Beard handicapping ’09

March 29

I’m writing this blog entry, a few days later than I should be, from the Rome airport. The nominations for the James Beard Foundation Awards always seem to come out when I’m out of the country, meaning I’m late in telling you who’s going to win them.
Okay, maybe that’s a bit arrogant. In the past two years I’ve guessed 7 out of 19 awards correctly, each year, which doesn’t exactly make me Nostradamus, but if you put it in baseball terms it's batting 368, which is pretty good.
My predictions are based basically on the fact that I cynically believe that the Beard awards are a popularity contest based not on the winners' abilities but on whether or not the cadre of journalists and past winners who vote for them feel good about them on some other level. So my predictions are knee-jerk reactions based on the buzz that’s in the air about the chefs, restaurants and other nominees in question, except for a couple which are just flat-out guesses.
In no way, by any stretch of the imagination, should anyone infer that the people I’m guessing will win are the people (or restaurants) I think should win. All the nominees that I know are terrific people (or restaurants), consummate professionals and every bit as worthy of recognition as anyone else.
And now, my predictions:

Outstanding Chef:
José Andrés
Dan Barber
Tom Colicchio
Suzanne Goin
Paul Kahan

Outstanding Restaurant:
Babbo
Boulevard
Fore Street
Highlands Bar & Grill
Jean Georges

Outstanding Restaurateur:
Tom Douglas
Keith McNally
Richard Melman
Drew Nieporent
Stephen Starr

Outstanding Service:
Daniel
Emeril’s New Orleans
La Grenouille
Spiaggia
Vetri

Best New Restaurant:
The Bazaar by José Andrés,
Corton
L2O
Momofuku KO
Scarpetta

Outstanding Pastry Chef :
Gina DePalma
Kamel Guechida
Pichet Ong
Nicole Plue
Mindy Segal

Rising Star:
Nate Appleman
Sean Brock
Johnny Monis
Gabriel Rucker
Michael Solomonov
Sue Zemanick

Wine & Spirits Professional:
Dale DeGroff
Merry Edwards
Garrett Oliver
John and Doug Shafer
Julian P. Van Winkle

Outstanding Wine Service:
Bin 36
Blackberry Farm
Le Bernardin
Patina
Picasso at Bellagio

Regional awards:
Great Lakes:
Koren Grieveson
Arun Sampanthavivat
Bruce Sherman
Michael Symon
Alex Young

Midwest:
Isaac Becker
Gerard Craft
Colby Garrelts
Tim McKee
Alexander Roberts

Northeast:
Rob Evans
Clark Frasier and Mark Gaier
Michael Leviton
Tony Maws
Marc Orfaly

New York City:
Michael Anthony
Terrance Brennan
Wylie Dufresne
Gabrielle Hamilton
Gabriel Kreuther

Mid-Atlantic:
Cathal Armstrong
Jose Garces
Peter Pastan
Maricel Presilla
Vikram Sunderam

Southeast:
Hugh Acheson
Linton Hopkins
Mike Lata
Bill Smith
Bob Waggoner

South:
Zach Bell
John Currence
John Harris
Douglas Rodriguez
Michael Schwartz

Southwest:
Paul Bartolotta
Sharon Hage
Ryan Hardy
Claude Le Tohic
Andrew Weissman

Pacific:
Jeremy Fox
Douglas Keane
Loretta Keller
David Kinch
Daniel Patterson

Northwest:
Maria Hines
Joseba Jiménez de Jiménez
Ethan Stowell
Cathy Whims
Jason Wilson

By the way, I did considerably better at predicting this year's nominees. I got a full three-quarters of them right, which doesn't show how smart I am, but how predictable these awards are.

Only time for a photo

March 27

I am in Italy, prisoner of the Gruppo Ristoratori Italiani, a horde of crazy U.S.-based Italian chefs who go to Italy one week a year and eat like they're never going to see food again.
Okay, maybe that's a bit unkind. Actually, it's totally inaccurate, the ramblings of someone trying to jot a few words before slipping into a food coma. The GRI is a group of charming and quite interesting restaurateurs, their friends and assorted others who choose one of Italy's 20 regions to visit each year and check out the food and wine there. I am one of their guests, along with some other journalists etc. The week's almost over and I doubt very seriously that I'll able to go into much detail about the adventure that has been my trip to Puglia (the heel and lower calf of the great Italian boot) before boarding a plane in Brindisi that will take me to Rome, where I will board a plane and fly home to New York.
But I wanted to check in with you, say hello, and let you know that I haven't forgotten about you, dear reader. I'll let you know of my adventures as soon as I can.
In the meantime, please enjoy this picture of an Adriatic monkfish.

Best of luck to Salma Abdelnour

March 19

I think a special bravery award should go to Salma Abdelnour, who yesterday gave notice to her bosses at O magazine, where she’s food editor, that she’s quitting to be a freelancer.
That’s right, she’s leaving a job in publishing of her own free will.
So, congratulations to her and best wishes; sometimes you just have to stare right in the face of danger and leap into the chasm.
Salma was at the Beard House last night along with the rest of an A-list of food writers that included Kate Krader from Food & Wine and The Great Melissa Clark, who was there armed with pictures of her adorable five-month-old daughter, Dahlia Beatrix.
Pat Cobe from Restaurant Business was there too.
It really was an impressive gathering for the Beard House, orchestrated by the Hall Company, who represent Zaré at Fly Trap, a restaurant in San Francisco that bills itself as serving Mediterranean cuisine with Persian influence.
But some of the Persians at the Beard House last night said a lot of the food was straight-up Persian, though I'm sure the grilled Alaska king salmon with toasted fregola, chermoula and raita was not.
That fish was served with a Tempranillo wine from Rioja (a 2000 Lopez Heredia “vina bosconia.”)
We were celebrating Norooz, or Persian New Year, which is on the first day of spring.

What else I ate:

hors d'oeuvres:
Marinated chickpeas with eggplant, Italian parsley and baby grapes
Roasted Italian eggplant with sundried yogurt and walnuts on toast
Pistachio meatballs with harissa-honey-pomegranate glaze
2000 Yarden blanc de blanc sparkling wine from the Galilee, Israel

Smoked trout with Persian cucumber “linguine”, trout roe and dill crème fraîche
2008 Sigalas Asyrtiko from Santorini, Greece

Ash é Reshteh — a stew of winter greens, beans and root vegetables
2006 Darioush Russian River Chardonnay

Kufteh Tabrizi: A double Niman Ranch lamb chop, preserved lime and turmeric broth, all encased in a giant kufteh-style casing, like a giant meatball, but with bones sticking out of it, served with an Iranian version of chutney and pickled string beans
1999 Château Musar Cabernet-Cinsault-Carignan, Lebanon

Maast é Keysehe — Yogurt panna cotta with white truffle honey and olive oil biscotti
2003 Clos du Papillon Savennierres

Breakfast with Wolfgang

March 17
5:30 p.m.

Wolfgang Puck says a recession is, in fact, a great time to open a restaurant, because it requires that you be a great manager and provide great food and service (My colleague Mark Brandau points out that Anthony Bourdain more-or-less agrees).
Of course, it helps if you’re Wolfgang Puck and you get to pick and choose which of the offers for partnership that come in every day you accept.
One such offer he accepted was from the investors in the restaurant atop Dallas's Reunion Tower, who spent $20 million renovating the place, according to Puck, so he could open a restaurant. That restaurant, Five Sixty (named for its altitude), opened a couple of months ago.
Puck says they wanted him to open a steakhouse, but opening another steakhouse in Dallas seemed silly. Besides, Puck’s not going to sell steak that isn’t USDA Prime, and even though the price of Choice cuts are coming down, he said Prime prices are still insane, and now is not the time to open an uber-expensive restaurant.
Instead, Five Sixty is a riff on Puck’s Chinois on Main concept, with Shanghai lobster risotto and Sichuan peppercorn steak, a robata and sushi bar. The check average is around $60, which isn’t cheap, but it’s not steakhouse-expensive, either.
Puck was holding court at breakfast this morning, speaking of many things, ranging from his son’s college career (he’s a sophomore at my alma mater, Tufts, and just switched from the engineering school to the college of liberal arts, where he’s studying Russian literature and goodness knows what else) to the new bistro concept that he has opened in North Carolina (outside of Charlotte), and in Los Angeles (one downtown, another in Westlake Village), to the new 11-inch pizza line he is launching in supermarkets this month, replacing the nine-inch.
The bistro is fast-casual by day, full-on table service by night.
I learned other things about Wolfgang Puck, too:
• The first restaurant he remembers eating in when he arrived in the United States in 1973 was La Grenouille, in New York, immediately dispelling the myth then popular in France that there was no good food in the United States.
• The most successful concept in his restaurant empire is the cafe in the Denver Airport (at the United terminal), which grosses more than $4 million annually.
• Three years ago Puck realized that he didn’t like the music in his restaurants and wondered why he used the fish he liked and the cutlery he liked but let someone else handle the music. So now he picks the music himself, and it turns out that he is a very big fan of Pink Floyd.
• Puck consulted with American Airlines for awhile, but he could not convince them when making a Caesar salad not to use the outer leaves of the Romaine lettuce. This was a cause of consternation for him.
• Last night the Pucks had dinner at Corton. They said it was terrific.

Overcaffeinated with Wolfgang Puck

March 17, 5 p.m.

