Ed Levine Eats

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Is Bouchon Bakery Overpriced? Please tell me!

2006-04-11T11:03:00.000-04:00

Is Bouchon Bakery overpriced? To help me answer that question I have decided to eat lunch at Bouchon Bakery in the Time Warner Center (3rd fl.) every Saturday after squash, until I have sampled the entire menu. This time I had a really good Pork Tonnato sandwich ($8.25) along with a bowl of chicken soup ($9.25!) . The soup was a rich brown color, obviously made from a dark stock, which is fine by me. There were a few inconsequential herb dumplings, some al dente vegetables, and a few pieces of tender dark meat chicken floating in the broth, but I actually liked the taste of the soup more after I had eaten all the other stuff. That has never happend to me before, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. The soup itself had great chicken flavor. For dessert I had a serious peanut butter sandwich cookie ($2.75) that may have been the finest peanut butter cookie I have ever eaten. The cookies were light and flavorful, and the filling tasted like an intensely flavored peanut butter mousse. Note: All of my Bouchon Bakery meals are being eaten and purchased in the retail bakery and not the sit-down restaurant.

Which is better, a roat pork banh mi hero or a mixed Italian coldcut hero from someplace good like Faico's

2006-04-11T10:56:00.000-04:00

The question of the day: Which is the superior sandwich, a roast pork banh mi or a mixed Italian cold cut hero? Is it just me, or has everyone fallen in love with the Vietnamese heroes called Banh Mih. When I was in Manhattan's Chinatown recently, searching for great chicken soup, I noticed a sign for Banh Mi in the window of what looked like a jewelry store. Sliceny's Adam Kuban and I walked in and ordered one roast pork and one chicken banh mih. Both sandwiches were sensational. The bread was crisp, the meat tender enough, the vegetables were spritely, and the fresh coriander in the sandwich had a lovely fragrance. If you're like me, and banh mi have taken over your sandwich life (at least when a banh mi joint is nearby) head over to Saigon Bakery, 138-01 Mott Street (just south of Canal) 212-941-1541.

Sea Grill Thrills Quietly

2006-04-09T11:03:00.000-04:00

In New York it's easy to forget about certain restaurants and chefs. Take the Sea Grill and Ed Brown. It's a corporate spot, owned and operated by Restaurant Associates, and though the well-spaced tables overlook the Rockefeller Center skating rink, the Sea Grill feels like a corporate spot, at least it did when I had lunch there last Friday (at dinner I presume there are fewer suits and a little more soul). But Ed Brown is a first-rate chef who uses his corporate resources wisely to buy the best ingredients on the planet. He then does his level-headed best not to mess with those ingredients very much. His food is disarmingly simple, his flavors direct and vivid. My lunch was very tasty indeed. I started with a snapper carpaccio with pickled red onions and baby cilantro, and then proceeded to a wonderfully meaty plate of sturgeon cooked a la plancha served with wilted spinach. The sturgeon had a lovely caramelized crust and the spinach delivered a surprising flavor punch. For dessert we had a palette of mini-ice cream cones and a couple of chocolate-covered banana mini-ice cream bars. There's not much new going on at the Sea Grill. When William Grimes last reviewed the restaurant for the Times, in 2000, he wrote about the same carpaccio presentation I alluded to above, and the same set of mini-ice cream cones. But it's still a treat to eat well-executed food prepared by a talented chef who still seems to care. Ed Levine Eats gives the Sea Grill a 90. The Sea Grill is at 19 W. 49th Street, 212-332-7610.

Ed Levine Screws Up

2006-04-08T14:48:00.000-04:00

A reader correctly chastised me for not giving the address of the restaurant where I had the great fancypants burger. Country is at 90 Madison (SW corner of 29th Street) on the ground floor (you walk down a few stairs from the street entrance) of the Carlton Hotel. The burger is served at lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. seven days a week.

