Blais’s glory

September 9

I’ve never had enough fame to know what it really does to a person. I’m not sure I’d handle it very well. Back when Rocco DiSpirito was declared “Sexiest Chef Alive” by People, and the magazine ran a picture with his shirt open and his chest oiled up, I went on the record as saying that if a magazine declared me the sexiest food writer alive I’d totally unbutton my shirt and spread on the oil.
So I can’t fault Richard Blais, who was a promising chef with a budding career, for deciding to become a contestant on Top Chef, or, after his season was over, for deciding to leave high-end dining to focus on opening a burger joint. I like burgers.
But one of my colleagues was working on a story about him as chef at Home in Atlanta, and then the story had to be scrapped when we found out last night that he has left the restaurant, or maybe that he was made to leave.
It’s a drag when you have to scrap a story.
From representatives of Home: “We wish Richard all the best on his individual endeavors, but his focus was not at Home with all his additional projects going on.”
Those include a burger joint, speaking engagements and some sort of Top Chef reunion tour.
Restaurant management continues: "We will promote Jeff Wright to be the Executive Chef from Sous Chef. Jeff has been the backbone of the kitchen since day one and we are thrilled to have him lead the kitchen and continue with the incredible food the team and him put out every day.”
So, congratulations to Jeff Wright.

Apothéke

August 5

Here’s a theory for creating buzz at a party: Invite one big-name guest, only one, and simply have him just kind of hang around (or her, obviously, I mean, it’s 2008).
That theory was put forward to me last night by a publicist at the opening party of Apothéke, Albert Trummer’s new medieval-medical-treatment-themed bar in the very unlikely location of Chinatown on the little-known street of Doyers, which juts off of Pell and dumps out onto Bowery.
It’s a solid four blocks away from Winnie’s, which Thrillist’s David Blend guessed was the closest bar.
Four blocks might not seem far away if you don’t live in New York, but if you do, and you’re out drinking late at night, four blocks could be another planet.
So it’s a destination bar. Good thing Albert Trummer’s a famous cocktail maker — famous as cocktail makers go, at least.
The party was reasonably well attended as far as I could tell, mostly with people I didn’t know who were younger, taller, and better looking than I, which is what you want at a bar. A bongo player was doing his thing off to one side, riffing off of the canned music that was not quite drowning out conversation.
I hope the air-conditioner was on the fritz, because the last party I’d been to that was so stifling was the Beard Awards after-party at Bar Boulud.
And that’s interesting, because the one big-name guest (or the one that I recognized — maybe there were famous supermodels or DJs, or actors that I didn’t notice) was chef Daniel Boulud.
Coincidence? Well, yes. Of course.
A very tall and stupid blond woman stepped on me as I was trying to get a drink, but those are the perils of Fashion Week, which starts today. And really it was a friendly crowd, the drinks were creative and the bouncer was British. That, Daniel and a bongo. What more could you ask for?
Air-conditioning, I suppose, but nothing’s perfect.
Besides, I was already well-fed and slightly buzzed, having dined at Felidia with the publicist from the Peanut Advisory Board. She loves the chef there, Fortunato Nicotra, and he often submits recipes to her annual contest (recently he entered a dish of penne pasta with speck, radicchio and peanut pesto). We sat at the bar and basically ate the entire bar menu, plus whatever Fortunato felt like sending out, including a sort of peanut-butter-and-jelly flatbread topped with chocolate-cured foie gras.
Chocolate and foie gras might be a trend worth looking into. Pichet Ong was doing that at P*ong when I ate there recently: Foie gras with pineapple and an almost burnt dark chocolate crisp.
Fortunato also sent out seasonal things like batter-fried squash blossoms and stuffed zucchini, and cured ham with a mustard-peach sauce — obviously a play on traditional mostarda and something Fortunato does often, changing the fruit according to season.
Apothéke had seasonal drinks, too, including a watermelon Margarita — although I had watermelon-and-vodka instead because he was making that for a wafer-thin model who said she couldn’t “do” tequila.
She was a very nice wafer-thin model, who passed on to me a cocktail that had peppers and dill and other things that she deemed simply to be weird.
That was good news for me, because the bar had just run out of ice.

Food Writer’s Diary real estate brokerage

August 5

New Yorkers might know Willis Loughhead as the recently departed chef from Country. Miamians, or Miami’s tourists, might remember him from Tantra, a South Beach restaurant featuring aphrodisiac cuisine (laugh if you want, but the restaurant’s still open) where he was chef around the turn of the century, or from the Ritz-Carlton Coconut Grove, where, back in 2004, as part of the VIP turndown service, he would prepare five different flavored popcorns. The flavors rotated, but they included tomato, Parmesan, truffle, pistachio and chocolate.
He actually popped the truffle popcorn in a truffle oil — with white and black truffle peelings added — tossed it in butter and sprinkled it with Maldon sea salt, Parmesan cheese and julienne black truffle.
As a kid he took popcorn — tossed with M&Ms while still hot — to drive-in movies.
Anyway, now Willis is looking for a restaurant space, ideally in the West Village but anywhere south of 14th Street. He's hoping to open what is a essentially “a large local bar with good food as a perk” — 40 seats, say, in addition to a big bar. He’s thinking open kitchen, too.
So drop me a line (bthorn@nrn.com) if you have a space to rent. I’ll put you in touch.

People love talking about food

September 4

I looked in the mirror on Monday and saw what looked like a stream of blood leaking across my right eyeball.
I thought: Darn it! I'm having a stroke.
But then I remembered reading about these blood smears on the eyeball, and that, although they are hideous and make you look like you are possessed by the Devil, they are perfectly harmless, like bruises — bruises that give children nightmares.
It didn't hurt, and it didn't affect my vision, but still, you never know, so I called my ophthalmologist and set up an appointment for today.
I waited for half an hour and then he looked at me and told me that my smear was a subconjunctival hemorrhage.
“That’s harmless,” he said. He made sure I didn’t have any excessive pressure in my eye and then we talked about eggplant.
He had recently made the best caponata in his life, the key being to cook each of the ingredients separately, and to leave just a little bit of crunch in the peppers so you get contrasting textures.
I congratulated him on his caponata and talked about how I used to bake eggplant whole until the inside was mushy and then I’d add the mush to pasta sauces for vegetarian friends. It gives it nice heft and a nutty flavor.
Then I suggested that maybe he had other patients to see and he sent me off into the world to terrorize onlookers.

Gusto

September 3

Magdalena Spirydowicz made the astute observation last night that for new food writers, the focus is on the food, but that the more time you spend covering the industry, the more you end up writing about the chefs.
That was an appropriate topic for conversation as we were eating at Gusto, one of her clients, with her husband and photographer Michael Tulipan and Gina Pace, who until recently mostly wrote about crime. But now she writes about food, too. And other things.
We spoke a fair amount about the celebrity chef phenomenon, a topic that I think I’ve beaten to death on this blog, so let’s go right to what I ate and drank:

Fried Parmigiano balls with prosciutto
Zucchini blossoms stuffed with cheese and basil
Carciofi alla Giudea (fried artichokes, “Jewish style,” a traditional Roman dish whose name always cracks me up).
Focaccia with robiolina, tomatoes, arugula and Parmigiano
Fava bean salad with escarole, Pecorino-Romano, mint and basil
Grilled octopus with celery and black olives
2006 Villa Sparina Gavi di Gavi

Meatballs with pine nuts and raisins
Saffron orecchiette with pork ragù and crisp prosciutto
Pan-seared scallops with braised dandelion, lardo and reduced grape must (saba)
Bucatini with sardines, pine nuts and raisins
Risotto with peas, fava beans and pancetta
2005 Antano Montefalco Rosso

Roasted peaches with mascarpone and Amaretto (almonds being a cousin of the peach, the Amaretto really brought out the peach’s flavor)
Tartufo with pistachios, vanilla and chocolate ice cream
Assorted cannoli and biscotti
Espresso

Food Writer’s Diary job service

August 28

Chef Tom Block, who has been catering since March, is looking for a full-time job. He was chef de cuisine at Falai when he left in March, having been promoted from line cook to sous chef and then to chef de cuisine over the course of three years.
Before that he was garde-manger and then tournant at Aquavit. He’s done stages at Nobu in Tokyo and, here in New York, at Washington Park and P*ong.
Oh, he also studied cooking in Bangkok.
Write a comment below or e-mail me at bthorn@nrn.com if you’d like to talk to him.

Trying to be antisocial

August 28

On Tuesday night, as I was finishing up work to go to the carnivorefest that is Josh Ozersky’s annual birthday party, I got a call from a friend who was standing at the host’s station of Thor, where they were under the impression that we were to be dining on Wednesday. I checked my calendar, and they were right and my friend was wrong, so I imagine he wandered off to Katz's or someplace for a quick bite before heading to his neighborhood bar on the Upper East Side.
I went to Josh’s party. I think tomorrow is his last day at Grub Street. He’s going to work for Citysearch, which very reliable sources tell me “made [him] an offer [he] couldn't refuse.” I hope it wasn’t a horse’s head in his bed.
At any rate, Josh used the full force of his influence to get cool chefs to cook delicious meat, and convinced all of the usual suspects to show up (except for Eater’s Ben Leventhal, who was on vacation).
So that was fine, and I certainly wish Josh many happy returns of the day, but, I mean, I see all those people all the time, at all the parties, and I don’t have to get sand in my shoes at Water Taxi Beach, where Josh holds his shindig, to do it. Seamus Mullen’s terrific lamb burgers notwithstanding, I just wasn’t in the mood.
So I didn’t bother to find a replacement date for dinner at Thor and instead went solo, allowing me to be somewhat antisocial and focus on the food of the restaurant’s new chef, Jesi Solomon, whose food you might have eaten at The Stanton Social, not far from Thor, where he was a sous chef.
Jesi’s half Turkish and is originally from Tucson, which he told me when explaining the main dish I ordered, which was spiced rack of lamb on avocado purée with a feta chile relleno, garnished with fresh cilantro.
I also had white bean purée with olive oil and Parmesan, which came out with the bread, and a salad of fried artichoke with Parmesan and toasted coriander vinaigrette.
Coriander, the seed, not the leaf which we Americans usually call cilantro, is enjoying quite the little wave of popularity here in Gotham. Cilantro is, too, but that’s nothing new.
While I was eating my salad, publicist Chris Langley, looking trim and well-tanned from time in Nantucket and Cape Cod — sauntered over to hang out. Jesi sent out a couple of types of flatbread — one with smoked tomato and whipped feta and another with pulled pork — and Chris and I spoke of New England and other things. A friendly-sounding commotion at the bar motivated him to move up front and the server brought out some smoked cheese with figs and balsamic vinegar.
Then I had the lamb and was told by Jesi to have the peanut butter sundae with salted chocolate and caramelized banana.
I ended up having that at the table of Food & Beverage Magazine editor Francine Cohen and her husband Jake, who had asked me to join them. We discussed the state of modern Judaism and other things.
So the attempts at being antisocial didn’t work, but I enjoyed myself anyway.

