August 7
I was a few minutes early for dinner at Nomad, a mostly North African restaurant in the East Village, with its owner, Mehenni Zebentout, so I was entertained and given a Moroccan Sauvignon Blanc blend by its manager, a Tunisian.
But Mehenni arrived soon enough and I learned all about him. He was a law student in his native Algeria before he got tired of that and moved to New York, where he was hired as a busboy at the now-shuttered Frutti di Mare by its Israeli owners.
He then went on to become manager of another restaurant of theirs, Cucina di Pesce, across the street. He eventually became that restaurant's owner and then, about a year-and-a-half ago, opened Nomad nearby, keeping his Israeli friends as part-owners.
Now it has all come full circle, as Mehenni has taken over the Frutti di Mare space and plans to open it in September as Belcourt.
Mehenni has been shopping for accoutrements for the place, including fancy wrought iron doors from a French post and telegraph office (he pointed out the telltale PTT on them). So the name and the door are French, but the food will come from all over the Mediterranean. That's his vision, at least. Scarcely a month before the intended opening, the search for a chef continues, although Mehenni says he has his eyes on a guy who currently is running the kitchen at a restaurant on the Lower East Side (I'd say which one, but it's not a done deal so it would be rude).
As we ate Nomad's house-made merguez, grilled octopus, brik, braised lamb shank with prunes, and b'steeya, followed by lightly sweetened tea made with Israeli mint (Mehenni says it's the best mint in the world), and assorted cookies and baklava, we discussed the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Algeria during the 1990s and continuing problems with democracy in the world, the differences between Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian cuisines, good books to read on that subject, and the philosophical approach required to run a good restaurant.
We also were visited by the chef at Cacio e Vino, next door (he came by to borrow takeout containers), and Mehenni asked him when they were going to have the couscous cook-off they'd been talking about (one area on Sicily, Trapani, makes its own version of the stuff).
Later on designer Lucia Nenickova, who used to be a waitress at Nomad, stopped in.
As Mehenni observed, she's done better since she quit.
Coda: the fact that Nomad's manager was Tunisian reminded me of a friend from my Bangkok days, Daniel Eaton, a New Zealander who worked for that country's defense ministry (which Dan insisted wasn't as important as it sounded because New Zealand, being surrounded by a 3,000 kilometer moat and having as its closest neighbor, Australia, a close ally, has little need for defense) before coming to Bangkok.
Dan's dad is an Anglican bishop and so he spent many years overseas. In fact, Dan's passport says he was born in Carthage, which is in modern-day Tunisia.
Ancient Carthage is just ruins now, but Tunis, the manager explained to me, has several suburbs with Carthage in its name. He also drew for me a diagram of the ancient port, brilliantly designed by the Phoenicians for ease in traffic flow.
You learn something new every day.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Sushi and a beer
August 7
“Confidentially,” Erica Duecy, who's in charge of Fodor’s restaurant books, said before beginning the good part of our conversation last night at Sushi Twist, so I’ll be keeping the conversation to myself.
She was on the record, however, in expressing her delight at the three city books that came out yesterday for Paris, London and New York. She said they looked awesome.
We sampled unfiltered sake and the restaurant’s version of a Caipirinha, and then, after some fried dumplings and Japanese pickles, settled in for sushi. The specialty house rolls looked very much like those of other sushi restaurants of the genre, containing all sorts of things mixed together, rolled in rice and then topped with stuff (a Philadelphia roll with salmon, cream cheese and avocado; a Dancing Eel roll with shrimp tempura and cucumber, topped with shrimp, avocado and tobiko; you get the idea). I know they’re really popular, but Erica lived in Japan and I’ve been trained on more straightforward sushi, so we had a salmon skin roll and otherwise headed straight for the nigiri sushi — and some scallop and fresh water eel sashimi. We did both seem to be in the mood for slightly atypical fish, so instead of tuna and salmon, we headed for mackerel, sea urchin, raw shrimp (tempura-battered shells on the side, of course), more fresh water eel and flying fish roe.
On the way home I stopped by Ocean’s 8, the fairly new restaurant part of a big Brooklyn pool hall called BrownStone Billiards. I thought maybe James the dancing bartender would be there.
To clarify, James doesn’t dance while tending bar. He’s an aspiring dancer who moved to New York from southern California and tends bar to make ends meet. He used to work at The Modern but determined that a lower-key place was more his style.
I met him in early June, just as the restaurant was opening, when I popped in to check it out and try the spaghetti and meatballs. Then I came back again just last Wednesday to observe weekly Karaoke Night, and he chastised me for not being there more often.
Though James is not really a dancing bartender, he is a singing one, being semi-forced by management and the audience to do a number on Karaoke Night (last Wednesday he sang “Mr. Brownstone” by Guns N’ Roses. Cute, right?).
Ocean's 8/BrownStone Billiards is a strange place. It’s in tony Park Slope, but on ghetto-y Flatbush, a really urban pool hall with all that implies, but also a sports bar with wide screen TVs and local microbrew. The karaoke singers included a couple of Park Slope lesbians (one sang Purple Rain with gusto), but most of them seemed to be from adjacent neighborhoods — African-Americans likely from Prospect Heights and Crown Heights (some with terrific voices, singing mostly R&B), white people with more of the blue-collar air of Bensonhurst, Sunset Park and Midwood than the urban-chic and privileged grunge of Park Slope (heartfelt Frankie Valli and Frank Sinatra; unbearable caterwauling of schmaltz like “I Believe I can Fly”).
Anyway, James wasn’t there last night, but I still enjoyed my Ithaca Nut Brown Ale.
“Confidentially,” Erica Duecy, who's in charge of Fodor’s restaurant books, said before beginning the good part of our conversation last night at Sushi Twist, so I’ll be keeping the conversation to myself.
She was on the record, however, in expressing her delight at the three city books that came out yesterday for Paris, London and New York. She said they looked awesome.
We sampled unfiltered sake and the restaurant’s version of a Caipirinha, and then, after some fried dumplings and Japanese pickles, settled in for sushi. The specialty house rolls looked very much like those of other sushi restaurants of the genre, containing all sorts of things mixed together, rolled in rice and then topped with stuff (a Philadelphia roll with salmon, cream cheese and avocado; a Dancing Eel roll with shrimp tempura and cucumber, topped with shrimp, avocado and tobiko; you get the idea). I know they’re really popular, but Erica lived in Japan and I’ve been trained on more straightforward sushi, so we had a salmon skin roll and otherwise headed straight for the nigiri sushi — and some scallop and fresh water eel sashimi. We did both seem to be in the mood for slightly atypical fish, so instead of tuna and salmon, we headed for mackerel, sea urchin, raw shrimp (tempura-battered shells on the side, of course), more fresh water eel and flying fish roe.
On the way home I stopped by Ocean’s 8, the fairly new restaurant part of a big Brooklyn pool hall called BrownStone Billiards. I thought maybe James the dancing bartender would be there.
To clarify, James doesn’t dance while tending bar. He’s an aspiring dancer who moved to New York from southern California and tends bar to make ends meet. He used to work at The Modern but determined that a lower-key place was more his style.
I met him in early June, just as the restaurant was opening, when I popped in to check it out and try the spaghetti and meatballs. Then I came back again just last Wednesday to observe weekly Karaoke Night, and he chastised me for not being there more often.
Though James is not really a dancing bartender, he is a singing one, being semi-forced by management and the audience to do a number on Karaoke Night (last Wednesday he sang “Mr. Brownstone” by Guns N’ Roses. Cute, right?).
Ocean's 8/BrownStone Billiards is a strange place. It’s in tony Park Slope, but on ghetto-y Flatbush, a really urban pool hall with all that implies, but also a sports bar with wide screen TVs and local microbrew. The karaoke singers included a couple of Park Slope lesbians (one sang Purple Rain with gusto), but most of them seemed to be from adjacent neighborhoods — African-Americans likely from Prospect Heights and Crown Heights (some with terrific voices, singing mostly R&B), white people with more of the blue-collar air of Bensonhurst, Sunset Park and Midwood than the urban-chic and privileged grunge of Park Slope (heartfelt Frankie Valli and Frank Sinatra; unbearable caterwauling of schmaltz like “I Believe I can Fly”).
Anyway, James wasn’t there last night, but I still enjoyed my Ithaca Nut Brown Ale.
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Beard Awards move to Gemini
August 2
The Rabelaisian icon of the food world, James Beard, was born on May 5, 1903. That means he was a Taurus, which is appropriate if you put any stock in astrology. We Taureans (my birthday’s April 22) are an epicurean lot, enjoying good food and other luxuries. We’re loyal, dependable, gentle, a bit stingy at times but willing to spend money on things we care about, like good food. Stubborn maybe, but in a passive sort of way. We’re really very sweet, and terrific restaurant patrons.
In the New York food world, the James Beard Foundation Awards usually happen in the middle of Taurus season (April 21st to May 20), right around the birthday of its namesake (and also, incidentally, that of my mother; my brother Todd’s a Taurus too, May 17). But this year the awards have been moved to June 8.
That’s a Sunday instead of a Monday, which means I won’t have to change into my tuxedo in the office bathroom and then rush over from work, but I will have to remember to pick up an office camera on the Friday before. It also is after the National Restaurant Association Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show in Chicago, which means I won’t be killing myself trying to get my work done that inevitably is due around that time. But, I mean, June 8?
The Beard Foudnation folks said the move was necessary to keep the event at Avery Fisher Hall, where it moved last year after being at the New York Marriott Marquis for most of its history (although I’m told the first Beard awards were on a boat — one of those booze cruises). That’s understandable, but it will require adjustment.
Taureans also are traditionalists.
The Rabelaisian icon of the food world, James Beard, was born on May 5, 1903. That means he was a Taurus, which is appropriate if you put any stock in astrology. We Taureans (my birthday’s April 22) are an epicurean lot, enjoying good food and other luxuries. We’re loyal, dependable, gentle, a bit stingy at times but willing to spend money on things we care about, like good food. Stubborn maybe, but in a passive sort of way. We’re really very sweet, and terrific restaurant patrons.
In the New York food world, the James Beard Foundation Awards usually happen in the middle of Taurus season (April 21st to May 20), right around the birthday of its namesake (and also, incidentally, that of my mother; my brother Todd’s a Taurus too, May 17). But this year the awards have been moved to June 8.
That’s a Sunday instead of a Monday, which means I won’t have to change into my tuxedo in the office bathroom and then rush over from work, but I will have to remember to pick up an office camera on the Friday before. It also is after the National Restaurant Association Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show in Chicago, which means I won’t be killing myself trying to get my work done that inevitably is due around that time. But, I mean, June 8?
The Beard Foudnation folks said the move was necessary to keep the event at Avery Fisher Hall, where it moved last year after being at the New York Marriott Marquis for most of its history (although I’m told the first Beard awards were on a boat — one of those booze cruises). That’s understandable, but it will require adjustment.
Taureans also are traditionalists.
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
swimming in coffee
August 1
On Lexington Avenue alone, between the subway entrance at 53rd and Lex and my office on Park and 55th, there are three Dunkin’ Donuts, two Starbucks and a Pret à Manger.
For a brief moment of maybe a couple of weeks, a large Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee was $3.02 with tax and a Starbucks venti iced coffee was $2.98. Dunkin’ Donuts’ large iced coffee is in a bigger cup — 32 ounces instead of Starbucks’ 24 ounces — but I was still struck to be paying more for coffee at proletarian Dunkin’ Donuts than at yuppy, tree-hugging Starbucks.
But my Starbucks (or is the plural Starbuckses?) have raised their prices and now a venti is $3.03. The world continues to spin on its axis.
Pret à Manger only serves one size of iced coffee. I'd guess it's around 16 ounces, and the price was recently raised from $2.00 to $2.16.
On Lexington Avenue alone, between the subway entrance at 53rd and Lex and my office on Park and 55th, there are three Dunkin’ Donuts, two Starbucks and a Pret à Manger.
For a brief moment of maybe a couple of weeks, a large Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee was $3.02 with tax and a Starbucks venti iced coffee was $2.98. Dunkin’ Donuts’ large iced coffee is in a bigger cup — 32 ounces instead of Starbucks’ 24 ounces — but I was still struck to be paying more for coffee at proletarian Dunkin’ Donuts than at yuppy, tree-hugging Starbucks.
But my Starbucks (or is the plural Starbuckses?) have raised their prices and now a venti is $3.03. The world continues to spin on its axis.
Pret à Manger only serves one size of iced coffee. I'd guess it's around 16 ounces, and the price was recently raised from $2.00 to $2.16.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
D.C.’s suburbs
July 30
La Caravelle was one of the last bastions of French fine dining in New York before its owners, Rita and André Jammet, one of the nicest couples in the city’s restaurant world, decided to close it with dignity a couple of years ago.
Jonathan Ray and Markus Müller are college friends of mine who live in the Washington, D.C., area. Wise, fun to hang out with and loyal in a low-maintenance sort of way, they’re the type of friends who contribute to the pleasant background noise in my psyche that makes the world seem less lonely. It would be nice to see them more often.
So when Rita sent me an e-mail invitation to the opening of sweetgreen, her son's grab-and-go salad-and-frozen-yogurt shop in Georgetown, it seemed like the perfect opportunity for a road trip.
Nicolas Jammet is partners with three of his fellow 2007 Georgetown grads, who saw a need in the neighborhood for high-quality salads with as many organic ingredients as possible. They thought offering tart, Pinkberry-style frozen yogurt and organic beverages — many from the company where Nicolas's twin brother Patrick works — was a good idea too.
I arrived in Georgetown with time to spare, so I stopped by Hook, two blocks away from the party, for a local ale. Since the crudo was priced below my resistance level, at three for $8, I sampled some of them, too (trout roe, barracuda and black bass).
sweetgreen’s landlord also owns an event space a couple of doors down from the restaurant, and she lent it to the kids for their party.
“We wanted to invite as many people as possible,” Nicolas told me, and a lot of people came, because Jammet and company understand how to work their connections. They got me there after all, didn’t they?
Bill Yosses, the White House’s pastry chef, was there, too. So was the Swiss ambassador and no-doubt other important people I didn’t recognize. sweetgreen’s owners also managed to secure a liquor license for the event, and Nicolas picked such unusual wines for the party that I thought maybe André had helped him. André denies it, and I believe him, because I don’t think he liked the smokey Shiraz that was being poured. I didn’t ask him about the French vin mousseux or the Chardonnay.
I munched on crudités and sample salads while chatting with Bill and some of his co-workers, including a freelance pastry chef who had just quit her job as an English professor, possibly to pursue a life in professional kitchens. She had worked at the White House during the holidays to help make the 40,000 Christmas cookies that were baked there during the season.
So it was a good party, and I stayed longer than I’d planned and didn't arrive at my dinner destination until after 9.
I was eating at Restaurant Eve in Alexandria, a place its publicist, Bronwyn Jacoby, had been after me to check out ever since it opened. I'd just been on a panel in New Orleans with its sommelier, Todd Thrasher, so the timing seemed right.
Restaurant Eve has three sections — a bar, a bistro and a tasting room. Bronwyn and I sat in the tasting room and left ourselves in the hands of Todd Thrasher and chef Cathal (pronounced kuh-HALL — it’s an Irish thing) Armstrong and spoke of many things. So it was after midnight when we finally arrived at PX, Todd’s speakeasy-style cocktail lounge. It’s the only cocktail lounge I've been to that actually seemed like a speakeasy, which effectively made me feel cool and elite.
So I was somewhat woozy when I woke up the next morning, but I managed to take the metro, D.C.’s mass-transit system, to Silver Spring, Md., where Jonathan picked me up. We bought sandwiches and pasta at Whole Foods and drove to his home at the other end of Silver Spring, where we had lunch with Jonathan's wife, Michelle, and their precocious, good-natured daughters Joanna (five-and-a-half) and Sage (two-and-a-half, but already quite articulate). I played with the kids, half-watched part of a Mets game with Jonathan (he’s from Mt. Kisco, N.Y., and will always be a Mets fan — he is not to be spoken to when a game is on), and napped until it was time to head back to Alexandria for dinner with Markus.
I described sweetgreen to Jonathan and Michelle. It’s of interest to them because Jonathan’s a history professor at Georgetown and could use a good salad for lunch.
I had never been to a Pinkberry, but Michelle, a native of Los Angeles, said she didn’t understand what the fuss was about, nor did she see the novelty in it. She said that in its early days, frozen yogurt — a product of southern California — was always a tart affair. It was only later that it was sweetened and flavored. Pinkberry, it seems, had simply revived an old custom, much as Cold Stone Creamery is simply a new-generation version of Steve’s, which was mixing stuff into ice cream on marble slabs in the 1980s (but not in California, where frozen yogurt had already taken root and premium ice cream didn't manage to gain a foothold).
Michelle stayed at home with the girls and Jonathan and I met Markus at Farrah Olivia, the restaurant of Ivorian chef Morou Ouattara, whom you may recall took me on a dine around of West African restaurants in D.C. last year.
Markus does something very impressive with regard to international development, particularly in the Middle East these days, although I've never managed to ascertain what exactly.
He did advise me on what to do about the messy state of my cubicle, which causes quite serious consternation among upper management (and human resources) at Nation’s Restaurant News.
If I threw away every single thing on my desk, he asked, what was the chance that I would miss any of it?
Indeed, I admitted, the chance was slim.
Some of the things we ate at Farrah Olivia (as you will notice, Morou is playing with the molecular gastronomy):
diver scallop with bacon powder and melon seed milk
Sweet plantain fitters with refried coconut and peanut butter powder
shocked escolar with wasabi pearls (made with gelatin, not alginate) and pickled watermelon rind
stuffed quail with garden vegetable brûlée and chorizo oil
La Caravelle was one of the last bastions of French fine dining in New York before its owners, Rita and André Jammet, one of the nicest couples in the city’s restaurant world, decided to close it with dignity a couple of years ago.
Jonathan Ray and Markus Müller are college friends of mine who live in the Washington, D.C., area. Wise, fun to hang out with and loyal in a low-maintenance sort of way, they’re the type of friends who contribute to the pleasant background noise in my psyche that makes the world seem less lonely. It would be nice to see them more often.
So when Rita sent me an e-mail invitation to the opening of sweetgreen, her son's grab-and-go salad-and-frozen-yogurt shop in Georgetown, it seemed like the perfect opportunity for a road trip.
Nicolas Jammet is partners with three of his fellow 2007 Georgetown grads, who saw a need in the neighborhood for high-quality salads with as many organic ingredients as possible. They thought offering tart, Pinkberry-style frozen yogurt and organic beverages — many from the company where Nicolas's twin brother Patrick works — was a good idea too.
I arrived in Georgetown with time to spare, so I stopped by Hook, two blocks away from the party, for a local ale. Since the crudo was priced below my resistance level, at three for $8, I sampled some of them, too (trout roe, barracuda and black bass).
sweetgreen’s landlord also owns an event space a couple of doors down from the restaurant, and she lent it to the kids for their party.
“We wanted to invite as many people as possible,” Nicolas told me, and a lot of people came, because Jammet and company understand how to work their connections. They got me there after all, didn’t they?
Bill Yosses, the White House’s pastry chef, was there, too. So was the Swiss ambassador and no-doubt other important people I didn’t recognize. sweetgreen’s owners also managed to secure a liquor license for the event, and Nicolas picked such unusual wines for the party that I thought maybe André had helped him. André denies it, and I believe him, because I don’t think he liked the smokey Shiraz that was being poured. I didn’t ask him about the French vin mousseux or the Chardonnay.
I munched on crudités and sample salads while chatting with Bill and some of his co-workers, including a freelance pastry chef who had just quit her job as an English professor, possibly to pursue a life in professional kitchens. She had worked at the White House during the holidays to help make the 40,000 Christmas cookies that were baked there during the season.
So it was a good party, and I stayed longer than I’d planned and didn't arrive at my dinner destination until after 9.
I was eating at Restaurant Eve in Alexandria, a place its publicist, Bronwyn Jacoby, had been after me to check out ever since it opened. I'd just been on a panel in New Orleans with its sommelier, Todd Thrasher, so the timing seemed right.
Restaurant Eve has three sections — a bar, a bistro and a tasting room. Bronwyn and I sat in the tasting room and left ourselves in the hands of Todd Thrasher and chef Cathal (pronounced kuh-HALL — it’s an Irish thing) Armstrong and spoke of many things. So it was after midnight when we finally arrived at PX, Todd’s speakeasy-style cocktail lounge. It’s the only cocktail lounge I've been to that actually seemed like a speakeasy, which effectively made me feel cool and elite.
