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Monday, August 21, 2006
Jasper White at the first of what will no-doubt be a string of 40th birthday celebrations
August 21
A dear college friend, science teacher Michael Gerber, turned 40 last week, so this weekend I took a bus to Boston to help him celebrate.
Greyhound has become surprisingly middle class in recent years. The dregs that used to accompany me on bus trips in college in the 1980s are nowhere to be seen. I wonder what has happened to them.
From Boston I took the T to Alewife, where I was picked up by Michael and our friend Shane Curcuru, who started as a debugger of spreadsheets at Lotus and now works on cutting edge software for IBM. We then drove to Lincoln to pick up Dennis Liu, who's a corporate lawyer of some sort, and then to the Millbury Park 'n' Ride where we met John Bruce, who does computer network consulting. We switched to his car and we all drove to Mohegan Sun to have dinner at Summer Shack.
I thought this was an odd choice of a place to honor Michael, who does not drink nor gamble. Nor does he smoke cigars, another thing one can do indoors at Mohegan Sun and not many other places in the northeast. But apparently Michael was in favor of trying something new, and he likes seafood (he's a native of Lexington and now lives in Gloucester, Mass., though, so it's not like we needed to schlep to Connecticut to find seafood).
But it turned out to be a lot of fun, and who did we see when we got to the Summer Shack but its chef and owner, Jasper White! He was in the kitchen, stirring sauces and expediting and stuff. Summer Shack has four units, so you don't really expect to see Jasper at the one you're eating in, especially if it's at Mohegan Sun on a Saturday night.
Anyway, I said hello and he sent us clams casino and peel-and-eat shrimp cooked in beer and Old Bay seasoning. Other than that we had a couple of "towers of power," which is what they call cold seafood platters, along with two styles of calamari and fried clam bellies. Then I had a lobster with drawn butter.
Michael doesn’t gamble, but he did try his hand at some penny slots. He got bored, so Shane took over and managed to turn an 18-cent bet into 40-some-odd dollars. Michael, not being a gambler, knew that that was the time to cash out.
Since he doesn’t drink, I bought him a shot of Macallan 18.
A dear college friend, science teacher Michael Gerber, turned 40 last week, so this weekend I took a bus to Boston to help him celebrate.
Greyhound has become surprisingly middle class in recent years. The dregs that used to accompany me on bus trips in college in the 1980s are nowhere to be seen. I wonder what has happened to them.
From Boston I took the T to Alewife, where I was picked up by Michael and our friend Shane Curcuru, who started as a debugger of spreadsheets at Lotus and now works on cutting edge software for IBM. We then drove to Lincoln to pick up Dennis Liu, who's a corporate lawyer of some sort, and then to the Millbury Park 'n' Ride where we met John Bruce, who does computer network consulting. We switched to his car and we all drove to Mohegan Sun to have dinner at Summer Shack.
I thought this was an odd choice of a place to honor Michael, who does not drink nor gamble. Nor does he smoke cigars, another thing one can do indoors at Mohegan Sun and not many other places in the northeast. But apparently Michael was in favor of trying something new, and he likes seafood (he's a native of Lexington and now lives in Gloucester, Mass., though, so it's not like we needed to schlep to Connecticut to find seafood).
But it turned out to be a lot of fun, and who did we see when we got to the Summer Shack but its chef and owner, Jasper White! He was in the kitchen, stirring sauces and expediting and stuff. Summer Shack has four units, so you don't really expect to see Jasper at the one you're eating in, especially if it's at Mohegan Sun on a Saturday night.
Anyway, I said hello and he sent us clams casino and peel-and-eat shrimp cooked in beer and Old Bay seasoning. Other than that we had a couple of "towers of power," which is what they call cold seafood platters, along with two styles of calamari and fried clam bellies. Then I had a lobster with drawn butter.
Michael doesn’t gamble, but he did try his hand at some penny slots. He got bored, so Shane took over and managed to turn an 18-cent bet into 40-some-odd dollars. Michael, not being a gambler, knew that that was the time to cash out.
Since he doesn’t drink, I bought him a shot of Macallan 18.
A night in
August 18
I've been hanging out a fair amount lately with Chandler Burr, who wrote a fascinating book called The Emperor of Scent about a guy who developed a new theory for how our sense of smell works. Conventional wisdom is that our olfactory receptors determine a molecule’s smell by its shape. This guy, Luca Turin, says they determine it based on its molecular vibration.
It’s really fun to suggest this to biologists because they get really angry and defend the shape theory like it’s really important.
Anyway, I threw some work Chandler's way and since then he has been helping me explore Thai restaurants. He also accompanied me to a recent meal at Duvet, which is one of those restaurants where you eat in bed. I have learned from those restaurants that tables and chairs are extremely practical when it comes to eating, especially soup.
This evening, Chandler, who also is The New York Times' new scent columnist, asked me to hang out with some friends of his, Mark Kingstone and Kevin Laursen. We met at their apartment and after much discussion resolved that ordering from Ali Baba, a neighborhood Turkish restaurant, was our best dinner option.
What we ordered from Ali Baba:
Humus
Babaghanoush
Lahmacun (flat bread with lamb on it)
Arnavut Cigeri (fried cubes of calf liver)
Falafel
Icli Kofte (beef-stuffed bulgur croquettes, like kibbeh)
Yogurtlu Tavuk (chicken in yogurt)
I've been hanging out a fair amount lately with Chandler Burr, who wrote a fascinating book called The Emperor of Scent about a guy who developed a new theory for how our sense of smell works. Conventional wisdom is that our olfactory receptors determine a molecule’s smell by its shape. This guy, Luca Turin, says they determine it based on its molecular vibration.
It’s really fun to suggest this to biologists because they get really angry and defend the shape theory like it’s really important.
Anyway, I threw some work Chandler's way and since then he has been helping me explore Thai restaurants. He also accompanied me to a recent meal at Duvet, which is one of those restaurants where you eat in bed. I have learned from those restaurants that tables and chairs are extremely practical when it comes to eating, especially soup.
This evening, Chandler, who also is The New York Times' new scent columnist, asked me to hang out with some friends of his, Mark Kingstone and Kevin Laursen. We met at their apartment and after much discussion resolved that ordering from Ali Baba, a neighborhood Turkish restaurant, was our best dinner option.
What we ordered from Ali Baba:
Humus
Babaghanoush
Lahmacun (flat bread with lamb on it)
Arnavut Cigeri (fried cubes of calf liver)
Falafel
Icli Kofte (beef-stuffed bulgur croquettes, like kibbeh)
Yogurtlu Tavuk (chicken in yogurt)
Two nights at Philippe
August 16
"This party is boring," I said to one of the only other people at the party at Philippe.
Philippe, a fairly new restaurant featuring chef Philippe Chow, who for many years was chef at the exclusive Mr. Chow restaurant (named after a different Mr. Chow), was celebrating the fact that two professional basketball players, Sebastian Telfair of the Boston Celtics and Al Harrington of the Atlanta Hawks, were investing in the restaurant and putting forward plans to open units all over the place (the next one will be in Miami Beach, they say). Gotham magazine was co-sponsoring the party for some reason.
I showed up and found there was no place to check my bag, which is annoying, but it was my fault that the party was boring. I arrived at 6:38 for a party that was scheduled to run from 6:30 to 11:30.
As a general rule you should wander into a party about an hour after it has started, at the earliest. I know this. I've known it for years and yet I still show up early. I wonder what I'm afraid of missing.
Anyway, by the time I’d finished my “saketini” — which actually was whatever vodka was sponsoring the event shaken with ice and a splash of sake, poured into a martini glass and garnished with a cucumber — I was in a better mood, I'd found a corner to stash my bag, and the party was in full swing. I switched to Champagne and met Sebastian Telfair, a little tiny fellow, bedecked in bling but extremely cordial. One of Philippe's publicists asked Mr. Telfair who he was and what team he played for. You'd think if you were a rather well-known basketball player and were investing in a business, you would expect that business's publicist to look you up on the Web or something before coming to your party, but he seemed unperturbed (I just looked him up on the Web and the NBA claims that he's six feet tall; it must have been a very tall party).
I hung out a bit with Josh Ozersky, a meat expert who recently was named New York magazine's online food editor (good thing I've always been nice to him), and I met food writer Ed Levine and the Australian guy who's on the WPLJ morning show. Texan chef Tim Love, who's opening Lonesome Dove Western Bistro in New York next month, caught me up with what he was doing.
Then Zak Pelaccio and I exchanged impressions of Buddakan (summary: I loved it, he didn't).
Many hors d'oeuvres, largely dumplings, spring rolls and satay, were passed around, many so fresh-out-of-the-fryer that you couldn't eat them right away.
That's impressive, so I was glad that I had arranged to have dinner there the following night with my colleague Janette Clark. Janette had met another one of Philippe's owners, Chris Brantley, at Nobu last month and he expressed an interest in having me come in and check it out, so I took Janette with me and left it up to Philippe to decide what we'd eat.
This is what he decided:
chicken satay
squab with lettuce wrap and plum sauce
crispy vegetable leaf with smoked chicken and walnuts
Nine seasons spicy prawns
House filet mignon in brown garlic sauce
Shrimp fried rice
sautéed string beans
"This party is boring," I said to one of the only other people at the party at Philippe.
