Chefs Congress

September 20

The United Nations General Assembly has been meeting in New York, which is a real drag for those of us who work in Midtown East. But I've been on the West Side at another gathering, the inaugural International Chefs Congress.
Isn't that a great name? Chefs Congress. How important!
It was a bunch of demonstrations and seminars and a little trade show. But the demonstrations I saw were quite interesting and engaging, all done by cutting-edge, famous chefs (famous for chefs, at least).
Despite the lack of air conditioning, it was a good event, at least what I managed to attend. I had to skip most of today's festivities to finish up NRN's Culinary Currents section.
I was a little annoyed that the guy interpreting for French pastry chef Pascal Barbot refused to say what the chef kept repeating, that the recipes he was demonstrating were all about respecting the integrity of the ingredients. The interpretor wouldn't say it. He just wouldn't. Maybe he thought that notion was just the bizarre ramblings of an overly artistic French prima dona, but if you're an interpretor, you're not supposed to edit (or not much).
Besides, using great ingredients and not doing much to them -- respecting the ingredients' integrity -- is where American food is going (and where Italian food, and to a lesser extent French food, has been for generations).
But I was mostly there to hang out with the chefs anyway. And I met a few that I'd only interviewed over the phone before, like John Critchley at Toro in Boston and Scott Boswell of Stella in New Orleans, so that was cool.
I'd meant to introduce myself to a guy who works for Joel Robuchon and who asked Jose Andres, after his demonstration, about spherification (when you use sodium alginate and calcium chloride to make globules; perhaps the most widespread use of molecular gastronomy, unless you count those ubiquitous foam canisters), but I didn't get around to it. Oh well.
But here's something interesting. Tonight at a big reception -- the Rising Stars Revue, thrown by StarChefs.com, which also held the congress -- I chatted with Tony Esnault, the chef at Alain Ducasse at The Essex House. To be honest, one reason I stopped to chat was because at the Beard Awards reception in May I felt like I might have snubbed him, but of course I also wanted to talk to him because this week first Eater.com and then the New York Post reported emphatically, emphatically, that the restaurant was closing. So I asked him what his plans were. He brushed off the notion of Ducasse closing as a ridiculous rumor, and one that has been floating around since the place opened (which is true).
So if Ducasse closes soon I'll know not to believe Tony Esnault when it comes to business plans, but I'll still interview him about food. He knows his stuff.

One other random thing. In Polish, if people know each other really well, they say they know each other like bald horses. Where on earth could that have come from?

Lonesome publicist

September 19

Interesting opening party for Lonesome Dove last night, and not because some of us got to brand a cabinet with our initials.
No, it was interesting because the party was thrown by PR company Bullfrog & Baum and one of the first people I saw there was from another PR firm, Baltz & Co.
"This isn't your party," I said.
"We're going to start representing them," he said. "Shhh."
He said "Shhh," to a journalist. I don't shoosh well, and if I wrote for a publication with a name like New York Publicists Gossip Sheet that bit of information would have been in it now, especially since several Baltz folks told me the same story and then shooshed me. Then I was told by one Baltzian that the shift from Bullfrog & Baum was amicable. Who am I to call him a liar?
I don't write for the New York Publicists Gossip Sheet, and I don't know where one goes to read about the New York restaurant PR world, but I think some of the readers of this blog our interested in such things.
So there you have it.

"authentic Pan-Asian street food"

September 15

I wouldn't have noticed today's featured stupid press release at all if it hadn't invoked the name of NoPa, the little section of San Francisco just north of the panhandle of Golden Gate Park where my good friends Craig and Susan Stuart live. I sent the release to Craig without reading it, thinking, regardless of what it said, that he'd enjoy hearing about a new restaurant in his neighborhood. Craig made thoughtful observations about the place, of which he was already familiar and where he had picked up Asian chicken salad for his babysitter, but he hadn't eaten there himself yet.
I gave the release another look.
Here's how it release starts: "A trek North of the Panhandle now doubles as a tropical getaway ... where enlightenment seekers are revitalizing their spirits through authentic Pan-Asian street food, holistic teas, and eclectic music."
To be fair, south of the panhandle is hippie mecca Haight-Ashbury, so if people are starting there, perhaps they are trekkers seeking enlightenment, but the release, of a restaurant that claims to be Balinese and declares that it's serving "authentic Pan-Asian street food," goes on to talk about the Balinese concept of duality and quotes one of the owners, whose surname sounds Indonesian, so he could be Balinese, as saying his eatery (and tea lounge, don't forget the tea lounge) "is more than just a restaurant, it's a notion of living."
I mean, come on.
And how can you be Balinese and authentically Pan-Asian at the same time? How can you be authentically Pan-Asian? Is that like Continental, only a different continent?
Craig and I worked together in Thailand for five years and did a fair amount of traveling during that time and so we are, oh, let's say skeptical, of claims of authenticity at any restaurants trying to invoke pretty much anything Asian. But Craig, being a better person than I, and of much more generous character, was willing to reserve judgment on the food's quality.
But what kind of chicken salad does a Pan-Asian eat? And what's Balinese about it?

Don’t go out during fashion week

September 14

I mean, who are these people?
I started yesterday evening by going to the opening of Ferro’s, which apparently is a new restaurant at the Kimberly Hotel. I’d just been invited the night before; I guess they were waiting until after the Wednesday food sections’ deadlines to tell anyone but the New York Times that the restaurant was opening. That’s a common practice. The Times likes to have exclusives and restaurants like to be mentioned in the Times. It’s a symbiotic relationship that’s really annoying to everyone else.
Annoying enough that my boss, Pam Parseghian, and I were the only food media I noticed there.
I have no idea, none, who anyone else was but they were all dressed bizarrely: Shiny shirts cut like smoking jackets, Asian women wearing jean short-shorts and tight-fitting tops that for some reason reminded me of Bavarian bräuhaus waitress uniforms. Paris Hilton hair.
I really can’t do it justice, but when I asked the publicist this morning who attended I was told they were “Mostly social people” and was sent a link with captioned photos of attendees. I still didn’t know who anyone was (except for Benihana founder Rocky Aoki and an aged Gina Lollabrigida) so I forwarded it to colleagues who read Page 6 and follow who the hip DJs are and so on. They were no help.
The invitation asked me to “join Robert De Niro” and others at the party, but I guess Bob had other plans.

So 45 minutes of that was enough, even though the stuffed grape leaves and roasted vegetables were tasty, and the cheese was pretty good, too.
I hopped on the subway to SoHo to attend the opening of the Alessi store, because Joe, a coffee house I've been meaning to try, had opened an outlet in the store.
From what I learned at the party between strange conversations with an apparent coke head who claimed to have been partying for the past two days, one benefit of attending the Ferro’s opening was that I missed the long line to get into the Alessi shop earlier on.
Outside, it was a beautiful, slightly cool late summer evening. Inside it was sweltering, and Mr. Coke Head was mopping my brow with paper napkins and periodically holding my glass of Pinot Grigio for me as he insisted I sample another Parmesan crisp or piece of prosciutto wrapped around a breadstick. I tried to explain to him that I had enough experience at parties to hold a glass of wine and an hors d'oeuvre at the same time, but he was uninterested and instead chattered about the rich guy of whom he was the (or perhaps a) kept man. A billionaire, apparently. Maybe I should have accepted his invitation to dinner, but then again maybe not.

Michelin and me

September 13

Just as I'll go to a party simply to go to a party, sometimes I'll interview people just because they're around.
So I didn't tell the CEO of Left Bank restaurants that I'd already written my story on chains using local produce (look for it in NRN's September 25 issue) until after I'd interviewed him. I saved the notes, and maybe I'll be able to write something about the company later.
And I didn't have any particular agenda for my interview with Michelin guide director Jean-Luc Naret today. I mean, if he were going to tell me what restaurants in San Francisco and New York were getting what stars before everyone else, I'd certainly report on that, but Monsieur Naret is not a stupid man.
I did learn that the San Francisco guide covers an area stretching from San Jose to wine country and into the East Bay and features about 350 restaurants, compared to New York's 500. I learned that the New York edition will have a special section of inspectors' favorites — good-value restaurants with average per-person checks under $40.
And I learned that chefs often contact Michelin before they talk to the press about plans to refurbish their restaurants.
Heston Blumenthal, probably the world's #2 practitioner (going by reputation alone) of molecular gastronomy (after Ferran Adrià), wanted to show M. Naret his business plan for The Fat Duck, his 3-star restaurant in Bray, England.

Dubai and the Jersey Shore north of Asbury Park

September 13

I went to the reopening of Picholine last night — it had closed early last August for redecoration — and so, it seemed, did everybody else. Rather than stand in line for cheese I sipped Taittinger rosé and chatted with Josh Ozersky about deckle, also known as calotte de boeuf if you've ever worked for Thomas Keller, and his position as online food editor for New York magazine. His site goes live shortly so stay tuned.
Around the time that the party was scheduled to end I sat down with Melanie Young et al., and shortly thereafter we were joined by an ebullient David Burke, who declared that Dubai and the Jersey Shore north of Asbury Park were major growth areas (he just opened David Burke Fromagerie in Rumson, N.J., and has plans to open something in Dubai).
Later, after the party had officially ended, David Burke pulled our table over to connect with Picholine chef-owner Terrance Brennan's and someone (probably Melanie) asked him what the next hot dessert would be. He said it would have something to do with ingredients that made it easier for you to sleep. Mr. Brennan asked him what his next restaurant would be and he said Hawaiian Tropic Zone was about to open in Times Square. I mentioned that people were surprised that he was teaming up with Dennis Riese on the project and he asked if people hadn't also been surprised when he joined forces with Alan Stillman. He had a point.