So I was somewhat woozy when I woke up the next morning, but I managed to take the metro, D.C.’s mass-transit system, to Silver Spring, Md., where Jonathan picked me up. We bought sandwiches and pasta at Whole Foods and drove to his home at the other end of Silver Spring, where we had lunch with Jonathan's wife, Michelle, and their precocious, good-natured daughters Joanna (five-and-a-half) and Sage (two-and-a-half, but already quite articulate). I played with the kids, half-watched part of a Mets game with Jonathan (he’s from Mt. Kisco, N.Y., and will always be a Mets fan — he is not to be spoken to when a game is on), and napped until it was time to head back to Alexandria for dinner with Markus.
I described sweetgreen to Jonathan and Michelle. It’s of interest to them because Jonathan’s a history professor at Georgetown and could use a good salad for lunch.
I had never been to a Pinkberry, but Michelle, a native of Los Angeles, said she didn’t understand what the fuss was about, nor did she see the novelty in it. She said that in its early days, frozen yogurt — a product of southern California — was always a tart affair. It was only later that it was sweetened and flavored. Pinkberry, it seems, had simply revived an old custom, much as Cold Stone Creamery is simply a new-generation version of Steve’s, which was mixing stuff into ice cream on marble slabs in the 1980s (but not in California, where frozen yogurt had already taken root and premium ice cream didn't manage to gain a foothold).
Michelle stayed at home with the girls and Jonathan and I met Markus at Farrah Olivia, the restaurant of Ivorian chef Morou Ouattara, whom you may recall took me on a dine around of West African restaurants in D.C. last year.
Markus does something very impressive with regard to international development, particularly in the Middle East these days, although I've never managed to ascertain what exactly.
He did advise me on what to do about the messy state of my cubicle, which causes quite serious consternation among upper management (and human resources) at Nation’s Restaurant News.
If I threw away every single thing on my desk, he asked, what was the chance that I would miss any of it?
Indeed, I admitted, the chance was slim.
Some of the things we ate at Farrah Olivia (as you will notice, Morou is playing with the molecular gastronomy):
diver scallop with bacon powder and melon seed milk
Sweet plantain fitters with refried coconut and peanut butter powder
shocked escolar with wasabi pearls (made with gelatin, not alginate) and pickled watermelon rind
stuffed quail with garden vegetable brûlée and chorizo oil
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Acquired situational narcissism
July 24
Celebrities are boring. I can’t believe it has taken me 40 years to figure that out, but it’s true, at least for people who don’t know them.
It’s not their fault. If people treat you like stories about your bowel movements are enthralling, that’s what you’ll talk about, and the people will gush and repeat until they die the tale of how they heard Mark Wahlberg or whomever talk about poop.
That’s what the title of this blog entry is about. It was a term highlighted in The New York Times a few years back in a year-in-review section about ideas that had emerged that year. It means, of course, that if people treat you like you’re the center of the universe you’ll start acting that way.
I think that's why I left the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen with a touch of ennui. I met plenty of interesting people, but I think I felt a need to engage in banter with the famous ones. I should know better. If you don’t have anything to say to someone, famous or otherwise, don’t bother.
Even the ones who have something to say often don’t have a chance to. At Chefs & Champagne, a James Beard Foundation function in the Hamptons that I went to this past weekend, celebrity chef Charlie Trotter, who was the honoree, was answering a question I’d asked about his own foundation’s work, and we were interrupted by a local fan who semi-accosted the poor guy, expressing shock and delight to actually see him in person. So I left to talk to other people.
But what really has reminded me recently of the boringness of celebrities was meeting several rather unfamous but fascinating ones. I mentioned Tariq Hanna a few entries back. He decided to learn about pastry by working for a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise and determined that the best way to learn to cook was in a diner. Fascinating.
Last night I had dinner at Beppe with Sylvia Casares Copeland, chef-owner of Sylvia’s Enchilada Kitchen in Houston (she had me pick the restaurant, and I think moderately creative Italian exemplifies New York’s cuisine well).
Sylvia’s working on being a celebrity, but she isn’t yet. She’s making more TV appearances and she has a self-published DVD. She was in town to visit a dear friend and also meet with an agent and similar types. And her publicist had arranged for her to have dinner with me.
But for now she’s a divorced woman from Brownsville, Texas, in her third career. She parlayed her degree in Home Economics into a research chef job with Uncle Ben's. Then she sold Sara Lee desserts to restaurants in three states before opening her own restaurant, originally with her husband, until they got divorced. She opened it with no restaurant experience.
She opened her current restaurant after the divorce, five years ago, learning as she went, and the restaurant’s doing quite well.
She also had interesting observations about human nature and was in no way boring or pretentious.
What a relief.
Celebrities are boring. I can’t believe it has taken me 40 years to figure that out, but it’s true, at least for people who don’t know them.
It’s not their fault. If people treat you like stories about your bowel movements are enthralling, that’s what you’ll talk about, and the people will gush and repeat until they die the tale of how they heard Mark Wahlberg or whomever talk about poop.
That’s what the title of this blog entry is about. It was a term highlighted in The New York Times a few years back in a year-in-review section about ideas that had emerged that year. It means, of course, that if people treat you like you’re the center of the universe you’ll start acting that way.
I think that's why I left the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen with a touch of ennui. I met plenty of interesting people, but I think I felt a need to engage in banter with the famous ones. I should know better. If you don’t have anything to say to someone, famous or otherwise, don’t bother.
Even the ones who have something to say often don’t have a chance to. At Chefs & Champagne, a James Beard Foundation function in the Hamptons that I went to this past weekend, celebrity chef Charlie Trotter, who was the honoree, was answering a question I’d asked about his own foundation’s work, and we were interrupted by a local fan who semi-accosted the poor guy, expressing shock and delight to actually see him in person. So I left to talk to other people.
But what really has reminded me recently of the boringness of celebrities was meeting several rather unfamous but fascinating ones. I mentioned Tariq Hanna a few entries back. He decided to learn about pastry by working for a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise and determined that the best way to learn to cook was in a diner. Fascinating.
Last night I had dinner at Beppe with Sylvia Casares Copeland, chef-owner of Sylvia’s Enchilada Kitchen in Houston (she had me pick the restaurant, and I think moderately creative Italian exemplifies New York’s cuisine well).
Sylvia’s working on being a celebrity, but she isn’t yet. She’s making more TV appearances and she has a self-published DVD. She was in town to visit a dear friend and also meet with an agent and similar types. And her publicist had arranged for her to have dinner with me.
But for now she’s a divorced woman from Brownsville, Texas, in her third career. She parlayed her degree in Home Economics into a research chef job with Uncle Ben's. Then she sold Sara Lee desserts to restaurants in three states before opening her own restaurant, originally with her husband, until they got divorced. She opened it with no restaurant experience.
She opened her current restaurant after the divorce, five years ago, learning as she went, and the restaurant’s doing quite well.
She also had interesting observations about human nature and was in no way boring or pretentious.
What a relief.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Stone Barns
July 22
Blue Hill at Stone Barns invited me to come up and visit the place. They said they’d happily send a car for me. It’s not the most environmentally sound way to get up to the historic former dairy farm near Tarrytown, but I agreed to it anyway.
Kari Naegler, who works on the food at Whole Foods’ Bowery location, was going too, and we live in the same neighborhood, so they sent the same car for both of us. That’s more environmentally sound, and it also made for a nice ride, because Kari’s cool and smart and told me that her store has keitan sushi. I had no idea (since my job involves eating in restaurants a lot, I have little need for supermarkets). We agreed on many things, such as the silliness of switching to dark chocolate because you think it’s better for you than milk chocolate. It’s chocolate; it contains high levels of sugar and fat. That’s okay because it’s delicious, but eat it because it’s delicious.
I didn’t realize I was going to Stone Barns to get a sales pitch about the facility’s classes on sustainable cooking, which it’s doing in conjunction with the French Culinary Institute, but I still enjoyed touring the farm and hanging out with Kari and Megan Steintrager (formerly of Restaurant Business, now of Epicurious). We were taken on a tour of the green house, and we got to see the pigs running around at what looked like a campsite. Sheep were baah-ing in a nearby meadow. Wild turkeys were wandering around.
Helping to lead our tour was Gabrielle Langholtz from the Greenmarket, which, in case you don’t live in New York, is the network of farmers markets in New York City. I’d never met her before, but I’d spoken to her once to complain about my local Greenmarket, the Grand Army Plaza one, which I have suspected more than once of giving us their leftovers because they know that my neighbors in Park Slope have so bought in to the whole movement that they’ll buy whatever garbage a farmer hands to them. That’s the only way I can explain the fact that at the height of strawberry season I’ve bought strawberries that tasted like golf balls. The poor quality of some of the produce — and the fact that apples are for sale year-round at all of the greenmarkets — I think does a disservice to the notion of local produce, which really ought to taste better than anything else. But of course if you keep an apple in cold storage for months it doesn’t matter where it came from.
My rant went something like that when I called her some years ago. For the record, this year I’ve had extraordinary strawberries from my Greenmarket, and I’ve never bought a bad grape there (no, they’re not in season yet, but Gabrielle says the first apples that actually are in season have arrived).
Anyway, I tried not to give Gabrielle too hard a time, because I liked her on the phone, I liked her better in person, and I think that farm-fresh food is a great idea. However I did point out that the tag on the canvas bag I’d been handed at the Greenmarket yesterday, when I bought some red and black currants, had an inaccuracy. The tag, with the unfortunately self-righteous slogan “Saving the world one bag at a time,” was printed with explanations on how plastic bags are bad for the environment. One of the bullet points said that paper doesn’t biodegrade in landfills, which of course it does. It takes awhile, but it does. I’m pretty sure they meant to type “plastic” instead of “paper.”
Gabrielle agreed.
I mean, if you’re going to be self-righteous, find a decent proof reader. It’s a drag when you try to save the world through education and then fail to provide accurate information.
Anyway, I lunched with Megan and Kari on salad, which I think was $12.95 a pound, and then Kari and I were taken back home. We dropped Megan off at the Tarrytown train station.
Blue Hill at Stone Barns invited me to come up and visit the place. They said they’d happily send a car for me. It’s not the most environmentally sound way to get up to the historic former dairy farm near Tarrytown, but I agreed to it anyway.
Kari Naegler, who works on the food at Whole Foods’ Bowery location, was going too, and we live in the same neighborhood, so they sent the same car for both of us. That’s more environmentally sound, and it also made for a nice ride, because Kari’s cool and smart and told me that her store has keitan sushi. I had no idea (since my job involves eating in restaurants a lot, I have little need for supermarkets). We agreed on many things, such as the silliness of switching to dark chocolate because you think it’s better for you than milk chocolate. It’s chocolate; it contains high levels of sugar and fat. That’s okay because it’s delicious, but eat it because it’s delicious.
I didn’t realize I was going to Stone Barns to get a sales pitch about the facility’s classes on sustainable cooking, which it’s doing in conjunction with the French Culinary Institute, but I still enjoyed touring the farm and hanging out with Kari and Megan Steintrager (formerly of Restaurant Business, now of Epicurious). We were taken on a tour of the green house, and we got to see the pigs running around at what looked like a campsite. Sheep were baah-ing in a nearby meadow. Wild turkeys were wandering around.
Helping to lead our tour was Gabrielle Langholtz from the Greenmarket, which, in case you don’t live in New York, is the network of farmers markets in New York City. I’d never met her before, but I’d spoken to her once to complain about my local Greenmarket, the Grand Army Plaza one, which I have suspected more than once of giving us their leftovers because they know that my neighbors in Park Slope have so bought in to the whole movement that they’ll buy whatever garbage a farmer hands to them. That’s the only way I can explain the fact that at the height of strawberry season I’ve bought strawberries that tasted like golf balls. The poor quality of some of the produce — and the fact that apples are for sale year-round at all of the greenmarkets — I think does a disservice to the notion of local produce, which really ought to taste better than anything else. But of course if you keep an apple in cold storage for months it doesn’t matter where it came from.
My rant went something like that when I called her some years ago. For the record, this year I’ve had extraordinary strawberries from my Greenmarket, and I’ve never bought a bad grape there (no, they’re not in season yet, but Gabrielle says the first apples that actually are in season have arrived).
Anyway, I tried not to give Gabrielle too hard a time, because I liked her on the phone, I liked her better in person, and I think that farm-fresh food is a great idea. However I did point out that the tag on the canvas bag I’d been handed at the Greenmarket yesterday, when I bought some red and black currants, had an inaccuracy. The tag, with the unfortunately self-righteous slogan “Saving the world one bag at a time,” was printed with explanations on how plastic bags are bad for the environment. One of the bullet points said that paper doesn’t biodegrade in landfills, which of course it does. It takes awhile, but it does. I’m pretty sure they meant to type “plastic” instead of “paper.”
Gabrielle agreed.
I mean, if you’re going to be self-righteous, find a decent proof reader. It’s a drag when you try to save the world through education and then fail to provide accurate information.
Anyway, I lunched with Megan and Kari on salad, which I think was $12.95 a pound, and then Kari and I were taken back home. We dropped Megan off at the Tarrytown train station.
Monday, July 23, 2007
It’s all fun and games until someone loses a city
July 20
Tales of the Cocktail is an extraordinary drinkfest held in New Orleans ostensibly, in part at least, to further educate the cocktail cognoscenti about local, national and global spirit trends. But mostly it’s a four-day-long, booze-drenched party.
I’m not complaining, I’m just saying.
I hear the seminars are well-attended, however, but I wouldn’t know because the only one I went to was the one I participated in.
I could only make it there for a day: My pages at NRN were closing on Wednesday and I was going to Chefs & Champagne in the Hamptons on Saturday, so a brief commando-style arrival on Thursday afternoon with a Friday afternoon departure was all I could manage.
And during my time there I was fully booked.
I landed, took a shower, checked e-mail and headed to Café Adelaide for drinks with Ti Adelaide Martin and Lally Brennan, because they’re charming people with whom I drink at every opportnity (you might recall that I drank with Ti in Aspen), and also because they’re from the Brennan family, which makes them as close as the American restaurant world has to royalty.
Lally drank a classic Daiquiri, Ti had a Tequila Mockingbird II (reposado tequila, limoncello, Angostura bitters and something else that I have forgotten; it tasted like an older, more worldly cousin of the Margarita) and I had a Corpse Reviver II (gin, Cointreau, Lillet, lemon juice and herbsaint, garnished with a stemless cherry). We shared sips. Ti tried my cocktail and immediately handed it to a member of the restaurant staff and said “Uh-uh. Try again.”
Oh how embarrassing for the bartender. Imagine that your bosses are entertaining a national food writer like me and your cocktail is rejected. What if he wrote about it in his blog or something?
But hey, I guess that’s what makes the Brennans successful. (It turns out that the lemons they were using were unusually sour, requiring the addition of two drops of simple syrup).
We chatted about many things, including of course New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina (universally called “The Storm” in The Big Easy), in which infrastructure repairs are held-up by delays in funding from Washington, in which nearly every night someone dining in Commander’s Palace (which suffered $6.5 million in damage) is doing so because it’s their last night in town.
Ti asked me what the rest of the country thought of New Orleans these days, and I decided to be honest and tell her that we weren’t thinking much of it at all.
So that was sad, but Ti and Lally said that the people of New Orleans had risen to the occasion, and that as many people were moving to New Orleans as were leaving.
In the restaurant world, Ti pointed out that New Orleans Times-Picayune restaurant critic Brett Anderson had stopped rating restarants with stars since the storm. Instead, he was simply describing them, because who wants to pick on the restarants of a city that was nearly destroyed?
Ti gave me a ride to my next appointment, at Sucré, the new dessert restaurant of another veteran New Orleans restaurateur, Joel Dondis, who had imported chef Tariq Hanna from Detroit as his partner.
I meant to just pop in, say hi, and then find a quiet corner in Commander’s Palace to go over data for my Friday morning panel, but instead I stayed for two-and-a-half hours, sampling the strawberry shortcake milkshake, four kinds of ice cream (coconut-basil, brown butter-pecan, chocolate and something intended to taste like Snowballs) and ten different chocolate bonbons.
That was followed by dinner at Commander’s Palace with chef Tory McPhail’s food paired with Audrey Saunders‘s cocktails. Perhaps I’ll list the menu for it when I find it.
At that party I finally met Stephen Beaumont, who does NRN’s Beer, Wine and Spirits page and recently took over from Gary Regan as our beverage columnist. He seemed very much the good-natured bon vivant I expected, and I ended up hanging out with him and others (Robin Schempp and Ron Givens, a beverage writer, among other things, who recently moved from New York to Iowa) at the Carousel Bar, so named because it rotates — a quality that I found literally nauseating, but not so much so that it kept me from sampling the local beer.
I declared a need for fried food, and the four of us set out to find some, finally finding Alibi. I was thinking of something like a fried oyster po’ boy, but instead we had breaded, fried things in baskets and fries drenched in chili and cheese. I made do.
I was also thinking that we would eat fried food, have a last beer and head back to the hotel. Instead I found myself back in my hotel room at 4 a.m. So I spent half an hour taking notes for my panel the next day and then called it a night, which it most certainly was.
I woke up at 9 a.m. for my 10 a.m. panel (I had to check out of the hotel and check into the conference, something I hadn’t had a chance to do yet).
I was at the conference because of my friend Erica Duecy. She had introduced me to the people who organize Tales of the Cocktail because she wanted me to come down and drink with her, and they soon invited me, asking me to organize a panel discussion and develop a cocktail to present.
I pointed out that, as a food writer, not a beverage writer or cocktail expert, I didn’t actually have the expertise appropriate to develop an intelligent panel and produce a cocktail for it. But they asked if I’d at least be on a panel and I said I would.
Fortunately, Nation’s Restarant News had orchestrated a beverage-trend survey that I had access to, and I had moderated a four-hour-long beverage roundtable that we sponsored at the Restaurant Show in Chicago in May, so I had enough data to speak intelligently about trends.
My fellow panelists — James Meehan from New York, Todd Thrasher from DC (really Alexandria these days) and John Kinder from Chicago — bartenders all, were amazing and smart and articulate and I wanted to drink their cocktails.
Todd actually made one that was served during the discussion that contained a sweetened tobacco infusion, honeycomb (not the cereal but the real thing), rum and other stuff. We all gulped it down, except for James who wanted an Advil and said so. In retrospect, someone should have gotten him one. What were we thinking?
Our panel was relatively well-attended, and people theoretically paid $50 just to go to that panel, so that’s nice.
I slept well on the plane home.
Tales of the Cocktail is an extraordinary drinkfest held in New Orleans ostensibly, in part at least, to further educate the cocktail cognoscenti about local, national and global spirit trends. But mostly it’s a four-day-long, booze-drenched party.
I’m not complaining, I’m just saying.
I hear the seminars are well-attended, however, but I wouldn’t know because the only one I went to was the one I participated in.
I could only make it there for a day: My pages at NRN were closing on Wednesday and I was going to Chefs & Champagne in the Hamptons on Saturday, so a brief commando-style arrival on Thursday afternoon with a Friday afternoon departure was all I could manage.
And during my time there I was fully booked.
I landed, took a shower, checked e-mail and headed to Café Adelaide for drinks with Ti Adelaide Martin and Lally Brennan, because they’re charming people with whom I drink at every opportnity (you might recall that I drank with Ti in Aspen), and also because they’re from the Brennan family, which makes them as close as the American restaurant world has to royalty.
Lally drank a classic Daiquiri, Ti had a Tequila Mockingbird II (reposado tequila, limoncello, Angostura bitters and something else that I have forgotten; it tasted like an older, more worldly cousin of the Margarita) and I had a Corpse Reviver II (gin, Cointreau, Lillet, lemon juice and herbsaint, garnished with a stemless cherry). We shared sips. Ti tried my cocktail and immediately handed it to a member of the restaurant staff and said “Uh-uh. Try again.”
Oh how embarrassing for the bartender. Imagine that your bosses are entertaining a national food writer like me and your cocktail is rejected. What if he wrote about it in his blog or something?
But hey, I guess that’s what makes the Brennans successful. (It turns out that the lemons they were using were unusually sour, requiring the addition of two drops of simple syrup).
We chatted about many things, including of course New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina (universally called “The Storm” in The Big Easy), in which infrastructure repairs are held-up by delays in funding from Washington, in which nearly every night someone dining in Commander’s Palace (which suffered $6.5 million in damage) is doing so because it’s their last night in town.
Ti asked me what the rest of the country thought of New Orleans these days, and I decided to be honest and tell her that we weren’t thinking much of it at all.
So that was sad, but Ti and Lally said that the people of New Orleans had risen to the occasion, and that as many people were moving to New Orleans as were leaving.
In the restaurant world, Ti pointed out that New Orleans Times-Picayune restaurant critic Brett Anderson had stopped rating restarants with stars since the storm. Instead, he was simply describing them, because who wants to pick on the restarants of a city that was nearly destroyed?
