Washington Post writer admits to having a fantasy of correcting typos in restaurant menus with "a distinctive purple pen". But sometimes the computer's spellchecker is no help.
Despite my attempts to stop it, my Microsoft Word program would always change the word for Italy's famous cured meat into what it assumed I meant to type. The night we closed an issue, I would have nightmares that when the magazine hit the stands, one of my reviews would describe "the delicate sweet and salty balance of melon and prostitute."
A fancy Manhattan restaurant opened by famed chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten features on its menu a dish called "Sea Urchin Bukkake". It, er, comes with "all the condiments of bukkake". (I could go on, but that's a good place to stop.)
A really nice remembrance of Florent, a beloved meatpacking district restaurant set to close its doors next month, by the people who knew the restaurant best.
The first time I went to Florent I had been out very late at night with some friends and we were looking for somewhere to go for breakfast at about, you know, 3:30 or 4 o'clock in the morning. We went down there and it was very dark and we came onto Gansevoort Street and the restaurant was lit up and it looked - it looked almost like a mirage. It felt magical.
The article is not just a history of Florent but also of a Manhattan and New York City that is all but gone. Says Calvin Klein:
It was alive with real downtown character types who dressed every which way: from straight, creative types of all ages, young and old, to transvestites, to probably local prostitutes. It was downtown. It was real downtown. That's when they were cutting meat all night long. And that was during the Studio 54 days. We were young and we were having a lot of fun and we were out all night. And we'd end up in the meatpacking district, at the clubs. You went to Florent after the clubs.
The New Yorker profiles chef Grant Achatz this week. The piece focuses on his restaurant, Alinea, and the battle with tongue cancer that threatened his life, and worse to Achatz, his career and passion. The loss of his sense of taste had a bright side:
Because his ability to taste has come back over time, Achatz feels that he is understanding the sense in a new way -- the way you would if you could see only in black-and-white and, one by one, colors were restored to you. He says, "When I first tasted a vanilla milkshake" -- after the end of his treatment -- "it tasted very sweet to me, because there's no salt, no acid. It just tasted sweet. Now, introduce bitter, so now I'm understanding the relationship between sweet and bitter -- how they work together and how they balance. And now, as salt comes back, I understand the relationship among the three components."
In the Diner's Journal, Pete Wells contrasts Achatz with another chef that the New Yorker recently profiled, Momofuku's David Chang.
In March, The New Yorker published a profile of a chef who was about to open a restaurant. The chef complained about his health, worried about the future and cursed as if he had slammed his thumb in a car door.
On Monday, the magazine will publish a profile of another chef. Last year a doctor told this chef that he had advanced oral cancer and that unless he had his tongue cut out, he would be dead within a few months. According to The New Yorker, the chef reacted as if he'd just been handed a particularly challenging logic problem.
The point of the contrast is not to marginalize Chang's problems or his reaction to them but to demonstrate what a different approach Achatz takes to kitchen work than the typical (stereotypical?) Anthony Bourdainity of the restaurant kitchen.
The NYer article includes an online companion, a slideshow of photos of the latest menu items at Alinea and chef Achatz, looking very Seth Bullock.
Nice anecdote from a former line chef at the French Laundry about Eric Ziebold, then the sous-chef there.
He was TFL's first ever sous chef and to this day I have never seen any one person work so many hours. (He, Thomas & Laura all put in 17-19 hour days, 7 days a week.) Everyone knows The French Laundry is an amazing restaurant, but few know why. It's easy to blame or praise one person, but the truth is that it takes a village.
Four chefs talk about how their kitchens are laid out in this month's Metropolis. Here's Dan Barber talking about his role at Blue Hill at Stone Barns:
At the same time, I don't think the cooks look at me as a real community member. I'm not that cozy paternal figure. I'm always doing different things, and it creates this atmosphere where the cooks are on the balls of their feet. They're thinking, Where's he going next, what's happening next? There's a little bit of confusion. I think that's good. It's hard to articulate, because you think of the kitchen as very organized; and, like I said, the more control you have, the better. But a little bit of chaos creates tension. And that creates energy and passion, and it tends to make you season something the right way or reach for something that would add this, that, or the other thing.