What else I learned at the party: the publicists who threw it are going to launch a blog, to be called Bullfrog & Blog.

transitions

September 6

I think I threw away the invitation to go to the press reception promoting the Bermuda Gourmet Getaway, but then the publicist e-mailed me asking me to stop by, and I had no other plans tonight, so I went, and I ended up having a good time. It was in Gourmet magazine's private dining room, and I met chef Jean-Louis Gerin and got to know Katy Sparks better. It turns out that Katy's a neighbor of mine; we both live on Union Street in Park Slope, though she's in the cool part near 5th Avenue and I'm in the part that's an Upper West Side colony of angry, overprotective parents on political diets ("I only eat sustainable food") near Grand Army Plaza, although she's a former Food Co-op member and I'm not, and she has kids and I don't.
Katy's the corporate chef for Great Performances, a sort of catering company that operates a bunch of restaurants attached to cultural institutions, like museums and the Asia Society. As she expressed pleasure at the accuracy with which Gourmet's kitchen duplicated her food, we talked about the transition successful chefs often have to make as the move from someone who cooks to a manager who develops food for other people to cook. It reminded me of a joke Bobby Flay made that for a celebrity chef, cooking means handing someone a recipe. She said she thinks the restaurants to go to are the ones run by up-and-coming chefs, who still have fire in their bellies and aren't yet trying to brand themselves.
Interestingly in her blog today Jennifer Leuzzi said pretty much the same thing.
So then the speeches started. There were only two, and the main one was from Doctor the Honorable Ewart E. Brown, J.P., M.P, who is Bermuda's deputy premier and the minister of tourism and transport. He was wearing a truly excellent beige double-breasted suit.
Dr. Brown was a young journalist in Washington during the Watergate years, and then he practiced medicine in Los Angeles for 20 years, and finally he returned home and became a government official. Not too shabby.
I ended up closing down the party as I fell into conversation with Steve Mumford, a former journalist who, as we journalists often say, "moved to the dark side" and now sells ads. He transitioned from working for a trade publication (Builder) to a consumer magazine (Better Homes and Gardens) where he went from writing about redecorating to writing about tech (it was the late '90s) and eventually jumped the fence with a move to New York, to Playboy, to sell ads.
And from there he went to Gourmet.
People are interesting.

As a publicist you make a good ditch digger

September 5

Reviewing some press releases today, I noticed that one misspelled the name of the street of the restaurant it was supposed to be promoting. Another misnamed that oh-so-popular HBO TV series, Sex and the City. The release called it Sex in the City. I know that’s a small thing, but editors can be small people, and very pedantic ones when it comes to things like spelling and, you know, getting names right.
Then again, careless if asinine mistakes like that won’t keep me from writing about something if it’s interesting. What will is a release that doesn’t say anything. I have before me an e-mail about an event that a restaurant is holding. It tells me when the event will be. It says it is being held at the restaurant — it doesn't say where the restaurant is, but I suppose I could look that up on the restaurant’s web site. I won’t, but I could. It says proceeds for the event would go to local charities — vague, but I’ll take it. But it doesn't say what the event would be.

Amazing.

the scent of a psychopathic, totalitarian murderer

September 1

Bringing a scent for a perfume critic to smell at dinner is about as rude as exposing your backside to a proctologist at dinner. And yet I did it last night, and Chandler Burr, the New York Times' new scent critic, with whom I was having dinner at Ruby Foo's on the Upper West Side, didn't seem to mind.
Well, I mean, he didn't mind me handing him the cologne. The cologne itself he minded a lot.
"This is the scent form of Stalinism," he declared. He elaborated about it destroying creativity and repressing freedom and so on.
We agreed it was a good enough description that he pulled out his palm pilot and wrote it down to use in his column.
He further compared it to the scent of a burning oil well in the desert. 0 stars.

My colleagues hated it, too. On-Site editor Elissa Elan tried to spray a little bit on a piece of paper and managed somehow to produce an irredeemably strong smell that spread for cubicles and cubicles. Executive food editor Pam Parseghian said it smelled like a grandmother and wondered if it had gone rancid.

Deputy managing editor Paul Frumkin just spritzed some on his wrist and ran to wash it off.
I still kind of like it.
It did just make me sneeze, though. Placebo effect, maybe.

What we ate:
Malaysian chicken pot stickers
fried shrimp dumplings
barbecued eel, avocado and cucumber roll
smoked and spicy salmon roll with chipotle-garlic sauce
Peking duck, and duck cooked a couple of otherways, too.
Green tea mochi, chocolate mint mochi, and a gigantic piece of chocolate cake.

Bad season for tomato haters

August 31

When the publicist from the Peanut Advisory Board sees an interesting peanut item on a menu, she feels compelled to try it. It's her job, after all. And often she invites me along. It's expense-able, after all.
So last night we went to Blue Hill, the one in the West Village, not the one upstate, for the chocolate bread pudding with salted caramel, roasted peanuts and cinnamon ice cream, which the publicist had learned about from reading a rave by Frank Bruni.
Blue Hill's chef, Dan Barber, not only is a big advocate of seasonal and sustainable stuff, but also, being a savvy guy, he is a regular reader of Nation's Restaurant News. He wasn't in the restaurant that evening, but he nonetheless had given orders to start us out with glasses of Champagne. I love it when that happens. We also got a mid-course bonus of heirloom tomato salad with cucumber, watermelon and basil.
I have what I consider to be a genetic defect: I hate most raw tomatoes. They taste toxic to me. Cook a tomato and I love it, but there's some enzyme or something in a raw tomato that either my taste buds or olfactory receptors (probably the latter) register as poisonous.
This is true, I found out by conducting an informal study, of about half of the men matrilineally descended from my own maternal great-grandmother, Dora Melman. [Skip the next paragraph if you don't care about the details of the tomato preferences of my male cousins].
Great uncle Dave Melman, one of three boys, hated tomatoes. First cousin Tom Kornfeld, middle son of my mother's sister, hates tomatoes of any shape or form — I think his daughter Naomi does too, actually — and so does second cousin once-removed Adam Rosner, an only child, whose mother Martha is only the daughter of Sarah Levi, only daughter of great aunt Fannie, who was the oldest of Dora's four daughters. Great aunt Millie had no children. I guess I'll have to find out about the tomato tastes of Noah, the great-grandson of Dora's other daughter, Anne. Actually, Anne's only daughter, Dorothy, had four daughters — Anne, Melanie, Cindy and Irene — and I'm out of touch with all of them. I guess I'll have to look them up to continue my research, but it certainly looks like dislike of raw tomatoes is a sex-linked trait in my family, just like male pattern baldness and color blindness (I have both of those too).
So for the most part, the more flavorful a raw tomato is, the more I hate it. But I soldier on, because it's my job and because I have found that I do like some obscure heirloom varieties. In fact, I liked about half of the tomatoes so kindly sent out by Dan Barber.
You may recall that I had an heirloom tomato salad last night too; this is a trying season for a tomato-hater.

What else I ate:
Salad of summer vegetables, raw and marinated greens from the restaurant's farm, pistachios and mushroom gelée
Grass fed lamb with quinoa, zucchini and Stone Barns bibb lettuce
Peach cobbler

Beppe

August 29

I finally managed to eat at Beppe, the old-school Tuscan place on 22nd Street. It's been there for years, during which time 22nd Street has quietly become a fascinating restaurant strip, all the failed restaurants in the space formerly known as Commune — and Rocco's and Caviar & Banana and so much more — notwithstanding.
I ate there with the beautiful and overqualified publicist Aurora Kessler, who, like me, lived in Thailand for a number of years. So we talked about, well, a lot of things ranging from Chatuchak Market, which she thinks is the greatest place on Earth and I think is hot and crowded (although she convinced me to give it another try), to olfactory receptors to the nature of revolution to the subtle southern Italian influences that Portuguese-Campanian chef Marc Taxiera was bringing to Tuscan's menu. She introduced me to a Spanish word, detaillista, or detail fanatic, which we agreed applies beautifully to Thai society, where subtle nuances in behavior are picked up on and assessed like no place else either of us knew about.
It's amazing how obvious an allegorical story is, as long as you realize that it's allegorical.

What we ate:

Stuffed fried zucchini flowers and zucchini salad
White bean and bottarga crostini
Crostini of chicken liver with vin santo
Mixed local tomato salad in tomato water
Warm gemelli pasta with diced tomato, basil, and young pecorino cheese
Spaghetti with fresh sardines, fennel, raisins, pine nuts, and fennel pollen
Roasted swordfish with summer greenmarket caponnata
Brined pork chop with grilled cipolline onions and sauteed greens

And for dessert:
Sweet corn gelato with sea salt and olive oil
chocolate-chip and vanilla canolli

What we drank (all of Beppe's wines, all of them, are supposed to be from Tuscany, but subtle exceptions are made for the sake of avoiding crappy wine, so the Brut sparkling wine, made using the techniques of Champagne and with Chardonnay grapes, actually is from Lombardia, but made by a Tuscan company, because, as I was told, Chardonnay from Tuscany would be gross):
Brut 2000 Marchesi Di Frescobaldi
Rosato 2005 Castello Di Ama
Sauvignon Blanc "Refola"2004 Poggio Salvi
Vermentino Di Maremma "Pagliatura" 2005 Magliano

Velvet-rope fast food

August 28,

Actually, it was one of those elastic straps stretched between poles, like the ones at long check-in lines at airports, but the idea was the same, and it materialized in front of Bamn near the end of the opening party.
Bamn is, I believe, the first automat to exist in New York in about 20 years, and its opening party was tonight.
An automat is a sort of vending-machine-cum-restaurant. The food is behind little glass doors in cubby holes; you insert your coins, open a door and pull out your food. Cheap and convenient. It was the latest thing several decades ago.
The new incarnation is kind of Asian, with a Hawaiian accent. Behind some doors is Spam musubi, a delicacy from the islands that uses nori seaweed to tie fried, teriyaki-glazed spam to sushi rice (it's much, much better than it sounds). Teriyaki burgers and pork buns are available too, along with American fast food like chicken nuggets, grilled cheese sandwiches, fried chicken wings and mozzarella sticks.
At the service counter are french fries (you can buy a $10 bucket) with a massive selection of sauces (I had salsa verde at the suggestion of the man behind the counter). Green tea soft serve is on hand, too. The food was all developed by Kevin Reilly, who currently is chef at Water Grill although I met him near the turn of the century during his ten-minute stint as the chef at Zoe, in Soho.
Most items cost about two bucks (change machines are on-site), but tonight everything was a quarter, and the quarters were provided by pretty young Asian women in tight-fitting, pink Bamn t-shirts and white pieces of cloth that approximated mini-skirts. But you needed to be somebody to get in, to the disappointment of many, many passersby. I don't think the elastic rope came out until CNN started filming, however.
Inside, I caught up with Nancy Davidson and Ted Lee, exchanged faux-kisses with Andrea Strong (real kisses are tacky when your mouth is full of teriburger), and was delighted to see the reaction of Jennifer Leuzzi, a Hawaiian, when Ted brought her the Spam musubi. Once she saw that shave ice also was available she declared Bamn to be the fall opening she was most excited about, although after some reflection she declared it number two, after l'Atelier de Joel Robuchon.

What would Hizbollah do?