Ti gave me a ride to my next appointment, at Sucré, the new dessert restaurant of another veteran New Orleans restaurateur, Joel Dondis, who had imported chef Tariq Hanna from Detroit as his partner.
I meant to just pop in, say hi, and then find a quiet corner in Commander’s Palace to go over data for my Friday morning panel, but instead I stayed for two-and-a-half hours, sampling the strawberry shortcake milkshake, four kinds of ice cream (coconut-basil, brown butter-pecan, chocolate and something intended to taste like Snowballs) and ten different chocolate bonbons.
That was followed by dinner at Commander’s Palace with chef Tory McPhail’s food paired with Audrey Saunders‘s cocktails. Perhaps I’ll list the menu for it when I find it.
At that party I finally met Stephen Beaumont, who does NRN’s Beer, Wine and Spirits page and recently took over from Gary Regan as our beverage columnist. He seemed very much the good-natured bon vivant I expected, and I ended up hanging out with him and others (Robin Schempp and Ron Givens, a beverage writer, among other things, who recently moved from New York to Iowa) at the Carousel Bar, so named because it rotates — a quality that I found literally nauseating, but not so much so that it kept me from sampling the local beer.
I declared a need for fried food, and the four of us set out to find some, finally finding Alibi. I was thinking of something like a fried oyster po’ boy, but instead we had breaded, fried things in baskets and fries drenched in chili and cheese. I made do.
I was also thinking that we would eat fried food, have a last beer and head back to the hotel. Instead I found myself back in my hotel room at 4 a.m. So I spent half an hour taking notes for my panel the next day and then called it a night, which it most certainly was.
I woke up at 9 a.m. for my 10 a.m. panel (I had to check out of the hotel and check into the conference, something I hadn’t had a chance to do yet).
I was at the conference because of my friend Erica Duecy. She had introduced me to the people who organize Tales of the Cocktail because she wanted me to come down and drink with her, and they soon invited me, asking me to organize a panel discussion and develop a cocktail to present.
I pointed out that, as a food writer, not a beverage writer or cocktail expert, I didn’t actually have the expertise appropriate to develop an intelligent panel and produce a cocktail for it. But they asked if I’d at least be on a panel and I said I would.
Fortunately, Nation’s Restarant News had orchestrated a beverage-trend survey that I had access to, and I had moderated a four-hour-long beverage roundtable that we sponsored at the Restaurant Show in Chicago in May, so I had enough data to speak intelligently about trends.
My fellow panelists — James Meehan from New York, Todd Thrasher from DC (really Alexandria these days) and John Kinder from Chicago — bartenders all, were amazing and smart and articulate and I wanted to drink their cocktails.
Todd actually made one that was served during the discussion that contained a sweetened tobacco infusion, honeycomb (not the cereal but the real thing), rum and other stuff. We all gulped it down, except for James who wanted an Advil and said so. In retrospect, someone should have gotten him one. What were we thinking?
Our panel was relatively well-attended, and people theoretically paid $50 just to go to that panel, so that’s nice.
I slept well on the plane home.
Izakaya Ten
July 17
Chandler and I had dinner at Izakaya Ten, a restaurant whose name should never be written Izakaya 10, as "ten" in this case is the Japanese word for “sky” or “heaven.”
Chandler was a few minutes late (it happens to all of us in Manhattan, especially when going as far west as 10th Avenue as we forget how far west that really is) so I took the time to ask my waitress about the restaurant’s name. I don’t speak Japanese, but I can get by in Mandarin Chinese, and the Japanese use Chinese characers as part of their overwrought writing system, which also includes two syllabaries, one for Japanese words and one for foreign ones, and, increasingly, romanji, or Roman letters.
(A syllabary is different from an alphabet in that each symbol — or most of them if you want to split hairs — represents a consonant-vowell combination, so one symbol would represent "ka" another "ke" and so on).
So “ten” was of course the character for “sky” or “heaven.” The middle character in Izakaya represented alcohol, which is the character the Japanese use for “sake,” and the last one was the character for “shop” or “store.” I didn’t know the first one, but my waitress said it meant “stay.” So an izakaya is either a shop where you stay for sake or a shop where sake stays, I’m not sure which. In either case it translates well as “bar,” although the folks at Izakaya Ten translate it cleverly and not inaccurately as “gastropub.”
Now Chandler, on the other hand, speaks Japanese quite well, so he chatted with the waitress about any number of things, and started to do so with the owner, Lannie Ahn, but she said, “Actually, I’m Korean.”
She sent out a bunch of food, including grilled smelt, raw octopus marinated with wasabi, and most anything else on the menu — more than I felt like writing down — plus a lot of sushi per Chandler’s request. She sent out a bunch of sakes, too, and several infused shochus.
Chandler, being The New York Times' scent critic, smelled everything.
“This smells like perfume,” he declared of one shochu. “Vanillin!” he said triumphantly.
I took a sip and wondered if that flavor that wasn’t vanilla might be shiso. Indeed, Lannie said it was, causing Chandler to look at me as though he were impressed.
We also had shochu infused with cherry and one with plum.
For dessert, three ice creams: green tea, red bean and sesame.
Chandler and I had dinner at Izakaya Ten, a restaurant whose name should never be written Izakaya 10, as "ten" in this case is the Japanese word for “sky” or “heaven.”
Chandler was a few minutes late (it happens to all of us in Manhattan, especially when going as far west as 10th Avenue as we forget how far west that really is) so I took the time to ask my waitress about the restaurant’s name. I don’t speak Japanese, but I can get by in Mandarin Chinese, and the Japanese use Chinese characers as part of their overwrought writing system, which also includes two syllabaries, one for Japanese words and one for foreign ones, and, increasingly, romanji, or Roman letters.
(A syllabary is different from an alphabet in that each symbol — or most of them if you want to split hairs — represents a consonant-vowell combination, so one symbol would represent "ka" another "ke" and so on).
So “ten” was of course the character for “sky” or “heaven.” The middle character in Izakaya represented alcohol, which is the character the Japanese use for “sake,” and the last one was the character for “shop” or “store.” I didn’t know the first one, but my waitress said it meant “stay.” So an izakaya is either a shop where you stay for sake or a shop where sake stays, I’m not sure which. In either case it translates well as “bar,” although the folks at Izakaya Ten translate it cleverly and not inaccurately as “gastropub.”
Now Chandler, on the other hand, speaks Japanese quite well, so he chatted with the waitress about any number of things, and started to do so with the owner, Lannie Ahn, but she said, “Actually, I’m Korean.”
She sent out a bunch of food, including grilled smelt, raw octopus marinated with wasabi, and most anything else on the menu — more than I felt like writing down — plus a lot of sushi per Chandler’s request. She sent out a bunch of sakes, too, and several infused shochus.
Chandler, being The New York Times' scent critic, smelled everything.
“This smells like perfume,” he declared of one shochu. “Vanillin!” he said triumphantly.
I took a sip and wondered if that flavor that wasn’t vanilla might be shiso. Indeed, Lannie said it was, causing Chandler to look at me as though he were impressed.
We also had shochu infused with cherry and one with plum.
For dessert, three ice creams: green tea, red bean and sesame.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Celebrating Shane
July 16
My friend Shane Curcuru is not the easiest person to get to know. Quirky and often introverted, he seems to view the world at right angles from most other people and is not particularly interested in how they feel about that.
But it is worth the effort to get to know him, and not merely because he would happily detach his own right arm for a good friend. Shane is brilliant and fascinating and quite a good baker.
An engineer by training, a history buff by vocation (he took high-level history classes at Tufts for fun while getting a degree in mechanical engineering) and a computer programmer of sorts by trade, he has plotted his own course to happiness, figured out what matters to him — good friends, strongly roasted coffee, pastry, cats, privacy — and has set up a nice life for himself, his wife and daughter in the Boston suburbs.
So it stands to reason that if he wants to celebrate he will find a reason to do it. The reason he thought of last weekend: The 10th anniversary of his bachelor party.
I thought it was a brilliant idea, as did most of the people I mentioned it to, although others thought it boded ill for his marriage.
It doesn’t: Shane’s friends marvel at the compatibility he has with his wife Amy, a sometimes timid, always clever former entomology student who to us it seems must have been molded by some higher being, maybe out of alabaster, expressly to be Shane’s companion.
Bachelor parties can include many activities meant to express independence, manliness, lust or merely a desire to celebrate.
And the group of friends that Shane and I share, from my first and second years of college, are far more inclined to get together for an orgy of food than of anything else.
Indeed, in my sophomore year of college we formed a sort of secret society around monthly dinners.
Okay, it wasn’t that secret, although for the sake of propriety I shall not mention its name, but what was discussed at dinner was not to be discussed elsewhere.
Seafood was usually involved in the meal, as we were in New England, and generally some kind of red meat and very likely something deep-fried.
It was supposed to be all-male and I think it generally has stayed that way, but I’m not sure as I spent much of the 1990s living overseas and generally out of touch with the group, although I did fly in for computer networking system consultant John Bruce aka JB’s wedding (people in the foodservice industry might be interested to know that John’s little brother Charlie is an executive chef for Sodexho at one of their accounts in Richmond, Va.).
Anyway, on Saturday we convened at the Concord Rod and Gun Club where we fired guns in the basement shooting range and then middle school science teacher Michael Gerber sliced up raw tuna and mollusks to eat as sashimi, and clams just to eat, while JB — after scouring nearby suburbs for a butcher with bone-in rib-eyes — charred us up some steaks and roasted corn on the cob.
Customarily we would discuss our romantic pursuits, but everyone but me was married and my romantic life remains as boring as ever, so inevitably we talked about kids instead (I talked about my nieces and nephew).
I spent the night at Shane’s and the next day he, Amy, their daughter Roxanne and I had a late lunch at La Verdad, Ken Oringer’s new Mexican restaurant on Lansdowne Street, just outside Fenway Park. The Red Sox were playing, so we went there after the game had started and the crowd had moved from the restaurant to Fenway. We had chips and guacamole, mole chicken wings and roasted corn with cheese and chiles, followed by assorted tacos, a chicken burrito and a chile relleno torta.
My friend Shane Curcuru is not the easiest person to get to know. Quirky and often introverted, he seems to view the world at right angles from most other people and is not particularly interested in how they feel about that.
But it is worth the effort to get to know him, and not merely because he would happily detach his own right arm for a good friend. Shane is brilliant and fascinating and quite a good baker.
An engineer by training, a history buff by vocation (he took high-level history classes at Tufts for fun while getting a degree in mechanical engineering) and a computer programmer of sorts by trade, he has plotted his own course to happiness, figured out what matters to him — good friends, strongly roasted coffee, pastry, cats, privacy — and has set up a nice life for himself, his wife and daughter in the Boston suburbs.
So it stands to reason that if he wants to celebrate he will find a reason to do it. The reason he thought of last weekend: The 10th anniversary of his bachelor party.
I thought it was a brilliant idea, as did most of the people I mentioned it to, although others thought it boded ill for his marriage.
It doesn’t: Shane’s friends marvel at the compatibility he has with his wife Amy, a sometimes timid, always clever former entomology student who to us it seems must have been molded by some higher being, maybe out of alabaster, expressly to be Shane’s companion.
Bachelor parties can include many activities meant to express independence, manliness, lust or merely a desire to celebrate.
And the group of friends that Shane and I share, from my first and second years of college, are far more inclined to get together for an orgy of food than of anything else.
Indeed, in my sophomore year of college we formed a sort of secret society around monthly dinners.
Okay, it wasn’t that secret, although for the sake of propriety I shall not mention its name, but what was discussed at dinner was not to be discussed elsewhere.
Seafood was usually involved in the meal, as we were in New England, and generally some kind of red meat and very likely something deep-fried.
It was supposed to be all-male and I think it generally has stayed that way, but I’m not sure as I spent much of the 1990s living overseas and generally out of touch with the group, although I did fly in for computer networking system consultant John Bruce aka JB’s wedding (people in the foodservice industry might be interested to know that John’s little brother Charlie is an executive chef for Sodexho at one of their accounts in Richmond, Va.).
Anyway, on Saturday we convened at the Concord Rod and Gun Club where we fired guns in the basement shooting range and then middle school science teacher Michael Gerber sliced up raw tuna and mollusks to eat as sashimi, and clams just to eat, while JB — after scouring nearby suburbs for a butcher with bone-in rib-eyes — charred us up some steaks and roasted corn on the cob.
Customarily we would discuss our romantic pursuits, but everyone but me was married and my romantic life remains as boring as ever, so inevitably we talked about kids instead (I talked about my nieces and nephew).
I spent the night at Shane’s and the next day he, Amy, their daughter Roxanne and I had a late lunch at La Verdad, Ken Oringer’s new Mexican restaurant on Lansdowne Street, just outside Fenway Park. The Red Sox were playing, so we went there after the game had started and the crowd had moved from the restaurant to Fenway. We had chips and guacamole, mole chicken wings and roasted corn with cheese and chiles, followed by assorted tacos, a chicken burrito and a chile relleno torta.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Note to self: Eat more hot dogs
July 13
Ray Garcia organized an outing to watch the Mets play. He thinks this might be their year, but they showed no indication of that tonight; the Reds trounced them. I spent $29 on four beers and had what I believe was my first ballpark hot dog in several years. It was fantastic.
A good time was had by all.
Ray Garcia organized an outing to watch the Mets play. He thinks this might be their year, but they showed no indication of that tonight; the Reds trounced them. I spent $29 on four beers and had what I believe was my first ballpark hot dog in several years. It was fantastic.
A good time was had by all.
Friday, July 13, 2007
pizza barbecue
July 12
Oh what fun last night. My friend Julie Besonen, who assigns stories for Paper, and her friend Tobey Grumet, who has an apartment with a backyard in Cobble Hilll, Brooklyn, joined forces to throw a grilled-pizza party.
Tobey supplied the venue, Julie supplied her husband, Jim Knapp, who made the pizza — crunchy, barely smokey, with good, simple ingredients (I don’t like to comment on the quality of the restaurant food, because that’s a slippery slope toward becoming a “critic” — imagine Alfred Hitchcock saying “actor” — but I love to comment on my friends’ cooking, as long as it’s good). Punch was made using leftover free stuff sent to Julie — coconut-infused vodka, pineapple juice and something else, so it was a sort of non-frozen Piña Colada with vodka instead of rum (later we drank pineapple-infused rum as a cordial).
Dave Wondrich, a nicer person than whom I don’t think exists, made some sort of delicious classic punch, but I spent more time with the rosé wines that
Alice Feiring brought. I sipped them as she broke down her strategies for giving away all the wine sent to her that she deems unworthy of her palate.
Dave and Steve Kelley — formerly of the Institute of Culinary Education and now a wine merchant — exchanged stories of extreme drunkenness in their youth and stories in their recent past of dealing with a particularly dishonest, unpleasant and darkhearted co-owner of a trendy pizza place on Flatbush. Andrea Strong and I exchanged opinions of the food blog world.
I kept meaning to leave but insead stayed and munched on pickled garlic and olives as the hosts opened a forgotten bottle of rosé.
I finally left later than I care to admit, it being a school night, but I had good subway mojo; the 2 train arrived just as I made it to the subway platform
Oh what fun last night. My friend Julie Besonen, who assigns stories for Paper, and her friend Tobey Grumet, who has an apartment with a backyard in Cobble Hilll, Brooklyn, joined forces to throw a grilled-pizza party.
Tobey supplied the venue, Julie supplied her husband, Jim Knapp, who made the pizza — crunchy, barely smokey, with good, simple ingredients (I don’t like to comment on the quality of the restaurant food, because that’s a slippery slope toward becoming a “critic” — imagine Alfred Hitchcock saying “actor” — but I love to comment on my friends’ cooking, as long as it’s good). Punch was made using leftover free stuff sent to Julie — coconut-infused vodka, pineapple juice and something else, so it was a sort of non-frozen Piña Colada with vodka instead of rum (later we drank pineapple-infused rum as a cordial).
Dave Wondrich, a nicer person than whom I don’t think exists, made some sort of delicious classic punch, but I spent more time with the rosé wines that
Alice Feiring brought. I sipped them as she broke down her strategies for giving away all the wine sent to her that she deems unworthy of her palate.
Dave and Steve Kelley — formerly of the Institute of Culinary Education and now a wine merchant — exchanged stories of extreme drunkenness in their youth and stories in their recent past of dealing with a particularly dishonest, unpleasant and darkhearted co-owner of a trendy pizza place on Flatbush. Andrea Strong and I exchanged opinions of the food blog world.
I kept meaning to leave but insead stayed and munched on pickled garlic and olives as the hosts opened a forgotten bottle of rosé.
I finally left later than I care to admit, it being a school night, but I had good subway mojo; the 2 train arrived just as I made it to the subway platform
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Singapore night at the Beard House
July 11
Did you know that Mitchell Davis was vice president of the James Beard Foundation? I had no idea. I thought he was just communications director or something, but he was named VP a couple of months ago.
I learned that last night at the Beard House, where a Singaporean export-promotion organization was having local and Singaporean chefs cook, and having Chris Johnson from Bao 111 make cocktails, including traditional Singapore Slings and an invented one called The Colonial, which is a mangosteen bellini with a sugared rim and a piece of candied ginger to chew on (the recipe says it should have a candied ginger rim, but that apparently didn't happen).
Last night marked the end of the Fancy Food Show at the Javitz Center, and Mitchell introduced me to several people who were in town for the show and had ended up at the Beard House, including some charming truffle exporters from Bologna (apparently Alba truffles are extremely hard to come by these days, but plenty of them are lodged at the roots of oak trees in Emilia-Romagna) and an Iranian caviar exporter — or maybe he was based in New York, and thus would have been an Iranian-caviar importer.
The always engaging Penny Trenk was there and I told her about my meal the night before at Benjamin Steakhouse, but since her son Michael is the GM at The Capital Grille in the Chrysler Building, she said she can’t go to anyone else’s steakhouse, which is fair enough.
At dinner I spent a fair amount of time talking to Alexa Goldstein, who like me spent time in China, and now works for an organization called International Enterprise Singapore, encouraging purchase in the U.S. of Singaporean goods and services.
Cooking were Cedric Tovar, the chef at Peacock Alley, Jake Klein, who used to be at Pulse, a restaurant at The Sports Club LA in Rockefeller Center, but apparently he’s not anymore (I’m looking into that even as I write this), and Daniel Tay, a Singaporean pastry chef and the owner of Bakerzin, a bakery-cafe chain with units in Malaysia, Indonesia and China as well as Singapore and the U.S. (on in the U.S., in Tucson).
Here's what they served:
hors d'oeuvres:
tiny fish maw in curry
salmon wrapped in lettuce
Hainanese chicken rice
lobster salad on rotis
Singapore Sling, The Colonial and Tiger Beer
Gado gado trio
Singapore Sling, The Colonial and Tiger Beer
Satay trio: lobster with kalamansi, tandoori foie gras, and xiao xing short ribs
2005 Ladera Sagrada Castelo Do Papa Godello (Galicia, Spain)
Laksa noodles with grilled cuttlefish
2005 Gainey Vineyard Riesling (Santa Inez Valley, Calif.)
Beef Rendang
2003 La Nunsio Barbera D’Asti (Piedmont, Italy)
Lemon grass jelly and golden raisin in a Martini glass
Molten chocolate cake with kumquat marmalade and vanilla ice cream
2005 Quady Essensia (Madera, Callif.)
Did you know that Mitchell Davis was vice president of the James Beard Foundation? I had no idea. I thought he was just communications director or something, but he was named VP a couple of months ago.
I learned that last night at the Beard House, where a Singaporean export-promotion organization was having local and Singaporean chefs cook, and having Chris Johnson from Bao 111 make cocktails, including traditional Singapore Slings and an invented one called The Colonial, which is a mangosteen bellini with a sugared rim and a piece of candied ginger to chew on (the recipe says it should have a candied ginger rim, but that apparently didn't happen).
Last night marked the end of the Fancy Food Show at the Javitz Center, and Mitchell introduced me to several people who were in town for the show and had ended up at the Beard House, including some charming truffle exporters from Bologna (apparently Alba truffles are extremely hard to come by these days, but plenty of them are lodged at the roots of oak trees in Emilia-Romagna) and an Iranian caviar exporter — or maybe he was based in New York, and thus would have been an Iranian-caviar importer.
The always engaging Penny Trenk was there and I told her about my meal the night before at Benjamin Steakhouse, but since her son Michael is the GM at The Capital Grille in the Chrysler Building, she said she can’t go to anyone else’s steakhouse, which is fair enough.
At dinner I spent a fair amount of time talking to Alexa Goldstein, who like me spent time in China, and now works for an organization called International Enterprise Singapore, encouraging purchase in the U.S. of Singaporean goods and services.