The other chefs are Alice Waters, Grant Achatz, and Wylie Dufresne. The one thing they all talked about is the importance of open sight lines, both between the dining room and kitchen and among the chefs in the kitchen.
After 10 years, kottke.org favorite New Green Bo (still the best soup dumplings in town, IMO) has changed its name to Nice Green Bo.
We're 10 years old, and we have so many nice customers, so we made it Nice Green Bo.
(via eater)
Update: My officemate Scott snapped a photo of the new signage during lunch.
I required redemption. When I arrived home two weeks ago after work, I was informed by my wife that I'd forgotten our anniversary. Eep. To partially make up for my cliched gaffe, I put my efforts towards getting a reservation at Momofuku Ko...the notoriously hard-to-get-into Momofuku Ko.1 We're big fans of the other two Momofukus, so I logged into their online reservation system and happened to get something for last Friday night.
But this isn't a story about their reservation system; too many of those have been written already. Bottom line: the food is wonderful and should be the focus of any Ko tale. Two dishes in particular were the equal of any I've had at other more expensive restaurants. The first was a pea soup with the most tender langoustine. The second dish, the superstar of the restaurant, was a coddled egg with caviar, onion soubise, and tiny potato chips (photo). Didn't want that one to end. And I didn't even mention the shaved foie gras (with Reisling built right in!) or the English muffins amuse or the nice wine pairings.
For the full food porn treatment, check out Kathryn's photoset, a review at Goodies First, Ed Levine's preview, Ruth Reichl's first look, and a review by The Wandering Eater.
[1] Two quick notes on the reservation process.
1. I spent all of five minutes on a Saturday morning making the reservation on the Ko web site. It can be done.
2. Chang and co. are serious about the web site being the only way to get into the restaurant. As we were leaving after our meal, a friend of Chang's and bona fide celebrity stopped in to say hi. After some chit chat, the fellow asked if he could get a reservation at Ko for the next evening. Chang laughed, apologized, and told him that he had to go through the web site. They're not kidding around, folks. ↩
Frank Bruni, the food critic for the NY Times, wrote yesterday about the difficulty of getting a reservation at David Chang's new Momofuku Ko restaurant. Ko's online reservation system is the *only* way of procuring a seat at the tiny Manhattan restaurant...no walk-ins, no friends of the chef or celebs getting preferential treatment. It works more or less like Ticketmaster's online ticketing: you select the number of guests, it shows you the available reservation times (if any), you click on a time, and if that time is still available when you click it, only then does the system hold your choice while you fill in some information.
It's a simple system; seats for dinner are released on the site a week in advance at 10am each day and the people that click on their preferred times first get the reservations. Ko takes only 32 reservations each night and the restaurant is one of the hottest in town, which means that all the reservations are gone each day in seconds...sometimes in 2 or 3 seconds. Just like Radiohead tickets on Ticketmaster.
Except that diners are not used to this sort of thing. One of Bruni's readers got irritated that he got through to the pick-a-time screen but then when he clicked on his preferred time was told that the reservation was already gone. Someone had beaten him to the punch. So he emailed the restaurant for an explanation. The exchange between the restaurant and the snubbed patron should be familiar with anyone who has done web development for clients or any kind of tech support.
In a nutshell, the would-be patron said (and I'm paraphrasing here), "your system is unfair and broken," and the folks at Ko replied, "sorry, that's how the internet works". The comments on the post are both fascinating and disappointing, with many people attempting to debunk Ko's seemingly lame excuse of, well, that's how the internet works. Except that's pretty much the right answer...although it's clearer to say that that's how a web server communicates with a web browser (and even that is a bit imprecise). When the pick-a-time page is downloaded by a particular browser, it's based on the information the web server had when it sent the page out. The page sits unchanged on your computer -- it doesn't know anything about how many reservations the web server has left to dole out -- until the person clicks on a time. An anonymous commenter in Bruni's thread nails the choice that a web developer has to face in this instance:
This is a multi-user concurrency problem that all sites with limited inventory and a high demand (users all clicking the button all at the same time) have to deal with. It's not an easy problem to solve.