I had dinner at Tintol, again, with its new publicist, and what more breezy topic to discuss over Portuguese small plates than the Middle East?
We seemed to agree that, although Israel's incursion into Lebanon might have been justified, it was not effective. Indeed, Israel's quite understandable policy of fighting brutal attacks with counter-brutal attacks has served simply to create more enemies.
The publicist suggested that Israel would have been better off treating Palestinians in its occupied territories the way Hizbollah and Hamas do: Run schools and hospitals and provide services.

Food to eat while solving the world's problems:

boquerones
flamed chorizo
grilled sardines
morcela
Chanfana de cabrito (goat stew) with carrot puree
bolos de bacalhau

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Jasper White at the first of what will no-doubt be a string of 40th birthday celebrations

August 21

A dear college friend, science teacher Michael Gerber, turned 40 last week, so this weekend I took a bus to Boston to help him celebrate.
Greyhound has become surprisingly middle class in recent years. The dregs that used to accompany me on bus trips in college in the 1980s are nowhere to be seen. I wonder what has happened to them.
From Boston I took the T to Alewife, where I was picked up by Michael and our friend Shane Curcuru, who started as a debugger of spreadsheets at Lotus and now works on cutting edge software for IBM. We then drove to Lincoln to pick up Dennis Liu, who's a corporate lawyer of some sort, and then to the Millbury Park 'n' Ride where we met John Bruce, who does computer network consulting. We switched to his car and we all drove to Mohegan Sun to have dinner at Summer Shack.
I thought this was an odd choice of a place to honor Michael, who does not drink nor gamble. Nor does he smoke cigars, another thing one can do indoors at Mohegan Sun and not many other places in the northeast. But apparently Michael was in favor of trying something new, and he likes seafood (he's a native of Lexington and now lives in Gloucester, Mass., though, so it's not like we needed to schlep to Connecticut to find seafood).
But it turned out to be a lot of fun, and who did we see when we got to the Summer Shack but its chef and owner, Jasper White! He was in the kitchen, stirring sauces and expediting and stuff. Summer Shack has four units, so you don't really expect to see Jasper at the one you're eating in, especially if it's at Mohegan Sun on a Saturday night.
Anyway, I said hello and he sent us clams casino and peel-and-eat shrimp cooked in beer and Old Bay seasoning. Other than that we had a couple of "towers of power," which is what they call cold seafood platters, along with two styles of calamari and fried clam bellies. Then I had a lobster with drawn butter.
Michael doesn’t gamble, but he did try his hand at some penny slots. He got bored, so Shane took over and managed to turn an 18-cent bet into 40-some-odd dollars. Michael, not being a gambler, knew that that was the time to cash out.
Since he doesn’t drink, I bought him a shot of Macallan 18.

A night in

August 18

I've been hanging out a fair amount lately with Chandler Burr, who wrote a fascinating book called The Emperor of Scent about a guy who developed a new theory for how our sense of smell works. Conventional wisdom is that our olfactory receptors determine a molecule’s smell by its shape. This guy, Luca Turin, says they determine it based on its molecular vibration.
It’s really fun to suggest this to biologists because they get really angry and defend the shape theory like it’s really important.
Anyway, I threw some work Chandler's way and since then he has been helping me explore Thai restaurants. He also accompanied me to a recent meal at Duvet, which is one of those restaurants where you eat in bed. I have learned from those restaurants that tables and chairs are extremely practical when it comes to eating, especially soup.
This evening, Chandler, who also is The New York Times' new scent columnist, asked me to hang out with some friends of his, Mark Kingstone and Kevin Laursen. We met at their apartment and after much discussion resolved that ordering from Ali Baba, a neighborhood Turkish restaurant, was our best dinner option.

What we ordered from Ali Baba:

Humus
Babaghanoush
Lahmacun (flat bread with lamb on it)
Arnavut Cigeri (fried cubes of calf liver)
Falafel
Icli Kofte (beef-stuffed bulgur croquettes, like kibbeh)
Yogurtlu Tavuk (chicken in yogurt)

Two nights at Philippe

August 16

"This party is boring," I said to one of the only other people at the party at Philippe.
Philippe, a fairly new restaurant featuring chef Philippe Chow, who for many years was chef at the exclusive Mr. Chow restaurant (named after a different Mr. Chow), was celebrating the fact that two professional basketball players, Sebastian Telfair of the Boston Celtics and Al Harrington of the Atlanta Hawks, were investing in the restaurant and putting forward plans to open units all over the place (the next one will be in Miami Beach, they say). Gotham magazine was co-sponsoring the party for some reason.
I showed up and found there was no place to check my bag, which is annoying, but it was my fault that the party was boring. I arrived at 6:38 for a party that was scheduled to run from 6:30 to 11:30.
As a general rule you should wander into a party about an hour after it has started, at the earliest. I know this. I've known it for years and yet I still show up early. I wonder what I'm afraid of missing.
Anyway, by the time I’d finished my “saketini” — which actually was whatever vodka was sponsoring the event shaken with ice and a splash of sake, poured into a martini glass and garnished with a cucumber — I was in a better mood, I'd found a corner to stash my bag, and the party was in full swing. I switched to Champagne and met Sebastian Telfair, a little tiny fellow, bedecked in bling but extremely cordial. One of Philippe's publicists asked Mr. Telfair who he was and what team he played for. You'd think if you were a rather well-known basketball player and were investing in a business, you would expect that business's publicist to look you up on the Web or something before coming to your party, but he seemed unperturbed (I just looked him up on the Web and the NBA claims that he's six feet tall; it must have been a very tall party).
I hung out a bit with Josh Ozersky, a meat expert who recently was named New York magazine's online food editor (good thing I've always been nice to him), and I met food writer Ed Levine and the Australian guy who's on the WPLJ morning show. Texan chef Tim Love, who's opening Lonesome Dove Western Bistro in New York next month, caught me up with what he was doing.
Then Zak Pelaccio and I exchanged impressions of Buddakan (summary: I loved it, he didn't).
Many hors d'oeuvres, largely dumplings, spring rolls and satay, were passed around, many so fresh-out-of-the-fryer that you couldn't eat them right away.
That's impressive, so I was glad that I had arranged to have dinner there the following night with my colleague Janette Clark. Janette had met another one of Philippe's owners, Chris Brantley, at Nobu last month and he expressed an interest in having me come in and check it out, so I took Janette with me and left it up to Philippe to decide what we'd eat.
This is what he decided:

chicken satay
squab with lettuce wrap and plum sauce
crispy vegetable leaf with smoked chicken and walnuts
Nine seasons spicy prawns
House filet mignon in brown garlic sauce
Shrimp fried rice
sautéed string beans

Exclusive event!

August 16

Last week I got an e-mail with the subject hed: "invite (sshhh)!! mommy & baby editor's preview"
After pleasantries about how hot it is out there, I was told "I‘m inviting you to this event we are holding next Friday (August 18th) – we’re only inviting select media contacts that work in the child & mommy space. We are debuting over 25 brand new, really unique under the radar companies that have recently launched new product lines just in time for holiday and new years."
Since I write about food trends in restaurants for the trade press, I think my mommy is probably the only mommy who reads my stuff, and she's not doing it to find new products to aid in raising kids; her youngest child is 34, after all.
But I get lots of disingenuous invitations from publicists who are unware of their own pathetic transparency — or maybe they are aware, know that their messages will mildly irritate people like me whom they don't care about, and perhaps touch the hearts of those they are trying to lure to their event. I usually just delete them, or if they're really bad I forward them to other editors and we have a good laugh.

But these jokers then tried again, thanking me for showing interest in the event.

"Some of the comments we have received: 'this is the talk of the town', 'this is the best invite I've received all summer' ..."
I think my best invite this summer, apart from the one to meet my newborn niece, was a trip to Thailand that I was unable to take, but perhaps the parenting-publication world is less glamourous.
Still, the message told me in no uncertain terms that only "media mommies" and "media that work in the mommy & child space ONLY [sic]" are invited.
Since the rest of the press release is such nonsense, I figure the part about it being exclusive is also untrue, so I thought I'd just let you know, should you feel like crashing a party, that the event is at a Beach House at 2 Saddle Lane in East Hampton. Maybe you could stop by and pick up some free stuff.

Whither Bill Yosses?

August 11

Bill Yosses was the pastry chef at Bouley Bakery for some years. Then he became pastry chef of Citarella, which was later renamed Josephs by Citarella. That restaurant's executive chef, Brian Bistrong — also a Bouley alumnus — left and became executive chef of The Harrison, and Bill became executive chef of Josephs.
But it closed in April, I'm trying to hunt Bill down and his e-mails are bouncing.
If you happen to know where he is, please let me know.

I’m from Jersey! Are you from Jersey?

August 10

When meeting a famous person, even a slightly famous person, I have to struggle not to make an idiot of myself. I'm not particularly starstruck, but I do want to make a good impression; I want to be remembered.
Fortunately, the side of me that would rather leave no impression than a bad one wins out more often than not, so I didn’t utter the title of this blog entry when meeting Joe Piscopo at the Beard House last night. Instead I just told him my name and he said that it was nice to see me, which is safer than “nice to meet you,” a phrase you don’t want to say to someone you’ve met before.
The former Saturday Night Live cast member (really former; he left in 1985) is friends with Barry Gutin, who owns Cuba Libre, Brûlée and other places in Philadelphia and Atlantic City.
Cuba Libre chef Guillermo Veloso was in charge of dinner at the Beard House last night, and pastry chef Jemal Edwards from Brûlée made dessert.
Mr. Gutin came up with his staff and friends, and I ate with him, his GM, his publicist, his beverage guy, a journalist from South Jersey, some other PR people and Joe Piscopo.
He looks trim and kind of stately these days, and sort of like he has internalized a bit of the Frank Sinatra impersonation he used to do.
He shared a few polite tales of the SNL days, reminiscing about getting Eddie Murphy out of his dressing room two minutes before showtime, but not going into detail about what he was doing in there. But mostly everyone talked about their kids. I don’t have any, so I talked about my nieces and nephew instead.
When the chefs were introduced, Jemal Edwards made a big deal out of the fact that we had been served a three-course dessert. But, excessive as it may seem, three-course desserts aren’t that uncommon at the Beard House or at other high-end food events. A fruit "pre-dessert," often is followed by something heavier, often containing chocolate, and then petits fours are served with coffee. It’s a bit grand to pair the pre-dessert and the dessert with different wines, but it’s not unheard of.
Edwards did something I like, though. He started with a small chocolate dessert and followed it with a fruity one. That makes more sense than the other way around. The higher acid content of fruit desserts can really clean up the chocolate-coated palate. Finish up with a high-tannin tea and you're golden.
The wines were selected by the staff of Vino Noir, Gutin's soon-to-open Atlantic City wine bar. The wine-list will be all-electronic with web-browsing ability, a concept speerheaded by Aureole in Las Vegas. But Vino Noir offers the added option, if you really like a particular wine that you're drinking, to order a case of it instantly online.

