May 2007 Archives

You don't need another review, but in case you wanted to know, I'm totally on board with the Momofuku Ssam Bar. I think it's innovative, delicious, and reasonable considering the quality and originality of the food. As my friend Janet says, the food is very male and aggressive -- aggressively rich, aggressively flavored, aggressively anti-diet, anti-vegetarian.

We tried to get the Bo Ssam $180 pork butt the other night, but they were all reserved for the evening, so we decided to blow some dough on the $100 ribeye. I know it's kind of ridiculous to spend $100 on a steak, but fuck it, it's 34 oz. of pure, unadulterated heaven with the kind of last meal bang you'd expect for that kind of money. Besides, we split it between five people. Seared to a perfect medium rare with plenty of raw, marbled red in the heart of the meat, it comes with silky shallot confit, a dish of sea salt and a cup brimming with clear beef fat infused with whole garlic cloves.

BRIAN: [In ecstasy, after a mouthful of ribeye] Dip the meat in the fat and you're dead! That's it! You're dead!

The waiter brought over our accompanying side dish, which he proudly presented as roasted sunchokes with mustard greens. Except they were clearly fingerling potatoes. I tried one and they were definitely potatoes, but he kept insisting that I was mistaken, that sunchokes are similar in look and taste, but these were not potatoes. Being the asshole that I am, I couldn't let it go.

ME: Try one, I swear they're potatoes.

WAITER: [insistent] No, they're not.

ME: I'd put money on it.

WAITER: How much do you want to bet? [Pause.] How about the steak?

ME: Sure.

He was totally crestfallen when he conferred with the other staff and found out that they were indeed fingerlings, prepared in a similar manner to the sunchokes they had served the day before. Of course I wasn't going to hold him to the bet, but I made him feel bad, so I felt bad. It's just never as satisfying to be vindicated as I think it's going to be. And now I feel weird about going back there in case we get the same waiter. And you care because you're my therapist? No. I'll shut up now.

First ingredient, water. Third ingredient, high fructose corn syrup. Fuck the salad, why not just snort a little Splenda between your Diet Cokes?

Name: Priya George

Occupation: Radio Producer

Borough: Brooklyn

Relationship status: Scrambled

What did you eat today?

For breakfast I had a ham and cheese croissant from the Victory, and Raspberry Yogurt by Emmi. For lunch, leftover Cuban food (fried fish, rice and beans). For dinner I intend to have a nice salad with tuna and capers. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

What do you never eat?

Heavy cream.

Complete this sentence: In my refrigerator, you can always find:

Condiments from mustard (at least three kinds) and a variety of chutneys.

What is your favorite kitchen item?

Tongs and my teapot.

Where do you eat out most frequently?

Bar Tabac, it's the closest restaurant to me.

World ends tomorrow. What would you like for your last meal?

My mother's lamb biriyani.

Thanks to Zak Pelaccio and my friend Janet for introducing me to the thigh puckering joys of the Egg Custard King. I'm completely addicted to the Portuguese egg custard -- still warm and slightly jiggly cream-touched egg custard with a broiled, spotty brown top, encased in a many-layered, crisp and flaky tart shell. It's trans-fat heaven for 75 cents a pop.

Egg Custard King
There's one on Mott St. near Canal and one on Grand St. near Chrystie

I don't want to gender stereotype, but...yeah I do. When a man throws a barbecue, he's usually got the meat covered. If you're looking to bring something, a vegetable side dish will most likely be a welcome addition to the buffet. I love a good meat fest, but I need to cleanse the palate with veggies between the chicken legs and the fatty short ribs.

I attended a lovely Brooklyn garden barbecue this Sunday afternoon, hopefully the first of many. My contribution: a refreshing fennel salad with grapefruit. I borrowed the idea from La Doug and tweaked it a bit. It's a sturdy summer side that preps in 10 minutes, won't wilt too much in the heat, can be dressed before you leave the house, and travels well in a covered mixing bowl. This is a classic example of good ingredients with little adornment. The grassy green of the pistachios picks up the pale dacquiri ice green of the fennel. With the peachy pink grapefruit segments, it's pretty in pastel.