Cooking were Cedric Tovar, the chef at Peacock Alley, Jake Klein, who used to be at Pulse, a restaurant at The Sports Club LA in Rockefeller Center, but apparently he’s not anymore (I’m looking into that even as I write this), and Daniel Tay, a Singaporean pastry chef and the owner of Bakerzin, a bakery-cafe chain with units in Malaysia, Indonesia and China as well as Singapore and the U.S. (on in the U.S., in Tucson).
Here's what they served:
hors d'oeuvres:
tiny fish maw in curry
salmon wrapped in lettuce
Hainanese chicken rice
lobster salad on rotis
Singapore Sling, The Colonial and Tiger Beer
Gado gado trio
Singapore Sling, The Colonial and Tiger Beer
Satay trio: lobster with kalamansi, tandoori foie gras, and xiao xing short ribs
2005 Ladera Sagrada Castelo Do Papa Godello (Galicia, Spain)
Laksa noodles with grilled cuttlefish
2005 Gainey Vineyard Riesling (Santa Inez Valley, Calif.)
Beef Rendang
2003 La Nunsio Barbera D’Asti (Piedmont, Italy)
Lemon grass jelly and golden raisin in a Martini glass
Molten chocolate cake with kumquat marmalade and vanilla ice cream
2005 Quady Essensia (Madera, Callif.)
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Undercover cocktails, steak and Andy
July 10
I wasn’t done yesterday after my two-and-a-half-hour lunch at Cafe Nougatine, oh no. I went to Benjamin Steakhouse for dinner with the excellent Andy Battaglia, The Onion’s city editor for New York. I’m pretty sure that of all my friends Andy loves steak the most, and he has certainly eaten at Peter Luger more often than any of my other friends — possibly more than all of them combined. So it made sense to take him to a steakhouse whose kitchen was being run by a Luger veteran.
So we ate German potatoes and the Benjamin salad — which had lump crab meat, avocado and other things — and asparagus and the porterhouse for two with a bottle of Frog's Leap Cabernet followed by pecan pie and cheesecake with tawny port.
But first, I asked about cocktails.
Victor, the manager, said the cocktail list hadn't been printed yet, but he gave me a nearly completed version, and now I give it to you (in case you're wondering, I had a Vesper — which is not a traditional Vesper as it is made with Bombay Sapphire rather than Gordon’s — and Andy had the Rang Pur Bloodhound):
Benjamin Steakhouse Cocktails
Benjamin’s Martini — Remy XO, Grand Marnier, Amaro Montenegro, dash of lemon juice
The Vesper Martini — Bombay Sapphire Gin, Stolichnaya Vodka, dash of Lillet, lemon twist
Negroni Classico — Campari Orange, Beefeater Gin, Cinzano Sweet Vermouth
Don Julio Margarita — Don Julio Blanco, Grand Marnier, lime juice, simple syrup
French Connection — Courvoisier VSOP, Amaretto Dissarono
Tequila Sunrise — Cuervo Tradicional, Grand Marnier, finished with a dash of grenadine
Rang Pur Bloodhound — Tanqueray Rang Pur, Dry Vermouth, Sweet Vermouth, orange juice
Crimson Crush — Belvedere, lemon juice, dash of cranberry juice, raspberries and Chambord
Yellow Cab — Navan Vanilla Cognac, pineapple juice, Cointreau
Espresso Martini — Absolut Vanil, Tia Maria, Kahlua, Bailey’s, espresso
The Left Bank — Smirnoff Vanilla Vodka, Chambord, pineapple juice
Apple of Eden Martini — Grey Goose Citron, Apple Pucker, lime juice, apple sliver
Cosmopolitan Martini — Absolut Citron, Cointreau orange, Cranberry juice, dash of lime juice
Bellini — Prosecco, peach schnapps and peach nectar
Royal Peaches and Cream — Crown Royal, peach schnapps, Grand Marnier, vanilla ice cream
Kir Royale — Moët & Chandon, Crème de Cassis
Scropino — Moët & Chandon, Grey Goose Citron and mango or raspberry sorbet
Chocotini — Smirnoff vanilla, Bailey’s Godiva liqueur, spash of cream
I wasn’t done yesterday after my two-and-a-half-hour lunch at Cafe Nougatine, oh no. I went to Benjamin Steakhouse for dinner with the excellent Andy Battaglia, The Onion’s city editor for New York. I’m pretty sure that of all my friends Andy loves steak the most, and he has certainly eaten at Peter Luger more often than any of my other friends — possibly more than all of them combined. So it made sense to take him to a steakhouse whose kitchen was being run by a Luger veteran.
So we ate German potatoes and the Benjamin salad — which had lump crab meat, avocado and other things — and asparagus and the porterhouse for two with a bottle of Frog's Leap Cabernet followed by pecan pie and cheesecake with tawny port.
But first, I asked about cocktails.
Victor, the manager, said the cocktail list hadn't been printed yet, but he gave me a nearly completed version, and now I give it to you (in case you're wondering, I had a Vesper — which is not a traditional Vesper as it is made with Bombay Sapphire rather than Gordon’s — and Andy had the Rang Pur Bloodhound):
Benjamin Steakhouse Cocktails
Benjamin’s Martini — Remy XO, Grand Marnier, Amaro Montenegro, dash of lemon juice
The Vesper Martini — Bombay Sapphire Gin, Stolichnaya Vodka, dash of Lillet, lemon twist
Negroni Classico — Campari Orange, Beefeater Gin, Cinzano Sweet Vermouth
Don Julio Margarita — Don Julio Blanco, Grand Marnier, lime juice, simple syrup
French Connection — Courvoisier VSOP, Amaretto Dissarono
Tequila Sunrise — Cuervo Tradicional, Grand Marnier, finished with a dash of grenadine
Rang Pur Bloodhound — Tanqueray Rang Pur, Dry Vermouth, Sweet Vermouth, orange juice
Crimson Crush — Belvedere, lemon juice, dash of cranberry juice, raspberries and Chambord
Yellow Cab — Navan Vanilla Cognac, pineapple juice, Cointreau
Espresso Martini — Absolut Vanil, Tia Maria, Kahlua, Bailey’s, espresso
The Left Bank — Smirnoff Vanilla Vodka, Chambord, pineapple juice
Apple of Eden Martini — Grey Goose Citron, Apple Pucker, lime juice, apple sliver
Cosmopolitan Martini — Absolut Citron, Cointreau orange, Cranberry juice, dash of lime juice
Bellini — Prosecco, peach schnapps and peach nectar
Royal Peaches and Cream — Crown Royal, peach schnapps, Grand Marnier, vanilla ice cream
Kir Royale — Moët & Chandon, Crème de Cassis
Scropino — Moët & Chandon, Grey Goose Citron and mango or raspberry sorbet
Chocotini — Smirnoff vanilla, Bailey’s Godiva liqueur, spash of cream
Spotted!
July 10
Yesterday I was planning to have a mellow, not-too-long lunch with David Leite at Cafe Nougatine, the casual restaurant in the atrium of Jean Georges.
But chef and owner Jean-Georges Vongerichten was talking on the phone when I came in, saw me, sauntered over to our table and asked if he could cook for us.
To say no would have been mean.
So we ate:
Caviar over scrambled eggs and other goodies, served in an eggshell
Santa Barbara sea urchin, black bread, jalapeño and yuzu
Sea trout sashimi draped in trout eggs with lemon, dill and horseradish
Foie gras brûlé, slowly roasted strawberries and aged balsamic vinegar
Crab and mango salad with chile-Champagne sabayon
Halibut steamed with honshimeji mushrooms and lemon grass consommé (the server originally told us it was black cod and then discovered that the chef had swapped in halibut instead because it was especially good that day; you gotta love it when servers correct their mistakes, tell you when they don't know something and then find out, and generally treat you like a person)
Smoked squab à l'orange, Asian pear, candied tamarind
Assorted Cheeses
A plate of four desserts themed in chocolate and strawberry: Molten chocolate cake with Madagascar vanilla ice cream, mini chocolate-hazelnut panini, strawberry shortcake, strawberry ice cream with strawberry-lavendar fruit leather. We were instructed to eat the molten cake first and the ice cream last, which isn’t the way most people would do it, but I think fruit desserts should follow chocolate ones as they refresh the palate and leave a better aftertaste.
Yesterday I was planning to have a mellow, not-too-long lunch with David Leite at Cafe Nougatine, the casual restaurant in the atrium of Jean Georges.
But chef and owner Jean-Georges Vongerichten was talking on the phone when I came in, saw me, sauntered over to our table and asked if he could cook for us.
To say no would have been mean.
So we ate:
Caviar over scrambled eggs and other goodies, served in an eggshell
Santa Barbara sea urchin, black bread, jalapeño and yuzu
Sea trout sashimi draped in trout eggs with lemon, dill and horseradish
Foie gras brûlé, slowly roasted strawberries and aged balsamic vinegar
Crab and mango salad with chile-Champagne sabayon
Halibut steamed with honshimeji mushrooms and lemon grass consommé (the server originally told us it was black cod and then discovered that the chef had swapped in halibut instead because it was especially good that day; you gotta love it when servers correct their mistakes, tell you when they don't know something and then find out, and generally treat you like a person)
Smoked squab à l'orange, Asian pear, candied tamarind
Assorted Cheeses
A plate of four desserts themed in chocolate and strawberry: Molten chocolate cake with Madagascar vanilla ice cream, mini chocolate-hazelnut panini, strawberry shortcake, strawberry ice cream with strawberry-lavendar fruit leather. We were instructed to eat the molten cake first and the ice cream last, which isn’t the way most people would do it, but I think fruit desserts should follow chocolate ones as they refresh the palate and leave a better aftertaste.
listen to me
Neil Chase interviewed me for Hong Kong radio and you can listen to it here. I’m interview #14, the one titled "The Food Scene..."
Monday, July 09, 2007
A soon-to-be-refurbished Italian villa without a chef
July 9
My friend and boss, NRN editor-in-chief Ellen Koteff, and I spent a Saturday afternoon outside the town of Chester, N.Y., at the very beginning of the Catskills, where her friends Dan DeSimone and Alan Steinberg are busily supervising the overhaul of a forgotten Tuscan-style Italian villa.
The mansion, called Glenmere, feels remote and isolated, but it’s just an hour-and-twenty-minute drive from New York City. Dan and Alan are working on turning it into a super-luxurious, 19-room hotel. They were inspired by Wheatleigh in Lenox, Mass., but Glenmere is on a much bigger, more isolated piece of land, with a grand view of Glenmere Lake and close proximity to fertile “black dirt” country, where we drove by fields of sweet onions and strawberries and corn and lettuce and so on.
And they’re looking for a chef, someone who wants to be immersed in the local flora and manage a luxurious kitchen from which to serve, say, 20 people a day, plus staff, except during weddings and such when of course more people would be eating.
So, if you’re a chef who wants to settle down into the country on a lovely piece of land in a beautiful villa not really that far from New York and cook for rich people, let me know.
The hotel is on track (for now) to open in May of 2009, but Dan and Alan want to have a chef on board within the next six months to help design the kitchen.
So, post a comment here or e-mail me at bthorn@nrn.com if you’d like to visit the place.
My friend and boss, NRN editor-in-chief Ellen Koteff, and I spent a Saturday afternoon outside the town of Chester, N.Y., at the very beginning of the Catskills, where her friends Dan DeSimone and Alan Steinberg are busily supervising the overhaul of a forgotten Tuscan-style Italian villa.
The mansion, called Glenmere, feels remote and isolated, but it’s just an hour-and-twenty-minute drive from New York City. Dan and Alan are working on turning it into a super-luxurious, 19-room hotel. They were inspired by Wheatleigh in Lenox, Mass., but Glenmere is on a much bigger, more isolated piece of land, with a grand view of Glenmere Lake and close proximity to fertile “black dirt” country, where we drove by fields of sweet onions and strawberries and corn and lettuce and so on.
And they’re looking for a chef, someone who wants to be immersed in the local flora and manage a luxurious kitchen from which to serve, say, 20 people a day, plus staff, except during weddings and such when of course more people would be eating.
So, if you’re a chef who wants to settle down into the country on a lovely piece of land in a beautiful villa not really that far from New York and cook for rich people, let me know.
The hotel is on track (for now) to open in May of 2009, but Dan and Alan want to have a chef on board within the next six months to help design the kitchen.
So, post a comment here or e-mail me at bthorn@nrn.com if you’d like to visit the place.
hot dog
July 9
In reference to the annual July 4 Nathan’s hot dog eating contest, here's a gem posted to the ASFS Listerv last week, about food-eating contests in general, by Ken Albala:
“This is American culture at its most refined. Football is a complete bore, baseball like death warmed over. You want our values encapsulated and deified, and true excitement, it's got to be stuffing hot dogs.”
In reference to the annual July 4 Nathan’s hot dog eating contest, here's a gem posted to the ASFS Listerv last week, about food-eating contests in general, by Ken Albala:
“This is American culture at its most refined. Football is a complete bore, baseball like death warmed over. You want our values encapsulated and deified, and true excitement, it's got to be stuffing hot dogs.”
Friday, July 06, 2007
Food by which to sing overproduced karaoke
July 6
Last night I had dinner at Spotlight Live, that gigantic space on Broadway and 48th that used to be Noche. Now it’s a restaurant and karaoke lounge, but not just any karaoke lounge. It has a green room where you can prepare (although most people don't seem to). It has backup singers and dancers. The performances are broadcast live on a giant screen on Times Square. They also are recorded, and you can purchase a DVD of your performance if you want to, or you can view it on the Internet. Too shy to get on stage? Cut your track in a private booth, but try not to do anything you don’t want the whole world to see — those tracks are on the Internet, too.
Conversation with the two publicists hosting me was somewhat hampered by the need to shout over bad versions of Love Shack by giggling rhythmless women; a respectable version of Uptown Girl by a bridge-and-tunnel South Asian; really quite good versions of any number of songs — Total Eclipse of the Heart comes to mind — by a zoftig sultry-voiced alto; an embarrassing version of Bye Bye Bye by teenagers who should be too young to have any interest in *NSYNC; genuinely terrifying performances by kids too young to be shaking their bodies that way in public, in front of parents who instead of wrapping their children in blankets and ushering them away were videotaping them; and so on.
All the while the backup singers and dancers admirably stayed out of the way of good performances and tactfully sang over bad ones (it helps that management has control of the mic volumes).
So conversation was somewhat hampered, as I said, but we really got used to the circmstances and managed to engage in interesting discussion while also passing judgment on the people onstage.
Spotlight Live’s food apparently has not been getting good reviews. I hadn’t seen any reviews, but the publicists indicated that the critics had not been particularly kind, especially to the entrées, although the critics’ biggest beef seemed to be that they didn’t understand why a well established chef like Kerry Simon would sully himself by orchestrating the menu for a giant space where food is not the priority.
David Burke is in a similar situation at the nearby Hawaiian Tropic Zone, a suntan-lotion-theme restaurant with scantily-clad, numbered waitresses — or “table concierges” as the PR material calls them — who perform twice-nightly floor shows. Why, critics have asked, would David Burke do that?
“Why don’t they just ask me?” David has asked me in response.
Why indeed? Give him a call. He can often be reached at Davdburke & Donatella. Or you can go through his publicists, Bullfrog & Baum (who don’t, incidentally, represent Spotlight Live; LaForce+Stevens does, so they can field your questions about Kerry Simon’s career decisions).
And the attack on the entrées raises another interesting issue with regard to restaurant criticism. Spotlight Live does manage to sell a fair amount of the pork tenderloin entrée (pretzel-crusted pork tenderloin with sweet potato mash and grainy mustard), but clearly this is a place for appetizers and desserts, and so perhaps that’s what reviews should focus on.
It’s certainly what we focused on in our meal.
To wit:
Popcorn shrimp with lemon grass aïoli and chile ponzu
Spiced Asian soy and citrus glazed baby back ribs
French onion dip and Yukon gold potato chips
Beef carpaccio pizza with blue cheese, arugula and truffle oil
Iron Chef mini burgers with bacon, cheddar cheese and truffle fries (which are on the entrée menu, but they work as appetizers)
The Make Your Own Sundae (chocolate, vanilla and strawberry ice cream, caramel and chocolate sauce, whipped cream, sprinkles, crushed Oreos, M&Ms, strawberries and Gummi bears)
Spotlight junkfood sampler (housemade versions of Snowballs, Hostess Cupcakes and Rice Krispy treats)
Last night I had dinner at Spotlight Live, that gigantic space on Broadway and 48th that used to be Noche. Now it’s a restaurant and karaoke lounge, but not just any karaoke lounge. It has a green room where you can prepare (although most people don't seem to). It has backup singers and dancers. The performances are broadcast live on a giant screen on Times Square. They also are recorded, and you can purchase a DVD of your performance if you want to, or you can view it on the Internet. Too shy to get on stage? Cut your track in a private booth, but try not to do anything you don’t want the whole world to see — those tracks are on the Internet, too.
Conversation with the two publicists hosting me was somewhat hampered by the need to shout over bad versions of Love Shack by giggling rhythmless women; a respectable version of Uptown Girl by a bridge-and-tunnel South Asian; really quite good versions of any number of songs — Total Eclipse of the Heart comes to mind — by a zoftig sultry-voiced alto; an embarrassing version of Bye Bye Bye by teenagers who should be too young to have any interest in *NSYNC; genuinely terrifying performances by kids too young to be shaking their bodies that way in public, in front of parents who instead of wrapping their children in blankets and ushering them away were videotaping them; and so on.
All the while the backup singers and dancers admirably stayed out of the way of good performances and tactfully sang over bad ones (it helps that management has control of the mic volumes).
So conversation was somewhat hampered, as I said, but we really got used to the circmstances and managed to engage in interesting discussion while also passing judgment on the people onstage.
Spotlight Live’s food apparently has not been getting good reviews. I hadn’t seen any reviews, but the publicists indicated that the critics had not been particularly kind, especially to the entrées, although the critics’ biggest beef seemed to be that they didn’t understand why a well established chef like Kerry Simon would sully himself by orchestrating the menu for a giant space where food is not the priority.
David Burke is in a similar situation at the nearby Hawaiian Tropic Zone, a suntan-lotion-theme restaurant with scantily-clad, numbered waitresses — or “table concierges” as the PR material calls them — who perform twice-nightly floor shows. Why, critics have asked, would David Burke do that?
“Why don’t they just ask me?” David has asked me in response.
Why indeed? Give him a call. He can often be reached at Davdburke & Donatella. Or you can go through his publicists, Bullfrog & Baum (who don’t, incidentally, represent Spotlight Live; LaForce+Stevens does, so they can field your questions about Kerry Simon’s career decisions).
And the attack on the entrées raises another interesting issue with regard to restaurant criticism. Spotlight Live does manage to sell a fair amount of the pork tenderloin entrée (pretzel-crusted pork tenderloin with sweet potato mash and grainy mustard), but clearly this is a place for appetizers and desserts, and so perhaps that’s what reviews should focus on.
It’s certainly what we focused on in our meal.
To wit:
Popcorn shrimp with lemon grass aïoli and chile ponzu
Spiced Asian soy and citrus glazed baby back ribs
French onion dip and Yukon gold potato chips
Beef carpaccio pizza with blue cheese, arugula and truffle oil
Iron Chef mini burgers with bacon, cheddar cheese and truffle fries (which are on the entrée menu, but they work as appetizers)
The Make Your Own Sundae (chocolate, vanilla and strawberry ice cream, caramel and chocolate sauce, whipped cream, sprinkles, crushed Oreos, M&Ms, strawberries and Gummi bears)
Spotlight junkfood sampler (housemade versions of Snowballs, Hostess Cupcakes and Rice Krispy treats)
Thursday, July 05, 2007
a good day for quotations
July 5
My favorite, from an e-mail from a restaurant-industry friend: “minor cases of ennui have been known to occur during or immediately after aspen.”
But also good, from a guy I met at the National Restaurant Association show in Chicago who sent me gift certificates for the restaurant chain he works for: “Please enjoy and don’t say it sucks!”
And randomly amusing but sad, the post-script of a comment posted to the ASFS listserv: “I know how hard it is to put food on your family… -- George W Bush”
My favorite, from an e-mail from a restaurant-industry friend: “minor cases of ennui have been known to occur during or immediately after aspen.”
But also good, from a guy I met at the National Restaurant Association show in Chicago who sent me gift certificates for the restaurant chain he works for: “Please enjoy and don’t say it sucks!”