It’s St. Patrick's Day in New York, so many people are already drunk. Me, I'm overcaffeinated.
It’s hard to overcaffeinate me. I drink a lot of coffee, and usually the caffeine just tickles my dopamine receptors and goes on its way.
But one of the results of this lousy economy is that I have slashed my coffee budget and am making my own. I make delicious coffee — better than what I was buying, or at least more suited to my personal taste — but it’s strong, and I drank it with gusto on the subway this morning on my way to the Loews Regency hotel, where Wolfgang Puck was granting a 9:45 a.m. audience to journalists over breakfast at 540 Park restaurant.
People who know my habits will tell you that it is rare, indeed, for me to be seen in public at 9:45 a.m. If you need me to be somewhere early, I'll be there. I'll be there at 4 a.m. if necessary. Otherwise, I'd rather shake the morning cobwebs out of my head more gradually.
But if Wolfgang Puck's hanging out for breakfast, I’ll go ahead and hang out with him.
A lot of chefs stay at the Loews Regency. My colleague Paul Frumkin tells me that Mr. Puck has been staying there for decades, and I know I’ve met other chefs there, too, and no one can explain why it draws chefs. I asked Wolfgang Puck this morning, but he had nothing to say on the matter.
I think one such explanation might be the coffee, which is both rich and smooth, gently roasted to allow the subtle fruity qualities of the 100 percent Colombian coffee that they serve to come through.
So I drank a lot of it, and now I feel jangly in my nerve endings and really need a slice of pizza and a nap.
I also ate of the fruit plate set before me and had a miniature pain au chocolat and something like an almond croissant.
I learned a lot about Wolfgang Puck, but I think I’ll make a separate blog entry about that as a courtesy to visitors to this blog who might want to know about Herr Puck but could not care less about me. I respect that.
I will say that Puck and his wife, Gelila, drank several cappuccinos, but they sent one of them back, lecturing whoever on staff would listen that the milk was too hot. The Pucks managed to do that graciously, but with the confidence of people who knew how they wanted their milk steamed.
Gelila is from Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, and she roasts her own beans most mornings.
She said that the word “coffee” comes from Kaffa, an ancient kingdom in Ethiopia, which might be true. She also said that Ethiopians make coffee leaves into tea. First roasting them a bit and then steeping them in hot water for a few minutes.
I didn’t know that.

Restaurant week poll results

March 17

In my last poll, I asked a separate question for Food Writer's Diary readers who our restaurateurs than for those who aren’t. I asked restaurateurs if they participate in restaurant week, and non-restaurateurs if they go to restaurants specifically for restaurant week.
Just a few restaurateurs responded. Three said they participate, two said they don't, and one asked what restaurant week was.
In case that participant wasn't joking, Restaurant Week is a promotional event during which restaurants offer special menus at a discounted price in the hope that it will attract new customers. Take a look at Marly's comment for an assessment of the pros and cons of restaurant week.
Non-restaurateurs needed less convincing of its advantages, with seven out of the ten respondents saying they go to restaurants specifically for restaurant week.
I think I’m going to take a break from the polls for a little while, until I think of something clever to aks you about.

Cheap eats at Atria

March 13

I sure wish people would tell me when my collar’s sticking up. This would be such a good picture of me if someone had just tucked my collar back down, and I so rarely take a good picture.
With me is my new friend Sandra Fowler, a multi-talented woman with a background in the type of foodservice that most people find not so romantic but that I find fascinating. She’s a Yum! veteran and has also worked for Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts. But at the moment she’s doing documentaries on sustainable food-and-drink production for PBS.
Sandra’s new to town, and my boss, Ellen Koteff, is one of her mentors, so obviously I agreed to meet her for drinks.
I suggested Atria.
Did you know that the bar at Atria, formerly know as Grayz, in the space that once was Aquavit, is a gin bar? That’s how they’re promoting it, at any rate, and they are fairly committed to expanding the horizons of vodka drinkers. Their key weapon: a gin, blackberry and mint number called The Bramble.
But there is other news coming out of Atria, too. This week they introduced a lunch menu and everything on it is less than $10.
Some examples:
Bratwurst and sauerkraut $7
Hummus, babaganoush and okra stew $8
Potato-leek soup with chervil $5
Hanger steak salad with peanut, radish and sesame-ginger vinaigrette $9
You can even get a can of Pablst Blue ribbon for $3

Eric Hara’s Oak Room dinner menu to debut next Wednesday

March 13

I’ll be continuing with tales of my adventures in dining soon, but the work is piling up here at NRN and it takes time to compose a thoughtful blog entry about the dining world in which I live.
But I don’t want to leave you hanging, so I have some news items for you.
People obsessed with the New York food scene already know that David Burke veteran Eric Hara is the new chef at The Oak Room, replacing Joël Antunes. (That picture, above, is of Eric).
I spoke with him today about his new dinner menu, which will be introduced next Wednesday.
“I think we’re going with more of an American style,“ he said, adding that he wanted to “keep it approachable.”
That’s not to say simple, or boring.
Among the menu items debuting Wednesday is a bone-marrow crusted scallop with cippolini purée, tomato marmalade and a bone marrow crouton.
He’ll also be doing veal cheek stuffed shells with chanterelles, a pecorino emulsion and sour cherries.
Also: brioche-crusted striped bass.
"It’s going to be a take on cioppino,” he says of the bass dish. It will include cherry tomatoes, fennel, mussls, clams and a cioppino broth poured at tableside.
Served with it will be a quenelle of crushed fingerling potatoes with rouille aïoli.
Appetizers will range from $12 to $18. Main courses will be $20 to $33, "and then Dover sole will be Dover sole."

Come on, eat out, take the leftovers home!

March 10

Not to harp on the doggie bag thing but restaurants are under fire as luxuries easily dispensed with.
CNN.Com’s “Quick Vote” right now asks the question: “What would you give up first to save money?”
And the choices are: car, cable service, dining out, cell phone and nothing.
Well, of course if you ask it like that, people are going to say they’ll give up dining out (as I write this, that’s what 70 percent of the respondents said).
But it’s not like a person must choose between dining out and not. There are lots of ways to dine out, lots of ways to economize in restaurants, lots of ways to slip out for a bite without blowing your budget, and restaurants are responding to customers’ needs for that in all sorts of ways. There are new prix-fixe menus (or combo deals, depending on the the fanciness of the restaurant or lack thereof), happy hour specials, cut-rate appetizers and entrées. It’s not like it‘s an either/or proposition.
I mentioned recently our upcoming April 20 report on restaurateurs reworking operations and pricing to fit customers’ current demands.
But there are signs that things aren’t all that bad in the restaurant world — at least not in the grand scheme of things. My colleague, NRN executive financial editor Sara Lockyer reports today on one analyst’s expectations for relative stability in the restaurant sector, because they fulfill the basic needs of eating and socializing.
Sara has more to say on the matter, too, which of course you would know if you’d just click on the link.

Yes, I want those three string beans wrapped up, too

March 9

I recently asked you, dear reader, whether you’re using doggie bags more now than you did a year ago. Most respondents said they aren't, but 40 percent said they are, which is certainly enough to say that doggie bag use is on the rise. Of course, these polls are unscientific, but interesting nonetheless, and the responses corroborate what restaurateurs are telling me, which is that doggie bag use is definitely on the rise (except at Capital Grille, where they say they haven’t noticed any such growth).
Okay, but who cares? Well, in our April 20 issue NRN we’ll run a special section on back-of-the-house strategies for improving guests’ experiences while managing costs. One article in that section will be on how to capitalize on the doggie bag trend (there are ways, oh, you bet your sweet maple syrup there are ways). Stay tuned.

Now, I’d like to ask both restaurateurs and restaurant goers how they feel about restaurant week. if you want to comment more elaborately, feel free to do so in the comment section below this blog entry.

For posterity, below are the results of the doggie bag poll.

DO YOU USE DOGGIE BAGS IN RESTAURANTS MORE NOW THAN YOU DID A YEAR AGO?
yes 13 (40%)
no 19 (59%)
Total votes: 32

Good news for the Daily News, AP and Channel 13

March 6

A 15,000-square-foot space at 450 West 33rd Street (at Tenth Avenue). the building that houses the New York Daily News, The Associated Press and WNET Channel 13, has a new lessee, according to restaurant consultant and broker John Harding, who brokered the deal and then e-mailed me to tell me about it. That lessee is restaurateur Simon Oren of the Tour De France Group (Pigalle, Marseille, Nice Matin, L'Express), Sushi Samba etc.
John says the space will house a bi-level American bistro, a self-serve cafe and a retail bakery.
So, there you have it.

My Facebook

March 5

As with most people who love their jobs, my work and play are inextricably intertwined, and that’s reflected on my Facebook page, where my collection of “friends” range from family members to elementary school friends to work colleagues, fellow journalists, publicists and chefs. Some of my actual real life friends are on there, too.
I have found that Facebook is, in fact, a useful work tool, and when my status updates are work-related, the responses are sometimes useful.
The responses below are not especially useful, but I found them amusing.

In response to “Bret Thorn wishes he could think of something interesting and maybe a little bit newsy to say about rice.”

Matt Rodbard [from Metromix]at 4:14pm March 4
Breaking: Rice was found by US special forces growing in a cave in the Kohistān border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Jennifer Beck Baum [the publicist] at 4:15pm March 4
It comes in a variety of colors, shapes and sizes?

Suzie Amer [friend] at 4:16pm March 4
It may be the main course for a long, long time, should current economic trends continue?

Bret Thorn at 4:18pm March 4
Indeed, Suzie, I made sprouted brown rice for dinner last night because I got it for free. It was chewy and very satisfying.

Suzie Amer at 4:21pm March 4
See that? Do I have a nose for news, or what?

Marisha Morris [foodservice professional and NRN subscriber] at 4:29pm March 4
food cost ---rice bowls, not just, for yoshinoya and jack in the box, they'll be a home cooked meal.... I definitely agree w/ Suzie...... And I'll have to try 'sprouted brown rice' .... nothing beats having fresh rice from off the farm, with the hulls and all.... now that's chewy, lol. By the way, my grandfather was a farmer in Arkansas with 28 acres of fresh vegetables and fruits... mmm, good times :)

Anne De Ravel [food writer among other things] at 4:35pm March 4
red rice from Camargue? It reminds me of many, many years ago when wild rice was the cool rice but few people knew what to do with it. It's a similar here with this red rice, it's delicious but you rarely see past it's assumed "boil and serve" role. Not sure if it's exported in the US.

Bret Thorn at 4:50pm March 4
I was thinking of writing about wild rice, but technically it's not rice at all, but some sort of aquatic grass seed. It's tasty, though.