The easier method (which the Ko site has chosen) is to not "lock" a reservation slot until the very end. You submit your party size and the system looks for available slots that it knows about. It shows you the calendar page, with the available slots it knows about (if any). This doesn't update in real time because they haven't implemented it to know about the current state of inventory. This can be done, but it's more complicated.
The more complicated method is to lock a reservation slot upon beginning of the checkout process, with a time out occurring if the user takes too long to finish, or some other error occurs (in other systems this can be a blacklisted credit card number). If this happens, the system throws the reservation slot back into the pool. However, you need to give people a mechanism to keep trying for ones that get thrown back into the pool (like a "Try Again" button).
Building something like this not impossible (see Ticketmaster) but requires a much more real-time system that is aware of who has what, and what stage of the checkout process they're in - in addition to total available inventory. Building a robust system like this is not cheap.
Even then, you might get shut out. You submit your party size, everything is already gone, and you never get to the calendar page. It just moves up the "sold out" disappointment to earlier in the process.
A subsequent commenter suggests using "Web 2.0" technologies (I think he's talking specifically about Ajax) but as Anonymous suggests, that would increase the complexity of the system on the server side (unnecessarily in my mind) while moving up the "'sold out' disappointment to earlier in the process". Plus, that sort of system could put you "on hold" for several minutes while the reservations are taken by the folks in front of you until you're told, "too bad, all gone". I'm not sure that's preferable to being told sooner and may result in much more irritation on the part of potential diners.
In my opinion (as a web developer and as someone who has used Ko's reservation system from start to finish), Ko's system does it right. You're locked into a reservation by the system only when you've chosen exactly what you want. It favors the web user who's prepared & lucky and is simple for Ko to implement and maintain. That the logic used to produce this simple system takes three paragraphs to explain to an end user is irrelevent. After all, a restaurant dinner is easy to eat but explaining how it came to be that way fills entire books.
This might seem too inside baseball for most readers -- the number of people interested in new NYC restaurants *and* web development is likely quite small, even among kottke.org's readership -- but there's an interesting conflict going on here between technology and customer service. What kind of a problem is this...technological or social? Bruni's correspondent blamed the technology and much of the focus of the discussion has been on the process of procuring a reservation. But the main limiting factor is the enormous demand for seats; tens of thousands of people a week vying for a few hundred seats per week. The technology is largely irrelevent; whatever Ko does, however well the reservation system works or doesn't work, nearly all of the people interacting with the restaurant are going to be disappointed that they didn't get in.
A list of amusing restaurant names presented somewhat oddly in scholarly paper format. Pony Espresso is a coffeehouse in Wyoming, Wiener Takes All in a hot dog place in Illinois, and Wholly Mackerel is a Gulf Coast seafood place.
This week's New Yorker has a profile of David Chang, chef/owner of the Momofuku family of restaurants. The profile isn't online but Ed Levine has a nice write-up with some quotes.
Just because we're not Per Se, just because we're not Daniel, just because we're not a four-star restaurant, why can't we have the same fucking standards? If we start being accountable for not only our own actions but for everyone else's actions, we're gonna do some awesome shit. [...] I know we've won awards, all this stuff, but it's not because we're doing something special -- I believe it's really because we care more than the next guy.
Reading the article, it appears that Chang is using Michael Ruhlman's The Soul of a Chef as a playbook here. Caring more than the next guy is right out of the Thomas Keller section of the book...with his perfectly cut green tape and fish swimming the correct way on ice, no one cares more than Keller.