Restaurant Critic Discovers Phenomenal Soft Pretzels

2006-04-08T09:27:00.000-04:00

It's really interesting to find out what you learn when you dine at the same restaurant two days in a row. You begin to see what it's like to be a restaurant critic at a serious publication like the New York Times, New York Magazine or the Los Angeles Times. Publications of that caliber give their critics the financial resources and the time to visit restaurants at least three times before writing their review. So I had my Frank Bruni (currently the restaurant critic at the NY Times) moment this week when I ate dinner on consecutive nights at the "newish" casual German restaurant (maybe gastropub would be a better descriptor), Blaue Gans, owned by chef-restaurateur Kurt Gutenbrunner, who also co-owns Wallse,Thor, and Cafe Sabarsky. At dinner on Thursday night, I loved just about everything we ate at Blaue Gans. The Burenwurst was a pork and beef sausage positively bursting with flavor, accompanied by delicious sauerkraut, a not too spicy mustard and pungent horseradish. The bread that showed up at our table was kind of a limp, wan version of German dark rye bread, and even though it was accompanied by a tasty, smooth liptauer spread (made of farmer's cheese, paprika, and onion) we ordered a pretzel to accompany our sausage and the terrific smoked trout that was more terrine than filet. The pretzel was a revelation: crisp enough on the outside, tender on the inside, with just enough interior and exterior salt. If it had been baked a little longer I would have declared it the best soft pretzel I have ever eaten. Our main dishes were a mixed bag. The meaty part of the roasted pork belly tasted great, but beneath the meat was a three inch slab of fat. Now I love pork belly, and I love fat, but I definitely would have preferred some of that fat to be rendered in the cooking process. The Jager Schnitzel, on the other hand, was a very successful cholesterol festival of a dish: pounded pork in a creamy sauce made with veal stock topped by bacon and mushrooms. And the spaetzle that accompanied the schnitzel was perfect, firm and slightly chewy with the right amount of buttery give. The Swiss cheese plate was a waste of time and calories, but the fried quark (cheese) dumplings on a pool of rhubarb compote were ethereally light and crunchy on the outside, and cooked through on the inside. The next night the pretzel and the sauerkraut were just as delicious, but the spaetzle was limp and overcooked. Perfect spaetzle one night, steam table quality spaetzle the next. How do you explain that? I saw the chef-owner there both nights, so that doesn't explain it. Potato salad was underseasoned, the boiled beef shoulder wasn't particularly tender or flavorful, and needed six shakes of salt to bring it to life, and the wiener schnitzel's crisp crust separated from the pork inside it way too easily. It didn't have the cosmic oneness between crust and flesh a great piece of fried chicken or pork should. The apple strudel was buttery and wonderful, and it came with a hillock of schlog. Two other fine desserts were the Salzburger Nockerl, cloud-like meringues perched atop a huckleberry compote, and the kaiserschmarren (sounds like a Mel Brooks invention), tender, slightly spongy little pancakes made just sweet enough by powdered sugar on top, that don't need the dull-tasting apple compote that comes with it. I hope the next time I go back (which will be soon, as this is a fun restaurant to be in) the spaetzl will be up to snuff, and the beef shoulder will be more tender and flavorful.
Bruni gave it one star (out of four), Robin Raisfeld and Rob Patronite gave it two stars (out of five) in New York Magazine, and Ed Levine Eats gives it a 90 (out of a hundred), which means I would love to have it in my neighborhood.: Blaue Gans, 139 Duane St. near West Broadway, 212-571-8880. No reservations taken, but I have found if you get there by 7:30 most evenings you can snag a table for dinner without waiting. Open 8 a.m. to 1 a.m. seven days a week.

An Excellent Fancypants Burger

2006-04-07T08:11:00.000-04:00

When you order a burger in a fancypants environment and it turns out to be great, it's a sure sign that the fancypants chef in charge of the kitchen loves a good burger as much as the rest of us. So the only conclusion I can draw after having a burger at Country is that the chef there, Doug Psaltis, has eaten his share of burgers once he takes off his toque and chef whites. The burger at Country is served on a homemade English muffin (it tasted like a brioche roll to me) with special sauce and French Fries Provencal. All pretensions aside, this burger is terrific. It has a properly charred and seared exterior and a wonderfully juicy and meaty interior. The special sauce is a fairly nondescript thousand island dressing that doesn't do much for the burger either way. The french fries provencal were just great french fries, crispy on the outside, soft and tender on the inside, with just the right amount of fancypants pimenton salt. The burger at Country is fifteen bucks without cheese, but it's a worthwhile plate of food. On the Fancypants Burger scale, Country's burger gets a 9 out of 10. For more on burgers fancypants and otherwise check out my piece on burgers in the Times.