And randomly amusing but sad, the post-script of a comment posted to the ASFS listserv: “I know how hard it is to put food on your family… -- George W Bush”
A menu without a restaurant
Chris Cheung, my favorite Cantonese chef from Bensonhurst, is on his own again. He had a difference of opinion with the owners of Almond Flower Bistro about where the restaurant should go culinarily. Chris wanted a menu that used Western ingredients in Chinese cooking techniques — something he already was doing to a certain extent with items such as foie gras roast char siu bao with black truffle. The owners, according to Chris, have decided instead to serve $5 plates in a kitchen without a chef.
Anyway, this was the menu that Chris wanted, and he says he hopes to implement something like it somewhere soon.
ALMOND FLOWER BISTRO
evolutionary asian american cuisine
DINNER
APPETIZERS
Noodle wrapped jumbo Maya shrimp 8
Foie gras roast pork buns 9
Roasted baby conch, black bean foam 7
Short rib lobster rice roll “cherng fun” 12
Asian green salad, mandarin oranges 6
Seared foie gras w/sautéed lychees 16
Truffled congee soup w/abalone wontons 12
Seafood chowder w/lotus chips 9
Wasabi crabcake 10
Mabu tofu wonton crisps 7
Crispy short rib wontons, truffle soy 8
Baked clams w/chili garlic gratin 9
Sliced salmon wrapped shrimp tempura 9
Sleeping oysters w/grilled scallops 16
Crispy calamari 8
COLD SEAFOOD BAR
Chilled baby conch 7
Shrimp cocktail 7
Clams on the half shell 8
Oysters on the half shell 15
Steamers (served hot) 15
The “Sea” cold platter 25
(3) clams (3) oysters (4) shrimp cocktail, chilled lobster
The “Ocean” cold platter 50
(6) clams (6) oysters (8) shrimp cocktail (3) baby conch, chilled lobster
ENTREES
MIDDLE SIZED PLATES
Sweet and spicy baby back ribs 13
Char siu roast pork w/manndarin orange marmalade 12
Broiled ½ Lobster w/blue crab chili 18
Pan seared flounder 14
Asian and American vegetable medley 10
Black cod w/char siu marinade 16
Pan seared sirloin 13
FULL SIZED PLATES
Szechuan pepper crusted salmon w/mandarin orange marmalade 19
Peking duck w/scallion hoisin pancakes, mango reduction 25
Rack of lamb, baby vegetables, minted daikon 28
Pan seared sirloin w/wasabi scallion mash 27
Grilled chicken w/yellow curry rice stew 17
5 spice braised short rib w/pappardelle noodles 17
Seared squid udon pasta 17
Vegetable medley w/spinach noodles 13
Seafood stir fry 25
Mai fun rice noodles w/Chinese sausage and clams 17
SIDES
Ginger and garlic hoi nam rice 3
Jasmine rice 2
Wasabi scallion mash potato 4
Little vegetables 4
DESSERTS
$7
Chocolate French tuile fortune cookie
Lychee custard tart
Mango cheesecake
Chocolate volcano cake
Assorted ice cream or sorbet
Anyway, this was the menu that Chris wanted, and he says he hopes to implement something like it somewhere soon.
ALMOND FLOWER BISTRO
evolutionary asian american cuisine
DINNER
APPETIZERS
Noodle wrapped jumbo Maya shrimp 8
Foie gras roast pork buns 9
Roasted baby conch, black bean foam 7
Short rib lobster rice roll “cherng fun” 12
Asian green salad, mandarin oranges 6
Seared foie gras w/sautéed lychees 16
Truffled congee soup w/abalone wontons 12
Seafood chowder w/lotus chips 9
Wasabi crabcake 10
Mabu tofu wonton crisps 7
Crispy short rib wontons, truffle soy 8
Baked clams w/chili garlic gratin 9
Sliced salmon wrapped shrimp tempura 9
Sleeping oysters w/grilled scallops 16
Crispy calamari 8
COLD SEAFOOD BAR
Chilled baby conch 7
Shrimp cocktail 7
Clams on the half shell 8
Oysters on the half shell 15
Steamers (served hot) 15
The “Sea” cold platter 25
(3) clams (3) oysters (4) shrimp cocktail, chilled lobster
The “Ocean” cold platter 50
(6) clams (6) oysters (8) shrimp cocktail (3) baby conch, chilled lobster
ENTREES
MIDDLE SIZED PLATES
Sweet and spicy baby back ribs 13
Char siu roast pork w/manndarin orange marmalade 12
Broiled ½ Lobster w/blue crab chili 18
Pan seared flounder 14
Asian and American vegetable medley 10
Black cod w/char siu marinade 16
Pan seared sirloin 13
FULL SIZED PLATES
Szechuan pepper crusted salmon w/mandarin orange marmalade 19
Peking duck w/scallion hoisin pancakes, mango reduction 25
Rack of lamb, baby vegetables, minted daikon 28
Pan seared sirloin w/wasabi scallion mash 27
Grilled chicken w/yellow curry rice stew 17
5 spice braised short rib w/pappardelle noodles 17
Seared squid udon pasta 17
Vegetable medley w/spinach noodles 13
Seafood stir fry 25
Mai fun rice noodles w/Chinese sausage and clams 17
SIDES
Ginger and garlic hoi nam rice 3
Jasmine rice 2
Wasabi scallion mash potato 4
Little vegetables 4
DESSERTS
$7
Chocolate French tuile fortune cookie
Lychee custard tart
Mango cheesecake
Chocolate volcano cake
Assorted ice cream or sorbet
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Fifth drink buyback
June 28
The Sonoma County Winegrape Commission wants some attention, and they hired Larry Levine to get it for him. Larry in turn hired Zagat-editor-turned-publicist Ben Schmerler to get the attention of New York media.
Ben, by the way, also is a new father as of June 25 — welcome to the world Sophie Anne Schmerler.
So Ben asked me if I would please meet Larry for a drink.
I wondered if it was the Bay Area-based publicist Larry Levine that I already knew, but there are several Larry Levines out there, so I didn’t mention it.
But indeed it was that boisterous, old-school publicist I’d known for years but hadn’t seen for awhile.
Ben, being smart, arranged for us to meet at Aquavit, which is across the street from the Nation’s Restaurant News headquarters.
We bellied up to the bar and I suggested he try the house-infused spirits, and we agreed that a three-drink sampler was a good idea. Larry went for the citrus ones, and I went for horseradish, saffron and peach-anise.
We found that we weren’t done catching up when we drained our drinks, so we each had another. I ordered another peach-anise aquavit. Larry had a Carlsberg, and since we had ordered four drinks, the bartender immediately poured us a fifth one — mango-chile aquavit.
That was too spicy for Larry’s delicate baby-boomer palate (statistically, Gen-Xers such as me have the strongest penchant for spicy food — more so than the youngsters). So he gave it to me.
Now, the aquavit served at Aquavit comes in small glasses, but, I mean, the sixth one meant I was well-primed for dinner, which I was having with another publicist, Philip Ruskin, at Colors, a restaurant owned and operated by a cooperative of former Windows on the World employees. That makes it a sentimental favorite, but not enough of one to make it a huge commercial success. They’re working on it.
Chef Jean Pierre (I’m not being excessively familiar; Pierre is his last name and he comes from Haïti) sent out samosas and scallop ceviche while I munched on papadams. Then we had a hot preparation of chicken and green papaya named Pam Thai because it was invented by one of their Thai chefs, whose name is Pam, along with braised pork ribs and bowls of pozole verde.
I’m not exactly sure what Philip and I talked about.
The Sonoma County Winegrape Commission wants some attention, and they hired Larry Levine to get it for him. Larry in turn hired Zagat-editor-turned-publicist Ben Schmerler to get the attention of New York media.
Ben, by the way, also is a new father as of June 25 — welcome to the world Sophie Anne Schmerler.
So Ben asked me if I would please meet Larry for a drink.
I wondered if it was the Bay Area-based publicist Larry Levine that I already knew, but there are several Larry Levines out there, so I didn’t mention it.
But indeed it was that boisterous, old-school publicist I’d known for years but hadn’t seen for awhile.
Ben, being smart, arranged for us to meet at Aquavit, which is across the street from the Nation’s Restaurant News headquarters.
We bellied up to the bar and I suggested he try the house-infused spirits, and we agreed that a three-drink sampler was a good idea. Larry went for the citrus ones, and I went for horseradish, saffron and peach-anise.
We found that we weren’t done catching up when we drained our drinks, so we each had another. I ordered another peach-anise aquavit. Larry had a Carlsberg, and since we had ordered four drinks, the bartender immediately poured us a fifth one — mango-chile aquavit.
That was too spicy for Larry’s delicate baby-boomer palate (statistically, Gen-Xers such as me have the strongest penchant for spicy food — more so than the youngsters). So he gave it to me.
Now, the aquavit served at Aquavit comes in small glasses, but, I mean, the sixth one meant I was well-primed for dinner, which I was having with another publicist, Philip Ruskin, at Colors, a restaurant owned and operated by a cooperative of former Windows on the World employees. That makes it a sentimental favorite, but not enough of one to make it a huge commercial success. They’re working on it.
Chef Jean Pierre (I’m not being excessively familiar; Pierre is his last name and he comes from Haïti) sent out samosas and scallop ceviche while I munched on papadams. Then we had a hot preparation of chicken and green papaya named Pam Thai because it was invented by one of their Thai chefs, whose name is Pam, along with braised pork ribs and bowls of pozole verde.
I’m not exactly sure what Philip and I talked about.
Monday, July 02, 2007
Raw scallops and the WASPiest WASPs in WASPtown
June 27
I really like Rhode Island. Have I ever mentioned that?
It’s this tiny little state that one passes through on the way to Massachusetts, and most people don’t give it a second thought, but it’s great. The people are totally different culturally from their neighbors in Connecticut and Massachusetts (although the cultural divide isn’t demarcated by state borders; I’ve heard the Rhode Island term “quahog,” for a type of large clam, used as far north as Falmouth, Mass. [Since writing this, I have been informed that the term “quahog” is widespread throughout eastern and central Massachusetts; I don't know about western Mass., so I’d be delighted to hear from someone from Stockbridge or Pittsfield or Lenox or Great Barrington]).
And the accents! Oh I wish I could do their accents. They sound like they’re making fun of Bostonians.
The capital, Providence, is a multicultural hodgepodge, but for the past few days I have been in Newport, which contrary to its name is one of the oldest settlements in the Northeast, and has a lot of Old Money to go with that fact.
“Rum and slaves,” Eben Klemm said to me, looking at the mansions for which the town is famous. Eben’s the historically-informed head bartender for BR Guest restaurants in New York.
Okay, actually he’s not, he’s like, senior director of beverages or something, but you get the idea. He was in Newport to talk at the International Corporate Chefs Association’s annual summit.
He was talking about cocktails, which is reasonable enough. I was there ostensibly to talk about New England food trends and to add my august presence to the proceedings, but really I was there to hang out with chain restaurant corporate chefs — fascinating people who do things like develop Buca di Beppo’s meatballs and make new salsas for On the Border.
The corporate chefs at Dunkin’ Brands — which includes Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins — I learned, are working on their own brand of soft-serve. I asked one of them if they could please also have dipped soft serve, with that hard chocolate shell, and he said that was problematic at this time as it’s hard to get it to harden without using trans fats.
Anyway, Old Money — the type that I imagine still distinguishes between different types of northern Europeans and that continues to be mostly Protestant and of Anglo-Saxon stock (and of course white, I mean, come on) — was very much in evidence in Newport.
I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere that seems so dominated by WASPs.
There were so many WASPs that some of them were doing manual labor. The groundskeepers at the International Tennis Hall of Fame (which I didn’t know was in Newport, but wasn’t surprised to find out) were blond-haired white guys.
The bell staff at the Viking Hotel, where the ICCA summit was held, looked like they’d come straight out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog.
Portuguese was about as “ethnic” as it seemed to get.
The summit, as conferences like these tend to be, was mostly a series of panel discussions on different topics, preceded by a keynote address, usually about leadership — given in this case by Dunkin’ Brands chief Jon Luther. But we also got to go out on the water if we wanted to (others visited an organic farm and someplace else I didn’t want to see). Some people went deep-sea fishing, others went out on a lobster boat, I spent half a day with some corporate chefs, some representatives from the meeting’s sponsors, the owner of American Mussel (which to me sounds like a gay porn site but isn’t) and his 19-year-old son Justin, an able deck-hand and nice kid.
American Mussel actually is a mollusk producer and processor. We first visited their oyster farm on the eastern passage of Narragansett Bay, where small oysters are put in crates stringed one on top of the other and hung in mid-stream, where the bulk of the plankton swim by. The oysters eat the plankton and grow, and then American Mussel harvests and sells them. They also process mussels and clams and scallops, but they don’t process them much. They just keep them alive and clean them and ship them out.
We toured the facilities and then ate steamed clams and mussels and raw clams and oysters and, for the first time in my life, a raw scallop.
Dear reader, you might have noticed that I eat pretty much whatever anyone puts in front of me and that I’ve tried many, many things just since I started writing this blog, but I cannot remember a more joyful, ethereal culinary experience than eating a raw scallop.
It was super fresh, mind you — still pulsing as it was being removed from the shell. Simultaneously firm and silky-smooth, sweet and briny, I wanted to curl up on the concrete floor of American Mussel and go to sleep, so at peace was I.
“I didn’t care for it,” said someone from the California Avocado Commission.
Great, I thought, more for me, and I proceeded to get stoned on mollusk protein.
I really like Rhode Island. Have I ever mentioned that?
It’s this tiny little state that one passes through on the way to Massachusetts, and most people don’t give it a second thought, but it’s great. The people are totally different culturally from their neighbors in Connecticut and Massachusetts (although the cultural divide isn’t demarcated by state borders; I’ve heard the Rhode Island term “quahog,” for a type of large clam, used as far north as Falmouth, Mass. [Since writing this, I have been informed that the term “quahog” is widespread throughout eastern and central Massachusetts; I don't know about western Mass., so I’d be delighted to hear from someone from Stockbridge or Pittsfield or Lenox or Great Barrington]).
And the accents! Oh I wish I could do their accents. They sound like they’re making fun of Bostonians.
The capital, Providence, is a multicultural hodgepodge, but for the past few days I have been in Newport, which contrary to its name is one of the oldest settlements in the Northeast, and has a lot of Old Money to go with that fact.
“Rum and slaves,” Eben Klemm said to me, looking at the mansions for which the town is famous. Eben’s the historically-informed head bartender for BR Guest restaurants in New York.
Okay, actually he’s not, he’s like, senior director of beverages or something, but you get the idea. He was in Newport to talk at the International Corporate Chefs Association’s annual summit.
He was talking about cocktails, which is reasonable enough. I was there ostensibly to talk about New England food trends and to add my august presence to the proceedings, but really I was there to hang out with chain restaurant corporate chefs — fascinating people who do things like develop Buca di Beppo’s meatballs and make new salsas for On the Border.
The corporate chefs at Dunkin’ Brands — which includes Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins — I learned, are working on their own brand of soft-serve. I asked one of them if they could please also have dipped soft serve, with that hard chocolate shell, and he said that was problematic at this time as it’s hard to get it to harden without using trans fats.
Anyway, Old Money — the type that I imagine still distinguishes between different types of northern Europeans and that continues to be mostly Protestant and of Anglo-Saxon stock (and of course white, I mean, come on) — was very much in evidence in Newport.
I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere that seems so dominated by WASPs.
There were so many WASPs that some of them were doing manual labor. The groundskeepers at the International Tennis Hall of Fame (which I didn’t know was in Newport, but wasn’t surprised to find out) were blond-haired white guys.
The bell staff at the Viking Hotel, where the ICCA summit was held, looked like they’d come straight out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog.
Portuguese was about as “ethnic” as it seemed to get.
The summit, as conferences like these tend to be, was mostly a series of panel discussions on different topics, preceded by a keynote address, usually about leadership — given in this case by Dunkin’ Brands chief Jon Luther. But we also got to go out on the water if we wanted to (others visited an organic farm and someplace else I didn’t want to see). Some people went deep-sea fishing, others went out on a lobster boat, I spent half a day with some corporate chefs, some representatives from the meeting’s sponsors, the owner of American Mussel (which to me sounds like a gay porn site but isn’t) and his 19-year-old son Justin, an able deck-hand and nice kid.
American Mussel actually is a mollusk producer and processor. We first visited their oyster farm on the eastern passage of Narragansett Bay, where small oysters are put in crates stringed one on top of the other and hung in mid-stream, where the bulk of the plankton swim by. The oysters eat the plankton and grow, and then American Mussel harvests and sells them. They also process mussels and clams and scallops, but they don’t process them much. They just keep them alive and clean them and ship them out.
We toured the facilities and then ate steamed clams and mussels and raw clams and oysters and, for the first time in my life, a raw scallop.
Dear reader, you might have noticed that I eat pretty much whatever anyone puts in front of me and that I’ve tried many, many things just since I started writing this blog, but I cannot remember a more joyful, ethereal culinary experience than eating a raw scallop.
It was super fresh, mind you — still pulsing as it was being removed from the shell. Simultaneously firm and silky-smooth, sweet and briny, I wanted to curl up on the concrete floor of American Mussel and go to sleep, so at peace was I.
“I didn’t care for it,” said someone from the California Avocado Commission.
Great, I thought, more for me, and I proceeded to get stoned on mollusk protein.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
JB’s birthday
June 23
Not many people call John Bruce JB anymore. He certainly doesn’t. I’m not even sure that I do; I think I say “hi John,” when I see him. But I still think of him as JB.
He’s a nice guy. Rabelaisian, gregarious and back in college sort of the social focal point of the group of friends that was very much like my family during my first two years of college. If you read this blog regularly, you have met many of the members of that group, including Birdman aka David Kraus, Shane Curcuru and Michael Gerber. Even big Chinese lawyer Dennis Liu has made an appearance, and you might have read Shane’s and JB’s comments. They make them from time to time.
JB turned 40 in February, making June a very good time for his wife, Kim, to throw him a surprise birthday party. He would never suspect — that is until she started getting ready for the party, at which point she told him. I imagine she said something like: “Get out of the way John, I’m setting up the grill. Happy birthday. Surprise!”
June is a particularly good time to throw a party to JB’s liking, as his favorite foods are lobster and ribs.
So Michael and I drove from Gloucester to the Bruce homestead in Northborough (I drove very briefly, while Michael spoke on the phone to his wife, Shoshi, in Israel; my driving terrified him enough that he made me get off the highway at the first possible exit after he was off the phone and switch places, which was fine with me). We stopped on the way for me to buy a bottle of bourbon for the birthday boy and for Michael to buy two bettas for a homemade gift he was preparing for JB: A blue betta over clear red stones, and a red one over clear blue stones, separated by a partition that could be covered by something opaque when JB didn’t want the two fighting fish to display their aggressive tendencies.
Michael set up camp in the kitchen and started making tuna sushi rolls for everyone.
“Should I bring one or two pounds of tuna?” He’d asked me.
“Two,” I said, and I was right. Celebrating chez les Bruce has always necessitated joy and indulgence, and it still does.
So after sushi I sat down next to Michael and we each ripped into a lobster. He instructed a young tween — someone’s daughter; I don’t know whose — how best to go at the crustacean. This was her first one and it was nice to see her learn. I then polished off an ear of corn and some ribs, grabbed my wine glass and hung out in the backyard where kids ran around and grown-ups drank beer and wine.
Thank goodness Michael was driving. He’s a teetotaler.
Not many people call John Bruce JB anymore. He certainly doesn’t. I’m not even sure that I do; I think I say “hi John,” when I see him. But I still think of him as JB.
He’s a nice guy. Rabelaisian, gregarious and back in college sort of the social focal point of the group of friends that was very much like my family during my first two years of college. If you read this blog regularly, you have met many of the members of that group, including Birdman aka David Kraus, Shane Curcuru and Michael Gerber. Even big Chinese lawyer Dennis Liu has made an appearance, and you might have read Shane’s and JB’s comments. They make them from time to time.
JB turned 40 in February, making June a very good time for his wife, Kim, to throw him a surprise birthday party. He would never suspect — that is until she started getting ready for the party, at which point she told him. I imagine she said something like: “Get out of the way John, I’m setting up the grill. Happy birthday. Surprise!”
June is a particularly good time to throw a party to JB’s liking, as his favorite foods are lobster and ribs.
So Michael and I drove from Gloucester to the Bruce homestead in Northborough (I drove very briefly, while Michael spoke on the phone to his wife, Shoshi, in Israel; my driving terrified him enough that he made me get off the highway at the first possible exit after he was off the phone and switch places, which was fine with me). We stopped on the way for me to buy a bottle of bourbon for the birthday boy and for Michael to buy two bettas for a homemade gift he was preparing for JB: A blue betta over clear red stones, and a red one over clear blue stones, separated by a partition that could be covered by something opaque when JB didn’t want the two fighting fish to display their aggressive tendencies.