What I ate and drank:

Chino-Latino Summer Rolls
Lobster Empanadas
Caviar Spoons
Mixed Anticuchos
Cuba Libre Signature Mojitos

Roasted Squab Breast and Tasajo of Squab Leg with Herb and Aromatic–Infused Squab Broth
Bonny Doon Vin Gris de Cigare 2003

10 Cane Tuna — Toro Marinated in Soy, Guava, and 10 Cane Rum, and Braised Pork Belly with King Crab, Calabaza, Coconut Calasparra Rice Tian, and Guava Gastrique
Nautilus Estate Sauvignon Blanc 2004

Guinea Boliche — Braised Guinea Hen Leg Stuffed with Foie Gras, Sweet Plantains, Olives, and Rum-Soaked Raisins and Roasted Guinea Hen Breast with Garlic Flan, Quail Egg, and Serrano Crisps
Numanthia Tinta de Toro 2003

Lamb en Tres Actos — Lamb Picadillo Empanadita; Crispy Lamb Frita; and Roasted Lamb Rib Chop with Roncal and Malanga Mash, Served with Baby Arugula in Porcini Mojo and Cilantro Essence
Bell Wine Cellars Big Guy Red 2002

Petite Chocolate–Hazelnut Cream Cone with Caramelized Hazelnuts and Frangelico Crème Anglaise
Broadbent 10-Year-Old Malmsey Madeira

Summer Strawberry Fantasy > Honey Financier with Tahitian Vanilla Panna Cotta, Strawberry Gelée, Strawberry-Basil Foam, Navan Vanilla–Cognac Sautéed Wild Strawberries, and Almond-Strawberry Croquant
Prager Sweet Claire Riesling 2003

Truffles, Bonbons, and Petits Fours

East Colfax

August 10

I was in Denver last week, visiting family and attending the naming ceremony of my new niece, Alia.
I grew up right in the middle of Denver, in Capitol Hill, and for the past 30 years, since I was nine (9!) years old, I have taken pretty much every opportunity to wander down what remains in many ways my favorite strip of America.
Simple-minded people think of East Colfax as a long row of sleaze — something that I would expect the Catholic Church might resent, since its Basilica of the Immaculate Conception is there, separated by a parking lot and Pennsylvania Street from a McDonald's; Chinese restaurants, convenience stores, empty buildings and Duman's Custom Tailoring all are across the street.
The capitol building is on Colfax, too, and I imagine the Colorado State government, or at least parts of it, might also feel bad about being stamped as sleazy. Besides, not nearly as many drunks are sleeping on the capitol's lawn as there were a couple of decades ago.
The 40-block stretch of Colfax from Broadway to Colorado Boulevard is an agglomeration of people just being themselves. If they look like drifters, they're really drifters, probably having recently gotten off the bus at the Greyhound station a block north of there (the mosaic in the station, of two different-colored hands, made out of the sort of male and female icons you see on bathroom doors, grasping each other, was done by my cousin, artist Doug Kornfeld).
There are day laborers waiting for work at the agencies on Colfax that hire them, and skate punks (skate punks never went out of style in Denver; I don't know why). I often overhear conversations recounting brushes with the law or the collapse of a romance, or both ("I told him that I wasn't going to get thrown in jail for his sorry ass...")
There are patrons of the only lesbian coffee house I know of, and customers at shops selling vintage comic books and posters and music (vinyl, cassettes, CDs). Each of those stores smells comfortably of shredded cardboard and dust.
Other shops sell used furniture. The headquarters of the local Guardian Angels chapter is on East Colfax, next to an Office Depot. There are martial arts centers and community organizations, chain restaurants and indies — including a former IHOP, with the signature roof, that's now the independent Mama's Café. I used to go to that IHOP after the midnight viewing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at The Ogden theater, which is now a venue for live performances.
And there's some sleaze, too. Kitty's, a 24-hour adult book, video etc. emporium, is bookended by two bars apparently owned by a Cervantes fan. They're named Sancho's Broken Arrow (A Thinking Place) and Dulcinea’s 100th Monkey.
There are many check cashing places, and tattoo parlors — the classiest looking one has polished hardwood floors and plush leather couches and also does piercings.
There are a couple of important liquor stores nearby, a gay bar, an Irish pub, and The Satire Lounge, where I recently had green chile — a New Mexican delicacy — so good it made me want to cry.
My high school, East, is on Colfax, and fast food restaurants nearby cater to the students there. Recently the theater across the street from East that for years was Bonfils and then was Lowenstein is now The Tattered Cover, a gigantic bookstore that was forced to relocate from increasingly tony, increasingly boring Cherry Creek North. It lost its lease.
Efforts are underway pretty much all the time to add some tone to East Colfax, as if its own natural rhythm were unworthy. A recently built condominium and retail complex sits mostly fallow just east of Greek Town (something of a misnomer; a few Greek restaurants, a Greek bakery and something called the "Greek Social Club" are there, but so are Chinese and Ethiopian restaurants, and a Caribbean bakery and "marketplace").
East Colfax mostly ignores those efforts, and glides along in its own way, a natural, slowly evolving stretch of humanity (or not in some cases — at least two barber shops on the avenue still say they do great flat tops). Every neighborhood I've visited in New York seems predictably scripted by comparison.

Vodka redux

Paul Adams has made some insightful comments about vodka that you might find interesting.

Truffled popcorn

July 26

A light went off in my head as I was reading the bio of Per Se’s chef de cuisine, Jonathan Benno. I interviewed him today for a special section in Nation’s Restuarant News that comes out on August 14.
The section’s called "The Next Generation of Talent," and it profiles half a dozen chefs recommended by some of the country's top chefs as great protégés.
Jonathan Benno was one Thomas Keller's picks.
His other choices, in case you were wondering, were Grant Achatz, Corey Lee, Eric Ziebod, Ron Siegel, Gregory Short, Stephen Durfee, Ryon Poli and John Fraser. I bet you wish you had such good protégés.
I could only pick one, though, and for reasons of my own I picked Jonathan Benno.
Part of his résumé- and experience-building process was a stint with Michael Mina at Aqua in San Francisco.
Now that’s interesting, because one of New York's very earliest bits of exposure to Per Se’s food was at Chef’s Night Out, the pre-Beard Award party, in 2004.
The party was held at the Time Warner Center and a bunch of the restaurants there served food. Per Se's offering was truffled popcorn. People gushed. They oohed and aahed: "Can you imagine truffled popcorn? Amazing!"
Which of course it wasn't. Michael Mina, when cooking for the Citymeals-on-Wheels event not long before, also served truffled popcorn. It's been a signature item of his for years.
I accused Jonathan of being the truffled popcorn connection and he looked annoyed. He said that neither he nor Michael Mina invented truffled popcorn. I didn't press the issue because I knew he was right. According to Mina, truffled popcorn was invented near the turn of the century (as in a few years ago), at his Aqua restaurant in Liguna Niguel, Calif., by his chef de cuisine at the time, Jeff Lloyd.
Mina was trying to think of an interesting lounge snack to be served at the big deck outside the restaurant and Lloyd suggested doing something new with popcorn.
Mina had just received a shipment of white truffles, and he stored them in unpopped popcorn.
The popcorn retained a surprising amount of truffle aroma when they popped it, and they finished it with butter flavored with truffle shavings.

bad press kit

July 26

Got a restaurant press kit that didn't contain a menu. I threw it away.

trans fat heads

July 19

I read in the Nation's Restaurant News Daily News Fax today that Chicago Alderman Edward Burke has reworded a bill currently working its way through the City Council that would prohibit restaurants from using oil containing trans fats.
He was persuaded by the Illinois Restaurant Association to change the bill to affect only restaurant companies with $20 million or more in annual sales, the reason being that the change away from trans fats would be too expensive for smaller restaurants.
Now, I think outlawing food of any sort is stupid, but the Chicago City Council is the same legislative body that idiotically banned foie gras. So here’s my question: Why is it okay for small companies to poison people but not big ones?

They couldn’t even wait a month

July 19

Yesterday I got yet another premium vodka. This one's French, and made only from the wheat grown in that country's Brie Champagne region that is then mixed with spring water from the Vosges mountains.
The marketing tactic of this vodka, you see, is to tie itself to the European system of designating food by its geographic origin. Parmigiano-Reggiano can only come from a particular section of Emilia-Romagna in Italy. Sancerre wine can only come from Sancerre, France.
Neither of those items is likely to be consumed with cranberry juice or apple pucker, however.

Sea of white

July 18

During the general session of the American Culinary Federation's annual convention, which just concluded in Philadelphia, education director Michael Baskette commented on the "sea of white" seated before him. He was marveling at all the people in chef coats, but he could just as easily have been commenting on the people in them.
The ACF continues to be one of the whitest organizations I know of; the manliest, too, if that's an accurate way to describe an organization without many women in it.
That's a strange thing in the American culinary world, where the lingua franca is Spanish owing to those who make up the backbone of nearly every professional kitchen in the country.
Just over half of the new students in culinary schools are women.
The New York Times created a kerfuffle earlier this year when it noted how few African American chefs are heading up kitchens. That topic was brought up at the New York Public Library during the question-and-answer part of a discussion among Anthony Bourdain, Mario Batali and Bill Buford. Bourdain pointed out that the dearth of hispanics among the ranks of top toques was an even more obvious travesty.
No one seems to know why this is. Professional kitchens tend to be genuine meritocracies, where you can be a ne'er-do-well, malcontent, illiterate drug addict or whatever else you want to be. If you show up on time and do your work, you're cool. If you have aptitude, you'll be promoted. Labor's in too short supply to do otherwise.
The foodservice industry, which tends to lean rather heavily toward the political right, loves immigrants, and many in it advocate an open-door policy.
Still, only at the convention that just concluded, in 2006, did Ferdinand Metz, president emeritus of The Culinary Institute of America and current head of the World Association of Chefs Societies (it used to be cooks societies, but the name was changed earlier this year), announce that WACS was now launching a program to help develop women chefs "believe it or not."
The ACF's immediate past president, Edward Leonard, did launch some programs that he hoped would attract African American and Hispanic chefs and help them feel at home. He arranged for them to have their own networking sessions, for example.
I don't know how well it worked.
The ACF does have a few Hispanics and African-Americans, and a fair number of Asians. I wonder if one reason for the whiteness of the organization is that most of its recruitment efforts are made at the more expensive culinary schools, whereas minority cooks, even in 2006, still work their way up the ranks by starting as dishwashers and prep cooks.
I did meet the first obviously gay couple I'd ever met at an ACF conference, so diversity is on the march, even if it's a slow march.