The deliverymen at Saigon Grill won their lawsuit against the restaurant's owners. The employees claimed that they were underpaid ($120 for 75 hours per week!), were fired, and then picketed the restaurant for months.
Twenty-eight of the deliverymen were fired during the next two days, in violation of a federal law prohibiting employers from "retaliating against workers for engaging in concerted activity for mutual aid and protection." As the lawsuit dragged on, diners arriving at the Saigon Grill locations were forced to cross picket lines of angry, unemployed workers.
We live near the Greenwich Village location (the enthusiastic chants of the picketing deliverymen could be heard from our living room) and didn't order from them or visit the restaurant during the strike. Assuming the workers are hired back and the restaurant reinstates delivery, we're looking forward to ordering from them again and doling out some big tips.
NYC restaurant advice from a huge douchebag Don Juan about where to wine her, dine her, and then complete the rhyming trifecta later that evening.
I have given much thought to this question of romantic restaurants. In each case you have to study the girl and find the right restaurant for her. One If by Land, Two If by Sea. Forget it. A joke. The Terrace. Never. Never. The minute you walk in she knows what you have in mind. You might as well write her a note 'Tonight I expect to do it.' It's too obvious.
(via eater)
If you can handle just one more, GQ has a long article on David Chang, the chef/co-owner of NYC's Momofuku restaurants.
Three years ago, David Chang was an obscure cook with a failing Manhattan noodle bar. Now he is being hailed as the most innovative and exciting chef America has seen in decades.
Decades? Please. I'm not backing down from my effusive review of Ssam Bar (Ssam Bar is one of my favorite restaurants of all time), but this decades business is bollocks. Just let the man (and his collaborators) cook and open more yummy restaurants.
The just-released Michelin restaurant guide for Tokyo awards more stars to that city's restaurants than New York and Paris put together. And 8 get a 3-star rating, only 2 fewer than in Paris.
Tokyo has more restaurants - at least 160,000 that could be classified as proper "restaurants" - than almost any other urban centre. Paris, by comparison, has little more than 20,000 and New York about 23,000.
There's a lot of handwringing about Tokyo restaurants getting so many stars, but to look at it another way, Paris has 8 times fewer restaurants and has more 3 stars than Tokyo. Not bad.
(via marginal revolution)
A taxonomy of NYC restaurant tables, from the lowly Sucker Tables to the Closer Tables. Two examples of the Closer Table are the cheeky Table Sex at Milk & Honey and the even cheekier Table 69 at Alto.
New York has a decreasing number of Jewish delis, but the reopened Second Avenue Deli will be among them.
Federman said that his clientele has gone from "95 percent Jewish to 50-50" and that changing with the times is part of business. (He now sells three varieties of tofu "cream cheese.") "I think Second Avenue Deli, Katz's, us, we're all making our little sphere of the world a better place," he said. "Doctors and lawyers basically live off other people's misery. Part of the perk of working here is people coming in and being so happy."
The deli's general manager recalled his favorite customers at the old location:
But my favorite was when we had five nuns eating matzoh balls served by a Lebanese waiter -- in a kosher deli. That's New York.
See also a writeup of a panel on Jewish Cuisine and the Evolution of the Jewish Deli on Serious Eats.
A reader of New York's Grub Street blog recenty wrote in, saying that he was about to have surgery that might permanently impair his sense of taste and he was looking for recommendations of places to go for his potential last few meals. Hearing of his plight, Eric Ripert agreed to cook the fellow a special Doomsday Menu at his 4-star restaurant, Le Bernardin.
A few cost-cutting recommendations for restaurants, focusing on discontinuing "several practices that have been introduced to impress rather than to deliver value".
I also think that the array of amuse-bouches, breads and petits fours that an ambitious restaurant now makes an integral part of the meal has got completely out of hand.
(via bruni)
Not sure why Mas warranted so many negative comments on this Chowhound thread about the worst nice restaurants in NYC. We were there last night for my birthday and everything was great: service, wine, and food. It was our 5th or 6th visit over the past 3 years and nothing's ever been amiss.