Michael set up camp in the kitchen and started making tuna sushi rolls for everyone.
“Should I bring one or two pounds of tuna?” He’d asked me.
“Two,” I said, and I was right. Celebrating chez les Bruce has always necessitated joy and indulgence, and it still does.
So after sushi I sat down next to Michael and we each ripped into a lobster. He instructed a young tween — someone’s daughter; I don’t know whose — how best to go at the crustacean. This was her first one and it was nice to see her learn. I then polished off an ear of corn and some ribs, grabbed my wine glass and hung out in the backyard where kids ran around and grown-ups drank beer and wine.
Thank goodness Michael was driving. He’s a teetotaler.
New England Kosher
June 22
I’m going to the International Corporate Chefs Association conference in Newport, and I have trouble going to Rhode Island without popping up to Boston to visit a friend or two.
Tonight I’m keeping my old college friend Michael Gerber company. His wife, Shoshi, is in Israel with their sons, five-year-old Nadav and three-year-old Gilad.
Michael picked me up at South Station and then we headed to Newbury Street to have dinner at Boston Public Meat. That’s Pino Maffeo’s new restaurant, in the space of his old restaurant, L.
Michael actually found parking on Newbury Street, a feat at which he marveled for some time.
He is a good and proper New Englander, from Lexington, Mass., although he lives in Gloucester now, and as such will eat pretty much anything from the sea. Slime, tentacles, six or more legs, antennae — none of it troubles him. Down his Yankee gullet it goes.
But tripe, veal cheeks, rabbit? No way.
“It’s a cultural bias,” he acknowledges with a shrug. He’s a biologist and middle school science teacher by trade, a naturalist by avocation, so he knows it’s all perfectly fine to eat. But it’s still not going to happen (or not often; I did convince him to try veal cheek when we went to Toro, Ken Oringer’s Spanish place, during its family-and-friends night; I don’t remember whether I convinced him to put tripe in his mouth).
Michael also is Jewish, and, like me, comes from a liberal tradition that does not fuss with the troubles of dietary law. Shoshi, on the other hand, is a Yemenite-Israeli who was raised keeping Kosher and still sort of does, more or less, basically.
So when they were setting up a household together, negotiations were in order, especially since Michael is the family cook.
He agreed to abstain from consuming pork in the house. He would not mix milk and meat, but as a New Englander, lobster is simply part of who he is. He wouldn’t eat it in front of Shoshi if it bothered her, but he was darn well going to eat it.
Okay, so it’s Friday night and Michael and I are preparing to have our Sabbath meal at Boston Public. We agreed to throw ourselves on the mercy of the chef, and let him send out whatever food he wanted, and appropriate wine to go with it, with the caveats that Michael would not be eating rabbit or pork this evening.
Pork wouldn’t normally be an issue for him, but he and Shoshi are pretty serious about Shabbat, and although pig flesh is really no more anathema than anything else that’s not Kosher (it either is or it isn’t), the swine is nonetheless symbolic of everything that is (spiritually) unclean, and so to him it seems like a tacky thing to eat on Friday night.
Rabbit, as we discussed, is simply cultural bias, although it’s not kosher either (indeed, in Leviticus, it’s mentioned before the pig on the list of things not to eat; so is rock badger, whatever that is).
Pino, the chef, actually was at MIT that evening talking to an audience about molecular gastronomy, but he came back in time to make us steak and dessert. I introduced him to Michael, and they discussed the work of Michael’s friend, doctor Morgan Hott, who is using alginate, a popular molecular gastronomy tool, to grow materials for human joint replacement.
Cool, huh?
What we ate and drank:
Local striped bass with truffle and yuzu
Onset and Hood Canal oysters, garnished with a little salad of wakame, lotus root and sesame
Crémant de Bourgogne
Alaskan king crab with grapefruit and avocado
Tuna summer rolls with ginger soy sauce
Potato spring rolls topped with smoked salmon and crème fraîche (for Michael)
Pork and shrimp spring rolls with mustard sauce (for me)
Pappardelle with braised rabbit, summer truffles, truffle froth and wild mushroom (for me)
Beefsteak and cherry tomato salad with mozzarella (for Michael)
2005 Umani Ronchi Casal di Serra, Puglia
Porterhouse topped with Himalayan rock salt grated at table side, served with taro purée and three sauces: Hollandaise, red wine oxtail and Béarnaise
French fries stacked like a Jenga game, served with mayonnaise
2005 Buehler Zinfandel, Napa
Red Bull, flash fried cranberries and lotus root chips
Peanut butter-chocolate gianduja with malted chocolate ice cream and raspberry sauce
De La Force Curious and Ancient 20-year-old tawny port
I’m going to the International Corporate Chefs Association conference in Newport, and I have trouble going to Rhode Island without popping up to Boston to visit a friend or two.
Tonight I’m keeping my old college friend Michael Gerber company. His wife, Shoshi, is in Israel with their sons, five-year-old Nadav and three-year-old Gilad.
Michael picked me up at South Station and then we headed to Newbury Street to have dinner at Boston Public Meat. That’s Pino Maffeo’s new restaurant, in the space of his old restaurant, L.
Michael actually found parking on Newbury Street, a feat at which he marveled for some time.
He is a good and proper New Englander, from Lexington, Mass., although he lives in Gloucester now, and as such will eat pretty much anything from the sea. Slime, tentacles, six or more legs, antennae — none of it troubles him. Down his Yankee gullet it goes.
But tripe, veal cheeks, rabbit? No way.
“It’s a cultural bias,” he acknowledges with a shrug. He’s a biologist and middle school science teacher by trade, a naturalist by avocation, so he knows it’s all perfectly fine to eat. But it’s still not going to happen (or not often; I did convince him to try veal cheek when we went to Toro, Ken Oringer’s Spanish place, during its family-and-friends night; I don’t remember whether I convinced him to put tripe in his mouth).
Michael also is Jewish, and, like me, comes from a liberal tradition that does not fuss with the troubles of dietary law. Shoshi, on the other hand, is a Yemenite-Israeli who was raised keeping Kosher and still sort of does, more or less, basically.
So when they were setting up a household together, negotiations were in order, especially since Michael is the family cook.
He agreed to abstain from consuming pork in the house. He would not mix milk and meat, but as a New Englander, lobster is simply part of who he is. He wouldn’t eat it in front of Shoshi if it bothered her, but he was darn well going to eat it.
Okay, so it’s Friday night and Michael and I are preparing to have our Sabbath meal at Boston Public. We agreed to throw ourselves on the mercy of the chef, and let him send out whatever food he wanted, and appropriate wine to go with it, with the caveats that Michael would not be eating rabbit or pork this evening.
Pork wouldn’t normally be an issue for him, but he and Shoshi are pretty serious about Shabbat, and although pig flesh is really no more anathema than anything else that’s not Kosher (it either is or it isn’t), the swine is nonetheless symbolic of everything that is (spiritually) unclean, and so to him it seems like a tacky thing to eat on Friday night.
Rabbit, as we discussed, is simply cultural bias, although it’s not kosher either (indeed, in Leviticus, it’s mentioned before the pig on the list of things not to eat; so is rock badger, whatever that is).
Pino, the chef, actually was at MIT that evening talking to an audience about molecular gastronomy, but he came back in time to make us steak and dessert. I introduced him to Michael, and they discussed the work of Michael’s friend, doctor Morgan Hott, who is using alginate, a popular molecular gastronomy tool, to grow materials for human joint replacement.
Cool, huh?
What we ate and drank:
Local striped bass with truffle and yuzu
Onset and Hood Canal oysters, garnished with a little salad of wakame, lotus root and sesame
Crémant de Bourgogne
Alaskan king crab with grapefruit and avocado
Tuna summer rolls with ginger soy sauce
Potato spring rolls topped with smoked salmon and crème fraîche (for Michael)
Pork and shrimp spring rolls with mustard sauce (for me)
Pappardelle with braised rabbit, summer truffles, truffle froth and wild mushroom (for me)
Beefsteak and cherry tomato salad with mozzarella (for Michael)
2005 Umani Ronchi Casal di Serra, Puglia
Porterhouse topped with Himalayan rock salt grated at table side, served with taro purée and three sauces: Hollandaise, red wine oxtail and Béarnaise
French fries stacked like a Jenga game, served with mayonnaise
2005 Buehler Zinfandel, Napa
Red Bull, flash fried cranberries and lotus root chips
Peanut butter-chocolate gianduja with malted chocolate ice cream and raspberry sauce
De La Force Curious and Ancient 20-year-old tawny port
Friday, June 22, 2007
rising stars
Starchefs.com has made its pick for the New York City chefs it deems to be "Rising Stars."
They'll be honored on September 18 at the end of Starchefs' International Chefs Congress.
Here they are:
Michael Anthony – Gramercy Tavern
Eric Hara – Davidburke & Donatella
Craig Hopson – Picholine
Chris Lee – Gilt
Akhtar Nawab – EU
Masato Shimizu – 15 East
Yosuke Suga – L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon
Damon Wise – Craft
Also:
Hotel Chef Award: Doug Psaltis – Country
Mixologist Award: Jim Meehan – PDT
Pastry Chef: Tim Butler – Alto
Pastry Chef: Bill Corbett – Anthos
Restaurant Concept Award: Chris Santos – The Stanton Social
Sommelier Award: Stephane Colling – The Modern
Sustainability Award: Daniel Eardley – Chestnut
They'll be honored on September 18 at the end of Starchefs' International Chefs Congress.
Here they are:
Michael Anthony – Gramercy Tavern
Eric Hara – Davidburke & Donatella
Craig Hopson – Picholine
Chris Lee – Gilt
Akhtar Nawab – EU
Masato Shimizu – 15 East
Yosuke Suga – L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon
Damon Wise – Craft
Also:
Hotel Chef Award: Doug Psaltis – Country
Mixologist Award: Jim Meehan – PDT
Pastry Chef: Tim Butler – Alto
Pastry Chef: Bill Corbett – Anthos
Restaurant Concept Award: Chris Santos – The Stanton Social
Sommelier Award: Stephane Colling – The Modern
Sustainability Award: Daniel Eardley – Chestnut
Thursday, June 21, 2007
What do I look like, Page 6?
June 21
People do like their celebrity gossip, but this is a high-class blog, so if I'm going to report on the doings of famous people I haven't met, it's going to be world leaders.
So, straight from a successful downtown restaurant company: “On Father's Day, Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert dined at Tribeca Grill. Then on Tuesday June 19th, Vietnam's President Nguyen Minh Triet had Dinner at Mai House. Just another week in the life of the Myriad Restaurant Group,” so I’m told.
People do like their celebrity gossip, but this is a high-class blog, so if I'm going to report on the doings of famous people I haven't met, it's going to be world leaders.
So, straight from a successful downtown restaurant company: “On Father's Day, Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert dined at Tribeca Grill. Then on Tuesday June 19th, Vietnam's President Nguyen Minh Triet had Dinner at Mai House. Just another week in the life of the Myriad Restaurant Group,” so I’m told.
pine shoots
June 21
I had lunch at The Modern today with Dean Max, chef of 3030 Ocean in Fort Lauderdale, the general manager of the Marriott resort where the restaurant is located, their publicists and assorted other journalists. Conversation ranged from regulations regarding catching Florida lobster (they have to be hand-caught) and counterfeiting of grouper (sometimes it's Vietnamese basa) to the next great hotel amenity (I suggested affordable minibars that might actually be used by regular people).
GM Jim Mauer explained how hotels used to be luxury experiences for most people, but now most people's homes are nicer than hotel rooms — just think about what a drag it is to be somewhere without your cable TV, DVR/TiVo etc. So hotels have to keep ramping up the amenities. The term "bed wars" was used.
And I actually tried an ingredient that I hadn't had before, which doesn't happen much these days. The amuse bouche was a tiny watermelon salad with what the server called "pine shoots." I'm not sure what they tasted like, because the tiny salad had all sorts of little elements I couldn't quite identify. Maybe I was distracted because I was so enthralled by the notion of a minibar soda that didn't cost $11.
I had lunch at The Modern today with Dean Max, chef of 3030 Ocean in Fort Lauderdale, the general manager of the Marriott resort where the restaurant is located, their publicists and assorted other journalists. Conversation ranged from regulations regarding catching Florida lobster (they have to be hand-caught) and counterfeiting of grouper (sometimes it's Vietnamese basa) to the next great hotel amenity (I suggested affordable minibars that might actually be used by regular people).
GM Jim Mauer explained how hotels used to be luxury experiences for most people, but now most people's homes are nicer than hotel rooms — just think about what a drag it is to be somewhere without your cable TV, DVR/TiVo etc. So hotels have to keep ramping up the amenities. The term "bed wars" was used.
And I actually tried an ingredient that I hadn't had before, which doesn't happen much these days. The amuse bouche was a tiny watermelon salad with what the server called "pine shoots." I'm not sure what they tasted like, because the tiny salad had all sorts of little elements I couldn't quite identify. Maybe I was distracted because I was so enthralled by the notion of a minibar soda that didn't cost $11.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Sunday in Aspen
Wow, some people attending the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen have a lot of money. One woman paid $37,000 so she and her daughter could be Bobby Flay's sous chefs for 20 minutes during the Sunday morning cookoff. The money went to charity, but still...
I thought the cookoff pretty much closed the Classic, but no, the big tasting tent opened, and there I heard of the pool party at the Sky hotel, and of another party at the Eagles club.
So I went.
But first I coincidentally ran into Greg Graber, who went to East High School in Denver with me and also happened to live in Bangkok when I did. Now he's a buyer of non-performing mortgages and spends his time mostly between Denver and Los Angeles.
Small world.
At the pool party I drank margaritas, got better acquainted with San Francisco mixologist Duggan McDonnel and caught up with chef E. Michael Reidt. I also chatted with young Justin Amick, whom I had met the night before -- or was it the night before that? -- at the 212 House. He's the son of Atlanta restaurateur Bob Amick, and plans to join him in the business.
The 212 and pool parties were similar in that they were the sort of parties held behind the second velvet rope of trendy clubs. You have to get past one rope just to get in -- that would be going to the Food & Wine Classic in the first place -- but then you have to be cool enough to get past the second rope to go to the best parties. It's elitist, but fun if you're part of the in crowd.
I didn't get to go to the much less exclusive publisher's dinner atop Ajax mountain two nights before, so I had duck confit lettuce wraps and carne asada tacos at Blue Maize with Erica Duecy, her friend Gibson, whom she met on a press trip to Italy, and his wife Heather.
Anyway, the pool party drew to a close shortly after Steve Olson and his entire crew ended up in the pool. The distributor of a high-end collection of mezcals also jumped in the pool -- he was the only one to do so bare naked.
So from there I wandered over to the Eagles club, where chef Todd Downs had invited me.
There I hung out with a very friendly group of local cooks and assorted others and munched on top-notch beef and lamb chops while drinking punch and wine.
We moved inside as stragglers from other parties showed up. I rehydrated on water, which seemed to annoy the bartender, and then wandered home.
Speaking of water, the water company that was one of the sponsors of the Classic estimates that it gave away 70,000 bottles of the stuff over the weekend.
I thought the cookoff pretty much closed the Classic, but no, the big tasting tent opened, and there I heard of the pool party at the Sky hotel, and of another party at the Eagles club.
So I went.
But first I coincidentally ran into Greg Graber, who went to East High School in Denver with me and also happened to live in Bangkok when I did. Now he's a buyer of non-performing mortgages and spends his time mostly between Denver and Los Angeles.
Small world.
At the pool party I drank margaritas, got better acquainted with San Francisco mixologist Duggan McDonnel and caught up with chef E. Michael Reidt. I also chatted with young Justin Amick, whom I had met the night before -- or was it the night before that? -- at the 212 House. He's the son of Atlanta restaurateur Bob Amick, and plans to join him in the business.
The 212 and pool parties were similar in that they were the sort of parties held behind the second velvet rope of trendy clubs. You have to get past one rope just to get in -- that would be going to the Food & Wine Classic in the first place -- but then you have to be cool enough to get past the second rope to go to the best parties. It's elitist, but fun if you're part of the in crowd.
I didn't get to go to the much less exclusive publisher's dinner atop Ajax mountain two nights before, so I had duck confit lettuce wraps and carne asada tacos at Blue Maize with Erica Duecy, her friend Gibson, whom she met on a press trip to Italy, and his wife Heather.
Anyway, the pool party drew to a close shortly after Steve Olson and his entire crew ended up in the pool. The distributor of a high-end collection of mezcals also jumped in the pool -- he was the only one to do so bare naked.
So from there I wandered over to the Eagles club, where chef Todd Downs had invited me.
There I hung out with a very friendly group of local cooks and assorted others and munched on top-notch beef and lamb chops while drinking punch and wine.
We moved inside as stragglers from other parties showed up. I rehydrated on water, which seemed to annoy the bartender, and then wandered home.
Speaking of water, the water company that was one of the sponsors of the Classic estimates that it gave away 70,000 bottles of the stuff over the weekend.
Best quotes from Aspen
The seminars organized at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen for people in the restaurant business were pretty good, which is nice since I have to write about them for Nation's Restaurant News.
NRN, incidentally, got three plugs during the panels: once when Drew Nieporent expressed frustration that his Tribeca Grill hadn't been inducted into our Fine Dining Hall of Fame, once when USA Today's Jerry Shriver said he read NRN to spot trends, and once by Dana Cowin. She told those who attended the panel about handling national press to pay attention to the local press and the underlings in national media. She said you might have met someone when they started as "an associate editor of Nation's Restaurant News, and now they're running something."
I happened to be sitting at the same table as my former colleague, Erica Duecy, who now is running some things at Fodor's, so of course I pointed to her, as she's the only one I know off the top of my head who used to be an associate editor ("field editor," actually) at NRN and now is running something.
That stuff won't make it into my story on the Classic. I'm afraid the quotes below might not either, so I'm publishing them here:
"You have to be comfortable on the corner of Art and Commerce." -Mario Batali
"I agree with you, but I'm going to disagree because it's more fun for them [pointing to the audience]." -Jose Andres
"Wine's a grocery, not a luxury." -Richard Betts
"I have a passion for selling expensive wines to rich people." -David Lynch
"Maybe it's because I'm in New York and to me everyone's a pain in the ass." -David Lynch
"There's not a lot of you that look great in a dress and can hold a knife." -Michelle Bernstein
NRN, incidentally, got three plugs during the panels: once when Drew Nieporent expressed frustration that his Tribeca Grill hadn't been inducted into our Fine Dining Hall of Fame, once when USA Today's Jerry Shriver said he read NRN to spot trends, and once by Dana Cowin. She told those who attended the panel about handling national press to pay attention to the local press and the underlings in national media. She said you might have met someone when they started as "an associate editor of Nation's Restaurant News, and now they're running something."
I happened to be sitting at the same table as my former colleague, Erica Duecy, who now is running some things at Fodor's, so of course I pointed to her, as she's the only one I know off the top of my head who used to be an associate editor ("field editor," actually) at NRN and now is running something.
That stuff won't make it into my story on the Classic. I'm afraid the quotes below might not either, so I'm publishing them here:
"You have to be comfortable on the corner of Art and Commerce." -Mario Batali
"I agree with you, but I'm going to disagree because it's more fun for them [pointing to the audience]." -Jose Andres
"Wine's a grocery, not a luxury." -Richard Betts
"I have a passion for selling expensive wines to rich people." -David Lynch
"Maybe it's because I'm in New York and to me everyone's a pain in the ass." -David Lynch
"There's not a lot of you that look great in a dress and can hold a knife." -Michelle Bernstein
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Gossip at Aspen
June 16
I invite you to read Ben Leventhal's coverage of what's going on here in Aspen. It's by no means comprehensive, but he's doing a good job of highlighting the things that might amuse consumers about the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen. Ben's a good guy. You'd like him. If you want to be scandalized about irresponsible, scurrilous rumors in the restaurant industry, read someone else; Ben's rumors are more measured.
He was called out by Food & Wine editor Dana Cowin in this morning's panel for people in the restaurant trade. The panel was about working with national press. She asked him, basically, what's up with blogs and why don't we understand you? And he basically said, we're an open book, send me an e-mail and let's talk.
Yet Ben's presence at the 212 House last night -- the de facto Aspen Classic after-party -- caused some minor kerfuffles. As an important chef was regaling a circle of people about past acid trips (scandal! A chef over the age of 24 has done acid!), an important publicist whispered into his ear about, um, shutting up because of the presence of bloggers. Said chef actually looked at me with a bit of leariness until Ben was pointed out, even though, from what I understand, Ben had been more or less muzzled as a condition of being let in to the 212 House.