A big stud and the perfect mint julep

July 13

I spent the past couple of days in Kentucky, visiting a bull and a bourbon distillery.
The bull was Prime, father of all the steak served at Primehouse, the Steve Hanson restaurant in Chicago whose chef is steak maestro and generally creative guy David Burke.
On the surface, Steve Hanson and David Burke are an unexpected team. Hanson's B.R. Guest restaurants tend not to be chef-driven. Instead, Hanson seems to run his restaurants from the perspective that, when people eat out, they want to get good service in a fun setting. The food doesn't need to impress, it just needs to meet expectations — to be good enough, as it were. The restaurants of Stephen Starr, Jeffrey Chodorow and other extremely successful operators seem to work on the same philosophy, although they sometimes take umbrage when I say so.
On the other hand, some B.R. Guest restaurants are clearly food- and chef-driven, such as Fiamma, whose chef Michael White has won high praise for his Italian food (I had a meal there for the Bon Appétit Food and Entertaining Awards awhile back and Mario Batali himself gushed over the pasta, and Mario Batali's no idle gusher).
Anyway, with Primehouse, the culinary focus is on its bull.
Prime is a beefcake stud of a Black Angus who spends his days strutting around Creekstone Farms in Kentucky, where his semen is collected three times a day, either to be frozen or inseminated into waiting females of similarly good breeding. In this case, breeding has nothing to do with manners or the ability to sneer with grace at the lower classes (which I guess would be Herefords and Brahmas and Holsteins and so on, not to mention Chianinis, I mean, really), but to marble well — to put on weight in such a way that little veins of fat are distributed evenly throughout your muscles, making for flavorful yet tender meat.
Prime’s children are raised on a mostly-grass diet until they are ready to be sent to Kansas feed lots, where they are fattened up mostly on grain until they're the right weight and size to be delicious rib-eyes, sirloins and filets. Then they're "harvested" and sent to many places, including Prime, where David Burke ages and cooks them.
Prime is the latest and perhaps most extreme example of the trend to identify the origins of foods. Hanson so liked the idea that he was hoping to continue the theme in other aspects of the restaurant. He wanted to get a supply of the straws used to store bull semen and use them (unused ones) as swizzle sticks.
He was dissuaded from the idea, but it took awhile.
In fact, Eben Klemm, who's in charge of B.R. Guest's beverage programs and who was in Kentucky with me, said Primehouse's purchasing manager was instructed to buy some semen straws and figure out how to do something with them.
He ordered them, opened the package, and only then realized that he had been sent not only the straws, but full ones with semen in them.
That bummed him out.
Freelance writer Greg Lindsay, who also was on the trip — nice guy, funny and smart as a whip — suggested quite seriously that bull semen could be an excellent cocktail ingredient, to be offered for a hefty supplement to testosterone-pumped types on the Chicago Board of Trade for example.
Hey, they'll drink Red Bull and vodka.
We also visited the Maker's Mark distillery, whose master distiller, Dave Pickerell, gave me the most detailed recipe I could imagine for a Mint Julep.
Maker's Mark, I learned on the tour, is all about removing bitterness from its brew. It uses no rye in its grain mix, just corn, wheat and malted barley, and it uses a roller mill instead of a hammer one to grind the grain so that no grain gets scorched (scorching creates bitter flavors). Maker's Mark is aged to be only sweet, without sourness or bitterness, and the entire taste experience is supposed to occur in the front of the mouth.
So Dave Pickerell isn't about to mull the mint for his julep. Mulling releases tannins, you see, which are bitter. So instead he creates an infusion, wrapping a bunch of mint leaves in cheese cloth, dipping them in bourbon, and squeezing, dipping and squeezing, dipping and squeezing until he has a nice, strong, minty infusion.
Separately, he combines six parts bourbon with one part simple syrup. He puts that in the freezer, and when it's time to make juleps, he pours it over ice and adds the infusion until it reaches the desired mintyness. He serves the juleps with straws cut short, forcing those drinking them to get up close to the drink to get a strong whiff of the mint.

Commando partying

July 10

Sometimes here in the New York food scene so many interesting-sounding events are going on that I try to make my version of commando raids — arriving, saying "hi, hi," having a drink, learning a fact and leaving for the next event.
Normally, Sundays in the summer are dead and I'm at home doing laundry or playing a computer game (Civilization IV), but the Fancy Food Show is underway, and many companies are taking the opportunity to show off their stuff.
So commando-style party attendance was in order.
That's hard to do, however, when your first event features an Italian product — Grana Padano cheese, in this case — and your host and many of the guests are in another room watching the World Cup championship between France and Italy (Italy won in a penalty-kick tie-breaker, which many people find gripping but I just think is kind of lame). That event was supposed to start at 4:30, so I had no idea that they expected us to sit down for dinner AFTER all the niceties and speaches given by representatives from the Grana Padano consorzio and various trade commissioners and so on — and then translated into English.
That was at Felidia, on the border between the Upper East Side and Midtown, and I had an event way downtown at Tribeca Grill (for Jamon Iberico) that started at 5:30. And I wasn't really at Felidia for the cheese, but for the Franciacorta they were pouring with it. Franciacorta is a sparkling wine I really like that comes, I believe, from the Italian region of Lombardy, which also is where a lot of Grana Padano comes from.
I learned at the event that Padano means "of or pertaining to the Po River," and that Grana Padano comes from several Italian regions in areas north of the Po.
Believe it or not, that will be a useful bit of information somewhere in the future. I know it will be.
My friend Arlyn Blake was at Felidia, too, and she and I finally decided to make a run for it at 5:50, when all we had eaten was three pieces of cheese, all of different ages and made in different seasons to reflect the variety in the world of Grana Padano. It was going to be a long night there.
So instead we apologized and hopped into the car of Arlyn's boyfriend, Sal, who drove us to the Tribeca Grill.
That was the see-and-be-seen party. I'm not sure why. Maybe chefs like Wylie Dufresne and Aaron Sanchez and pastry chef Johnny Iuzzini and writers like Jeffrey Steingarten and Peter Kaminsky and Kate Krader were there to sample the Jamon Iberico that was being presented by chef José Andres (Peter Kaminsky definitely was). Or maybe they were there because everyone likes José and wanted to see him. Or maybe they were there because almost everyone like's Drew Nieporent, Tribeca Grill's owner, and they wanted to see him.
It would have been a good place to hang out, but I had a dinner commitment back uptown near Columbus Circle, at San Domenico. So I walked to the 1 train and ran into Beverly Stephen of Food Arts and a friend of hers whose name didn't quite sink in. They, too, were headed to San Domenico, for a dinner by a chef from Italy's Campania region that also featured Campanian wine.
I sat down at my assigned table and the woman next to me, while doing something with her blackberry quizzed me as to who I was and what business I had being there. Was I in the industry? Did I have a culinary background?
Try not to do that when you go to a dinner party. It's, well, unbelievably bad form.
I thought of being a jerk right back, but instead introduced myself to her and then to everyone else at the table and we ended up having a very nice time exchanging amusing anecdotes. That's why you should avoid being a jerk at the beginning of dinner parties; you have to sit with those people for the rest of the night.
One person cited a "fact" she'd heard at a nutrition seminar that 33 percent of women were not interested in sex (the seminar was apparently trying to correlate bad nutrition with lack of interest in sex and a bunch of other things).
That seems like an awefully high percentage for a species that has managed to survive for even the several hundreds of thousands of years that we've been around. If you have any notion of where that statistic comes from, I'd love to hear about it.

What I ate at San Domenico:
Passato di fagioli di Controne con scuncigli e bottarga
Timbalo di bucatini, patate e provola su salsa di carote
Parmigiana di alici fresche
Filetto di maiale alla erbe con umidi di cardiofi
Fondente di cioccolato con mousse di ricotta
Caffe & piccola paticceria

and what I drank there:
Asprinio di Aversa, Fescine, Cantine Caputo, 2005
Fiano di Avellino, Campore Terredora, 2003
Aglianico Donnaluna, De Conciliiis, 2004

Alien abduction

July 5

A propos of not much, a question occurred to me after I finished writing a column on animal treatment:

Is alien abduction their form of catch-and-release?

It’s the 5th, so there must be a new organic vodka

July 5

A month ago today I went to the launch party of a superpremium organic vodka. Today, I got two airplane bottles of another one. This one’s from Hawaii and apart from being organic, it declares that a portion of the profits from sales of the vodka goes to “organizations that help to protect and revitalize the ocean’s resources.”
That’s very nice, but, I mean, it’s vodka. How many factors am I supposed to consider when selecting a flavorless beverage?
Then again, although the superpremium vodka craze shows no sign of abating, as the marketplace for the stuff gets more and more crowded, I guess you might as well think up as many distinguishing characteristics as you can.
This vodka, by the way, is made from a combination of rye and corn. Last month's was just rye.