Fennel salad for a Brooklyn garden party

2 fennel bulbs (choose a "female" bulb -- they're bubbly and round, not flat and long, and they're supposedly sweeter)
2 large pink grapefruits
A few handfuls of shelled California pistachios
Olive oil
1/2 lemon
salt and pepper
Parmesan cheese

Shave fennel bulbs thinly with a mandolin into a large bowl, across the grain. (The bulb should sit on the mandolin and get shaved almost til you reach the stems.) Sprinkle with sea salt and pepper. Pour a few glugs of good, fruity olive oil into the bowl. Squeeze the juice of half a lemon onto the salad. Toss the fennel in the bowl.

Pare the rind from the grapefruits by lopping off the stem end and the bottom, then cutting around the sides of the grapefruit rind til you just have a skinless grapefruit. Remove the smile-shaped segments of the grapefruit over your bowl of fennel by cutting along the segment skin. Drop the segments on top of the fennel salad.

Using a vegetable peeler, shave a generous amount of parmesan cheese strips on top of the grapefruit til the salad is covered with a single layer of cheese shavings. Sprinkle your pistachios on top. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and take your salad on the subway to go.

Name: Martin Gelin

Occupation: Journalist

Borough: Brooklyn

Relationship status: Messy

What did you eat today? breakfast: some fruit and lots of coffee. lunch: bahn mi-sandwich in Chinatown dinner: pizza with italian sausage from Franny's + had some chocolate and manchego cheese later on.

What do you never eat?

Stupid fusion food

Complete this sentence: In my refrigerator, you can always find:

Grey Poupon, manchego cheese, perhaps a bottle of sancerre and sadly not much else...

What is your favorite kitchen item?

Take out menus from Amorina and Franny's

Where do you eat out most frequently?

Frankie's Spuntino (for the pork chop and the jersualem artichokes) and Il Buco (for everything). [Wow, somebody likes Italian food. --Ed.]
Oh, and Dumpling House at Eldridge street whenever I'm in the neighborhood.

World ends tomorrow. What would you like for your last meal?

There's an amazing, old Italian guy called Vincent who runs a place called Chez Vincent in Paris, and I would let him throw a huge dinner party for me and all my friends. He's always singing along to the opera and drinking lots of wine while he's cooking. If he wouldn't take reservations that evening, I guess I'd go for my mom's Swedish Vasterbotten cheese pie.

Speak Swedish? Check out saffransrok, Martin's food blog.

3 days with my visiting friend Anel have just about undone about four weeks of working out at the gym. I look like one of those Chinese happy Buddha statues right now. Or a Teletubbie. Somebody is probably going to give up their seat on the subway for me tomorrow. I am Olympic champion of water retention. I would like to pop my belly like a zit.

There comes a time in every food writer's life when they have to decide if they're going to go the way of M.F.K. or the way of A.J. I know which way I'd like to go, but it's going to be a battle.

Meanwhile, at a pre-slaughter fattening dinner at Otto with nine people (I gotta say, except for the really loud music, that place is great for groups) we loved this Zaccagnini Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, available at Astor Wines for $13.99. It's dark chocolate-y and smooth. In my very slow and barbaric wine education, I'm finding that I prefer the Italian wines.

Name: Daniel Hobbs

Occupation: In sharply descending order of material gain: paralegal; classical pianist; Editor-in-Chief, Board of Directors, and Janitor of The Hobbs Digest

Borough: Manhattan

Relationship status: Paired off

What did you eat today?

I started out with a cup of good coffee at home, then had some mediocre sludge at the office. I enjoyed a handful of cashews in the morning, had a so-so bacon, tomato and cheddar sandwich for lunch, and had some very empty calories in the form of cookies left over from a meeting and set out for the scavengers mid-afternoon. After work, I met up with my friend Gabrielle and we had an impromptu picnic in Central Park, with some syrupy sauvignon blanc from New Zealand, some lackluster eggplant/goat cheese terrine, rice crackers, olives and bocconcini. The food, sadly, didn't match the brilliance of the weather and the company, but there's no such thing as a bad picnic. Now I'm at home and am not very hungry, but I may have a tangelo. Blah. Not my proudest food day, but it's a true account.

What do you never eat?

