'm a team player. I’m no chef, but I do cook, and I'm good at fetching spices and whatnot. I was happy to be a helper.

Our team leader was Philadelphia chef and restaurateur José Garces, who, as you probably know, is also a star of Iron Chef America. He seemed like a good choice for team captain.

“Are you comfortable in a kitchen?” he asked everyone on the team, which included several chefs who won regional competitions, but also me and Plate editor Chandra Ram, both of whom had been to culinary school.

Michigan-based chef Steven Grostick, who was a butcher before he became a chef, volunteered to handle breaking down the pig half.

“I’m a food writer,” I said, and volunteered to fetch things and be a prep cook and slave as they saw fit.

So the next day, José handed me lists of spices and ingredients to fetch. He had me put eggs in the immersion circulator and track down a terrine mold for him to put his scrapple in.

Then he asked: “How are your knife skills?”

Compared to what? I thought. Because, you know, they’re better than my 11-year-old nephew’s but I would presume considerably worse than an Iron Chef’s.

I shrugged and tried to indicate as much trepidation as I could when I said they were okay.

That was good enough for him, and he had me chop mushrooms and julienne onions.

It was interesting to watch José manage everyone. He seemed aware of the need to respect the skills of the other chefs, with whom he spoke with great diplomacy but generally left alone, and he also gave me increasingly challenging tasks, as though he were automatically training me.

I mean, they didn't get too challenging, but I did graduate from chopping mushrooms and onions to finely chopping parsley and chives. I think that’s a little bit harder.

At any rate, it was while I was chopping chives that I managed to smash the fingernail on my right index finger and cause an incident.

Seriously, I thought I just needed to wrap the thing up and keep chopping, but James the security guy rubbed it with an antiseptic ointment and applied one of those fingertip band-aids to my finger — really expertly, I might add; it covered everything perfectly. Then he gave me what he called a “finger cot,” a sort of (non-lubricated) condom for my finger, to keep me from bleeding into the chives. I give him a business card so he could spell my name right in the incident report that he’d have to file.

I apologized to José for the delay in finishing my chive chopping, grabbed some parsley from the walk-in, washed it off and chopped it up.

He had no interest in the fact that I'd chopped up my finger, and I appreciated that.

It made me feel like a grown-up.

CEOs at Soul Daddy

2011-05-04T18:41:00.000-07:00

May 4

Did you know that a cabal of restaurant CEOs get together several times a year to scheme and plot?

Okay, maybe that’s not exactly true. They don’t really plot. They get together and talk about the restaurant businesses and visit restaurants in different cities.

And I guess I wouldn’t call them a cabal. “Some guys” is probably more accurate.

But I don’t really know. Which Wich chief executive Jeff Sinelli just told me about them. They’re in New York now, and Jeff asked me to join some of them at Soul Daddy, the winner of America’s Next Great Restaurant, for a quick bite.

So I went to the South Street Seaport and met Abe Ng, president, CEO and chief sushi officer (so says his business card) of Sushi Maki in Miami, and David Goronkin, who doesn’t have a business card because he’s between jobs. He used to be the boss at Bennigan’s, and on June 1 he starts as CEO of Real Mex Restaurants, which operate the Chevys, El Torito and Acapulco chains.

We picked at the food, and then Jeff asked for a manager and quizzed him about the restaurant.

I didn't have to do anything. I just sat there and sampled the wild rice salad while Jeff interviewed the guy.

It turns out that America’s Next Great Restaurant was filmed last year, and the winner, Jamawn Woods, didn’t know he won until it was announced on Sunday. But in the meantime, Steve Ells and the other investors in this next great restaurant got to work hiring staff and securing real estate and generally making the restaurant happen in three places at once — Los Angeles, New York and Minneapolis.

That they kept the restaurant’s identity under wraps all that time is amazing.

The manager confirmed that the New York restaurant was packed on its first two days of business. But it was pretty quiet when I met the CEOs there at 5:10 on its third day of business. It was a crappy, rainy day, which might have had something to do with it.

The food is supposed to be soul food that's good for you.

We tried the ribs and the chicken and the pulled pork sandwich, the black-eyed pea salad and the wild rice salad and the sweet potato salad and the cabbage slaw. We had a cornbread waffle and some cheese grits.

The manager told us that the menu items were developed based merely on their names, which the investment partners gave to their development team in Denver.

And I don’t like to badmouth a place, so I’ll say I liked the waffles and the cheese grits. The rest of it tasted like it was good for you.

It would be harsh to say it’s soul food without soul, but, well, I guess I just did.

Jeff, Abe and David had dinner plans with Drew Nieporent, who was going to show them Tribeca Grill, Nobu and Centrico, so that was probably fun.

A new Rickshaw’s coming to town

2011-05-04T15:58:00.000-07:00

May 4

I just got off the phone with Rickshaw Dumpling Bar owner Kenny Lao, who’s opening his second location in Manhattan next week.

Or maybe it's his sixth location. It kind of depends on how you look at it.

The new restaurant is at 459 Lexington Avenue. That's the northwest corner of Lexington and 45th.

“We're aiming to open early next week,” Kenny said. That's when the butcher paper you see in the picture will come off of the windows.

He already has one brick-and-mortar store on 23rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, and he also has a fleet of four food trucks.

It was what he learned from his food trucks that told him where to open his next restaurant.

“We realized with our trucks that there was a large base of customers here in Midtown who loved us. We responded to how well the trucks do parking around here, as well as to requests from customers, and we started looking for a new location.”

Kenny’s optimistic about the restaurant’s prospects.

“We think it’s going to be fantasmo,” he said.

That would be an improvement over the last store he opened, on Eighth Street, near NYU. It failed to thrive and closed after the economy went south.

The health inspector has been by, the permits are in place, but Kenny’s still trying to figure out his new magnetic menu board, which you can see in the picture. He says keeping all of those letters in a straight line is a lot harder than it looks.

The denizens of Midtown East have gotten familiar with Rickshaw's classic pork, chicken Thai basil and edamame dumplings, but at the new shop they’ll have the whole gamut to choose from, including Peking duck, kimchi beef, Szechuan chicken, and mustard green veggie dumplings, along with steamed buns, three salads instead of the single one that's available at the trucks, a bunch of sides and four different noodle soups.

Some new items are being added with the new opening, too, including warm sesame noodles.

Those are made from fresh Shanghai noodles and what Kenny calls “a really creamy sesame paste sauce with scallions and cucumbers.”

He’s also adding a cucumber wakame salad and herbaceous Vietnamese spring rolls — not the fried kind, the other kind — with a peanut dipping sauce.

Poll results: fries should be replaced on kids menus

2011-04-19T06:59:00.000-07:00

April 19

The bulk of this blog's poll takers — 67 percent — think French fries should be replaced on kids' menus, and a solid plurality — 42 percent — would do the same thing with adults' menus.

That’s not to say fries should be banned, just that they shouldn’t be the default option. Why not live it up with some artichoke or mango from time to time?

Twenty-eight people voted in the poll, which really isn’t terrible, but it’s not great, either, so my next poll is a poll on what sort of polls you’d like to participate in on this blog.

You can view the results of the most recent poll below:

SHOULD RESTAURANTS REPLACE FRIES WITH OTHER VEGETABLES OR FRUIT ON KIDS' MENUS?

Yes	7 (25%)
Yes, and on adults' menus, too	12 (42%)
No	4 (14%)
I don’t care	3 (10%)
Maybe	2 (7%)

Votes: 28

[April 28 update: never mind — clearly you’d like to leave the poll choices up to me.]
I LIKE POLLS ON THIS BLOG THAT ARE ABOUT...

My personal taste	1 (16%)
Beard Award nominees	0 (0%)
predicting trends	3 (50%)
Social or health issues	2 (33%)
I want to read your blog, not take polls	0 (0%)

Votes so far: 6
Poll closed

Biryani and mangoes in Hyderabad

2011-04-13T23:11:00.000-07:00

April 14

On the left is a picture of what biryani is supposed to look like, so I'm told. I took it with my cell phone, so it's not of the best quality, but according to the menu at Paradise restaurant in Hyderabad, the grains of rice in a biryani should all be separate — no sticking together.

Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh state, claims to be the birthplace of biryani, and the best place to eat it. And Paradise, by several accounts, is as good a place as any to get it. So while the franchisors on the trade mission were having their late morning speed dates, I hired a driver to help me find mangoes and to take me to Paradise.

When I worked in Thailand, a place with very fine mangoes as far as I and the Thais are concerned, my Indian colleagues would snigger and laugh at the local fruits, declaring them to be inadequate shadows of real Indian mangoes.

My pre-trip research indicated that mangoes were in season now in India, and although the people of Mumbai told me it was a bit early for the prized fruits yet, they agreed that I might have better luck in Hyderabad, farther south.

The Hyderabadis laughed at me — about as politely as you can laugh at someone, but they laughed — and suggested I wait a couple of weeks before trying mangoes.

I pointed out to them that I was in India now and would not be in a couple of weeks, and suggested that perhaps with Indian mangoes being so good, even those that were not at the peak of season might possibly be the best I’d ever tasted, and they agreed that that might be so.

So I had my driver take me to the fruit market. To see what we could find.

There weren’t a lot of mangoes, but there were some, and after wandering around for awhile the driver recommended a stand to me, and I bought a kilo of mangoes for 40 rupees — about a dollar.

They had the great floral aroma of a good mango and the promise of a complex and nuanced flavor that I would expect from an excellent piece of fruit.

Delighted with my purchase, I headed to Paradise for lunch and had mutton biryani.

What can I say? All the Biryani I’d had in the past was basically rice pilaf with meat in it, and so was this. The distinguishing characteristics were very long-grained basmati rice that didn't stick together and a strong but not overpowering cardamom aroma. This being Andhra Pradesh, which claims to be the state with the spiciest food (although I’m told that some people in Tamil Nadu would beg to differ), there was also plenty of chile in the rice.

It was tasty. I suppose it might have been the most delicious biryani I'd ever had. I don't know. It was hardly worth a trip to Hyderabad to eat, but since I was there already I was glad for the experience, and to have a benchmark for what is considered great biryani.

Back at the hotel, I had the staff peel and slice my mangoes for me, which they did with alacrity.

And let me tell you, they were terrible. The flesh had the right orange color, glistening sheen and slippery texture of a good mango, but it was soulless and sour, and I was sorely disappointed.

Speed dating in India

2011-04-11T20:55:00.000-07:00

April 11

“Did you see that guy’s watch? That thing’s worth $300,000,” Jeff Sinelli, founder of the Which Wich? sandwich chain told me after a couple of potential franchisees left his table.

I hadn’t seen the watch, but I’d noticed his stylish cufflinks made out of string.

We had both observed his and his partner’s complete lack of a sense of humor.

What do you expect from financiers whose pride and joy seemed to be a distribution network for PVC pipes?

I’m in India, covering a trade mission organized by the United States Commerce Department’s Commercial Service. This particular mission is focused on franchisors, mostly restaurant companies, looking for Indian partners.

The mission is centered around what are essentially speed dates. They’re meetings between the franchisors and potential franchisees to do a combination of pitching themselves and getting acquainted with one another — almost exactly like first dates, really.

I’ve been sitting in on some of the meetings to see what they’re like — the pictures in this blog entry show you what they look like.

What I’ve seen so far indicates that finding business partners through blind dating — even with dates who have been vetted by the Commercial Service — is about as tough and almost as grueling as finding a love match that way. I’m not sure what the equivalent of a one-night stand would be in this case, but please let me know if you can think of one.

The would-be franchisors, being Americans working in foodservice, would talk about having “passion” for the business. The potential franchisees — real estate agents, retailers, PVC pipe distributors with lots of money of unknown origin — would blink once or twice and stare back blankly.

But you never know. The McDonald’s executive in charge of western and southern India comes from the lubricant business, so maybe Mr. Fancy Watch will be the man behind Which Wich? India.

Personally, I liked the owner of The Devil’s Workshop, a bakery chain with the slogan “Food you hate to love.”

After the speed dates, we all went to the Residence of the American Consul General for a reception, and I learned that India is by far the world’s largest consumer of whisky. So after a glass of perfectly acceptable red wine I switched to nice single malts and chatted with Subway franchisees and politicians, commercial attachés and Assistant Commerce Secretary Nicole Lamb-Hale, who is on the trip with us.

Marketing consultant Jagdeep Kapoor explained to me the challenges of presenting the right message in India. He pointed out that standing in line to order food is insulting to many middle class Indians, because it seems like begging. Besides, they’re accustomed to having servants and like to be waited on.

But then for other middle class Indians, who studied in the United States, American fast food gives them a sense of nostalgia and they want to stand in line for it (“They feel like they’re in New York”) and then get exactly the same food that they would have in the U.S.

Others want food that reminds them of their mother’s home cooking, so it should taste completely Indian.

I asked Kapoor how you could do all of that with one brand while maintaining a single identity.

“Give the people what they want,” he said, which didn’t really answer the question, but it is indeed what a restaurant should do.

He also said that Indians love bossing people around, so that the model at Subway, or any chain where your food is assembled in front of you, appeals to them because they can tell the restaurant worker exactly how they want their food to be made.

Indeed, that seems to appeal to everyone.

Food Writer’s Diary readers don’t like to vote for Beard Award nominees

2011-04-05T10:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, okay, I get it. You don’t want to vote for Beard Award nominees.

In the Rising Star category, which is really the only career-maker, a total of six people voted, one for each nominee, except for Momofuku Milk Bar's, Christina Tosi, who got two.

Given the geographical diversity of this category, it is hard to believe that many people are familiar enough with all of the chefs’ work to vote with authority, so let’s try something new:

A number of chain restaurants have been responding to pressure — from customers, government, public health advocates, what have you — to make kids' meals more healthful.

Some, notably IHOP, have swapped out fries as the automatic side dish and instead serve fruit or vegetables, with fries made available on request.

How do you feel about that?

Please vote in the poll, and feel free to comment below if you like.

Thank you.

For the record, the results of the last poll.

Aaron London, Ubuntu	1 (16%)
Thomas McNaughton, Fire + Water	1 (16%)
Gabriel Rucker, Le Pigeon	1 (16%)
Christina Tosi, Momofuku Milk Bar	2 (33%)
Sue Zemanick, Gautreau’s

Food Writer’s Diary readers pick Girl & The Goat as best new restaurant

2011-03-28T13:32:00.000-07:00

March 28

Despite a mid-week rally in favor of Torrisi after Grub Street alerted New Yorkers that the Nolita hot spot was losing in my poll for best new restaurant, Girl & The Goat in Chicago still won handily.

Granted, only 26 people voted, but 30 percent of them picked chef Stephanie Izard’s Chicago eatery. Benu in San Francisco came in second.

Next, I’d like you to vote on your choice of Rising Star Chef from among the Beard Award finalists. Please click on a name in the poll to your right, or feel free to make comments below.

Results from the last poll:

WHICH BEARD NOMINEE FOR BEST NEW RESTAURANT WOULD YOU VOTE FOR?

ABC Kitchen: 5 (19%)
Benu: 6 (23%)
Girl & The Goat: 8 (30%)
Menton: 2 (7%)
Torrisi: 5 (19%)

Untitled: first look

2011-03-23T12:11:00.000-07:00

March 23

Danny Meyer’s new restaurant at the Whitney museum, called Untitled, had a soft opening today, sort of.

“Soft is a malleable word today,” Richard Coraine, president of new business for Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group told me at 2:40 pm. "Because it was busy. Still is.”

I would have swung by the place myself, but I’m woefully behind in my work and shouldn’t even be writing a blog entry today. Call me a rebel.

Untitled wasn’t supposed to open softly this week. It was supposed to just open. But not all of the furniture has arrived yet (the picture illustrating this blog entry is a rendering from designer David Rockwell).

“We had everybody trained and ready to go. Just because we didn’t have furniture, it didn’t make sense to hold up the opening.” So this is a “sneak peak week” at the restaurant, with a limited menu and about 50 seats instead of 85.

Coraine said the missing banquettes actually gives the restaurant the opportunity to "take a few baby steps” and let the staff find their legs while seating is still limited.

Breakfast business was good: “A lot of eggs, a lot of pancakes, and a lot of people came for Stumptown coffee.” At lunch they sold a lot of hamburgers.

So, business as usual in Danny Meyer Land.

One of the highlights of the place as far as I’m concerned is the custom-made soda which they’re serving out of kegs.

Local boyfriend/girlfriend team Brooklyn Soda Works is providing root beer and apple-ginger soda. Coraine said the team makes the soda in their kitchen at home. “The cool thing about them is there’s no syrups. The ingredients are either steeped or macerated. The root beer is made from roots that they foraged,” he said.

The restaurant’s executive chef, Chris Bradley, gave me a rundown of what he had planned a couple of weeks ago. You can read that interview here.

Oh, and see that poll above and to your right, about which Beard Award nominee you’d pick for best new restaurant? Go ahead and vote on that.

Beard Handicapping 2011

2011-03-21T14:57:00.000-07:00

March 21

The nominations for the James Beard Foundation Chef and Restaurant Awards were announced today.

So were nominations for cookbooks, journalism and broadcast media, but I don’t cover those and so I don’t care much.

Even the chef and restaurant awards are kind of, well, I mean it’s great for all the chefs and restaurateurs to come to New York and celebrate, and it’s even better that they get to publicize their nomination and maybe drum up more business, but so many nominees return each year that there are never any great surprises. These will be the 13th Beard Awards that I cover, and they have all started to blur together.

Then again, why would there be surprises? The nominees tend to be talented chefs and restaurants that many people in their communities love, which is why they get nominated.

So I’m not saying that the awards necessarily need to be done differently. They are what they are; winners should use them for whatever they’re worth and those who don’t win shouldn’t take them too seriously.

This will be my fifth year predicting the winners, and I must say that I’m getting better at it. I guessed seven out 19 winners my first two years, then I bumped it up to eight, and last year I guessed nine winners. That’s practically half, almost.

My approach to these predictions is based on the idea that these awards don’t go to the best chef — I mean, “best chef”? What does that even mean?

They tend to go to those whose names are most easily recognized by the judges, who are food writers and past winners.