Shrine

August 25

You can get to Foxwoods from New London, Conn., on a public bus for $2.25. The driver told me that mostly only employees take the bus — and it’s free for them as Foxwoods pays the tab — but it’s surely the cheapest way to get to the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation’s resort and casino.
Traffic was ghastly around Foxwoods last Saturday, though, because it was the weekend of the annual Schemitzun. That sounds like a Yiddish word to me, but in fact it’s the green corn festival.
At any rate I didn’t arrive at the hotel until 8, and I’d had reservations at Shrine at 7.
But of course one of the joys of being a food writer is that restaurants will likely hold your table for you. And I did call Shrine’s marketing manager, Shana Barry, with progress updates.
By the time I washed the train and bus grime off of me and looked presentable enough to go to dinner, it was 8:20, but a seat was available for me at the counter in front of the open kitchen. There Shana pointed out the restaurant’s three sushi chefs, and executive chef Edwyn Ferrari slid over periodically to bring me food and chat about it before sailing off to his next task. Pastry chef Martin Rainbacher was stationed in front of me for most of the evening, plating desserts and decorating birthday cakes and other pastries basically to order. He’s Austrian, and he talked a little about Arnold Schwarzenegger, who Martin says sounds as funny in German as he does in English. He also gave me a taste of Advocaaq, an Austrian egg liqueur that he made in-house. The way he described it it sounded like a strong egg-nog, but it tasted more like a cream liqueur.
I started dinner with an East Meets West — which basically was a Margarita with vodka as well as tequila (I guess that’s appropriate for the club crowd). I followed that with Harbin Lager, a fairly typical East Asian lager with odd marketing. The label said it was “Inspired by the Tradition and Culture of China’s Most Northern Province of Heilongjiang.”
Harbin is the capital of Heilongjiang, but who in the West cares? The beer itself is made in Wuhan in the south-Central province of Hubei. I’ve never been to Wuhan. I hear it’s getting better, but for many years it had the reputation of being a pit — perhaps the most boring of Communist-style, soulless concrete monstrosities. But again, who in the West knows that or cares? Who decided that Harbin was a sexier name for a beer than Wuhan?
I’ve been to Harbin, and believe me, it’s no Shangri-La. It is cold and has a pretty ice-lantern festival in February, both of which could invoke good feelings about the beer if anyone in the West knew about it, but they don’t.
Ed said business was good at Shrine, both the restaurant upstairs and the club downstairs. We talked about that, and about mutual friends, like Luke Palladino, who was executive chef at Specchio and Ombra at Borgata, where Ed was a chef at Mixx. We didn’t talk much about Ed, though, more about his food.
What I ate:
Fluke sashimi with cucumber, Saratoga water, lime, cardamom oil (made by infusing grape seed oil with cardamom; I'd never had it before) and poppy seeds
Panko crusted calamari with heirloom tomatoes and Thai beurre monté (with fish sauce, ginger, galangal, roasted peanuts, soy and lime)
Local (Rhode Island) steamed black bass with baby zucchini, carrot, tomatoes, leeks and chervil (I’m telling you it’s coming back) with tomato water, dashi and fish sauce (made from crab instead of fish) topped with ginger and ginger-carrot oil
Seared East Coast cod basted in ginger-garlic butter, served with summer ratatouille, sweet miso, olive oil, black pepper and fried Thai basil
Ginger-soy chicken marinated in yogurt, ginger and soy, charred and served with local corn succotash (with peas), cilantro and scallions
Sirloin, cut against the grain for more tenderness, seared in its own fat, sliced and served on a beefsteak tomato with lemon grass sambal (with shallot and Thai bird chile) and scallion radish salad
A mashed potato stick served with tonkatsu sauce and kewpie mayonnaise.
For dessert, Martin started me off with Asian-flavored fruit salad with cantaloupe granité, which he served with strawberry-infused sake. Next came a fried banana with sweet soy and almond praline, served with vanilla ice cream.
Finally he gave me a little square of caramelized chocolate-chile mousse with rosewater cherries.
After dinner Shana took me downstairs to the club. It was around 11 p.m. and the place had just opened, but it was pulsing with young and beautiful people who’d paid $20 to get in (cocktails were about $12 each).
Shrine had had more than 1,200 covers the night before and was expecting about the same this evening. The bottle-service tables had been reserved, the line outside stretched well into the casino and was comprised mostly of men (straight-looking ones) and very few women. I thought of pointing that out to them, but decided not to bother and after making a loop through the casino I called it a night, went to my room and shaved my head.
I'd been thinking of shaving my head for awhile now. A couple of friends have been bugging me to do it.
“Shave your head!” my friend Chandler Burr says from time to time, and I suggest maybe I will on some four-day weekend, in case it looks horrible.
Chandler then sneers at my cowardice and says I should just try it.
I posited the idea on my Facebook page, and the few people who commented pointed out that it was one of those few mistakes that would quickly be undone.
I’ve been thinking about this for years, and finally I just did it.
I was hoping it would be a transforming experience, that somehow beneath the quite thin veneer of hair that ringed the outside of my scalp (the rest having abandoned me 20 years ago), would emerge a great new look, that suddenly I would resemble Vin Diesel, or at the very least Bruce Willis.
But no, it’s just me, with a shaved head.

The week in drinking

August 22

I had fried rice for lunch today in an attempt to soak up the alcohol I've been drinking all week.
Human physiology doesn't work that way, and I know the alcohol is already out of my system, but I do feel invigorated, nonetheless, and ready for Jono Pandolfi’s birthday celebration this evening at Radegast Hall.
At any rate, it has been a boozy, boozy week. Monday, as you know, I had dinner at Forge, with something alcoholic paired with every course. Then Tuesday, as I mentioned, involved food, yes, but also drinks (something with absinthe, then a beer, then, at Bridge Cafe, a New York State rye and a Scottish lowlands single malt).
And then on Wednesday all hell broke loose, as can happen when I go drinking with my colleagues. Executive editor Richard Martin was in town, and that’s always cause for celebration, so I met with him and a bunch of other NRN staff members at Papillon and I chatted with the gang while drinking Jack Daniels with one ice cube, as is fashionable these days.
Macho drinkers would order their whisky straight-up, but in fact the subtle aromatics of brown spirits are released better with just a splash of water, hence the single ice cube. Of course, people with brains should drink whatever they like however they like. If you enjoy your Jack Daniels with tomato juice, go ahead and drink it that way.
I had to peel off from there and go to a party at the Royalton celebrating Veev, a new açaí infused spirit. Açaí is probably the hippest fruit out there because it has a lot of antioxidants.
But of course all fruits and vegetables have antioxidants and we should eat a wide variety of them as often as we can. Going out of our way to consume one specific fruit is simple-minded. And drinking alcohol for health reasons, well, that’s so dumb it leaves me speechless.
Veev’s marketers have all sorts of other claims about how morally good it is — it’s green and kind to children and who knows what else. But managing partner Carter Reum seemed like a nice guy, the cocktails tasted good and marketing is such an important aspect of what people decide to drink that I can’t fault the Veev people for trying to set themselves apart.
I had a really fun chat with Pierrick Chouard, founder and chocolatier of Vintage Plantations, which is a politically correct chocolate that was being served at the party. It’s Rainforest Alliance certified and vegan and gluten free and blah blah blah blah. It tasted good, though, and Pierrick, a Frenchman who went to high school in Japan and, being a foreign service brat, grew up all over the planet, was very engaging. I drank several cocktails so I’m not completely sure what exactly we spoke about, but I remember that he had a complex understanding of labor policies and a refreshing sophistication in his philosophy about how things should be run.
And, as I said, his chocolate tastes good. They were passing around chocolates flavored with tree-tomato, a fruit Pierrick had sourced in South America. I said I thought they were the same thing as tamarillos, but when I described them he said his tree-tomatoes were different. Maybe so.
I kind of remember someone putting a bracelet made of açai seeds on my wrist. In the morning I was wearing two of them. Hmm.
Then last night I had dinner with the bright, engaging and quite tall Blain Howard.
When I met Blain he was a restaurant publicist, but now he does PR for video games and so we can be friends.
I have nothing against restaurant publicists (except for the incompetent ones) and I'm friendly with most of the ones I work with, but of course they have to be nice to me; it’s their job. Equal relationships can’t really develop that way. So restaurant publicists who are actual friends of mine were friends before they became publicists. The rest are friendly work associates, or something.
Anyway, Blain’s a fun-loving, good-natured, rugby-playing, former mixed martial arts practitioner who shares similar taste in television with me (except that he watches Top Chef). He does things that I find fascinating, like periodically get into bar fights.
I told Blain of the story when I almost got my head kicked in outside of a bar in Bangkok:
I’m usually a friendly, good-natured drunk, but for some reason on that particular steamy night in Bangkok I was feeling surly, and entirely unprovoked I called a little Thai bar worker a monitor lizard.
In Thai, that’s about as grave an insult as you can hurl at someone. And so naturally he stood up to do me harm.
As I said, he was a little bar worker, but lots of Thais, perhaps most but maybe not, are shorter than I am, but they’re also wiry, and those who work in bars are accustomed to inflicting pain if necessary. So of course I immediately apologized, professed my drunkenness and was let off the hook.
I was also almost beat up in Bangkok by a giant Australian, who was hanging out in the guest house where my friend and work colleague James Eckardt lived. He just seemed like he was in the mood to beat someone up and I, being a smart-ass, seemed as good a target as any. But I somehow managed to de-escalate and convince him that I was an amusing little fellow.
He did lift me, and the chair I was sitting in, up in the air, which is impressive and terrifying.
Stories of terrifying Australians was appropriate last night, as we were eating at Bondi Road, an Australian-themed restaurant on the Lower East Side, where all of the staff is from the Antipodes.
Blain in turn told stories of his reality-TV friends. Apparently if you’re in a reality TV show in Los Angeles you end up getting to know all of the other reality TV people, and Blain was friends with one of them, so he met the rest. While drinking with some of them in a bar, he had to get up and punch someone once. He’d been having a bad day and the guy wouldn’t shut up.
I guess that’s an option if you’re a 6'4" rugby-playing mixed martial arts practitioner.
I expressed gratitude for the existence of Joe Pesci, or really Tommy DeVito, his character in Goodfellas, who reinforced the notion that little guys can be wild creatures who might just suddenly go snake on you and tear a hole where you didn’t have one previously.
It’s good to keep people guessing.
What we ate:

Classic oysters Kilpatrick (baked bluepoints on the half shell, dressed with bacon and Worcestershire sauce)
Barbecue shrimp and watermelon salad with feta in lemon-mustard vinaigrette
Baby scallop rigatoni with asparagus and porcini
Shark and roasted beets
Barramundi and chips
King George whiting over garlic mushrooms and pea purée
Tasmanian ocean trout over roasted ratatouille and roasted-tomato sauce
Breaded "roo fillet," which is to say chicken-fried kangaroo, with arugula salad and sweet cherry dressing
Fruit pavlova

And cocktails, beer, wine, whisky &tc.

Prospect Lefferts Barbecue

August 22

If I want barbecue in the little Brooklyn neighborhood of Prospect Lefferts Gardens, I visit my friend and colleague Milford Prewitt, who makes delicious barbecue (and in fact fed it to me and my colleagues last weekend; my boss Pam Parseghian brought delicious cole slaw).
But apart from being a great cook, a charming host and a really talented house fixer upper, Milford is also a terrific journalist and active neighbor, and so he has learned the following about a barbecue joint that the owners of Enduro on Lincoln Road hope to open in the space next door to their current restaurant (this was first mentioned in the blog Hawthorne Street):
It will be called Richard’s Barbecue, will have 100-110 seats and will probably focus on St. Louis-style food, although they haven’t decided for sure yet. They hope to open it in December.

Forge

August 21

Quite apart from the minor hullabaloo I managed to stir up over at eater.com, which was fun enough (wow, anonymous commenters embarrass themselves with their ignorance), it’s been a good week.
On Monday night I had dinner at Forge with publicist Jennifer Baum. We’ve known each other for years and years and probably last dined together at Citarella, back when it was a restaurant.
Boy did we gossip, and you'll hear none of it, thank you very much. But we also spoke of family and politics. I said my 12-year-old niece Tahirah and nine-year-old nephew Harrison surely understand that you can't invade a country and impose democracy from above, and Jennifer was sure that her seven-year-old son Griffon, an avid Obama-supporter, would easily arrive at that conclusion as well.
And we also reflected on the rarefied world we live in, in which chefs like Marc Forgione come out of the kitchen and ask if they can cook for us. I actually have a number of friends who would roll their eyes and ask if we can please just have a simple meal and escape from the restaurant at a reasonable hour.
Since I’m supposed to spot trends, I of course am happy to have the chef serve whatever he wants. What he chooses to cook tells me what he thinks is his trendiest, best or most interesting stuff. Ditto with wine pairings. Let the sommelier pick and you can see what he or she thinks is the coolest stuff in the cellar (that can affordably be poured for media).
By the way, I wrote a profile of Marc back in mid-2005, when he was chef de cuisine of BLT Prime, which had just opened. I asked him where he’d like to be in five years, and he said: "I'd like to open a small restaurant in New York City, but we'll see what happens. My dream: 75-seat restaurant; four, five people in the kitchen. My food."
Forge has 81 seats.
And this is what Marc had to say on Monday:

Tomato consommé gelée over grilled corn-basil salad
Scrambled egg and American caviar
Nueske bacon, heirloom tomato and smoked onion rémoulade with three types of basil and a black pepper crouton
Wild kampachi tartare with avocado, red radish, American caviar and Saratoga chips.
Chilled watermelon soup with jumbo lump crab and wild flower honey
Black pepper linguine with 24-hour veal breast, smoked ricotta and summer squash
Basil crusted halibut with marinated cherry tomatoes and sorrento oil
A meat tasting, including suckling pig leg as well as loin (the loin isn't on the menu) as well as hanger steak au poivre and Colorado lamb with cocoa beans.
Basil mashed potatoes, cole slaw with mustard oil and other sides
Peach upside-down cake with sweet corn ice cream and caramel corn
Plum jelly doughnuts with lemon verbena crème anglaise
Yogurt panna cotta with black mission fig, marcona almond and Pedro Jimenez reduction

Idle gossip about New York restaurant openings

August 20

Brad Blum, who in the past was a big executive at Darden (which owns Olive Garden, Red Lobster etc.) and Burger King, is opening restaurants of his own in New York. Rumors say he’s opening an “American Deli” of some sort in Williamsburg, and also — perhaps as soon as in two to three weeks — a place on Union Square, possibly near Heartland Brewery. One rumor monger told us it was going to be Italianish, but Mr. Blum's PR flak said it wouldn’t be Italian, but wouldn’t say anything else because she promised an exclusive to someone else [update: previously I said it was Florence Fabricant of the Times, but my colleague corrected me; he said he asked the publicist if it was Florence and she just laughed].
That’s a common practice, but it’s still rude to other journalists, so I thought I’d just throw the information out there.
I actually met Randy McNamara, Heartland’s vice president of operations, last night at Spiegel Tent, where my friend Ben Schmerler, who does PR for Heartland (which runs Spiegelworld’s foodservice), was hosting several NRNers. McNamara said he didn't know anything about Brad Blum opening a new restaurant nearby.
At any rate, two of my colleagues here at Nation’s Restaurant News, Paul Frumkin and Elissa Elan, just headed to Union Square to knock on doors and find out what they can find out.

Stay tuned...

In other news, Ben just landed Murray’s Cheese as a client, so congratulations to him.

Cocktail for the US Open

August 18

Why haven’t I heard this cocktail name before? It's so brilliant, yet so obvious.
In celebration of the US Open, the Wheeltapper, at the Fitzpatrick Hotel in Manhattan, is offering a variety of specially-named menu items, including the Martini Navratilova.
It's actually a Cosmopolitan with a splash of pomegranate juice (“to keep it healthy” the press release says).
But surely someone can think of a more interesting drink for such a great athlete.
Your suggestions are welcome.

Mushrooms at Blue Hill

August 15

Bob Tam is no longer corporate chef at PF Chang’s. That’s one of many things I learned last night when eating with a bunch of chefs and mushroom promoters at Blue Hill.
The mushroom board's publicist, my old friend Alexei Rudolf, had e-mailed me asking for suggestions for restaurants (“Strong mushroom capabilities preferred”) where he could take a collection of chefs. I didn’t suggest Blue Hill (I have nothing against the place, but my restaurant suggestions tend to be off-the-cuff and Blue Hill just wasn’t top-of-mind on that day), but Alexei picked it anyway and invited me to join them for dinner. So I did.
The last time I’d eaten at Blue Hill was for a media luncheon showcasing Kona Kampachi, another of Alexei’s clients.
I drank Gruner-Veltliner and Pinot Noir as I sat across from Bob Okura, Cheesecake Factory’s corporate chef (he tells me that their new Southeast Asian restaurant, Rock Sugar, is doing better than expected and is projected to gross $8-$10 million in its first year, which is a lot — but remember he’s the corporate chef, not the money guy). Sitting next to him was Monica Pope, chef-owner of t'afia, the politically correct, organic, sustainable green restaurant in Houston. It was nice to see her hanging out with the chain guys. She extolled the virtues of Momofuku Ssäm bar’s Brussels sprouts and the carrot salad at The Spotted Pig, while Bob spoke of many things, including his wife's love for Korean soap operas.
Good times.
As the evening wound down Alexei moved over to my table, along with PF Chang's publicist Laura Cherry, with whom I'd worked over the phone for years, but we'd never met in person. So that was cool. We finished the wine as Blue Hill's staff closed up, and then we went next door to the Stoned Crow for a nightcap. Laura had an Abslolut Citron and soda, Alexei had an Absinthe. I had a Brooklyn Lager.