Philippe, a fairly new restaurant featuring chef Philippe Chow, who for many years was chef at the exclusive Mr. Chow restaurant (named after a different Mr. Chow), was celebrating the fact that two professional basketball players, Sebastian Telfair of the Boston Celtics and Al Harrington of the Atlanta Hawks, were investing in the restaurant and putting forward plans to open units all over the place (the next one will be in Miami Beach, they say). Gotham magazine was co-sponsoring the party for some reason.
I showed up and found there was no place to check my bag, which is annoying, but it was my fault that the party was boring. I arrived at 6:38 for a party that was scheduled to run from 6:30 to 11:30.
As a general rule you should wander into a party about an hour after it has started, at the earliest. I know this. I've known it for years and yet I still show up early. I wonder what I'm afraid of missing.
Anyway, by the time I’d finished my “saketini” — which actually was whatever vodka was sponsoring the event shaken with ice and a splash of sake, poured into a martini glass and garnished with a cucumber — I was in a better mood, I'd found a corner to stash my bag, and the party was in full swing. I switched to Champagne and met Sebastian Telfair, a little tiny fellow, bedecked in bling but extremely cordial. One of Philippe's publicists asked Mr. Telfair who he was and what team he played for. You'd think if you were a rather well-known basketball player and were investing in a business, you would expect that business's publicist to look you up on the Web or something before coming to your party, but he seemed unperturbed (I just looked him up on the Web and the NBA claims that he's six feet tall; it must have been a very tall party).
I hung out a bit with Josh Ozersky, a meat expert who recently was named New York magazine's online food editor (good thing I've always been nice to him), and I met food writer Ed Levine and the Australian guy who's on the WPLJ morning show. Texan chef Tim Love, who's opening Lonesome Dove Western Bistro in New York next month, caught me up with what he was doing.
Then Zak Pelaccio and I exchanged impressions of Buddakan (summary: I loved it, he didn't).
Many hors d'oeuvres, largely dumplings, spring rolls and satay, were passed around, many so fresh-out-of-the-fryer that you couldn't eat them right away.
That's impressive, so I was glad that I had arranged to have dinner there the following night with my colleague Janette Clark. Janette had met another one of Philippe's owners, Chris Brantley, at Nobu last month and he expressed an interest in having me come in and check it out, so I took Janette with me and left it up to Philippe to decide what we'd eat.
This is what he decided:
chicken satay
squab with lettuce wrap and plum sauce
crispy vegetable leaf with smoked chicken and walnuts
Nine seasons spicy prawns
House filet mignon in brown garlic sauce
Shrimp fried rice
sautéed string beans
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Exclusive event!
August 16
Last week I got an e-mail with the subject hed: "invite (sshhh)!! mommy & baby editor's preview"
After pleasantries about how hot it is out there, I was told "I‘m inviting you to this event we are holding next Friday (August 18th) – we’re only inviting select media contacts that work in the child & mommy space. We are debuting over 25 brand new, really unique under the radar companies that have recently launched new product lines just in time for holiday and new years."
Since I write about food trends in restaurants for the trade press, I think my mommy is probably the only mommy who reads my stuff, and she's not doing it to find new products to aid in raising kids; her youngest child is 34, after all.
But I get lots of disingenuous invitations from publicists who are unware of their own pathetic transparency — or maybe they are aware, know that their messages will mildly irritate people like me whom they don't care about, and perhaps touch the hearts of those they are trying to lure to their event. I usually just delete them, or if they're really bad I forward them to other editors and we have a good laugh.
But these jokers then tried again, thanking me for showing interest in the event.
"Some of the comments we have received: 'this is the talk of the town', 'this is the best invite I've received all summer' ..."
I think my best invite this summer, apart from the one to meet my newborn niece, was a trip to Thailand that I was unable to take, but perhaps the parenting-publication world is less glamourous.
Still, the message told me in no uncertain terms that only "media mommies" and "media that work in the mommy & child space ONLY [sic]" are invited.
Since the rest of the press release is such nonsense, I figure the part about it being exclusive is also untrue, so I thought I'd just let you know, should you feel like crashing a party, that the event is at a Beach House at 2 Saddle Lane in East Hampton. Maybe you could stop by and pick up some free stuff.
Last week I got an e-mail with the subject hed: "invite (sshhh)!! mommy & baby editor's preview"
After pleasantries about how hot it is out there, I was told "I‘m inviting you to this event we are holding next Friday (August 18th) – we’re only inviting select media contacts that work in the child & mommy space. We are debuting over 25 brand new, really unique under the radar companies that have recently launched new product lines just in time for holiday and new years."
Since I write about food trends in restaurants for the trade press, I think my mommy is probably the only mommy who reads my stuff, and she's not doing it to find new products to aid in raising kids; her youngest child is 34, after all.
But I get lots of disingenuous invitations from publicists who are unware of their own pathetic transparency — or maybe they are aware, know that their messages will mildly irritate people like me whom they don't care about, and perhaps touch the hearts of those they are trying to lure to their event. I usually just delete them, or if they're really bad I forward them to other editors and we have a good laugh.
But these jokers then tried again, thanking me for showing interest in the event.
"Some of the comments we have received: 'this is the talk of the town', 'this is the best invite I've received all summer' ..."
I think my best invite this summer, apart from the one to meet my newborn niece, was a trip to Thailand that I was unable to take, but perhaps the parenting-publication world is less glamourous.
Still, the message told me in no uncertain terms that only "media mommies" and "media that work in the mommy & child space ONLY [sic]" are invited.
Since the rest of the press release is such nonsense, I figure the part about it being exclusive is also untrue, so I thought I'd just let you know, should you feel like crashing a party, that the event is at a Beach House at 2 Saddle Lane in East Hampton. Maybe you could stop by and pick up some free stuff.
Friday, August 11, 2006
Whither Bill Yosses?
August 11
Bill Yosses was the pastry chef at Bouley Bakery for some years. Then he became pastry chef of Citarella, which was later renamed Josephs by Citarella. That restaurant's executive chef, Brian Bistrong — also a Bouley alumnus — left and became executive chef of The Harrison, and Bill became executive chef of Josephs.
But it closed in April, I'm trying to hunt Bill down and his e-mails are bouncing.
If you happen to know where he is, please let me know.
Bill Yosses was the pastry chef at Bouley Bakery for some years. Then he became pastry chef of Citarella, which was later renamed Josephs by Citarella. That restaurant's executive chef, Brian Bistrong — also a Bouley alumnus — left and became executive chef of The Harrison, and Bill became executive chef of Josephs.
But it closed in April, I'm trying to hunt Bill down and his e-mails are bouncing.
If you happen to know where he is, please let me know.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
I’m from Jersey! Are you from Jersey?
August 10
When meeting a famous person, even a slightly famous person, I have to struggle not to make an idiot of myself. I'm not particularly starstruck, but I do want to make a good impression; I want to be remembered.
Fortunately, the side of me that would rather leave no impression than a bad one wins out more often than not, so I didn’t utter the title of this blog entry when meeting Joe Piscopo at the Beard House last night. Instead I just told him my name and he said that it was nice to see me, which is safer than “nice to meet you,” a phrase you don’t want to say to someone you’ve met before.
The former Saturday Night Live cast member (really former; he left in 1985) is friends with Barry Gutin, who owns Cuba Libre, Brûlée and other places in Philadelphia and Atlantic City.
Cuba Libre chef Guillermo Veloso was in charge of dinner at the Beard House last night, and pastry chef Jemal Edwards from Brûlée made dessert.
Mr. Gutin came up with his staff and friends, and I ate with him, his GM, his publicist, his beverage guy, a journalist from South Jersey, some other PR people and Joe Piscopo.
He looks trim and kind of stately these days, and sort of like he has internalized a bit of the Frank Sinatra impersonation he used to do.
He shared a few polite tales of the SNL days, reminiscing about getting Eddie Murphy out of his dressing room two minutes before showtime, but not going into detail about what he was doing in there. But mostly everyone talked about their kids. I don’t have any, so I talked about my nieces and nephew instead.
When the chefs were introduced, Jemal Edwards made a big deal out of the fact that we had been served a three-course dessert. But, excessive as it may seem, three-course desserts aren’t that uncommon at the Beard House or at other high-end food events. A fruit "pre-dessert," often is followed by something heavier, often containing chocolate, and then petits fours are served with coffee. It’s a bit grand to pair the pre-dessert and the dessert with different wines, but it’s not unheard of.
Edwards did something I like, though. He started with a small chocolate dessert and followed it with a fruity one. That makes more sense than the other way around. The higher acid content of fruit desserts can really clean up the chocolate-coated palate. Finish up with a high-tannin tea and you're golden.
The wines were selected by the staff of Vino Noir, Gutin's soon-to-open Atlantic City wine bar. The wine-list will be all-electronic with web-browsing ability, a concept speerheaded by Aureole in Las Vegas. But Vino Noir offers the added option, if you really like a particular wine that you're drinking, to order a case of it instantly online.