Alan Grant [friend, from my Bangkok days; great guy] at 7:30pm March 4
Bret old stick, I could wax lyrical about rice all day. You could explain the many differences and how annoying it is when they serve basmati rice in a non-Indian environment. Indeed, basmati may well be my least favourite rice even though I adore and consume Indian food on an almost daily basis. Interestingly here in Singapore, many of the Indian restaurants serve the more moist and delicious Thai jasmine rice if you order white rice, serving basmati only in byrianis, pilaus and the like.

Then there's our old favourite khao neow ...

Todd Thorn [brother] at 7:56pm March 4
How come I have to run the vacuum cleaner over a grain of rice seven times to pick it up, but when the vacuum gets within six inches of a shoe, it sucks the lace right up? What about that, huh? No good? I know, but it really chaps my a$$!

Don Odiorne [publicist for Idaho potatoes] at 8:18pm March 4
Americans eat about 126 pounds of potatoes per capita, 35 pounds of rice and 25 pounds of pasta. I think you should write about potatoes instead. Just kidding. Rice doesn't make much of an exciting late night snack or appetizer though. My favorite rice dish was Mom's beef, tomato sauce and rice stuffed peppers (probably the recipe was right out of Better Homes & Gardens cookbook). Who eats more Chinese fried rice, the Chinese or Americans?

SD PSA

March 4

The Marine Room in La Jolla is running a nice little promotion for restaurant kitchen workers throughout San Diego County.
Executive chef Bernard Guillas is extending the restaurant’s 50 percent employee discount to all back-of-the-house workers in the county and their friends and families for dinner on Tuesdays and Wednesdays during the months of March and April. Make your reservations by calling 858-459-7222 and tell the reservationist that you are joining them for the back-of-the-house promotion.

The fine print: Discount valid on Tuesday and Wednesdays through 04/30/09. Valid for parties of 6 or less.
Proof of employment (i.e. current pay stub or business card) must be presented, one per table.
Alcohol and gratuity not included. Please remember to tip on the pre-discount total.

Chef Bernard thanks you.

A long day's journey into protein

March 2

For the past two weekends I’ve been driven south. Not driven as in forced by invading Canadians to flee with whatever possessions I could carry; driven as in someone with a car gave me a ride somewhere I wanted to go anyway.
Two weekends ago I was driven by Eric Scheffler to our friend Jonathan Ray’s 40th birthday party at Taberna del Alabardero in Washington, D.C. Jonathan lives in Silver Spring, Md., as he’s a professor at Georgetown, so the location was appropriate. He’s also an expert on Medieval Spain, so the cuisine was fairly appropriate.
Eric is a walking advertisement for exercise. He’s not a Chelsea-style body-beautiful guy, but an endurance runner. He and his wife vacation by going to a different city and running a marathon there. He ran for, I think, 19 hours straight across the Grand Canyon. His endurance limit doesn’t come when his legs give out or his lungs can't manage anymore, but when his body is so exhausted that it can no longer keep food down. He says he vomited trail mix during the Grand Canyon run and survived on some sort of sugar paste.
But he still inspires me, because when his system hasn’t completely shut down, he can eat whatever he wants. Every once in awhile, he says, he runs from his Scarsdale home to his Midtown office — 19 or 20 miles — and walks in with a garbage bag full of food.
Eric says you burn a bit more than 1,000 calories an hour when you run, which means if you run for four hours, you have to eat about three times what a normal person would eat just to maintain your body weight. He says it with a smile on his face and, it seems to me, a song in his heart — probably a head banging hard rock song, as that’s what he works out to.
And Eric loves to eat a lot of food. To top it off, he says: “I'm always happy and I sleep like a log." He’s also about as nice a person as you’d like to meet. Clever, too: In college at Colgate he decorated his room in his fraternity house with lace curtains and throw pillows and lovely pink things. He says it was a very successful chick magnet, and I see no reason to doubt him.
This past Saturday Birdman and I executed a long-awaited plan to go to Philadelphia for cheese steak.
If I lived in Philadelphia, I'd weigh about 400 pounds, because I would eat a cheese steak every day. It's just thinly sliced beef cooked on a greasy grill, plain or with a choice of onions, mushrooms and bell peppers, and a choice of cheese whiz, provolone or American cheese. It should not taste that great, and indeed outside of Philadelphia it doesn't. But something happens in Philadelphia that makes them sublime.
There are all sorts of theories about what makes a Philly cheese steak such a different animal from one anywhere else. Some say it's the soft Amoroso roll, some say it's the well-seasoned nature of the ancient griddles on which they’re cooked.
Personally, I think it's the onions, or the way the onions are made. Because the onions are diced and stacked in a huge pile on the griddle. If you order your cheese steak ”with,” or “wit” in local South Philadelphia dialect, meaning “with onions,” they stick a spatula under the stack of onions and mix some in. That means that some onions are burnt, some are raw, some are perfectly cooked and some are a little under done, giving you a really great combination of oniony goodness.
Birdman and I arrived in Philadelphia a little after 2pm and got in line at Pat’s, because it was closer than Geno’s, which was diagonally across the street.
Pat’s claim to fame is that it was first, founded by immigrants from Italy’s Abruzzo region — the same latitude as Lazio, where Rome is, but across the peninsula on the Adriatic side. Geno’s markets itself with a rabid jingoistic patriotism that I find kind of, well, juvenile. Sure America’s great, but if it’s that great you don’t need to brag about it. Better to be quietly excellent.
As for the cheese steaks, they’re about the same, and I think quibbling over which is better is like making a big deal about which vodka to have in your Bloody Mary.
Nonetheless, Birdman and I were of opposite opinions. He preferred Pat's, and I preferred Geno's.
Birdman’s a more discerning eater than I am, and he picks out subtle nuances that I miss. He also loves things that are older or original and so he would have a bias, conscious or otherwise, for the original cheese steak place.
I, on the other hand, was not immediately taken with Pat's cheese steak the way I usually am with cheese steaks, I think because we decided we’d get them with cheese whiz, which is the basic, standard cheese, the Ur cheese, for a cheese steak. But I like provolone better.
So I fully expected to like Geno's better, and I did.
We separated our cheese steaks by a couple of beers, and after Geno’s we went on to Tony Luke’s, which I’ve been told is the best cheese steak in the city. But really it’s a different animal from Pat’s or Geno’s, because it has a firmer roll, with more of a crust, and sesame seeds on top. That makes for a completely different experience. Birdman and I split one, because we were full, and I think I liked it better than the other two, but as I said it was a completely different animal and so difficult to compare.
I think my favorite cheese steak in Philadelphia is at Little Pete’s, which I have visited on previous trips to the city, but I’ve had it with provolone and only at 2am after a night of drinking, which makes it a completely different experience, too.
Obviously, it would have been nice if I had Eric Scheffler’s habit of long-distance running to process all of that food, but I’ve been more stuffed after a long media dinner than I was after two and a half cheese steaks and three beers (we went to the sit-down, inside part of Tony Luke's and had a beer with our final sandwich, also changing the experience, I know).
We were back in New York by a little after 8pm. We parked Birdman’s car near his Upper East Side apartment and took the cross town bus to 79th and Broadway, two blocks from the new Fatty Crab, which was having an opening party that night.
It was a good turnout — a bit crowded for people who had just eaten about 4,000 calories worth of cheese steak, but we found a good place to hang out, near the bar but around the corner from the long side of the bar, so we weren't in the way of people who wanted to get drinks. I drank a Rogue Ale — the beer company's sales person there called it a West Coast style red ale. It was thoroughly hoppy with a sweet bass note — until the one keg the company donated was gone, and then I switched to bourbon on the rocks. We were ensconced near the Rogue rep and also near my friends Julie Besonen and Sheri de Borchgrave. Akiko Katayama, who took me to Japan a couple of years ago to gain a better understanding of Niigata prefecture, swung by, too, and chef Franklin Becker. I broke away to chat with Will Goldfarb, who’s back in the New York food scene to open his sandwich kiosk Picknic for the season — although he’s still exploring the notion of setting up shop in Bali.
I'd seen Will just the night before at NYU, as he was an added speaker on the panel I was on last night. Blue Hill chef Dan Barber had to cancel at the last minute, but he was replaced by Will and Adam Kaye, Blue Hill's vice president for culinary affairs.
If I find the time, I’ll try to write a bit about the panel, but I don’t have time right now.
At Fatty Crab I also met Cabrito chef David Schuttenberg, who said business is good but no longer as insane as right after Cabrito’s Times review. It’s now possible to get in there.
I did eat a bit at Fatty Crab — a wing, some crab salad, a spoonful of chicken curry — but I was full and mostly in the mood to talk.
I was peckish after the party, however, and I noticed a Gray's Papaya near my subway stop. I realized I’d just gone to a whole different city to try its iconic food, but had never had this quintessential New York food.
So I had two hot dogs, and they were so good I had two more.
What’s wrong with me?

Meet me live, tonight!

I’ll be participating in a panel discussion at NYU tonight from 6:30 to 8:30 (at 19 University Place, Room 102), along with chefs and other writers. The topic: “Chefs and their Publics.” Sounds a bit academic, I know, but the panelists are good and the discussion should be lively. I know I'm going to do my best to be fascinating. And I’m told there might be Room4 (hint hint) a surprise extra guest speaker.

