While poking around in the newly opened archives of the New York Times yesterday, I stumbled upon an article called How We Dine (full text in PDF) from January 1, 1859. I'm not well versed in the history of food criticism, but I believe this is perhaps the first restaurant review to appear in the Times and that the unnamed gentleman who wrote it (the byline is "by the Strong-Minded Reporter of the Times") is the progenitor of the paper's later reviewers like Ruth Reichl, Mimi Sheraton, and Frank Bruni.
The article starts off with a directive from the editor-in-chief to "go and dine":
"Very well," replied the editor-in-chief. "Dine somewhere else to-day and somewhere else to-morrow. I wish you to dine everywhere, -- from the Astor House Restaurant to the smallest description of dining saloon in the City, in order that you may furnish an account of all these places. The cashier will pay your expenses."
Before starting on his quest, the reporter differentiates eating from dining -- noting that many believe "whereas all people know how to eat, it is only the French who know how to dine" -- and defines what he means by an American dinner (as opposed to a French one). Here's his list of the types of American dinner to be found in New York, from most comfortable to least:
1. The Family dinner at home.
2. The Stetsonian dinner.
3. The Delmonican, or French dinner.
4. The Minor dinner of the Stetsonian principle.
5. The Eating-house dinner, so called.
6. The Second-class Eating-house dinner.
7. The Third-class Eating-house feed.
The remainder of the article is devoted to descriptions of what a diner might find at each of these types of establishments. Among the places he dined was Delmonico's, where dining in America is said to have originated:
Once let Delmonico have your order, and you are safe. You may repose in peace up to the very moment when you sit down with your guests. No nobleman of England -- no Marquis of the ancienne nobless -- was ever better served or waited on in greater style that you will be in a private room at Delmonico's. The lights will be brilliant, the waiters will be curled and perfumed and gloved, the dishes will be strictly en règle and the wines will come with precision of clock-work that has been duly wound up. If you "pay your money like a gentleman," you will be fed like a gentleman, and no mistake... The cookery, however, will be superb, and the attendance will be good. If you make the ordinary mistakes of a untraveled man, and call for dishes in unusual progression, the waiter will perhaps sneer almost imperceptibly, but he will go no further, if you don't try his feelings too harshly, or put your knife into your mouth.
According to a series of articles by Joe O'Connell, Delmonico's was the first restaurant in the US when it opened in 1830 and invented Eggs Benedict, Oysters Rockefeller, Baked Alaska, Lobster Newberg, and the term "86'd", used when the popular Delmonico Steak (#86 on menu) was sold out, or so the story goes. O'Connell's history of Delmonico's provides us with some context for the How We Dine piece:
The restaurant was a novelty in New York. There were new foods, a courteous staff, and cooking that was unknown at the homes of even the wealthiest New Yorkers. The restaurant was open for lunch and dinner.
The restaurant featured a bill of fare, which was itself new. Those who dined at inns were fed on a set meal for a set price. As a result, everyone was fed the same meal and were charged the same price, whether they ate little or much. In Paris, however, restaurants offered their patrons a "bill of fare", a carte, which listed separate dishes with individual prices. Each patron could choose a combination of dishes which was different from the other patrons. Each dish was priced separately. Thus, the restaurant was able to accommodate the tastes and hunger of each individual. The various dishes and their prices were listed on a carte or (the English translation) "bill of fare". Today, we call it a menu.
And from Delmonico's developed many different types of dining establishments, which the Strong-Minded Reporter set out to document thirty years later. Contrast his visit to Delmonico's with the experience in the "sandwich-room" at Browne's Auction Hotel, an eating-house:
The habitués of the place are rarely questioned at all. The man who has eaten a sandwich every day for the past ten years at the Auction Hotel no sooner takes his seat than a sandwich is set before him. The man who has for the same period indulged daily in pie or hard boiled eggs (there are some men with amazing digestion) is similarly treated. The occasional visitor, however, is briefly questioned by the attendant before whom he takes his place. "Sandwich?" or "Pie?" If he say "Sandwich," in reply, the little man laconically inquires, "Mustard?" The customer nods, and is served. If his mission be pie, instead, a little square morsel of cheese is invariably presented to him. Why such a custom should prevail at these places, no amount of research has yet enabled me to ascertain. Nothing can be more incongruous to pie than cheese, which, according to rule and common sense, is only admissible after pie, as a digester. But the guests at the Auction Hotel invariably take them together, and with strict fairness -- a bite at the pie, and a bite at the cheese, again the pie, and again the cheese, and so on until both are finished.
The experience of being a regular has barely changed in 150 years. And finally, our intrepid reporter visits an unnamed third class eating-house:
The noise in the dining hall is terrific. A guest has no sooner seated himself than a plate is literally flung at him by an irritated and perspiring waiter, loosely habited in an unbuttoned shirt whereof the varying color is, I am given to understand, white on Sunday, and daily darkening until Saturday, when it is mixed white and black -- black predominating. The jerking of the plate is closely followed up by a similar performance with a knife and a steel fork, and immediately succeeding these harmless missiles come a fearful shout from the waiter demanding in hasty tones, "What do you want now?" Having mildly stated what you desire to be served with, the waiter echoes your words in a voice of thunder, goes through the same ceremony with the next man and the next, through an infinite series, and rushes frantically from your presence. Presently returning, he appears with a column of dishes whereof the base is in one hand and the extreme edge of the capital is artfully secured under his chin. He passes down the aisle of guests, and, as he goes, deals out the dishes as he would cards, until the last is served, when he commences again Da Capo. The disgusting manner in which the individuals who dine at this place, thrust their food into their mouths with the blades of their knives, makes you tremble with apprehensions of suicide...
The entire article is well worth the read...one of the most interesting things I've found online in awhile.
Update: According to their web site, a restaurant in New Orleans named Antoine's claims that they invented Oysters Rockefeller. Another tidbit: from what I can gather, the Delmonico's that now exists in lower Manhattan has little to do with the original Delmonico's (even though they claim otherwise), sort of like the various Ray's Pizza places sprinkled about Manhattan. (thx, everyone who sent this in)
Rebecca Charles, owner of the Pearl Oyster Bar in NYC, a seafood place modeled after hundreds of similar restaurants in New England offering similar menus, is suing a former employee (of six years) for copying too closely her restaurant and menu in opening his new place, Ed's Lobster Bar.
Many parallels here to the design/art/film world...what is mere inspiration versus outright theft? The key question in these kinds of cases for me is: does the person exercise creativity in the appropriation? Did they add something to it instead of just copying or superficially changing it? Clam shacks are everywhere in New England, but an upscale seafood establishment with a premium lobster roll is a unique creative twist on that concept brought to NYC by Charles. An upscale clam shack blocks away from a nearly identical restaurant at which the owner used to work for six years...that seems a bit lame to me, not the work of a creative restaurateur. Who knows how this stuff is going to play out legally; it's a complex issue with lots of slippery slope potential.
Meg has more thoughts on the issue and Ed Levine weighs in over at Serious Eats with information not found in the NY Times article. It was Ed who first raised the issue about Ed's Lobster Bar earlier in the month.
Update: I forgot to link to the menus above. Here's the menu for Pearl Oyster Bar and here's the menu for Ed's Lobster Bar. For comparison, here are the menus for a couple of traditional clam shacks: the Clam Box in Ipswich, MA and Woodman's in Essex, MA.
Taking advantage of a burst steam pipe in our bedroom and the slushy weather, the wife and I finally ventured out to Momofuku Ssäm Bar. Due to the icy sidewalks, the place was less than jam-packed so we were seated immediately. From our seats at the bar, we could see David Chang slicing ham and utilizing the one-for-me-one-for-you plating technique. Hholy Ccrap, what a place!
I could go on and on about the food -- it's some of the best I've had in the city -- but equally impressive is how the place feels and how fun it is to eat there. The staff seems imported wholesale from one of Danny Meyer's restaurants...the service is friendly and enthusiastic and genuinely loves when when you're excited about the food. The music ranged from the Pixies to Metallica to Bob Dylan while we were there and was at just the right volume. The vibe is more relaxed than at the Noodle Bar...the food is less "street" and "on-the-run" so you feel less rushed in your meal. The beverages are a casual and interesting mix; we had a taste of a sparkling Shiraz from The Black Chook...fizzy like champagne and red like, well, red wine. In the opening paragraphs of his recent review of Ssäm Bar, Frank Bruni does a great job capturing what's so good about the place:
It has also put a greater premium on service, distinguished by attentive young waiters with more knowledge and palpable enthusiasm about the menu than many of their counterparts at more conventionally polished establishments.
And it has emerged as much, much more than the precocious fast-food restaurant it initially was. By bringing sophisticated, inventive cooking and a few high-end grace notes to a setting that discourages even the slightest sense of ceremony, Ssäm Bar answers the desires of a generation of savvy, adventurous diners with little appetite for starchy rituals and stratospheric prices.