Mystic Coffee II: The Grown-ups' table

July 3

My taxi driver suggested that perhaps the friendly people I encountered in Mystic were tourists.
Maybe, but the guy in the restaurant seemed local.
Anyway, I managed to get to the lighthouse museum lawn in time for Erica and Jono's wedding. In fact, I was there early enough to chat with Will Guidara who, apart from being a friend of the bride and groom, also is one of New York restaurateur Danny Meyer's underlings. He's in management at the foodservice operations at the Museum of Modern Art, which are run by Meyer's company. I congratulated Will on The Modern, the fine dining restaurant in the museum, winning the Beard award for best new restaurant and we chatted about the recent barbecue block party thrown on 27th street, where Blue Smoke, another Danny Meyer restaurant, is located. Will was on staff at that event, too, putting out fires (figuratively) and generally making sure things flowed well. I have yet to attend that party. Will suggested that if they hold it again next year and I decide to go, I should go on day 2, when operational kinks are banged out and the lines move more quickly. Makes sense.
I asked him off the record what kinks needed to be worked out at the museum, and he told me, but it was off the record, so you're just going to have to guess what he said.
Freelance writer Charlotte Kaiser was there, too, with her husband, Ari Weinberg, who used to work for Forbes but quit to go to business school at Harvard (the priorities of some people, I tell ya).
I sat next to Charlotte during the ceremony, but at dinner I was seated at a grown-up table.
I'm something like nine years older than Erica, so it made sense, really, that I was seated with Erica's mother and various godparents of the Pandolfi boys. But I'd never been seated at a grown-up table at a wedding before, at least not at a table earmarked for people a generation older than the happy couple, and it kind of surprised me.
It was a fun table. We grabbed bottles of wine from the bartenders as I talked venture capital with a venture capitalist, and learned clever techniques for raising teenage children from people who had successfully done so: A family friend of the Pandolfis, who also was at my table, has a daughter aged between Chris and Nick. She said that 13-year-olds really do need babysitters, but of course you can't get them a babysitter; they'd kill you or the babysitter or both of you. So Chris was paid $5 an hour to "hang out" with the family friend's daughter, who was later paid to hang out with young Nick.
Nick's about 20 now, and is taking reservations at Gramercy Tavern, another Danny Meyer restaurant, while also being a volunteer slave for Chanterelle chef-owner David Waltuck.
Nick had wanted to go to culinary school but his father insisted that he get a four-year degree first. It seems to be working out well for him.
Sitting with the grown-ups didn't keep me from playing with the kids as the night progressed. We wandered to what apparently was the only bar still open in Stonington at 10pm on a Sunday in the middle of the summer, and then when that place closed we caroused loudly about the beaches of Stonington.
Stonington's a wealthy community, no-doubt well-policed, and so I wondered how closely our moves were being monitored. Were police radios reporting on the movements of the Pandolfi post-wedding party?
"They've left the parking lot and have moved to Lobster Point. Over."
I suppose if we'd engaged in vandalism we would have found out.
Special props to Dan DiSalvo, a college friend of Jono's and a poly-sci professor at Amherst, who gave up his seat in someone's car so I could be taken back to my lodgings at Whaler's Inn in Mystic. Nice guy.
Today I sampled the pizza at Mystic Pizza, you know, from the movie. They should practice cooking their crusts through. Maybe their ovens are too hot.

Mystic coffee

July 2,

"Hi, I'd like a large, black, unsweetened iced coffee, please."
That seems like a really straightforward way to ask for a large, black, unsweetened iced coffee, but it has confused two people in a row, who tried to give me hot coffee. I'm in the Northeastern United States, where iced coffee is an extremely common thing to order in July, so I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.
The first person to give me hot coffee was in New York's Penn Station. She seemed to be a recent Slavic immigrant, so maybe I was just speaking too quickly or something. At any rate, I thought my train was about to leave so I just took it and got on the train, which sat there for another 40 minutes.
The train was waiting for another train that was nine (9!) hours late, I presume due to flooding. I was on the last train to Boston for the evening, and I guess the conductor or whoever decides when to delay a train thought it was reasonable for us to wait for those passengers. It seemed reasonable to me, too.
But it meant I pulled into my destination, Mystic, Connecticut, 50 minutes late. It was close to 11 when I got to my hotel, and I flipped through the guide in my room to see if anything other than the 24-hour Tim Hortons might still be open. Angie's Pizza Restaurant & Pier 27 serves until 1 a.m. on weekends and was a short walk away, so I took the opportunity to study Connecticut pizza culture a bit.
Don't laugh. Connecticut has a complex pizza culture, most notably in New Haven, where the super-thin crusts of a couple of local pizza places are greatly admired by pizza cognoscenti nationwide.
Pier 27 — the bar side of Angie's Pizza Restaurant & Pier 27, and the only part that stays open after 11, it seems — is a friendly neighborhood place whose mostly-middle aged guests yesterday evening seemed to really enjoy their Jimmy Buffett and Eagles and other music of that genre. Two raucous women were doing shots — one was drinking tequila, the other vodka — although the bartender said the Jagermeister tap got a lot of usage and was one of the most popular shots in the bar.
I shuddered and dug into my small sausage pizza.
Pier 27’s pizza has a pretty thick crust, perhaps midway between New York- and Chicago-style. It was crisp while the pizza was too hot to eat, but it got kind of soggy as the pizza cooled down.
My first and only back-of-the-house restaurant job was as a cook at a three-unit chain in Denver called Pizza Bug (the pizza was delivered in Volkswagen bugs), but I’ve never been a fussy pizza guy. I mean, I had tomato sauce, cheese and sausage in front of me, what was there to complain about?
This morning I had my typical splurge-in-a-diner breakfast of coffee, two eggs over-easy with sausage, home fries and whole wheat toast. Then I walked around Mystic and had lunch of fried clam strips at Sea Swirl. They were mild clam strips, overwhelmed by the tartar sauce that was served with it, so I didn’t eat the tartar sauce.
On the way back to my hotel I stopped by Tim Hortons and ordered a large, black, unsweetened iced coffee. The person at the counter, who seemed like a native English speaker, handed me a large, black, unsweetened hot coffee.
Is it me? I wondered. Am I swallowing my words?
I apologized and said I actually wanted iced coffee. She gave me a "why didn't you say so?" look and gave me the iced coffee I'm still drinking now. It's in a gigantic styrofoam cup called "The Tank" that contains at least a quart of liquid. The coffee itself is a delicious medium-roast so the beans’ nice fruity, acidic nuances are coming through. A+.
I like this town of Mystic. It’s quaint and pretty in the way that many New England towns are, but the people are really warm. They greet you on the street as you walk by, and some random customer at 41 North, the restaurant where I had breakfast, made eye-contact with me as I left and said “I hope you have a good day.” I wished him the same.
This is not typical New England behavior, where people tend to be quite standoffish, and it’s certainly not typical behavior of people in touristy towns. It deserves further investigation.

I’m in Mystic to attend the wedding of my friend and colleague Erica Duecy. She’s marrying jeweler, potter, artist and all-around nice guy Jono Pandolfi, who is a member of quite a talented family. Brother Chris plays the banjo down south somewhere. Other brother Nick, an NYU student, is an aspiring chef. His brothers tell stories of Nick’s gingerbread house with stained glass windows that he made from smashed, melted rock candy. Smart!
Since I’m a food writer, people often (almost always) ask me to pass judgment on the food at weddings. I always say it scores 10 out of 10.

North Square

June 30

When the topic of New York neighborhood restaurants comes up, I never think of North Square, and I don't know why. It's a nice place on the northwest corner of Washington Square Park whose chef, Yoël Cruz, has been the chef there for more than four years, and he was sous chef there before that. I must have eaten there half a dozen times by now and I always think I should write about it, and then it slips my mind.
I wrote about their tea service once, and I ran the announcement of Yoël's promotion, but I haven't actually written about the food since John McGrath was chef and the restaurant was named C3 (its address is 103 Waverly Place, get it?).
Anyway, I went there again last night with the restaurant's publicists to sample some new menu items.
We sampled a lot of them:

•Rosemary seafood salad — scallops, shrimp, mussels, calamari, romaine lettuce, onions, radish, crispy shoestring potatoes, lemon shallot dressing.
•Pan-roasted lobster served over a wild mushroom tamal with steamed asparagus and green pea sauce
•Porcini-dusted halibut with baby bok choy, chanterelle mushrooms, fava beans, pearl onion marmalade, red pepper and tarragon sauce
•Crisp Long Island duck breast with sautéed spinach, baby beets, steamed snow peas, roasted eggplant quinoa, tamarind and apricot demi-glace
•Citrus-rubbed seared tuna with vegetable couscous, baby herb salad, lime curry and shallot sauce
•Marinated pork tenderloin with mashed plantain and yuca, baby broccoli florets, red wine and ginger-fig sauce
•Tortilla-crusted snapper with sautéed Swiss chard, creamed corn and dried chile sauce.

And for dessert (obviously we were jonesing for chocolate):
•Caramel and chocolate parfait with pecan chocolate topping, served with a chocolate brownie
•Pecan pie triangles with rum cream, chocolate sauce, nut tuile and chocolate
•Chocolate mousse cake with caramel Heath Bar ice cream, chocolate and caramel sauces and chopped Heath Bar.

Fillilp’s

June 29

After the rooftop party (see the entry below), I had dinner at Fillip’s, a year-old place in Chelsea that I’d never heard of until the publicist invited me there. She likes to throw press dinners, at which 6 or 8 or a dozen people sit at a long table and theoretically get to know one another in a convivial environment. It’s a hit-or-miss proposition.
Tonight, though, Kathryn and Chris Matthews (not that Chris Mathews), were there. Kathryn’s a food writer and Chris writes about wine, and they’re both very good dinner companions.
I’m not a wine writer, and I find some of them to be rather elitist and insufferable, but I like Chris and spent most of the night talking to him and Fillip’s sommelier about the wines.
After dinner, the chef, Brian Bieler, came out and chatted. He’s a Kansas farm boy who managed to finagle his way to New York. He says he changes the menu pretty much every day.

What I ate and drank:

Vichyssoise with osetra caviar and nutmeg
2004 Domaine de la Batardière Muscadet Sur Lie, Loire, France

Roasted Maine diver sea scallops with citrus suprème salad and coriander
NV Gruet Blanc de Noir, Brut, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Warm early summer asparagus with baby arugula and frisée salad, romesco and sherry vinaigrette
2003 Raymond Reserve Chardonnay, Napa Valley, California

Flying Pig Farms braised pork belly with granny smith apple, wild arugula and French lentil
2003 Jaboulet Isnard, Côtes Du Ventoux, Rhone, France

Crispy Long Island duck breast with Broccoli raab, pine nuts, Vermont baby carrot confit and natural reduction
2004 Heron Pinot Noir, American Canyon, California
(American Canyon, the sommelier discovered after I asked him, is a sort of broad appelation allowing for grapes to come from many parts of the state).