What I did during the Top Chef finale

February 26

Tom Colicchio spent the night of this season’s Top Chef finale at Pier 60 on the Hudson River, at the annual C-CAP benefit. I know because I saw him there. I took his picture and spoke with him briefly, too.
Someone tried to introduce us, Rita Jammet, maybe, or Drew Nieporent, but we’d already met.
“Sure, I know Bret. He likes to say very mean things about me,” he said.
He was referring to my attack on Top Chef, a show that I barely watch but whose fans get on my nerves by showing up at food events and being the idiotic groupies that they are.
Well, that some of them are. Most of my friends watch Top Chef and they’re not idiotic groupies at all.
I sort of tried to explain myself to Tom, but he just smiled and graciously waved it off, in the way that you do when you don’t really care when someone quibbles with you, or when you’re Tom Colicchio and the ramblings of a little guy like me matter not a whit in your life.
At any rate, I took a picture of Tom, third from the left, along with consultant and cookbook author Pamela Morgan, Gotham Bar & Grill chef Alfred Portale, and Rita Jammet, who with husband André owned New York landmark La Caravelle for many years. Now her son Nic is a partner in Sweetgreen, a fast-casual salad and frozen yogurt shop in Georgetown. She said they’re adding new units at Dupont Circle and in Bethesda, Md.
The C-CAP benefit is one of the great events of the New York food scene. It’s an excellent cause — funding and nurturing at-risk students pursuing careers in culinary arts — and so many of the city’s great chefs and restaurateurs show up rather than sending their minions. The food is great, the crowd is fun, and even the wine is usually pretty good.
So I caught up with Ben Pollinger at Oceana, who has a newborn at home, so congratulations to him, and Marc Murphy of Landmarc and Ditch Plains — he says business at Ditch Plains in particular is booming, especially the bar.
Marcus Samuelsson saw me fussing with my camera, so he took it from me and took quite a good picture of me and Wylie Dufresne (that’s us on the right; Wylie’s in the apron, I’m the little gnome over whom he’s towering).
Drew Nieporent’s hoping this will be his year at the Beard Awards. I think he’d particularly like Corton to be named best new restaurant. Drew’s also on the long list of semifinalists for Outstanding Restaurateur, but he said he didn’t much care about that, and that everyone on that list would be a worthy winner.
A C-CAP spokeswoman told me they wouldn’t be discussing how much money was raised this year, but rather stressing how great it was that the whole chef community participated in the effort. She didn’t correct me when I assumed that that meant receipts were down. Of course they’re down. Business is lousy.
One fine dining chef did tell me he was starting to see light at the end of the tunnel — that after an abysmal January saved only by restaurant week (or really fortnight), some people are gradually shifting back from the cheap-o prix-fixe menus and ordering with a bit more gusto. After all, New York still does have a large moneyed class, and they can only refrain for so long from drinking deeply from the cup of life.
Tony and Marissa May were at the event, and they said construction on SD-26, the successor of their recently closed landmark restaurant San Domenico NY, was coming along.
Michael Lomonoco of Porter House introduced me to his longtime chef de cuisine, Michael Ammirati, with whom he’s worked since they were at Windows on the World, as he handed me a slider.
Michael's on the right in this picture, and that’s not ordinary schmootz on his forehead; yesterday was Ash Wednesday.
Oh, speaking of sliders, I had a tiny pork belly slider from Aureole, where Chris Lee is the new executive chef. Chris wasn’t there when I was, but I got to the party late as NRN’s culinary pages closed last night and I, naturally, had to stay until they were ready to ship.
Still, I had plenty of time to nibble my way through the C-CAP festivities and still make my 9pm reservations at Inakaya.
It’s a Japanese robatayaki place near Times Square (in the New York Times building, in fact), part of a Japanese chain, and I think it very much belongs in Times Square. It’s a gigantic space with a lot of yelling.
Yelling — or at least speaking with great enthusiasm and gusto — is par for the course in proper Japanese restaurants, where it’s customary for everyone on staff to greet you with a hearty Irrashaimase! when you arrive. It’s terrifying when you’re not used to it, but then it becomes kind of sweet.
They similarly yell to you when you leave.
But at Inakaya they yell about everything. If you order something, the server shouts out the order and the guys preparing the food behind the bar repeat it. It kind of reminded me of Cold Stone Creamery and the way they all have to sing with great enthusiasm anytime someone drops something into the tip jar.
I loved the guys behind the bar, dressed in loose-fitting garments that allowed them to nimbly climb around and reach for ingredients on display as they needed them, like acrobatic elves. Then they'd use long wooden palettes to deliver the food to you. Sometimes they would shout at you to tell you what it was, but sometimes they’d just say something to the effect of “here you go, sir.”
Yes, very Times Square.

What I ate at Inakaya:
grilled eringi mushroom
grilled shishito pepper with grated ginger
grilled ginkgo nut
grilled skewer of chicken thigh
marinated scallion in miso vinaigrette
wakame in chef's special vinaigrette
dried stingray (served with a side of mayonnaise)
red bean ice cream
And I drank some sake and a dark beer called Asahi kuronama, or “black draft.”

To finish off this blog entry, here are some guys with tattoos, from the culinary staff of Union Square Cafe. On the left is chef tournant Louis Opoku. Executive sous chef T.J. Steele is on the right.

I think Missy Robbins is glad to be back in New York

February 25

Last night I tried to get Missy Robbins to say nice things about Chicago, but I couldn’t do it.
Missy was the chef at Spiaggia in the Windy City for five years or so, working under chef-owner Tony Mantuano. But she’s from the New York area and is clearly very happy to be back.
She has a good job. She’s been the chef at the critically acclaimed A Voce for about the past six months, replacing Andrew Carmellini, who left late last spring.
I ate there last night with one of her publicists, young John Weiss from the Susan Magrino Agency. I don't think John would like me to call him young, as he is a five-year veteran of the New York PR world, where five years is a lifetime. And he’s spent it all at the same agency. But I mean, come on: He’s 27.
Nice guy, though. Good dining companion.
I have always found Chicago to be a great restaurant city and I told Missy so, but she neither agreed nor disagreed with me. I asked if she missed it, and she said she thought Spiaggia was a great place to work and that Tony Mantuano was still a good friend of hers.
Well, all-righty then.
I imagine New York’s as glad to have her back as she is to be here.

What we ate (after I took the day's edge off with a Negroni):
Ricotta di bufala with extra virgin olive oil, mint, thyme, chiles and thick crusty bread.
Pugliese burrata with grilled broccoli raab and basil
Roasted trumpet royal mushrooms with fonduta, truffle and hazelnuts
Chestnut pappardelle with pork sausage and treviso
Pecorino and ricotta filled pasta with Savoy cabbage, bacon and black pepper
One other pasta; I believe Tagliatelle with oxtail ragù and Parmigiano-Reggiano
Roasted monkfish with purple artichokes, baby fennel and sweet green olives
Grilled lamb chops, braised lamb neck, borlotti beans and root vegetable sofrito
Chocolate Zuppa Inglesa with hazelnut brittle
Vanilla panna cotta with Meyer lemon and thyme

It’s not really for my dog

February 23

I had an interesting chat this afternoon with Brasserie manager David Pogrebin, who is going through a lot more doggie bags than he used to.
And a wider variety of people are using them, and taking home less desirable items than they used to.
Brasserie has a big rib-eye, so it has never been uncommon for people who didn’t arrive in chauffeur-driven cars to take half of it home with them. But now, people of all walks of life are taking food home, David says, and not just eight ounces of steak. They're taking home a couple of extra bites. If all that's left is the French fries, they take the fries home (like anyone really wants day-old fries).
Regulars who didn't used to ask for doggie bags are asking for them now.
The super-rich are doing it, too, and explaining themselves when they do it, David says.
“I’m taking this home for my wife,” for example, like David cares why they're taking it home.
We talked about that for a bit, and I think maybe the customers are bragging — showing their thriftiness now that that's considered a positive quality and a sign of good character rather than an indication of miserliness and ill-humor, which is what many people thought it was eight months ago.
I’m asking around to see if this is a significant trend, and I’ll start by asking you, dear blog reader, if you use doggie bags more often?
(There's a poll on the right side of this blog. Click on the 'yes' or 'no' button if you feel so-inclined).

Calling all lardo!

February 23

I'm collecting interesting ideas for things to do with lardo, as my boss is writing about it. If you'd like to share your thoughts, please do so by commenting below. She's particularly interested in learning what professional chefs are doing with it, but anyone should feel free to comment.
Thank you.

28 percent of you should try reading NRN

February 19

My fault: The results of the latest poll are kind of confusing, because I let participants tick as many boxes as they wanted, and they ticked an average of 1.52 of them.
I was curious to know what kind of crossover there is between Food Writer’s Diary readers and readers of its parent, Nation’s Restaurant News.
I learned that 28 percent of the 25 participating poll takers don’t read NRN at all, but that 60 percent do read it (assuming that no one said that they read NRN primarily both online and in print). And that 16 percent of those who read it read it in print.
Two respondents — that’s 8 percent — said they usually read it at home.
In the bathtub, maybe.
Anyway, the results are below. I’ll post a new poll sometime soon.

I read NRN: 6 (24%)
I do not read NRN: 7 (28%)
I read NRN primarily in print: 4 (16%)
I read NRN primarily online: 11 (44%)
I usually read NRN at work: 8 (32%)
I usually read NRN at home: 2 (8%)

Me, live

February 18

If you're going to be in New York on Friday, February 27, and you’re not doing anything else between 6:30 and 8:30 PM, you might enjoy this event, involving chefs and writers talking about food and words. I’m on the panel, and I know two of the other panelists, Dan Barber and Heather Carlucci-Rodriguez, are articulate people with interesting things to say for themselves. In fact, I've been on panels with them before, separately, and we’ve always had a good time.
The fourth panelist, Frederick Kaufman, I’ve only met briefly online, but he was congenial enough, and certainly seems like an interesting guy.
I think it should be a fun evening.

creeping serving sizes

February 18

Restaurants take a lot of heat from public health advocates who accuse them of fattening up the American population. Restaurants tend to respond that they're serving customers the tasty food that they enjoy in the portion sizes that they demand.
And it turns out that it’s not just restaurants that have been serving up bigger portions (until the past two or three years, say, when different-sized options have become more readily available in restaurants).
It turns out that, according to this article from the Associated Press, that cookbooks are doing it, too.
Okay, mostly The Joy of Cooking is doing it. Their portion sizes have gotten larger just like restaurants' have.
I love The Joy of Cooking, by the way. If you need to know how to cook something, that book will tell you. You’ll likely have to tweak the recipes, but the basic technique is there.