Hot Heroes for Our Times

2006-04-06T08:18:00.000-04:00

I had a terrific 'Cueban sandwich yesterday at Blue Smoke for lunch, made with smoked instead of roast pork, and I was reminded that I had not included the "Cueban" in my New York Times Hot Heroes roundup. There were a number of other fine hot sandwiches on long rolls that I didn't have the space to write about, so my next few posts will highlight my favorites: The best fried seafood'poboys I have found in New York are at Jacque-Imo's NYC at 366 Columbus (77th Street) 212-799-0150. Decent roll, crisp, greaselessly fried seafood, and properly dressed New Orleans-style with shredded lettuce and dressing. Please note that the Jacque-Imo's To Geaux in Grand Central's subterranean food hall serves truly awful fried seafood 'po boys that have clearly not been cooked to order.

The Cookie Calorie Monster

2006-04-05T19:03:00.000-04:00

Okay, I finally went to my supermarket to check out the caloric content of the national cookie brands to compare them to the 5o calorie (and rather small) South Beach Diet Oatmeal Chocolate Chip cookies. Sure enough a regular Chips Ahoy cookie has 53 1/3 calories, a s does a regular Oreo, and a Fig Newton has 55 calories. The only conclusion a sane man could come to: Eat two Oreos or Fig Newtons. Of course the problem is they don't make 100 calorie packages of regular Oreos or Fig Newtons. But doesn't this suggest a marketing opportunity for Nabisco?

Serious about Sorbet

2006-04-04T21:08:00.000-04:00

Sorbet eaten in moderation is a dieter's best friend. Some of the best commercial sorbets on the market contain a hundred calories in a serving. Of course it's hard to limit yourself to a single serving of sorbet if it's really good, but that's a problem that can be solved by a creative sorbet manufacturer. When I found myself perusing the ice cream selection at Whole Foods the other day, I came upon Blue Moon Sorbets, made in Queechee, Vermont, undoubtedly by some old hippies that went to college when I did in the late sixties. I bought two pints, Blackberry Lime and Pear Ginger. They cost $5.00, or half of what a pint of Capogiro's sorbetto costs. They are not as smooth-textured as Capogiro's are, but they are intensely flavored and very clean-tasting. The Pear Ginger was downright smooth, perhaps because pears are naturally creamy. The flavor combinations are blessedly straightforward and carefully thought out. Pear belongs with ginger as blackberry belongs with lime. No savory flavors or herbs need apply here. I'm a fan of Sharon's sorbets and even of Haagen Dazs, but neither offers the judiciously chosen flavor combinations that Blue Moon does. I wish they were creamier, but you can't have everything.

An Early NYC Bouchon Bakery Visit

2006-04-04T09:57:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday I went to NYC's Time-Warner Mall and braved the three escalators you ride to get to the newest branch (The first two are in Yountville, Ca. and Las Vegas) of Thomas Keller's Bouchon Bakery. The first thing you are confronted by is a sit-down area with waiter service. The retail bakery with a few stools and tables is down the hall. There I was confronted by display cases filled with impossibly beautiful and elegant pastries, cookies and chocolates, all at French Laaundry prices. I ordered a grilled vegetable sandwich with gruyere on seven-grain bread ($8.25) that the counterperson plucked pre-made out of the case. He asked me if I wanted it pressed. I said yes, and he told me it would take five minutes. I then bought an apple danish ($3.00, I think), a caramel macaroon ($3.00) and a large iced tea ($2.75). I sat down on one of the stools and took a bite of the buttery apple danish. It was too doughy, and the ratio of apples to pastry was all wrong. The caramel macaroon was excellent, chewy, just crunchy enough, and not too sweet. The iced tea was a total rip-off. My glass was mostly ice, and I ran out of tea well before my sandwich was ready, which was in 15 minutes, not five. The sandwich was very fine, though the vegetables kept falling out of the sandwich as I took succeeding bites. I will go back, I won't order the tea, and I would say this early visit was promising if not perfect.