Teaser trailer for Alinea's cookbook, which is due out in Autumn 2008 and will contain 600 recipes. Pre-orders through the site will get signed copies and early access to a companion web site which will contain more recipes, demo videos, and behind the scenes videos. I'm really appreciating the effort these top chefs and restaurants make to open source their recipes and process...it sounds like between the book and web site, one could open a restaurant serving Alinea's menu. (Whether that restaurant would be successful or not would depend mostly on the 90% of the stuff involved with running a restaurant that doesn't rely on the ability to read a cookbook.)
Update: Jason Fried says businesses could learn a lot from chefs giving their secrets away.
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)
Le Pain Quotidien uses stale bread for menu holders on their tables. Clever design.
Regarding the food plagiarism business from yesterday, Ed Levine reports that he visited both restaurants yesterday and has some further thoughts on the situation. I think he nails it with this observation: "He was her right-hand man for six years, with complete and unfettered access to her creativity, recipes, craftsmanship, and even the combination to her safe. Charles is a smart, fiercely independent, tough-minded chef and businessperson who misplaced her trust when she gave her chief lieutenant all that access. McFarland, bereft of his own ideas, decided to open what is, for all intents and purposes, a clone of Pearl."
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.
NY Times on the rise of OpenTable, which wasn't exactly an overnight success. To me, the thing that pushed OT over the edge toward acceptance wasn't so much the public-facing business (let your customers make reservations online) but the software that the restaurants were provided to keep better track of their customers and their habits. It used to be a big deal that Four Seasons Hotels tracked the preferences of all their customers but now any restaurant with the OT system can easily do the same. "Doug Washington, a co-owner of Town Hall, said the notes were not just helpful, they are occasionally indispensable. Next to the name of one regular, who has a habit of bringing in women he is not married to, is an instruction to make sure the man's wife has not booked a separate table for the same day."
For Pixar, the making of Ratatouille included some time in real kitchens and restaurants, complete with a stop at the French Laundry for some face-time with Thomas Keller.
Photos from a meal at L'Enclume in the UK, where chef Simon Rogan is practicing molecular gastronomy at a high level. "I don't think there's a more exciting meal than this anywhere in the whole world, even [at El Bulli]. This was 24 flawless brilliant courses by a chef who is not just 'at the top of his game', but somewhere out in front of his rivals." More photos and information at L'Enclume's web site.
The Fat Duck, one of molecular gastronomy's main outposts, recently offered a course complete with its own soundtrack served up on iPods shuffle. "Heston Blumenthal, the chef, said he wanted to experiment with using sound to enhance a dining experience. Hence the iPod, playing the soothing sound of the sea breeze and waves gently caressing the seashore."
In the high stakes game of making restaurant reservations in NYC, restaurants and their patrons are engaged in attempting to outflank one another in vying for tables at prime times. "I have a well-connected friend in the entertainment industry, and I often say I am calling from his office in order to score a weekend reservation at a crowded restaurant. If NYC restaurants are going to play the game this way, we have no choice but to play along with them."
Chicago chef Homaro Cantu talks a bit more about his plans for edible advertising. "You open up a magazine, there's a small plastic thing in there, and you rip it open. It looks like a cheeseburger, tastes like a cheeseburger, it's made from all organic ingredients." The ads will also be allergen-free and may contain a bit of fluoride to help keep your teeth clean. (via seriouseats)
The secret ingredient in Jamba Juice's "non-dairy blend"? Milk! (via bb)
Profile of British chef Gordon Ramsey during his effort to open a 4-star restaurant in NYC. Someone should tell this guy he's in the hospitality business, not an understudy for R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket.
Restaurants are beginning to experiment with smaller portions on their menus, but since portion Supersizing has meant increased profits (and expanding American waistlines) for years, it's a risky play. "Larger portions are so profitable because food is relatively cheap. On average, food accounts for about a third of the total cost of running a restaurant; such things as labor, equipment, advertising, rent and electricity make up the rest. So while it may cost a restaurant a few pennies to offer 25 percent more French fries, it can raise its prices much more than a few cents. The result is that larger portions are a reliable way to bolster the average check at restaurants."