Beard pre-handicapping

February 13

To win a restaurant award from the James Beard Foundation you need to jump three hurdles. First, a judge must nominate you. Next, you must be among the top five (or sometimes six) vote getters among those nominated. Then you need to get the most votes from that group.
Until last year, no one knew who passed the first hurdle. But in 2008 someone leaked the preliminary list, and it was published all over the Internet. This year, the Beard Foundation seems to have decided to manage the story themselves and released the list to the media.
Or as their publicist told me: “There was such a great interest last year in the semifinalists, so this year, JBF wanted to release the semifinalist list again to give people a window into how the nominations process works.”
Again?
Well, anyway, to me the list looks like a list of any chef, restaurateur, restaurant or wine or spirits professional who was nominated by any judge, but it could have been whittled down by the various committee chairs. I haven’t asked.
In most categories, the same people, more or less, are nominated every year until they win. The winner is taken off the list and a replacement is named. It's not unusual for four out of five nominees in a category to be named two years in a row, and it seems to me that three out of five is pretty much the norm.
That’s not true for best new restaurant, of course.
For the “rising star” award, given to someone aged 30 or younger, most chefs who are nominated cross the age barrier before they win. This year, four out of last year’s six nominees are on the long list. Gavin Kaysen of Café Boulud won, so he's not on the list anymore. I guess the other nominee, Matt Molina of Mozza in Los Angeles, got too old.
I’m going to go ahead and predict that last year's other four nominees will be back on the list. They’re Nate Appleman of A16 in San Francisco, Sean Brock of McCrady's in Charleston, S.C., Johnny Monis of Komi in D.C., and Gabriel Rucker of Le Pigeon in Portland, Ore.
They’re going to need to be joined by one other nominee, and I’m going to predict that it will be Aaron Deal of Tristan in Charleston. That will mean two Charleston chefs and no New York chefs will be on the list, which is weird, but Aaron’s getting a lot of good press and since many of the judges are the press, media attention is a good predictor of nominees as well as winners.
That’s my approach in the predictions below, too. In no way does it reflect my opinion of the chefs nominated. I simply have noticed over the ten years that I have been covering the Beard awards that most nominees get renominated and the ones with the best name recognition win.
Best new restaurant is a tossup, because of course none of them could have been nominated last year. But I'm going to predict that Corton in New York, L20 in Chicago, Momofuku Ko in New York, The Bazaar by José Andreés at SLS Hotel at Beverly Hills in LA, and Bottega in Yountville will be on the list.
Let me reiterate that these are not my choices. These are my predictions of who will be on the list.
For outstanding restauratuer, we have as returning nominees Tom Douglas in Seattle and Richard Mellman in Chicago. I think they’ll be joined by New York restaurateurs Kieth McNally and Drew Nieporent, and, mmm. I’m not sure about the last nominee (well, obviously I’m not sure about any of them, but you know what I mean) I’m going to go ahead and guess Stephen Starr in Philadelphia, but if Pano Karatassos in Atlanta gets the nod, I won’t be surprised.
Outstanding chef went inevitably to Grant Achatz last year. José Andres in DC., Dan Barber in New York, Suzanne Goin in Los Angeles and Frank Stitt in Birmingham are on the long list again and I think they'll make it to the short list.
All of the usual suspects are on the long list, but Tom Colicchio recently returned to the kitchen in New York with Tom: Tuesday Dinner. I think that and his Top Chef star power will be enough for him to get the nomination.
For outstanding restaurant, Boulevard in San Francisco and Jean Georges in New York will be back on the list. I think they will be joined by Fore Street in Portland, Maine, Blackbird in Chicago and Bacchanalia in Atlanta.
For pastry chef, I think Gina de Palma of Babbo in New York, Pichet Ong of P*ong in New York, Nicole Plue of Redd in Yountville, Calif., and Mindy Segal of Mindy’s Hot Chocolate in Chicago will be back on the list. Let’s see, that’s two in New York, one in Napa and one in Chicago. I’m going to guess that the last finalist will be in Las Vegas: Kamel Guechida of Joël Robuchon at the Mansion at MGM Grand Hotel & Casino.
Three of last year’s nominees for outstanding wine service are on the long list and I think they’ll all make the cut: Bin 36 in Chicago, Blackberry Farm in Walland, Tenn., and Picasso at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.
I think La Toque, the only restaurant on the long list located in California’s wine country, will get the cut, then the only New York potential nominee, Le Bernardin, will round out the list.
Moving on to wine and spirits professional, Dale DeGroff and Merry Edwards are on the long list and so will likely make the short one. I think Garrett Oliver of The Brooklyn Brewery will join them, along with Todd Thrasher of Restaurant Eve in Alexandria, Va., and John and Doug Shafer of Shafer Vineyards in Napa, Calif.
For outstanding service, Canlis in Seattle, Spiaggia in Chicago and Vetri in Philadelphia will be returning nominees. Campanile in Los Angeles will be on the list, too, because Beard judges love Campanile. I think Daniel in New York will be nominated, too.
Okay, now for the regional awards.
Pacific:
Returning: Douglas Keane, Cyrus, Healdsburg, Calif.;David Kinch, Manresa, Los Gatos, Calif. and David Myers, Sona, Los Angeles
New: Jeremy Fox of Ubuntu in Napa and Chris Cosentino of Incanto in San Francisco

Mid-Atlantic:
Returning: Cathal Armstrong, Restaurant Eve, Alexandria, Va.; Jose Garces, Amada, Philadelphia; Maricel Presilla, Cucharamama, Hoboken, N.J. , and Cindy Wolf, Charleston, Baltimore. There's room for just one newbie, and I'm going to guess Jay Caputo of Espuma in Rehoboth Beach, Del.

Midwest:
Returning: Isaac Becker, 112 Eatery, Minneapolis; Colby Garrelts, Bluestem, Kansas City, Mo.; Tim McKee, La Belle Vie, Minneapolis; and Alexander Roberts, Restaurant Alma, Minneapolis
Joining them I'm going to take a stab in the dark and guess Gerard Craft of Niche in St. Louis.

Great Lakes:
I find it interesting that Graham Elliot Bowles didn’t even make it on the long list. I doubt that reflects on him, but I’m not sure what it does reflect on.
At any rate, on the long list, and probably on the short list: Bruce Sherman, North Pond, Chicago; Michael Symon, Lola, Cleveland; and Alex Young, Zingerman’s Roadhouse, Ann Arbor, Mich.
I think joining them will be Paul Virant of Vie in Western Springs, Ill., and Curtis Duffy of Avenues at the Peninsula Chicago, but it could really go a bunch of different ways.

For New York:
Returning: Michael Anthony, Gramercy Tavern; Terrance Brennan, Picholine; Wylie Dufresne, WD-50; and Gabriel Kreuther, the Modern. I think Michael White of Alto will be the fifth nominee.

In the Northeast:
Returning: Rob Evans, Hugo's, Portland, Maine; Clark Frasier and Mark Gaier, Arrows Restaurant, Ogunquit, Maine;, Michael Leviton of Lumière in West Newton, Mass., and Mark Orfaly of Pigalle in Boston.
For the fifth nominee, I'm going to predict Michael LaScola of American Seasons, on Massachusetts island of Nantucket.

Northwest:
Returning: Scott Dolich, Park Kitchen, Portland, Ore.; Maria Hines, Tilth, Seattle; Ethan Stowell, Union, Seattle; and
Jason Wilson, Crush, Seattle.
New to the list (or really back on it as he has been nominated many times) I think will be Joseba Jiménez de Jiménez of The Harvest Vine in Seattle.

Southeast:
Returning: Hugh Acheson, Five and Ten, Athens, Ga.; Arnaud Berthelier, The Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton, Buckhead, Atlanta; Linton Hopinks of Restaurant Eugene in Atlanta and Mike Lata of Fig in Charleston, S.C.
I think they’ll be joined by Bob Waggoner of Charleston Grill in Charleston, S.C.

Southwest:
Returning: Saipin Chutima, Lotus of Siam, Las Vegas; Sharon A. Hage, York Street, Dallas; Ryan Hardy, Montagna at the Little Nell, Aspen, Colo.; and Andrew Weissman, Le Rêve, San Antonio.
I'm going to predict Kelly Liken, of restaurant Kelly Liken in Vail, Colo., as the fifth nominee

And finally the South:
Returning:Zach Bell, Café Boulud at the Brazilian Court, Palm Beach, Fla.; John Currence, City Grocery, Oxford, Miss.; Christopher Hastings, Hot and Hot Fish Club, Birmingham, Ala.; and Douglas Rodriguez, Ola, Miami Beach, Fla.
I think Scott Boswell of Stella! in New Orleans will round out the list.
For the entire long list click here.

“I worked with Marc’s dad”

February 10

Last night Forge restaurant celebrated its renaming as restaurant Marc Forgione. The name change had to do with some sort of trademark or copyright dispute that I didn’t follow due to lack of interest.
At any rate, it was a good party, with ham (described as prosciutto, but I don’t think it was) from what someone called Marc’s own pig, as well as duck sliders, other little passed hors d’oeuvre and a selection of artisan cheeses whose producers or distributors were there to tell us about them.
One of them, an American whose relatives in the Italian region of Abruzzo made farmstead sheep milk cheese from their homes and hired him as their distributor, said what I used as the title of this blog entry. Because Marc’s dad is Larry Forgione (the e is silent), one of the founders of the American cuisine movement and one of the most respected chefs in the country. He is not normally called Marc’s dad. Marc is referred to as his son.
But times do change, and I don’t think I’d ever seen most of the people who were at the party. I did know some of them, though. I caught up with Arlyn Blake, social networking maven of the traditional sort, in which people are introduced personally to one another and might become actual friends rather than the Facebook variety. And I hung out with Food & Beverage editor Francine Cohen and Restaurant Business food editor Pat Cobe.
Someone asked if Pat and I weren’t competitors, and we are, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun at parties together. You can be a competitor without being a jerk.
The always-engaging Chris Shott from the New York Observer was there. His birthday was yesterday, or maybe today. He’s 33, the same age as Jesus when he was crucified. Chris said some of his friends said they hoped this Easter was better for him than it had been for Jesus when he was 33, and I pointed out that, in fact, Jesus had a terrific Easter as that’s when he rose from the dead (if you believe such things).
Good Friday was the problem.
I caught up with photographer Michael Harlan Turkell, too, who says he has been photographing Bushwick taquerias.
Of course, there was talk of the economy. One person, who is in the unfortunate position of running a company that provides temporary catering staff when companies need them — needless to say, business is down a lot — was complaining that it was no longer socially acceptable to have any sort of gathering that might require the spending of money so guests can sit down to a meal.
It’s true that such behavior is out of fashion, but if your company has just been the recipient of bailout money, it’s understandable that they would be disinclined to be ostentatious about their spending. It’s too bad they hadn’t thought about that before handing out huge bonuses.
I know the economy is stimulated by spending money, but spending money you don’t have is how we got here in the first place (among other things, I know).
Earlier in the evening I was extremely politically incorrect when I asked when we could start referring to the current situation as a depression.