What we ate at Blue Hill:

A cold tomato soup that chef Dan Barber didn't want to call gazpacho, topped with a sort of foamy tomato water sorbet
Prosperosa eggplant Parmesan with portobello mushrooms
This morning's farm egg with local corn, roasted maitake and king trumpet mushrooms and Stone Barns Tuscan kale
Stone Barns Berkshire pork with shiitake and blue foot mushrooms, lima beans and tomatoes
Raspberries on cheesecake with raspeberry sorbet (and no mushrooms)

celebrating bread

August 14

Thanks to Gael Greene, people following the New York food scene know that Jean-Georges Vongerichten is investing in a pizza place with Sullivan St Bakery’s Jim Lahey. Conveniently, Mr. Lahey has just brought on a new publicist, who e-mailed me to tell me he was the new publicist.
Normally I hate that — publicists telling me they have a new client. What do I care? When you have something to say about that client, let me know.
But this client is in the news, so I didn’t mind at all. In fact, I asked the publicist about the new pizzeria, and now I’ll pass his response on to you because I know you’re interested in this sort of thing:

Hi Bret,

To clarify, Jean-Georges is only an investor in the project. He has no control over the management and Jim’s vision for menu and design will be carried out. (But, not a bad person to have believe in you, right?).

The menu is still being conceptualized, but it will celebrate bread, which can be anything from bread-based foods to those foods that pair well with bread. Once we have definitive details of an opening date and a menu, you’ll be among the first to know...

Margarita tragedy

August 13

Our world is plagued with many tragedies — genocide, epidemics, calamitous hurricanes and tsunamis.
Getting Margarita splashed on you is not a tragedy. It’s funny. If the worst thing that happens to you in a day is having Margarita splashed on you, that’s a good day. A great one, in fact. Even if the Margarita gets on your handbag.
Someone was not aware of that last night at the Stone Rose in the Time Warner Center, where I was invited to witness and participate in the bar’s make-your-own-Margarita bottle service. For the price of a bottle, plus $40 for all-you-can-eat chips and guacamole and all-you-can-use mixers, and salt, and lime slices, a hostess will show your table how to make Margaritas, and then you can have at it.
A bottle of Patrón tequila would be $350, so the whole thing, before tax and tip, would be $390.
Personally, I don’t think you need to invest in Patrón to make a good Margarita, but I’m not the target market for bottle service. If I didn’t want bartenders to make my drinks for me, I’d stay at home.
Anyway, most of the people at my table seemed to write for the sort of socialite-fashion publications that target people who might like bottle service. One of them brought a date. The date was a newcomer to New York and he was trying to fit in, and doing so just fine, but when he was getting ready to shake his Margarita he forgot to put the little cap on the shaker and doused the humorless woman who brought him with unmixed tequila, Cointreau and house made sour mix of lime and simple syrup (theoretically you can have it made with agave nectar or even stevia if you ask, although I asked about stevia and they didn’t seem to know what I was talking about).
She didn’t like that. She excused herself, I would guess to go to the bathroom and clean herself up, and came back a few minutes later to inform her poor date that they were leaving.
She was really mad, especially, it seemed, because it got on her handbag.
Imagine the ruckus she’d raise if someone committed genocide on her.

Anybody want a Pinkberry?

August 13

I got a voice mail this morning from Pinkberry’s corporate office. Apparently when I called them to interview them for an article I was writing about the latest frozen yogurt phenomenon they put me on the wrong list and thought I was interested in being a franchisee.
They're now accepting applications.
I thought you might want to know.

Gracie’s

August 12

Ah Rhode Island, such a crazy little pocket universe, with its own little mafia, dialect, cuisine (can you say coffee milk?) and fascinating lack of interest in the rest of the world.
They say quahog (pronounced co-hog), like everyone in the world knows what that is.
It's a large, meaty clam.
Quahog’s also the Rhode Island town where The Family Guy takes place, but unlike South Park, which really is a town in Colorado, there is no Rhode Island town called Quahog.
That Family Guy fact is one of the many things I learned at the Beard House last night, where Joseph Hafner of Gracie’s in Providence was cooking. A couple of kids from Star Chefs were at my table, too, and Michael Goldman, the publisher of HauteLife Press, which does custom publishing for restaurants etc. It turns out that Michael is a neighbor of mine and holds similar disdain for the haters at the Park Slope food co-op and the smug people at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket who will buy whatever garbage the farmers put in front of them. In fact, we both believe that the farmers, not being stupid, have figured that out and save their worst produce for that particular market.
Except for the grape people. I love them. And Evolutionary Organics — hate the name, love the greens.
I sat next to Gracie’s publicist, Ann Martini, whose main job is actually producing firefighter calendars for charity. She taught me how to pronounce her native state’s name properly (Ruh-DYE-lund).

What I ate and drank:

Hors d’oeuvres:
Foie gras and duck heart mousse with red onion marmalade
Point Judith bluefish rillettes and tomato crumpets
Mayonnaise biscuits with salty ham, red pepper jelly and Grafton cheddar
Gazpacho with Jonah crab and tiny tomatoes
Champagne Duval — Leroy Design Paris Brut, NV

Tuna Niçoise terrine with haricots verts, golden wax beans, triple cooked potatoes, Re Manfredi first press olive oil, tomato water and Eva's pea tendrils
Domaine de l'Hortus Rosé de Saignée, 2007

Brown butter-and-potato gnocchi with provolone mandarone, summer truffles and herbs
Joseph Drouhin Beaune Clos ds Mouches Blanc, 2005

Crisp softshell crab with salad of nasturtium flower and leaf, heirloom tomatoes and Rhode Island corn agnolottie
vPaslcal Jolivet Château de Noizay Sancerre, 2006

Intermezzo: Frozen Cherry Lemonade

Veal Two Ways: Grass-fed veal roulade with country bacon and sage, and crisp sweetbreads with peppadew gastrique and creamed garlic fondue
Louis Latour Château Corton Grancey Grand Cru, 2003

Dancing Cow Farmstead Sarabande with figs and Ken's honey
Lustau Solera Reserva dry oloroso Don Nuño sherry

Baked Rhode Island: Coffee milk rocky road ice cram, Kenyon's Johhncake and marshmallow meringue
W & J Graham’s 40-year-old tawny port

What’s next for Chris Cheung?

August 7

The legion of people obsessed with the New York restaurant scene already know that Graydon Carter has bought Monkey Bar, where Chris Cheung was the chef.
I called Chris. He was at the restaurant.
“We’re cleaning it up for Mr. Carter,” he said. “Everything has actually been shipped off on the trucks.” The whole place will be vacated in the next day or so.
But Chris is still working for the Glazier Group, which sold the restaurant to Carter. Chris said they’re still trying to decide what to do with him — maybe give him a corporate position, although Chris says he’d ultimately like to be back in a restaurant where he can showcase his food.
“It’s a pretty good time to look at all your options, I guess.”
He said company principal Peter Glazier has kept most of the staff on the payroll and is figuring out what to do with them.

More about Chris Chueng.

Terrible writing, or the worst writing I’ve ever seen?

August 7

Seriously, alliteration is not good writing. In fact, it often makes a perfectly readable sentence hokey.
And big words don’t make you seem smart.
My comments are bracketed below. I added the boldface.

Dear Bret ,

We at [a consulting company that does not respect the English language] facilitate public relations practitioners [read: help publicists] to reach the right contact and pitch their relevant stories. Most of our persistent PR professionals are continually keen on getting your current details on outlets/publications you are associated with, current job title, the latest topics you cover and essentially your preferred mode of communication. Hence [hence?] I request to [read: please] send the above mentioned information to [e-mail, fax and mailing address withheld for obvious reasons].
If the said information is available on the Web, feel free to simply send us the link.

[I was thinking of suggesting Google].


The message was signed by the senior vice president for projects, and that left me speechless.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Journalists make their living by using words. We get offended when they are used badly.

Ambience Chaser

Please join me in welcoming NRN’s newest blog, Ambience Chaser. It’s written by my soft-spoken but quietly brilliant colleague Elizabeth Licata, whose humor you will very likely enjoy and whose insights you’ll no-doubt appreciate. Already she has a video of a magical expanding table, as well as an appreciation for blowing things up.
What more could you ask for?

Department of Redundancy Department

July 31

My summer drink of choice is iced coffee — black, unsweetened. It tastes like cold anger, and for some reason that appeals to me when it's hot outside.
In the two (2) blocks from my subway stop to our offices, there are five (5) chain restaurants and at least two independents where I can get iced coffee. At Dunkin’ Donuts I order a large black iced coffee, they ask if I want sugar, I tell them I don’t.
At Pret à Manger I order a black iced coffee, because they only have one size of iced coffee. They get it without discussion and wish me well.
At Starbucks I order a venti unsweetened iced coffee, and the baristas can't help themselves: They have to add another "iced" to the drink’s description when announcing that it’s ready.
“Iced venti unsweetened iced coffee,” they say.
I kind of understand why that happens, because all languages have a sort of rhythm, and that includes Starbucks language, with its invented definitions of things like macchiato, its own internal distinction between latte and cappuccino, its use of “venti,” from the Italian word for 20, to mean “large,” even though a venti iced drink there is 24 ounces. "Iced venti unsweetened iced coffee" has a nice little rhythm that "venti unsweetened iced coffee” doesn’t, although that certainly flows better than “iced venti unsweetened coffee.”
So I guess it’s good Starbucks language. You could even argue that the first “iced” is meant to go with the “venti” to describe the cup size, and then the second “iced” describes the temperature of the drink.
Even so, it’s bad English.
Double use of the same word in a sentence is kind of an old joke. I first heard it probably in the early 1980s with the phrase that is the title of this blog entry, possibly from George Carlin.
The gag was used quite effectively in the 2004 movie Dodgeball. That game is, of course, the province of thugs and bullies who delight in causing pain to those who are smaller, slower and weaker than they are, and can think of no more clever way to do it than to fling balls at them. So naturally its advocates and historians — which all sports have — are dimwits who declare that true dodgeballers must learn the five d’s of the sport: dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge.
Because they’re stupid, you see. So stupid they can’t remember five distinct words. As stupid as rabbits. (You might recall in the novel Watership Down that the runt of the litter is named Fiver. The book’s appendix explains that rabbits can only count to four, and so Fiver might not have been the fifth rabbit in the litter, but the last one — that five in the mind of a rabbit is equivalent to a thousand.)
The gag has been repeated again recently, in Joss Whedon’s viral video phenomenon Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, in which Dr. Horrible, played by Neil Patrick Harris, is aspiring to join the Evil League of Evil, which as far as I can tell is a cabal of the sorts of social misfits who would be on the losing end of a dodgeball game. They’re anarchists, but they’re not stupid, and certainly clever enough to notice that “evil” is used twice in their club’s four-word name.
But it does sound good, doesn’t it?
Evil League of Evil, iced venti unsweetened iced coffee. Part of the same linguistic shift? You decide.
Speaking of Starbucks and other chain restaurants, please allow me to link to a story in this week’s Nation’s Restaurant News about customers’ reactions to New York City’s new regulation requiring chain restaurants to post calorie information on their menus and menu boards.
I certainly hope you enjoy it.
Food-in-film note: Dr. Horrible buys a frozen yogurt for his love interest, Penny (who of course is infatuated with his nemesis, Captain Hammer). He pretends he was given two yogurts when he only ordered one, because he’s so shy, so insecure, that he couldn’t possibly risk the rejection that could come from showing enough interest in Penny to buy her a snack.
It looks like a Pinkberry-style yogurt, plain and tart. Inexplicably, they eat it with a spork, allowing Dr. Horrible to stab himself in the leg with it in frustration.