They want great food, but they want it to feel more accessible, less effete. They'll gladly take some style along with it, but not if the tax is too punishing. And that's what they get at Ssäm Bar, sleek, softly lighted and decidedly unfussy. Most of its roughly 55 seats are at a gleaming dark wood counter that runs the length of the narrow room, though these seats afford more elbow room than exists at the much smaller Noodle Bar.
And ok, a word or two about the food. Is it even Asian? It's more like food that tastes fantastic and you can eat with chopsticks. I would describe it as truly international food, drawing upon many influences without being obvious about it. And who cares anyway...Chang could put Swedish food on the menu and make it work. I have no real evidence or experience to back this up, but the approach to food at Ssäm seems like a new one to me, a new type of cuisine, an approach that values the tastiness and the end result over regional influence and style1. We'll see how that prediction works out.
[1] Maybe I like this approach so much because it reminds me of the way in which I edit kottke.org. This isn't a tech site or a design site or a pop culture site or a news site...I'll put anything on kottke.org as long as it's interesting, topic be damned. ↩
Serious Eats is looking for a web designer who's familiar with blogs, isn't afraid of a little PHP code, and is located in (or is planning on relocating to) NYC. Serious Eats is a start-up that is focused on sharing food enthusiasm through blogs and online community. You'll be working with a fine group of folks. SE is headed up by Ed Levine, who Gourmet editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl calls the "missionary of the delicious" and Meg Hourihan, who co-founded blogger.com and happens also to be married to me. Alaina Browne, formerly of A Full Belly and Mule Design, and Adam Kuban, pizza and burger expert, round out SE's crew of passionate food people.
Fringe benefits: you can't imagine all the culinary goodies that make their way into that office everyday. Meg comes home and casually says things like, "oh, we had a private tasting of the new Haagen-Dazs flavors in the office today" all the freaking time. If you're a web designer with an interest in food, this is your place.
I learned something terrific yesterday: if you take a really cold but still liquid beer out of the freezer and open it, the beer will freeze within seconds. The freezing trick also works if instead of opening the beer, you give the unopened bottle a sharp rap. The reasons I've found online for why the trick works varies slightly for the two cases. According to Daryl Taylor's site for science teachers, opening the bottle changes the pressure in the bottle and thus lowers the temperature:
The sealed bottle's envoronment has a specific volume, pressure, and temperature. By changing one, you are necessarily affecting the others. The chilled liquid has a smaller temperature, esentially the same volume, thus a smaller smaler pressure. This is, of cousre, according to the basic gas-law, PVNERT. Better known as PV=nRT. Even though the internal pressure has decreased, it is still far greater than the pressure outside the container, namely one atmosphere. Upon opening, the pressure inside drastically plunges as it tries to equalize with the atmosphere. This rapid decrease in P corresponds to a rapid decrease in T, since the V is essentially the same. This rapid drop in temperature of a liquid that is NEAR freezing actually plunges the liquid into a frozen state.
Not sure I completely buy this...does the ideal gas law work for liquids? I can see that the small amount of gas in the neck of the bottle would decrease in pressure and thus decrease in temperature and that might be enough to spur the liquid into freezing. For a better answer for both cases, I consulted the internet's all-seeing oracle, Ask Metafilter. This comment gives a succinct answer:
The beer is below the freezing temperature, but there is not enough contamination for the ice to form. The bubbles of carbon dioxide released when the bottle is hit act as nuclei for ice crystal growth in the supercooled beer. Same thing happens in reverse when water is microwaved in a smooth container but won't boil until hit.
This more scientific discussion of unfreezable water provides more evidence of what may be going on: supercooling effects, the carbon dioxide in solution hindering freezing (osmotic depression of freezing point), and hydration factors. Anyway, wicked cool! Supercooled beer!
Update: If you require visual proof, check out these two videos of beer freezing after it's been opened. Here's a video with water...so fast! (via digg)
At PopTech a few weeks ago, Lester Brown, who has been a leading advocate of environmentally sustainable development for almost 30 years, spoke about the impact of the increasing production of ethanol. As more corn gets used for making automotive fuel, that reduces the amount of grain available for food production. As demand rises, so will the price...no matter what people are using the corn for, be it fuel or food. The countries that will really suffer in this scenario are those that import lots of grain for food.
When Brown said this, I immediately thought of Mexico. When you consider the food culture of Mexico, one of the first things to mind is corn. Corn (maize) was likely first domesticated in Mexico and remains the cornerstone of Mexican cuisine; in short, corn is far more Mexican than apple pie is American. In 1491, his excellent book on the pre-Columbian Americas, Charles Mann tells us that despite corn's high status, Mexico is increasingly importing corn from the United States because it's cheaper than local corn:
Modern hybrids are so productive that despite the distances involved US corporations can sell maize for less in Oaxaca than can [local farmer] Diaz Castellano. Landrace maize, he said, tastes better, but it is hard to find a way to make the quality pay off.
Those great tortillas you had at some local place while on vacation in Mexico? There's an increasing chance they're made from US corn. Mmm, globalizious! Of course, Mexican farmers are getting out of the farming business because they can't compete with the heavily subsidized US corn and Mexico is losing control over one of their strongest cultural customs. Now that ethanol is changing the rules, there's a bidding war brewing between Americans who want to fill their gas tanks and Mexicans who want to feed their children. Odds are the tanks stay fuller than the stomachs.
For reference, here's what increasing ethanol production has done to the price of corn over the past three months:
And that's despite a fantastic US corn harvest. The graph is from this article in the WSJ, which contains a quick overview of the effects that the growing ethanol industry might have.
At one of the few chain restaurants in Chinatown today, I witnessed a Spanish-speaking cashier taking an order from a Cantonese-speaking customer off of an English-only menu. It took awhile, but the woman seemed satisfied as she left with her food.
As part of a World Series promotion, Taco Bell will give away a free taco to everyone in the United States if someone hits a home run over the left field wall in tonight's game 3. This is a big offer for a big company so of course their lawyers want to make darn sure that we know precisely what "Taco Bell" means when they say "home run", "left field", and "free taco" with an extensive list of terms and conditions. Surely the first legal document containing the phrase "a completely outside the bun idea", the T&C is a fun read, but my favorite is the first condition that you agree to if you take advantage of the offer:
...to release, Major League Baseball Properties, Inc., Major League Baseball Enterprises, Inc., MLB Advanced Media, L.P., MLB Media Holdings, Inc., MLB Media Holdings, L.P., MLB Online Services, Inc., the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, and the Major League Baseball Clubs, and each of their respective shareholders, employees, parents, directors, officers, affiliates, representatives, agents, successors, and assigns (hereinafter, "MLB Entities") and Sponsor and their affiliates, subsidiaries, retailers, sales representatives, distributors and franchisees, and each of their officers, directors, employees and agents ("Promotional Parties"), from any and all liability, loss or damage incurred with respect to participation in this contest and/or the awarding, receipt, possession, and/or use or misuse of any Free Taco
Man, I really hope someone hits a left field home run tonight. I'm dying to see some creative misuse of free tacos.
From the perspective of the outside observer, New York's Little Italy seems like little more than a chunk of Disney World plopped down in the midst of lower Manhattan. On the ground, the reality is not much better, particularly if you're out to find a good meal. Unlike neighboring Chinatown, Little Italy's food reputation is not the best. Since we started working in our new office in Chinatown, a number of forays have been made into Little Italy in order to procure take-out to bring back to the office, particularly pizza-by-the-slice. The results have been disappointing; several slices of blah pizza and a deep-fried risotto ball with prosciutto, mozzarella, and peas (sounds fantastic, right?) that was way not fantastic.
Is there anywhere in this whole small country we can get good Italian food to go or pizza-by-the-slice? As it is, Little Italy is reflecting poorly on the mother country and its excellent cuisine, and it would be nice, if possible, to salvage some of that reputation.
If you've ever used any of the various menu sites out there, you may have noticed that the menus are occasionally not as up-to-date or complete as they could be. A typical response in the blogosphere to a situation like this is to fire off a snarky missive about how menu sites suck, wish harm on the site's owners and their children, and why don't they just die already, those sucking bastards, and basically overreact in such a way as to make the writer feel temporarily better and all but ensures that nothing constructive comes of it.
Since its launch last year, I've admired the tone of Eater, a site about New York city food and dining. The site strikes the right balance between criticism, enthusiasm, insider knowledge, and detatched reportage while covering a topic where too much of any one of these is deadly for the reader. Last week, Eater took note of the menu site situation, but instead of just complaining, they went looking for some evidence and reported the results:
Last week, Eater began an exhaustive investigative series called MenuGate. For those who think we'd forgotten about it, ten-hut. Tomorrow morning, we'll be conducting a SPOT INSPECTION of the major menu site players, then scoring them on how accurate (or inaccurate) their menus are. The benchmark will be the menu that's freely available, at this very moment, on the restaurant's official website.