My predictions do not in anyway indicate who I would like to win. For the sake of propriety, I will keep that to myself.

And now onto my predictions.

Rising Star Chef of the Year:

I think Christina Tosi will benefit from the name of Momofuku, which introduced Asian food to many New Yorkers who had, it seemed, not bothered to walk a mile south of the East Village to Chinatown or two miles northwest to Koreatown.

Aaron London, Ubuntu, Napa, Calif.

Thomas McNaughton, flour + water, San Francisco

Gabriel Rucker, Le Pigeon, Portland, Ore.

Christina Tosi, Momofuku Milk Bar, NYC

Sue Zemanick, Gautreau’s, New Orleans

Best New Restaurant:

Torrisi’s the darling of New York gastroscenti at the moment, and although it’s possible that it and ABC Kitchen will split the New York vote and the award will go to Benu, whose chef Corey Lee won the Rising Star award a few years ago and who still shines in the glory of the Thomas Keller empire as The French Laundry’s former chef, I don’t think it will.

ABC Kitchen, New York City

Benu, San Francisco

Girl & the Goat, Chicago

Menton, Boston

Torrisi Italian Specialties, New York City

Outstanding Restaurateur:

The judges, feeling bad that they dissed Jean-Georges Vongerichten by not voting for his ABC Kitchen as best new restaurant, will give this award to his business partner, Phil Suarez.

Bruce Bromberg and Eric Bromberg, Blue Ribbon Restaurants, New York City

Tom Douglas, Tom Douglas Restaurants, Seattle

Pat Kuleto, Pat Kuleto Restaurant Development & Management Company, San Francisco

Richard Melman, Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, Chicago

Phil Suarez, Suarez Restaurant Grou, New York City

Outstanding Restaurant:

This one’s always a crap shoot, but if in doubt, pick the restaurant with the most famous owner. That would be Danny Meyer of Eleven Madison Park.

Blue Hill, New York City

Boulevard, San Francisco

Eleven Madison Park, New York City

Highlands Bar and Grill, Birmingham, Ala.

Vetri, Philadelphia

Outstanding Chef:

Paul Kahan is new to this category, and it usually takes a few years for a chef to win. Everyone loves José Andrés, but we’re in kind of a post-molecular gastronomy mood at the moment. I think this one’s a toss-up between Gary Danko and Suzanne Goin. I think I’ll pick the one with the homier reputation.

José Andrés, mini bar by José Andrés, Washington, D.C.

Gary Danko, Restaurant Gary Danko, San Francisco

Suzanne Goin, Lucques, Los Angeles

Paul Kahan, Blackbird, Chicago

Charles Phan, The Slanted Door, San Francisco

Outstanding Pastry Chef:

Can Eleven Madison Park possibly win two awards? Well, yes, it can, but Mindy Segal’s the only chef in this category who also was nominated last year. I think that’s a sign

Joanne Chang, Flour Bakery + Café, Boston

Patrick Fahy, Blackbird, Chicago

Dahlia Narvaez, Osteria Mozza, Los Angeles

Angela Pinkerton, Eleven Madison Park, New York City

Mindy Segal, Mindy’s HotChocolate Restaurant and Dessert Bar, Chicago

Outstanding Service:

Emeril’s famous, but in my world I think Thomas Keller’s even more so.

Canlis, Seattle

Emeril’s, New Orleans

La Grenouille, New York City

Per Se, New York City

Topolobampo, Chicago

Outstanding Wine Service:

San Francisco’s got to win something big, and Bay Area judges are used to voting for A16, whose Nate Appleman was named Rising Star Chef a couple of years ago. Appleman’s consulting for Chipotle now, but that’s his journey, not A16’s.

A16, San Francisco, Shelley Lindgren

Blackberry Farm Walland, Tenn., Andy Chabot

Frasca Food and Wine, Boulder, Colo. Bobby Stuckey

Picasso at Bellagio, Las Vegas Robert Smith

The Modern, New York City, Belinda Chang

Outstanding Wine & Spirits Professional:

So many ways to go with this one. The Beard Foundation is trying to shake its New York-centric reputation. In fact, it announced the list of nominees at a press conference in Portland, Ore., this year. It was a classy move, but still, if you wonder which city is going to take an award, it’s probably going to be New York.

Sam Calagione, Dogfish head Craft Brewery, Milton, Del.

Merry Edwards, Merry Edwards Winery, Sebastopol, Calif.

Paul Grieco, Hearth and Terroir, New York City

Rajat Parr, Mina Group, San Francisco

Julian P. Van Winkle III, Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery, Louisville, Ky.

Best Chef: Great Lakes:

Perennial favorites like Zingerman’s tend to linger as nominees, but they don’t win very often. I’m going to guess that Chicago will follow the lead of their new Michelin guide, which gave two stars to Avenues.

Michael Carlson, Schwa, Chicago

Curtis Duffy, Avenues, at the Peninsula, chicago

Bruce Sherman, North Pond, Chicago

Paul Virant, Vie, Western Springs, Ill.

Alex Young, Zingerman’s Roadhouse, Ann Arbor, Mich.

Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic:

You know what? Philadelphia’s a really great food city.

Cathal Armstrong, Restaurant Eve, Alexandria, Va.

Johnny Monis, Komi, Washington, D.C.

Peter Pastan, Obellisk, Washington, D.C.

Maricel Presilla, Cucharamama, Hoboken, N.J.

Michael Solomonov, Zahav, Philadelphia

Best Chef: Midwest:

I think the Midwesterners are going to vote classically this year, and that means a vote for L’Etoile.

Justin Aprahamian, Sanford, Milwaukee

Isaac Becker, 112 Eatery, Minneapolis

Colby Garrelts, Bluestem, Kansas City, Mo.

Tory Miller, L’Etoile, Madison, Wis.

Lenny Russo, Heartland, St. Paul, Minn

Best Chef: New York City

New York has an incredibly dynamic restaurant scene, and yet April Bloomfield’s the only newcomer on this list. With all due respect to the very deserving nominees here, that says something bad about something, but I’m not sure what.

That said, as much as food writers love April Bloomfield, I think they like Michael White even more.

Michael Anthony, Gramercy Tavern

April Bloomfield, The Spotted Pig

Wylie Dufresne, WD-50

Gabrielle Hamilton, Prune

Michael White, Marea

Best Chef: Northeast:

Tony Maws is the only returning nominee on this list and so I’ll follow the same logic I did picking outstanding pastry chef.

Tim Cushman, o ya, Boston

Krista Kern Desjarlais, Bresca, Portland, Maine.

Gerry Hayden, The North Fork Table & Inn, Southold, N.Y.

Matt Jennings, La Laiterie, Providence, R.I.

Tony Maws, Craigie on Main, Cambridge, Mass.

Eric Warnstedt, Hen of the Wood, Waterbury, Vt.

Best Chef: Northwest:

This list shows me that I need to get to the Pacific Northwest more often, because I am, quite frankly, at a loss as to who to predict. But I have to pick someone, so, congratulations in advance to Cathy Whims.

Matt Dillon, Sitka & Spruce, Seattle

Christopher Israel, Grüner, Portland, Ore.

Andy Ricker, Pok Pok, Portland, Ore.

Ethan Stowell, Staple & Fancy Mercantile, Seattle

Cathy Whims, Nostrana, Portland, Ore.

Best Chef: Pacific:

I’ve heard many good things about Daniel Patterson, and that means that judges in the Bay Area have, too.

Michael Cimarusti, Providence, Los Angeles

Christopher Kostow, The Restaurant at Meadowood, St. Helena, Calif.

Daniel Patterson, Coi, San Francico

Richard Reddington, Redd, Yountville, Calif.

Michael Tusk, Quince, San Francisco

Best Chef: South:

The Brennans are possibly the most respected restaurant family in the entire country, and this list indicates that New Orleans still is enjoying a post-Katrina bump.

Zach Bell, Café Boulud, Palm Beach, Fla.

John Harris, Lilette, New Orleans

Christopher Hastings, Hot and Hot Fish Club, Birmingham, Ala.

Tory McPhail, Commander’s Palace, New Orleans

Stephen Stryjewski, Cochon, New Orleans

Best Chef: Southeast:

Bigger cities have more judges.

Hugh Acheson, Five and Ten, Athens, Ga.

Craig Deihl, Cypress, Charleston, S.C.

John Fleer, Canyon Kitchen at Lonesome Valley, Cashiers, N.C.

Linton Hopkins, Restaurant Eugene, Atlanta

Edward Lee, 610 Magnolia, Louisville, Ky.

Andrea Reusing, Lantern, Chapel Hill, N.C.

Best Chef: Southwest:

Remember what I said about the Southeast? It’s true of the Southwest, too.

Bruce Auden, Biga on the Banks, San Antonio, Texas

Bryan Caswell, Reef, Houston

Saipin Chutima, Lotus of Siam, Las Vegas

Tyson Cole, Uchi, Austin, Texas

Ryan Hardy, Montagne at the Little Nell, Aspen, Colo.

And that concludes my predictions.

Please feel free to share your own observations in the comment section below.

Food Writer’s Diary readers vote differently from Beard Foundation judges

2011-03-21T11:01:00.000-07:00

March 21

As you would expect, readers of this blog had a different notion of who should be Rising Star Chef of the year, an award the James Beard Foundation gives to chefs aged 30 or younger who show promise.
Of the five nominees, who were named today, only one, Christina Tosi of Momofuku Milk Bar in New York City, also was in the top five voted on by this blog’s readers from among the long list of Beard Foundation semifinalists for the award.

Not a whole lot of people participated in the vote, just 49, apparently many of them from the Twin Cities.
I’ll post the results below, and also point out that I have a new poll up with the finalists for Best New Restaurant on the right.

Vote away (write in your own candidate in the comments section below)!

MY CHOICE FOR RISING STAR CHEF OF THE YEAR IS:

Sameh Wadi, Saffron Restaurant & Lounge, Minneapolis — 10

Christina Tosi, Momofuku Milk Bar, New York City — 6

Jonathon Sawyer, The Greenhouse Tavern, Cleveland — 5

Kevin Gillespie, Woodfire Grill, Atlanta — 4

Nicholas Stefanelli, Bibiana, Washington, D.C. — 4

Anthony Martin, Tru, Chicago — 3

Sue Zemanick, Gautreau’s, New Orleans — 3

Andrew Ashmore, The Greene House, Scottsdale, Ariz. — 2

Clayton Chapman, The Grey Plume, Omaha, Neb. — 2

Sheldon Simeon, Star Noodle, Lahaina, Hawaii — 2

Benjamin Bailly, Fraîche, Culver City, Calif. — 1

Eric Gabrynowicz, Restaurant North, Armonk, N.Y. — 1

Will Gilson, Garden at the Cellar, Cambridge, Mass. — 1

Greg LaPrad, Quiessence, Phoenix — 1

Matt Lightner, Castagna, Portland, Ore. — 1

Jesse Schenker, Recette, New York City — 1

Bjorn Somlo, Nudel, Lenox, Mass. — 1

Blaine Wetzel, The Willows Inn, Lummi Island, Wash. — 1

Justin Aprahamian, Sanford, Milwaukee — 0

Sean Baker, Gather, Berkeley, Calif. — 0

Sean Ehland, Kaya, Pittsburgh — 0

Sam Gorenstein, BLT Steak, Miami Beach, Fla. — 0

Perry Hoffman, étoile, Yountville, Calif. — 0

Casey Lane, The Tasting Kitchen, Venice, Calif. — 0

Aaron London, Ubuntu, Napa, Calif. — 0

Thomas McNaughton, flour + water, San Francisco — 0

Paul Qui, Uchiko, Austin, Texas — 0

Dan Richer, Arturo's, Maplewood, N.J. — 0

Gabriel Rucker, Le Pigeon, Portland, Ore. — 0

Lee Styer, Fond, Philadelphia — 0

Michael Toscano, Manzo, New York City — 0

Total votes: 49

Preparing for a pop-up

2011-03-11T15:34:00.000-08:00

March 11

Last night my evening really began, at least in my own mind, at around 4pm, when I saw the following tweet from Red Cat owner Jimmy Bradley:

“Feeling bitter? Stop by The Red Cat and drown your sorrows with one of Trace’s signature cocktails.”

I wasn’t feeling bitter, nor sorrowful, but I still felt like Jimmy was speaking directly to me.

Three months ago, when our offices were in Midtown East, a shlep to west Chelsea, when I had an event to go to later in the evening near Times Square, would have seemed ludicrous.

But since Nation’s Restaurant News was bought by Penton Media and we moved offices to central Chelsea (17th Street between seventh and eighth avenues, closer to eighth), The Red Cat is now just a slight detour.

So as soon as I could extract myself from the office I sauntered over to The Red Cat and had a couple of bracing drinks — Elixir No. 1 followed by a bourbon-based one that I think was called Old Pal — refreshing but bitter, and looked at my phone to see where I’d agreed to have dinner that evening.

It seemed I'd agreed to attend the opening night of The Feast, a three-day pop-up restaurant at the soon-to-open Sanctuary Hotel (where the Portland Square Hotel was until recently).

The chef: 15-year-old Greg Grossman.

“Oh, Bret, you stupid, stupid man,” I said to myself. “You have RSVPed in the affirmative to something ridiculous.”

But I’m a man of my word. If I can possibly make it to something that I said I’d go to, I go, except when I occasionally forget.

So I paid for my drinks and walked through the rain to the E train and took it to Times Square.

I was early as I walked toward the hotel, and my heart sank when I saw the searchlights in front.

Because an event at which you must endure the silly food of a child is bad enough. Having to do it in the company of scenesters and minor self-important celebrities — well, I wasn’t going to show up early, that was for sure.

I walked to Sixth Avenue in search of time-killing amusement and, realizing I was near Oceana, I walked in for another bracing drink — whiskey-based, slightly sweeter than the ones at The Red Cat; I think it was called The Dubliner.

Chef Ben Pollinger was nice enough to send out some oysters lightly dressed in pomegranate and some escolar sashimi with mango and macadamia.

With three stiff drinks and some fortifying marine protein under my belt, I was ready for the ridiculous.

It started with a fourth cocktail, as servers were handing out rocks glasses filled with dirty vodka Marinis garnished with blue-cheese stuffed olives and truffle oil.

It was, indeed, a scenester crowd with very minor slightly self-important celebrities, and also women dressed in skimpy white outfits, clearly hired for the titillation of the guests.

I don't think I’d seen anything like that since before 9/11, and I see nothing wrong with hiring consenting adults to be eye candy, and if it helps to usher in a new age of decadence, that’s fine with me.

Also, the truffle oil in the dirty vodka Martinis worked for me. So did the fact that the Martinis were on the rocks, which meant they were not in cocktail glasses and thus not nearly so hard to keep from sloshing.

I was seated next to someone who worked at a celebrity web site. He was on my right, and on my left was originally the female companion of one of the hotel owners, but over the course of the evening various other women rotated in there. I didn’t catch their names.

The guy from the celebrity web site seemed nice enough but wasn't interested in talking to me, and the House music was too loud for meaningful conversation anyway, so I mostly sat and let the evening sort of wash over me.

The theme of the Pop-up restaurant was Pop Art — in fact it was called the Pop Art Pop Up. The place was decorated in sort of Warhol-era theme, and the dishes on the menu developed by our “Wunderkind Chef” — that’s what the menu called him, a Wunderkind — were each named after a work of pop art.

What can I say? I had a good time. The food was mostly delicious, the music was fun — between bursts of House music a diminutive singer, about my height, with great pipes sang songs from my formative years by artists such as Lionel Richie (Hello), Tracy Chapman (Talkin’ Bout a Revolution) and Cyndi Lauper (Time After Time) — and I’d already had four cocktails by the time we sat down.

But I did notice that Greg Grossman had a surprising level of poise. He came out to talk about the food, described the first dish and realized the crowd wasn’t interested. So he told them all the pictures of the art were on the back of the menu and to enjoy their meal.

I wish more chefs knew to do that.

Oh! I almost forgot: Guess who was helping young Greg Grossman prep? Don Pintabona, former chef of Tribeca Grill and then chef-owner of Dani. Remember him?

Don’s freshly back from Asia (Sri Lanka, Laos and someplace else — I think Vietnam) where he was working on a project to help communities develop sustainable agriculture and such, but he also has known young Master Grossman since he was an even littler kid, and he always has been interested in cooking.

What I ate (with photos graciously provided by the Sanctuary’s publicists):

Jeff Koons “Balloon Dog (Orange)”
Carrot, Stilton, coconut, cardamom and lemon grass

Damien Hirst “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD)”
Scallop, potato, apple, tamarind and Thai basil

Andy Warhol: “Marilyn Monroe”
Beef, lamb, salmon and bass in monochromes

Roy Lichtenstein:
“Meat”
New York strip steak, foie gras, cilantro and sherry

Takashi Murakami
“Flower of Joy”
Fennel, yuzu, mango, white chocolate and strawberry

And below, the back of the menu with a collage of all the works of art on which the food was based:

The food at the Gay Men's Health Crisis fundraiser

2011-03-01T13:37:00.000-08:00

March 1

People don’t generally go to fundraisers for food, and for good reason. You just have to hope for good dinner conversation or a moving speech about whatever cause you’re there to support. Otherwise you’re better off mailing in your check and ordering pizza.

But Savor is different. The annual fundraiser for the Gay Men's Health Crisis is all about the food — and with good reason since, among the GMHC’s many services, is its meals program, through which it provides nearly 100,00 meals annually to low-income men and women living with HIV.

The focus of those meals is nutrition, but at Savor this year it’s all about showcasing New York’s chefs and food. The five appetizers to be served during the cocktail reception — created by Stephen Lewandowski of Tribeca Grill — are intended to represent each of the city’s five boroughs. Cute, right?

The event’s being held this Monday, March 7 at Gotham Hall.