August 18 update: “I-V-I-C,” my Starbucks barista said to me today, handing me my venti iced coffee. I repeated it back to him, but as a question.
“Iced venti iced coffee,” he said, as though I were dumb.
I pointed out that both of the i's stood for “iced” and that he only needed one of them.
He was convinced that I was slow, but said, with clarity, politeness and a smile on his face: “One for the cup, one for the coffee.”
So I was right. I have innate knowledge of Starbucks language even though I have never worked there. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Bún again

July 29

Michael Bao Huynh is still at Bún, kind of, or perhaps as much as he ever was, I’m not sure.
“He’s my brother,” said Tony Lam, who owns the place and does the food. Huynh’s a partner there, but his day-to-day involvement is minimal, except perhaps when Tony’s out of town. And maybe not then, either. (click here if you’re curious about this topic, otherwise read on as I am about to change the subject).
Because although Tony conceptualizes the food, he trains cooks to cook. He doesn’t do it himself.

Bún has a new publicist (Susan Rike), and often with a new publicist comes a new round of press dinners.
Susan’s press-dinner style is to round up four to eight journalists and bring them all to dinner at once, in a group. She tends to do three such dinners per restaurant.
Group dinners can, of course, be deadly, but there’s always the off-chance that you’ll meet someone interesting at them, and I have met a number of interesting people at Susan Rike dinners. She tends to draw an eclectic group.
I already knew (and like) the three other journalists at dinner last night, and so I could focus on getting to know Tony Lam, the Sino-Vietnamese owner, born in Saigon, spending formative years living in and then running refugee camps in Malaysia, and then going to college and becoming a merchant.
Tony kind of reminded me of my former boss and (former) guru Pansak Vinyaratn, who ran the magazine, and later the newspaper, that I worked for in Bangkok. He would wax philosophical about things and discuss them in mercurial ways that made you wonder whether he was really smart, borderline crazy or just messing with you.
But I ended up staying and listening to him talk about his approach to ambient music and his food background until after the other journalists had left, and until after Susan had left.
After dessert of pandan panna cotta (very much like the bay leaf panna cotta I had at Fireside; this might be a trend) and sweet coconut-banana tapioca, he ordered some cuttlefish for me to try.
Tony served us lots of things that weren't on the menu, including raw green guava (underripe, the way they like it in Southeast Asia) with dried plum powder. That was sort of an intermezzo after the sweet-and-sour fish, if I remember correctly, which actually came after the lamb chops with eggplant, pear chutney and anise sauce.
Tony also interspersed the menu with drinks, including a couple of flaming shots that we were supposed to drink quickly through straws. The problem with that is that if you're not quick about it your drink tastes like melting plastic, but I was quick.
We also had a pretty remarkable Piña Colada flavored with crushed mint, giving it a cooling effect that somehow was in no way minty. In a cocktail that I think he called the Poison Ruby, lychee liqueur was made to taste even more lychee-like with the addition of rosewater.
Who knew?

Speaking of Mexican food…

... but really otherwise à propos of nothing, I was talking to a friend the other day who had just had tacos from a place with a weird name he couldn’t remember that he assumed was a local New York joint trying to copy Chipotle.
I asked him if it was Qdoba.
“That's it!” he said.
So I broke the news to him that Qdoba is in fact a national chain just like Chipotle is. Indeed, both are based in Denver. I didn’t break down the differences in the concepts — that Chipotle has a much simpler menu, all developed by its founder and president, Steve Ells, and all of the restaurants are company-owned, whereas Qdoba is largely franchised and has an evolving menu under the stewardship of strategic product development director Ted Stoner.
Isn’t that a great name for someone who develops burritos?
“Dude! I totally need a queso burrito, dude. Can you put some ancho chile barbecue sauce on that, brah?”
Sorry Ted, I'm sure you’ve heard it all before.

Trixters, fajitas and a drink named mitch — oh, and the end of the world

July 24

Mercadito Cantina doesn’t have a full liquor license, just one for beer and wine, so drink consultants Tad Carducci and Paul Tanguay, the Tippling Bros., had to get clever.
I was early last night for my dinner there, so while I waited for my friend Andy Battaglia, Tad gave me the low-down on the tric-quila.
You know how tequila has sort of a spicy bite to it? Well, sake doesn’t, so they added chiles, white and black pepper and Sichuan peppercorns to it to simulate that bite. Tad poured me a taste. It’s pretty cool. Kind of tequila-like. It's used to make what the restaurant calls “Mentirosas,” which I think means liars or tricksters, because there’s not really any tequila in them.
I started with a Paper Daisy, which is made with lime, agave nector and orange flower essence (and tric-quila) and is meant to taste like a Margarita.
Andy was right on time and I asked him if his friends pretty much thought the world was going to end soon, maybe today or tomorrow (or the day after).
He said that indeed some of his friends were gloomy.
That’s going around a lot these days, and neither Andy nor I were able to determine exactly why people think things are so much worse now than over the past several thousand years (or past 500 million years, if you get right down to it). Remember how we were all going to die from avian flu a couple of years ago, and how Y2K was going to make planes fall out of the sky at the turn of the millennium? That's not to say the current dangers of economic collapse, environmental disaster, global political instability etc. aren’t legit, but those things are always around. Doesn’t anyone remember the Cold War? DDT? Thalidomide? The Second World War? The Great Depression? Hasn’t anyone read about the deaths of almost the entire population of North America from small pox in the 16th Century, the death of half of Europe from the Bubonic Plague in the 14th Century?
Can anyone in the developed world even imagine a cholera epidemic?
How about the asteroid that killed all the dinosaurs?
I’m truly sorry that the polar bears are in trouble. I really am. But that’s not going to keep me from enjoying my tacos and taquiza.
A taquiza is Mercadito Cantina’s version of a fajita. It’s served in corn tortillas rather than flour ones along with a choice of salsas, onions, cilantro and lime.
We had the chef pick the food for us (I’m not sure whether it was chef-owner Patricio Sandoval or chef de cuisine Ivan Garcia, because the place was packed and so he understandably didn’t come out to chat). He sent out the carne asada taquiza (grass-fed skirt steak, marinated with hoja santa) along with the salsa verde and the salsa de cacahuate (peanut).
He also sent out some head-on shrimp marinated in roasted garlic, and two types of tacos: estilo Baja, which had beer-battered shrimp, roasted habanero, avocado and cole slaw; and the pescado (tilapia in this case) with a poblano chile-tomato-garlic mojo.
We had three types of guacamoles: traditional, chipotle (also with pineapple, pico de gallo and mint), and sandia (watermelon with habanero peppers, epazote and pico de gallo).
And three salsas with crispy cornbread bites: Veracruzana (roasted tomato, capers, pickled jalapeños), habanero (with grilled tomato, garlic, lemon and crema fresca, as well as habanero chiles), and chipotle (with roasted tomatillo and garlic).
We also sampled another Mentirosa, the Papa Low, made from passion fruit, an herb called papalo, jalapeño, salt and pepper. And we had a couple of Miches (prounounced "mitches"), which are the Tipplong Bros. riff on the Michelada, a sort of Mexican Bloody Mary made with beer instead of vodka. It’s not nearly as gross as it sounds.
I had the ker~mich, made with cucumber, hoja santa, agave nectar, cumin and salt. Andy had the happy~mich, made with watermelon, lime, hot sauce (it says salsa picante on the menu, which sounds a lot better and means hot sauce), and hibiscus.