In canning the snark, offering fair criticism, and letting the results speak for themselves, Eater made it possible for the menu sites to respond in a congenial fashion:
We saw you chose 11 Madison Park this morning to do a menu comparison and our menu was out of date. To be fair, we waited to let you investigate the differences before we updated the menu, even though we noticed the menu had changed. In any event, now that you've written your piece, we have updated the menu as we do for restaurants everyday. We have a team specifically assigned to update menus and we receive user submissions as well to let us know about restaurant changes.
The end result? The situation improved for everyone. A small improvement perhaps, but MenuGate is an ongoing Eater feature so we can expect future improvements. And perhaps when the menu sites get tired of taking their lumps each time around, MenuGate may lead them to think of better ways to keep their menus up-to-date and useful. Anil Dash wrote a post two years ago about how bloggers could take positive action against "Stuff That Sucks":
I'm proud of what [bloggers have] done in creating so many different weblog communities, and I don't want our legacy to be one of having the positives overshadowed by our frequent, though understandable, tendency to be unkind or uncivil to those we're communicating with.
The way Eater has approached the menu sites issue is certainly a good example of what Anil was talking about. Good show.
A reader dropped an interesting question into my inbox yesterday, and I thought I would open it up to the group. Darko writes that he's in NYC for the next two weeks but doesn't have a lot of money to spend because he lives and works in Serbia. So, he's wondering a) what to eat on a daily basis that doesn't cost a whole lot, and b) where to go for a splurge meal, a place with "really glorious food" that's $80-100 for two.
Cheap everyday food has been the subject of many pieces online, including this kottke.org thread from Feb 2003, New York magazine's Cheap Eats 2004, New York magazine's Cheap Eats 2005, New York magazine's Cheap Eats 2006, Eating Pleasure. Price: $2, and Delicious for a Dollar?
My recommendations would be: bagels, Chinatown (the five-for-a-buck dumpling places as well as some other restaurants), pizza ($2/slice anywhere in the city), street carts (particularly the hot dogs and pretzels, check out the best street food in NYC), sandwiches from a deli (although some delis can be expensive, particularly in Manhattan...anyone know of any cheap places?), Curry Hill (Indian food around Lexington and & 28th), getting out of the touristy places in Manhattan (head for the East Village or the Lower East Side), or getting out of Manhattan entirely (cheaper eats in Brooklyn, etc.). And to drink, New York City tap water is free and better than Evian.
The splurge meal is a bit tougher, although if you forsake having wine, you can eat pretty well for $50/person. It might be best to seek out this meal in Brooklyn...there are some great places there and you don't have to pay the Manhattan premium. Going at lunchtime is another good option...you often get the same calibre of food at a lower price than dinner. Gotham Bar and Grill near Union Square has a prix fixe lunch for $25 (or used to...you should call ahead). I think Eleven Madison Park also has a similarly priced prix fixe at lunch (prix fixe = fixed price). Anyone have any other suggestions, particularly about good places in Brooklyn?
For some, a trip to Austria steers their gastronomic attention to wiener schnitzel, but for me, it's all about the wurst.1 Following the good advice of a reader to ignore the sausages on offer in cafes and restaurants, we hit up every lunchtime sausage stand we could find during our visit for the real deal.
In Salzburg, the typical stand offers 8-10 different kinds of wurst, from the familiar frankfurter to the spicy pusztakrainer. You can get your wurst on a plate with mustard and a piece of bread or as a "hot dog" (in a bun with mustard and ketchup). For my first wurst, I had a kasekrainer, hot dog-style with ketchup, and it turned out to be my favorite of the trip. Melted cheese (kase) filled the sausage and the bun was perfectly crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside. Meg sampled a burenwurst. The next day, we hit up another stand; I tried the frankfurter while Meg had a delicately flavored weisswurst (her favorite of the trip). She speculated they didn't grill the weisswurst because it would interfere with mild flavor; the spicer wursts seemed to be grilled.
From thence to Innsbruck in the Austrian Alps. At 10,000 feet above sea level, we had an unspecifed wurst (the restaurant called it, basically, "the sausage of the day") that ranks among the best food I've ever tasted, but that assessment may have been colored by the fact that we'd hiked up a glacier to get it. On our last day in Innsbruck, we surrendered to the comfort of cafe chairs and had bratwurst (mit sauerkraut und mustard) at a small place in the old town. After a hard day of walking, it beats eating standing up, which is how it works at the wurst stand.
Our final link in the sausage trail was Zurich, which is not in Austria but in the section of Switzerland near Austria and Germany. From a stand by the lake, we shared a pork-based sausage I forget the name of and another beloved weisswurst. Based on the relative unavailability of the wurst there, I get the feeling that the Swiss don't take their sausages as seriously as the Austrians, at least in cosmopolitan Zurich. Not that the Swiss wurst wasn't good; they just have other things to worry about...like fondue.2
But to focus entirely on the wurst is to ignore the equally fantastic brot (bread) that accompanies it and many other Austrian dishes. My favorite bread growing up in Wisconsin was called "Vienna bread" and I had always assumed that the cheap loaves we got at the local chain supermarket approximated something found in the Austrian capital. We didn't get to Vienna, but the Austrian bread we had was indeed like the bread of my childhood...except about 1000 times better. The small, crisp roll we got with our wurst, called a semmel, was not unlike what's called a roll or kaiser roll at an NYC deli. These rolls, accompanied by some richly flavorful butter, were also available at the complementary breakfast served at our hotel and I was tempted to violate the no-taking-food-from-the-breakfast-area rule and cram my bag full of them. If the bread at our hotel was that good, I can't imagine what the best bakeries of the region have to offer. The French, whom I've always considered the champions of all things bread, might have something to worry about from Austria. Clearly, more delicious research is called for.
[1] Not that the rest of Austrian cuisine wasn't uniformly excellent. I had a pork dish with spatzle in a creamy mushroom sauce at a Salzburg restaurant that I will crave for months to come. And that garlic soup at Ottoburg in Innsbruck! ↩
[2] I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize for the title of this post (the other option was "It was the wurst of times"). But count your blessings that you're not reading an article on the yummy fondue we had in Zurich entitled "You're damned if you fondue, and you're damned if you fondon't". (I know what you're thinking: "oh no, he fondidn't...") ↩
An outpost of Philly Slim's, a restaurant specializing in Philly cheesesteaks, recently opened up near our apartment. In the weeks since its opening, the place has been near-empty every time I've walked past it. Without proper intel (i.e. a recommendation from friends or perhaps New York magazine), no one in the neighborhood wants to make the first move; when people wander by to glance at the menu, they take its emptiness as a sign that the food's bad and head somewhere else for a meal. It's a real catch-22 situation.
Last week, we were in the mood for some serious comfort food, so we tried out Philly Slim's. And surprise of surprises, it was good. Really good. I tend to be disappointed by most steak sandwiches -- the meat is usually thick, tough, and looks like it's been boiled for weeks -- but Philly Slim's steak has a nice flavor and is sliced/chopped thin. The roll is nice & soft and doesn't overwhelm the rest of the sandwich. The rest is pretty straightforward...Cheez Whiz, BBQ sauce, mayo, pickles, bacon, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, and lettuce are among the toppings you can get on your sandwich. Add a Philadelphia-area soda, some onion rings, and a Tastykake for dessert, and you're golden.
Bottom line: if you're in the Union Square area and hungry, check out Philly Slim's on University between 12th and 13th Streets. Ignore the lack of line and head on in.
One of the first reviews Ruth Reichl wrote as the New York Times food critic was of Le Cirque, a fancy French restaurant in midtown Manhattan. In the now-famous piece, immortalied in her memoir, Garlic and Sapphires, Reichl compares the service she receives at the restaurant as a welcomed reviewer with that as an average Jane. From the review:
Over the course of five months I ate five meals at the restaurant; it was not until the fourth that the owner, Sirio Maccioni, figured out who I was. When I was discovered, the change was startling. Everything improved: the seating, the service, the size of the portions. We had already reached dessert, but our little plate of petit fours was whisked away to be replaced by a larger, more ostentatious one. An avalanche of sweets descended upon the table, and I was fascinated to note that the raspberries on the new desserts were three times the size of those on the old ones.
Thirteen years later, current food critic Frank Bruni reviews the newest incarnation of Le Cirque in today's Times and echoing Reichl's technique, finds that little has changed:
I also experienced Le Cirque's famously split personality, half dismissive and half pampering, depending on who you are. On my first visit, when a companion and I arrived before the two other members of our party, a host let us know we should wait in the bar area not by asking or telling us to go there but by gesturing silently in that direction with his head. Most of the seats were occupied, so we stood. Over the next 10 minutes, no one asked us if we wanted a drink or anything else.
After we were taken to our table, servers seemed to figure out who I was and offered to move us to prime real estate with better sightlines. (We declined.)
So on a subsequent visit I sent three friends in ahead of me. One sat at the bar for 15 minutes without getting a server's attention, and a bartender quarreled with the two others when they asked that the charges for their Champagne be transferred to the table. At a place as self-consciously posh as Le Cirque, such a request should be granted instantly.
But I was treated like royalty when I showed up, and on another night, when I dined with a filmmaker whom the staff also knew, soft-shell crabs, which weren't on the menu, appeared almost as soon as she mentioned an appetite for them. They were fantastic: crunchy, meaty, sweet.