What I ate and drank:
Chino-Latino Summer Rolls
Lobster Empanadas
Caviar Spoons
Mixed Anticuchos
Cuba Libre Signature Mojitos
Roasted Squab Breast and Tasajo of Squab Leg with Herb and Aromatic–Infused Squab Broth
Bonny Doon Vin Gris de Cigare 2003
10 Cane Tuna — Toro Marinated in Soy, Guava, and 10 Cane Rum, and Braised Pork Belly with King Crab, Calabaza, Coconut Calasparra Rice Tian, and Guava Gastrique
Nautilus Estate Sauvignon Blanc 2004
Guinea Boliche — Braised Guinea Hen Leg Stuffed with Foie Gras, Sweet Plantains, Olives, and Rum-Soaked Raisins and Roasted Guinea Hen Breast with Garlic Flan, Quail Egg, and Serrano Crisps
Numanthia Tinta de Toro 2003
Lamb en Tres Actos — Lamb Picadillo Empanadita; Crispy Lamb Frita; and Roasted Lamb Rib Chop with Roncal and Malanga Mash, Served with Baby Arugula in Porcini Mojo and Cilantro Essence
Bell Wine Cellars Big Guy Red 2002
Petite Chocolate–Hazelnut Cream Cone with Caramelized Hazelnuts and Frangelico Crème Anglaise
Broadbent 10-Year-Old Malmsey Madeira
Summer Strawberry Fantasy > Honey Financier with Tahitian Vanilla Panna Cotta, Strawberry Gelée, Strawberry-Basil Foam, Navan Vanilla–Cognac Sautéed Wild Strawberries, and Almond-Strawberry Croquant
Prager Sweet Claire Riesling 2003
Truffles, Bonbons, and Petits Fours
When meeting a famous person, even a slightly famous person, I have to struggle not to make an idiot of myself. I'm not particularly starstruck, but I do want to make a good impression; I want to be remembered.
Fortunately, the side of me that would rather leave no impression than a bad one wins out more often than not, so I didn’t utter the title of this blog entry when meeting Joe Piscopo at the Beard House last night. Instead I just told him my name and he said that it was nice to see me, which is safer than “nice to meet you,” a phrase you don’t want to say to someone you’ve met before.
The former Saturday Night Live cast member (really former; he left in 1985) is friends with Barry Gutin, who owns Cuba Libre, Brûlée and other places in Philadelphia and Atlantic City.
Cuba Libre chef Guillermo Veloso was in charge of dinner at the Beard House last night, and pastry chef Jemal Edwards from Brûlée made dessert.
Mr. Gutin came up with his staff and friends, and I ate with him, his GM, his publicist, his beverage guy, a journalist from South Jersey, some other PR people and Joe Piscopo.
He looks trim and kind of stately these days, and sort of like he has internalized a bit of the Frank Sinatra impersonation he used to do.
He shared a few polite tales of the SNL days, reminiscing about getting Eddie Murphy out of his dressing room two minutes before showtime, but not going into detail about what he was doing in there. But mostly everyone talked about their kids. I don’t have any, so I talked about my nieces and nephew instead.
When the chefs were introduced, Jemal Edwards made a big deal out of the fact that we had been served a three-course dessert. But, excessive as it may seem, three-course desserts aren’t that uncommon at the Beard House or at other high-end food events. A fruit "pre-dessert," often is followed by something heavier, often containing chocolate, and then petits fours are served with coffee. It’s a bit grand to pair the pre-dessert and the dessert with different wines, but it’s not unheard of.
Edwards did something I like, though. He started with a small chocolate dessert and followed it with a fruity one. That makes more sense than the other way around. The higher acid content of fruit desserts can really clean up the chocolate-coated palate. Finish up with a high-tannin tea and you're golden.
The wines were selected by the staff of Vino Noir, Gutin's soon-to-open Atlantic City wine bar. The wine-list will be all-electronic with web-browsing ability, a concept speerheaded by Aureole in Las Vegas. But Vino Noir offers the added option, if you really like a particular wine that you're drinking, to order a case of it instantly online.
What I ate and drank:
Chino-Latino Summer Rolls
Lobster Empanadas
Caviar Spoons
Mixed Anticuchos
Cuba Libre Signature Mojitos
Roasted Squab Breast and Tasajo of Squab Leg with Herb and Aromatic–Infused Squab Broth
Bonny Doon Vin Gris de Cigare 2003
10 Cane Tuna — Toro Marinated in Soy, Guava, and 10 Cane Rum, and Braised Pork Belly with King Crab, Calabaza, Coconut Calasparra Rice Tian, and Guava Gastrique
Nautilus Estate Sauvignon Blanc 2004
Guinea Boliche — Braised Guinea Hen Leg Stuffed with Foie Gras, Sweet Plantains, Olives, and Rum-Soaked Raisins and Roasted Guinea Hen Breast with Garlic Flan, Quail Egg, and Serrano Crisps
Numanthia Tinta de Toro 2003
Lamb en Tres Actos — Lamb Picadillo Empanadita; Crispy Lamb Frita; and Roasted Lamb Rib Chop with Roncal and Malanga Mash, Served with Baby Arugula in Porcini Mojo and Cilantro Essence
Bell Wine Cellars Big Guy Red 2002
Petite Chocolate–Hazelnut Cream Cone with Caramelized Hazelnuts and Frangelico Crème Anglaise
Broadbent 10-Year-Old Malmsey Madeira
Summer Strawberry Fantasy > Honey Financier with Tahitian Vanilla Panna Cotta, Strawberry Gelée, Strawberry-Basil Foam, Navan Vanilla–Cognac Sautéed Wild Strawberries, and Almond-Strawberry Croquant
Prager Sweet Claire Riesling 2003
Truffles, Bonbons, and Petits Fours
East Colfax
August 10
I was in Denver last week, visiting family and attending the naming ceremony of my new niece, Alia.
I grew up right in the middle of Denver, in Capitol Hill, and for the past 30 years, since I was nine (9!) years old, I have taken pretty much every opportunity to wander down what remains in many ways my favorite strip of America.
Simple-minded people think of East Colfax as a long row of sleaze — something that I would expect the Catholic Church might resent, since its Basilica of the Immaculate Conception is there, separated by a parking lot and Pennsylvania Street from a McDonald's; Chinese restaurants, convenience stores, empty buildings and Duman's Custom Tailoring all are across the street.
The capitol building is on Colfax, too, and I imagine the Colorado State government, or at least parts of it, might also feel bad about being stamped as sleazy. Besides, not nearly as many drunks are sleeping on the capitol's lawn as there were a couple of decades ago.
The 40-block stretch of Colfax from Broadway to Colorado Boulevard is an agglomeration of people just being themselves. If they look like drifters, they're really drifters, probably having recently gotten off the bus at the Greyhound station a block north of there (the mosaic in the station, of two different-colored hands, made out of the sort of male and female icons you see on bathroom doors, grasping each other, was done by my cousin, artist Doug Kornfeld).
There are day laborers waiting for work at the agencies on Colfax that hire them, and skate punks (skate punks never went out of style in Denver; I don't know why). I often overhear conversations recounting brushes with the law or the collapse of a romance, or both ("I told him that I wasn't going to get thrown in jail for his sorry ass...")
There are patrons of the only lesbian coffee house I know of, and customers at shops selling vintage comic books and posters and music (vinyl, cassettes, CDs). Each of those stores smells comfortably of shredded cardboard and dust.
Other shops sell used furniture. The headquarters of the local Guardian Angels chapter is on East Colfax, next to an Office Depot. There are martial arts centers and community organizations, chain restaurants and indies — including a former IHOP, with the signature roof, that's now the independent Mama's Café. I used to go to that IHOP after the midnight viewing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at The Ogden theater, which is now a venue for live performances.
And there's some sleaze, too. Kitty's, a 24-hour adult book, video etc. emporium, is bookended by two bars apparently owned by a Cervantes fan. They're named Sancho's Broken Arrow (A Thinking Place) and Dulcinea’s 100th Monkey.
There are many check cashing places, and tattoo parlors — the classiest looking one has polished hardwood floors and plush leather couches and also does piercings.
There are a couple of important liquor stores nearby, a gay bar, an Irish pub, and The Satire Lounge, where I recently had green chile — a New Mexican delicacy — so good it made me want to cry.
My high school, East, is on Colfax, and fast food restaurants nearby cater to the students there. Recently the theater across the street from East that for years was Bonfils and then was Lowenstein is now The Tattered Cover, a gigantic bookstore that was forced to relocate from increasingly tony, increasingly boring Cherry Creek North. It lost its lease.
Efforts are underway pretty much all the time to add some tone to East Colfax, as if its own natural rhythm were unworthy. A recently built condominium and retail complex sits mostly fallow just east of Greek Town (something of a misnomer; a few Greek restaurants, a Greek bakery and something called the "Greek Social Club" are there, but so are Chinese and Ethiopian restaurants, and a Caribbean bakery and "marketplace").
East Colfax mostly ignores those efforts, and glides along in its own way, a natural, slowly evolving stretch of humanity (or not in some cases — at least two barber shops on the avenue still say they do great flat tops). Every neighborhood I've visited in New York seems predictably scripted by comparison.
I was in Denver last week, visiting family and attending the naming ceremony of my new niece, Alia.
I grew up right in the middle of Denver, in Capitol Hill, and for the past 30 years, since I was nine (9!) years old, I have taken pretty much every opportunity to wander down what remains in many ways my favorite strip of America.