Chef's Garden

July 21

We really, really did not want Marcel Vigneron to win the cook-off last weekend.
I was in Milan (MY-lun), Ohio at the Chef’s Garden Food & Wine Celebration, the annual fundraiser for Veggie U, a program to teach elementary school kids how to grow vegetables. It’s a great cause, you can’t argue with it at all, and the Jones family, which runs Chef’s Garden, are such nice people that you want to help them. So when they asked me to help judge the cook-off, I said I would.
Of course, they provided transportation and accommodation. And in fact it was transportation on Viking Corporation’s private jet, accommodation at the Cleveland Ritz-Carlton. So it wasn’t a sacrifice.
Veggie U’s a charity, but Chef’s Garden isn’t. It’s a very high-end purveyor of precious little herbs and vegetables. We (six other passengers and I, including two guys from the The Food Network, journalists from Saveur and Food Arts, chef Joël Antunes and my fellow judge, Jody Eddy, who is the brand new editor of Art Culinaire) were picked up by Bob Jones, the family patriarch, who sets the aw-shucks tone of the family.
The entire Jones family persona, you see, is so folksy and down-to-earth that it would be a parody if they weren’t absolutely sincere about it.
Bob said something to the effect of “Hi folks, gosh I’m sure glad you’re here. I’m just a senile old man who’s come here to pick you up. My kids don’t let me out too often, so I hope I don’t mess this up.”
See, Bob Jones is the founder of this multi-million dollar company that has something like 130 employees and charges a king’s ransom for tiny little microgreens and precious little vegetables. And many, maybe most, of the top chefs all over the country gladly pay for it. They use top-of-the-line technology to analyze their soil quality, have designed their own ergonomically sound farm equipment for ease in working the land, and are starting to do DNA testing for dangerous types of salmonella and e. coli.
They have weeding machines that shield their laborers — Mexicans who are paid about $11 an hour, have work visas and are flown by Chef’s Garden to and from Mexico annually — from the sun as they lie on their stomachs inches above the soil and pick weeds as the machines move over the crops. It’s quite cool.
It was Bob’s idea, after his more conventional vegetable crop was wiped out by a hailstorm and he was driven to bankruptcy, to rebuild by growing food to the specifications of chefs.
That’s the story told by Lee Jones, Bob’s son and the face of the company, whom I’ve written about here before. His brother, Bob aka Bobby, does the planting while Lee does the marketing.
Lee seems still to be under the impression that he’s helping to run a small family farm. Again, this would be crazy if he didn’t believe it.
So that’s the Joneses, this was the Veggie U Food & Wine Celebration (held near Chef’s Garden, which is in Huron, Ohio, at the Culinary Vegetable Institute — a sort of chef’s retreat and test kitchen), and Jody and I (and a chef and writer named Fred Mensinga) were judging a cook-off.
Okay, actually, the day before the fundraiser was the Chefs Summit, which is mostly a series of 20-minute cooking demonstrations by chefs, including Will Goldfarb, pictured here with his almost-three-year-old daughter Lulu, who was helping him. So was the local volunteer, pictured on the right. It’s worth noting that nearly all of the chefs who did demonstrations did something with molecular gastronomy. Will did many things with molecular gastronomy, but that’s part of his schtick. He and Lulu made a pomegranate-beet mousse using some of his hydrocolloids, his point being that using great products and the latest techniques are in no way contradictory but in fact go hand-in-hand, and that by using a few grams of powder you can really highlight those products at their most pristine (unless you just eat them raw).
And it’s so easy a three-year-old can do it.
While all of this was going on, I got the chance to get to know Joël Antunes, who recently moved from Atlanta to New York to be the chef at The Oak Room, which is scheduled to reopen later this year.
The picture of Joël, on the left, is an old one that was used in the 2001 profile that my former colleague, the late, great Jack Hayes, wrote of him.
But he looks about the same now.
Joël (his surname is Basque, and is pronounced an-tu-NESS) spent much of his childhood in sub-Saharan Africa, where his father worked for Michelin (the division that makes tires, not guidebooks) and bought rubber. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, he spent about four years in Bangkok, where he worked at The Oriental hotel, at Le Normandie restaurant, in the same position that Jean-Georges Vongerichten held before him. There he raced motorcycles and otherwise enjoyed himself before returning to the West. He’s very cool, and I’m looking forward to The Oak Room opening.
Jody Eddy is very cool, too. She was a cook, and among the places she worked was The Fat Duck, so she has an opinion about molecular gastronomy. She pointed out to me that it could take Fat Duck chef Heston Blumenthal and his team two years to develop a dish. Other chefs try to rush the process, which is why the results are sometimes so bad.
But she doesn’t seem to take that very seriously, and she has a chef’s stamina for partying, sleep deprivation and salty language. We were engaging in the last of those while much of the cook-off was going on, the one that we (and Fred) didn’t want Marcel Vigneron to win.
Because Top Chef is stupid. Well, okay, maybe not stupid. It’s entertaining enough if you like that sort of thing, but we don’t. It’s the celebrity chef phenomenon at its most banal, its fans seem to care more about personalities than food, so the show (or to be fair, its fans) fosters the sort of celebrity chefdom that degrades and distorts what working in a professional kitchen is all about.
And he was competing against the delightful Celina Tio, who is just now leaving The American Restaurant in Kansas City to open a place of her own in Charlotte, to be called Julia(n), and the well-respected Don Yamauchi of Forte, in Birmingham, Mich.
The three chefs were on stage, frantically cooking, while emcee (and chef) Bob Waggoner, along with co-emcee, tie-breaking judge and local celebrity chef Michael Symon entertained the audience and Jody, Fred and I sat on a dais in back of the audience and chatted. I also nibbled on the cardamom shoots that were one of the ingredients the chefs had to use (the others were black cherry tomatoes — another Chef’s Garden specialty — and the pork tenderloin and grass-fed beef filet provided by the sponsors).
Then we went on stage (that’s a picture of us on stage), tasted the food and commented on it while marking our score cards, hoping to hate Marcel’s food. But what can I say? His food tasted the best, and we’re all judges with integrity, so he won.
Damn it!
The competition followed the fundraising tasting event, which was also a competition of sorts, as the chef that one of the sponsors liked the most was given a free trip to Spain to eat at elBulli.
And the winner was Aaron Deal, the chef of Tristan in Charleston, S.C.! Can you believe it?
Well, sure you can. Aaron’s a good chef and a nice chap. Here he is, on the right with Lee Jones and sous chef Wes Grubbs.
He made Manchester Farms quail with carrot purée, baby carrot, and Benton’s Bacon.
The chef who was cooking next to him at the tasting event, Craig Deihl of Cypress restaurant in Charleston, took the grease from the bacon and used it, instead of oil, to make bacon mayonnaise.
I recommend that you try this at home.

Three stars

July 17'

“please come by 10:30-11Pm tonight for some bubbly!"
That was Ben Pollinger, the executive chef of Oceana, which got a three star review in The New York Times yesterday.
I e-mailed him my congratulations, he e-mailed me an invitation for sparkling wine. We both win.
And I had visiting out-of-town colleagues Robin Allen and Catherine Cobb, and that meant an after-work drink or two, giving me the opportunity to linger in Midtown until Oceana closed and the party could start.
The restaurant’s on 54th Street, between Park and Madison avenues, just two blocks from our Park Avenue office.
It was a relatively small, quietly exuberant affair, with very brief speeches from Ben and executive pastry chef Jansen Chan, Champagne, and a banana-cashew cake with chocolate ganache and white chocolate butter cream.
I asked if they were happy with the review, if anyone, like maybe their boss, Nick Livanos, had said anything like: “Why not four stars?”
I even asked Nick that, and he said that to get a four-star review you basically had to run a non-profit restaurant. He also talked about the new restaurant he was opening, Burger Deluxe, in Wayne, N.J., which will be a pared-down version of his City Limits Diner chain. Jim Botsacos, the Livanos group’s corporate chef, was so excited about the new place that it almost made me nervous. Boy, what a great story for Nation’s Restaurant News! (he said) How a savvy restaurateur takes a great concept and refits it for a smaller space in New Jersey!
Jake Addeo, the chef at Abboccato, was there, too — proof that rumors of his departure were wrong.
All of those people are part of the Livanos group of restaurants, but Tony Esnault isn’t. He’s the chef of Adour, Alain Ducasse’s wine-oriented place, but he was at the party, too.
“Do you work here?” he asked me, which is funny since he and I were among the only people at the party who didn’t work for Nick Livanos — us and a guy from Rachel Ray or Martha Stewart or someplace like that who was hanging out with the young publicists from KB (now KB/Hall), which represents the Livanos restaurants.
It was a perfectly reasonable question. Maybe I’d changed jobs.
Tony goes to a lot of chef parties, which I wouldn’t really expect from a Ducasse chef, and that just shows what I know. But I mean you expect someone who works for Alain Ducasse to be aloof, snooty and way too cool to hang out with other chefs.
I kind of expect that from New York Times writers, too, but in fact the ones that I’ve met are quite nice. Then again, I tend only to meet them at parties at the top of my social stratum.
Either there or just randomly on the Internet.
Eventually I settled in to conversation with Jansen, who was kind of mentally parsing the Times review while handing out pieces of cake.
Times critic Frank Bruni said of Jansen’s creations: “Desserts on the whole are splendid.”
Jansen wondered about the word “splendid.” Where, exactly, did it fit in the realm of quality? Better than “good,” surely. But maybe a hair short of “excellent”?
Mr. Bruni especially loved the frozen banana mousse, which is funny because Jansen took it off the menu on Monday, replacing it with a dish of peaches & cream with croissant ice cream. The ice cream is made by making a crème anglaise without vanilla, freezing it and then mixing pieces of baked croissant into it. Jansen leaves the vanilla out because he wants the toastiness and yeastiness — especially the yeastiness — of the croisssants to come through. He also garnishes it with croissant crumbs, if I remember correctly.
The idea came to him when he was eating a croissant with peach jam and butter.
Because of the toastiness, people think there’s coconut in there, but what they're tasting is the toastiness which they associate with toasted coconut. Funny how that works.