I can't imagine wanting to go someplace like that when there's so many other places with food as good or better and where the service is friendly, helpful, and accommodating for everybody. I guess that's the side of New York I don't like.
Here it is, the awful truth. After sampling In-N-Out Burger twice this past weekend (a cheeseburger with raw onion and, 4 days later, a Double Double w/ no onions) and having had several Shack Burgers this year (my most recent one was a couple of weeks ago), an adequate comparison between the two can be made. The verdict?
The Shake Shack burger wins in a landslide. It's more flavorful, features a better balance of ingredients, and a yummier bun. On the french fries front, In-N-Out's fresh-cut fries get the nod.
Courtesy of Mena, something to keep in mind: a cheeseburger at In-N-Out is $1.85 while a similarly appointed Shack Burger is $4.38, almost 2.5 times as much. SS french fries are nearly twice the price of In-N-Out fries. The burger comparison is an unfair one because, despite its location and style, Shake Shack is a restaurant and In-N-Out is a fast food joint. That the burgers are even close enough to compare -- and make no mistake, I still love the In-N-Out burger -- says a great deal about In-N-Out.
I was fortunate enough to attend the Taste3 conference in Napa Valley, CA over the weekend. What a nice change from technology conferences. Instead of software demo CDs in the schwag bags, there were bottles of wine and chocolate and instead of BOF gatherings on podcasting, there were dinners with fine wine and yummy cheese. As you would expect, the folks in the hospitality industry are a lot more outgoing than the nerds; except for me, there was a distinct lack of people standing in corners looking down at their shoes.
For the next few days I'll be posting some thoughts and links from the conference; I hope they'll be as interesting as the conference was.
From a Guardian review of Heat, Bill Buford's new book on, in part, celebrity chef Mario Batali:
Batali would play Bob Marley songs on the sound system, knowing the New York Times restaurant critic was a fan. He would berate staff who failed to recognise celebrities, who must be served first and given special treatment. To make a humble fish soup called cioppino, he would rummage through bins and chopping boards, collecting left overs (tomato pulp, carrot tops, onion skins), then price the dish at $29 and tell the waiters to sell the hell out of it or be fired. Short ribs prepared in advance, wrapped so tightly in plastic wrap and foil that they wouldn't spurt sauce if stepped on, would keep in the walk-in fridge for up to a week.
Maybe that's why a recent trip to Babbo was not the top-shelf experience we expected.
At lunch today, I ordered the pizza of the day, a BLT pizza. When it arrived, it was completely missing the L and had green peppers on it instead (which was apparently how it was supposed to be). That got us joking about how the restaurant just tosses random ingredients in their dishes and we amused ourselves for (probably) far too long by coming up with different not-so-tasty combinations.
We ordered the apple crisp for dessert (me: "I love apple crisp") and digging in upon its arrival, we discovered that half of the apples were actually peaches. (WTF?) Then the waiter showed up with an iced tea instead of Jonah's espresso -- an actual mistake this time, they were for another table -- but the damage was done and I was spraying apple/peach crisp/cobbler all over the place from laughing so hard about our meal from the Random Cafe.
Earlier today I posted a link to Frank Bruni's new food blog over at the NY Times. At the same time, I added a comment to this post about how restaurant reservations work here in NYC. I went back to see if there was any further conversation and my comment had been deleted (or had otherwise disappeared). Not such a good start. I've resubmitted the comment...we'll see how long it lasts.
Church of the Customer takes a look at how a Northern California restaurant called Cyrus competes with The French Laundry in attracting local customers, particularly those from wineries with big expense accounts for entertaining clients:
1. Match your competitor's exceptional quality.
The food at both restaurants was cooked perfectly and beautifully presented. Both delivered flawless service. By matching the quality of its better-known competitor, Cyrus removes the primary barriers of opposition.
2. Allow your customers to customize.
The French Laundry offers three prix-fixe menus of nine courses each. Cyrus allows its customers to choose their number of courses and the dishes.
Local competition still matters. You usually think of restaurants like The French Laundry as competing on a national or international level. Over the years, Keller's flagship has made several short lists of the best restaurants in the world. But as this article demonstrates, having to compete for the same pool of local customers can drive competitors to achieve a high level of excellence, higher perhaps than they would have achieved without that competition, and that excellence could lead to wider recognition. Even companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon who compete on a global level and don't interact with their customers face-to-face still have to vie with each other for local resources, particularly employees.
eGullet recently interviewed author Michael Ruhlman and he had this to say about what he liked about working in a professional kitchen:
You can't lie in a kitchen -- that's what I like most about it. You're either ready or you're not, you're either clean or you're a mess. You're either good or you're bad. You can't lie. If you lie, it's obvious. If your food's not ready, then it's not ready. If you're in the weeds, its clear to everybody -- you can't say that you aren't. So I love that aspect of it. I love the immediacy of it, the vitality of it.
I've worked in a number of different places over the years and the ones I ended up liking the least were the places that allowed people (myself included) to hide. Some companies just have way too many people for the amount of available work. Other times, particular employees have a certain status within the organization that allows them to determine their own schedules and projects. Deadlines are often malleable, meaning that work can pushed off. Inexperienced or nontechnical managers might not have a clue how long a task should take a programmer...budgeting 2 weeks for a six-hour task that seems hard buys one a lot of blog-surfing time. Companies with coasting employees are everything a kitchen isn't; they just feel slow, wasteful, lifeless, and eventually they suck the life out of you too.
We had a couple of notable lunches in Saigon. The first was at Quan An Ngon. The owner of this establishment found the best street food vendors in Saigon, offered them a steady wage, and brought them all under one roof to form a restaurant[1]. When you arrive (and after waiting for 10 minutes or more at this busy place) and are shown to your table, you pass the various cooks preparing their street specialties. The waiter was super-quick in taking our order so we didn't get too good of a look at the menu, but we managed to have an excellent lunch.
A couple of days later, we checked out La Fenetre Soleil (the link is in Japanese, but the photos are good). As you probably know, France ruled Vietnam for about 100 years and the influence can be seen in several aspects of life there. La Fenetre Soleil feels quite French (circa 1940), mostly due to the architecture of the building and the deliberate styling of the proprietors. There are a few tables, but we sat in two ridiculously comfortable stuffed chairs and lunched on banh mi with cold drinks. A very cool place to chill out and have a small meal or a drink...comfortable enough to lounge for hours.
[1] A great idea, BTW. I wonder if such a thing could work in NYC?[2]
[2] Or some other city somewhere else. I live in NYC so I spend a lot of time (publicly and privately) wondering if things I notice elsewhere could work where I live.
For our first lunch in Saigon, we met up with Graham from Noodlepie, a Saigon-centric food blog. We cabbed it from our hotel to Quan Co Tam - Banh Canh Trang Bang to have one of his favorite Vietnamese dishes, banh trang phoi suong (literally "rice pancake exposed in the dew (at night)"). Here's the outlay:
It's a simple dish; just boiled pork wrapped in thin rice paper with an assortment of herbs, pickled onions & carrots, cucumber, and raw bean sprouts. As you can see from the photo (or the much better photos that Graham took on a previous trip), the plate of herbs that they give you is quite impressive and varied; one smelled like lemon, another like fish. All wrapped up and dipped in fish sauce, it's delicious and simple.
Afterwards we headed to the market, Graham for dinner fixings and us for some browsing around. Before we parted, he treated us to a sugarcane & lemon drink (mia da) and a pennywort smoothie (not as bad as I'd thought for something that tasted like salad through a straw). Thanks for the nice lunch, Graham!
When you only know a few words of a language, it's easy to get confused when speaking. Somehow the phrase "tod mon pla" is one of the few Thai phrases that has stuck fast in my head, so much so that I'm afraid I'll get flustered when somebody greets me with "sa-wat dee kha" that I will answer with "tod mon pla":
Them: "Hello!"
Me: "Fish cakes."
Thai also sounds a bit like Klingon to me; it's all the short one-syllable letter combinations strung together. Any day now, instead of "khawp khun khrap" (which means "thank you"), I'm going to reply with qapla' (roughly pronounced "kah-pla", it's the Klingon word for "success" or "good luck"[1]).
Meanwhile, my fast and loose eating on the streets of Bangkok has finally caught up with me as I've been spending a little more time in the bathroom than usual for the past day. I flew too close to the sun on bags of soda, my friends. It's not bad, but I think I'll lay off getting ice from places on the street.
[1] qapla' is the only Klingon word that I know, gleaned from hours of watching ST:TNG on TV in high school and college. I'm a big dork, but not the kind that's anything approaching fluent in Klingon.
Just got back from dinner at Anna's Cafe (118 Soi Sala Daeng). I had the grilled chicken with garlic and pepper and Meg got tom kah gung (the coconut and galangal soup that we learned how to make in our cooking class, except with shrimp instead of chicken). The reviewers at Fodor's didn't like Anna's, but we thought it was pretty good. Anna's also seems to be the place in Bangkok to go for your birthday...we heard Happy Birthday sung five different times while we were there.