Warm heirloom apple tart with vanilla bean ice cream and caramel
2004 Pirramimma Late Harvest Riesling, South Australia

Pick something for me

June 29

I asked the bartender at the rooftop party I went to last night what the cool people were drinking.
"What, here? In New York? In the World?" he asked. The tone was flip, but I think he really was trying to be helpful.
Obviously, cool people drink whatever they want, but I like to take suggestions from bartenders. I might discover a new drink that way, or I might get something the bartender likes, and thus probably makes well.
But the youngster at this particular bar suggested that perhaps I would like an Apple Martini or a Cosmopolitan.
For a bartender at a chic Midtown boutique hotel to recommend something that was trendy five years ago is, well, sad, especially at a press event attended by food and beverage writers whose tastes tend to veer toward the experimental.
I tried a different tack and asked for a refreshing glass of white wine.
He gave me a California Chardonnay, which is not refreshing. It's rich and sort of creamy, but on a hot summer day, something more acidic, a crisp Sauvignon Blanc, say, would have been the thing.
To be fair, it might not have been the young bartender's fault. Sometimes when you say: “Pick something for me,” even though you might mean, “I have confidence that you, as a professional, will use your best judgment in selecting something really good for me," they interpret it as, "I don’t care, just give me a drink!”

Minnesota

June 26

I love living in New York, but I also love leaving it from time to time to see what‘s happening out in the world. So I was delighted to spend the past four days in Minnesota hanging out with corporate chefs from chain restaurants, a couple of CEOs from small chains, and officials from Hormel, which sponsored a meeting about pork, coordinated by Nation's Restaurant News' extraordinary event planner (really, she is) Monique Monaco.
We talked about how pork fits into current menu trends and toured one of Hormel’s plants on the Minnesota-Iowa border. The restaurant people flew from Minneapolis in a Hormel corporate jet, the NRN people took a road trip in which I learned that our publisher loves to sing along with the radio. He plays a bit of air-guitar, too.
We also had two nights to dine out in Minneapolis and had truly great meals at a tapas place called Solera and a chef-driven, ingredient focused restaurant called Cafe Lurcat.
Given how much pork we had consumed in the days leading up to our dinner at Cafe Lurcat, we managed to pack away an impressive amount of food.
Qdoba chef Ted Stoner proved to be a particularly good eater: Unbeknownst to him, a porked-out Jeff Sinelli, top dog at Which ’Wich?, slipped half of his wagyu beef onto Ted’s plate.

I don’t like standing in line

June 21

Summer is upon us here in New York, and I don't like it one bit. Being outside sort of makes me feel like I'm being poached.
And yet last night and the night before I went to events that required me to stand in line to get into parties whose hosts seemed disinclined to use their air conditioning.
I think it stands to reason that the first few minutes of any event can make or break it. A seemingly minor thing like the ability of list checkers to do their job efficiently can cause a major attitude shift, especially if sweat beads have started to form on your forehead.
Monday’s event wasn’t bad. It was Pastry Arts & Designs' 10 Best Pastry Chefs party, held at the Institute of Culinary Education.
But the hallway leading to the school's entrance, which is on the 5th floor of a building in Chelsea across from Rickshaw Dumpling Bar, was untreated by air conditioning, and a bunch of us were standing there waiting to get into the school.
As my hair (of which I have very little) started to moisten I entered the lobby to see a table strewn with nametags in vaguely alphabetical order. Approximately three young women were sorting through them as they tried to check people in. It seemed like an odd way to do it.
The crowd, which was ample, but not insanely so, nonetheless seemed to overstretch the air-conditioner, which just managed to keep the place below sweltering as we tried, at least for a few minutes, to listen to the speeches being made using audio equipment that sounded like it had been swiped from the nearby subway station.
Some people left early, others wandered off to less crowded rooms where wine was being poured and the packaged cookies of one of the awards' sponsors were out on plates. Considering that we were about to sample desserts from actual pastry chefs, it seemed like an uninspired move on the part of the sponsors.
But I had a nice time, anyway, and in the course of several conversations I was reminded of some restaurant-industry rumors that I was supposed to follow up on. I made note of them as I sampled mostly overwrought, excessively complicated desserts, two (2!) of which featured basil seeds.
Then last night I stood in line on East 48th Street as I waited to be let in to the opening party of Alma Grill, a restaurant owned by music mogul Ralph Mercado and Union Telecard Alliance multi-millionaire Carlos Gomez (I thought it was character actor Carlos Gomez, but apparently not).
The party was hosted by Lisa Lisa, which would have been really excellent if this were 1983. But in 2006, if the best a music mogul and telecom mogul can scare up in Midtown Manhattan is a 1980s pop-star, it's a red flag.
The line was slow-moving and people were being turned away. Apparently, they had only been invited to the afterparty.
That's interesting because many of the regular restaurant-party crashers got in: Weird Shaggy Haired Guy was sitting at a table, and Slightly Creepy Italian Guy was wandering around the cramped space. I didn't see Eccentric Cookbook Thief, but she might have been there, too.
They poured so-so Chardonnay and Chianti. I drank the former because I was wearing my cream-colored sports coat, and sweating in it — it wasn't that hot out, so I'm not sure why the air conditioner couldn't handle the crowd.
My colleague, Molly Gise, came to the party, too, so we had fun chatting, otherwise I would have left. As at most bad parties, they seemed unaware of how to pass hors d'oeuvres efficiently, so I had a good time watching guests, who surely had $1.50 to buy a slice of pizza if they needed to, pounce on the food as if they'd just been let out of concentration camps.
I got a couple of slices from my favorite neighborhood pizza place in Park Slope, Antonio's, on Flatbush, just outside the 7th Avenue B/Q subway station.

The maiden from Lomzyn

June 15

Arlyn Blake lives to connect people whom she thinks should know each other, and to get all of them to try the food at Lomzynianka.
Lomzynianka (which isn't quite how it's spelled, there's a line through the L and some other things, but I'm afraid I don't know how to add Polish diacritical marks on this computer, or any computer for that matter) is a tiny restaurant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with the best latkes I've ever had (sorry, Dad), and pierogi, and borscht and blintzes and various other really tasty Polish food, cheap. It's BYO.
The name, I'm told, means "Maiden from Lomzyn," which I think is pronounced Wom-zin, but I'm not sure. As one of my Russian history professors in college used to joke, Polish is written in code.
The town of Lodz is pronounced "wooj." I mean, what are you supposed to do with that?
Anyway, Arlyn invited like eight people to join her for dinner at Lomzynianka last night. I arrived just as they were passing around pickled beets, cucumbers in dill, sauerkraut and various other salads. I ended up sitting between a spirits marketer from Kobrand and the owner of a magazine that profiles woman entrepreneurs. The Kobrand marketer originally was from Bulgaria, and she and the magazine owner chatted about Bulgarian wines and strategized ways to get the magazine’s readers in front of the marketer's wines.
Arlyn does that. She arranges what seem like random agglomerations of people and then it turns out that they have more in common than you'd expect. I can't say whether she does that on purpose or not.

What else I ate:
cold borscht, hot veal meatballs, wienerschnitzel with a fried egg on top, potato croquettes and blintzes.

vodka, chocolate and modern Peruvian food

June 13

Premium vodka again!
I went to an event thrown by the Distilled Spirits Council, which is always a good idea. In this case it was a particularly good idea: It was a seated tasting of vodka cocktails, prepared by the articulate, dapper and talented Brian Van Flandern of Per Se, and chocolates by Jacques Torres, who needs no adjectives, held at Jacques Torres Chocolate Haven in SoHo.
Unfortunately I couldn't stay long, which made me angry as I sampled a "Mango Mary" paired with a heart-shaped chocolate candy filled with passion fruit ganache.
The Mango Mary had muddled rosemary and a rosemary sprig in it, which sounds stupid at first, but if you think about it, the muskiness of a good mango has a quality that's pretty similar to rosemary, and the added rosemary accentuates that.
But I had to leave, heavy-hearted, because I also had RSVP'ed to have dinner at the Beard House. "Stupid Bret!" I thought, as my taxi took me from SoHo to 12th Street and I wondered what I would do with the two cocktail shakers in my gift bag as I resolved to stop over-booking myself.
But then the Beard dinner was great fun, too.
Dinners at the James Beard House start at 7, with a 45-minute cocktail "hour," when guests drink wine — usually sparkling — and get their first samplings of the chef's food as hors d'oeuvres are passed around. I showed up right at 7:45, delaying my arrival as long as possible so I could enjoy my passionfruit chocolate and Mango Mary. I figured I would have to sacrifice the hors d'oeuvres as penance for my overbooking, but a plate of hors d'oeuvres had been kindly saved for me, hidden away in a kitchen cupboard and presented to me when I arrived.
My guest that evening, Yishane Lee, had arrived just a few minutes earlier and observed that they hadn't saved a plate of hors d'oeuvres for her.
Yishane works for Time Inc.'s web site and deserves to be sucked up to every bit as much as I do, but what can I say? I did share my hors d'oeuvres with her, at any rate, as we sipped some Bodega Lurton Rosé from Argentina, made with a combination of Malbec and Bonarda grapes if memory serves.
If you’re wondering what Yishane looks like, you know those Visa ads that promote drinking deeply from the cup of life and letting your credit cards help you do that? Well, if you’ve ever seen the one of a pretty Asian woman floating in the Dead Sea while reading a newspaper, that's Yishane.

The chef of the evening was a Peruvian fellow by the name of Jean Paul Desmaison, who is chef at La Cofradia, a five-month-old restaurant in Coral Gables, Fla. A soft-spoken man, he charmingly had nothing to say when introduced to Beard House attendees at the end of the meal. A regular beard foundation member did coax out of him commentary on guinea pig, which is a delicacy in Peru and Ecuador. It was not served at the meal this evening.
Here's what was:

Hors d'oeuvres:
Eggplant Carpaccio with Extra-Virgin Olive Oil and Lime Juice
Causa Roll — Shrimp, Avocado, and Crab
Sole Tiradito with Yellow Chile–Mandarin Cream
Asian-Style Tuna Tartare
Bodega Lurton Rosé 2006

Salmon Carpaccio and Caviar with Lemon Cream Sauce
Gran Araucano Sauvignon Blanc 2005

Baby Octopus with Tuscan Ragoût
Gran Lurton Pinot Gris 2005

Black Grouper with Sour Orange Escabèche, Mashed Yuca with Red Peppers, and Extra-Virgin Olive Oil
Château des Erles 2003

Braised Lamb Shank with Purple Corn, Rice, Sautéed Artichoke Hearts, and Asparagus
Campo Eliseo 2003

Fig and Apple Phyllo Tart with Maple Ice Cream, Peruvian Lucuma Mousse with Chocolate Macaroons, and Suspiro de Limeña
Vignobles Lions de La Louvière 1996

The Mango Mary:
1/4 oz. Finlandia Mango Vodka
1 oz. Finlandia Vodka (here's an interesting trick from beverage guru Brian Van Flandern: some people complain that flavored vodkas have a bit of a chemical taste to them, so to retain the aromatics of the flavored vodka while cutting back on the taste, he mixes one part flavored vodka to four parts of the regular stuff).
Finlandia’s apparently the only company that makes a mango vodka
1 oz. fresh mango purée
3/4 oz. lemon juice
a splash of simple syrup
muddled rosemary
rosemary sprig to garnish

pushing my buttons

June 6

I like to think of myself as a pretty mellow, happy-go-lucky kind of guy, but then I realize what a petty, nasty little fusspot I can be if you push the wrong buttons.
Among those buttons are bad produce, premium vodka and people who see organic comestibles as a panacea for all the world’s ills.
Nonetheless, I went to the launch of an organic, premium vodka. One reason I went was because I wasn’t doing anything else at the time. The other was because it was at Blue Hill, and I hadn’t had much of chef-owner Dan Barber’s food in a long time, except for an absolutely extraordinary freshly picked radish sprinkled with salt that he served at the annual C-Cap benefit earlier this year. So I knew that at least the produce would be good in the food served at this vodka party.