You can buy tickets at gmhc.org

What they’re serving:

Cocktail reception:
Red wine braised short rib pierogi with caramelized onion sour cream (Greenpoint, Brooklyn)

Crispy curried pea samosa with green apple & kaffir lime ;eaf (Murray Hill, Manhattan)

Porcini & walnut baklava with white truffle honey (Astoria, Queens)
Dominican braised pork shoulder on crispy plantain chip (The Bronx)
Rosemary-scented Gulf shrimp with chestnut honey (Staten Island)

First Course, by Peter Hoffman, chef-owner of Savoy:

Winter green salad with Ascutney Mountain cheese, shaved fennel and puffed wheat berries

Second Course, by chef Carmen Quagliata of Union Square Cafe:
Bloominghill Farm Carnival squash brodo with chicken tortelloni, black truffle butter and sage

Main Course, by Peter Hoffman:
Braised lamb shanks with Swiss chard sofrito and rutabaga mostarda

Dessert, by François Payard of François Payard Bakery:
Crémeux of chocolate mousse and raspberry, raspberry jam and flourless chocolate cake topped with homemade raspberry marshmallows with a hint of olive oil

Pick your own rising star chef

2011-02-17T14:52:00.000-08:00

February 17

Well, the James Beard Foundation released its list of 403 semi-finalists in its chef and restaurant categories (not including the design and graphics awards, which don’t have semi-finalists).

It’s a relatively fresh list, with only about half of last year’s semifinalists returning, which is about in line with the number of returning semifinalists last year, too.

For the most part, the Beard Awards are a nice feather in your cap that if marketed properly can help boos sales in restaurants, and that’s about it.

But the Rising Star award, given to chefs aged 30 or younger, can be a real career maker. Just ask Nate Appleman or Marcus Samuelsson or Chris Lee or David Chang or any of a number of other chefs who benefited from that nice piece of recognition.

Nominations of semifinalists for the Beard Awards is open to the public, but now the final determination of the finalists and then the winners will be determined by a few hundred food writers and past winners and other people-in-the-know in the restaurant world.

Except here. I’ll be keeping the poll to the right, listing all of the Beard Foundation’s “Rising Star” semifinalists, open until the day before the finalists are announced. So go ahead and vote.

Last year the winner of the Food Writer’s Diary poll, Jonathan Sawyer, didn’t even make it into the finals of the actual Beard Awards. However Food & Wine magazine did name him one of the country’s 10 “Best New Chefs,” which is arguably better than being a Beard Foundation rising star.

I doubt that had anything to do with this poll, but go ahead and vote anyway. Let your voice be heard.

What The Loop Pizza Grill has learned about Facebook

2011-02-07T08:03:00.000-08:00

February 7

I just got off of the phone with Cathy Manzon, director of marketing for The Loop Pizza Grill, a 14-unit chain based in Jacksonville, Fla. Mostly I was talking to her about pizza trends for a story I’m working on for the magazine (available online for subscribers).

But I also asked her about how they get feedback from customers. She said they have comment cards, but people very rarely fill them out.

If they have something negative to say, they generally register their complaints on the web site.

If they have something nice to say, they say it on Facebook.

I thought that was interesting enough that it was worth sharing.

Why Domino’s Pacific Veggie pizza sells so well

2011-02-03T15:22:00.000-08:00

February 3

Awhile back I was talking to an official at Domino's Pizza who expressed surprise at how well the delivery giant’s American Legends Pacific Veggie pie was selling. I mentioned that last November in a story on how chain restaurants are changing the ways they develop menu items.

You expect sausage to sell, and of course pepperoni, as this story in yesterday’s New York Times points out. That the Philly Cheesesteak pizza sells well is no surprise.

But Pacific Veggie?

It’s not like it’s even particularly good for you. Domino’s American Legends line has 40 percent more cheese than the chain’s regular pizza (the Wisconsin cheese producers helped to promote the line) — not that actual nutrition and what customers think is nutritious is necessarily related anyway.

Still, Domino’s executives wanted to offer a meatless option, but they didn’t expect it to sell well. Yet it did.

I mentioned that today to Joe Calcagno, the chef-owner of Capizzi Pizza, which opened quietly last October across the street from Port Authority, on 9th Avenue and between 40th and 41st streets, in New York City.

He said “of course it sells well.” Vegetarians make up a large contingent of pizzeria customers.

Think about it, he said. Pizzerias always have good vegetarian options — a cheese pizza, if nothing else, and very possibly pastas and antipasti and all sorts of non-meat things.

I’d never thought about that before.

Capizzi’s a serious little (35-seat) pizzeria. Joe built the oven himself (that’s a side business of his), and he dries his own oregano, crushes his own red pepper, found some sort of heirloom pepperoni.

I’d tell you more about it, but I have to write a story for our magazine in a couple of weeks, and I don’t want to give away all the good stuff.

In fact, that story will be in our subscriber’s-only section of nrn.com, so if you want to read it, you should subscribe.

Come on, almost all of the cool people already subscribe. Once you sign up, we’ll be all set.

Dantes, celebrities and Jumbos at the Beard House

2011-02-02T14:21:00.000-08:00

February 2

Mario Cantone likes my wit.

I know he does because he told me so last night.

“I like your wit,” he said.

That’s right. Comedic performer Mario Cantone thinks I have wit. And he likes it.

I don’t know if he likes your wit because he didn’t say, but he likes mine.

We were at the James Beard House last night, having a dinner that had been dubbed “Battle of the Dantes” — later changed to “Dueling Dantes” which is equally Top Chef-like and not what chefs do when they cook together at the Beard House. Dual Dantes would have worked, or Dante Duo or even Dante Duet.

But when grown-up chefs cook together, they don’t fight. They collaborate, and that was clearly what Boston-based Dante de Magistris and Dante Boccuzzi, from Cleveland, were doing last night.

Mario Cantone doesn’t like Top Chef, by the way, because viewers can’t taste the food, and so they can't judge with any intelligence.

But his dining companion and former work colleague said she enjoys Top Chef. She gets into the food. She was seated between Mario and me. You might have heard of her, because she was Kim Cattrall.

She’s a nice person to have dinner with. She tells stories that are amusing and brief about travel and life experience. She graciously and politely answers questions about being a celebrity without droning on about it. She asks other people about themselves.

So we exchanged observations about restaurants. She had eaten a fair amount of Dante Boccuzzi’s food before because she lives near Aureole’s former Upper East Side location, where Dante was executive chef for a number of years.

“He’s cooked for me many times,” she said, showing an admirable awareness for the fact that it’s good to be a celebrity in a restaurant — although she later said it was a drag to go to places, particularly on Madison Avenue (who knew?) where fans are likely to harass you when you’d just like to have a meal.

Obviously, one must be grateful to fans, so she’s fine with signing autographs, but pictures are a drag because if one person sees someone having a picture taken with her then everyone wants to have a picture taken with her.

Anyway, she was nice. And she can eat.

So the celebrities were on my left. To my right: Jumbos.

Ben Bell, who does social networking at The Huffington Post, was there with Simone Press, who’s in an entry-level job at CBS (as is appropriate, since they graduated from college in, like, 2007).

We bonded quickly, because we all went to college outside of Boston.

No, we didn’t go to Harvard, we went to Tufts. Sure, I graduated 17 years before them, but we can still bond.

Especially since we didn’t just all go to Tufts, we all studied in China.

Well, sort of — they studied in Hong Kong, which was still a British colony when I was roughing it in Nanjing in 1988, but it’s certainly more adventurous then spending your junior year in London, say.

Did you know Kim Cattrall was born in Britain and grew up in British Columbia (Vancouver Island) as well as London?

She says she can totally walk around in London without anyone bothering her. New Yorkers take pride in leaving celebrities alone when they see them, but Kim says we’re not nearly as good at it as Londoners are.

Mario Cantone, a Massachusetts native, was the celebrity who was invited to the dinner, by Dante de Magistris’ publicists [or so I thought — it turns out that he was invited by Dante Boccuzzi’s people, because, like Kim, he became a fan of Dante’s at Aureole; see comment #1 below]. Kim was his guest. When the chefs came out with their crew at the end of the meal, as one does at the Beard House, Mario declared loudly — shouted, really — that he knew that the Dantes had just left their wives and were hooking up that evening in the St. Regis.

Kim bowed her head slightly, appropriately embarrassed.

“Write it up!” Mario said to me of his declaration of the Dantes' mutual love.

Sure, why not?

Consider it written up.

What we ate and drank:

Stuzzichini:
by Dante Boccuzzi:
Truffled mortadella panino (the best bologna sandwich I’ve ever had).
“Caviar in a cloud” (American sturgeon roe in potato foam over cooked egg yolk)

by Dante de Magistris:
“Vitello tonnato“ (but with a piece of raw tuna instead of the traditional sauce made from canned tuna) with caluiflower giardiniera
Candied guanciale and artichoke dip
NV rosé brut Conti di Buscareto, (Ancona, Marche, Italy)
Crudo (by Dante Boccuzzi):
Long Island fluke with octopus garnish, blood oranges, extra virgin oil Toscano, mustard greens
(2009 Anima Umbria Bianco, Arnaldo Caprai, (Umbria, Italy)

Trota (by Dante de Magistris):
Mafalde pasta Alfredo, smoked trout, trout roe and black radish
2009 Grechetto, “Grecante,” Arnaldo Caprai, (still Umbria)

Quaglia:

by Dante Boccuzzi: Black pepper seared quail, black quinoa risotto, leeks, rosemary toasted pine nuts

by Dante de Magistris: Chestnut and porcini stuffed quail Milanese with pomegranate molasses and pear mostarda

2007 Montefalco Rosso, Arnaldo Caprai (you know the drill)

Cinghiale:

by Dante Boccuzzi (who said he’d never cooked boar before): Confit boar shoulder and prosciutto, persimmon compote, green garlic chives, yuzu soy gastrique

by Dante de Magistris: Slow roasted boar loin, peperonata, vincotto, cocoa, hazelnuts

2004 Sagrantino di Montefalco, “Collepiano,” Arnaldo Caprai...

Dolce:

by Dante Boccuzzi: Chocolate hazelnut arancino with caramelized bananas and passion fruit syrup

by Dante de Magistris: Chocolate eggplant pasticcio, amarena cherries, cedro citrus

NV “Cardamaro,” Giovanni Bosca, Canelli (Piedmont, Italy).

Marion Nestle on the new USDA dietary guidelines

2011-02-01T14:05:00.000-08:00

February 1

If you’re an avid follower of the quintennial release of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s dietary guidelines, then yesterday was a big day for you.

Or maybe it wasn’t. The guidelines were certainly released yesterday, but they weren’t earth shattering. At least that’s what Marion Nestle told me. I’m not an avid follower of the USDA’s five-year declaration, in conjunction with the Department of Health and Human Services, of what we should eat, so I don’t really know.

But apparently it was the same perfectly reasonable guidelines that say, basically, that you should eat a balanced diet. That’s stated in 23 specific recommendations — an improvement over the 43 recommendations in the last set of guidelines, according to Nestle, the Paulette Goddard Professor at New York University's Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health (and the department's former chair).

But she was delighted by the press materials that accompanied it, which underscored the fact that obesity is a huge health problem in the United States, with more than one third of children and more than two-thirds of adults being overweight.

The first bullet point in the press release announcing the guidelines: “Enjoy your food, but eat less.”
“That’s fantastic,” Nestle said: Clear, concise, to the point.

She said she wished the guidelines themselves were so pointed.

Indeed, the guidelines themselves don't say to eat less, they say to “control calories.”

Nestle, author of ”Food Politics,” among other books, says politics is the reason the USDA doesn’t come out and tell Americans to eat less. They tell us to eat fewer of certain ingredients (she said “nutrients,” but I think that term could confuse a lot of people in this context), such as sugar, sodium and saturated fat, and more of such foods as vegetables and whole grains.

Foods are only singled out when the USDA says to eat more of them, when it comes to eating less, the guidelines get more abstract.

That’s because the USDA oversees all American agricultural products, including grains that are made into simple carbohydrates and animal products that contain a lot of saturated fat. The corn and beef industries would have a fit if Americans were told to eat less of their food, Nestle said.

I’m not sure she singled out corn and beef in this particular conversation, but I know those are some of the foods she had in mind — we’ve spoken about this topic at length.

The basic thesis of "Food Politics" is that the United States produces far more calories per person than we should healthily consume, and that that fact is a fundamental reason for the obesity epidemic.

Lotus of wine

2011-01-28T16:09:00.000-08:00

January 28

Ben Weinberg expressed amazement at Lotus of Siam’s wine list.

My old high school friend and enthusiastic wine writer was in town for a big Italian wine shindig called Vino 2011 and wanted to have dinner.

I missed Monday’s report in The New York Times that the Chutima family, who founded Lotus of Siam in Las Vegas and recently opened an outpost in New York, had given up on the Big Apple venture, apparently as suddenly as they announced they were opening it a few months back.

What can I say? I have to write about the whole country, so I miss a lot of local news.

Besides, it's a big-name Thai restaurant within easy walking distance of NRN's new offices on 17th and 8th. Surely it was worth checking out regardless of the ownership.

Ben had two fellow wine people and a bottle of Franciacorta in tow.

Franciacorta’s basically the Italian answer to Champagne, priced similarly, accorded nearly as much respect by many wine experts, but not remotely as well known.

That, of course, means Franciacorta’s much cooler to drink than Champagne, because only people in the know have the wisdom to drink it.

I hadn’t looked at much of what the critics and bloggers had said about Lotus of Siam, because as a general rule New Yorkers don’t have the faintest idea what they’re talking about when it comes to Thai food, so their opinions do not interest me.

I’ve since glimpsed some of the reviews and comments and don’t understand why people think they should be comparing what’s basically a fine dining restaurant in an elegant space on 5th Avenue with hole-in-the-wall food in Queens. They’re different.

People don’t drop $200 per person at Daniel and say, “well, I could have had a croque madame at La Bonne Soupe at a fraction of the price.”

Of course you could have, and indeed you might have enjoyed it more — it depends on your mood, the occasion, what you’re trying to get out of the experience.

Compare Lotus of Siam to Kittichai if you like — both are fine dining, both have lost their original chefs as Ian Chalermkittichai left the restaurant at 60 Thompson years ago, both offer fine-dining trappings — but comparing them to Sripraphai or Ploy Thai or Pam Real Thai Food or Won Dee Siam is silly.

If you’re with wine people, Lotus of Siam is appropriate.

Typically I drink beer with my Thai food, but I must say that my dining companions’ choices were excellent and made for a really fun evening — at eight or nine times the price of many other Thai meals I’ve had in New York, but wine can do that. It was money well spent.

Before I list what I ate and drank I will take a moment to comment on the very nice staff’s odd persistence in getting us to try the Koong Sarong, which they insisted was fantastic. It’s shrimp wrapped in bacon, rolled in a spring roll wrapper and deep-fried, and that’s exactly what it tastes like. It’s fine, but it’s not Thai.

What we ate and drank:

Pik kha kra pao krob — crispy fried chicken wings tossed with chile garlic sauce & fried Thai basil
Nam kao tod crispy rice — crispy rice tossed with Thai sausage, fresh chile, ginger, peanuts & lime
Nam prik hed — roasted chile, garlic & onion dip, pounded in a mortar (it was similar to nam phrik noom)
Northern larb — minced pork with spices and Thai herbs (without lime, unlike Issan laab).
Tenuta Mazzolino Oltrepo Pavese Cruase DOCG Franciacorta
Vincent Mothe Chablis, 2008

Kaeng khiao wan (green curry) with chicken
Moo krathiam prik thai — stir-fried pork with garlic and black pepper
Braised short rib penang
Julienas 'Clos du Fief,' Michel Tete 2009 (a fun and inspired choice by Doug Cook, creator of a wine search engine called able grape)

Koong Sarong (remember? the bacon-and-shrimp dish)
Sua rong hai (it literally means “crying tiger,” please let me know if you know why) — grilled, marinated rib eye with chile-kaffir lime dipping sauce
Pla koong — grilled shrimp salad with sliced red onion, lime, Thai herbs and lettuce
Donnhoff Riesling Spatlese ‘Norheimer Kirschneck’ 2002

Aaron Deal watch

2011-01-13T07:53:00.000-08:00

January 13

Do you know why I report on every new job that Aaron Deal gets? Quite apart from the fact that he’s a talented chef who gets high-profile jobs, he tells me when he gets them. It’s a great way to get press, alerting the media.

Keep that in mind.

Anyway, Aaron, who most recently was in Chilhowie, Va., working at Townhouse for John and Karen Shields, has moved up to Boston, where he’s Tony Maws’ chef de cuisine at Craigie on Main.

There actually have been a number of high-profile chef changes recently, which, naturally, you can read about in Nation’s Restaurant News.

Bizarre coincidences from Andy’s birthday party

2011-01-10T15:01:00.000-08:00

January 10

You might recall that I went to an Icelandic fashion show the other day. I neglected to mention that there was a singer at the show, too. He just sang one song and it was hard to hear over the audience, which completely ignored him. I didn’t catch his name, and so I just let it go.

Then, there he was, sitting across from me on Saturday at my good friend Andy Battaglia’s birthday party.

He was Andy’s house guest, you see.

It turns out that he’s Snorri Helgason, a musician of some note in Iceland, where he’s the lead singer of a bang called Sprengjuhöllin.

Snorri lives in London, released a solo album in late 2009 and is doing some performances in the U.S. I’m not sure why he’s staying with Andy, but Andy is a music writer of some note (and the proud owner of two ukuleles), so it all makes sense in a way.

After we finished drinking at The Roebling Inn (I drank a fairly dark IPA from the Hudson Valley called Hurricane Kitty), we went back to the apartment of Andy and his girlfriend, Jennifer Prediger, and Snorri and fellow band member Atli Bollason (sitting on the far left in the video), who was visiting from Montreal, performed a song that I managed to find on YouTube and posted here.

It’s called “Worry till Spring” in English, but in Icelandic it’s “Verum í Sambandi,” which consular official Hlynur Gudjonsson tells me means “let’s stay in touch.”

More small-world stuff from the party: Andy’s girlfriend Jennifer is a documentary producer, among other things, and at Andy’s party I learned that she produced my friend Rachel Wharton’s “Let’s Eat” spots on NY1.

I often say that it’s not really a small world. In fact, it’s a big world with more than six billion people and encompassing every experience that every human being has ever had. Indeed, the world is not just the world, for most practical purposes it’s our entire universe. It’s huge.