We stopped for lunch today at Tonpo, which is right on the river near a water taxi stop. The heat is brutal here, especially in the middle of the day, so the breeze from the river was quite refreshing. One of the dishes we ordered was fried chicken wrapped in pandanus leaves:
The fried chicken was excellent, some of the best I've had (I think we're venturing out tonight to get more at this place Meg heard about). But do you see that sauce next to the chicken? It tasted exactly like Bazooka bubble gum, swear to god. Fried chicken and gum, a match made in heaven.
We've been eating a lot off the street[1] here in Bangkok. On our morning and afternoon walks to and from the Skytrain[2], there are one-person food carts each serving up a particular little snack for 5-10 baht[3] apiece. It's a good grazing situation; lunch yesterday lasted about five hours[4] and consisted of some orange juice, a thai iced coffee, pork balls on a stick, grilled chicken on a stick, some sort of sweet coconut custard thing, chrysanthemum juice, some noodles that very much tasted like ramen (with pork), more sweet coconut custard things, some peanut crepes...
[1.5 hour interlude for a foot and thai massage[5] that I quite enjoyed and Meg quite didn't]
...fried dough balls, pork and pineapple on a stick, a bag of orange soda, pork crepes with tiny egg[6], and dessert tacos. Altogether it was maybe US$6 for the two of us (and my dad ate some too).[7]
I love eating this way and it was something that was sorely missing in HK.
[1] From street vendors, not literally off the street.
[2] Auto traffic is awful here...traffic jams everywhere. So we've been using the Metro (subway), Skytrain (the elevated train), and the river taxis to get around. They get us to most places we need to go. There are motorcycle taxis available, but we'd rather not split up on the journey. Two/three-person motorcycle-powered rickshaws called tuk tuks are also available, but we've heard conflicting reports of the usefulness/sketchiness that we've opted out of them altogether.
[3] It's about 40 baht to a US dollar. A meal at a small restaurant with tables on the street cost us around US$5 for the two of us, including gigantic beer.
[4] We started out at Aw Kaw Taw market, walked over to Chatuchak market, and then to the area around Sala Daeng.
[5] The massage was around US$7 per person. I want one every day.
[6] Onto each crepe, the cook cracked a tiny egg. He made up about 10 for the woman ahead of us and cracked 10 tiny eggs, one for each crepe.
[7] To those who say they can't afford to travel, I say to you: stop making excuses. If you've got the income and leisure time to be spending time reading this blog, are sufficiently motivated, and make it a priority in your life[8], you can certainly afford it. The most costly item is the plane ticket, but if you watch for deals and are flexible in where you want to visit (maybe you go to Brazil instead of Thailand), you can get over here for less than you might think. And once you're here, you can get by on $20 a day, including lodging. Travel is cheaper here as well, buses and trains are always an option, and there are several low-cost airlines that serve the region. It requires a little effort and intrepidity, but low-cost international travel can be done.
[8] This is the big sticking point for most people, I think. If you choose to have a family or focus on your career or pursue a costly photography hobby, you might not have the money or flexibility to travel this way. But that's a choice you've made (on some level)...and I would argue that if you're 30 years old, you can arrange to make an overseas trip once every 3-5 years, and that's about 7-8 trips by the time you're 60.
Ok, one last wrap-up post about Hong Kong and then we're focusing on the matter at hand in Bangkok (short summary: having a great time so far here). So, three things I really liked about/in Hong Kong and then some miscellaneous stuff.
1. Octopus cards. I really can't say enough about how cool these cards are. Wikipedia provides a quickie definition: "The Octopus card is a rechargeable contactless stored value smart card used for electronic payment in online or offline systems in Hong Kong." It's a pay-as-you go stored value card...you put $100 bucks on it and "recharge" the card when it's empty (or when it's even more than empty...as long as your balance is positive when you use it, you can go into a HK$35 deficit, which you pay when you recharge the card). You can use it on pratically any public transportation in the city: buses, trains, MTR, trams, ferries, etc. It works with vending machines, at 7-Eleven, McDonald's, Starbucks, and the supermarket. You don't need to take it out of your wallet or purse to use it, just hold it near the sensor. Your card is not tied to your identity...there's no PIN, you can pay cash, they don't need to know your credit card number, SS#, or anything like that. They even make watches and mobile phones that have Octopus built it, so your phone (or watch) becomes your wallet. Mayor Bloomberg, if you're listening, NYC needs this.
2. The on-train maps for the MTR. Here's a (sort of blurry) photo (taken with my cameraphone):
The current stop blinks red -- in this case, Tsim Sha Tsui (blinking not shown, obviously) -- with the subsequent stops lit in red. If the next stop connects to another line, that line blinks as well. A small green arrow indicates which direction you're traveling and there's an indictor (not shown) which lights up either "exit this side" or "exit other side" depending which way the doors are going to open. Great design.
3. Muji! We located one in Langham Place (an uber-story mall) in Mong Kok (for reference, the store in Silvercord in TST listed on their site has closed). Muji is kind of hard to describe if you've never been to one of their stores before (and if you live in the US, you probably haven't because they're aren't any, aside from a small outpost in the MoMA Store). Adam (see previous link) roughly translates the name as "No Brand, Good Product", so you can see why I like it so much. They sell a wide variety of products (take a look at their Japanese-only online store for an idea of what they carry); at the Monk Kok store, they had snacks & drinks, some furniture (made out of sturdy cardboard), their signature pens and notebooks (a display of the former was completely surrounded by a moat of teenaged girls, so much so that I didn't get a chance to test any of the super-thin pens), some clothes (including some great pants that they didn't have in anything approaching my size), dishes, cosmetics, bath products, and containers of all shapes, sizes, and uses. I wanted one of everything, but settled for a couple of shirts (with absolutely no logos or markings, inside or out, to indictate that they are Muji products).
m1. Big Buddha, worth the trip. It'll better when the tram from Tung Chung and back is built, although then you'll miss the boat ride (fun) and the bus ride (harrowing at times).
m2. The Peak Tram. Touristy, but also worth the trip. The weird/ugly anvil-shaped building at the top is currently under construction, so the views will be much better when its finished. Go at night for the best view.
m3. The view from the waterfront in Kowloon of the Hong Kong skyline at night is one of the best in the world.
m4. Speaking of, Hong Kong is a night-time city. All the buildings are lit up, there's a nightly light show at 8pm (think Laser Floyd without the music), and buildings that appear monolithic in the daytime transform at night, either by disappearing into the darkness while leaving a graceful trace of their outline or acting as huge screens for projected light shows. Reminded me of Vegas in this respect.
m5. We had tea in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel (go for the view, it's incredible) and the live band played the theme song from The Lord of the Rings. I tried to get a recording of it with my phone (iPod was back in our hotel room), but it didn't turn out so well. Very weird; we were cracking up and expecting the theme from Superman or even 3's Company to follow.
m6. Oh, I'm sure there's more, so I'll add it here as I think of stuff.
Meg and I took a Thai cooking class today at Baipai Cooking School on the recommendation of my friend Darby (thx, Darb!). Since cooking is her thing, Meg's got the full write-up with photos. They pick you up at your hotel, you spend 4 hours cooking (part instruction, part hands-on) in a small outdoor kitchen (there were about 8-10 other people in the class) tasting as you go, you eat the meal you cook, and then they drop you back at your hotel. All for around US$35 per person. We made pad thai, tom kha gai (chicken & galangal in coconut milk soup), fish cakes, and tab tim grobb (water chestnut in coconut milk). Very fun and highly recommended.
Quick note to say that we've arrived in Bangkok, which I think is going to be more our speed somehow. Not that Hong Kong wasn't nice, but something about here feels better. We had a really chatty taxi driver on the way in (wish I'd gotten a photo or recorded some of the conversation, but I was too busy trying to keep up with his wall of words)...we learned a bit of the Thai language, that Pepsi is more popular than Coke here, and not to trust doormen. "Never go eat seafood where the doorman tell you to go eat seafood. Is too expensive. He get a commission. Go Chinatown, find your own." And then when we drove up to the hotel, he spotted the doorman and his eyes narrowed..."there he is, the doorman," and gave us a look of warning.
After checking in and showering, we met up with my dad, who took us for a typical Thai meal in a small, unassuming restaurant. Green mango salad, pork with spring vegetables, and a coconut milk soup with shrimp and mushrooms (it came in what looked like a bundt cake pan, with a small flame in the middle to keep the soup warm). Then we walked around a bit, orienting ourselves to the city. All the street food looked super good, and lots of bargains to be had at the night market (including about 15 different kinds of "pussy" listed on a card I had shoved in front of me on Patpong street). More to follow.
The day before yesterday, we went for dim sum for lunch again...can't get enough of those meat-stuffed buns and pastries. This time, we cleverly arranged to bring some locals along so we'd have a little better idea what was going on food-wise. Or rather, they cleverly arranged to meet up with us. A couple of days into the trip, we received an email from a couple of HK high school students, Denise and Christine. They just happened to be working on an article about blogging for a school magazine that gets published once a year, and wrote to see if they could interview us. We agreed -- on the condition that we treat them to dim sum -- and off we went on Saturday to the Chao Inn on Peking Road in TST.