Simple-minded people think of East Colfax as a long row of sleaze — something that I would expect the Catholic Church might resent, since its Basilica of the Immaculate Conception is there, separated by a parking lot and Pennsylvania Street from a McDonald's; Chinese restaurants, convenience stores, empty buildings and Duman's Custom Tailoring all are across the street.
The capitol building is on Colfax, too, and I imagine the Colorado State government, or at least parts of it, might also feel bad about being stamped as sleazy. Besides, not nearly as many drunks are sleeping on the capitol's lawn as there were a couple of decades ago.
The 40-block stretch of Colfax from Broadway to Colorado Boulevard is an agglomeration of people just being themselves. If they look like drifters, they're really drifters, probably having recently gotten off the bus at the Greyhound station a block north of there (the mosaic in the station, of two different-colored hands, made out of the sort of male and female icons you see on bathroom doors, grasping each other, was done by my cousin, artist Doug Kornfeld).
There are day laborers waiting for work at the agencies on Colfax that hire them, and skate punks (skate punks never went out of style in Denver; I don't know why). I often overhear conversations recounting brushes with the law or the collapse of a romance, or both ("I told him that I wasn't going to get thrown in jail for his sorry ass...")
There are patrons of the only lesbian coffee house I know of, and customers at shops selling vintage comic books and posters and music (vinyl, cassettes, CDs). Each of those stores smells comfortably of shredded cardboard and dust.
Other shops sell used furniture. The headquarters of the local Guardian Angels chapter is on East Colfax, next to an Office Depot. There are martial arts centers and community organizations, chain restaurants and indies — including a former IHOP, with the signature roof, that's now the independent Mama's Café. I used to go to that IHOP after the midnight viewing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at The Ogden theater, which is now a venue for live performances.
And there's some sleaze, too. Kitty's, a 24-hour adult book, video etc. emporium, is bookended by two bars apparently owned by a Cervantes fan. They're named Sancho's Broken Arrow (A Thinking Place) and Dulcinea’s 100th Monkey.
There are many check cashing places, and tattoo parlors — the classiest looking one has polished hardwood floors and plush leather couches and also does piercings.
There are a couple of important liquor stores nearby, a gay bar, an Irish pub, and The Satire Lounge, where I recently had green chile — a New Mexican delicacy — so good it made me want to cry.
My high school, East, is on Colfax, and fast food restaurants nearby cater to the students there. Recently the theater across the street from East that for years was Bonfils and then was Lowenstein is now The Tattered Cover, a gigantic bookstore that was forced to relocate from increasingly tony, increasingly boring Cherry Creek North. It lost its lease.
Efforts are underway pretty much all the time to add some tone to East Colfax, as if its own natural rhythm were unworthy. A recently built condominium and retail complex sits mostly fallow just east of Greek Town (something of a misnomer; a few Greek restaurants, a Greek bakery and something called the "Greek Social Club" are there, but so are Chinese and Ethiopian restaurants, and a Caribbean bakery and "marketplace").
East Colfax mostly ignores those efforts, and glides along in its own way, a natural, slowly evolving stretch of humanity (or not in some cases — at least two barber shops on the avenue still say they do great flat tops). Every neighborhood I've visited in New York seems predictably scripted by comparison.
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Vodka redux
Paul Adams has made some insightful comments about vodka that you might find interesting.
Truffled popcorn
July 26
A light went off in my head as I was reading the bio of Per Se’s chef de cuisine, Jonathan Benno. I interviewed him today for a special section in Nation’s Restuarant News that comes out on August 14.
The section’s called "The Next Generation of Talent," and it profiles half a dozen chefs recommended by some of the country's top chefs as great protégés.
Jonathan Benno was one Thomas Keller's picks.
His other choices, in case you were wondering, were Grant Achatz, Corey Lee, Eric Ziebod, Ron Siegel, Gregory Short, Stephen Durfee, Ryon Poli and John Fraser. I bet you wish you had such good protégés.
I could only pick one, though, and for reasons of my own I picked Jonathan Benno.
Part of his résumé- and experience-building process was a stint with Michael Mina at Aqua in San Francisco.
Now that’s interesting, because one of New York's very earliest bits of exposure to Per Se’s food was at Chef’s Night Out, the pre-Beard Award party, in 2004.
The party was held at the Time Warner Center and a bunch of the restaurants there served food. Per Se's offering was truffled popcorn. People gushed. They oohed and aahed: "Can you imagine truffled popcorn? Amazing!"
Which of course it wasn't. Michael Mina, when cooking for the Citymeals-on-Wheels event not long before, also served truffled popcorn. It's been a signature item of his for years.
I accused Jonathan of being the truffled popcorn connection and he looked annoyed. He said that neither he nor Michael Mina invented truffled popcorn. I didn't press the issue because I knew he was right. According to Mina, truffled popcorn was invented near the turn of the century (as in a few years ago), at his Aqua restaurant in Liguna Niguel, Calif., by his chef de cuisine at the time, Jeff Lloyd.
Mina was trying to think of an interesting lounge snack to be served at the big deck outside the restaurant and Lloyd suggested doing something new with popcorn.
Mina had just received a shipment of white truffles, and he stored them in unpopped popcorn.
The popcorn retained a surprising amount of truffle aroma when they popped it, and they finished it with butter flavored with truffle shavings.
A light went off in my head as I was reading the bio of Per Se’s chef de cuisine, Jonathan Benno. I interviewed him today for a special section in Nation’s Restuarant News that comes out on August 14.
The section’s called "The Next Generation of Talent," and it profiles half a dozen chefs recommended by some of the country's top chefs as great protégés.
Jonathan Benno was one Thomas Keller's picks.
His other choices, in case you were wondering, were Grant Achatz, Corey Lee, Eric Ziebod, Ron Siegel, Gregory Short, Stephen Durfee, Ryon Poli and John Fraser. I bet you wish you had such good protégés.
I could only pick one, though, and for reasons of my own I picked Jonathan Benno.
Part of his résumé- and experience-building process was a stint with Michael Mina at Aqua in San Francisco.
Now that’s interesting, because one of New York's very earliest bits of exposure to Per Se’s food was at Chef’s Night Out, the pre-Beard Award party, in 2004.
The party was held at the Time Warner Center and a bunch of the restaurants there served food. Per Se's offering was truffled popcorn. People gushed. They oohed and aahed: "Can you imagine truffled popcorn? Amazing!"
Which of course it wasn't. Michael Mina, when cooking for the Citymeals-on-Wheels event not long before, also served truffled popcorn. It's been a signature item of his for years.
I accused Jonathan of being the truffled popcorn connection and he looked annoyed. He said that neither he nor Michael Mina invented truffled popcorn. I didn't press the issue because I knew he was right. According to Mina, truffled popcorn was invented near the turn of the century (as in a few years ago), at his Aqua restaurant in Liguna Niguel, Calif., by his chef de cuisine at the time, Jeff Lloyd.
Mina was trying to think of an interesting lounge snack to be served at the big deck outside the restaurant and Lloyd suggested doing something new with popcorn.
Mina had just received a shipment of white truffles, and he stored them in unpopped popcorn.
The popcorn retained a surprising amount of truffle aroma when they popped it, and they finished it with butter flavored with truffle shavings.
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
trans fat heads
July 19
I read in the Nation's Restaurant News Daily News Fax today that Chicago Alderman Edward Burke has reworded a bill currently working its way through the City Council that would prohibit restaurants from using oil containing trans fats.
He was persuaded by the Illinois Restaurant Association to change the bill to affect only restaurant companies with $20 million or more in annual sales, the reason being that the change away from trans fats would be too expensive for smaller restaurants.
Now, I think outlawing food of any sort is stupid, but the Chicago City Council is the same legislative body that idiotically banned foie gras. So here’s my question: Why is it okay for small companies to poison people but not big ones?
I read in the Nation's Restaurant News Daily News Fax today that Chicago Alderman Edward Burke has reworded a bill currently working its way through the City Council that would prohibit restaurants from using oil containing trans fats.
He was persuaded by the Illinois Restaurant Association to change the bill to affect only restaurant companies with $20 million or more in annual sales, the reason being that the change away from trans fats would be too expensive for smaller restaurants.
Now, I think outlawing food of any sort is stupid, but the Chicago City Council is the same legislative body that idiotically banned foie gras. So here’s my question: Why is it okay for small companies to poison people but not big ones?
They couldn’t even wait a month
July 19
Yesterday I got yet another premium vodka. This one's French, and made only from the wheat grown in that country's Brie Champagne region that is then mixed with spring water from the Vosges mountains.
The marketing tactic of this vodka, you see, is to tie itself to the European system of designating food by its geographic origin. Parmigiano-Reggiano can only come from a particular section of Emilia-Romagna in Italy. Sancerre wine can only come from Sancerre, France.
Neither of those items is likely to be consumed with cranberry juice or apple pucker, however.
Yesterday I got yet another premium vodka. This one's French, and made only from the wheat grown in that country's Brie Champagne region that is then mixed with spring water from the Vosges mountains.