But really, it’s a small world.

Icelandic food and fashion

2011-01-06T13:02:00.000-08:00

January 6

I was not a high-ranking reporter at the fashion show I went to last night.

When I checked in they handed me a card with the letter ‘C’ on it, meaning I was to be seated in the third of three rows.

That briefly hurt my feelings until I remembered that I wasn’t a fashion writer.

I was at the show, at Volvo Hall in New York’s Scandinavia House (does it it surprise you that Scandinavia House has a Volvo Hall? I didn't think so), as a guest of Hlynur Gudjonsson of the Icelandic consulate, whom I met at a lunch a couple of years ago, just as his country’s economy was on the brink of ruin.

An Icelandic outerwear company called 66° North was holding a fashion show last night, and it was being catered by Lava restaurant at The Blue Lagoon, a hot spring that’s a short detour from the road between Iceland’s Capital, Reykjavík, and the national airport.

Hlynur and I agreed that the food was reason enough for me to go to the show.

Nordic food isn’t exactly all the rage these days, but there is a lot of buzz about it, largely due to my fellow food writers’ current love affair with René Redzepi, chef of the much ballyhooed Noma restaurant in Copenhagen. But there are other factors at work, too (I wrote about them last July).

So I sipped a cocktail made from Icelandic vodka and ate assorted delicacies. The one pictured above is brandade with tarragon mayonnaise and rye bread. The bread is crumbled on top and looks like dirt, as is the current fashion.

Speaking of fashion, I didn’t realize until it started that this was the first proper fashion show, with a catwalk and everything, that I’d ever attended.

And I realized what a terrible, miserable job being a fashion model must be. I mean, you’re basically a coat rack, but it’s still hard work. You have to stand up straight and walk smoothly and no-doubt spend hours waiting to put on the clothing and walk out on a runway for a few seconds so everyone can look not at you but the clothing that someone made you wear.

The models themselves looked beyond bored. They looked downright resentful — so much so that I wondered if they were instructed to look that way for some reason or if they just couldn’t help it.

My phone’s camera was not up to the task of taking pictures that brought out the models’ inner pain. The one on the right was the best I could do. But here are some good ones from the blog Her Campus.

What else I ate:

lamb filet with peanuts and basil

smoked Arctic char with celery root purée

fried langoustine with garlic and Jerusalem artichoke

dill-cured salmon with (honey) mustard on toast

skyr with blueberry and crumbles

Food Writer's Diary readers like local ingredients, burgers not so much

2011-01-04T09:43:00.000-08:00

January 4

Well reader, you spoke loud and clear about the trends you liked in 2010 and what you’d like to see less of in 2011.

You like local and seasonal ingredients and you’ve had enough of burgers and sliders.
The results are pasted below. If you’d like to see what a news story about the poll looks like, click here.

This is a big year at Nation’s Restaurant News. We were just sold to Penton Media, and we’ll be moving offices later this month, leaving Midtown East for Chelsea (17th Street between Seventh and Eight avenues, closer to Eighth Avenue — lunch recommendations are welcome).

This blog will be moving, too, and will be hosted at nrn.com. I'll probably be cross-posting at both sites for awhile, and of course I’ll let you know as all of that develops. It should mean that I’ll be updating this blog more regularly from now on, and I hope that’s good news for you.

Below, please find the results of the latest poll.

My favorite food trend in 2010 was:

local/seasonal: 38 (58%)

small plates: 12 (18%)

comfort food: 7 (10%)

pork: 7 (10%)

burgers/sliders: 1 (1%)

Total votes: 65

The 2010 food trend I hope to see less of in 2011 is:

local/seasonal: 3 (6%)

small plate: 3 (6%)

comfort food: 4 (8%)

pork: 8 (17%)

burgers/sliders: 29 (61%)

Total votes: 47

Food Writer's Diary end-of-year poll

2010-12-15T10:40:00.000-08:00

December 15

I have one final poll for you this year, asking your favorite and least favorite food trends in 2010. I’ve listed on the right what seem to me to be probably the five biggest food trends of the year (I welcome disagreement, of course; feel free to berate and chastise me in the comment section below). Please select the one you like the best (whatever that means to you) and the one you hope not to see in 2011.

Thank you.

Eat this, not that, or maybe eat all of it

2010-12-13T12:40:00.000-08:00

December 13

I just wanted to quickly paste a link to Men’s Health’s “20 Worst Foods in America.”

I’m not linking to it to tell you what foods to avoid. I think you should eat whatever you like, and if you want to try to stay reasonably healthy it makes sense to eat a balanced diet and get some exercise.

That, however, will in no way keep you from getting hit by a bus or falling victim to whatever congenital conditions you might have, or prevent cancer (it might cut down on your chances of getting cancer, although it depends).

But the reason I wanted to post that link is because some chain restaurant executives have told me that getting your food highlighted as being bad for you actually can be a boon to sales.

They’re not sure whether that’s because people want to say “You’re not the boss of me,” to Men’s Health or because just mentioning those dishes gives people a craving for them, but they’ve definitely seen sales go up.

Drinks at PDT (and way more information than you need to know about the house I grew up in)

2010-12-10T15:20:00.000-08:00

December 10

Kim Yorio definitely didn’t know what she was getting into when she invited me to have drinks with her and Holly Arnold Kinney at PDT. She didn’t even remember that I was from Colorado.

Holly and I vaguely remembered meeting one another a few years ago at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen — we’re not exactly certain of the circumstances, but we’re pretty sure that Ti Martin was there — and I knew that my father had been friends with her father, legendary restaurateur Sam Arnold of The Fort.

Oh, but there was so much more.

It turned out that my dad, Bill Thorn, had been involved in producing a documentary about her dad and The Fort in the 1960s, and we also learned that Holly had been to the house where I grew up in Denver many times.

My parents had bought the house some years before we moved in, and for a couple of years their tenant was the Divine Light Mission, a religious offshoot of Hinduism whose followers did a lot of meditating.

Holly was in the Divine Light Mission as a young mother in the early 1970s, and she frequented the house, which had been turned into an ashram.

“That’s a great house!” she said, and so we were instantly friends, because it’s nice to say positive things about someone’s childhood home.

It is, conversely, mean to say negative things about someone’s childhood home. It’s important to remember that.

I’m pretty sure Kim thought we were going to talk about Holly’s new cookbook, which is also a sort of mémoire and history of The Fort, where Holly also lived, above the restaurant, in her early years.

Before Kim got to PDT, Holly and I actually did look through the book in our booth at the back of the bar. She showed me pictures of her pet bear, Sissy, a 6'5" 700-pound black bear that used to take naps with her. So Sam Arnold called his daughter “she who sleeps with bears.”

“She had been de-clawed,” Holly told me, as if that made it safe. She said the stuffed bear that’s part of PDT’s décor upset her a bit.

Anyway, the bear lived at The Fort for something like 19 years without serious incident, although Holly said it did occasionally startle customers who wandered out back.

Holly’s father and mine also both died at the same age, 79. Sam died a few years ago, and my dad died last year.

After he died, my mother, living alone with her two dogs in the former ashram, was left with the question of what to do with the house.

It looked almost certain that my brother and his family would move in, but instead the house is now once again a home of communal living.

My mom is now renting rooms to an adorable group of hippie-esque 20-somethings who write poetry and form drum circles and work for recycling companies and make chalk drawings on the sidewalk outside.

They sit around and drink wine and talk about ideas, and I just want to put them all in my pocket and take them home, except they’re already there.

The picture at the beginning of this entry is of Plus Randomity by Ron Kessinger. The picture was taken by Nick Orf, one of my mom’s housemates, a street performer and just a sweetheart of a guy. It’s emblematic of cool things in the house.

Randomity is a term from Scientology that as far as I can tell pretty much means “randomness.” I’m not sure why they used the -ity suffix, but they didn’t ask me.

So Plus Randomity basically means “sensory overload.” As you can probably see in the picture, it’s a giant horn with strings and a drum attached, and you can make a lot of noise with it.

The mobile in the bell is actually an addition made by my mother.

What I drank at PDT (descriptions graciously sent to me by the enduringly affable boss of PDT, James Meehan, because I was too rapt in conversation to take notes):

THE GOLD COAST

Karlsson’s Vodka, Swedish Punsch, Dill,

Black Pepper Essence

Jim Meehan created this old-fashioned style

cocktail spiked with punsch, herbs and spice

after visiting the Bjäre Peninsula in southern

Sweden where the golden potatoes used to make

Karlsson’s vodka are grown.

MEZCAL MULE

Sombra Mezcal, Lime Juice, Passion Fruit

Purée, House Ginger Beer, Cucumber, Chili

A backyard barbeque in a glass, this spicy passion

fruit and cucumber buck gets its smoky quality from

mezcal distilled from agaves roasted in a handmade

underground oven heated by wood-fired stones.

Chicago Michelin guide retweeted

2010-11-16T15:25:00.000-08:00

November 16

The big news in American fine dining today was, of course, the release of the first Michelin guide for Chicago restaurants.

If you were awarded a star, heartfelt congratulations. If you weren’t, remember, it’s just a guide book by a tire company.

Being the branché hep cat that I am, I had my TweetDeck up and followed yesterday’s apparent leaking to Yelp of the list of restaurants anointed with stars and today’s reaction by its winners.

There’s not much more to say than that, except that one of the two three-star restaurants, L20, recently lost its chef, although perhaps just temporarily, making the brand new book already a bit obsolete. People who know the Chicago restaurant scene much better than I are already doing their analysis, and will likely pillory it the way it was pilloried in New York and San Francisco.

I think I’ll just let the chefs speak for themselves, as they did through their twitter accounts.

Paul Kahan, whose restaurant Blackbird got a star, but his restaurant Avec did not:

@PaulKahan

Avec?

@Paul Kahan

In the begining, they didn't understand the clash either. Avec rules.

Curtis Duffy, whose restaurant Avenues got two stars:

@curtisduffy

Feeling for the Michelin Release on Wednesday: excited, enlivened,psyched, edgy, anxious, restless,tense! What will it be?

@curtisduffy

It's official Avenues gets 2 Michelin Stars! Thank you to my team from the past and the present! Amazing!

Grant Achatz, whos restaurant Alinea got three stars:

@Gachatz

What does it mean when Jean Luc Naret films NBC news show from your dining room on the morning of the release? I guess we will find out...

@Gachatz

True??? How do they deal with chef Gras' departure? http://tinyurl.com/2b239xz

Graham Elliot Bowles, whose restaurant graham elliot got a star:

@grahamelliot

My name may be on the door but this star belongs to the GE team. From chef de cuisine to dishwasher, sommelier to busser...job well done XO

@grahamelliot graham elliot

Congrats!! Official 2010 Chicago Michelin-Starred Restaurants http://bit.ly/9cgSfK

@grahamelliot graham elliot

Graham Elliot Spoofs Jean-Luc Naret on His Voicemail eater.cc/akYZrb via @EaterChicago

NoMI restaurant, which got a star:

@NoMIchicago

Thank You! We are very excited! RT @Audarshia CONGRATS to @NoMIChicago for its one star @MichelinGuidechi!

@NoMIchicago

RT @JLynnePR Wish I had more than 140 characters to recognize all of the @MichelinGuideCH honorees - Congrats to all. Chicago is very proud.

@NoMIchicago NoMI

Congrats to all! RT @ChicagoCVBPR Congrats to Blackbird, Boka, NoMi, Seasons, Sixteen, Spiaggia, Topolobampo, Tru, Vie, NAHA for a star!

Carrie Nahabedian, whose restaurant NAHA got a star:

@cnaha

Michelin Guide Chicago winners appear to have been leaked | Consumer | Crain's Chicago Business shar.es/0N3vK

@cnaha

Great 10year anniversary gift. A Michelin star and a phone call! Congrats to all our friends, it is such an honor. LOVE our NAHA staff! Xox

RT @MichaelNagrant

I've been tough on Charlie Trotter over the years, but most of these Michelin stars don't exist without him and Jean Banchet. Bravo.

@cnaha

is having a glass of Champagne.

The usually twitter-loquacious Rick Bayless, whose Topolobampo got a Michelin Star, and which also recently got a three-star certification from the Green Restaurant Association, actually was pretty succinct:

@Rick_Bayless

Thanks!! T @GreenChicago: A Michelin Star AND Guaranteed Green - CONGRATULATIONS @619blackbird and @Rick_Bayless!!!

@Rick_Bayless

Thanks to all of you who've sent your congratulations on Topolobampo's star from Michelin. Needless to say, our staff is really proud!!

And finally Paul Virant, whose restaurant Vie got a star.

@jarstarvie

Alright, Facebook friends! It's official!! Chef Paul Virant just received the good news: Vie has been awarded a... http://fb.me/Es8uaWlH

@jarstarvie

We're so excited to be included in the very first Michelin Guide for Chicago! http://fb.me/Er5p7wAM

@jarstarvie

We knew our staff was the best, but it's nice to know that others agree! Congrats to the whole crew on the... http://fb.me/Leht3we3

@jarstarvie

What do you say? Chef Paul Virant for Mayor of Western Springs??

RT@alpanasingh Alpana Singh

@jarstarvie I worked w/Paul and would 2nd that! One of the nicest, most thoughtful human beings put on this earth. Whole family is great.

RT@ChicagoBites Chicago Bites

[Post] Michelin: Comparing ratings from around the Web http://bit.ly/co5TVK

@jarstarvie Paul Virant

If you're interested in buying the Michelin Guide, it will be available 11/18. http://fb.me/AVKGNipC

And for the record, the winners:

Three stars:

Alinea

L2O

Two stars:

Avenues

Charlie Trotter’s
Ria

One star:

Blackbird 

Boka 

Bonsoirée

Crofton on Wells 

Everest 

graham elliot 

Longman & Eagle 

NAHA 

NoMI 

Schwa 

Seasons 

Sepia

Sixteen

Spiaggia

Takashi

Topolobampo

Tru

Vie     

Takashi’s dashi

2010-11-07T03:46:00.000-08:00

November 6

“Look, I have goose bumps,” Suvir Saran told me.

It was true. He had goose bumps.

Suvir, Indian chef extraordinaire, chairman for Asian culinary studies at The Culinary Institute of America, and just a puppydog of a sweet guy, had just finished telling Takashi Yagihashi how awesome he was for figuratively staring his Japanese compatriots down.

Takashi, you see, had — on stage, in front of everybody at the Worlds of Flavor conference — added ground duck to dashi and then used a coffee siphon to infuse it with lemon grass and kaffir lime leaf.

It seemed to me like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Indeed, I'd seen a coffee siphon — you might have seen these things, especially if you were drinking coffee in a hotel in Bangkok in the mid-’90s as they were all over that city at the time; they look like glass, high-tech percolators — used to infuse similar herbs into lobster stock at David Burke Town House in New York last year.

But Suvir told me that Japanese chefs would have regarded such acts as desecration of sacred dashi — the broth made by steeping kombu seaweed and then skipjack flakes (often called bonito flakes, but I’m told it’s really skipjack) in hot water. Dashi is the Great Mother Broth of Japanese cuisine, the source of much of the umami that makes their food so delicious.

For the record, and I wish this were the last time I’d have to write this but I know it's not, umami is basically just the flavor of protein. That’s it. It can be enhanced by exposing more of the bits of protein that trigger the umami receptors in our mouths — the amino acid glutamate along with certain nucleotides and other assorted protein components — but that’s all it is. It's one of our five tastes, along with sweetness, sourness, bitterness and saltiness. It’s not some mystical quality from the mysterious Orient. It’s just a taste. If you want to know what it tastes like, put some powdered MSG on your tongue.

If I’d taken a shot of shochu every time someone on stage said “umami” during the conference I’m pretty sure I would have died from alcohol poisoning.

Anyway, Takashi — who is the chef-owner of his eponymous restaurant in Chicago, although he’s probably better known for his work as executive chef of Tribute in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills, Mich. — souped up his dashi and served it around sashimi of geoduck clam that he garnished with sliced lotus root that sandwiched a shrimp mousseline and then was dipped in cornstarch and sautéed. Also in the dish was shiso leaf and two pieces of daikon, and the picture of it that accompanies this blog entry was sent to me from the smart phone of Will Dunbar, food & beverage director for the River Rock Casino in Geyserville, Calif., who had the presence of mind to take the picture.

In his notes, Will declared the dish to be “ridiculous,” but that, I soon learned, is the word he uses for foods that are unexpected, extraordinary and brilliant.

But Suvir was sure that the 39 chefs visiting from Japan would have found Takashi’s dish to be ridiculous in the more usual sense of the word and were possibly ridiculing it at that moment, while we were enjoying the day’s buffet lunch and congratulating Takashi, who gave us fist bumps and wandered off.

Then Suvir showed me his goose bumps.

Worlds of Flavor: The CIA does Japan

2010-11-04T23:52:00.000-07:00

November 4

Did you know that Ruth Reichl’s an editor-at-large for Random House now?

That’s not the only thing I learned on the first day of The Culinary Institute of America’s 13th annual Worlds of Flavor conference, but I thought it was pretty interesting, nonetheless — almost as interesting as the fact that the Japanese used to throw away the fatty parts of the bluefin tuna in favor of the leaner parts.

That changed after the Japanese developed an appreciation of beef and thus also an appreciation for the fatty, marbled belly of the bluefin.

At least that’s what Yousuke Imada said, through a translator, as he was curing shad during the conference's first demonstration. Imada’s the chef-owner of Kyubey, a five-unit chain specializing in sushi and sashimi with four restaurants in Tokyo and a fifth in Osaka.

“Japan: Flavors of Culture” is the theme of this year’s Worlds of Flavor. It’s the first one I’ve been to, and so far, so good.

I’m a bit skeptical of the tuna-belly “fact,” though. Sometimes information like that gets a bit messed up in translation (although I must say the interpreter at the conference is one of the best I’ve ever encountered), and sometimes chefs who are very skilled at slicing tuna or assessing how much salt to sprinkle onto a shad have an incomplete grasp of history (or of nutrition, or modern animal husbandry or animal rights or the details of genetic modification or the effects on the metabolism of high fructose corn syrup or other aspects of food that they’re often asked to discuss).