We ordered a variety of dim sum, including a Chaozhou specialty dish (made of beef...it looked a little like headcheese), which after an initial taste by everyone at the table, was left for the wait staff to collect. We also had some shrimp dumplings, BBQ pork buns, sticky rice (and beef?) wrapped in lotus leaf, spring rolls, and some rice noodle dish I'm forgetting the exact ingredients of. We chatted about food, blogging, teen life in Hong Kong, movies, etc. They attend an English-speaking school, so their English was quite good and the conversation flowed easily. A favorite conversational tidbit was that when you buy fake electronics in Hong Kong, they ask you which logo you want on it (Sony, Panasonic, NEC, etc.) and then affix the proper sticker. Awesome.
Thanks for the nice lunch, girls. I hope you got what you needed for your interview.
Finally procured some dim sum here in HK (with more to come tomorrow). On a recommendation from Arthur, we hit Spring Moon in the Peninsula Hotel. After getting some oolong tea that smelled like apricots (which we later learned was also organic), we ordered the following:
From right to left are the xiao long bao with scallop (soup dumplings with scallop), the steamed green chive dumpling with minced shrimp, and rice noodle roll with chicken and spinach. Not pictured is the baked BBQ pork puff (the pastry had impossibly little flaky layers) that we started with.
And for dessert, Meg had the mango pudding and I went for the deep fried egg yolk buns. Arthur hyped up the mango pudding:
People that know me have heard me hype this up forever: there is a good chance that this place has the best mango pudding in the world. No exaggeration. You can also get the mango pudding in the lobby lounge, or get it room service if you're staying at the hotel. I remember the first time I tried it, I was staying there, and we got mango pudding like every day. It's just so damn good, I can't even describe it. The texture is moist, not too rubbery, perfect mango flavor... it's just awesome. If you're EVER in Hong Kong, you must at least go to the Peninsula lobby and try this out. You won't be dissappointed.
And according to Meg (who admittedly might not have extensive mango pudding experience), he's not wrong. Now, being a Minnesota State Fair veteran, deep fried is something I do know a lot about, and those egg yolk buns (when you cut into them with your fork, they look like eggs; white bread surrounds a deep yellow bread center) were fantastic...somehow light and rich at the same time.
BTW, if you're heading to Hong Kong (and elsewhere in Asia) in the future, you should check out last week's Asia thread. Lots of great suggestions in there; thanks everyone.
Went to dinner at Xiao Nan Guo last night, a Shanghaiese restaurant in Central (level 3 in the Man Yee building). Meg had a little trouble with her entree (a hairy crab), but Grandma's BBQ pork belly (or something like that...I should have written it down) that I ordered was pretty good.
We also had an order of "chef's special steamed pork dumplings", which we guessed (correctly!) were soup dumplings. They looked quite similar to ones we've had in NYC (@ New Green Bo, Grand Sichuan International, and Joe's Shanghai), but the broth inside was a lot lighter and the dumplings were more delicate (meaning that they tended to break before we could get them into our spoons and slurp the yummy juice). Very tasty...I could get used to the lighter soup, but I still prefer the NYC ones. I think we're off to find some dim sum today, so we'll see if we can drum up more soup dumplings.
(Also, after lunch yesterday, we picked up some pastries on the way back to the hotel from the MTR. I had some maple syrup bread and Meg had a milk French toast bun. I've found the bread here in Hong Kong to be great, something I didn't expect before we got here.)
Soon after we arrived, we discovered that Alain Ducasse -- fresh off his 3 star grade in the NYC Michelin Guide -- has a place in Kowloon quite close to where we are staying called Spoon. Thinking of splurging a bit on dinner, we went to check out the menu (fish choices shown below):
Turns out that Spoon is somewhat like Craft in NYC...you mix and match entrees with different sauces and sides. Here's how they describe Spoon:
The menu is not organized in a usual progression of first course, main course, cheese and dessert, but reflects a concept that allows each guest to tailor make his/her own meal. Each section is divided into three columns, allowing guests to mix and match their own main course, sauce and accompaniments. Ducasse says "everything is proposed and nothing is imposed". With the idea of having something for everyone, the menu includes Asian, Western and vegetarian dishes.
One of things I like about eating out is placing myself in the hands of a chef who knows what he's doing. I'm not sure my curried yams with truffled bacon in Hollandaise sauce would compare favorably with whatever a chef picked by Alain Ducasse would prepare for me to eat. As interesting as it looks, we may have to skip it and check out Felix at the Peninsula instead...you can take a whiz while looking out at the city.
Although the sandwich was named so after an 18th century British Earl, its invention dates back to a rabbi who lived in the first century B.C.. In my short history, I've eaten more than my fair share of sandwiches and while I can't consider myself a true connoisseur, the humble sandwich is one of my favorite things to eat and the ultimate in comfort foods.
The keys to a good sandwich are the three Bs: bread, balance, and...ok, there's only two Bs, but they're important. Aside from the main ingredient (turkey, tuna, chicken salad, etc.), the bread has the power to make or break a sandwich. The first thing you taste when you take a bite is the bread, so it had better be good and it had better be fresh.
Balance, or how the various parts come together to make a whole sandwich experience, is even more critical than the bread. Too much meat and the sandwich tastes only of meat. (The "famous" delis in NYC are big offenders here...the amount of meat in their sandwiches is way too much. These are sandwiches for showing off, not consumption.) Too much mustard and you overwhelm that beautiful pastrami. The mighty sandwich should not be a lowly conduit for your mustard addiction; why not just eat it straight from the jar? If you've got a dry bread, add a slice of tomato, a little extra mayo, or save it for tuna or egg salad. If you've got a lot of bread (a Kaiser or sub roll, for example), you'll probably need more of everything else to balance it out. Make sure the ingredients are distributed evenly throughout the sandwich. You should get a bit of everything in each bite...it's a BLT, not just an L on toast. If the sandwich maker is doing his job right, you should be able to taste most of the ingredients separately and together at the same time.
Here are a few sandwiches I've enjoyed over the years. I haven't included any of the ones that I regularly make for myself because they're pretty boring, although IMO, they're right up there with any of these.
In college, when my friends and I got sick of eating on campus (and had the money to do so), we'd venture across the street to Zio Johno's, a little Italian place with good, cheap food. At first I just got the spaghetti or lasagna, but one time I tried the Italian sub they offered and I was hooked. The key was the super-sweet sub roll; my measely $3 was enough for both a savory dinner and sweet dessert at the same time. I've never found anywhere else that uses bread that sweet.
I've lived in NYC for three years now, but I haven't run across a steak sandwich that rivals the one I used to get on my lunch break at The Brothers' Deli in Minneapolis. Fried steak, fried onions, and cheddar cheese on a Kaiser roll with a side order of the best potato salad I've ever had[1].
Surdyk's (say "Sir Dicks") is an institution in Northeast Minneapolis (say "Nordeast"), the finest liquor store and cheese shop around. They also had good croissants (say "Qua Sawn" or "Cross Aunts") on which they put fresh ham, Swiss cheese, lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise. Mmm.
There's nothing I like more than a good BLT, and Specialty's in San Francisco has one of the best I've had. Secret ingredient: pickles. Also, they didn't toast the bread, which I usually frown upon, but it worked well anyway.
As for New York, I don't live close to any good delis, but when I worked in Midtown, I used to zip over to the food court below Grand Central and hit Mendy's. Their chicken salad is top-notch; the chicken is good quality and it isn't overwhelmed by the mayonnaise. I'm usually not such a fan of rye bread, but their rye (it's a light rye) is fantastic and goes very well with the chicken salad. The salami is good too. I usually have half a sandwich with a cup of their chicken noodle.
Do you have a favorite sandwich? Know of any good NYC sandwich spots I should check out?
[1] Although Meg has been making this warm garlic potato salad lately that is a serious contender for the top spot.
I had this idea the other day that instead of having to open my laptop or turn on the TV to check the weather report, my toaster could burn that information onto my breakfast toast as a passive information delivery mechanism. I knew that people had wired toasters to print images on them, but I didn't remember that someone had done the weather thing already. That got me thinking about what other information a toaster could print on bread. A graph of the previous day's DJIA activity? Photo of your kids? The Red Sox score from last night?
There are constraints, of course. Bread is not exactly a high resolution medium. A course wheat bread would be difficult to print on while a dense rye might give you a couple dozen ppi to work with. But then you run into a contrast problem...toasted rye bread isn't much darker than untoasted rye bread. Now, if you were to use Pop Tarts, they're a little more high-res, a finer grained paper. You might even be able to print a few lines of text if the heating elements were precise enough...your stocks, meeting schedule for the day, top news stories, shopping list, the 5-day forecast, or a serial short story that you read over a few breakfasts (you could call them Breakfast Serials™!!). Or maybe toasters will be free in the future, with the toaster companies making their money from advertising printed on your morning toast, not unlike the free newspapers they hand out in the NYC subways.