Toscanini's Ice Cream is in the House

2006-04-03T08:22:00.000-04:00

Although I am neither a Whole Foods advocate or a Whole Foods basher (After all, Whole Foods is a very complicated enterprise) there are certain things I love about Whole Foods. One is their selection of ice creams. They carry Capogiro Gelato and Sorbetto from Philadelphia, which is obscenely expensive ($10 a pint) but often very, very good, in addition to the standard premium brands like Haagen Dazs and Ben and Jerry's. Last Saturday I was perusing the ice cream case at my local Whole Foods when I spotted a label that read Tosca. When I picked up a pint I discovered that it was actually Toscanini's, from Cambridge, Mass. Gus Toscanini is one of this country's seminal artisanal ice cream makers. I bought a pint of Toscanini Burnt Caramel and miraculously resisted buying a pint of Gus' Cocoa Pudding. The Burnt Caramel Ice Cream has been in my freezer for almost 48 hours now, and I have managed to eat less than a fourth of it. What discipline, what self-restraint. What little I have eaten has been delicious, intensely flavored, creamy, and blessedly unsweet. I am going to see if I can make this pint of ice cream last a week. This is going to be a true test of my willpower and my longterm prospects for maintaining and continuing my weight loss. I'll keep you posted.

The Shake Shack Phenomenon

2006-04-02T10:03:00.000-04:00

It was a gorgeous day in New York last Friday, so I ventured over to the Shake Shack, Danny Meyer and the Union Square Hospitality Group's burger and hot dog emporium in Madison Square Park (Madison Ave. and 23rd St.). The line was insanely long (about an hour from getting on line to eating), but my Shack Burger, made with American cheese, lettuce, tomato and some kind of Thousand Island dressing, was delicious, rare as ordered, with the Shake Shack's trademark salty, crusty exterior. The order-taker at the cash register had talked me out of my usual small vanilla frozen custard and steered me to the special flavor of the day, Coffee Brownie. I loved the coffee frozen custard, but the chunks of brownie were too big and too sweet. A Shake Shack source told me that morning they're already serving 900 burgers a day (it was only late March for Christ's sake), so lord only knows how long the line is going to be come summer. Check out the other early reports on Shake Shack from eater.curbed.com and ahamburgertoday.com

A Great Cheap Meal in NYC

2006-04-02T09:26:00.000-04:00

Money is tight in the Levine household these days, so when we meet friends for dinner we don't go to expensive restaurants. In fact, we look for restaurants where we can both eat for $35 or less. The night before last we ended up at Saravanaas, a relatively new South Indian restaurant in Manhattan's Little India. Saravanaas is a branch of Saravana Bhavan, a 40 location chain based in Chennai in South India. I don't know about the other 39 locations, but this branch turned out to be a pretty enough, comfortable to talk in, restaurant that serves terrific South Indian vegetarian food. The Times' Peter Meehan had reviewed the restaurant seven months ago, so we just followed his instructions about what to order. Sambar Vada were lentil-flour doughnuts plopped into a lentil-based gravy studded with fresh cilantro and onions. Slightly weird but very tasty. Channa Batura was a supersized poori-like bread that came with a bowl of delicious and complex chickpea curry. Why should I describe the food when Meehan has already done so beautifully. Just read his review and follow his lead. Suffice to say you will eat very well and cheaply at Saravanaas.

Crisp or Pliant, How Do You Like Your Bacon?