The marketing tactic of this vodka, you see, is to tie itself to the European system of designating food by its geographic origin. Parmigiano-Reggiano can only come from a particular section of Emilia-Romagna in Italy. Sancerre wine can only come from Sancerre, France.
Neither of those items is likely to be consumed with cranberry juice or apple pucker, however.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Sea of white
July 18
During the general session of the American Culinary Federation's annual convention, which just concluded in Philadelphia, education director Michael Baskette commented on the "sea of white" seated before him. He was marveling at all the people in chef coats, but he could just as easily have been commenting on the people in them.
The ACF continues to be one of the whitest organizations I know of; the manliest, too, if that's an accurate way to describe an organization without many women in it.
That's a strange thing in the American culinary world, where the lingua franca is Spanish owing to those who make up the backbone of nearly every professional kitchen in the country.
Just over half of the new students in culinary schools are women.
The New York Times created a kerfuffle earlier this year when it noted how few African American chefs are heading up kitchens. That topic was brought up at the New York Public Library during the question-and-answer part of a discussion among Anthony Bourdain, Mario Batali and Bill Buford. Bourdain pointed out that the dearth of hispanics among the ranks of top toques was an even more obvious travesty.
No one seems to know why this is. Professional kitchens tend to be genuine meritocracies, where you can be a ne'er-do-well, malcontent, illiterate drug addict or whatever else you want to be. If you show up on time and do your work, you're cool. If you have aptitude, you'll be promoted. Labor's in too short supply to do otherwise.
The foodservice industry, which tends to lean rather heavily toward the political right, loves immigrants, and many in it advocate an open-door policy.
Still, only at the convention that just concluded, in 2006, did Ferdinand Metz, president emeritus of The Culinary Institute of America and current head of the World Association of Chefs Societies (it used to be cooks societies, but the name was changed earlier this year), announce that WACS was now launching a program to help develop women chefs "believe it or not."
The ACF's immediate past president, Edward Leonard, did launch some programs that he hoped would attract African American and Hispanic chefs and help them feel at home. He arranged for them to have their own networking sessions, for example.
I don't know how well it worked.
The ACF does have a few Hispanics and African-Americans, and a fair number of Asians. I wonder if one reason for the whiteness of the organization is that most of its recruitment efforts are made at the more expensive culinary schools, whereas minority cooks, even in 2006, still work their way up the ranks by starting as dishwashers and prep cooks.
I did meet the first obviously gay couple I'd ever met at an ACF conference, so diversity is on the march, even if it's a slow march.
During the general session of the American Culinary Federation's annual convention, which just concluded in Philadelphia, education director Michael Baskette commented on the "sea of white" seated before him. He was marveling at all the people in chef coats, but he could just as easily have been commenting on the people in them.
The ACF continues to be one of the whitest organizations I know of; the manliest, too, if that's an accurate way to describe an organization without many women in it.
That's a strange thing in the American culinary world, where the lingua franca is Spanish owing to those who make up the backbone of nearly every professional kitchen in the country.
Just over half of the new students in culinary schools are women.
The New York Times created a kerfuffle earlier this year when it noted how few African American chefs are heading up kitchens. That topic was brought up at the New York Public Library during the question-and-answer part of a discussion among Anthony Bourdain, Mario Batali and Bill Buford. Bourdain pointed out that the dearth of hispanics among the ranks of top toques was an even more obvious travesty.
No one seems to know why this is. Professional kitchens tend to be genuine meritocracies, where you can be a ne'er-do-well, malcontent, illiterate drug addict or whatever else you want to be. If you show up on time and do your work, you're cool. If you have aptitude, you'll be promoted. Labor's in too short supply to do otherwise.
The foodservice industry, which tends to lean rather heavily toward the political right, loves immigrants, and many in it advocate an open-door policy.
Still, only at the convention that just concluded, in 2006, did Ferdinand Metz, president emeritus of The Culinary Institute of America and current head of the World Association of Chefs Societies (it used to be cooks societies, but the name was changed earlier this year), announce that WACS was now launching a program to help develop women chefs "believe it or not."
The ACF's immediate past president, Edward Leonard, did launch some programs that he hoped would attract African American and Hispanic chefs and help them feel at home. He arranged for them to have their own networking sessions, for example.
I don't know how well it worked.
The ACF does have a few Hispanics and African-Americans, and a fair number of Asians. I wonder if one reason for the whiteness of the organization is that most of its recruitment efforts are made at the more expensive culinary schools, whereas minority cooks, even in 2006, still work their way up the ranks by starting as dishwashers and prep cooks.
I did meet the first obviously gay couple I'd ever met at an ACF conference, so diversity is on the march, even if it's a slow march.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
A big stud and the perfect mint julep
July 13
I spent the past couple of days in Kentucky, visiting a bull and a bourbon distillery.
The bull was Prime, father of all the steak served at Primehouse, the Steve Hanson restaurant in Chicago whose chef is steak maestro and generally creative guy David Burke.
On the surface, Steve Hanson and David Burke are an unexpected team. Hanson's B.R. Guest restaurants tend not to be chef-driven. Instead, Hanson seems to run his restaurants from the perspective that, when people eat out, they want to get good service in a fun setting. The food doesn't need to impress, it just needs to meet expectations — to be good enough, as it were. The restaurants of Stephen Starr, Jeffrey Chodorow and other extremely successful operators seem to work on the same philosophy, although they sometimes take umbrage when I say so.
On the other hand, some B.R. Guest restaurants are clearly food- and chef-driven, such as Fiamma, whose chef Michael White has won high praise for his Italian food (I had a meal there for the Bon Appétit Food and Entertaining Awards awhile back and Mario Batali himself gushed over the pasta, and Mario Batali's no idle gusher).
Anyway, with Primehouse, the culinary focus is on its bull.
Prime is a beefcake stud of a Black Angus who spends his days strutting around Creekstone Farms in Kentucky, where his semen is collected three times a day, either to be frozen or inseminated into waiting females of similarly good breeding. In this case, breeding has nothing to do with manners or the ability to sneer with grace at the lower classes (which I guess would be Herefords and Brahmas and Holsteins and so on, not to mention Chianinis, I mean, really), but to marble well — to put on weight in such a way that little veins of fat are distributed evenly throughout your muscles, making for flavorful yet tender meat.
Prime’s children are raised on a mostly-grass diet until they are ready to be sent to Kansas feed lots, where they are fattened up mostly on grain until they're the right weight and size to be delicious rib-eyes, sirloins and filets. Then they're "harvested" and sent to many places, including Prime, where David Burke ages and cooks them.
Prime is the latest and perhaps most extreme example of the trend to identify the origins of foods. Hanson so liked the idea that he was hoping to continue the theme in other aspects of the restaurant. He wanted to get a supply of the straws used to store bull semen and use them (unused ones) as swizzle sticks.
He was dissuaded from the idea, but it took awhile.
In fact, Eben Klemm, who's in charge of B.R. Guest's beverage programs and who was in Kentucky with me, said Primehouse's purchasing manager was instructed to buy some semen straws and figure out how to do something with them.
He ordered them, opened the package, and only then realized that he had been sent not only the straws, but full ones with semen in them.
That bummed him out.
Freelance writer Greg Lindsay, who also was on the trip — nice guy, funny and smart as a whip — suggested quite seriously that bull semen could be an excellent cocktail ingredient, to be offered for a hefty supplement to testosterone-pumped types on the Chicago Board of Trade for example.
Hey, they'll drink Red Bull and vodka.
We also visited the Maker's Mark distillery, whose master distiller, Dave Pickerell, gave me the most detailed recipe I could imagine for a Mint Julep.
Maker's Mark, I learned on the tour, is all about removing bitterness from its brew. It uses no rye in its grain mix, just corn, wheat and malted barley, and it uses a roller mill instead of a hammer one to grind the grain so that no grain gets scorched (scorching creates bitter flavors). Maker's Mark is aged to be only sweet, without sourness or bitterness, and the entire taste experience is supposed to occur in the front of the mouth.
So Dave Pickerell isn't about to mull the mint for his julep. Mulling releases tannins, you see, which are bitter. So instead he creates an infusion, wrapping a bunch of mint leaves in cheese cloth, dipping them in bourbon, and squeezing, dipping and squeezing, dipping and squeezing until he has a nice, strong, minty infusion.
Separately, he combines six parts bourbon with one part simple syrup. He puts that in the freezer, and when it's time to make juleps, he pours it over ice and adds the infusion until it reaches the desired mintyness. He serves the juleps with straws cut short, forcing those drinking them to get up close to the drink to get a strong whiff of the mint.
I spent the past couple of days in Kentucky, visiting a bull and a bourbon distillery.
The bull was Prime, father of all the steak served at Primehouse, the Steve Hanson restaurant in Chicago whose chef is steak maestro and generally creative guy David Burke.
On the surface, Steve Hanson and David Burke are an unexpected team. Hanson's B.R. Guest restaurants tend not to be chef-driven. Instead, Hanson seems to run his restaurants from the perspective that, when people eat out, they want to get good service in a fun setting. The food doesn't need to impress, it just needs to meet expectations — to be good enough, as it were. The restaurants of Stephen Starr, Jeffrey Chodorow and other extremely successful operators seem to work on the same philosophy, although they sometimes take umbrage when I say so.