I saw nothing scandalous at 212 House. I did see Thomas Keller hanging out with what I think is his ex-business partner Laura Cunningham, but that's really sweet rather than scandalous. I saw Jean-Georges Vongerichten, which is slightly unusual, but not scandalous. I found myself spending time with some of the United States' greatest chefs and beverage specialists, and with some of the high-end food scene's coolest people -- an agglomeration so cool that I didn't want to leave at 2:30 but instead drank more water, until I finally did leave at 3. But if anything was going on that would have made it on to Page 6, I either missed it or I'm not telling you.
I invite you to read Ben Leventhal's coverage of what's going on here in Aspen. It's by no means comprehensive, but he's doing a good job of highlighting the things that might amuse consumers about the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen. Ben's a good guy. You'd like him. If you want to be scandalized about irresponsible, scurrilous rumors in the restaurant industry, read someone else; Ben's rumors are more measured.
He was called out by Food & Wine editor Dana Cowin in this morning's panel for people in the restaurant trade. The panel was about working with national press. She asked him, basically, what's up with blogs and why don't we understand you? And he basically said, we're an open book, send me an e-mail and let's talk.
Yet Ben's presence at the 212 House last night -- the de facto Aspen Classic after-party -- caused some minor kerfuffles. As an important chef was regaling a circle of people about past acid trips (scandal! A chef over the age of 24 has done acid!), an important publicist whispered into his ear about, um, shutting up because of the presence of bloggers. Said chef actually looked at me with a bit of leariness until Ben was pointed out, even though, from what I understand, Ben had been more or less muzzled as a condition of being let in to the 212 House.
I saw nothing scandalous at 212 House. I did see Thomas Keller hanging out with what I think is his ex-business partner Laura Cunningham, but that's really sweet rather than scandalous. I saw Jean-Georges Vongerichten, which is slightly unusual, but not scandalous. I found myself spending time with some of the United States' greatest chefs and beverage specialists, and with some of the high-end food scene's coolest people -- an agglomeration so cool that I didn't want to leave at 2:30 but instead drank more water, until I finally did leave at 3. But if anything was going on that would have made it on to Page 6, I either missed it or I'm not telling you.
Friday, June 15, 2007
Bobby Flay and Me
June 15
During my recent vacation in Denver, my eight-year-old nephew Harrison, who goes to sleep to the Food Network (he finds it less scary than The Weather Channel, which sometimes reports on frightening storms), wanted to get an idea of how well I knew some of the celebrity chefs. So he asked me if I knew Bobby Flay's favorite color.
I explained to him that grown-ups don't actually talk about their favorite colors much, and that at any rate I didn't know Bobby Flay very well. Although I'd interviewed him over the phone once or twice, he doesn't seem sure of who I am when he sees me. He seems aware that he should acknowledge me, but he's not sure why.
That's totally understandable. There's no reason why he should know me. I have many similar relationships with people.
For some reason I have been seeing a lot of Bobby Flay here at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen.
I ran into him in the elevator of the St. Regis Hotel yesterday, apparently after he'd been working out.
"What's goin' on?" he asked.
"Aspen," I said.
He agreed.
But this morning I ended up at the same table as he and his cohorts during a panel discussion in which Food & Wine editor Dana Cowin asked Steve Ells, Drew Nieporent, Thomas Keller and Tom Colicchio about the future of fine dining.
Like me, Bobby Flay likes to comment to his friends in the middle of panel discussions. So when Dana introduced Steve Ells, the founder of Chipotle, Flay leaned over to his business partner, Laurence Kretchmer, and said, "It's good food."
At one point during the discussion, Drew sort of started insulting everyone, and everyone at the table seemed to get a big kick out of that.
It wasn't really intentional, but he grimaced when he said "Chipotle" and later he basically said that Thomas Keller's strategy for handling reservations was to raise prices so fewer people would want to go. He pointed out that Craft, Tom Colicchio's fine dining restaurant, was spelled with a 'C,' not a 'K.'
He even managed to take a swipe at Bobby Flay (and Nation's Restaurant News, which continues to anger him because we haven't inducted his Tribeca Grill into our Fine Dining Hall of Fame, but the magazine staff can handle it). He said he couldn't imagine Tom Colicchio's face on a bucket of chicken, but "Bobby Flay's, yes."
"Was I just insulted?" he asked Kretchmer.
"A little bit," was the response.
"He's speaking from the heart," said Jose Andres, who had seated himself between me and Flay, with a shrug.
Flay also asked Ells a great question about what food was prepared on-premise and what wasn't, and Ells' response was extremely forthright, as it usually is from him but rarely is from many other chain restaurant operators when it comes to those sorts fo details (basically if it's braised, it's made off-premise, but by Chipotle, not by suppliers or manufacturers).
Flay also asked Andres about a project the Spanish chef was working on in Los Angeles. I thought I had a little scoop, but it turns out that my colleague Milford Prewitt wrote about it awhile ago: He'll be involved in the redevelopment of Le Merdian hotel on La Cienega. The new property, SLS, is being designed by Philippe Starck.
During my recent vacation in Denver, my eight-year-old nephew Harrison, who goes to sleep to the Food Network (he finds it less scary than The Weather Channel, which sometimes reports on frightening storms), wanted to get an idea of how well I knew some of the celebrity chefs. So he asked me if I knew Bobby Flay's favorite color.
I explained to him that grown-ups don't actually talk about their favorite colors much, and that at any rate I didn't know Bobby Flay very well. Although I'd interviewed him over the phone once or twice, he doesn't seem sure of who I am when he sees me. He seems aware that he should acknowledge me, but he's not sure why.
That's totally understandable. There's no reason why he should know me. I have many similar relationships with people.
For some reason I have been seeing a lot of Bobby Flay here at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen.
I ran into him in the elevator of the St. Regis Hotel yesterday, apparently after he'd been working out.
"What's goin' on?" he asked.
"Aspen," I said.
He agreed.
But this morning I ended up at the same table as he and his cohorts during a panel discussion in which Food & Wine editor Dana Cowin asked Steve Ells, Drew Nieporent, Thomas Keller and Tom Colicchio about the future of fine dining.
Like me, Bobby Flay likes to comment to his friends in the middle of panel discussions. So when Dana introduced Steve Ells, the founder of Chipotle, Flay leaned over to his business partner, Laurence Kretchmer, and said, "It's good food."
At one point during the discussion, Drew sort of started insulting everyone, and everyone at the table seemed to get a big kick out of that.
It wasn't really intentional, but he grimaced when he said "Chipotle" and later he basically said that Thomas Keller's strategy for handling reservations was to raise prices so fewer people would want to go. He pointed out that Craft, Tom Colicchio's fine dining restaurant, was spelled with a 'C,' not a 'K.'
He even managed to take a swipe at Bobby Flay (and Nation's Restaurant News, which continues to anger him because we haven't inducted his Tribeca Grill into our Fine Dining Hall of Fame, but the magazine staff can handle it). He said he couldn't imagine Tom Colicchio's face on a bucket of chicken, but "Bobby Flay's, yes."
"Was I just insulted?" he asked Kretchmer.
"A little bit," was the response.
"He's speaking from the heart," said Jose Andres, who had seated himself between me and Flay, with a shrug.
Flay also asked Ells a great question about what food was prepared on-premise and what wasn't, and Ells' response was extremely forthright, as it usually is from him but rarely is from many other chain restaurant operators when it comes to those sorts fo details (basically if it's braised, it's made off-premise, but by Chipotle, not by suppliers or manufacturers).
Flay also asked Andres about a project the Spanish chef was working on in Los Angeles. I thought I had a little scoop, but it turns out that my colleague Milford Prewitt wrote about it awhile ago: He'll be involved in the redevelopment of Le Merdian hotel on La Cienega. The new property, SLS, is being designed by Philippe Starck.
drinking at 8,000 feet, post script
June 15
I did pop out briefly last night, into the cool air in search of non-alcoholic beverages (Aspen tap would have been fine, but I guess I wasn't ready to throw in the towel for the evening).
I ended up being waylaid by some folks from PR company Bullfrog & Baum and we ended up at 212 House, an after hours spot being run by good old Scott Feldman. I drank several bottles of water from the sponsoring company and swapped stories with Chris Lee about fussy eaters we knew (his wife Melissa gave me a brief talking to for not going to bed).
And I saw chef Todd Downs, who's here cooking for the California Raisin Board.
Good times.
I did pop out briefly last night, into the cool air in search of non-alcoholic beverages (Aspen tap would have been fine, but I guess I wasn't ready to throw in the towel for the evening).
I ended up being waylaid by some folks from PR company Bullfrog & Baum and we ended up at 212 House, an after hours spot being run by good old Scott Feldman. I drank several bottles of water from the sponsoring company and swapped stories with Chris Lee about fussy eaters we knew (his wife Melissa gave me a brief talking to for not going to bed).
And I saw chef Todd Downs, who's here cooking for the California Raisin Board.
Good times.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
drinking at 8,000 feet
June 14
I've been told that high altitude affects a person's ability to hold alcohol. I think that makes sense scientifically, but I had never experienced it, until tonight.
Maybe it was the three ice coffees I had on my drive from Denver to Aspen -- one in Golden, one in Frisco and one in Leadville -- maybe it was part of the unjustifiable anxiety I felt in driving above the tree line to get over Independence Pass, or maybe it was just one of those things you hear about when people feel woozy at high altitude, but I didn't feel right after that first glass of Champagne in the "green room" of the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen (it used to be the Classic at Aspen, but I was told today that they changed it two years ago).
The green room was in lieu of the usual gift bags; you just went there and took whatever merchandise the sponsors had laid out for media and VIPs to take. I filled my bag with chazerai to give to my family in Denver, sipped Champagne and felt woozy.
So at the opening reception I drank water before having a glass of wine. Then I had more water and chatted with people (including Steven Holt, who used to do PR for the Jerome Hotel and took me under his wing at my first Food & Wine Classic, which was at Aspen, but now Steven is at the Ritz-Carlton Bachelor Gulch in Beaver Creek, where the fourth Spago will open sometime soon; you learn something new every day) before sampling a Manhattan made from a high-end single malt.
I was feeling better by the time I climbed into the front seat of a Lexus that had been hired to take invitees to the Wines from Spain party, where Jose Andres and his crew were cooking, and also slicing sausages and thin pieces of jamon iberico. I chatted with local Aspen press, and with wine consultant Steve Olson and a bunch of other people, while drinking wine and neglecting my water, until someone collapsed on the floor and had a brief siezure. She recovered quickly and seemed coherent, but it was a reminder of the need to stay hydrated.
An ambulance was called and I went downstairs for some of the Spanish bottled water that had been imported for the party.
Many tall people in the right clothing and with a lot of gel in their hair were at the party. I wondered who they were and where they came from. I suppose I could have asked them, although you have to choose your words carefully in such situations.
Instead I hung out with New York journalists, eating pork products, gazpacho shooters and oysters with lemon "air." One of those journalists, Amy Cortese, suggested we repair to the Little Nell, where word had it that a party featuring American caviar was afoot.
We wandered over there while Rachel Wharton of the New York Daily News and I expressed outrage at deceptive food marketing (like the fruit-pops I saw in Denver that were marketed as having only 19 calories per ounce; soda only has 13 or 14 calories per ounce).
We got to the Little Nell early and lay on the recliners around the pool until the party started.
Then I ate domestic sturgeon roe and French trout roe while drinking Tokai Friuliano and noticing more tall, fair-haired people. But these looked less like socialites and more like people I went to high school with in Denver -- stereotypical Coloradans with sandy-brown hair and an apparent readiness to go snowboarding or mountainbiking at any moment.
I got in line for more Tokai and was greeted by Ti Martin of the Brennan clan (the New Orleans Brennans, first family of American foodservice). We hadn't seen each other since the last time we were in Aspen, several years ago, and neither of us had been to Aspen since. Ti said her plans had been scuttled by "that stupid hurricane."
But she said everything was coming back together. I wanted to talk more about Katrina, but she changed the subject and we exchanged our opinions on a variety of matters, such as the Tokai we were drinking and the cooking of Grant Achatz.
Soon, however, I was aware of my parched throat and the need to rehydrate. I excused myself and began my search for water as Chris Lee, the chef of Gilt, arrived with his wife Melissa and sommelier Jason Ferris.
"Are you staying or going?" Chris asked. As I squawked about my need for water Melissa sent me to my hotel, which is where I went.
I've been told that high altitude affects a person's ability to hold alcohol. I think that makes sense scientifically, but I had never experienced it, until tonight.
Maybe it was the three ice coffees I had on my drive from Denver to Aspen -- one in Golden, one in Frisco and one in Leadville -- maybe it was part of the unjustifiable anxiety I felt in driving above the tree line to get over Independence Pass, or maybe it was just one of those things you hear about when people feel woozy at high altitude, but I didn't feel right after that first glass of Champagne in the "green room" of the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen (it used to be the Classic at Aspen, but I was told today that they changed it two years ago).
The green room was in lieu of the usual gift bags; you just went there and took whatever merchandise the sponsors had laid out for media and VIPs to take. I filled my bag with chazerai to give to my family in Denver, sipped Champagne and felt woozy.
So at the opening reception I drank water before having a glass of wine. Then I had more water and chatted with people (including Steven Holt, who used to do PR for the Jerome Hotel and took me under his wing at my first Food & Wine Classic, which was at Aspen, but now Steven is at the Ritz-Carlton Bachelor Gulch in Beaver Creek, where the fourth Spago will open sometime soon; you learn something new every day) before sampling a Manhattan made from a high-end single malt.
I was feeling better by the time I climbed into the front seat of a Lexus that had been hired to take invitees to the Wines from Spain party, where Jose Andres and his crew were cooking, and also slicing sausages and thin pieces of jamon iberico. I chatted with local Aspen press, and with wine consultant Steve Olson and a bunch of other people, while drinking wine and neglecting my water, until someone collapsed on the floor and had a brief siezure. She recovered quickly and seemed coherent, but it was a reminder of the need to stay hydrated.
An ambulance was called and I went downstairs for some of the Spanish bottled water that had been imported for the party.
Many tall people in the right clothing and with a lot of gel in their hair were at the party. I wondered who they were and where they came from. I suppose I could have asked them, although you have to choose your words carefully in such situations.
Instead I hung out with New York journalists, eating pork products, gazpacho shooters and oysters with lemon "air." One of those journalists, Amy Cortese, suggested we repair to the Little Nell, where word had it that a party featuring American caviar was afoot.
We wandered over there while Rachel Wharton of the New York Daily News and I expressed outrage at deceptive food marketing (like the fruit-pops I saw in Denver that were marketed as having only 19 calories per ounce; soda only has 13 or 14 calories per ounce).
We got to the Little Nell early and lay on the recliners around the pool until the party started.
Then I ate domestic sturgeon roe and French trout roe while drinking Tokai Friuliano and noticing more tall, fair-haired people. But these looked less like socialites and more like people I went to high school with in Denver -- stereotypical Coloradans with sandy-brown hair and an apparent readiness to go snowboarding or mountainbiking at any moment.
I got in line for more Tokai and was greeted by Ti Martin of the Brennan clan (the New Orleans Brennans, first family of American foodservice). We hadn't seen each other since the last time we were in Aspen, several years ago, and neither of us had been to Aspen since. Ti said her plans had been scuttled by "that stupid hurricane."
But she said everything was coming back together. I wanted to talk more about Katrina, but she changed the subject and we exchanged our opinions on a variety of matters, such as the Tokai we were drinking and the cooking of Grant Achatz.
Soon, however, I was aware of my parched throat and the need to rehydrate. I excused myself and began my search for water as Chris Lee, the chef of Gilt, arrived with his wife Melissa and sommelier Jason Ferris.
"Are you staying or going?" Chris asked. As I squawked about my need for water Melissa sent me to my hotel, which is where I went.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Prelude to Aspen
June 13
I've just realilzed that I eat differently depending on who I'm trying to impress. That's kind of pathetic, I know, but it's food for thought as I prepare to head up to Aspen for the Food & Wine Classic there.
I'll be driving up there tomorrow; at the moment I'm in Denver for family time.
I arrived last Saturday and have been mostly hanging out with family -- Mom, Dad, brother, sister, sister-in-law, nieces and nephew, aunts, uncle, cousins. I also reconnected with Pam Paulien, a friend from back in fourth grade, who is moving into one of my family's apartment buildings (sort of; they're actually turning it into a co-housing development, a dream of my sometime-socialist mother). And I did my usual obligatory walk down East Colfax, where I stopped in tHERe bar & lounge and had iced coffee with a truck driver named Sonya.
And of course I've checked out some restaurants. I went with my sister-in-law Helen Thorn, her son Harrison and my niece Tahirah Thorn to Amazing Jake's -- one of those places where you can eat and play video games and ride bumper cars and play laser tag.
The price of admission included an all-you-can-eat buffet, and I stuck exclusively to the salad bar, loading up on greens and drizzling it with a little basil oil and balsamic vinegar.
Now, had I been on my own, I might very well have loaded up on Mac & Cheese and pizza, but it seemed reasonable to model for the kids.
Had I been in a restaurant where the chef might know me, I would have ordered whatever was most obscure or "cool" in the eyes of a chef -- sweetbreads or something with cockscombs. Had I been trying to assess whether the restaurant was any good, I would have ordered signature dishes or anything else the restaurant seemed to be hanging its hat on.
Later in the week I took my brother, Todd (Thorn, obviously), his wife Helen, and their kids Harrison and Alia (a tender 11 months and just the sweetest thing, unless she's tired or hungry or otherwise out of sorts) to Rioja, where I did a combination of eating what I wanted, modeling and trying to find a wine my relatively teatotaling brother and sister-in-law would enjoy. So I picked a Suttcliffe Vineyards Gewurtztraminer to drink. It's a Colorado wine, and I'd interviewed the winemaker for an article I'd written on the Four Corners region, so I wanted to try it, and I thought it would appeal to Todd and Helen's sweet teeth, but Helen found it too light and Todd didn't comment, so I guees I should raise the ante next time and get a German Riesling.
I ordered some braised pork belly (called "fresh bacon" on the menu, which was cute), to show Harrison the desirability of being adventurous (he seemed more interested in his Game Boy, which is reasonable, but you never know exactly what kids pick up), and then in the interest of moderation, to model the value of moderation, and because I wanted to try it, I ordered the vegetarian main course, which was a tasting of four different vegetable preparations.
It was a lot of thought for a simple dinner, but a good time was had by all.
And now it's time for me to go. We're dining at Texas de Brazil this evening. It's a churrascaria, so I shall be eating large quantities of meat. I might even skip the salad bar.
I've just realilzed that I eat differently depending on who I'm trying to impress. That's kind of pathetic, I know, but it's food for thought as I prepare to head up to Aspen for the Food & Wine Classic there.
I'll be driving up there tomorrow; at the moment I'm in Denver for family time.
I arrived last Saturday and have been mostly hanging out with family -- Mom, Dad, brother, sister, sister-in-law, nieces and nephew, aunts, uncle, cousins. I also reconnected with Pam Paulien, a friend from back in fourth grade, who is moving into one of my family's apartment buildings (sort of; they're actually turning it into a co-housing development, a dream of my sometime-socialist mother). And I did my usual obligatory walk down East Colfax, where I stopped in tHERe bar & lounge and had iced coffee with a truck driver named Sonya.
And of course I've checked out some restaurants. I went with my sister-in-law Helen Thorn, her son Harrison and my niece Tahirah Thorn to Amazing Jake's -- one of those places where you can eat and play video games and ride bumper cars and play laser tag.
The price of admission included an all-you-can-eat buffet, and I stuck exclusively to the salad bar, loading up on greens and drizzling it with a little basil oil and balsamic vinegar.
Now, had I been on my own, I might very well have loaded up on Mac & Cheese and pizza, but it seemed reasonable to model for the kids.
Had I been in a restaurant where the chef might know me, I would have ordered whatever was most obscure or "cool" in the eyes of a chef -- sweetbreads or something with cockscombs. Had I been trying to assess whether the restaurant was any good, I would have ordered signature dishes or anything else the restaurant seemed to be hanging its hat on.
Later in the week I took my brother, Todd (Thorn, obviously), his wife Helen, and their kids Harrison and Alia (a tender 11 months and just the sweetest thing, unless she's tired or hungry or otherwise out of sorts) to Rioja, where I did a combination of eating what I wanted, modeling and trying to find a wine my relatively teatotaling brother and sister-in-law would enjoy. So I picked a Suttcliffe Vineyards Gewurtztraminer to drink. It's a Colorado wine, and I'd interviewed the winemaker for an article I'd written on the Four Corners region, so I wanted to try it, and I thought it would appeal to Todd and Helen's sweet teeth, but Helen found it too light and Todd didn't comment, so I guees I should raise the ante next time and get a German Riesling.