Or maybe the Japanese used to throw away tuna bellies. It’s not like I know everything.

I’m more confident of the fact that the former editor-in-chief of Gourmet is now editing at Random House. Because she told me she was, and I’m just not an important enough person in her life for her to lie to me. I think this was only the second or third time we’d ever met.

She was speaking with White House pastry chef Bill Yosses, who was taking a break from his presentation of adzuki beans layered with chocolate and served as an Opera pastry.

The organizers of the conference let us off easy today. They introduced themselves and the conference sponsors and then just had one presentation, by Japanese author and cooking-school owner Yoshiki Tsuji, who has the excellent qualities of speaking beautiful Cambridge English and also having the sort of cute Japanese sense of humor that meant his PowerPoint presentation had cartoon drawings of animals who had eaten too much (having gorged themselves on the cuisine of Osaka) and others imploring us to wake up.

I'm going to have to figure out how to put cute Japanese cartoons in my presentations.

The lecture part of Tsuji's presentation actually came after three brief cooking demonstrations — the first, as I mentioned, by Imada-san, the second, of a sea bream soup that would be part of a kaiseki meal, by Kyoto chef Yoshihiro Takahashi, who's the managing director and third-generation chef of Kinobu in that city, and the third by Kunio Tokuola, who is also the third-generation owner of a restaurant in Kyoto, called Kyôto Kitcho, but his demonstration was of an Osaka-style preparation made of herbs and flowers and other ingredients meant, basically, to look beautiful. Apparently in Osaka kaiseki, each dish is meant to express a different aspect of enjoyment of the meal — flavor, aroma, what have you. Tokuoka's dish, which he called Yamoki Kashima and is meant to evoke a Chinese folk tale, was supposed to represent beauty.

And it was beautiful. I should have taken a picture.

Or maybe not. I neglected to bring the wire with the company camera that would let me download the pictures immediately for you, which is why instead you have a picture of a flower arrangement from one of the sake booths at the “marketplace” and walk-around tasting that followed the Tsuji-san show. I used my cell phone to take it and, well, let’s just say my cell phone pictures are best viewed as abstract images.

Of course the food was good — lots of tasty fish in dashi with other elements added, a surprising number of pork belly presentations, indicating that that particular cut of meat has at least one winter of life left in it, and something I hadn’t seen before — “Delacata.” That’s what the catfish folk are calling a farm-raised variety of the fish that their letting grow to about three times the size of the usual farm-raised catfish, making it a suitable substitute in some preparations for grouper, Chilean sea bass and other species that have, by many accounts, been over-fished.

So that was new.

So is the cotton candy at Golden Corral, which corporate chef Debra Olson told me the chain was rolling out. I asked if she was going to be adding Japanese food to the Golden Corral buffet soon.

She said: “You never know.”

Venison

2010-10-19T14:22:00.000-07:00

October 19

I wanted to comment about a tweet I made the other day: “Venison two nights in a row. Is it the protein of this fall?”

It occurred to me that maybe you thought I was weird, that just because I had chosen to eat venison two nights in a row didn’t mean everyone else was eating it. Who was I, some genius so plugged into the Zeitgeist of the modern American dining world that, if I was eating something, so was everyone else?

And you’d have a point, except that I often don’t choose what I eat. At the sort of dinner’s I’m often invited to, they don’t give you a choice. You show up, sit down, and they bring you whatever they’re showcasing. They generally provide you with a printed menu of what you’ll be eating, but you don’t get to pick anything, you just eat it.

That’s probably my third favorite way to eat in restaurants, because I don't have to think about anything. I can just sit there and let the whole experience wash over me.

My second favorite way to eat is alone in a nice restaurant, off the clock, without having to talk to anybody or meet anyone’s expectations. That approach might drop in my esteem if I did it very often, but I don’t.

My favorite way is a Maryland-style crab boil, with newspapers on the table, a mallet, and crab juice dripping down my arm.

Anyway, I made that tweet from The Four Seasons restaurant, where I was having dinner at a 10-top in the pool room with my friend Jennifer Watson. It was, believe it or not, The Four Seasons’ first-ever Spanish wine dinner. It’s 2010 already, and that landmark restaurant has wine dinners all the time, but I guess they’ve mostly been focused on French and Italian wines.

But The Four Seasons isn’t known as being super-progressive. It sails its own course and does just fine with that. It did try to get a bit more hip late last year when it hired celebrity-ish chef Fabio Trabocchi as its executive chef, but that only lasted for about three months.

That’s not to say that the food at the restaurant is boring or bad, but you don’t go there to be cutting-edge, you go there, well, for a lot of reasons.

Back in 2007, when Frank Bruni reviewed the restaurant for The New York Times and demoted it from three stars to two, I remember talking to eater.com founder Ben Leventhal about it. This was actually right before the review came out, but Ben, a native New Yorker (Upper East Side, I’m pretty sure), who knows perfectly well what places like The Four Seasons are all about, said the newspaper was wasting its time reviewing the place. A Times review can put a restaurant on the map, and it can damage the prestige of many restaurants, but The Four Seasons is The Four Seasons. People eat there to have power lunches or to enjoy the setting or to say they’ve eaten there or because they always have eaten there. What the Times says about it doesn’t make a lick of difference, Ben said. And I think he was right.

So the main course during the Spanish dinner, paired with a big, lusty 2005 Clos L'Obac Priorat, was roasted venison loin with huckleberries — a classic combination, although it would have been considered trendy in 1999, which was The Year of the Huckleberry.

Indeed, back at the turn of the century venison was all over fall menus, but you just don’t see it much these days.

Then on the following night, I had dinner at the James Beard House, where the featured chef was Ty Thoren of the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center in Dallas (where MUFSO is being held next year). Ty might live in Texas now, but he’s originally from Ithaca, N.Y., and talks faster than your average downstater. I’m not sure what his hurry was, but we sat down to dinner at around 7:45 and were out of there before 10.

That's a good thing.

What I ate and drank:

At The Four Seasons:

Fluke, tuna and mackerel carpaccio

2009 Albariño, La Cana

king salmon with roasted porcini mushrooms

2000 Bodegas Muga, Rioja, Prado Enea “Grand Reserva”

2001 Bodegas Muga, Rioja, Prado Enea “Grand Reserva”

2005 Bodegas Muga, Rioja, Torre Muga

Roasted duch breast with Hudson Valley foie gras

2005 Emilio Moro, Ribera del Duero, Malleollus

2006 Emilio Moro, Ribera del Duero, Valderramiro

2006 Emilio Moro, Ribera del Duero, Sancho Martin

Filet of lamb with black truffle

2007 Bodegas Alto Moncayo, Campo de Borja, Alto Moncayo

2006 Bodegas Alto Moncayo, Campo de Borja, Aquilon

Roasted venison loin with huckleberries

2005 Clos L’Obac, Priorato

Christopher’s Dream (that would be pastry chef Christopher Broberg)

2007 Victoria, Jorge Ordóñez, Malaga

(oh, and Four Seasons has two co-executive chefs these days, Pecko Zantilaveevan and Larry Finn)

At the Beard House with chef Ty Thoren:

Grilled Texas quail with jalapeño–bacon vinaigrette and butternut squash succotash

Veramonte Chardonnay Reserva 2008

Fire-roasted poblano soup with oven-dried tomatoes

Flowers Sonoma Coast Chardonnay 2008

Cilantro and ancho–rubbed ahi tuna with chile–chipotle barbecue sauce and jícama slaw

Flowers Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir 2008

Mesquite-smoked venison chop with spicy pomegranate glaze, crispy cheese grit cake, and braised greens with tumbleweed onions

Faust Cabernet Sauvignon 2007

Caramelized apple lattice tart with white chocolate–cardamom sauce

Burger King’s new breakfast items

2010-09-16T13:15:00.000-07:00

September 16

If you ever wondered what a Burger King would look like if it had a velvet rope in front of it, wonder no longer. Just look to your left.

BK’s corporate folks roped off this franchised location in Midtown Manhattan (34th St., between Seventh and Eighth avenues) to invite the New York City media to try some of the chain’s new breakfast items, which they launched last week.

As you might imagine, New York City food writers can be pretty snotty when it comes to fast food. The last time BK threw a similar shindig, to introduce us to its new batch broiler, one of my fellow writers expressed shock to me that he actually enjoyed his hamburger.

Snotty, but open-minded.

Today one of the guests, who may or may not have been an idiot, declined when a server (oh yes, there are servers at these events, and tablecloths and metal cutlery and actual glasses for water — very classy) asked if she’d like some blueberry biscuits.

One of her table mates pointed out that this was, in fact, a tasting and that she should at the very least taste them.

Yeah, probably she was an idiot.

You can see the best picture I took of the biscuits on the right (note the classy blue tablecloth underneath). Beauty shots from BK can be seen here.

They also gave us a sausage, egg and cheese Croissan'wich®, which I didn't bother to take a picture of because they’ve been around forever.

On the left is a picture of the relatively new breakfast bowl, which corporate chef Jason Sullivan described as being everything you’d want in an omelet, but in a bowl instead.

This one had roasted potatoes, grilled onions and peppers, sausage and cheese, along with eggs that “Chef J,” as the company likes to call him, said were scrambled in-house.

I asked if unit employees were actually cracking eggs and scrambling them, which of course they’re not. He said the pasteurized eggs come in standard pre-cracked foodservice form and are scrambled and cooked usually in a microwave, except at units, like the ones in Mexico, that have a griddle insert that can be put on top of the fryer.

He said they’re not supposed to be held for more than 20 minutes.

We also had pancakes, which I photographed, too, but you already know what pancakes look like, and the new breakfast ciabatta club sandwich.

Chef J said the "smoky tomato sauce" is supposed to remind us of sun-dried tomatoes, and the raw tomatoes and bacon are supposed to remind us of club sandwiches.

I bet you didn’t know chefs at quick service burger chains thought so much about their food, did you?

genetically modified salmon

2010-09-08T13:39:00.000-07:00

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is considering approving the first genetically modified animal for human consumption. It's a salmon that has been modified to grow faster than other Atlantic salmon. The company that developed the fish says they are sterile and would be raised in inland pools to prevent their mixing and breeding with wild salmon.

How does that sound to you?

That’s the subject of my next poll, which I'm just putting up until 1pm tomorrow, which is when I have to finish writing the story.

As always, feel free to comment below.

And below are the results from my last poll.
Quite interesting, I thought:

HOW MUCH MORE WOULD YOU PAY FOR LOCAL INGREDIENTS IN A RESTAURANT?
nothing:8 (5%)
less than 10%: 14 (10%)
10%-25%: 76 (54%)
25%-50%: 24 (17%)
50%-75%: 3 (2%)
75%-100%: 4 (2%)
More than double: 1 (0%)
It depends: 9 (6%)
Total votes: 139

Aaron Deal watch

2010-09-08T08:06:00.000-07:00

September 8

The last time we heard from Aaron Deal, he and Custom House in Chicago had parted ways and he was looking for a new job.

He's still looking, but for now he’s moving to Chilhowie, Va., to work with chef John Shields and pastry chef Karen Shields at Townhouse, a restaurant widely praised for its culinary innovation, most notably, perhaps, by Food & Wine magazine, which named John one of the country’s ten best new chefs earlier this year.

I, personally, like the fact that John makes food that looks like dirt and rocks, like the picture on the right that they sent to me last year.

John says he’s inspired by the bucolic countryside, which he likes to reflect on the plate.

I suspect Aaron will have a fun autumn in Chilhowie, and maybe he’ll get to avoid that nasty Chicago winter.

Frank Bonanno’s next restaurant

2010-09-01T13:31:00.000-07:00

September 1

Well the work load here at NRN is just crazy, but I wanted to pop into the blog very briefly, to let you know that I was vacationing in Denver recently and hope to find time to report on that.

Also, speaking of Denver, I just got off the phone with restaurateur Frank Bonanno, who told me he’s scheduled to close on a property on September 9 in the Highlands, where he plans to open that French-style charcuterie that has been talked about since May (or really April, I guess.

Plans now are to call it Lou’s Food Bar and to serve a whole bunch of house-made pâtés and sausages.

Frank said he also has plans to open a bar somewhere, but he decided to stay tight-lipped on the details of that.

How much are local ingredients worth to you?

2010-08-17T08:25:00.000-07:00

August 17

For my latest poll, I’d like to ask you how much more you’d be willing to spend for local products in restaurants. Polls being polls, they’re imprecise, so please comment below if you have something to say about what local ingredients are worth paying for (seasonal grapes or corn, say) and which ones aren’t (I don’t know, ketchup maybe).

Thank you.

Regarding my last poll, about what you thought Seamus Mullen would do next now that he has left Boqueria, most readers had no interest in such speculation, but here are the results from the seven voters:

Open a cute snout-to-tail restaurant in New York 3 (42%)

Open a cute snout-to-tail restaurant in another city 1 (14%)

Launch a new burger concept with hopes of turning it into a chain 1 (14%)

Get a job at a country club to make money and live a less hectic life 0 (0%)

Leave foodservice to become a full-time celebrity chef, possibly with a gig on Dancing with the Stars. 0 (0%)

Become a chef at someone else’s restaurant, possibly with Danny Meyer or Steve Hanson 0 (0%)

Something else. 2 (28%)

What will Seamus Mullen do next?

2010-08-06T12:09:00.000-07:00

August 6

People who follow the New York restaurant scene closely were likely surprised and possibly saddened when it was announced several weeks ago that Seamus Mullen had left his job as executive chef and owner of Boqueria.

Naturally, I asked Seamus what he was up to next, and he didn’t respond. That’s fair. It’s my job as a journalist to ask, it’s not his job to answer if he doesn’t feel like it.

However he was good enough to send me a recent picture of himself so I could illustrate a blog entry about him. He sent it with the message: “headshots coming to you from Havana...”

So he was either in Cuba or engaging in a complicated plot of subterfuge, and I don't think he takes me seriously enough to bother with subterfuge.

But it means we get to speculate, and that’s always fun.

What do you think Seamus Mullen will do next? Is he in Cuba doing research for some Latin-American-themed place, or is he just on vacation?

Will he open a new restaurant in New York, or will he try his hand in a new market, like former Buddakan chef Lon Symensma recently said he’d be doing?

Or has he had enough of the day-to-day restaurant rat race and possibly heading to lower-stress and probably higher paying jobs, like former Daniel executive chef Alex Lee, who's currently in charge of the food at Glen Oaks Country Club in Old Westbury New York (NRN’s classified ads saleswoman Leslie Wolowitz says the food is phenomenal), or like former Oceana executive chef Cornelius Gallagher, who's currently corporate chef for the Long Island-based Bohlsen Restaurant Group (and, I hear, considering joining the growing number of restaurateurs who are serving wine out of kegs)?

I’ll leave the speculation up to you with the poll on the right. If you have different guesses about what he’s doing, please write a comment below.

And Seamus, if you’re out there, obviously we’d love to hear from you. Just say “hi” if you like.

Strawberry’s star-studded Sports Grill

2010-08-05T14:18:00.000-07:00

“Excuse me, why do you think you were invited to this?”

That looks worse in writing than it sounded. Nadia, the woman in back of me on the bus, wasn’t asking me what made me think I was supposed to be on the bus. She wasn't assuming that I wasn’t invited and had somehow sneaked on.

Or, gosh, maybe she was. She did point out the guy on the bus I was supposed to check in with. Is it possible that I’ve finally evolved to a point where it doesn’t even cross my mind that I might be spotted as a fraud who doesn’t belong on the same bus as fabulous people?

At any rate, I thought Nadia was, like me, just trying to figure out who all these people were.

I did notice that it was a handsome crowd, and the guy sitting next to Nadia looked familiar, like he was part of that good-looking set of food and lifestyle writers (mostly lifestyle writers, except for Andrew Knowlton) whom I notice from time to time.

Is there a group word, like herd or gaggle, for impossibly tall, thin and leggy blond models? Bevy, I guess.

Well a bevy of them came onto the bus shortly before it pulled away. They all sat together, possibly in the same seat. And then I knew I was going to one of those parties.

I told Nadia I was a food writer, and so I tended to get invited to restaurant openings, like the opening of Strawberry's Sports Grill that we were all going to, braving the traffic to head to the Queens-Nassau County border.

The restaurant is owned in part by New York Mets legend Darryl Strawberry. It hadn’t occurred to me that it was one of those parties that celebrities go to, but in retrospect it should have.

How about Nadia? What did she do?

“I’m an actor.”

“Oh, where do you act?” I asked, because of course New York has a lot of actors, tens of thousands of them I’d guess.

“TV,” she said.

I cringed as I asked the ridiculous question of whether I was supposed to know her.

It’s a stupid question, to which the only civilized answer is “no,” which she gave, and told me she was next going to be on The Big C, on Showtime with Laura Linney.

I introduced myself to the guy next to her, hoping we hadn't met before and now assuming that I recognized him because I’d seen him acting somewhere. “Mike,” he said, and shook my hand and I went on with my conversation with Nadia.

She also has a baseball show on the web and was hoping to get Darryl Strawberry to be on it.

I wished her luck, and then looked at Mike and said “Oz!”

“You were on Oz. You were that guy who was mad at whatshisname...”

Mike knew exactly who he was and I don’t think he felt like listening to me fumble around with a plot summary. He said succinctly that he was a violently homophobic rapist who was himself raped and killed.

Yeah, that was it.

I said I was sorry when he was killed. I mean, it seemed like the polite thing to say, and I was sorry when he was killed. I had enjoyed watching him.

Well, that was that. I figured Mike and Nadia had actor things to talk about or whatever, so I turned around and, with the entire borough of Queens to get through and my Blackberry before me, I looked them up.

I determined without a lot of trouble that they were Mike Doyle and Nadia Dajani.

Later I even found Nadia’s web show, Caught Off Base. It’s cute.

When we arrived at Strawberry’s, I got off behind one of the statuesque blondes and in front of Mike Doyle. I felt like a gnome.

But I was, in fact, recognized by someone. Oh yes I was.