2006-04-01T07:19:00.000-05:00

I was at the Fairway Cafe yesterday eating a plate of overcooked scrambled eggs when I started stewing about the state of bacon there, and at most breakfast spots across this land. Much too often, the bacon served to us is suffering from BACON RIGORMORTIS. That is, it is so stiff it could be used as a straight edge ruler. Now I don't mind crisp bacon, though I prefer pliant, tender strips of pig with crisp edges. But stiff, cold or room-temperature bacon which has been cooked an hour or two before it's served simply doesn't cut it. Is it too much to ask when we cross over to the nutritional dark side to have bacon with a little give in it? I don't think so. Maybe I am in the minority. So I ask you, Ed Levine Eats readers, "How do you like your bacon, crisp and stiff or pliant and tender?" Bacon lovers want to know.

Denino's makes a fine pie

2006-04-01T07:02:00.000-05:00

A reader e-mailed me about the Pala post and asked if I was a fan of Denino's, a Staten Island pizzeria. In Slice of Heaven, my book about pizza, I wrote the following about Denino's: "At Denino's, the pizza box says it all: IN CRUST WE TRUST. They should trust their crust, because it is light and crisp and plaint. Denino's is a classic red-brick tavern pizzeria (with a separate dining room), but it is just as welcoming to kids after a little league game as it is to middle-aged softball players coming in for a pie and a brew after a game. I'm crazy about Denino's sausage pie, which features fine sweet Italian sausage made fresh every day by a local butcher. If you want to go vegetarian, try the white pie, made with mozzarella, onions, fresh garlic and a splash of olive oil. After fifty-four years you might think the Denino family has gotten bored with making pizza. Not so, according to third-generation co-owner Michael Denino: "We still put our heart and soul into every pie."

Willie Mae Seaton Needs You

2006-03-31T09:58:00.000-05:00

Willie Mae Seaton makes the best fried chicken I've ever had in my life. And I've eaten thousands of pieces of fried chicken across America in search of the best. Willie Mae Seaton's chicken has a crisp and crunchy exterior, is just salty enough, and has that cosmic "oneness" between skin and crust. And if you want to taste it, listen up. Now pushing ninety, Ms. Seaton was wiped out by Katrina. Her restaurant, Willie Mae's Scotch House, was until a few years ago a true neighborhood treasure savored by her fellow Treme residents and some foodies in the know from New Orleans and beyond. Now the Southern Foodways Alliance, along with the Viking Range Company, is trying to raise the $135,000 needed to rebuild and reopen Willie Mae's. So get out your checkbook and write the biggest, fattest check you can to the Gulf Coast Renaissance Fund, then mail it to Mary Beth Lasseter, Southern Foodways Alliance, P.O. Box 1848, University, MS 38677.

Pizza Needs Heart and Soul

2006-03-30T08:54:00.000-05:00

There are a few ingredients every great pizza needs, and I don't mean cheese, sauce and dough. Last night I went to Pala, a new Roman-style pizzeria just south of Houston Street at the northern tip of the Lower East Side. I was a few minutes early so I chatted with an Italian gentleman who I deduced to be the owner. He told me that he uses a brick-lined electric oven that can get up to 800 degrees Fahrenheit, a combination of Italian fresh mozzarella and a good local cow's milk mozzarella purveyor, DiPalo Dairy, high-quality LaValle (sp?) canned tomatoes, and twelve kinds of flour in his dough, including King Arthur and Giusti, a California-based organic flour purveyor. So why was his pizza so bland and flat-tasting? Well, first and foremost because it lacked salt. And beyond that, it was missing the most important ingredients of all, heart, soul and love. Either nobody in the joint either knew what great pizza tastes like, or nobody cared enough to do what it takes to make great pizza. Pala coulda been a contender. At this point it's clearly a wannabe.