I ordered some braised pork belly (called "fresh bacon" on the menu, which was cute), to show Harrison the desirability of being adventurous (he seemed more interested in his Game Boy, which is reasonable, but you never know exactly what kids pick up), and then in the interest of moderation, to model the value of moderation, and because I wanted to try it, I ordered the vegetarian main course, which was a tasting of four different vegetable preparations.
It was a lot of thought for a simple dinner, but a good time was had by all.
And now it's time for me to go. We're dining at Texas de Brazil this evening. It's a churrascaria, so I shall be eating large quantities of meat. I might even skip the salad bar.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Kampuchea
June 7
You might remember my first encounter with Kenyon Phillips, but maybe you don’t as it was 14 blog entries ago. But whenever I meet someone who can engage in quick elevator banter about imagined criminal activity, I try to stay in touch, especially if he’s a musician who’s work I enjoy.
So I e-mailed him — nice meeting you, blah blah blah, always looking for people to check out restaurants with, yada yada.
And I asked him about dietary restrictions.
He replied: “I'm a vegetarian (lacto-ovo, not vegan) and a straight-edge (so no booze), but am an adventurous foodie nonetheless...”
Oh brother.
Not vegan. Woohoo!
What happened to the bacchanalian rockers of yore? (My other rockin’ friend, Peter Yanowitz of Morningwood, doesn’t eat meat either, although he does eat fish).
I suppose I could have written back: “Well, I’m sorry then, but we cannot be friends.” But I’ve learned that vegetarians are not necessarily bad people.
So I took him to Kampuchea, a restaurant with a strong Cambodian accent on the Lower East Side.
“Kampuchea” is kind of an odd name for a restaurant. It simply means “Cambodia” in Khmer, that country’s national language, but the outside world only referred to Cambodia thus — in modern times, at least — under the rule of the Khmer Rouge, who were a bunch of murderous bastards.
Cambodia, being a poor country albeit a Buddhist one, doesn’t have many vegetarians. People eat pretty much whatever they can there. But a Cambodian restaurant on the Lower East Side would have to be vegetarian friendly, even though chef Ratha Chau is pretty hard-core in his desire to reproduce the flavors of the country where he was born.
He doesn’t hold back with the spices, and Kenyon, a southern Californian, and I actually suffered from chile overload while eating from the pickle plate. That doesn’t happen very often in the Northeast.
Despite Kenyon’s dietary shortcomings, he proved to be an excellent dining companion — and one highly dubious of, but open-minded about, tofu. It was fun getting acquainted and swapping childhood stories and opinions on music (not surprisingly, we agree on our dislike of Emo). We even exchanged 9/ll stories — everyone who was in New York at the time has some, of course.
And we both appreciated the artwork on the walls in the bathroom — people with light bulb heads performing the bodily functions that one performs in a bathroom. It reminded me of the Japanese “Story of farts,” of which I had actually read the Thai translation (if you choose to follow this link, I have to point out that Martha Gordon seems to be a humorless prig with an anti-dairy bias).
What we ate:
Grilled sweet corn with coconut chile mayo, chili powder and coconut flakes
Plate of pickled watermelon rind, daikon, red cabbage, cucumber and soy sprouts
Tofu salad with pickled cabbage, chives, red onions, sprouts, shiitake mushrooms, lime dressing
Prince Edward Island Mussels, spicy and sour, with tomatillos, celery, okra, red onions and Thai chiles, served with toasted baguette pieces
Shiitake mushroom, soybean and butternut squash crêpes with lettuce, soy sprouts, mint, basil and tuk trey
Num Pang (sandwich) tasting of grilled tofu with ginger-scallion soy, grilled Thai and Chinese eggplant with ginger and garlic, and hoisin Berkshire pork meatballs with rice and light tomato sauce
Tamarind baby back ribs with honey and cilantro-lime dip
You might remember my first encounter with Kenyon Phillips, but maybe you don’t as it was 14 blog entries ago. But whenever I meet someone who can engage in quick elevator banter about imagined criminal activity, I try to stay in touch, especially if he’s a musician who’s work I enjoy.
So I e-mailed him — nice meeting you, blah blah blah, always looking for people to check out restaurants with, yada yada.
And I asked him about dietary restrictions.
He replied: “I'm a vegetarian (lacto-ovo, not vegan) and a straight-edge (so no booze), but am an adventurous foodie nonetheless...”
Oh brother.
Not vegan. Woohoo!
What happened to the bacchanalian rockers of yore? (My other rockin’ friend, Peter Yanowitz of Morningwood, doesn’t eat meat either, although he does eat fish).
I suppose I could have written back: “Well, I’m sorry then, but we cannot be friends.” But I’ve learned that vegetarians are not necessarily bad people.
So I took him to Kampuchea, a restaurant with a strong Cambodian accent on the Lower East Side.
“Kampuchea” is kind of an odd name for a restaurant. It simply means “Cambodia” in Khmer, that country’s national language, but the outside world only referred to Cambodia thus — in modern times, at least — under the rule of the Khmer Rouge, who were a bunch of murderous bastards.
Cambodia, being a poor country albeit a Buddhist one, doesn’t have many vegetarians. People eat pretty much whatever they can there. But a Cambodian restaurant on the Lower East Side would have to be vegetarian friendly, even though chef Ratha Chau is pretty hard-core in his desire to reproduce the flavors of the country where he was born.
He doesn’t hold back with the spices, and Kenyon, a southern Californian, and I actually suffered from chile overload while eating from the pickle plate. That doesn’t happen very often in the Northeast.
Despite Kenyon’s dietary shortcomings, he proved to be an excellent dining companion — and one highly dubious of, but open-minded about, tofu. It was fun getting acquainted and swapping childhood stories and opinions on music (not surprisingly, we agree on our dislike of Emo). We even exchanged 9/ll stories — everyone who was in New York at the time has some, of course.
And we both appreciated the artwork on the walls in the bathroom — people with light bulb heads performing the bodily functions that one performs in a bathroom. It reminded me of the Japanese “Story of farts,” of which I had actually read the Thai translation (if you choose to follow this link, I have to point out that Martha Gordon seems to be a humorless prig with an anti-dairy bias).
What we ate:
Grilled sweet corn with coconut chile mayo, chili powder and coconut flakes
Plate of pickled watermelon rind, daikon, red cabbage, cucumber and soy sprouts
Tofu salad with pickled cabbage, chives, red onions, sprouts, shiitake mushrooms, lime dressing
Prince Edward Island Mussels, spicy and sour, with tomatillos, celery, okra, red onions and Thai chiles, served with toasted baguette pieces
Shiitake mushroom, soybean and butternut squash crêpes with lettuce, soy sprouts, mint, basil and tuk trey
Num Pang (sandwich) tasting of grilled tofu with ginger-scallion soy, grilled Thai and Chinese eggplant with ginger and garlic, and hoisin Berkshire pork meatballs with rice and light tomato sauce
Tamarind baby back ribs with honey and cilantro-lime dip
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Herring Week
June 6
Aquavit has two summertime celebrations: Herring Week and the Crayfish Festival. Owner Håken Swahn and chef-owner Marcus Samuelsson always hold a little reception for the press to let us know about them. Herring Week starts next week, the reception was today, so my boss Pam Parseghian and I walked over for a snack.
The reception was in Aquavit’s private room, at the far end of the bar which was unusually packed for a Wednesday at 1pm.
To my delight, at the reception I ran into young Nick Pandolfi, the baby brother of my friend Erica Duecy’s husband Jono. Nick just finished his junior year at NYU (can you believe it?) and, having just interned at Spin magazine is now interning with my friends at Food & Wine. He looked very pleased.
I also chatted with Johan Svensson, the executive chef, who said lunches have been crazy busy for the past three weeks, and no one knows why. He wasn't complaining, of course, but he wondered what precisely was going right.
Håken, speaking to the crowd, pointed out that Aquavit is 20 this year — an unusual feat for a New York restaurant. He also said they would be opening an Aquavit in Stockholm this February, which is nice. But of far more interest was his announcement of the opening in about a month of a commissary that would provide baked goods for a chain of AQ Cafes he hopes to open in New York. Further investigation is required.
Marcus told the room that, during a recent conversation with Gourmet editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl, she told him that writers were pitching more stories on Scandinavian food than anything else.
I think maybe she was exaggerating.
Aquavit has two summertime celebrations: Herring Week and the Crayfish Festival. Owner Håken Swahn and chef-owner Marcus Samuelsson always hold a little reception for the press to let us know about them. Herring Week starts next week, the reception was today, so my boss Pam Parseghian and I walked over for a snack.
The reception was in Aquavit’s private room, at the far end of the bar which was unusually packed for a Wednesday at 1pm.
To my delight, at the reception I ran into young Nick Pandolfi, the baby brother of my friend Erica Duecy’s husband Jono. Nick just finished his junior year at NYU (can you believe it?) and, having just interned at Spin magazine is now interning with my friends at Food & Wine. He looked very pleased.
I also chatted with Johan Svensson, the executive chef, who said lunches have been crazy busy for the past three weeks, and no one knows why. He wasn't complaining, of course, but he wondered what precisely was going right.
Håken, speaking to the crowd, pointed out that Aquavit is 20 this year — an unusual feat for a New York restaurant. He also said they would be opening an Aquavit in Stockholm this February, which is nice. But of far more interest was his announcement of the opening in about a month of a commissary that would provide baked goods for a chain of AQ Cafes he hopes to open in New York. Further investigation is required.
Marcus told the room that, during a recent conversation with Gourmet editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl, she told him that writers were pitching more stories on Scandinavian food than anything else.
I think maybe she was exaggerating.
Can you please explain what this sentence means?
“Burgers proudly ruled the American menu throughout its tenure.”
Anyone?
Anyone?
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
mismatch
June 5
Have you ever met anyone who for whatever reason just doesn’t like you? There’s a producer for one of the national early morning news shows like that. At least I think she doesn’t like me. I always sense when she glances at me that she’s feeling a combination of boredom and disgust. It’s unsettling.
And I was already unsettled today. I thought I put on a suit this morning until I looked down during my subway ride and realized that my jacket didn’t match my trousers.
I have no excuse. I mean, I was at dinner last night with publicists at Pera, but it wasn’t such a late night that I shouldn’t have been able to see in the morning.
Believe it or not, business attire is required at the offices of Lebhar-Friedman, Nation’s Restaurant News’ parent company, but not between Memorial Day and Labor Day, when business casual is permitted.
At any time of year it’s okay not to wear a suit — trousers and a sportcoat are fine — and wearing a suit jacket instead of a sportcoat is really just a minor faux pas in this modern era, as long as you look like you did it on purpose.
But I was wearing two different patterns of dark pinstripe. I looked like an idiot.
And I was having lunch at Daniel, which is why I tried to wear a suit in the first place.
I don’t know if Daniel actually enforces a jackets-for-gentelmen dress code, and at any rate I’m pretty sure they’d let me slide at a press luncheon in the private dining room, which is where I was eating. But it seems wrong to walk into Daniel without wearing a jacket.
Then again, it also seems wrong — indeed it is wrong — to go to a press function looking like an idiot.
I didn’t see that I had much of a choice, though; I don’t have an off-the-rack-shaped body. So I went to Daniel in my mismatched suit, resolving to stand in the shadows or shift around confusingly to keep people from noticing that I didn’t match.
Of course no one said anything, but that producer who hates me was there. She didn’t arrive until right before we were being seated, though, so I’m just going to go ahead and assume she didn’t notice.
We were at lunch to enjoy the food of Gavin Kaysen, the young chef — just six years out of culinary school — of El Bizcocho at the Rancho Bernardo Inn in San Diego, who was visiting. Gavin's also one of Food & Wine magazine’s ten "Best New Chefs” this year, so I’ll be seeing him soon in Aspen anyway.
He represented the United States in the most recent Bocuse D’Or competition, which is what most people who follow such things consider to be the most rigorous culinary competition in the world. Gavin spent a year preparing for the competition, as one does, and came in 14th out of 24, which isn’t bad at all, especially, Gavin said, considering what happened during the competition.
Obviously I asked him what he meant, and he told the story of their French assistant, "Kevin,” (Gavin’s eyes narrowed), who inexplicably ate the chicken wings that were to garnish one of Gavin’s plates, something that Gavin didn’t notice until it was time for the plates to go out.
Gavin asked what happened to the wings and Kevin simply said he ate them, with no explanation or expression of concern:
"I ate them."
Here’s what we ate for lunch at Daniel:
From Gavin:
Grilled hamachi with mango, fennel purée and ponzu vinaigrette
From Daniel Boulud:
Slow-baked halibut peas à la Française, potato confit, herb beurre blanc
From Gavin:
Lamb loin, zucchini flower, eggplant caponata and wild arugula
From Daniel
Berry fruit soups, followed by an assortment of chocolate desserts, which of course were followed by his famous madeleines.
Have you ever met anyone who for whatever reason just doesn’t like you? There’s a producer for one of the national early morning news shows like that. At least I think she doesn’t like me. I always sense when she glances at me that she’s feeling a combination of boredom and disgust. It’s unsettling.
And I was already unsettled today. I thought I put on a suit this morning until I looked down during my subway ride and realized that my jacket didn’t match my trousers.
I have no excuse. I mean, I was at dinner last night with publicists at Pera, but it wasn’t such a late night that I shouldn’t have been able to see in the morning.
Believe it or not, business attire is required at the offices of Lebhar-Friedman, Nation’s Restaurant News’ parent company, but not between Memorial Day and Labor Day, when business casual is permitted.
At any time of year it’s okay not to wear a suit — trousers and a sportcoat are fine — and wearing a suit jacket instead of a sportcoat is really just a minor faux pas in this modern era, as long as you look like you did it on purpose.
But I was wearing two different patterns of dark pinstripe. I looked like an idiot.
And I was having lunch at Daniel, which is why I tried to wear a suit in the first place.
I don’t know if Daniel actually enforces a jackets-for-gentelmen dress code, and at any rate I’m pretty sure they’d let me slide at a press luncheon in the private dining room, which is where I was eating. But it seems wrong to walk into Daniel without wearing a jacket.
Then again, it also seems wrong — indeed it is wrong — to go to a press function looking like an idiot.
I didn’t see that I had much of a choice, though; I don’t have an off-the-rack-shaped body. So I went to Daniel in my mismatched suit, resolving to stand in the shadows or shift around confusingly to keep people from noticing that I didn’t match.
Of course no one said anything, but that producer who hates me was there. She didn’t arrive until right before we were being seated, though, so I’m just going to go ahead and assume she didn’t notice.
We were at lunch to enjoy the food of Gavin Kaysen, the young chef — just six years out of culinary school — of El Bizcocho at the Rancho Bernardo Inn in San Diego, who was visiting. Gavin's also one of Food & Wine magazine’s ten "Best New Chefs” this year, so I’ll be seeing him soon in Aspen anyway.
He represented the United States in the most recent Bocuse D’Or competition, which is what most people who follow such things consider to be the most rigorous culinary competition in the world. Gavin spent a year preparing for the competition, as one does, and came in 14th out of 24, which isn’t bad at all, especially, Gavin said, considering what happened during the competition.
Obviously I asked him what he meant, and he told the story of their French assistant, "Kevin,” (Gavin’s eyes narrowed), who inexplicably ate the chicken wings that were to garnish one of Gavin’s plates, something that Gavin didn’t notice until it was time for the plates to go out.
Gavin asked what happened to the wings and Kevin simply said he ate them, with no explanation or expression of concern:
"I ate them."
Here’s what we ate for lunch at Daniel:
From Gavin:
Grilled hamachi with mango, fennel purée and ponzu vinaigrette
From Daniel Boulud:
Slow-baked halibut peas à la Française, potato confit, herb beurre blanc
From Gavin:
Lamb loin, zucchini flower, eggplant caponata and wild arugula
From Daniel
Berry fruit soups, followed by an assortment of chocolate desserts, which of course were followed by his famous madeleines.
getting reacquainted with my neighborhood
June 1
Matt and Ted Lee have a lot of friends, or at least they can get a lot of people to show up at a party, as I found out this evening, the first truly warm night of the year.
The Lee brothers were celebrating the fact that their cookbook had taken top honors at the James Beard Awards by throwing a party at an art gallery in the Brooklyn neighborhood of DUMBO*.
The party didn't start until 9:30, so not only did I have time to go home beforehand, I actually had time to kill. I also had to find my way to the F train, which is in southern Park Slope. I live on the other end of the neighborhood, near Grand Army Plaza, and so I decided to wander down 5th Avenue (more interesting than 7th Avenue, although farther from the subway) and eat at whatever restaurant caught my eye.
The ever-popular Al Di Là had a wait of just 20 minutes, at 8pm on Friday, so I took them up on it, relaxing with a glass of Sancerre in their neighboring wine bar until I was summoned to my table, where I started with the special of grilled sardines over salad greens and then had cazunsei, a type ravioli, with beets, ricottta and poppy seeds. With dinner I drank a couple of glasses of Erbaluce, a Piedmontese white wine made from the indigenous Erbaluce grape, which I had just recently learned about (high acid with floral and herbal notes).
Feeling slightly bad that I was dining solo at a table of two, I gave up my table and had coffee at Cocoa Bar, drinking it as I walked to the F train.
I got to the party at 10:30 and it was in full swing. I congratulated the Lee brothers and chatted with Salma Abdelnour briefly before getting in line for beer. Then Julie Besonen from Paper arrived with her husband Jim Knapp, and I got back in the beer line with them and caught up.
You would think that an art gallery would have air conditioning, but I guess not. People were still psyched to be there, though, although half of them stayed outside and chatted.
I talked to a couple of publicists and then decided it was time to go. Since it was only 11:30 I stopped by Excelsior for a beer once when I was back in my neighborhood and then went for a stroll. I was stopped by jazz music coming from a storefront I'd never noticed before. Turns out it was Puppet’s Jazz Bar, which I learned was in fact a couple of years old and I just hadn’t noticed, and now it’s losing it’s lease, or so the owner tells me. He’ll be throwing some fundraisers in an attempt to relocate, so stay tuned for more information on that.
I drank Australian Shiraz and listened to the music. Victor Bailey was in the audience, too, wearing a T-shirt with a bass clef on it. He sat in on the bass for a song or two, shrugging off praise. It was a nice way to end the evening.
*Non-New Yorkers might not know that that means "down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass."
Matt and Ted Lee have a lot of friends, or at least they can get a lot of people to show up at a party, as I found out this evening, the first truly warm night of the year.
The Lee brothers were celebrating the fact that their cookbook had taken top honors at the James Beard Awards by throwing a party at an art gallery in the Brooklyn neighborhood of DUMBO*.
The party didn't start until 9:30, so not only did I have time to go home beforehand, I actually had time to kill. I also had to find my way to the F train, which is in southern Park Slope. I live on the other end of the neighborhood, near Grand Army Plaza, and so I decided to wander down 5th Avenue (more interesting than 7th Avenue, although farther from the subway) and eat at whatever restaurant caught my eye.
The ever-popular Al Di Là had a wait of just 20 minutes, at 8pm on Friday, so I took them up on it, relaxing with a glass of Sancerre in their neighboring wine bar until I was summoned to my table, where I started with the special of grilled sardines over salad greens and then had cazunsei, a type ravioli, with beets, ricottta and poppy seeds. With dinner I drank a couple of glasses of Erbaluce, a Piedmontese white wine made from the indigenous Erbaluce grape, which I had just recently learned about (high acid with floral and herbal notes).
Feeling slightly bad that I was dining solo at a table of two, I gave up my table and had coffee at Cocoa Bar, drinking it as I walked to the F train.
I got to the party at 10:30 and it was in full swing. I congratulated the Lee brothers and chatted with Salma Abdelnour briefly before getting in line for beer. Then Julie Besonen from Paper arrived with her husband Jim Knapp, and I got back in the beer line with them and caught up.
You would think that an art gallery would have air conditioning, but I guess not. People were still psyched to be there, though, although half of them stayed outside and chatted.
I talked to a couple of publicists and then decided it was time to go. Since it was only 11:30 I stopped by Excelsior for a beer once when I was back in my neighborhood and then went for a stroll. I was stopped by jazz music coming from a storefront I'd never noticed before. Turns out it was Puppet’s Jazz Bar, which I learned was in fact a couple of years old and I just hadn’t noticed, and now it’s losing it’s lease, or so the owner tells me. He’ll be throwing some fundraisers in an attempt to relocate, so stay tuned for more information on that.
I drank Australian Shiraz and listened to the music. Victor Bailey was in the audience, too, wearing a T-shirt with a bass clef on it. He sat in on the bass for a song or two, shrugging off praise. It was a nice way to end the evening.
*Non-New Yorkers might not know that that means "down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass."
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