Wow, that’s a gloomy way to end a blog entry, so let’s bring the situation into perspective.
A couple of weeks ago I went to a party at the New York Palace hotel, at which members of the Dorchester Collection — a group of hotels to which the Palace belongs — presented cocktails and mocktails for us to sample. You’ll have to ask someone else about the mocktails, but the cocktails were all distinctive and interesting, ranging from a Prickly Pear Margarita from The Beverly Hills Hotel to a fairly classical Martinez from The Dorchester in London, to the Palace’s Bourbon Smash (Bourbon, mint, lemon, simple syrup).
My favorite, owing to my weakness for spicy things, was the Chile and Passion Fruit Martini from the Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan.
Anyway, among the people I met at the party was a young Dorchester representative from Moscow. She expressed cynical mirth at our fretting over this economic downturn. Having a memory that goes back before 1999, I knew what she was talking about. Russia’s economy was thrown into absolute chaos in the early 1990s, when the formerly controlled economy was thrown open, destroying the currency and in general causing economic turmoil the likes of which I don’t think we’ve ever seen in the West.
I mean, in the United States we had 25 percent unemployment during the Great Depression, but I don’t think it compared to the Wild West-style chaos of Russia in the early 1990s.
And that was a piece of cake for them in the grand scheme of things. Russians resorted to cannibalism both during the World War II siege of Leningrad and during the Soviet civil war of the 1920s. I recounted this to the Russian, who didn’t contradict me, so I’m going to go ahead and assume that I got it right.
You think you got it bad? Just remember, your neighbors aren’t trying to eat you yet.

Hearts and Thai food

February 9

I bet you don’t have a model of a defibrillator on your desk. Well, I do. It’s an exact replica of the Medtronic Virtuoso™ with Conexus™ Telemetry that gets installed into people whose hearts have a tendency to stop beating. The defibrillator gives the heart a little jolt and the patient continues to live.
My new friend Jennifer Watson sells them and she brought one to dinner for me to have. It's missing the Virtuoso’s guts, but it looks the same.
Or so she says. I wouldn’t know, really, but is that something to lie about?
Jennifer doesn’t just sell defibrillators. She watches the doctors install them to make sure they attach them right. Because it’s important.
And she loves eating. She loves it! She has no interest in cooking, though. Chefs have flirted with her, hoping to seduce her with the allure of a private lesson, but that is not the right approach for Jennifer.
I’d told her about Rhong Tiam, my favorite Thai place in the city, and she thought our eating there together would be a good idea.
And indeed it was, as Jennifer has possibly a higher threshold for spicy food than I do, and thinks eating is just about the greatest thing in the world to do. So she gets up early in the morning to work out to make up for it.
Me, I just eat. I used to go to the gym regularly, but when I stopped going and the world didn’t end I realized I didn’t have to go, and I find it hard to work up the motivation to do so.
At least if I ever need to have a defibrillator installed, I’ll know what it looks like.
What we ate:
Thai chorizo (sai krok isaan)
Vietnamese summer rolls (Jennifer apologized, but she loves them, and I’m not the purist I once was — I mean, go ahead and have Vietnamese food in a Thai restaurant if you want to; even on Rhong Thiam’s menu in its Thai classics section the first dish listed is rendang, and that’s actually Malay)
Thai beef salad (neua nam tok)
Southern style chicken (khua glin gai)
Honey duck (a bit different from the classic pet yang nam phueng, but still delicious)
Then we chatted for about an hour and decided to finish up with tom yam noodle soup with beef

10

February 9

Today is my 10th anniversary at Nation’s Restaurant News. Can you believe it?

different fats, people with the same name, and karaoke

February 5

“Are you Bret?"
“Yes."
“Hi, I’m Brett.”
I’m pretty sure Davids and Michaels and Saras get no thrill from that kind of conversation, but there just aren’t that many Brets out there, so we do derive a fair amount of joy from meeting one another, even when we stand on opposite sides of the fence when it comes to the number of 't's we use.
Brett in this case was the bouncer at Little Branch, keeping a line of people, well, in line with gracious authority, even in the cold February air.
Not me, though. I just went right in, as my friend Jim the goose man was already there, and I was expected.
In my mind, I said to the people in line “get out of my way, you ill-connected rubes, I’m with a goose farmer from South Dakota!”
In retrospect I feel bad that Little Branch was my third stop in the evening, because it is supposed to be one of the great cocktail bars of the city, and I had been out way too long to care. It was dumb of me not to pay attention.
I had come from the Hall Company's 13th anniversary party at Pulse Karaoke Lounge and Suites, where I sang "Sweet Caroline" with my boss, Ellen Koteff, and Stephen Hall's business partner Sam Firer, and assorted others who came on stage because "Sweet Caroline" is a crowd pleaser.
I also chatted with Ed Witt and expressed sympathy that his restaurant Bloomingdale Road had just closed.
And I drank Maker's Mark on the rocks.
It seemed reasonable and proper to continue with the same theme when it came to drinks at Little Branch, where I also ordered whiskey on the rocks from our booth. They asked me what sort of whiskey. I said I didn’t care. And that’s true, but Jim had likely told them he was bringing the food editor of Nation’s Restaurant News and I imagine they wanted to leave a good impression. For me to be dismissive of their stock-in-trade was wrong.
In fact, they gave me a tasty whiskey cocktail that was wasted on me because I was focused on discussing goose fat with Jim and a new acquaintance of his, animal fat enthusiast and jazz musician Jon Burr.
My apologies to the nice bartenders of Little Branch, whose drinks deserve more consideration.
Jon was playing the bass at the bar that night and Jim and I were there ostensibly to listen to him play. But we were really there to talk about animal fat, and ways for Jim to market the rivers of goose grease that are soon going to be available for consumption.
Now that’s interesting, because the evening began with fat.
For the first time, I had been invited to an event specifically as a blogger. Iron Chef Cat Cora was going to be there. Those two facts were interesting enough for me to go to the event. It turns out that Ms. Cora is now working with bigfatlie.org, which is an attempt by Lever Brothers to promote its “soft spreads” new-generation non-margarines that they’re promoting as heart-healthy and convenient. They’re certainly trans fat free, and convenient. Cat did a cooking demonstration of baked wontons, brushed with one of the soft spreads beforehand to make them crunchy. I personally would rather eat deep-fried foods, but less of them, but to each his own.
The highlight of the party was the fact that Sara Bonisteel was there, recently freed from her job with Fox News and now working for AOL. I also met a new work colleague of hers also named Sara (or maybe Sarah, I didn’t ask).
So finishing out the evening with fans of animal fat (and fiber, Jon’s also very big on fiber) balanced it all out well.

Goose fat: available soon

February 3

Boy, it was hard to find a place to eat lunch yesterday. Egg man Howard Helmer had asked me to have lunch with him and the president (and I believe the only member) of the National Goose Council, Jim Schiltz.
We had planned on eating at Bistro Desaret, because it’s near NRN’s offices and because Howard likes the kind of homey French food that they serve. But Howard had found out the day before that they no longer served lunch on Mondays, due to the fact that no one was eating there even if they were open.
So we planned on lunch at the Japanese noodle shop Menchanko-Tei, near Howard’s Midtown apartment.
A sign on the restaurant said “temporarily closed.”
So we went across the street to the La Bonne Soupe, a neighborhood favorite with a croque madame that Howard loves.
The place was quite busy, but a table was available for us. Howard had his croque madame, Jim had a daily special of red snapper in red pepper coulis, and I had brandade de moroue.
And Jim explained that he had developed a new process for harvesting his geese that got him a lot more USDA-approved goose fat than he did previously. He figured it out during the end of last autumn’s harvest cycle, so now he has 6,000 pounds of goose fat for sale. Most years he has 2,000 pounds.
But this is the big news: Next year he’ll have 80,000 pounds of the stuff, and he plans to undercut the duck fat merchants by selling it for $2 a pound.
Duck fat usually wholesales for about $3 a pound, he says.
Goose fat is most famously used in the French dish pommes sarladaise, which is basically potatoes fried in goose fat. It’s something you should try sometime in your life, maybe every day.
But it’s a wonderful frying medium for all sorts of things, and soon it will be available cheap. Hurray!

Today for lunch I had smoked goose breast at my desk.