The paparazzi didn’t care about me, but I was greeted warmly near the back of the bar by restaurateur Michael Sinensky, who had fond memories of something I’d written about his restaurant Vintage Irving.
Michael is friends with Eytan Sugarman, who is Strawberry’s business partner in this restaurant.

He’s also the owner of Southern Hospitality, which I thought was partly owned by Justin Timberlake, but if that was true, it is no longer. He just helped conceptualize the place, according to Sugarman’s publicists.

Because we all know how intrinsically good pop stars are at conceptualizing restaurants...

Parties with paparazzi tend to be tedious and lame, but I knew I was trapped at this one until the bus departed at 11pm, so I had beer and crispy buffalo shrimp and barbecued chicken and watched the crowd go by, not recognizing the sports stars, except for Strawberry himself because I was in Boston during the 1986 World Series, and only being jostled enough to splash my own beer on myself twice.

I certainly didn’t recognize the reality TV stars that were there — apparently a Bachelorette and a Dancing With the Stars winner. There were a number of young men with high-maintenance gel-laden haircuts and beautiful eyes. I wonder who they were. Possibly just locals with good eyes.

The return bus was delayed as it waited for good looking, drunk people in their 20s to pile in, so in the meantime I caught up with Tom Farley and got acquainted with Max Gross, who, quite apart from being a writer for the New York Post (and, being a native New Yorker and lifelong Mets booster, a huge fan of Strawberry’s), is also Arthur Schwartz's godson. Imagine that.

As we waited we talked about restaurants and such with Juliet Izon, who works for Life & Style. Meanwhile some of the other reporters from magazines like People had to get off the bus because Justin Timberlake had arrived and they had to, oh, I don't know, stand near him or something. It’s their job.

But I’d met Mike Doyle, so I was all set.

He shook my hand and wished me a good evening as he left, I’ll have you know.

Oh right, pictures. I didn’t bring a camera, but I got one from StarTraks Photo of Karina Smirnoff from Dancing with the Stars, and some of New York’s Finest.

I asked for pictures of Mike Doyle or Nadia Dajani, but I guess they didn’t rate.

Here's my news story about the restaurant.

Lunch at a new restaurant, dinner at an old(ish) one

2010-07-30T13:53:00.000-07:00

July 30

Sorry the blog has been so quiet lately, I've been busy over at nrn.com, where I’ve been filing stories about all sorts of things, from vegetarian menu items (that one’s for subscribers only, click here if you want to subscribe), to Cascabel chef Todd Mitgang (listen to the interview here), to Carino's new low-calorie kids' menu, to 5 Napkin Burger’s beer list, to Marco’s Pizza’s new lending facility for franchisees.

“Oh, that’s boring,” egg man Howard Helmer said yesterday when I told him about the Marco’s Pizza story, which I’d filed that morning.

What can I say? Some people want to read about beer lists, others about menu items, others about creative ways, during this credit crunch, to help franchisees fund their expansion.

Here at NRN we have something for everyone in the restaurant world.

I was at lunch with Howard, goose farmer Jim Schiltz (freshly returned from a feather conference in China, during which everyone apparently asked Hungary to desist from its centuries-old practice of live plucking), and Food & Wine executive editor Tina Ujlaki. We were at the much ballyhooed ABC Kitchen, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s new restaurant focused, like all new restaurants these days that aren't burger joints, on local, seasonal food.

Howard ordered a pizza for the table, one with morels, Parmesan and a “farm fresh egg.”

Howard represents the American Egg Board, you see. He also occasionally represents the National Goose Council, of which Jim is the president and only member (we only produce about 250,000 geese a year in this country, and most of them are raised or processed by Jim — or both).

Howard was supposed to retire recently, and was going to be replaced by Next Food Network Star runner up Jeffrey Saad.

Jeffrey's doing a lot of the social networking stuff for the egg board, which is all well and good, but apparently they still want Howard to make omelets at state fairs and whatnot.

So he’s not retiring.

I ate relatively lightly — raw diver scallops with market chiles, anise hysop and lime, followed by sautéed Arctic char, summer beans, lime and spicy corn broth, and Jim and I split one of the signature juice drinks, made of peach, currant, cherry and ginger — because my friend Jonathan Ray was in town and I’d managed to finagle us a table at The Little Owl.

But it was a 6 o’clock table, which was fine with us because Jonathan had to take a train back to Westchester that evening. But it meant I shouldn’t gorge myself at lunch.

This is embarrassing to admit, but I hadn’t been to The Little Owl before. It’s one of those little places that everybody seems to love, and although it’s not new by any stretch of the imagination —it opened in May of 2006 — it continues to be a hard place to get a table.

So, good for The Little Owl, but with so many places to check out, sometimes I pass over the cute little ones that are hard to get into.

So I was glad Jonathan was in town, because it was an excuse to check the place out, and to eat:

baked clams with watercress salad and bagna cauda vinaigrette,
broiled halibut with corn, favas and pesto vinaigrette
rhubarb crisp

The Soup Man draws a crowd

2010-07-20T15:29:00.000-07:00

July 20

Whenever you see a big mob of professional camera-wielders, you can bet that that’s not where the news is. What you have here is not news, it’s a media event — scripted, predictable, usually boring, but in this case irritating because it was about 88 degrees out and muggy and I didn’t want to be there.

This particular media event was the re-opening of the soup shop that became famous in the Seinfeld “Soup Nazi” episode. Al "The Soup Nazi" Yeganeh capitalized on that episode and now there are 21 "Soup Man" restaurants, because you can’t call yourself a Nazi, across the country. Well, now 22 with the reopening of the original shack.

Why should you care? I don’t really know. I took my pictures and left. I'm not standing in line for soup.

But a lot of people apparently do care and will stand in line for soup. Because below, on the left there is a picture of the end of the line of people waiting to get their soup, and next to it is a picture of the line as it continued around the corner to the actual entrance of the restaurant, where they could buy the soup.

Now, although as a customer I’m not going to stand in that line, as a restaurant owner I’d sure like to have people doing that outside my restaurant. At least I’d like it to be an option.

The key to making that happen, it seems, is to be featured on a massively successful situation comedy, spend a decade or more milking that and hiring a good PR firm to promote the reopening of your spot.

Oh, it also helps if you get Reggie Jackson to show up to promote the event.

Did the people in line think it was worth it? Feast New York asked some of them. They seemed fine with it.

Rick Tramonto and Wendy’s salads

2010-07-15T08:19:00.000-07:00

July 15

Rick Tramonto got his start cooking with Dave Thomas at Wendy’s.

“I still know the chili recipe.”

That’s what he told a number of journalists recently at the Institute of Culinary Education as he assembled the chain’s new salads in front of us.

I think it’s a little risky for a fine-dining chef to associate with fast food.

You might remember that another celebrity chef from Chicago, Rick Bayless, was in a national TV ad back in 2003 promoting Burger King’s new and ultimately unsuccessful line of low-fat chicken baguette sandwiches.

BK actually tapped two celebrities to promote those sandwiches, Bayless and Rachel Ray.

I think Ray was an excellent choice, but Bayless seemed like a silly one. He wasn’t yet famous enough outside of the food world for him to impress many Burger King customers, and in the world of food-elitists where I dwell, he was (and still is) a champion of local, seasonal, touchy-feely food from cute farms. He advocated strongly against development of genetically modified organisms (in fact, I’ve never managed to get a call back from him when writing about his forte, Mexican food, but he was on the phone instantly when I was writing about GMOs) and in general was viewed as an opponent of “Big Food.”

Many of those relatively few people who knew Bayless’ reputation at the time were hurt, puzzled or outraged by his appearance in a BK commercial (although, for what it’s worth, from what I understand he did insist on trying the sandwich before promoting it, so that’s something).

Times have changed, lines have blurred, many fine dining chefs are opening burger joints, and Tramonto, if memory serves, has never wrapped himself as tightly in the Slow Food mantle as Bayless has.

Indeed, he said the spirit of quality and training that he got at Wendy’s is part of his DNA.

He also said he met his wife — I assume he meant his ex-wife, celebrity pastry chef Gale Gand — at Wendy’s where she was making sandwiches while he was flipping burgers.

Tramonto looked like he knew his association with Wendy's could be controversial in the food snob world, and he seemed relieved, or at least glad, when I told Wendy’s corporate chef Lori Estrada how much I liked the avocado ranch dressing (it’s true, I did; the pomegranate vinaigrette not so much, but I’m not in to lo-cal dressings).

And although the Rick Bayless-Burger King association was scandalous for about 20 minutes, both Bayless and BK survived quite well, and if I hadn’t just dredged it up again that episode would have been relegated to the dustbin of history.

Jeremy Fox not just at Plum

2010-06-30T15:52:00.000-07:00

June 30

I just got off the phone with former Ubuntu chef Jeremy Fox, who was recom-mending new and soon-to-open restaurants in San Francisco for me (including Benu, the much-anticipated restaurant of former French Laundry chef Corey Lee, which is slated to open later this summer).

The world learned last month that Jeremy was going to be the chef at Plum, an Oakland, Calif., restaurant Daniel Patterson (of Coi in San Francisco) had planned to open in July.

Jeremy tells me Plum is now slated to open in the first week of September, serving plant-based cuisine, much of it from a garden on which he and Patterson will be breaking ground this summer (the picture above is from Jeremy’s days at Ubuntu, where he also had a garden).

Plant-based doesn’t mean vegetarian. Jeremy said he will be making his own charcuterie for Plum, and that the restaurant’s dishes will have more animal ears and skin than loins and other muscle meat — for flavoring rather than to be featured in the center of the plate.

But things will be hopping at that garden, which not only will be supplying produce for Plum, but also for Bracina, Patterson’s long-delayed restaurant in Oakland’s Jack London Square, which Jeremy says is now slated for a January opening.

Jeremy told me he’s going to be involved in that restaurant as well as in Plum, and also in future Patterson ventures.

I asked if he was Patterson’s corporate chef, then.

I kind of heard him shrug, and he said: “For lack of a better word.”

And there you have it.

Malacca

2010-06-18T00:58:00.000-07:00

June 18

Malacca’s a very touristy city.

That in itself is not surprising. It’s an old port settled first by a rebel Malay prince of the maritime empire of Srivijaya, whose capital, it is believed, was near the modern-day city of Palembang, on Sumatra.

Then the Portuguese took it over, then the Dutch, who traded it to the British for Aceh, the northernmost province on Sumatra (and the epicenter, as you may recall, of that terrible tsunami in 2004).

So it has cool architecture and old forts turned into museums and, on top of that, is an important center for Peranakan culture and Nyonya cuisine. Why wouldn’t it be touristy?

What I found interesting was that most of the tourists we saw were Malaysians.

I hadn’t expected that.

But we didn’t take a day-trip to Malacca to see its historic sites (although we did a bit of that; you might as well while you’re there). We were there to eat Nyonya food. See? That’s me, on the right, taking notes as Alvin, the owner of Taragon restaurant, explained what I was about to eat.

See how serious a note-taker I am? I was, as always, glad that Albert Foo was there to take the pictures.

Usually in the United States we refer to the food of the Straits Chinese as Nyonya cuisine.

Actually, we don’t usually refer to the Straits Chinese at all, as Malaysia is noticeably absent from our country’s radar. We don’t know a thing about the place. But you know what I mean.

In Malaysia I’ve usually heard it referred to as Baba-Nyonya, which is really more illustrative. As I understand it, “Baba” is Chinese for father, while “Nyonya” is Malay for mother, or “madam” — the female head of the house.

You see, single Chinese men came to the Malay Peninsula centuries ago to work in the tin mines. They married Malay women and tried to instruct them how to cook food they were accustomed to.

But the Malay women had their own ideas, and as a matter of course added their own culinary flourishes to the food.

The result was dishes like the sambal-petai squid you see as the first picture of food in this blog entry. It’s stir-fried squid — something Chinese would make, but it’s flavored with Malay sambal, the local chile sauce, often spiked with shrimp paste called belacan (pronounced bla-chan), and a, oh, let’s call it aromatic, bean called petai, known for its bitter taste and ability to linger on the breath.

Next is terung bakar, or eggplant, served with chiles and a soy-sauce based gravy.

Notice also the tiny limes that flourish in this part of the world.

Next, well, that’s actually just a Malay dish — beef rendang. It’s a sort of curry made — as curries generally are — by heating chiles and other spices in oil, and adding liquid to that. Rendang has coconut milk added to it, and is generally cooked down until most of the liquid has evaporated, although like all national dishes it kind of depends on who you talk to.

Alvin told us that at Taragon they make the rendang a day in advance to make it taste better, as stews tend to do as their flavors meld.

We also had a cincalok omelet. Cincalok (pronounced cheen-cha-loke) is very much like belacan, except it comes from Malacca.

The last picture is of lemak nenas, a ginger-laden fish cooked with coconut sauce and pineapple.

Satay

2010-06-16T05:14:00.000-07:00

June 16

On your left, please enjoy a beautiful picture by Albert Foo, the kind man and extraordinary photographer who accompanied us on Penang and has rejoined us here in Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur.

He actually took that picture at the Shangri-La Rasa Sayang in Penang, and once I get his shots from last night I’ll replace it, or possibly just add it below for the sake of contrast, because this picture would not be approved by Matrade.

[update: I did it; I added the new picture below]

Malaysia’s export-promotion body takes its satay seriously, you see, and this satay is displayed incorrectly.

Satay is not just a bunch of skewers of meat, it’s a meal. Like the one on the right, in the picture taken, of course, by the inimitable Albert Foo.

Incidentally, it’s also not Thai, any more than tacos are American. You can get satay in Thailand, but they’ll tell you flat out that it’s Malay.

Whether it’s Malaysian Malay or Indonesian Malay is open to debate, but everyone agrees, more or less, that satay was invented by the people of the Malay archipelago.

Honey Ahmad, chief content creator and co-founder of friedchilies.com, who accompanied us last night to a restaurant called Satay Station, says the term might be an abbreviation of salai di tepat.

Salai is the Malay word for barbecue, and a tepat is a makeshift grill.

Makes sense to me.

But as I was saying, satay is more involved than that. To be called satay by Malaysian standards, it must be served with ~~pickled~~ cucumber [see comment #1 below] and onion as well as peanut sauce.

And it must also come with rice.

Ideally, satay is served with nasi ketupat, which is made by pouring uncooked rice into a sort of stiff pouch made by weaving coconut leaves together. That’s put in boiling water, and as the rice cooks it expands and is compressed into one solid piece of rice, which is then sliced and eaten with the satay (and also dipped in peanut sauce if you like).

If you don’t have nasi ketupat (and Satay Station doesn’t have it) nasi himpit, which is boiled white rice pressed together into one solid piece, will do.

A Matrade-sanctioned picture of satay must have the skewered meat, pickled cucumbers, onions and rice in it.

Honey explained that satay is made by pounding together fresh turmeric, sugar, onion (or shallot — usually shallot) and lemon grass and marinating cubed meat in it — any meat, including liver or tripe or whatever you like — for about a day.

Then you skewer it and cook it over coals, being sure to let some of it caramelize.

We had chicken, beef and chicken liver satay, with a really sweet peanut sauce with coconut milk in it. The beef had little bits of fat skewered on it, too, and the chicken had pieces of fatty skin.

It was fantastic.

It was preceded by mee rebus, which you can see on the left (in a picture by Albert Foo) made in the style of Johor state, I’m told. That’s yellow noodles, green chile and seafood broth with potatoes, sweet potatoes, boiled eggs and fried shallot.

Kelantan

2010-06-15T09:16:00.000-07:00

June 15

This dish might not look particularly appetizing, but blame that on my photography, not on the food.

It’s ayam percik (pronounced perchik), one of the specialties of the Malaysian state of Kelantan, in the country’s northeast. It’s charcoal-grilled chicken topped with a coconut milk sauce.

Sounds good, right?

It is typically served with nasi kerabu, which is rice topped with herbs and other nutritious green things, plus bean sprouts. And two nights ago, when I took this picture, it also was served with shrimp crackers.

You can see a picture of it on the right.

Ayam percik and nasi kerabu are delicious together, they really are, and I think they’d translate well to a western state of mind.

We also had them with clams cooked in sambal (what’s not to like about that?) and peppers stuffed with fish paste and served with salted, hard-boiled eggs that were sliced in half and served still in their shells.

I suspect going to Kelantan was my doing: As this trip was being planned I mentioned to one of the organizers that I’d had the best mangoes in my life in this state’s capital, Kota Bahru.

Next thing I knew it was on our agenda.

Apparently I had given entrée to Wan Norma Wan Daud, director of the Product Section of the Product & Services Development Division of the Malaysia External Trade Development Corporation, or Matrade.

Matrade sponsored this trip, and Norma is a native of Kelantan.

We had a good time there. Kelantan, I’m told, is quite distinct from other parts of Malaysia. It’s the most Muslim of the 13 states, but also displays strong influence from its neighbor to the north, mostly Buddhist Thailand, a country of which it was once a part.

The part of Thailand that shares a border with Kelantan is actually mostly Muslim, but the Malaysian state still has a number of Buddhist temples and monasteries, and it shares some words and eating habits with Thailand, too.

The Kelantanese expressed pride in their elaborate wau (pronounced “wow,” which, in a perfect world, is also how it would be spelled). It’s a word for kite they share with the Thais.

They also share a love for funky, fishy flavors, such as budu, made from fermented and, to my taste, slightly rotten, anchovies.

That was served to us during lunch yesterday, they day after our dinner of ayam percik and its traditional accompaniments.

Kelantan was unseasonably, unreasonably, inhumanely hot yesterday and, cognizant of the fact that I was in a serious Muslim state, I chose to forego shorts and wear long pants instead. Thus did I swelter with my fellow westerners as we were led through the market, breakfasting on a hot soup of laksam — sort of like boiled rice gnocchi — and looking at the region’s signature blue rice, dyed from a flower we haven’t yet identified, and at silks [June 16 update: the flower, according to my new friend Krista, is bunga telang; she hasn’t lied to me yet].

I had Paco buy some mangosteens — a fruit I’ll discuss later, along with the salak that we’d found the night before — before we went off to look at how serunding and dodol were made.