What's in a McDonald's Chicken McNugget? 56% of it is corn and a tiny percentage is actually lighter fluid (for freshness!). (via cyn-c)
Update: There are several comments in the above thread that indicate that the chemical sprayed on McNuggets for freshness is not butane (lighter fluid). Also, the 56% corn figure counts meat from corn-fed chickens, for which corn is not a natural food. (thx, demetrice)
The nominees for the 2007 Beard Awards were announced this morning. I'm disappointed that Alinea and Grant Achatz aren't on the list more (Achatz got a lone nomination for best chef in the Great Lakes region) but am happy to see David Chang, Ssam, Thomas Keller, and Wylie Dufresne on the list.
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. ↩
Eater doesn't come right out and say it ("note new equipment..."), but I think that when the Shake Shack opens for business on Wednesday, they'll be distributing those light-up buzzer thingies that vibrate when your food is ready instead of having everyone mill around the window while employees yell things that sound like your name even though it's not.
Update: Confirmed...the ShackWand will be in full effect. (And psst, rumor has it the Shack opens today, not Wed...)
Partial shot of a Waffle House grill cook's cheat sheet. The placement of various condiments on the plate denote what the cook should be making at any given time.
David Chang of Momofuku and Ssam tells us about the "money piece", the ticket in the kitchen of a restaurant that gets randomly upgraded to VIP (or soigné) treatment for the evening. Nice idea.
Nice interview with Grant Achatz, owner and chef at Alinea, which many consider to be the best restaurant in America right now.
British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay had high hopes for his new restaurant in NYC, but it garnered only two stars from the New York Times on Thursday in a review that called the restaurant cautious, polite, predictable, and timid. NYC food site Eater reports that copies of the NY Times distributed at the hotel in which Ramsay's restaurant is located had the Dining section, and therefore the disappointing review, removed from them.
Profile of "radical chef" David Chang and his restaurants, Momofuku Noodle Bar (one of my favorite restaurants) and Momofuku Ssam Bar, an Asian version of Chipotle. After a vegetarian customer threatened to sue Chang for not offering vegetarian broth, he took all but one of the veggie options off the menu. "We added pork to just about everything[...] Fuck it, let's just cook what we want."
Shopsin's, who closed their beloved eatery in the West Village last month, has updated their web site with plans to open in a stall at the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side. (thx, janelle)
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.
Notes from day 3 at PopTech:
Chris Anderson talked about, ba ba baba!, not the long tail. Well, not explicitly. Chris charted how the availability of a surplus in transistors (processors are cheap), storage (hard drives are cheap), and surplus in bandwidth (DSL is cheap) has resulted in so much opportunity for innovation and new technology. His thoughts reminded me of how surplus space in Silicon Valley (in the form of garages) allowed startup entrepreneurs to pursue new ideas without having to procure expensive commercial office space.
Quick thought re: the long tail...if the power law arises from scarcity as Matt Webb says, then it would make sense that the surplus that Anderson refers to would be flattening that curve out a bit.
Roger Brent crammed a 60 minute talk into 20 minutes. It was about genetic engineering and completely baffling...almost a series of non sequiturs. "Centripital glue engine" was my favorite phrase of the talk, but I've got no idea what Brent meant by it.
Homaro Cantu gave a puzzling presentation of a typical meal at his Chicago restaurant, Moto. I've seen this presentation twice before and eaten at Moto; all three experiences were clear and focused on the food. This time around, Cantu didn't explain the food as well or why some of the inventions were so cool. His polymer box that cooks on the table is a genuinely fantastic idea, but I got the feeling that the rest of the audience didn't understand what it was. Cantu also reiterated his position on copyrighting and patenting his food and inventions. Meg caught him saying that he was trying to solve the famine problem with his edible paper, which statement revealed two problems: a) famines are generally caused by political issues and therefore not solvable by new kinds of food, printed or otherwise, and b) he could do more good if he open sourced his inventions and let anyone produce food or improve the techniques in those famine cases where food would be useful.