Reinventing yourself

February 2

My friend Ben Weinberg blew into Denver in 1982 like a force of nature. The gregarious 17-year-old high school junior from Minneapolis was instantly popular. He made the soccer team, became president of our youth group chapter, and had bright and pretty girlfriends.
The way he tells it, his friends from back home would not have recognized him. In Minnesota he had been shy and bookish, but the mid-high school move to Colorado gave him a chance to reinvent himself, and that’s just what he did.
His success thrilled him. I remember him telling me so after he was elected president. I was delighted, too, as Ben was my idol — he was popular and two years older than I, and yet he deigned to talk to me — and it seemed I had chosen wisely.
We lost touch, as you do. Ben’s life took a circuitous route, but he found himself in corporate law and then financial planning. He hated it.
So a few years ago he reinvented himself again. Taking an approximately 93 percent pay cut, he quit his financial planning job and started work in a wine shop.
Since then he has achieved reasonable success as a wine writer.
Last week he was sitting across from me at Zereoué, giddy as a 17-year-old who had just reinvented himself. He was being put up at the Waldorf=Astoria to attend an Italian wine conference, meeting all the big national wine writers and tasting as much Barolo as he wanted.
Ben’s not my idol anymore, because I’m no longer 15, but I’m still delighted.
Amos Zereoué, the owner of the restaurant we were in, had to reinvent himself, too, as he used to be a professional football player — a career with a limited time span. He bought the restaurant space that once housed Frère Jacques (13 East 37th St.) and reopened it as a French restaurant called La Gorge d'Or.
Generic French food wasn’t working for the place, so he closed it and reinvented it, renaming it Zereoué, and adding themes of his native Ivory Coast into the food, décor and music (Zereoué was raised on Long Island, but he’s originally from West Africa). My buddy Chris Shott over at The New York Observer wrote about the restaurant being reworked last June, and since then, the place still hasn’t gotten much press or business.
Slowly the food has gotten more and more West African, which surprises me, because there’s very little West African food in New York, and what of it there is in Manhattan is mostly north of 115th St., and I pay attention to West African food. It’s had a special place in my heart since my Ivorian friend Fatou cooked it for me.
And yet I didn’t know anything about Zereoué.
The food there is pretty West African. It’s toned down spice-wise, to be sure, and tarted up a bit in presentation, with little domes of rice and attieke instead of heaping piles of it, but it’s still distinctive enough that there’s nothing like it for miles and miles around.
Ben said it was the best meal he’d had on this trip to New York.

What we ate:
Sautéed calamari with red pepper Ivory Coast sauce
Duck spring rolls drizzled with a sweet sambal glaze and served with mixed greens
Beet salad
Aromatic crushed eggplant stew served with a white fish in an Ivorian sauce that I should probably describe better than that
Kedjenou: chicken stew in a peanut sauce
Crème brûlée

Alpha males take a break

January 30

A couple of weeks ago I was talking to my friend Kenyon Phillips over dinner at Dhaba. Kenyon is my only vegetarian friend with whom I will eat dinner, an indication of just what good company he is.
While munching on lasoni gobi, a stir-fried cauliflower dish that’s part of India’s distinctive Chinese cuisine (every country has its own Chinese cuisine, as immigrants from China have adapted to local tastes), as well as a variation of palak paneer, plus a lamb stew for me, we were talking about human beings’ natural desire to be liked.
“It’s a survival instinct,” he said, which of course it is.
A common theory among biologists is that young mammals are cute — with disproportionately large heads and big eyes — so that their parents will take care of them rather than eating them or selling them into slavery.
Even as cute as babies and puppies and bear cubs are, it doesn’t always work. Just imagine what would happen if we looked like caterpillars.
I think being likeable is also a tactic of non-dominant beta males. If we can’t beat people up to get our way, we can try to cajole them into it, and that works a lot better if people like you.
These days, as the economic winds blow ever-colder, I’ve found that I’m getting nicer. I’ve always been kind of a yes-man in the office, but these days, I feel like I’m being even cheerier, more accommodating, kinder to publicists, more fun at parties.
I think my colleagues are getting nicer, too.
I think we’re responding to these dark times by turning up the volume on our survival tactics.
Not too long ago I read about a troop of baboons whose alpha males, being the aggressive creatures that alpha males are, forced their way onto a garbage heap, ate tainted food and died. All of them.
With only betas left, that baboon troop behaved the way betas usually do. They worked collaboratively and helped each other out, in stark contrast to most baboon troops, which work pretty much like dictatorships.
When new would-be alphas came along and behaved like they were in charge, they were rebuffed and shunned until they learned to play nicely.
I wonder if that’s going to be going on here in the United States, where our alpha males didn’t die from food poisoning, but a lot of their companies died from toxic debt, and a lot of them lost their jobs, because firing a high-ranking alpha saves you a lot more money than letting go of a measly beta.
I wonder what kinds of effects that will have on corporate culture.

Of course, if you’re not careful when making your staff cuts, you run the risk of losing valuable corporate memory, and I was reminded of that at a book party I went to just before I met Kenyon for dinner.
The book is Dirty Dishes: A restaurateur’s story of passion, pain, and pasta by Pino Luongo and Andrew Friedman.
Florence Fabricant, who writes a column both for The New York Times and Nation’s Restaurant News, was at the party, too, and during all the speeches she pointed out Pino Luongo’s unique qualities as a cookbook writer, including the fact that he doesn’t include measurements in his recipes.
I like that, because I’ve always thought that recipes gave cooks a false sense of security. A list of ingredients and instructions on what to do with them is no substitute for knowing how to cook. It’s like any art form. Imagine getting a recipe for how to paint a picture of a tree, or how to write a song.
Don’t get me wrong, recipes are useful, but they’re not all you need, and I think encouraging people to cook creatively, and to taste the food, by not telling them exactly how much of something to use, helps them to become better cooks.
And you need someone who has been around for as long as Florence has to explain that that’s what Pino Luongo has always done.
I was also reminded of the need for a corporate memory by my cousin Leonard Kamsler, a freelance photographer specializing in instructional golf pictures who for several decades now has done work for Golf Digest. I had dinner with him, his partner Stephen Lyles and Stephen’s mother, Pete (yes, Pete, just let it go). While I ate Stephen’s delicious garlicky tilapia and Pete’s equally yummy rice dish, a sort of pilaf, but with a lot of spinach mixed in (trust me, it was a lot better than I just made it sound), Leonard reflected on John Updike, who had just died. He remembered that Golf Digest had sent Updike to the Masters tournament one year and had him write a thought piece about it. Leonard was pretty sure that no one currently on staff at Golf Digest would have any idea that Updike had ever written for them, and so they wouldn’t know to track down the article and maybe run it again in tribute to him.
He said he’d give them a call.

It’s the food, stupid

January 30

Time for a new poll.
For the last one, I asked you to give the main reason you pick the restaurants you choose to eat in.
One guy responded via my Twitter account with a whole list, presumably ranked in order of importance: Location, taste, price, value, staff, cleanliness. But of the 21 of you who responded on the blog, 57 percent said you went to restaurants because you like the food. Nineteen percent of you helped justify the adage that the three most important things a restaurant needs to succeed are location, location and location.
Here, for the record, is the full list of responses to the question: "When choosing a restaurant, what is usually the most important factor?"

Location: 4 (19%)
Whether I like the food: 12 (57%)
The amount of time I’ll have to spend there: 0 (0%)
Quality of service: 1 (4%)
Whether I know the owners or people who work there: 3 (14%)
Price: 0 (0%)
Ambience: 0 (0%)
Coupons or other promotions: 0 (0%)
I go where my dining companions want to go: 0 (0%)
Other: 1 (4%)

You’ll notice that 14 percent of respondents said they choose a restaurant based on whether they know the owners or people who work there, an indication that many Food Writer's Diary readers are industry insiders.
And that leads to our next question, about this blog’s parent, Nation’s Restaurant News, the paper of record of the foodservice industry.
It’s really a three-part question: Do you read NRN? Do you read it in print or online? Do you read it at work or at home?
Answer as much of it as you like. Click away. Go crazy. Feel free to comment below if you feel like elaborating.
And thank you for your time.

John Doherty’s leaving the Waldorf

January 27

John Doherty is hanging up his chef’s toque, leaving the Waldorf-Astoria after working there for 30 years — 23 of them as executive chef.
It’s hard to know for sure, but it looks like he’s leaving of his own freewill and has hired a PR company (Hall) to announce the formation of his new restaurant development company, JCM Hospitality Group.
John’s really one of the nicest chefs I know, and he’s partnering with a couple of interesting guys.
One is Mark Wood, who has worked with both culinary wunderkind-cum-vegan and raw food enthusiast Matthew Kenney, and with hard-nosed restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow.
The other, Christian Palikuca, worked at Sign of the Dove and then Daniel (he was director of operations at both) before falling in with the Marlon Abela Restaurant Corporation (aka and dba MARC), which owns A Voce, becoming its chief operating officer.
John also will apparently be working on a book on leadership, producing a television project, and going on leadership speaking engagements. He plans to do consulting too, but who doesn’t?
Meanwhile, back at the Waldorf, executive sous chef Peter Daledda is running the show.

Things that are from Brittany, and things that aren’t

January 23

I wish I looked like my name. Because, seriously, Bret Thorn is a dead sexy name. It's the name of a romance novel character or a porn star. If I looked like Bret Thorn, I swear I’d never wear a shirt.
Thorn is the German name for Torún, the Polish city that my paternal grandfather’s side of the family claims to come from. When they left Poland they lived in Krakow, but they said they were from Thorn, which is weird because Thorn is in Pomerania and Jews weren’t supposed to live in Pomerania.
So who knows if my last name is accurate.
And my first name means “from Brittany,” which I’m not. I’ve never even been to Brittany. As far as I know, none of my ancestors ever set foot in Brittany, either.
But chef Cyril Renaud is from Brittany, and so I was happy to check out his new restaurant, Bar Breton.
I suspect that places like Bar Breton will be the ones that succeed in New York in the near future: focused without being hokey, casual yet distinctive, restaurants that have something to say for themselves that isn’t “you’re going to have to sell a kidney to eat here.”
I went with my friend Birdman, aka biology professor David Krauss, and as we drank pear cider out of what looked like oversized teacups (our waiter said Cyril said they were traditional cups for drinking cider), we spoke of things that annoy us.
I had been annoyed at a restaurant opening the night before — a crowded affair whose door was being manned by the staff of a PR firm that, in my experience, is always stressed out in that way that a certain class of New Yorkers always are: Put-upon, with too much to do to be bothered with the niceties of civil behavior.
“Hold on,” the publicist said to me, her hand up to halt me, as though she were directing traffic.
"Come on in,” she said to a cluster of statuesque blondes who, to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, I’m just going to assume were important friends of the restaurant.
With the VIPs taken care of, she turned to the rest of us, so I introduced myself and she was all goodness and light, sweetness and smiles, as though that would make me forget that she had just stuck her hand in my face.
It’s true that I’m not an important person to that restaurant. I don’t make or break restaurants by reporting on food trends. I can give them press or not, but regardless of what I do, the restaurant won’t be transformed, and whether I like the publicist has little to do with what I’ll write. If there’s something interesting to say about a restaurant I’ll say it even if the publicist is a simpleton who doesn’t understand that you’re supposed to treat everyone with respect, if for no other reason than because, even if you don’t know who they are, that doesn’t mean they’re not someone important, and if they're not someone important now, that doesn’t mean they won’t be important someday.
It was another reminder that, just because someone has a job, it doesn’t mean that he or she is good at it.
Anyway, Bar Breton had a good crowd. Former Times critic Mimi Sheraton was there, too, and a couple of other food writers whose faces I remember but whose names I forget.
What Birdman and I ate:
Denise's sardines with white pepper and cornichon vinaigrette
suckling pig & foie gras terrine with apple & breakfast radish
braised lamb shank galette (that’s a Breton buckwheat crêpe) with roasted winter vegetables
Roasted baby vegetables and parsley butter
French fries
Black sea bass, endive, bacon, chervil, walnuts and balsamic reduction
Pot de lait with chicory gelée
Far Breton Brûlée

Many Food Writer’s Diary readers count calories

January 20

Apologies for my silence over the past week. I’m not ignoring you, just, you know, meeting deadlines and stuff. But I have many exciting stories of blowfish and book launches, casseroles and sheet cakes.