On the other hand, some B.R. Guest restaurants are clearly food- and chef-driven, such as Fiamma, whose chef Michael White has won high praise for his Italian food (I had a meal there for the Bon Appétit Food and Entertaining Awards awhile back and Mario Batali himself gushed over the pasta, and Mario Batali's no idle gusher).
Anyway, with Primehouse, the culinary focus is on its bull.
Prime is a beefcake stud of a Black Angus who spends his days strutting around Creekstone Farms in Kentucky, where his semen is collected three times a day, either to be frozen or inseminated into waiting females of similarly good breeding. In this case, breeding has nothing to do with manners or the ability to sneer with grace at the lower classes (which I guess would be Herefords and Brahmas and Holsteins and so on, not to mention Chianinis, I mean, really), but to marble well — to put on weight in such a way that little veins of fat are distributed evenly throughout your muscles, making for flavorful yet tender meat.
Prime’s children are raised on a mostly-grass diet until they are ready to be sent to Kansas feed lots, where they are fattened up mostly on grain until they're the right weight and size to be delicious rib-eyes, sirloins and filets. Then they're "harvested" and sent to many places, including Prime, where David Burke ages and cooks them.
Prime is the latest and perhaps most extreme example of the trend to identify the origins of foods. Hanson so liked the idea that he was hoping to continue the theme in other aspects of the restaurant. He wanted to get a supply of the straws used to store bull semen and use them (unused ones) as swizzle sticks.
He was dissuaded from the idea, but it took awhile.
In fact, Eben Klemm, who's in charge of B.R. Guest's beverage programs and who was in Kentucky with me, said Primehouse's purchasing manager was instructed to buy some semen straws and figure out how to do something with them.
He ordered them, opened the package, and only then realized that he had been sent not only the straws, but full ones with semen in them.
That bummed him out.
Freelance writer Greg Lindsay, who also was on the trip — nice guy, funny and smart as a whip — suggested quite seriously that bull semen could be an excellent cocktail ingredient, to be offered for a hefty supplement to testosterone-pumped types on the Chicago Board of Trade for example.
Hey, they'll drink Red Bull and vodka.
We also visited the Maker's Mark distillery, whose master distiller, Dave Pickerell, gave me the most detailed recipe I could imagine for a Mint Julep.
Maker's Mark, I learned on the tour, is all about removing bitterness from its brew. It uses no rye in its grain mix, just corn, wheat and malted barley, and it uses a roller mill instead of a hammer one to grind the grain so that no grain gets scorched (scorching creates bitter flavors). Maker's Mark is aged to be only sweet, without sourness or bitterness, and the entire taste experience is supposed to occur in the front of the mouth.
So Dave Pickerell isn't about to mull the mint for his julep. Mulling releases tannins, you see, which are bitter. So instead he creates an infusion, wrapping a bunch of mint leaves in cheese cloth, dipping them in bourbon, and squeezing, dipping and squeezing, dipping and squeezing until he has a nice, strong, minty infusion.
Separately, he combines six parts bourbon with one part simple syrup. He puts that in the freezer, and when it's time to make juleps, he pours it over ice and adds the infusion until it reaches the desired mintyness. He serves the juleps with straws cut short, forcing those drinking them to get up close to the drink to get a strong whiff of the mint.
Monday, July 10, 2006
Commando partying
July 10
Sometimes here in the New York food scene so many interesting-sounding events are going on that I try to make my version of commando raids — arriving, saying "hi, hi," having a drink, learning a fact and leaving for the next event.
Normally, Sundays in the summer are dead and I'm at home doing laundry or playing a computer game (Civilization IV), but the Fancy Food Show is underway, and many companies are taking the opportunity to show off their stuff.
So commando-style party attendance was in order.
That's hard to do, however, when your first event features an Italian product — Grana Padano cheese, in this case — and your host and many of the guests are in another room watching the World Cup championship between France and Italy (Italy won in a penalty-kick tie-breaker, which many people find gripping but I just think is kind of lame). That event was supposed to start at 4:30, so I had no idea that they expected us to sit down for dinner AFTER all the niceties and speaches given by representatives from the Grana Padano consorzio and various trade commissioners and so on — and then translated into English.
That was at Felidia, on the border between the Upper East Side and Midtown, and I had an event way downtown at Tribeca Grill (for Jamon Iberico) that started at 5:30. And I wasn't really at Felidia for the cheese, but for the Franciacorta they were pouring with it. Franciacorta is a sparkling wine I really like that comes, I believe, from the Italian region of Lombardy, which also is where a lot of Grana Padano comes from.
I learned at the event that Padano means "of or pertaining to the Po River," and that Grana Padano comes from several Italian regions in areas north of the Po.
Believe it or not, that will be a useful bit of information somewhere in the future. I know it will be.
My friend Arlyn Blake was at Felidia, too, and she and I finally decided to make a run for it at 5:50, when all we had eaten was three pieces of cheese, all of different ages and made in different seasons to reflect the variety in the world of Grana Padano. It was going to be a long night there.
So instead we apologized and hopped into the car of Arlyn's boyfriend, Sal, who drove us to the Tribeca Grill.
That was the see-and-be-seen party. I'm not sure why. Maybe chefs like Wylie Dufresne and Aaron Sanchez and pastry chef Johnny Iuzzini and writers like Jeffrey Steingarten and Peter Kaminsky and Kate Krader were there to sample the Jamon Iberico that was being presented by chef José Andres (Peter Kaminsky definitely was). Or maybe they were there because everyone likes José and wanted to see him. Or maybe they were there because almost everyone like's Drew Nieporent, Tribeca Grill's owner, and they wanted to see him.
It would have been a good place to hang out, but I had a dinner commitment back uptown near Columbus Circle, at San Domenico. So I walked to the 1 train and ran into Beverly Stephen of Food Arts and a friend of hers whose name didn't quite sink in. They, too, were headed to San Domenico, for a dinner by a chef from Italy's Campania region that also featured Campanian wine.
I sat down at my assigned table and the woman next to me, while doing something with her blackberry quizzed me as to who I was and what business I had being there. Was I in the industry? Did I have a culinary background?
Try not to do that when you go to a dinner party. It's, well, unbelievably bad form.
I thought of being a jerk right back, but instead introduced myself to her and then to everyone else at the table and we ended up having a very nice time exchanging amusing anecdotes. That's why you should avoid being a jerk at the beginning of dinner parties; you have to sit with those people for the rest of the night.
One person cited a "fact" she'd heard at a nutrition seminar that 33 percent of women were not interested in sex (the seminar was apparently trying to correlate bad nutrition with lack of interest in sex and a bunch of other things).
That seems like an awefully high percentage for a species that has managed to survive for even the several hundreds of thousands of years that we've been around. If you have any notion of where that statistic comes from, I'd love to hear about it.
What I ate at San Domenico:
Passato di fagioli di Controne con scuncigli e bottarga
Timbalo di bucatini, patate e provola su salsa di carote
Parmigiana di alici fresche
Filetto di maiale alla erbe con umidi di cardiofi
Fondente di cioccolato con mousse di ricotta
Caffe & piccola paticceria
and what I drank there:
Asprinio di Aversa, Fescine, Cantine Caputo, 2005
Fiano di Avellino, Campore Terredora, 2003
Aglianico Donnaluna, De Conciliiis, 2004
Sometimes here in the New York food scene so many interesting-sounding events are going on that I try to make my version of commando raids — arriving, saying "hi, hi," having a drink, learning a fact and leaving for the next event.
Normally, Sundays in the summer are dead and I'm at home doing laundry or playing a computer game (Civilization IV), but the Fancy Food Show is underway, and many companies are taking the opportunity to show off their stuff.
So commando-style party attendance was in order.
That's hard to do, however, when your first event features an Italian product — Grana Padano cheese, in this case — and your host and many of the guests are in another room watching the World Cup championship between France and Italy (Italy won in a penalty-kick tie-breaker, which many people find gripping but I just think is kind of lame). That event was supposed to start at 4:30, so I had no idea that they expected us to sit down for dinner AFTER all the niceties and speaches given by representatives from the Grana Padano consorzio and various trade commissioners and so on — and then translated into English.
That was at Felidia, on the border between the Upper East Side and Midtown, and I had an event way downtown at Tribeca Grill (for Jamon Iberico) that started at 5:30. And I wasn't really at Felidia for the cheese, but for the Franciacorta they were pouring with it. Franciacorta is a sparkling wine I really like that comes, I believe, from the Italian region of Lombardy, which also is where a lot of Grana Padano comes from.
I learned at the event that Padano means "of or pertaining to the Po River," and that Grana Padano comes from several Italian regions in areas north of the Po.
Believe it or not, that will be a useful bit of information somewhere in the future. I know it will be.
My friend Arlyn Blake was at Felidia, too, and she and I finally decided to make a run for it at 5:50, when all we had eaten was three pieces of cheese, all of different ages and made in different seasons to reflect the variety in the world of Grana Padano. It was going to be a long night there.
So instead we apologized and hopped into the car of Arlyn's boyfriend, Sal, who drove us to the Tribeca Grill.