Remember, it’s easily 90 degrees out. And humid. Feel your scalp as the sweat pools there and then trickles behind your ears and down your neck and back as I explain that serunding is shredded meat made by stewing beef or chicken in massive vats of a rendang-type curry for a couple of hours, until the meat falls apart into strings.

We stood over hot cauldrons watching this happen, and saw the meat in other cauldrons being further dried out over huge flames.

Remember that heat as we moved on to watch the production of dodol, a type of caramel made of palm sugar and coconut milk that are slowly cooked together, again in big, bubbling cauldrons.

Dodol’s interesting, because coconut milk has a gelatinous quality that becomes evident as it solidifies; dodol has a softer, gummier, less chewy and more tender texture than a western caramel. It’s frequently flavored with pandan, although Paco gave me one with durian, which he has decided is my new favorite flavor (it’s not; I like it now, but I like pandan, too).

It was all quite interesting, as was seeing the coconut-milk snacks made by pouring coconut milk mixed with flour and eggs into cast iron molds over smoldering fires, covered with coconut husks to give them a bit of extra smoky coconut essence.

But did I mention how hot it was?

We didn’t have much of an appetite for lunch, which was another traditional Kelantanese meal called nasi ulam kampung (rice and village greens, I believe).

The name of the meal focuses on the rice, but it really reminded me of the Thai meal known as nam phrik, which means (roughly) “chile paste.”

Here’s how they both work: You start with rice in the middle of your plate, and you add to it, one bite at a time from an array of dishes in the center of the table, any of a wide variety of greens and a dab of chile sauce (nam phrik in Thailand, sambal in Malaysia), augmented occasionally by a bit of meat or fish.

Our nasi ulam kampung also had a tasty roast chicken, fried fish and a couple of different fish curries, plus that fermented/rotten fish called budu that I was telling you about.

I told Paco that budu was one of those tastes that are not easily accessible to Westerners, and he said that lots of Malays don’t like it either, “including this one,” he said.

But A’dzimah showed me how to eat it.

Both A’dzimah and Paco are from near Kuala Lumpur, but A’dzimah married a man from Trengganu, the next state over from Kelantan, which shares an appreciation for budu.

The key, she basically explained, is not to eat very much of it. You mash some chile up in it, then get a bit of fish and a vegetable, and eat it all together.

I agree that if you have to eat fermented fish, maybe because, I don’t know, no other food is available or something, it’s a pretty good way to do it.

Along with various faintly aromatic greens that looked like weeds, we also had green jackfruit, which has a texture very much like artichoke hearts, and a vegetable that looks like a gigantic pea pod, maybe from the Cretaceous era. I knew it from Thailand as satoh, but Paco just called it “stinky bean,” probably because of its tendency to linger on the breath. I’ve always kind of liked its weird nuttiness.

I later learned its Malay name: petai.

We all agreed the chicken was terrific.

Hainanese food, but not really

2010-06-13T02:49:00.000-07:00

June 13

Paco, good Muslim that he is, bowed out of dinner last night, which was destined to be laden with pork, and instead we were treated to the company of Helen Ong (pictured with restaurateur Ong Shin Hong), a charming Peranakan woman who just finished writing her second edition of the book Great Dining in Penang.

Peranakan is a Malay word indicating a mixed-race heritage, but it refers specifically to Straits Chinese, the Chinese people who started settling here on the Malay Peninsula (mostly), starting in the 16th Century. Initially they were men, who naturally married Malay women, and a new culture was born. Their cuisine is often called Nyonya, or Baba-Nyonya, the titles of the woman, or man and woman, of the house.

The bulk of Peranakans originally came from Fujian province. Fujian’s actually the Mandarin name for the province. In Fujian dialect it's called Hokkien.

The Hokkien worked hard and prospered, and as Malaya came under British rule, they began to adopt the characteristics of their new overlords, wearing top hats and suits and walking with canes.

“Even furs,” Helen told us, with an expression of disbelief and disdain very much in the style of a posh English person.

Remember, Malaysia’s a tropical country. Fur coats would be uncomfortable.

Helen explained the Peranakans to us as she ordered dinner at Shing Kheang Aun, a restaurant that opened its doors in 1941, serving Hainanese food.

But not really.

You see, Helen explained, in the late 1800s, the Malay Peninsula experienced a huge migration of Chinese laborers from Hainan, a large island to the southwest of China’s Guangdong province (whence come the Cantonese, and, incidentally, the Teo Chiew, but they are not part of this story).

For the sake of accuracy, I’ll point out that Hainan itself has for much of its history been part of Guangdong.

The Hainanese came to be known for their culinary skills and were hired by the British as cooks. The Peranakans, mimicking the British as they were wont to do, hired the Hainanese, too.

So the Hainanese learned to cook both British and Peranakan food, but also retained their own culinary culture.

That, Helen said, is the “Hainan” cuisine of modern-day Malaysia.

At any rate, Joanna, Bob and I thought the food was fantastic. Helen, local restaurant critic and anglicized socialite that she is, was more critical. She disagreed with the sambal belacan, which according to Peranakan custom should be made from shrimp paste, fresh chile, salt and sugar, and that’s it.

“That’s the Peranakan way,” she said.

Shing Kheang Aun had added vinegar to theirs — a common practice to extend the condiment’s life, and a bastardization of the original

Thais add garlic and fish sauce, she said, which is equally delicious, but not Peranakan (she pointed out, by the way, that Peranakans are not just in Singapore, Malacca and Penang, the cities for which they are known, but also on the Thai island of Phuket, and Medan, a large city in northern Sumatra, just across the Strait of Malacca, and there are some on Malaysia’s east coast, too).

She also said her assam tumis was better than Shing Kheang Aun’s.

I have no reason to doubt here, but I thought the restaurant’s assam tumis was terrific.

Assam is the Malay word for “sour,” and tumis means “fry.” It refers to the sour paste that’s fried to make the sauce for this fish curry, which tasted very much like southern Thai gaeng som, which means “sour curry,” and is made with garlic, chile and fresh turmeric fried together to make a curry base. Assam tumis also has tamarind in it, and I have no doubt that some versions of gaeng som do, too.

It was my favorite dish, but Joanna and Bob really loved the shrimp, which was marinated in tamarind, salt and sugar and then fried (it’s pictured on the right, unlike the assam tumis, which is not as photogenic).

We also had beef liver and pork fried with soy sauce, stir-fried been sprouts flavored with salted fish (which reminded me once again how ridiculous it is to eat bean sprouts raw — a state in which they’re disgusting), salted vegetables flavored with pig trotters, and Hainan-style noodles (apparently it is not the Hainanese custom to add black soy sauce to their noodles).

As dinner wound down Helen explained the origins of the name Fatty Crab, a chain restaurant in Kuala Lumpur after which Zak Pelaccio’s New York restaurant is named.

In Cantonese, "fatty crab" is pronounced "fei hai." But you have to use the right tones, especially for “hai.”

“Fei” means “fatty” and “hai,” pronounced correctly, means “crab.” Pronounced otherwise, it’s a vulgar word for “vagina.”

Transliterated into Roman letters as Fei Hai, it could mean either one.

If you’re Cantonese and see a sign written that way, it’s funny.

It’s kind of like the California-based chain Pink Taco.

Spice Market and spice garden

2010-06-12T02:54:00.000-07:00

June 12

When we left off, I was headed to a cooking demon-stration. On your left is a picture of that demon-stration. One of the chefs here at the Shangri-La showed us how to make roti jala. Roti is a griddled flatbread. Jala means “net,” and you can see why. The batter is poured out onto a griddle using a special cup with holes poked in it.

You have to fill in the center of when drizzling the batter onto the griddle, but the outside is meant to be light, thin and a bit lacy. Then you fold the sides in and roll it up into a little spring-roll shaped package.

Joanna and I took turns at it, and then Paco, our head tour-guide and an avid amateur cook, showed us how it’s done — the key being rotation of the wrist. I forget why.

The result looks sort of like a crêpe, but the texture’s more spongy, reminding me a bit of Ethiopian injera, actually.

The chef also showed us how to make a chicken curry, and then we went inside and had dinner at Spice Market, a giant buffet restaurant with foods from Peninsular Malaysia’s three main cultures, as well as Japanese and Western food.

We were joined by lovely and charming local journalist CK Lam, and her camera-bearing husband whose name I didn’t catch. Nice guy, though.

I learned long ago that buffets are not to be conquered. You simply can’t try everything there, so you must narrow your focus. Inspired by our cooking demonstration, I settled on Indian food and helped myself to beef and fish curry. I was glad I’d been relatively abstemious, because then we were brought out roti jala and chicken.

And then, just for the heck of it, they brought out beef rendang and passembur. The former is a rich beef curry and sort of Malaysia’s national dish (although I think the comfort food of choice is a fish-and-rice job called nasi lemak, which I haven't had on this trip yet but probably will soon).
Passembur is an assortment of fried things, hard boiled egg and shredded cucumber eaten with a peanut sauce.

We spent today at the Penang Spice Garden, which specializes in spice-related plants, like this cinnamon tree pictured on the right.

After a quick tour, focused for some reason on spices’ homeopathic qualities, we took a cooking class with Nazlina Hussin, who had me straddling a wooden box with a circular piece of serrated metal sticking out of it. That’s used to grate coconut, which I did.

She also taught me how to crack open a coconut: The fruit has a trio of black spots, two of which are indented. The other protrudes a little bit. Hold the coconut with your thumb on the protruding bit and hit the thing on top with a hammer. If you give it an adequate whack it will split, so hold it over a receptacle to catch the coconut water, which is a very trendy drink these days, because it has electrolytes and is supposed to cure every ailment and probably will help you sing better, and fly, too.

Continue hammering around the side of the coconut to open it all the way.

Then Nazlina put me in front of a batu giling, which is the Malay version of a metate — a flat stone and a big stone rolling pin — and I spent the next hour or so smashing garlic, shallot and dried, rehydrated red chiles into a paste. It was fun, actually, and quite therapeutic, and it gave us all a chance to chat. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures because I was busy making a curry paste, but Albert Foo, our accompanying photographer, was busy at work, and I’ll have many great pictures from him to share shortly.

From there we went to a section of covered hawker stalls, because we all agreed that that would be more useful for our mission than to visit the temple that was scheduled for that time.

We’d gorged ourselves on Nazlina’s beef with black sauce and a vegetable curry called dalcha, and the plan wasn’t to eat, but I thought I’d better try some curried noodles, which I ordered and then learned that the service style at these hawker stalls was fast-casual. I ordered the food and it was brought back to our table.

Joanna had taken Albert with her to explore more of the food stalls, and after I’d finished my curried noodles she returned with clay pot bee tai bok, a very rich dish of short, fat rice noodles that looked like worms, and was rich and soy-saucy and really spectacular.

And Paco brought us a light, fish-based laksa because, well, if you’re at a bunch of hawker stalls in Malaysia you should have some laksa.

My curry mee had been plain, not with pork blood, but I did want to let you know that that was an option.

I finally understand durian

2010-06-11T02:35:00.000-07:00

June 11,

That picture on the left, friends, is of durian. I should have posed the fruit next to something so you could see just how big a durian is. Each one of those bad boys is about the size of a human head.

I’m on Penang, an island in the Strait of Malacca just off the coast of the Malay Peninsula, and it’s my first day of a press trip to Malaysia, where my job is to eat the food and eventually write about it.

It is not a hardship posting.

This is my first time back in Southeast Asia since I left Thailand in 1997, after having lived there for five years. Malaysia’s not Thailand, but this is my third or fourth time in this country — and at least my third time to Penang — so it feels like something of a homecoming.

Living in the tropics made me into something of a fruit snob, and I’m eager to rejuvenate my soul a bit by gorging on the stuff while I’m here.

This morning before breakfast I availed myself of the basket of fruit in my room and ate a mango, and then at breakfast I had some pineapple and papaya and dragonfruit (either dragonfruit has no flavor or I haven't had a good one yet).

To be honest, durian wasn’t high on my list as something to try again. It’s a famously malodorous fruit — banned in many hotels and airplanes — with a fragrance similar to sulfurous, rotting sewage.

People say durian smells like hell but tastes like heaven, but that hadn’t been my experience. I’d had it twice before, once in Thailand and once in Cambodia, and both times it had the agreeable texture of a really good avocado, but it tasted like a toned down version of what it smelled like, only sweeter. Like sweet rotten sulfur.

Honestly, as bad as that sounds I didn’t hate it the way many people do, but given all the things you can put in your mouth, why invite durian in there?

But people I know who truly love durian — New York Malaysiaphile chef Zak Pelaccio among them — learned to do so in Malaysia. My friend Thomas Fuller, a great guy and durian lover who was based in Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, for awhile while working for the International Herald Tribune, said that Malaysians have a saying about Thai durian — that it’s like the Thai people, universally sweet and all the same.

That’s not a very nice thing to say, but I wanted to find out what all the fuss was about. Was Malaysian durian really that great?

Right now just happens to be the height of durian season. So this morning, after a second breakfast of charcoal-grilled bread that we dipped in dahl and fish curry, plus coddled eggs with soy sauce and white pepper, all eaten at a Mamak food stall — that’s a stall run by Indian Muslims — when we walked to a nearby open-air market, we tried the durian.

And it was better than any durian I’d had before. Absolutely it was. Sweet and rich, aromatic and deeply satisfying. In many ways it was like a raw scallop, something that I also love, in that as much as I enjoyed it, a few bites was enough. So I gave the rest to one of our guides, A'dzimah Ahmad Ghazali, a nice Malay woman who had told me she could eat three whole durians in one sitting.

Durian out of the way, I insisted that my fellow travelers — the power food writing couple of Bob Lape and Joanna Pruess — have some longgong.

That’s longgong, on the right, in front of the Coca-Cola Light can. I just took that picture in my room here at the luxurious Shangri-La Rasa Sayang.

When I refer to longgong, people who think they know all about tropical fruit but don’t often correct me and tell me it’s pronounced longan. Longan’s different. A longan’s sort of a soulless brown shadow of a lychee.

Longgong has a smoother, drier texture than a longan and a bright acidity reminiscent of citrus. It has a flavor not unlike grapefruit, but with a somewhat floral bass note. It’s awesome, not like a stupid, boring longan.

We went on to sample some pickled fruit, including papaya, mango and salak (also called snake fruit, I’ll get back to that if I ever see a fresh one because they’re great in a weird, sort of off-putting way). After that we had a first lunch of Hokkien dim sum and then toured the mansion of Cheong Fatt Tze, I think to let the food go down before our second lunch, at an Indian place called Ananda Bawan.

Malaysia is an ethnic hodgepodge, but the three biggest groups (at least on the Malay peninsula; it’s different in the two Malaysian states on Borneo) are Malays, Chinese (mostly Hokkien, but with plenty of Hainanese, Teo Chiew, Hakka and Cantonese), and Indians, mostly Tamils.

That’s a big part of the official, government-mandated Malaysian Zeitgeist, their cultural plurality. I think that’s part of the basis of their insult of Thais and their durians — Thais are all Thais, and thus implicitly boring.

Of course, that’s patently false. About a third of the Thai population is Lao, ethnic Malays live in the southern provinces. The north (which also has an array of hill tribes) and west of the country have Shan and Mon people, and there’s a very healthy scattering of Chinese people thoughout the country, particularly in Bangkok and the South.

I used to think the durian insult was more grave than that — that it was meant to imply that Thais were shallow, insipid and boring, just like their durians — but today I’m under the impression that the intention is less deep than that.

Anyway, since we’d had Chinese food for first lunch, for second lunch, we naturally had Tamil food.

We had a classic banana leaf lunch, with curries and dahl and rasam and roasted chicken all served with rice on a banana leaf, which is to be eaten with your hands (or, more properly, your hand — the right one, which is used to conduct public business, while the left one is for more private activities.

From there we toured a Thai Buddhist temple and a Burmese Buddhist temple across the street from that and then went on a mission to get Bob a new recording device, as the one he brought with him was misbehaving.

Penang is actually an important center for assembly of electronic equipment, and it’s also quite wealthy, meaning electronic recording devices are easily found at any shopping mall.

So we went to the Guerney shopping mall and wandered around while Bob went to the Sony center.

The shopping mall, as malls are, was a great place for people watching, and there really was a great ease with which the Chinese, Malays and Indians all seemed to interact together. It reminded me very much of Brooklyn, actually.

The Chinese make up the majority of Penang’s population, but the country as a whole is mostly Malay. That means they’re Muslim. Although they’re fairly mellow Muslims, politically Malaysia likes to project itself as a leader of the Muslim world, and when it comes to issues such as Israel it tends to align itself with countries such as Syria.

So I was delighted to see quite risqué displays in the shopping center. I was so delighted, in fact, that I thought I’d display a picture of one, which you can see above on the right.

From there we went back to the hotel to recover from the heat and rest in advance of our cooking demonstration tonight. But I decided to update my blog instead. And I will finish this entry with a picture from the market of a cow’s head.

Pranna's new chef

2010-06-02T15:06:00.000-07:00

June 2

New York, say hello to Keith Kornfeld, the new chef at Pranna.

Keith, a New Orleans native, comes fresh off of a stage at Namh, a Michelin-starred Thai restaurant in London, where he studied under renowned Thai chef David Thompson (Thompson's actually Australian, but he is perhaps the world's greatest chef of Thai cuisine nonetheless — at least that's his reputation, I've never eaten his food myself, but I met him at the Beard awards a few years back and he seemed like a nice guy).

Before his ten-day stint at Namh, Keith was chef of The Outrigger on the Lagoon in Fiji, and he also has worked in both Bangkok and Phuket in Thailand.

Keith has high aspirations for Pranna, which is good, both because Pranna's owners have high aspirations for it and because this city could use some more good Southeast Asian food (although last week my friend Andy Battaglia and I did have some top-notch food at Betel -- of course they knew I was a food writer and that obviously could color the experience, as you know).

Pranna's a bit hamstrung when it comes to culinary aspirations by the fact that it looks and feels like a club. Are its guests looking for great Southeast Asian and South Asian food? Would they know it if they saw it? Is it condescending of me to ask (of course it is, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong)?