I can't profess to having even a perverse, delinquent appetite for franchise fast food, even when extremely hungover, so I never go to McDonald's and the like. Also, I'm not very adventurous when it comes to offal. The appeal of raw meat is generally lost on me as well, so I'll pass on that steak tartare. Find me the best example of anything, though, and I'll try it.

Complete this sentence: In my refrigerator, you can always find:

A baffling range of condiments, prosecco, Indian pickles, wilting herbs, capers, anchovies, yogurt, maple syrup, Branston pickle, seltzer, and various other odds and ends from which it would be impossible to create a meal.

What is your favorite kitchen item?

I'd be hard pressed to have to choose between the most complex and the simplest: my non-human dishwasher and my trusty Lodge cast iron skillet. The two don't get along, but I love them both. [A dishwasher?! In Manhattan?!]

Where do you eat out most frequently?

Unfortunately, I have to say Pret a Manger, since I buy my lunch there at least 3 times a week, but here are some of the restaurants I go to most often, when I have a say in the matter: Sripraphai, Haandi, Saravanaas, Paprika, XO Kitchen.

World ends tomorrow. What would you like for your last meal?

I would like to be seated in the middle of a buffet of poulet de Bresse à la crème et aux morilles, bacon, cashews, Sichuan green beans, rivers of great wine, a stupefyingly hot lamb curry, custards of all sorts, a damn good taco truck taco or two, roasted fennel, foie gras, pollo a la brasa with ridiculously caramelized plantains, a cheese plate, perfectly made pasta... Oh, just bring it all on! I wouldn't be too happy if I had to eat in any particular order; it would have to be there to eat as I please. And since I'm creating my own terrestrial paradise before I go, let me stuff my ears with Bach's B Minor Mass.

I love the idea of going into that good night with a soundtrack. You can read Daniel's food jottings at The Hobbs Digest.

If you've got $1395 to spare (and who doesn't), spend an October weekend with the fifth annual Gourmet Institute. Experience cooking demos and seminars with such culinary luminaries as Ruth Reichl, Thomas Keller, Grant Achatz, Eric Ripert, Colman Andrews, Drew Nieporent, Masaharu Morimoto...and me.

What?

Shhhhh....I know. It's sort of batshit crazy. I've been asked to be on a blogger panel. Here's the description from the website:

Eat the Web: Blogging's Effect on the Food World

Tyler Colman (DrVino.com)/Ben Leventhal (Eater.com)/Ed Levine (SeriousEats.com)/Ganda Suthivarakom (EatDrinkOneWoman.com)

Blogging is a new and powerful phenomenon. In this discussion, four of the most respected bloggers share their thoughts and insights on topics such as: How does one start a blog? What makes a blog a blog? What does the food-blog world look like? How is the Internet changing the restaurant business and how bloggers are shaping food trends. Ruth Reichl moderates.

Shut up! Stop laughing! What the hell am I going to talk about? Who wants to hear from a blogger panel?

I feel a little bit like I did when I was a freshman in college. My buddy Julian and I desperately wanted to see our favorite Brit pop bands (shut up! stop laughing!) play down at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco. The only problem was that I was 17 and she was 18, and Bottom of the Hill is 21+.

So -- very sneaky -- we would take the Bart to 16th and Mission and walk many, many blocks to the club. Once we got there, which was usually around 5pm, there was never anyone checking IDs at the door so we'd sneak in, go to the back garden and just pretend like we belonged there. The bartenders would be setting up, it would be fully light out, and if we were lucky, we'd catch a bit of the band's soundcheck. The only problem was that the bands didn't actually go on until about 11pm. So we would basically get there and hang out in this tiny club for SIX HOURS.

I mean, clearly we did not belong. But nobody kicked us out once we were in. I'm just hoping the gatekeepers at the Gourmet Institute turn a similarly benevolent blind eye and let a fangirl squat in the telephone booth. Maybe next to the Andrew Carmellini white truffle station.

For a preview of my coming NYMag.com review of Amazing 66, check out the pic on jozzard -- that's right, a whole boneless, fleshless chicken skin is stuffed with Chinese sausage-studded sticky rice, then deep fried. It's $33, and you actually have to pre-order it.