I'm in love with DiPaola's Turkey Sausage

2006-03-30T08:35:00.000-05:00

I find most chicken and/or turkey sausage dry and tasteless. So when I discovered DiPaola's Turkey Sausage at my local greenmarket a couple of years ago, I was thrilled. DiPaola is a local poultry farm located in Trenton, NJ. Its sweet turkey sausage actually tastes like good Italian sausage. It has enough fat in it to keep the turkey meat moist and the right amount of fennel seeds. It tastes great formed into turkey sausage patties, crumbled into pasta sauces (I just brown the sausage and throw it into some Patsy's Marinara Sauce), or served alongside a couple of softly scrambled eggs in the morning . DiPaola Turkeys -- Trenton, NJ Ph: 609-587-9311. At 16 Greenmarkets, including Union Square on Wednesdays and Fridays; Grand Army Plaza, Fort Greene, Borough Hall and Cortelyou in Brooklyn on Saturdays; Dag Hammarskjold Plaza on Wednesdays; West 97th Street on Fridays; St. George and Historic Richmond Town, Staten Island, on Saturdays; Columbia University on Sundays.

Wave Hill Bread Waves

2006-03-30T08:26:00.000-05:00

I received the following e-mail from the folks at Wave Hill Bread: "Thanks for writing up your experience with WAVE HILL BREAD. Sorry about your diet. It may help to know that the spelt and rye we use are organic whole grains that we mill for each batch. We use very little yeast because the milling brings out the wild yeast in the hulls of the organic grains.

Interesting that you found a sourdough flavor. We use a "poolish" which is made in advance for each batch every day instead of a "levain" used in sourdough bread. Our mentor, Gerard Rubaud, does make a sourdough bread. We do use rye (and also spelt), and that may be what you tasted.

If you have any questions about the bread or how we got into this, please let us know and we can arrange to meet you or talk about it over the phone.

We are honored that you are considering our admission to your pantheon of breadmakers.

Kind regards,
Margaret and Mitch"

Another 100 calorie bag of happiness

2006-03-29T09:03:00.000-05:00

In my never-ending quest for the perfect hundred calorie bag of happiness I have come across South Beach Diet Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies. I have to say that they're not bad, not bad at all. Which to my way of thinking is the highest accolade I can give a whole grain cookie made without butter. These cookies have a nice crunch, aren't too sweet, and are pretty tasty. They come two cookies to a bag, so utilizing my formidable math skills I conclude that each cookie has fifty calories. That seems like a lot to me, so I'm heading to the grocery store to check out the caloric content of various popular cookies. My beloved Oreo crisps have the same caloric content, but they come 21 crisps to a bag. I guess what I'm saying is that since it takes longer to dip your hand into a bag and eat 21 crisps (I try to eat them one at a time) then it does to eat a measly two cookies, the satisfaction meter is higher with the Oreo crisps.

I Don't Hate Vegans!

2006-03-28T14:20:00.000-05:00

Someone accused me of being anti-vegan after reading my pig-hunting entry. I am not, but I must apologize for my often flippant remarks about vegans. I must say that I've never had a vegan meal (or even a dish) I loved, but that doesn't mean I hate vegans. In fact, one of my favorite people in the world is a vegan, a first cousin of the "some of my best friends are" cliche.

Absolute Bagels address and phone

2006-03-28T14:16:00.000-05:00

A reader e-mailed me looking for the address and phone number of Absolute Bagels. I didn't put it in the post because I linked to my NY Times bagel piece, which I believe has the Absolute Bagels essential info. But Absolute Bagels is at 2788 Broadway (between 107th and 108th St.) Ph: 212-932-2052

A Love (Letter) Supreme

2006-03-28T08:06:00.000-05:00

I can't say I know Calvin Trillin well. But as one of my writing heroes I'm happy to say that we do break bread together a couple of times a year. Yes, he's as funny as you think he would be, and he really loves and knows good food. Trillin, as many people know, lost his beloved wife and muse Alice Trillin on September 11, 2001 (yes, that September 11th). Last week, a little less than five years after her death, Trillin wrote one of the longest, most beautiful love letters ever written, to Alice in the New Yorker. It rang so heartbreakingly true and was so emotionally resonant for so many of us I just can't get it out of my head. I have teared up three kinds just thinking about the piece. It has nothing to do with food, and everything to do with life. And those damned Conde Nast people don't have the good sense to make it available on-line. A pox on their houses. So if you still have last week's New Yorker (and most people keep their New Yorkers for a long time) read it and then re-read it. And if you have to borrow a friend's New Yorker or even steal it from your doctor's office, do it.