Kurve

July 16

Kurve is finally sort of open. Kind of. The East Village restaurant where Andy Yang of Rhong-Tiam is in charge of the food and Karim Rashid (Morimoto in Philadelphia) did the design is doing reservation-only service to control customer flow and make sure the staff is ready.
Its opening party was last night. It was supposed to be on the 8th, but I don't think that one happened. Even for this one I was only invited yesterday afternoon. But I love Andy’s food at Rhong-Tiam, which was a sleepy little place until the Times wrote about it a few weeks ago, (and now you can't get in, so good for them), and thought I’d check the place out.
Kurve’s totally different, much more high-concept (fusion food, not Thai), trying much harder to be a scene.
Several large African-American bouncers blocked my way as I approached the door while one of them looked up my name on a list. Inside was a small crowd, and a host who I think was named Jeremy and seemed to be hired just for the party. He offered me a cocktail, I asked what was good, he suggested a Mojito, I took it. I later learned that Sasha Petraske was doing the drinks and wondered why I was offered a mere Mojito, but the place is new.
I don't know from décor, but the restaurant was definitely curvy, dominated by an irregular-shaped bar, curvy shapes on the walls, a floor that I think I'd call Morimoto-green, although I can't be sure as I'm partially color blind.
Plasma screen TVs, too, embedded in the walls.
Odd, it seems to me, for Second Avenue and Fifth Street.
Thank goodness Steve Bryant from Thrillist was there, so he could explain to me who the important scenesters were at the party (such as a TV co-host from a show I never saw, I forget the name), and also because he's a congenial guy who's pleasant to talk to.
At Rhong-Tiam, Andy’s a low-key, casual guy, but this was an opening party and he was decked out. I'm not sure exactly what he was wearing as I couldn't get past his hair, which was tricked out with gel to help him look like an animé character. He had me pose with him for a photographer from Thailand’s Praew magazine, which, if I remember correctly is kind of a big deal in Bangkok.
I switched from Mojitos to Chimay and settled in for a chat with the Thrillist people. As you'd expect from a scenester opening, not much food was served. I did manage to score some edamame, a bit of pork wrapped in sticky rice and served with a spicy-sour Thai dipping sauce, and also some ovaltine-milk chocolate pudding.
Underfed and full of beer, I stopped by Cooper 35 for cheap kimchi fried rice (I think it was $6) and called it a night.

I did pick up a copy of the party’s ostensible bar menu, which I'll type up for you now:

FIRST
wok charred edamame & spicy miso glaze
oyster
fried oyster
sashimi sampler
sea eel hako sushi
kurobuta pork sticky rice

SECOND
miso cured black cod
sake infused Chilean sea bass
prime rib teriyaki & shiitake mushroom
rack of lamb
massaman curry with organic chicken breast
lobster Thermidor with sea urchin & miso butter
seared king salmon with green curry

THIRD (which I neglected to mention are being done by Pichet Ong)
carrot cake with cream cheese chantilly, lime & flower salted caramel
ovaltine-milk chocolate pudding, banana, caramelized rice crispies
yuzu panna cotta, huckleberries, black pepper meringue
sorbet: passion fruit banana
ice cream: condensed milk

Socioeconomic implications of food in animated American television

July 10

Participants in the Listserv of The Association for the Study of Food and Society were talking about refrigerators. I’m not sure what exactly they were saying about refrigerators because the ASFS listserv has many threads and if I followed all of them I wouldn’t get any work done. But I did poke my head in briefly to read a joke from Cara de Silva, which was in fact not the least bit funny, and yet it made me laugh. Then what followed was an excellent conversation. To wit (edited just a bit, I hope to eliminate typos):

Cara De Silva:
The entire time this refrigeration thread has been going on, I have only been thinking of one thing. A joke from childhood that used to send me into gales of laughter. Forgive me List, but I am never going to get this out of my mind unless I unburden myself. And since, unbelievably, I was able to find the joke on the Internet, here it finally is. (However, when I heard it at age six or seven, the protagonist was Bugs Bunny.)

A lady opened her refrigerator and saw the Easter Bunny sitting on one of the shelves.
"What are you doing in there?" she asked.
The Easter Bunny replied: "This is a Westinghouse, isn't it?" to which the lady replied, "Yes."
"Well," the Easter Bunny said, "I'm westing."

Kenneth Albala:
Bugs is, without doubt, the paragon of comedic timing and obscure references. At the [ASFS] conference in New Orleans (wish you had been there) I was entering Antoine’s with a group of people, and started the schtick which culminates in “Louisiana Back Bayou Bunny Bordelais a la Antoine - Not the Antoine of New Orleans? - I don‘t mean Antoine of Flatbush!” No one had any idea what I was talking about. No one ever gets the “peng-oo-ins is practically chickens” bit. Wabbit season, Duck season, Elmer Season. Have you considered how many Warner Brother’s cartoons are all about food? Everyone is just trying to avoid being eaten. And nearly everyone is food. Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Foghorn, Tweety, Roadrunner - there's a dissertation in here somewhere.

Bret Thorn:
Good point. But of course, most of the characters are animals, and what are animals for if not eating? Unless you’re a coyote, in which case your purpose is to fall down steep canyons and get hit on the head with anvils and 2000 pound weights.

Michael McGuckin:
Interesting observation how many cartoons are about some characters trying to catch food, and other characters avoiding being eaten — yet there is almost no actual eating going on.

Bugs has a carrot he never finishes, as far as I know, Yogi and Boo-boo steal the pic-a-nic baskets, but almost never enjoy the spoils, and ants at a picnic may carry away the entire cake but they eat it off camera.

Jerry and Tweety may get as far as Tom or Sylvester sprinkling them with salt and pepper, but they always make good their escape while their potential diners are tying on the napkin and licking their chops.

The gags, therefore, to me, seem to be more about hunger than about eating. Wily, the hapless coyote, is starving and desperate. Elmer is a glutton, and his hunger is less edgy, but no less laughable. Tom is forever pulling out a fish skeleton and gazing on it forlornly, with longing, before his mind turns to Jerry.

The cartoons may have something to say about nature — long in tooth and claw — but I wonder if they don’t say more about our attitude towards hunger, and those unfortunate creatures who, in this land o’ plenty, are down and out and reduced to pulling figurative fish skeletons out of the garbage, and whose thought balloons contain images of pigeons morphing into roasted Thanksgiving Day turkeys with all the trimmings.

A dissertation awaiting, indeed.

A Pappas publicist

July 10

“This is Georgea,” said Jennifer Neugeboren. She pronounced it "geor-GEE-uh."
Jennifer's a newbie publicist at Baltz & Co., having been there for three months, and Georgea is their intern, a recent graduate of the French Culinary Institute.
I asked Georgea what ethnicity her name was.
“Greek.”
“What’s your last name?” I love Greek last names. The longer the better, perhaps because my own last name is so short, lacking even a silent 'e'.
”Pappas.”
Not long, but interesting nonetheless.
“What a great restaurant family name,” I said, because of course the Pappases are a near legendary family of restaurateurs in Houston — owners of Pappas Restaurants Inc., which includes perhaps the greatest list of restaurant names in the history of the planet: Pappadeaux, Pappasito’s Cantina, Pappas Seafood House, Pappas Bros. Steakhouse, Pappas Bar B-Q, Pappas Burger, Pappas Grill & Steakhouse, and Yia Yia Mary’s Pappas Greek Kitchen.
“That’s my family!” said Georgea. Hurray!
Georgea is in fact the daughter of Christopher Pappas, who, apart from being a principal in his own company, is the CEO of Luby’s. In a small modification of Greek tradition, all of Mr. Pappas’s children, men and women, have Christopher as their middle name. This often caused confusion on the first day of school, when teachers expected Georgea to be a burly Greek lad, which she is not. Not even close.
We were at Elizabeth, a two-month old restaurant in Nolita, where the consulting chef is Doug Psaltis (Greek) and the executive chef is John Iconomou (French — just kidding; he’s Greek, too). Both chefs are veterans of Country, owned by Armenian chef-operator Geoffrey Zakarian.
I’m sure Turks are nonetheless welcome at Elizabeth.

What we ate (we drank a 2007 New Harbor Sauvignon Blanc from the New Zealand region of Marlborough):

Sweet corn with poached egg, chorizo and almonds
Beef tartare with horseradish crème, capers and quail egg
Grilled squid with garlic cream and spicy pepper salad
Sweet pea risotto with Parmesan, pea shoots and mint
Grilled salmon with meyer lemon, roe and potato pearls
Organic chicken with couscous, dried fruit and green olives
Warm berry crumble

P*ong

July 8

I speak to Pichet Ong from time to time. We have mutual friends and see each other at parties, and of course he’s a chef and restaurateur and I’m a food writer. Our circles overlap.
There has been a common thread in our conversations ever since he opened P*ong in April of 2007.
“You haven’t been to P*ong yet,” he says, every time we talk. And of course he’s right. It’s his restaurant, and it’s a small place. He can tell.
So last night I went. I just showed up and asked if they had room for one person to eat, and they did.
Pichet seemed almost shocked, and possibly nervous, but maybe not. He might have just been distracted; he was about to leave for Copenhagen for a consulting gig. Good for him.
As an aside, if I may speak on behalf of all writers and editors, which of course I cannot, if you’re wondering how we like the use of asterisks and such in the names of restaurants, we don’t.
But I do like Pichet.

What I ate and drank:

Cocktail: The Vegetarian
vegetable-infused vodka (celery, bay leaf, yellow beets, coriander) mixed with carrot juice, orange juice, and served with a Chantenay carrot strip pickled in rice vinegar and sea salt. It's served in a glass rimmed with ginger molasses.
The carrot strip is sort of accordioned onto a skewer, which, along with the fact that the edges are darker than the center, makes it look like a pink bacon strip. Funny, given the name of the drink.
Pichet says it’s not intentional.