That was the see-and-be-seen party. I'm not sure why. Maybe chefs like Wylie Dufresne and Aaron Sanchez and pastry chef Johnny Iuzzini and writers like Jeffrey Steingarten and Peter Kaminsky and Kate Krader were there to sample the Jamon Iberico that was being presented by chef José Andres (Peter Kaminsky definitely was). Or maybe they were there because everyone likes José and wanted to see him. Or maybe they were there because almost everyone like's Drew Nieporent, Tribeca Grill's owner, and they wanted to see him.
It would have been a good place to hang out, but I had a dinner commitment back uptown near Columbus Circle, at San Domenico. So I walked to the 1 train and ran into Beverly Stephen of Food Arts and a friend of hers whose name didn't quite sink in. They, too, were headed to San Domenico, for a dinner by a chef from Italy's Campania region that also featured Campanian wine.
I sat down at my assigned table and the woman next to me, while doing something with her blackberry quizzed me as to who I was and what business I had being there. Was I in the industry? Did I have a culinary background?
Try not to do that when you go to a dinner party. It's, well, unbelievably bad form.
I thought of being a jerk right back, but instead introduced myself to her and then to everyone else at the table and we ended up having a very nice time exchanging amusing anecdotes. That's why you should avoid being a jerk at the beginning of dinner parties; you have to sit with those people for the rest of the night.
One person cited a "fact" she'd heard at a nutrition seminar that 33 percent of women were not interested in sex (the seminar was apparently trying to correlate bad nutrition with lack of interest in sex and a bunch of other things).
That seems like an awefully high percentage for a species that has managed to survive for even the several hundreds of thousands of years that we've been around. If you have any notion of where that statistic comes from, I'd love to hear about it.
What I ate at San Domenico:
Passato di fagioli di Controne con scuncigli e bottarga
Timbalo di bucatini, patate e provola su salsa di carote
Parmigiana di alici fresche
Filetto di maiale alla erbe con umidi di cardiofi
Fondente di cioccolato con mousse di ricotta
Caffe & piccola paticceria
and what I drank there:
Asprinio di Aversa, Fescine, Cantine Caputo, 2005
Fiano di Avellino, Campore Terredora, 2003
Aglianico Donnaluna, De Conciliiis, 2004
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Alien abduction
July 5
A propos of not much, a question occurred to me after I finished writing a column on animal treatment:
Is alien abduction their form of catch-and-release?
A propos of not much, a question occurred to me after I finished writing a column on animal treatment:
Is alien abduction their form of catch-and-release?
It’s the 5th, so there must be a new organic vodka
July 5
A month ago today I went to the launch party of a superpremium organic vodka. Today, I got two airplane bottles of another one. This one’s from Hawaii and apart from being organic, it declares that a portion of the profits from sales of the vodka goes to “organizations that help to protect and revitalize the ocean’s resources.”
That’s very nice, but, I mean, it’s vodka. How many factors am I supposed to consider when selecting a flavorless beverage?
Then again, although the superpremium vodka craze shows no sign of abating, as the marketplace for the stuff gets more and more crowded, I guess you might as well think up as many distinguishing characteristics as you can.
This vodka, by the way, is made from a combination of rye and corn. Last month's was just rye.
A month ago today I went to the launch party of a superpremium organic vodka. Today, I got two airplane bottles of another one. This one’s from Hawaii and apart from being organic, it declares that a portion of the profits from sales of the vodka goes to “organizations that help to protect and revitalize the ocean’s resources.”
That’s very nice, but, I mean, it’s vodka. How many factors am I supposed to consider when selecting a flavorless beverage?
Then again, although the superpremium vodka craze shows no sign of abating, as the marketplace for the stuff gets more and more crowded, I guess you might as well think up as many distinguishing characteristics as you can.
This vodka, by the way, is made from a combination of rye and corn. Last month's was just rye.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Mystic Coffee II: The Grown-ups' table
July 3
My taxi driver suggested that perhaps the friendly people I encountered in Mystic were tourists.
Maybe, but the guy in the restaurant seemed local.
Anyway, I managed to get to the lighthouse museum lawn in time for Erica and Jono's wedding. In fact, I was there early enough to chat with Will Guidara who, apart from being a friend of the bride and groom, also is one of New York restaurateur Danny Meyer's underlings. He's in management at the foodservice operations at the Museum of Modern Art, which are run by Meyer's company. I congratulated Will on The Modern, the fine dining restaurant in the museum, winning the Beard award for best new restaurant and we chatted about the recent barbecue block party thrown on 27th street, where Blue Smoke, another Danny Meyer restaurant, is located. Will was on staff at that event, too, putting out fires (figuratively) and generally making sure things flowed well. I have yet to attend that party. Will suggested that if they hold it again next year and I decide to go, I should go on day 2, when operational kinks are banged out and the lines move more quickly. Makes sense.
I asked him off the record what kinks needed to be worked out at the museum, and he told me, but it was off the record, so you're just going to have to guess what he said.
Freelance writer Charlotte Kaiser was there, too, with her husband, Ari Weinberg, who used to work for Forbes but quit to go to business school at Harvard (the priorities of some people, I tell ya).
I sat next to Charlotte during the ceremony, but at dinner I was seated at a grown-up table.
I'm something like nine years older than Erica, so it made sense, really, that I was seated with Erica's mother and various godparents of the Pandolfi boys. But I'd never been seated at a grown-up table at a wedding before, at least not at a table earmarked for people a generation older than the happy couple, and it kind of surprised me.
It was a fun table. We grabbed bottles of wine from the bartenders as I talked venture capital with a venture capitalist, and learned clever techniques for raising teenage children from people who had successfully done so: A family friend of the Pandolfis, who also was at my table, has a daughter aged between Chris and Nick. She said that 13-year-olds really do need babysitters, but of course you can't get them a babysitter; they'd kill you or the babysitter or both of you. So Chris was paid $5 an hour to "hang out" with the family friend's daughter, who was later paid to hang out with young Nick.
Nick's about 20 now, and is taking reservations at Gramercy Tavern, another Danny Meyer restaurant, while also being a volunteer slave for Chanterelle chef-owner David Waltuck.
Nick had wanted to go to culinary school but his father insisted that he get a four-year degree first. It seems to be working out well for him.
Sitting with the grown-ups didn't keep me from playing with the kids as the night progressed. We wandered to what apparently was the only bar still open in Stonington at 10pm on a Sunday in the middle of the summer, and then when that place closed we caroused loudly about the beaches of Stonington.
Stonington's a wealthy community, no-doubt well-policed, and so I wondered how closely our moves were being monitored. Were police radios reporting on the movements of the Pandolfi post-wedding party?
"They've left the parking lot and have moved to Lobster Point. Over."
I suppose if we'd engaged in vandalism we would have found out.
Special props to Dan DiSalvo, a college friend of Jono's and a poly-sci professor at Amherst, who gave up his seat in someone's car so I could be taken back to my lodgings at Whaler's Inn in Mystic. Nice guy.
Today I sampled the pizza at Mystic Pizza, you know, from the movie. They should practice cooking their crusts through. Maybe their ovens are too hot.
My taxi driver suggested that perhaps the friendly people I encountered in Mystic were tourists.
Maybe, but the guy in the restaurant seemed local.
Anyway, I managed to get to the lighthouse museum lawn in time for Erica and Jono's wedding. In fact, I was there early enough to chat with Will Guidara who, apart from being a friend of the bride and groom, also is one of New York restaurateur Danny Meyer's underlings. He's in management at the foodservice operations at the Museum of Modern Art, which are run by Meyer's company. I congratulated Will on The Modern, the fine dining restaurant in the museum, winning the Beard award for best new restaurant and we chatted about the recent barbecue block party thrown on 27th street, where Blue Smoke, another Danny Meyer restaurant, is located. Will was on staff at that event, too, putting out fires (figuratively) and generally making sure things flowed well. I have yet to attend that party. Will suggested that if they hold it again next year and I decide to go, I should go on day 2, when operational kinks are banged out and the lines move more quickly. Makes sense.
I asked him off the record what kinks needed to be worked out at the museum, and he told me, but it was off the record, so you're just going to have to guess what he said.
Freelance writer Charlotte Kaiser was there, too, with her husband, Ari Weinberg, who used to work for Forbes but quit to go to business school at Harvard (the priorities of some people, I tell ya).
I sat next to Charlotte during the ceremony, but at dinner I was seated at a grown-up table.
I'm something like nine years older than Erica, so it made sense, really, that I was seated with Erica's mother and various godparents of the Pandolfi boys. But I'd never been seated at a grown-up table at a wedding before, at least not at a table earmarked for people a generation older than the happy couple, and it kind of surprised me.
It was a fun table. We grabbed bottles of wine from the bartenders as I talked venture capital with a venture capitalist, and learned clever techniques for raising teenage children from people who had successfully done so: A family friend of the Pandolfis, who also was at my table, has a daughter aged between Chris and Nick. She said that 13-year-olds really do need babysitters, but of course you can't get them a babysitter; they'd kill you or the babysitter or both of you. So Chris was paid $5 an hour to "hang out" with the family friend's daughter, who was later paid to hang out with young Nick.
Nick's about 20 now, and is taking reservations at Gramercy Tavern, another Danny Meyer restaurant, while also being a volunteer slave for Chanterelle chef-owner David Waltuck.