Richard Dawkins gave part of his PopTech talk (the "queerer than we can suppose" part of it) at TED in 2005 (video).
Bob Metcalfe's wrap-up of the conference was a lot less contentious than in past years; hardly any shouting and only one person stormed angrily out of the room. In reference to Hasan Elahi's situation, Bob said that there's a tension present in our privacy desires: "I want my privacy, but I need you to be transparent." Not a bad way of putting it.
Serena Koenig spoke about her work in Haiti with Partners in Health. Koening spoke of a guideline that PIH follows in providing healthcare: act as though each patient is a member of your own family. That sentiment was echoed by Zinhle Thabethe, who talked about her experience as an HIV+ woman living in South Africa, an area with substandard HIV/AIDS-related healthcare. Thabethe's powerful message: we need to treat everyone with HIV/AIDS the same, with great care. Sounds like the beginning of a new Golden Rule of Healthcare.
2.7 billion results for "blog" on Google. Blogs: bigger than Jesus.
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.
Megnut's got the scoop: Gourmet magazine has named Alinea the best restaurant in the US, amazing considering its only been open a little more than a year. "[Grant Achatz] is redefining the American restaurant once again for an entirely new generation. And that -- more than his gorgeous, inventive, and delicious food -- is what makes Alinea the got-to-go-to restaurant in the country right now." (I would argue that the food is the real reason to go, but whatever...)
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.
A few photographic reports of meals at El Bulli, Ferran Adria's highly regarded restaurant in Spain.
I Like Killing Flies is a 2004 documentary about Shopsin's, a unique NYC eatery. Playing at NYC's Cinema Village this coming weekend. See also Shopsin's menu design and Calvin Trillin's classic NYer piece.
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.
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.
A weblog about finding a decent lunch meal in midtown Manhattan. My suggestions: Mendy's deli in Grand Central (great chicken salad on rye), any Hale & Hearty for soup, and Little Italy on (I think 43rd) for pizza by the slice. Oh, and isn't there a Daisy May's cart on Park Avenue? (via tmn)
Wendy's announced they are removing the "Biggie" designation from their fries and drinks because the term confused customers. The former "Biggie" size will now be "medium", "medium" will be "small", and a new "bigger than Biggie" size will be called "large". Clear?
Short list of hot dog places in NYC. What, no Crif Dogs? That's unpossible.
Bouchon Bakery has dog biscuits with foie gras and bacon in them. Taste test verdict? "Not good for humans. Good for spoiled dogs."
Ed Levine gets served a hot dog at Per Se. "I'm quite sure this was the first time Thomas Keller ever served anyone a hot dog in one of his restaurants." Let's see if this works...I totally want a hot dog next time I'm at Per Se. (via the eater)
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.
McGriddle Fan Fiction group on LiveJournal. "Keep it focused on breakfast products. I don't want to hear about any french fries." (thanks, thirteen) -dj
I did some important investigatory journalism today: burgers at the Shake Shack on opening day. Journalism has never been so delicious.
Megnut reports that Thomas Keller (an In-N-Out fan) may be doing his own burger joint in the Napa area. He must have tired of Danny Meyer crowing about the Shake Shack at all those restauranteur slumber parties. (ps. Shake Shack reopens in 6 days!)
Thomas Keller's Bouchon Bakery is set to open in the Time Warner Center on March 6. They're going to "serve various breads, pastries, and cookies of the highest quality" as well as "sandwiches, salads, soups, and even hand-made chocolates".
A look at the special Valentine's Day dinner that White Castle offered yesterday. Tablecloths (well, not cloth exactly), candles, menus with a scripty font, table service, and a crystal candy dish. Awesome. More photos on Flickr.