Salad of fava beans, peas, sugar snaps, manchego, radish and almond with basil ice cream
Chapuy Brut Tradition NV Champagne (Oger, France)

Chilled New Jersey corn & Manhattan milk soup with avocado and caviar
Peeky toe crab salad with tarragon, mint, lemon crème fraîche and green apple mousse
Sancerre, Domaine Sylvain Bailly 'Terroirs' 2006 (Loire, France)

Charred baby octopus, watermelon ketchup, cucumber and bulgarian feta
House cured arctic char, fennel-vidalia marmalade and maple mustard emulsion
Grolleau/Cabernet Franc (organic), Chateau de Passavant 2006 (Loire, France)

Organic lamb & spring pea shepherd’s pie with purple and white yukon gold potato
Cabernet Sauvignon, Amber Knolls Vineyard 2005 (Napa, California)

Foie gras napoleon, with chocolate, pineapple, hazelnut, cognac and chile pepper jam (I believe this is the first time I’ve ever had foie gras genuinely served as a dessert)
Sauternes, Chateau Les Tuileries 2005 (Bordeaux, France)

Coconut sorbet and vanilla-roasted pineapple
Bay leaf panna cotta with native strawberry & rhubarb compote
Gewurztraminer, kent rasmussen winery, late harvest 2003 375ml (Russian River, California) e

Poached stone fruit & gianduja truffle, moscato d’Asti, hazelnut hard candy and ricotta ice cream
Brachetto d'Aqui, le donne dei boschi, ca'dei mandorli 2006 500ml (Castelrocchero, Italy)

Milk chocolate & sicilian pistachio terrine with blood orange, rum and pistachio ice cream
(Tawny) Port, Cockburn's '20 Year' (Oporto, Portugal)

Whatever happened to Tim Kelley?

July 2

About a month ago, I’m pretty sure I saw Tim Kelley on the subway. I should have said hello, because I can’t figure out what he’s doing these days.
He was quite the hot number around the turn of the century, when he was the executive chef of The Painted Table in Seattle. Then he moved to New York to become chef of Zoë for about ten minutes before leaving to travel in Southeast Asia, from which he wrote a blog called The Runaway Chef, which has now vanished from cyberspace.
Do you happen to know what happened to him?

How do you cook a 13-pound lobster?

If you want to know about how to cook a large lobster and don’t care about my personal life, scroll down to the bold type that says “How to cook a big lobster.” If you have questions, feel free to ask me.

July 2

I turned 41 last April, but last weekend my dear friend Michael Gerber decided he wanted to throw me a 40th birthday party.
Michael’s brilliant, but deliberative. Sometimes his plans take awhile.

“I have a lot of marine protein and the biggest lobster you’ve ever seen,” he said. He’s a science teacher, having majored in biology in college, and so he talks like that.

So does my buddy Birdman, aka professor David Krauss, who teaches college biology and has a new girlfriend who has an internship in Boston this summer. Michael lives in Gloucester, Mass., so it was convenient for Birdman to drive me up. And he was invited to Michael’s party, too.

So was good old Shane Curcuru. Loyal, good company and with a comfortable couch to sleep on, which I did on Friday.
Shane also took the picture of the lobster that you see above.

The party was on Saturday, and involved the four of us standing around drinking and preparing food.

Michael’s an innovative cook, so, not having horseradish, he used wasabi instead to make cocktail sauce (by adding it to ketchup), which we could use with the raw clams that he and Birdman shucked. Then they went outside to hack up scrap wood to light a fire (Michael has a stove, but he wanted to make a fire as it is more manly) over which he put a cast-iron skillet to sear scallops, which he just dusted with Old Bay.

Eating scallops in New England makes me angry, because it reminds me of how humdrum they often are in New York. Michael’s were sweet, rich, and with a great texture — just cleaving from our teeth as we bit into them.

I gave Michael grief for buying a 13-pound lobster, because, you see, large lobsters like that are important for the lobster gene pool. Unlike the smaller ones, which kind of stay put, big lobsters wander up and down from Cape Cod to northern Maine, breeding as they go. Also, large female lobsters are extremely fecund. They’re so important to the fishery that in Maine it’s illegal to sell lobster that’s longer than five inches from the rear of the eye socket to where the tail starts.

Michael says Massachusetts bans catching big lobsters in traps, but if they happen to be dragged up in a trawler, they can be sold.

“Is it male at least?” I’d asked.

“I haven’t checked,” he said, and then turned to ask Shane, who was half-dozing on a couch, ”is he serious or is he just giving me shit?”

It was a good question. None of us really had an answer.

Then he brought out the lobster. It was gigantic and paleolithic and...

... “That’s pretty!” said Michael's four-year-old son, Gilad, who was not invited to the party but he wandered in anyway.
“I want to set it free,” Michael said, suddenly squeemish, and not because of Gilad’s reaction. We’re just not accustomed to eating animals older than we are.

I suggested it probably wouldn't survive if we set it free. It had been out of the water for awhile. It seemed to still be alive — some of its parts were moving a bit — but it was sluggish.

We ended up taking it to the nearby harbor and setting it in the water to see if it perked up, but instead it started dripping something oily into the water, which isn't something healthy, living lobsters do.

So we took it back and cooked it.

(By the way, the lobster was a male.

Birdman sexed it for us. You know those little rows of fan-like appendages on the bottom [ventral] side of lobsters? On females they're all about the same size and shape, but on males the front [anterior] pair is smaller, skinny, and can be brought together to form a sort of channel for squirting reproductive material into the females, which is exactly what it’s used for.

So now you know.)

All four of us are good cooks. Shane’s a terrific baker, but he also had made me delicious omelets for breakfast that morning. Birdman’s the biggest purist of us — fish with beurre blanc, lamb with garlic, perfect crème brûlée — but also the one probably to have thought the most about the science of cooking. Michael’s into finding cool flavor combinations (wasabi and ketchup, as discussed, but he also made three different fish pâtés for us to play around with, and really, why not flavor white fish with single malt?). I’m the only one in the group who went to culinary school, but so what?

How to cook a big lobster

None of us knew how to cook a 13-pound lobster.

Birdman suggested we par-steam it and then pull out the meat and cut it up for cooking, which we did.

The little legs were perfectly cooked once the lobster turned red, and so we ate those, and they were delicious. So was the knuckle meat. Michael sautéed the claw and tail meat in butter, but some of it was quite tough. But at that point we were full anyway, so I suggested it be cooked in moist heat at low temperature until the meat softened.

August 18 update: I asked Charleston Grill chef Bob Waggoner about how to cook a 13-pound lobster when we were at the Chef’s Garden’s Food & Wine Celebration. He’s a terrific chef, but he said he wouldn’t even try to cook it.

May 20, 2010 update: I recently spoke with Michael about our lobster experience, and he surmised that the main problem was that it wasn’t a very good lobster, having recently moulted its shell, making for watery, stringy meat. Our method probably would have worked better on a better lobster.

What to know when eating David Bouley’s food

July 1

“On Thursday, 6/26 at 7:00pm, David and Oz are hosting an informal tasting of some of the dishes they have collaborated on at his test kitchen on West Broadway. ... Please let me know if you can make it.”

That would be mad chef David Bouley and nutritionist Oz Garcia, in Bouley’s test kitchen, which is a grand space in back of his Tribeca offices, complete with cookbook library, multimedia doodads, funky spotlights and other things that might be necessary for photography, and seating for, oh, I don't know, 40.
I was told that the last time Bouley did a tasting people were still there after midnight and was assured that wouldn’t be the case on Thursday.
But here’s the thing about David Bouley, and you just have to remember it if you’re going to enjoy his food: He is completely unaware of the passage of time (or at least he acts that way).
He has been that way for a very long time. I’ve heard stories dating back to his first restaurant, Bouley, which he closed a decade ago, about people sitting in the dining room for hours and hours as their meal progressed at Bouley’s pace.
I completely understand why that's not acceptable to some people. But I’ve been shocked by how good his food is for so long (I first had it in Bangkok, I think in 1996, and it made me want to giggle), that I’m willing to wait for it.
But an “informal tasting” should be a brief affair.
Theoretically, it started at 7, but when I arrived at 7:20 and was brought up stairs, the chef was sitting at his computer (remember, the test kitchen is in back of his offices). We had sat down by 8, and Bouley spoke for awhile about his philosophy about food and how it should be good for you, but must also absolutely be delicious. This, he pointed out, was something the Europeans and Japanese had managed to do for many centuries.
You might think he was talking about food that’s good for you because he and Oz Garcia are doing the food at a resort in Anguilla, but he actually has been talking about it for years. Back in 1999 I interviewed him for a piece Nation’s Restaurant News was doing for our end-of-millennium special, and he talked about trying to get people addicted to food that was good for them instead of food that was bad for them.
Here’s the quote we used from him, which really was kind of prescient: “There will be a joining of hands among growers, people who sell and cook food and people who study its health effects. Cooks … will learn how to treat food so the most nutrition can be absorbed and to pinpoint flavors that only nature can bring in. What are you going to add to improve a perfect peach?”
Below, I’ll list what he served, but also, an update for those waiting for his new restaurant to open: He said it would be another two to three months.
He’s also going to open a Japanese place in New York, featuring mostly cooked food with just a bit of sushi and sashimi, in the next eight or nine months.
But remember what I said about his concept of time.
Speaking of which, I left the test kitchen at around 12:30 a.m., but a number of diners had departed earlier. I walked out with some of Bouley’s cooks, who expressed sadness that guests left early, pointing out that the meal was intended to reach a crescendo at the end.
When I’m being wined and dined, I tend to stick around for as long as possible, but maybe I’m just a shallow hedonist.

What I ate:

Rose Florida shrimp with a julienne of calamari In an ocean herbal broth

Maine day boat lobster, Hawaiian heart of palm, pencil asparagus, royal trumpet mushrooms, miso-yuzu dressing

Chatham cod with a stew of artichokes, honshimeji mushrooms, baby shiitake, fava beans, black truffle dashi

Homemade tofu with ginger dashi

Koji marinated tile fish, fresh yuzu and lime snow crab sauce

Japanese charcoal grilled wild toro, black miso and five assorted Japanese rices

Organic Colorado rack of lamb, zucchini-mint and Langres purées (Langres is a type if cheese)

Coconut soup with pineapple granité, and organic yogurt sorbet

Chocolate soufflé with an azuki bean core, green tea and rose ice creams