Nick had wanted to go to culinary school but his father insisted that he get a four-year degree first. It seems to be working out well for him.
Sitting with the grown-ups didn't keep me from playing with the kids as the night progressed. We wandered to what apparently was the only bar still open in Stonington at 10pm on a Sunday in the middle of the summer, and then when that place closed we caroused loudly about the beaches of Stonington.
Stonington's a wealthy community, no-doubt well-policed, and so I wondered how closely our moves were being monitored. Were police radios reporting on the movements of the Pandolfi post-wedding party?
"They've left the parking lot and have moved to Lobster Point. Over."
I suppose if we'd engaged in vandalism we would have found out.
Special props to Dan DiSalvo, a college friend of Jono's and a poly-sci professor at Amherst, who gave up his seat in someone's car so I could be taken back to my lodgings at Whaler's Inn in Mystic. Nice guy.
Today I sampled the pizza at Mystic Pizza, you know, from the movie. They should practice cooking their crusts through. Maybe their ovens are too hot.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Mystic coffee
July 2,
"Hi, I'd like a large, black, unsweetened iced coffee, please."
That seems like a really straightforward way to ask for a large, black, unsweetened iced coffee, but it has confused two people in a row, who tried to give me hot coffee. I'm in the Northeastern United States, where iced coffee is an extremely common thing to order in July, so I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.
The first person to give me hot coffee was in New York's Penn Station. She seemed to be a recent Slavic immigrant, so maybe I was just speaking too quickly or something. At any rate, I thought my train was about to leave so I just took it and got on the train, which sat there for another 40 minutes.
The train was waiting for another train that was nine (9!) hours late, I presume due to flooding. I was on the last train to Boston for the evening, and I guess the conductor or whoever decides when to delay a train thought it was reasonable for us to wait for those passengers. It seemed reasonable to me, too.
But it meant I pulled into my destination, Mystic, Connecticut, 50 minutes late. It was close to 11 when I got to my hotel, and I flipped through the guide in my room to see if anything other than the 24-hour Tim Hortons might still be open. Angie's Pizza Restaurant & Pier 27 serves until 1 a.m. on weekends and was a short walk away, so I took the opportunity to study Connecticut pizza culture a bit.
Don't laugh. Connecticut has a complex pizza culture, most notably in New Haven, where the super-thin crusts of a couple of local pizza places are greatly admired by pizza cognoscenti nationwide.
Pier 27 — the bar side of Angie's Pizza Restaurant & Pier 27, and the only part that stays open after 11, it seems — is a friendly neighborhood place whose mostly-middle aged guests yesterday evening seemed to really enjoy their Jimmy Buffett and Eagles and other music of that genre. Two raucous women were doing shots — one was drinking tequila, the other vodka — although the bartender said the Jagermeister tap got a lot of usage and was one of the most popular shots in the bar.
I shuddered and dug into my small sausage pizza.
Pier 27’s pizza has a pretty thick crust, perhaps midway between New York- and Chicago-style. It was crisp while the pizza was too hot to eat, but it got kind of soggy as the pizza cooled down.
My first and only back-of-the-house restaurant job was as a cook at a three-unit chain in Denver called Pizza Bug (the pizza was delivered in Volkswagen bugs), but I’ve never been a fussy pizza guy. I mean, I had tomato sauce, cheese and sausage in front of me, what was there to complain about?
This morning I had my typical splurge-in-a-diner breakfast of coffee, two eggs over-easy with sausage, home fries and whole wheat toast. Then I walked around Mystic and had lunch of fried clam strips at Sea Swirl. They were mild clam strips, overwhelmed by the tartar sauce that was served with it, so I didn’t eat the tartar sauce.
On the way back to my hotel I stopped by Tim Hortons and ordered a large, black, unsweetened iced coffee. The person at the counter, who seemed like a native English speaker, handed me a large, black, unsweetened hot coffee.
Is it me? I wondered. Am I swallowing my words?
I apologized and said I actually wanted iced coffee. She gave me a "why didn't you say so?" look and gave me the iced coffee I'm still drinking now. It's in a gigantic styrofoam cup called "The Tank" that contains at least a quart of liquid. The coffee itself is a delicious medium-roast so the beans’ nice fruity, acidic nuances are coming through. A+.
I like this town of Mystic. It’s quaint and pretty in the way that many New England towns are, but the people are really warm. They greet you on the street as you walk by, and some random customer at 41 North, the restaurant where I had breakfast, made eye-contact with me as I left and said “I hope you have a good day.” I wished him the same.
This is not typical New England behavior, where people tend to be quite standoffish, and it’s certainly not typical behavior of people in touristy towns. It deserves further investigation.
I’m in Mystic to attend the wedding of my friend and colleague Erica Duecy. She’s marrying jeweler, potter, artist and all-around nice guy Jono Pandolfi, who is a member of quite a talented family. Brother Chris plays the banjo down south somewhere. Other brother Nick, an NYU student, is an aspiring chef. His brothers tell stories of Nick’s gingerbread house with stained glass windows that he made from smashed, melted rock candy. Smart!
Since I’m a food writer, people often (almost always) ask me to pass judgment on the food at weddings. I always say it scores 10 out of 10.
"Hi, I'd like a large, black, unsweetened iced coffee, please."
That seems like a really straightforward way to ask for a large, black, unsweetened iced coffee, but it has confused two people in a row, who tried to give me hot coffee. I'm in the Northeastern United States, where iced coffee is an extremely common thing to order in July, so I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.
The first person to give me hot coffee was in New York's Penn Station. She seemed to be a recent Slavic immigrant, so maybe I was just speaking too quickly or something. At any rate, I thought my train was about to leave so I just took it and got on the train, which sat there for another 40 minutes.
The train was waiting for another train that was nine (9!) hours late, I presume due to flooding. I was on the last train to Boston for the evening, and I guess the conductor or whoever decides when to delay a train thought it was reasonable for us to wait for those passengers. It seemed reasonable to me, too.
But it meant I pulled into my destination, Mystic, Connecticut, 50 minutes late. It was close to 11 when I got to my hotel, and I flipped through the guide in my room to see if anything other than the 24-hour Tim Hortons might still be open. Angie's Pizza Restaurant & Pier 27 serves until 1 a.m. on weekends and was a short walk away, so I took the opportunity to study Connecticut pizza culture a bit.
Don't laugh. Connecticut has a complex pizza culture, most notably in New Haven, where the super-thin crusts of a couple of local pizza places are greatly admired by pizza cognoscenti nationwide.
Pier 27 — the bar side of Angie's Pizza Restaurant & Pier 27, and the only part that stays open after 11, it seems — is a friendly neighborhood place whose mostly-middle aged guests yesterday evening seemed to really enjoy their Jimmy Buffett and Eagles and other music of that genre. Two raucous women were doing shots — one was drinking tequila, the other vodka — although the bartender said the Jagermeister tap got a lot of usage and was one of the most popular shots in the bar.
I shuddered and dug into my small sausage pizza.
Pier 27’s pizza has a pretty thick crust, perhaps midway between New York- and Chicago-style. It was crisp while the pizza was too hot to eat, but it got kind of soggy as the pizza cooled down.
My first and only back-of-the-house restaurant job was as a cook at a three-unit chain in Denver called Pizza Bug (the pizza was delivered in Volkswagen bugs), but I’ve never been a fussy pizza guy. I mean, I had tomato sauce, cheese and sausage in front of me, what was there to complain about?
This morning I had my typical splurge-in-a-diner breakfast of coffee, two eggs over-easy with sausage, home fries and whole wheat toast. Then I walked around Mystic and had lunch of fried clam strips at Sea Swirl. They were mild clam strips, overwhelmed by the tartar sauce that was served with it, so I didn’t eat the tartar sauce.
On the way back to my hotel I stopped by Tim Hortons and ordered a large, black, unsweetened iced coffee. The person at the counter, who seemed like a native English speaker, handed me a large, black, unsweetened hot coffee.
Is it me? I wondered. Am I swallowing my words?
I apologized and said I actually wanted iced coffee. She gave me a "why didn't you say so?" look and gave me the iced coffee I'm still drinking now. It's in a gigantic styrofoam cup called "The Tank" that contains at least a quart of liquid. The coffee itself is a delicious medium-roast so the beans’ nice fruity, acidic nuances are coming through. A+.
I like this town of Mystic. It’s quaint and pretty in the way that many New England towns are, but the people are really warm. They greet you on the street as you walk by, and some random customer at 41 North, the restaurant where I had breakfast, made eye-contact with me as I left and said “I hope you have a good day.” I wished him the same.
This is not typical New England behavior, where people tend to be quite standoffish, and it’s certainly not typical behavior of people in touristy towns. It deserves further investigation.
I’m in Mystic to attend the wedding of my friend and colleague Erica Duecy. She’s marrying jeweler, potter, artist and all-around nice guy Jono Pandolfi, who is a member of quite a talented family. Brother Chris plays the banjo down south somewhere. Other brother Nick, an NYU student, is an aspiring chef. His brothers tell stories of Nick’s gingerbread house with stained glass windows that he made from smashed, melted rock candy. Smart!
Since I’m a food writer, people often (almost always) ask me to pass judgment on the food at weddings. I always say it scores 10 out of 10.
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