Though what would be even better is wifi-enabled Alpha Bits. Just connect the box to your local network, pour yourself some cereal, and view the five most recent headlines from your RSS reader floating in your milk. Then right click your bowl to open up links on the screen in your refrigerator. That and a rocket-powered hoverbike, please.
Here's a sampling of the rest of the AIGA Design Conference, stuff that I haven't covered yet and didn't belong in a post of it's own:
- Juan Enriquez gave what was probably my favorite talk about what's going on in the world of genetics right now. I've heard him give a variation of this talk before (at PopTech, I think). He started off talking about coding systems and how when they get more efficient (in the way that the Romance languages are more efficient than Chinese languages), the more powerful they become in human hands. Binary is very powerful because you can encode text, images, video, etc. using just two symbols, 1 and 0. Segue to DNA, a four symbol language to make living organisms...obviously quite powerful in human hands.
- Enriquez: All life is imperfectly transmitted code. That's what evolution is, and without the imperfections, there would be no life. The little differences over long periods of time are what's important.
- Enriquez again: The mosquito is a flying hypodermic needle. That's how it delivers malaria to humans. We could use that same capability for vaccinating cows against disease.
- Along with his list of 20 courses he didn't take in design school, Michael Bierut offered some advice to young designers:
1. Design is the easy part.
2. Learn from your clients, bosses, collaborators, and colleagues.
3. Content is king.
4. Read. Read. Read.
5. Think first, then design.
6. Never forget how lucky you are. Enjoy yourself.
- Nicholas Negroponte: If programmers got paid to remove code from sofware instead of writing new code, software would be a whole lot better.
- Negroponte also shared a story about outfitting the kids in a school in Cambodia with laptops; the kids' first English word was "Google", and from what Negroponte said, that was followed closely by "Skype". He also said the children's parents loved the laptops because at night, it was the brightest light in the house.
- Christi recorded Milton Glaser's mother's spaghetti recipe. "Cook until basically all of the water is evaporated. Mix in bottle of ketchup; HEINZ ketchup."
- Ben Karlin and Paula Scher on the challenges of making America, The Book: Books are more daunting than doing TV because print allows for a much greater density of jokes. In trying to shoot the cover image, they found that bald eagles cannot be used live for marketing or advertising purposes. The solution? A golden eagle and Photoshop. And for a spread depicting all the Supreme Court Justices in the buff, they struggled -- even with the Web -- to find nude photos of older people until they found a Vermont nudist colony willing to send them photos because they were big fans of The Daily Show.
- Bill Strickland blew the doors off the conference with his account of the work he's doing in "curing cancer" -- his term for revitalizing violent and crime-ridden neighborhoods -- in Pittsburgh. I can't do justice to his talk, so two short anecdotes. Strickland said he realized that "poor people never have a nice day" so when he built his buildings in these poor black neighbohoods, he put nice fountains out front so that people coming into the building know that they're entering a space where it's possible to have a good day. Another time, a bigwig of some sort was visiting the center and asked Strickland about the flowers he saw everywhere. Flowers in the hood? How'd these get here? Strickland told him "you don't need a task force or study group to buy flowers" and that he'd just got in his car, bought some flowers, brought them back, and set them around the place. His point in all this was creating a place where people feel less dissimilar to each other...black, white, rich, poor, everybody has a right to flowers and an education and to be treated with respect and to have a nice day. You start treating people like that, and surprise!, they thrive. Strickland's inner city programs have produced Fulbright Scholars, Pulitzer Prize winners, and tons of college graduates.
- I caught 30 minutes of David Peters' presentation of Typecast: The Art of the Typographic Film Title and realized I should have gotten there in time to see the whole thing. I could sit and watch cool movie titles all day long. Among the titles he showed were Bullit, Panic Room, Dr. Strangelove, Barbarella, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Superman. The title sequence for Napoleon Dynamite (which was discussed on Design Observer last year) was shown later in the main hall.
- At the closing party at the Museum of Science, we checked out the cool Mathematica exhibit that was designed by Charles and Ray Eames, two designers who were also pretty big science/math nerds.
- And some final thoughts from others at the conference. Peter Merholz says that "form-makers", which make up the vast majority of the AIGA audience, "are being passed by those who are attempting to use design to serve more strategic ends". (That's an interesting thought...) A pair of reviews from Speak Up: Bryony was a bit disappointed with the opening Design Gala but left, like everyone else, in love with emcee John Hockenberry while Armin noted that the preservation of digital files is a big concern for museums in building a collection of graphic design pieces...in 35 years, how are you going load that Quark file or run that Flash movie?
For more of what people are saying about the conference, check out IceRocket. There's a bunch of photos on Flickr as well.
If you've got a bag of Orville Redenbacher's Butter microwave popcorn on hand but no microwave, there's no need to panic. Just tear open the bag and pour the kernels into a large pot. Put over medium heat. The kernels will be in a big clump of congealed butter-like substance...break them apart with a wooden spoon as the pot heats up and the "butter" starts to melt.
When the "butter" is melted, stir the kernels around with the spoon so they don't burn. At this point, you may want to don some protective eyewear so that when the first kernels pop, you don't get hot butter-like liquid in your eye; I just put on my sunglasses. When the first kernels pop, cover the pot and shake it across the burner so the kernels don't burn. Stop periodically to listen for pops and to exclaim, "I can't believe this is actually working!" When popping stops, quickly remove from the heat, and get it out of that hot pot into a bowl. Eat. As good as microwaved.
I've recently begun using PubSub to follow a few topics, people mostly. One of my keyword subscriptions is for "thomas keller", the noted chef. A new item comes across the wire every day or so, usually from someone who is trying out a recipe from Keller's Bouchon cookbook.
Then one day I noticed an item about Keller playing in a poker tournament. "Hmmm," I thought, "I didn't know he played poker. Must be participating in one of those celebrity tournaments that are all over the cable television." Over the next few weeks, I discovered that Keller evidently played in a lot of celebrity poker tournaments. "Must be really into poker as a hobby," I thought, not really reading any particular item very closely.
Then it got ridiculous...there was an item every few days about Keller's poker playing exploits. How on earth does this guy have time to run his restaurants when he's playing all this poker? Has this famed perfectionist workaholic chef found a new obsession? Does Thomas Keller have a gambling problem?
And then the obvious truth hit me...wrong Thomas Keller, stupid. Thomas "Thunder" Keller, aged 24, is the youngest person to ever win a World Series of Poker event. Perhaps I can take consolation in that somewhere out there, there's a young poker fan as confused as I was about his hero "Thunder" shirking his card-playing responsibilities to write a cookbook about French bistro cuisine.
When you're out to eat with friends and family, it can be challenging to decide what to order off the menu. There are often too many choices on the menu, everything sounds good, nothing sounds good, you're unfamiliar with a particular type of cuisine, you'd like have what that woman over there is having but you don't know what that is, etc. etc.
Luckily, a group of authors has recently released a series of pop science books focused on solving this particular problem. Here are some lessons on ordering food from those books:
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Glance quickly at the menu and order whatever catches your eye first. Spend no more than 2-3 seconds deciding or the quality of your choice (and your meal) will decline.
Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
The key to ordering a good meal in a restaurant is understanding the economic incentives involved. Ask the server what they recommend and order something else...they are probably trying to get you to order something with a high profit margin or a dish that the restaurant needs to get rid of before the chicken goes bad or something. Never order the second least expensive bottle of wine; it's typically the one with the highest mark-up on the list (i.e. the worst deal).
The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
Take the menu and rip it into 4 or 5 pieces. Order from only one of the pieces, ignoring the choices on the rest of the menu. You will be happier with your meal.
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
Poll the other patrons at the restaurant about what they're having and order the most popular choices for yourself.
Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson
Order anything made with lots of butter, sugar, etc. Avoid salad or anything organic. A meal of all desserts may be appropriate. Or see if you can get the chef to make you a special dish like foie gras and bacon covered with butterscotch and hot fudge. Ideally, you will have brought a Super Sized McDonald's Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese Meal into the restaurant with you. Smoke and drink liberally.
Progress on learning to cook like a proper human being has been slow because I've been so busy the past month or so. But baby steps are better than no steps at all and in the past weeks, I've tackled cheeseburgers and pancakes. (Ok, you can stop snickering...I said *baby steps*!)
The first time I tried frying up a burger, I filled my apartment with the thick smell of burning cow flesh. Ok, medium heat then. After that initial misstep, I got it down. Burger goes in the pan, flip it once or twice, slap on a piece of cheese, and stick it on a bun with lettuce, sliced raw onion, thinly sliced tomato (there can be no going back to thickly sliced tomatoes now that I've done thin), mayo, and ketchup. I've eaten better burgers, but I've never had one that was more satisfying than one I've cooked myself. I can't wait until summer rolls around...I'm going to get a little grill and have some friends round for a BBQ** in the backyard.