But if nothing else, I need a new poll, because the old one has closed.
I asked Food Writer's Diary readers if posting of calorie information on menus would affect what you order.
If you don’t eat at chain restaurants in New York City, the question is theoretical, but here in the Big Smoke such information has been on menus and menu boards of chains with 15 or more units (nationwide) since mid-July. Similar laws are likely to sweep the nation sooner rather than later.
Thirty-two of you were kind enough to participate in the poll. These are the results:

WOULD POSTING OF CALORIE INFORMATION ON MENUS AFFECT WHAT YOU ORDER?

Yes: 15 (46%)

No: 9 (28%)

Maybe: 8 (25%)

If you feel like participating in a new poll, I'd like to ask why you pick the restaurants you do.

Thank you.

Tom Colicchio gave us omelets

January 13

I wonder if breakfast press conferences are a new trend. The running joke among us trend spotters is that you can call something a trend once you see it three times, and I’ve only been to two breakfast press conferences in recent memory.
The first was at the end of September, when Tom Colicchio summoned us all to Craft’s private dining room to announce that every other Tuesday the place would be transformed into a fine-dining, tasting-menu-only restaurant called Tom: Tuesday Dinner. Very exciting!
This morning, Eric Ripert called us all to Le Bernardin at 9 a.m. to announce that he was going to be donating a dollar for every patron that ate in his restaurant or private dining facilities, and for every book he sold, to City Harvest, which is New York’s food bank.
Perhaps you’re thinking, as I initially thought: “A dollar? One dollar? Big deal!”
Except that it is. I imagine that Le Bernardin is doing reasonably good business, but restaurant margins are tight at the best of times, and M. Ripert said he expected he would be giving $100,000 to the food bank in the first year.
Perhaps you’re thinking, as I initially thought: “Le Bernardin gets 100,000 customers a year?”
But then I did the math. That’s just shy of 274 customers a day.
Besides, Ripert already does his share for City Harvest, donating his time at charity events, allowing himself to be auctioned off to make dinner for people and donating 16,000 lbs of food — mostly good stuff like fish, vegetables and fruit.
He has a refrigerator at Le Bernardin dedicated specifically for City Harvest.
He’s also a board member of the charity.
The chef pointed out the dichotomy of Midtown Manhattan, where some of the richest and most powerful people in the world live and work, but where there is also a fair number of destitute people, especially in the Rockefeller Center area. And their ranks are growing.
At Tom Colicchio’s press conference, we had a full breakfast buffet, plus omelets made to order — in fact, some of the best omelets I’ve ever had.
Eric Ripert’s breakfast was Continental, which is fair — he’s Continental, too.
And I can’t very well complain about eating Michael Laiskonis’ pain au chocolat. They were small, and at the server’s prompting I took two. We also had delicious, light yogurt parfaits and fruit cups.
No omelets, but it would be petty to complain, wouldn’t it?

Recommendation for anyone holding a press conference: Serve pastry.

Who are you?

January 8

Thanks to the 48 readers who participated in my survey of who you are. A quarter of those who responded are amateur food enthusiasts, slightly fewer than that are chefs. The amateurs all chimed in when I reminded my Twitter followers of the survey. One respondent is a self-proclaimed celebrity chef. One of those who ticked “other” commented that he or she was a sommelier.
Participants were allowed to pick more than one answer, and a lot of them did, which is why there are 65 responses from the 48 participants.
And now I’ll put up a new poll, about one of the hot-button issues in foodservice these days: Posting calorie information on menus and menu boards.

The question was, Who are you?
The answers were thus:

Chef at an independent restaurant: 5 (10%)
Chef at a chain: 3 (6%)
Fine dining chef: 3 (6%)
Chef at a non-restaurant foodservice operation: 1 (2%)
an NRN subscriber: 5 (10%)
Celebrity Chef: 1 (2%)
Journalist: 9 (18%)
Foodservice supplier or manufacturer: 1 (2%)
Amateur food enthusiast: 12 (25%)
Food Writer’s Diary fan: 5 (10%)
Publicist: 12 (25%)
unrelated in any way to foodservice: 4 (8%)
Other: 4 (8%)
Total voters: 48

The best restaurants are the ones where they know you

January 5

You might remember that I spent the day after Christmas waiting to have dinner at The Spotted Pig.
The day after New Year's, I walked right in to Kurve and got a table immediately
Well, of course I got a table at Kurve; the place is pretty much always empty. It’s a good thing to remember if you’re looking for a place to eat, because remember the chef and owner is Andy Yang, who also is chef-owner of the delicious Rhong-Tiam.

Andy had e-mailed me:

“Hi Bret
I have a new duck menu and couple of appetizer and also a new Steak pruveyor
would like your opinion. Come in bring friends...
Let me know....
C u :)”

A week earlier, my great friend Jonathan Ray had called. He was going to be in town for a historians conference and would like to hang out.
So I combined the two opportunites and invited Jonathan and his wife Michelle to dinner at Kurve.
Boy, was it empty. I arrived on Saturday at 7 — teeth-clenchingly early for the East Village, it’s true, but there wasn’t a single person in the restaurant besides me who didn’t work there.
I’m not sure why Kurve is empty, It has gotten lousy reviews but that’s not usually enough for a place to be completely deserted. Of course the retro-futuristic decor doesn’t really fit with the East Village.
“Really? It would fit better in Midtown?” Jonathan asked. "Tell me, in what neighborhood would this fit in?”
Jonathan gets passionate about architecture. He does. You should drive with him sometime past some of the McMansions in his native Westchester County (Jonathan’s not a spoiled rich kid; he comes from middle class Mount Kisco).
He agreed that a place with Kurve’s design might be suitable in the Meatpacking District, but suggested Miami would be better.
But the drinks are by Sasha Petraske, the desserts are by Pichet Ong, and the food by Andy himself. That's good pedigree.
I always get great food there, but as Anna Teresa Callan loves quoting James Beard as saying: “The best restaurant is the one where they know you.”
I don’t know if James Beard actually said that, but Anna Teresa does pretty much every time I see her.
So Jonathan, Michelle and I just sat there and let Andy send out food and drinks until we’d tried everything he wanted us to try, discussing Top Chef (Jonathan’s a fan), and the state of Medieval and early modern Jewish historiography, because Jonathan, whose PhD thesis was on Jews in 13th Century Spain, is now working on a book on what happened to the Jews who were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the 15th Century.
Apparently that book hasn’t been written yet.
Michelle doesn’t talk about history much, but she does talk about her genius students — she’s teaching gifted 11-year-olds in the DC suburbs — and global politics, and how much she loved Andy's wagyu beef burger, which she said was the best burger she'd ever had.
She gushed over all the food. She really did, and she’s not a gusher.
We also had chicken laab served in little cucumber cups; tiny little shrimp cakes; corn soup with apple wood bacon; beet soup; chicken wings wrapped with pandanas (a Thai classic, except they usually use cubes of thigh meat); tuna kratong-tong (an amusing play on a Thai classic appetizer that might be over the heads of most white diners); garlic skate wing; daurade served with the classic Thai sauce of vinegar, chile and fish sauce; beef tenderloin with a whole bunch of dipping sauces, but I focused on the jao, which I think is a Northeastern Thai sauce, although it could be Northern, sprinkled with ground, toasted rice.
Oh, we also had roasted lobster, and foie gras torchon topped with red currant jam, and I think I’ve forgotten some things.

I forgot the duck.
I thought that would be impossible: honey-roasted duck with fig sauce. I think it was Jonathan’s favorite, although he also claimed great affection for the burger.
Honey-roasted duck is a Sino-Thai specialty, typically served in a sweet soy-sauce based sauce with young ginger.

For dessert, Andy sent out Pichet's butterscotch pudding with baby bananas, caramel popcorn and salted caramel; dark chocolate devil's food cake with kirsch Chantilly, brandied bing cherries, shaved chocolate and cocoa pearls (I don’t hear Chantilly mentioned much — it’s just whipped cream, with some powdered sugar and vanilla of course); and green tea tiramisu with pink rhubarb and raspberries.
We were there for about three hours, on a Friday night. A few people had come in for drinks by the time we left, but it was still pretty quiet.
I’d say you should check the place out, because it’s conveniently located, you’ll have no trouble getting a table and the wagyu burger’s just $17 (a good price for wagyu burgers in New York), but I’m not in the business of recommending restaurants and Andy’s a friend of mine, so I probably get better service than you would, and maybe better food.
Maybe you should go in and introduce yourself, say you read about Kurve in Food Writer’s Diary and thought you’d give it a try.
It’s worth a shot.