You might recall that back in February I met the restaurant's bar manager, Eric Greczel, who shared his plans to turn Pranna's basement into a high-end cocktail bar.

I've been a bad journalist and haven't followed up to see if those plans came about. If you have, well, why don't you tell me about it by commenting below?

In the meantime, best of luck to Keith Kornfeld and the whole Pranna team.

(Keith is not, by the way, related to my cousins, the Wichita-Denver Kornfelds, in case you were wondering).

The Big Show

2010-05-21T10:42:00.000-07:00

I’m leaving town tomorrow to help Nation’s Restaurant News cover the gigantic National Restaurant Association Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show, also sometimes called the NRA Show, the Restaurant Show, or The Show.

While I’m there, I’ll be collaborating with my colleagues on our NRN@NRA blog, which you can link to by clicking on the logo above, or simply by clicking here.

So this blog will be dormant until I return on Tuesday night, and probably longer as I’ll be behind in my work.

In the meantime, follow me and my dear colleagues on the NRN@NRA blog, and I’ll try to check back in with you here next week.

But before I go, here's a link to some breaking news about a new partnership between Nation’s Restaurant News and the National Restaurant Association.

Fashion 26 and Hotel Griffou

2010-05-18T16:20:00.000-07:00

May 18

I should just take a pastry brush and a bowl of vegetable oil, lay out all of my dress shirts and paint a light coat on each of them. It would save me the trouble of worrying about grease stains. I should just be proactive, make them all nothing but stain and be done with it.

I should probably soak them all in red wine first.

Instead, I stood in the middle of Rare Bar & Grill in the Fashion 26 hotel with streaks of grease down the front of my gray cotton shirt with French cuffs.

I don’t know how they got there. I was trying to be careful. It was, after all, the fanciest launch party I’d been to in awhile, and the fashionistas were there in droves, posing in front for photographers and then standing around looking statuesque and fabulous. Not a stain on them.

If this had been 1999, say, or even 2004, it would have been easier to avoid having grease drip down my body. But it’s 2010, and that means that at fancy, high-brow openings, they must serve sliders at the very least. For this opening they also served buffalo wings and cones of French fries with mini-cones of ketchup in them and fried pickles (the first I’d had in New York — batter-fried little disks).

I was snacking on the fries and looked down because I thought I’d sensed a drip from the ketchup, and there I was, covered in grease.

It was probably the slider, but I’ll never know.

I hadn’t seen a coat check so I still had my bag with me. I adjusted it so the strap covered most of the stain and went to get a cocktail.

What can I say? I don’t let a stain get in the way of a good time, and the DJ was phenomenal.

My cocktail was something with citrus, strawberry purée and a brand of tequila that was far too good to be used in a cocktail. But with positive GDP growth in the first quarter and anecdotes of robust restaurant traffic here in New York, I guess the days of the over-fancy cocktail are back.

The food is still supposed to be down-to-earth, though.

Business was certainly robust last week when I stopped into the Hotel Griffou at the request of its publicist.

“It's a good thing you guys have a publicist,” I said, raising my voice over the din at the packed bar. “This place is dead. I’m surprised I don’t see tumbleweeds rolling through here.”

They expressed polite amusement at my sarcasm and showed me and my guest to our table.

The Hotel Griffou actually isn’t a hotel at all. It’s one of those cute restaurants tucked away in the West Village (in this case West Ninth Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues) that everyone likes so much. Its original owner was a certain Madame Griffou, and she did run a hotel there.

We wound our way through the crowded bar area and ended up in one of several more sedate dining rooms — homey, eclectic, it reminded me of a more casual version of the second floor of Bobo.

My guest for the evening was the always awesome Blain Howard, my pop-culture and sci-fi guru (who, by the way, encouraged me to see Kick Ass, one of the funnest movies I’ve seen in a really, really long time).

Looking at the cocktail menu, Blain, a warrior at heart (rugby player and former mixed martial artist, as you may recall), was intrigued by the Beowulf Bramble (Aquavit, blackberries, lemon juice and crème de mure), but instead went for the Avocado & Vanilla Daiquiri.

Yes, trendy food is often staid, but the drinks can be as crazy as you like.

I had a Negroni.

What we had for dinner was also very, very 2010. And here’s what it was:

Poutine with duck confit and thyme
foie gras seared with plums, parsnip purée and kiwi berry

grass-fed steak frites with poivre sauce
Hanger steak grilled with potatoes, asparagus and maitake mushrooms

Very, very 2010.

I did get out of there stain-free, though. I think.

This blog’s readers are not animal rights activists

2010-05-18T15:55:00.001-07:00

Actually, I’m surprised.

I thought mentioning foie gras would trigger the Google Alerts of some rabid, misinformed (though possibly well-meaning) people and draw them out to defend pampered, well-fed ducks.

But no. Not a one.

I guess they just don’t care anymore.

A couple of the participants in my latest poll — which asked, simply, "Foie Gras, yes or no?” said they don’t like foie gras, and a few said they hadn’t really thought about the treatment of ducks raised for their unctuous livers (thanks for participating, all the same).

But most participants (52 percent), said they think foie gras ducks are treated just fine (and they are, by all accounts from informed people that I've heard), and just about a third said they don’t care how the ducks are treated.

See for yourself.

Question
FOIE GRAS, YES OR NO?

I refuse to eat foie gras because I think it's cruel to animals: 0 (0%)
I think foie gras ducks are treated fine: 20 (52%)
I don't care how foie gras ducks are treated, I like how it tastes so I'm eating it: 12 (31%)
I don't like foie gras: 2 (5%)
I hadn't really thought about it: 4 (10%)

Bill Yosses, not such a classicist

2010-05-13T12:02:00.000-07:00

May 13

I enjoyed this story in yesterday’s New York Times that profiled Bill Yosses, the breathtakingly affable pastry chef at the White House (he really is, I had a great chat with him and some of his friends back in 2007 at the opening of Sweetgreen in Georgetown).

But I was surprised by the passage about him being a relative culinary traditionalist:

“He might play with a little agar-agar (to set finely chopped rhubarb into a soft gel) or crystallized vitamin C (to preserve the green of an herb purée), but he has generally kept to a strong French backbone of flavor profiles. In his work, chocolate remains paired with hazelnut; pineapple with lime.

“ ‘He does not approve of a dessert like tomato sorbet with rosemary syrup,’ said Jonathan Hayes, a forensic pathologist and former food writer who has been a friend and fan since the 1980s.”

French backbone, really? I mean, certainly his pastry roots are French, but I’ve always thought his style was a bit more cosmopolitan than what the article describes, and he has spent a significant amount of time in Southeast Asia, which is reflected in his style.

I guess it’s true that he doesn’t get completely crazy with weird flavor combinations, but back in 2006, when he was a partner in a Vietnamese restaurant called Boi, he made a dessert of coconut tapioca garnished with diced mango, toasted coconut and pomegranate molasses. Also in that dish were basil seeds that were hydrated in warm water steeped with vanilla bean, star anise, cinnamon and lemon grass.

Sounds tasty, but not so French.

When he was at Citarella in New York, in 2002, he made a gelatin out of the super-tart juice of the Philippine citrus fruit calamansi. He froze that in a madeleine mold with an orange segment in it, and served that over warm coconut tapioca to give it an acidic spike. That dish was rounded out with coconut sorbet and a pistachio madeleine.

And even when he’s sticking to the French palette of ingredients, he gets whimsical. At Citarella he used a classic French combination — Pears and Fourme d'Ambert cheese (a cow milk bleu from the Loire Valley) — but made up the name Pear Dauphinois for it. The name was a play on pommes dauphinois, which is mashed potatoes mixed with cream puff pastry dough, rolled into balls and deep-fried.

Pear Dauphinois, on the other hand, was made by plunging paper-thin slices of pear into a 50-50 mixture of water and pear juice, spiked with vitamin C (to keep the pears from discoloring) and pear brandy (because why not?), and then layering them with the cheese to make a sort of dessert casserole, which he served with quince paste and almond biscotti.

I never tried the Pear Daupinois, but Bill said it was a very satisfying end to a meal, and I believe him.

Foie Gras, yes or no?

2010-05-10T14:40:00.000-07:00

May 10

I have a new poll for you this week. I think it speaks for itself. It's on the right. Click away!

Beard Awards 2010 — not a jedi to be seen

2010-05-04T15:16:00.000-07:00

May 4

The James Beard Foundation Chef and Restaurant Awards ceremony and the awards press room were practically unrelated this year.

There are really two press rooms — one for sanctioned, formal photography of each of the winners, where people like Kent Miller take pictures like this of people like Timothy Hollingsworth (pictured here in a photo taken by Kent Miller), who was named Rising Star Chef of the Year at the awards last night.

Click here for a complete list of winners.

Then there’s the press room for the rest of us, where we drink Champagne and cocktails (there was even a gin sponsor this year), and eat cheese and drink espresso. This year there was caviar, too, all domestic and sustainable, yet tasty.

And there were little flat screen TVs where, if you wanted to, you could watch the beard awards.

You couldn’t hear them, though. The speakers weren’t working right, so to hear anything above the din of the socializing journalists you had to walk to the very front of the press room — a foyer, really — where you couldn’t see the TVs but you could hear pretty well.

If you didn’t pay attention, you missed the winners, and God help you if you wanted to hear any of their speeches, or the tribute to Michael and Ariane Batterberry, who were given lifetime achievement awards.

I did pop my head into the photographer’s press room long enough to notice that whenever an award winner was named, they played music from Star Wars.

I tried to figure that out. The theme for the awards was “The Legacy Continues,” which sounded bizarre, but it was supposed to be about mentoring and fostering talent and so on, which is nice.

Today I asked my sci-fi and pop-culture guru Blain Howard if "The Legacy Continues" could be associated with Star Wars in any way.

“30th Anniv of Empire is this year...so MAYBE? that?” he suggested.

I commended him for his efforts, and remain confused by the Star Wars music and by the fact that nobody who might possibly write about the awards could simultaneously see and hear them.

But it was still fun. I hung out with old friends, met some fans from the blogosphere, drank multiple cocktails and ate caviar, periodically peering up to see who had won what awards.

Last night I thought I’d predicted eight out of the 19 categories that I care about (I don’t guess the design and graphics awards), but I had missed the fact that Jason Wilson of Crush in Seattle won. I’d predicted that, too, meaning I got nine right. That’s practically half (47 percent), which isn’t bad if I do say so myself.

I didn’t eat much after the awards. I don’t like to stand in line for food, I was full on caviar canapés and the slice of pizza (pepperoni) I’d had before the awards, and there were pictures to take, people to catch up with etc., so I drank a Leffe Blonde and ate some Mangalica ham from D'Artagnan, and a "French Kiss" from them, too. That’s a foie gras-stuffed Armagnac-soaked prune, I believe. It was good.

And I took some pictures

I decided to pick one after party and stick to that one this year, and I picked Eleven Madison Park, whose chef, Daniel Humm, was named, as I predicted, best chef in New York City. It made sense. Daniel Boulud (whose restaurant Daniel won the Outstanding Restaurant award). Stood on some furniture with Humm and danced, eventually spraying the crowd with Champagne.

He did that in 2006 at an after party at Thor (he’d won Outstanding Restaurateur that year), so it was kind of old hat, but people loved it.

The picture above, taken by Kent Miller, is of Daniel Boulud earlier in the evening.

I have some pictures of my own to share, but they’ll have to wait as I’m late for dinner (at Aquavit, sampling the food of its new chef, Marcus Jernmark), so I’ll post one now, and more later.

(Starting on the left) This is French Culinary Institute dean emeritus Alain Sailhac with his wife Arlene, and awesome chef extraordinaire David Bouley and his wife Nicole Bartelme Bouley.

The Bouley’s were wed in a legendary, awesome five-day feast that was in fact covered for the New York Times by my good friend Thomas Crampton.

Oh, and below are the results of my most recent poll, in which I asked you to vote for the Rising Star Chef of the Year. I find the results interesting.

Timothy Hollingsworth, French Laundry, Yountville, Calif. 9 (31%)

Johnny Monis, Komi, Washington, D.C. 3 (10%)

Grégory Pugin, Veritas, New York City 3 (10%)

Gabriel Rucker, Le Pigeon, Portland, Ore. 7 (24%)

Sue Zemanick, Gautreau’s, New Orleans 7 (24%)

May 7 update: I have dug myself out of the work hole I have been in all week and have time to upload some more pictures from the Beard Awards, starting with a shot of Lachlan MacKinnon-Patterson, chef-partner of Frasca Food & Wine in Boulder, Colo., and Bobby Stuckey, that restaurant’s master sommelier and partner.

Lachlan might be the quietest chef I know, or maybe we just haven’t had a chance to bond.

Next we have Gary Danko, who you won’t be surprised to learn is the chef-owner of restaurant Gary Danko in San Francisco. To his left (your right) is George Atterbury, general manager of Craft restaurant in New York City.

I’m not sure what they’re doing together, and frankly it’s none of my business.

It’s none of yours, either.

Moving right along, we have Nancy Olson and Chris Bradley.

Nancy, of course, is the famous pastry chef of Gramercy Tavern in New York City, Chris is that restaurant’s sous chef.

He’s not famous yet, but you never know. It’s good to be a sous chef at Gramercy Tavern.

Next up, we have Rita Jammet, former co-owner of La Caravelle, with her twin sons Nic, on the left (her right) and Patrick.

Nic is a partner in a successful little fast-casual salad-and-frozen-yogurt chain in the Washington, D.C., area called Sweetgreen. Very big on local, organic, sustainable stuff, including using recycled materials to build their stores. Their yogurt truck is a supergreen hybrid. They hired someone special just to source the best products, and called her their sourceress. Cute, right?

Patrick works for one of those high end beverage companies that sells tea drinks. I’m afraid I have forgotten which one.

From the Chicago contingent, pictured here are best chef in the Great Lakes region nominee Bruce Sherman from North Pond (sporting the beard), and Paul Kahan, who has already won that award.

In fact, this year that award went to one of his underlings, Koren Grieveson. This is what Paul (@PaulKahan) tweeted about that: ”First time ever that someone wearing a jb medal said I was their mentor. Feels pretty great.“

Staying with the Chicago contingent, we have two other previous Beard Award Winners.

On the left is Rick Bayless of Frontera Grill, Topolobampo, etc., and on the right is Tony Mantuano, chef-owner of Spiaggia.

I’m embarrassed to say that I have never eaten Rick Bayless’s food, except for a bit of salsa served at a cooking demonstration at the St. Helena campus of The Culinary Institute of America.

I’ve eaten at Spiaggia, though it was years ago. It was the first, and possibly the last, place I ever had Ohio wine — not that it was bad, you just don’t see a lot of Ohio wine out there. It was a flinty Pinot Grigio.

Heading down south, we have this year’s best chef in the Southeast winner, Sean Brock, executive chef of McCrady’s in Charleston, S.C, who was just beside himself that he’d won. Shocked, really, and I’m not sure why.

Next to him is New Orleans chef Susan Spicer. I don’t know if she and Sean actually know each other. I pulled them together in the press room for this picture.

Here’s Michel Nischan and his son Chris.

I met Michel, oh, probably in 1999, when I was a new puppy at NRN and he was the chef at Heartbeat at the W Hotel in Midtown East. It was the first of the five Ws that are now in New York City, and Heartbeat was ahead of its time in offering food that was good for you without tasting like you were missing something.

He’s currently the chef-owner of The Dressing Room in Westport, Conn.

Chris and I had never met before.

Finally, from DC, we have pastry chef David Guas, who was with the DC Coast restaurants for years but now has his own company, damgoodsweet. Next to him is Ann McCarthy, whom I met years ago when she worked at Saveur. But now she’s José Andrés’ communications director.

Chef’s Night Out

2010-05-03T10:16:00.000-07:00

May 3

Chefs’ Night Out, the annual party thrown by Bon Appétit magazine and the James Beard Foundation on the night before the chef and restaurant awards, was held last night at SD 26, the newer, younger, more downtown, hipper incarnation of the former San Domenico.

Odette Fada reportedly is leaving her job as executive chef there, but she hasn’t left yet, and she was downstairs in the kitchen, moving around and supervising things in the way you’d expect a chef to do when hundreds of people from the food world are milling around in your restaurant expecting you to feed them.

The picture at the beginning of this blog entry is SD 26’s Porchetta, which was being served in the downstairs kitchen. That picture was taken by my friend Yishane Lee, who has two small children at home and so doesn’t get out much.

She was my guest last night, because we both agree that, although she doesn’t get out much, she should get out once in awhile, and why not go out to a fabulous see-and-be-seen chef party?

Yishane took that picture right after publicist Sam Firer tore off the pig’s second ear to eat.

On the right you can see a wider shot, giving you the whole tableau.

Sam’s an immigrant from Brezhnev-era Russia, his excuse for his ability to eat anything.

I don’t see why he would need such an excuse. What's wrong with eating a pig’s ear?

I’m old and jaded. Tonight will be the twelfth time I’ve covered the James Beard Awards, and last night was my eighth or ninth Chefs’ Night Out. In some ways that’s nice. It means I don’t really have to go out of my way to shmooze and can mostly stand around with Yishane, drink red wine, eat pork, pizza and pasta and comment on other people’s clothing choices. It’s an agreeable way to spend an evening.

I did catch up with a lot of old friends and acquaintances, got a good basic Margarita recipe from Zarela Martinez (one part lime, one part triple sec, one and a half parts silver Tequila; quoth Zarela: “It’ll knock you on your ass”), and met a couple new people.

I briefly met Naomi Pomeroy of Beast in Portland, Ore., who's up for a Beard Award for best chef in the Northwest. And I had a really fun conversation with the disarmingly charming David Sax, who has just won a Beard Award for his book Save the Deli.

Those awards were handed out last night, and, as is the custom, many of the attendees then came to Chefs’ Night Out.

David was wearing the big gold-colored medallion that is a James Beard Award. The only places, ever, where it’s appropriate to wear such bling is Chefs’ Night Out and the Beard Award after parties that will happen later this evening.

Normally, David says he wears a big diamond-crusted Mercedes medallion, but I think he was joking.