I had a good time. The food was either bursting with flavor from delicious fruits and vegetables or — as in the case of the arancini topped with melting lardo, or the pork belly on skewers — great without having any fruits and vegetables. Dan Barber’s food is all about using really excellent ingredients and treating them with respect. I have no complaints about that.
And I met the nice owners of Circa Tabac, a downtown tobacco lounge. I’ll have to take my smoking friends there at some point.
The organic premium vodka that was being launched is made from rye, which apparently is desirable in a vodka — one of the PR flaks there said that was what the tsars drank — but hard to do organically.
As I sipped the very good cocktails made from the vodka — I sampled it neat first and found my single shot too boring to finish — I expressed my skepticism about premium vodka to one of the company’s marketers.
I can understand why those who sit around drinking straight vodka might want a premium vodka. I can even understand why the millions of vodka-martini drinkers would have intense brand loyalty. But vodka, by definition, is flavorless. The difference in vodkas has to do with mouth feel and a certain smoothness that can certainly be distinguished if you line up a bunch of shot glasses with different vodkas and taste them side-by-side. But I have yet to be convinced that the type of vodka used in drinks that also include lemonade or cranberry juice or Red Bull makes any difference in the quality of the cocktail.
Au contraire, said the marketing guy, as he would, of course. Since I was not in the mood to demand a taste test then and there, I didn’t press the point. Besides, that’s a very rude thing to do at a party.
Instead, I asked him about the organic qualities of said premium vodka. Did the vodka’s target audience care? He admitted that people really devoted to organic food were mostly disinclined to spend $36 (retail) for a bottle of vodka, and premium vodka aficionados were paying for taste and generally didn’t care if it was organic or not.
I kept trying to avoid one blowhard from northern Westchester county who went on an anti-non-free-range-chicken diatribe and then bad-mouthed corn-fed beef and opposed Wal-Mart’s offering organic stuff and in general kept blathering the smug manifesto of the environmentalist elite.
I believe I’ve made reference previously here to my solid granola credentials, but to reiterate:
My parents are both retired now, but my father worked for public television and my mother was a schoolteacher.
In Denver in the 1970s, when recycling services weren’t yet available, they saved their paper and aluminum and so on and, the one time a month they could schlep it to a nearby collection center and hand it all over to recyclers, they did just that.
I was weaned while wearing cloth diapers, because my mother deemed disposable stuff environmentally unsound.
My parents voted for McGovern.
They own some property in Denver, but they keep rents low so lower-middle class people can afford to live there.
A few years ago they gave up eating mammals for moral reasons.
So I get it. I understand that it’s important to know how the way you live affects the world, and as a food guy I love to eat food made from excellent ingredients.
But I also have noticed that politically correct food doesn’t necessarily taste better (although sometimes it does), and isn’t always what it purports to be.
And I have visited some of those industrial food-processing facilities and have not found them to be the chambers of horror that they’re often described to be. To be fair, I haven’t been to a chicken hatchery yet, but I hope to someday soon.
I think what really bugs me is the vilification of industries that were created for a good purpose. Food became largely industrialized in this century in an attempt to feed the hungry. To a large extent, that mission has been accomplished. Obviously there are still major distribution issues with regard to food, particularly in developing countries, but here at home, too. Nonetheless, the fact that obesity is now the most serious health issue in the developed world is a massive victory over millennia of hunger.
Now we have to address obesity while not forgetting that some people, even in developed countries, still are hungry, and we should avoid environmental damage in the process. I’m not sure how sneering at cheap, nutritious food does that.
So I did finally say with feigned respect for Ms. Blowhard that her consumption exclusively of hand-nurtured animals and produce was fine for her, but it was not an option for most Americans.
Then I tried the premium organic vodka neat for a second time. I couldn’t finish it.

One of the cocktails I had:

The Coriandrum
2 ounces Vodka
1/4 ounce vermouth
Splash of Coriander Nectar (1 cup coriander seeds, 4 cups water, 1 1/4 cups Madhava agave nectar or simple syrup, briefly heated together)
Splash of orange bitters
Lemon twist
Coriander seeds
Add first 4 ingredients to cocktail shaker. Fill with ice and shake vigorously. Strain into a chilled
martini glass. Garnish with a few coriander seeds from the nectar mix and a twist of lemon.

Wings, pork, Japan and a second Martini

June 5,

I woke up this morning and wondered why I thought last night that a second Martini would be a good idea.

5 Ninth restaurant was celebrating its 2nd anniversary from 6 to 8 last night, so I went to enjoy chef Zak Pelaccio’s kecap manis-glazed chicken wings and his whole roasted pig while drinking beer and hanging out mostly on the third floor with my friend Clark Mitchell at Travel + Leisure and his friend, Peter Sherwood, who’s dining editor of Next Magazine, and various members of their entourages, including two women named Alex.
I also had a couple of chats with Steven Hall, the publicist who organized the party. While standing in line for food (it was a short line; I don’t stand in long lines for food), I asked him about the music that we were listening to, which came from the late ’70s and ’80s. It was pretty typical music for New York parties in 2006, and also was played at many restaurants and bars throughout the city. Why, I wondered to him, had the music of that period taken hold so thoroughly? Growing up to this music, I naturally enjoyed it but, being a member of Generation X, I always felt that our pop culture was inferior to that of our older Baby Boomer cousins. And yet it was quite common to hear The Smiths and Erasure and REM and old U2 and so on, yet the Rolling Stones and The Who and The Beatles were comparative rarities.
So why was the music I grew up with so popular?
“Because it’s good,” he said.
Maybe the DJ — one of 5 Ninth’s bartenders, I think — was listening. He played The Kinks later on in the evening.
Later I talked to Steven about some of his latest ventures and a trip he took to Japan. To summarize what he said, basically, notice that the company formerly known as Restaurant Associates recently bought itself back from Compass with the help of a Japanese company (but not the name “Restaurant Associates,” according to a spokeswoman from the company, hence the pending name change), and keep your eyes open for opportunities both to open Japanese restaurants in New York and American ones in Japan.
I had that chat while finishing a weisbier and then I headed to the bar at the terrace of the Maritime hotel and had Martinis with Clark, Peter and one of the women named Alex (although she had water). We stayed until, I don’t know, late, and Clark had a 10:15 a.m. radio interview to prepare for. I e-mailed him today and he, too wondered why we thought we should have that second Martini.

dumb sushi

June 1

Got an e-mail to day from what appears to be another newsletter explaining to me how to be a trendy New Yorker. It told me about a $68 sushi roll at a restaurant I won't name because it happens to be a very good restaurant that doesn't deserve the embarrassment.
There's nothing wrong $68 sushi. If a restaurant wants to charge it and people want to pay it, who am I to argue? But this one is a spicy tuna roll made from hon maguro, rare blackfin tuna. I'm all for eating blackfin tuna. But if you're eating such a great piece of fish, why on earth would you wrap it up in a roll and drench it with spicy mayonnaise? What a waste of a good piece of fish.
Here's some trivia: The spicy tuna roll was invented by a Mexican-American in Los Angeles, according to Michael Cardenas, a sushi pioneer in that city.

Restaurants and their previous names, and fugu

May 31

Brasserie Ruhlmann has a new chef, and it threw a party to celebrate. Laurent Tourondel now is in charge of the kitchen there as well as at his three BLT (Bistro Laurent Tourondel) restaurants (listed in the order they opened): BLT Steak (at the space that housed, over the past decade, Le Chantilly, Restaurant David Ruggerio, Sono and Pazo), BLT Fish (which was AZ) and BLT Prime (where Union Pacific once stood).
Brasserie Ruhlmann opened, for breakfast at least, at the end of January, when Georges Masraff, formerly of Tavern on the Green, was in charge of the kitchen. Laurent Tourondel's involvement in the place was announced in April.
It was a crowded but convivial party, with many of my favorite food-scene people in attendance. I spent the first half hour or so trying to remember the name of the restaurant that occupied the space previously. It was a Provençal-Tuscan restaurant that was a joint venture among celebrated French chef Roger Vergé Roberto Ruggeri's Bice Restaurant Group, and Italian fast-food chain Sbarro. It was a cheery place with bright yellows and blues, but despite its choice location, just north of the Rockefeller Center skating rink, it failed to thrive. It opened in late 2001, which of course was bad timing, and limped along for a while before shutting its doors. The space remained vacant until Brasserie Ruhlmann opened this year, according to a guy I talked to at the party who's involved in operations of Rockefeller Center. He also was nice enough to remind me of the former restaurant's name: Medi.
I also ran into my friends Shigeko Fuke and Miguel Cardona. Somehow the subject of fugu, Japanese blowfish, came up. Fugu's famous for being potentially poisonous if not prepared properly. I've never had it, but I'd love to give it a try. Shigeko said a Japanese company was trying to find export markets for pre-prepared, pre-sliced fugu that already has been sliced properly to remove the poisonous bits.
So it was a fun party, but, it being my first post-Memorial Day party, I was wearing an off-white sport coat and felt disinclined to battle crowds and risk spilling things on it, so after Champagne and a few nibbles, I left and contemplated dinner as I wandered to the subway.
I had long known that Carnegie Deli was very close to a Q train station, but for some reason — its iconic status, maybe — I had never thought of it as a dinner option until tonight. I got a corned-beef sandwich on rye and had half of it for dinner, which was a very big dinner. The rest will make for a fine lunch, maybe two.