The pancakes, oh, the pancakes were way yummier, fluffier, and moister*** than I would have ever expected from a novice cook working without a measuring cup on a halved recipe. I'm a fucking pancake-making natural!
** Hello to my readership south of the Mason-Dixon. When you grow up in Wisconsin, BBQ (or barbeque) means any meal cooked on a grill, regardless of the presence of slow-cooking, smoked meat, or some kind of sauce. Apologies to you and your delicious cuisine for my unfortunate regional vernacular.
*** Oh, it's a word alright.
After ice skating with friends in Central Park the other day, we hit the Burger Joint in Le Parker Meridien hotel for some much needed sustenance. This is one of those classic New York juxtapositions, a burgers-only greasy spoon (dinner: $8) in a midtown four-star hotel (rooms start at $300/night)...kinda like discovering an In-N-Out Burger in a Four Seasons hotel. Duck behind the curtain in the lobby and you'll find good burgers, beer (Sam Adams only), and an eclectic music mix (Bobby McFerrin, Edwin Starr's War, and some opera).
After we ate, JCN inquired at the counter how such an odd arrangement came to be. A hip bar previously occupied the space, but the bartender left and took a bunch of his clientele with him. The space lay fallow for a time while they figured out what to do with it, but renovating the space and building up a new clientele was too daunting for them. Someone had the idea of putting a burger place in there, so they put walls on the space and gave it a try. Judging by the full house in there and the terrific lines at lunchtime on weekdays, it's succeeded pretty well.
New Yorkers, there's still lots of time to take advantage of Restaurant Week:
Enjoy special three-course, prix fixe menus at the city's best restaurants. The restaurants listed below offer $20.12 lunches and/or $35.00 dinners during Restaurant Week. Duration: Jan. 24 - 28 and Jan. 31 - Feb. 4, 2005; Excludes Saturday, Jan. 29 and Sunday, Jan. 30
I can personally vouch for lunch at 11 Madison Park (three full courses with five possible choices for each course and they gave me so much dessert) and have also dined favorably in the past at Artisanal, Blue Smoke, Craft, and Gramercy Tavern. The "lunch only" places are probably the best deals...$20.12 for so much good food, it feels like you're stealing from them.
Dan Barber has a great op-ed in the NY Times today about the benefits of natually-grown food (especially when compared to ridiculous fad diets like Atkins):
A serving of broccoli is naturally rich in vitamins A and B, and has more vitamin C than citrus fruit. But raised in an industrial farm monoculture, shipped over a long distance and stored before and after being delivered to your supermarket, it loses up to 80 percent of its vitamin C and 95 percent of its calcium, iron and potassium. Fruits and vegetables grown organically, however, have higher levels of antioxidants. That's largely because a plant's natural defense system produces phenolic compounds, chemicals that act as a plant's defense against pests and bugs. These compounds are beneficial to our health, too. When plants are grown with herbicides and pesticides, they slow down their production of these compounds.
Broccoli is only one example...turkeys, chickens, beef, eggs, carrots, milk, beets, etc. are all made less nutritious and delicious by current methods of mass production. We're painting ourselves into a corner here. Soon even the non-processed food we eat will be almost entirely virtual. Our flavorless, nutrient-free broccoli will be artificially flavored, artificially colored, and supplemented with multivitamins (Centrum-brand broccoli?) and result in meals that are artificially satisfying. (via tmn)
Since two Fridays ago, I have been unable to sleep past 7:30 in the morning, no matter what time I go to sleep or what time I am required to get up. In the months prior to that, I can count on one hand the number of times I awoke before my alarm at 7:45. I have no idea what's causing this.
Finally got the chance to check out Daisy May's BBQ with a friend last night. We wandered over to the restaurant, but I would recommend getting delivery instead (there are no tables, just a small counter), which according to to CitySearch, is free anywhere in the city. I had a beef brisket sandwich with pickles and onions (yummy!) while Nichol had a whole, like, 2 quarts of creamed spinach which she completely finished so it must have been good.
While I was waiting outside Daisy May's for my companion to arrive, a horse-drawn carriage sped by on 11th Ave. His horse at a full trot, the driver loudly sang the chorus to "Zombie" by the Cranberries:
In your head, in your head,
Zombie, zombie, zombie,
Hey, hey, hey. What's in your head,
In your head,
Zombie, zombie, zombie?
Hey, hey, hey, hey, oh, dou, dou, dou, dou, dou...
It's been in my head (in my head, zombie...) ever since.
Earlier in the evening, I saw the largest blue screen of death ever near Times Square. I tried not to take it as a sign of something.
Some people spend their money on cars, houses, tobacco, music, alcohol, shoes, clothes, electronic gadgets, or collectables. After taking care of my rent and savings account, I spend my money on very few things, one of which is food. Specifically, eating for experience. I developed this habit while living in San Francisco -- one of the best cities in the world for food -- and have continued it here in NYC, also, as it happens, one of the best cities in the world for food.
Eating for experience doesn't necessarily require vast sums of money. I probably spend less on average per month than the typical twenty-something does on booze or clothes. I haven't eaten at all of these cheap places in NYC, but I've been to more than a few of them and have had some very good experiences. Many professional food critics will tell you that their favorite spots to eat, places they wouldn't dare to review or write about, aren't particularly expensive. The soup dumplings at New Green Bo are 8 for ~$3 and I'd choose them over a $35 filet mignon most days of the week.
But every once in awhile, when you need to celebrate an occasion and have your tiny mind blown in the process, you get yourself a reservation at the type of place that requires reservations and perhaps a jacket and tie. For my birthday (as well as another special occasion I am quasi-legally bound not to reveal), Meg took me to Daniel, one of only five NY Times four-star restaurants in New York.
The vocabulary of a physics major can't do justice to the meal we had at Daniel, so I'm not even going to try. The dining room, the service, the food...all great/excellent/fantastic or whatever superlative you want to supply. Two things stood out:
- The -- and I'm quoting from the menu here -- Duo of Cedar River Farm Beef: Braised Short Ribs in Red Wine with Scallion-Mashed Potatoes, Seared Dry-Aged Rib Eye with Watercress, Porcini, and Young Carrots. The short ribs were excellent and I don't remember what I thought of any of the accompaniments, but the rib eye was a revelation. It literally floored me. Ok, not literally, but I would have been knocked to the actual floor if that kind of thing was acceptable behavior at Daniel. The first bite startled me it was so good. Beef, even really good beef, tastes like beef, but this was on some other level of flavor...it tasted like magic. The remaining few bites were as perplexing as the first as I struggled to comprehend how ordinary meat could taste like that. Best dish I've ever had in my life, ever. Ever!
- When the maitre 'd comes up to your table in the middle of the meal and inquires if you're there for a special occasion "or something", he's basically asking, "what the hell are you young people doing here?" in the really polite way of someone who has a lot of practice asking indirect questions. Because if there was a sore thumb sticking out in the restaurant that night, it was us. Young, not particularly fashionable (me only...Meg looked quite fine in her new dress), not rich, not there for the scene or to be seen, and genuinely interested in the meal rather than just eating on an expense account. I told him it was my birthday. Still trying to figure out precisely why we were there without asking outright, he tried the obvious follow-up question: "are you a chef?" I replied that I wasn't but that Meg worked in the kitchen of a restaurant.
From there, it was easy. When Meg starts talking about something she's enthusiastic about, the other participants in the conversation can't help but be engaged. Soon they were talking about garde manger, covers, and who knows what else. A tour of the kitchen was offered and accepted. After we paid our check, he showed us all around the huge kitchen, if that's even what you can call three stories of food prep area. Really nice guy and generous with his time...he spent 20 minutes showing us around when I'm sure, as the maitre d' of the whole fricking place, that he had a much better class of flesh to press about the dining room. He even gave Meg a card for the women in charge of staffing and suggested she come in to do a stage in the kitchen.
Right before we left (5+ hours after we'd arrived at the restaurant), we got to watch Daniel Boulud direct plate traffic and then chatted with him for a few moments. I tried to relate to him my religious experience with the rib eye, but I'm sure I didn't do it justice. What a wonderful experience all the way around.
Related:
- A visit to the French Laundry
- Rosecrans enjoys a night at Chez Daniel
Two years ago, Calvin Trillin wrote an article for the New Yorker about Shopsin's, an eccentric eatery in the West Village with about 9 billion menu items:
What does happen occasionally is that Kenny gets an idea for a dish and writes on the specials board -- yes, there is a specials board -- something like Indomalekian Sunrise Stew. (Kenny and his oldest son, Charlie, invented the country of Indomalekia along with its culinary traditions.) A couple of weeks later, someone finally orders Indomalekian Sunrise Stew and Kenny can't remember what he had in mind when he thought it up. Fortunately, the customer doesn't know, either, so Kenny just invents it again on the spot.
Shopsin's has moved to another Village location since the article came out, but they've still got that big old menu. If you dare, feast your eyes on a tour de force of outsider information design, all 11 pages of the Shopsin's General Store menu (PDF, 188K).