Saba is my Secret Weapon, or What to Cook Tonight

2006-03-28T07:35:00.000-05:00

Fairly often my wife gets fed up with our eating regimen (lots of grilled cheese sandwiches (made with great cheese or sometimes Kraft Deluxe American slices), salads, hot dogs and burgers) and demands that I make her a home-cooked meal. So yesterday I bought a container of roasted vegetables at Fairway, one of my local gourmet stores, to use as a sidedish with the boneless pork roast I was going to make. After liberally salting the meat with kosher salt I browned the outside of the pork roast in a saute pan on top of the stove in some olive oil and a little butter. Put the butter in after the olive oil has heated up or else the butter will burn. I then put the pork roast into a 350 degree preheated oven. I cooked the small (a pound and a half) pork roast until an internal meat thermometer reads 155 degrees. Then I put the roasted vegetables in the saute pan I had browned the pork in. I then put in the pan three or four tablespoons of Saba, cooked grape juice made from Trebbiano grapes, the same ones they use to make balsamic vinegar. My friend and co-author Dave Pasternack (chef-partner of Esca) calls Saba Italian maple syrup. It has a fruity, sweet, surprisingly complex flavor, and Saba makes just about anything taste better, especially pork and roasted vegetables. Cook the saba down until it's just about the consistency of maple syrup. Slice the pork roast, dip the slices in the saute pan to soak up the pan juices and saba, and then plate the vegetables. You're ready to eat. My wife loved the meal. I did, too, and now I get to order pizza tomorrow. Out of the frying pan into the pizza oven, so to speak. Saba is available at many gourmet grocery stores. It's also available online from the Zingerman's catalogue.

I wish I'd never heard of Wave Hill Bread

2006-03-28T07:03:00.000-05:00

Damned those Sterns. Why did they have to turn me on to Wave Hill Breads? I've been doing so well on my diet by eating only whole grain bread. You may remember that last week I tried to sample Wave Hill bread, only to be turned away by a locked door and a sign telling me they close at noon. One of this blog's readers (who it turns out attended a talk I gave in Chicago on pizza) alerted Wave Hill's breadbaker-owners Mitchell Rapoport and Margaret Sapir to my plight. Yesterday they then delivered two loaves of the only kind of bread they currently make, Three Grain Pain de Campagne. I immediately tore off a piece and knew my diet was in trouble for the next 24 hours. I tore off another piece and then another. This was world-class bread. It has a fantastic crunchy crust, it's tender on the inside with terrific hole structure, and it has great complex sourdough flavor. I am ready to consider Rapoport and Sapir for my own Breadbaker's Hall of Fame, whose membership currently includes Nancy Silverton, Jim Lahey, Steve Sullivan, Amy Scherber, and Paula Oleand, among others (I just can't think of the others right now). So don't get me wrong, Jane and Micheal. I appreciate the green tea and schnecken we shared the other day. Just don't expect a thank you note in the mail for turning me on to Wave Hill Bread. This bread is wreaking havoc in my diet life. Wave Hill is at 196 Danbury Road (off Route 7 in back of a doctor's office). 203-762-9595. Call first. I believe they are open from nine to 11:30 in the morning every day but Tuesday or Wednesday. But do call. They also sell their bread at some local stores in the Wilton-Westport area.

Pass the Pig, Please

2006-03-27T11:27:00.000-05:00

I hate to keep mining yesterday's New York times for my posts, but there were lots of thought-provoking food stories worth commenting on. Michael Pollen's Times Magazine cover story on hunting for his dinner was well-written but ultimately unsurprising. Pollen concluded after shooting a pig and serving it to his dinner guests that that killing the flesh he served made the food on his table more meaningful. I guess the only other conclusion he could have come to was that he and every other carnivore should become a vegetarian or even worse, a vegan.

One from Column A, None from Column B

2006-03-27T11:04:00.000-05:00

In yesterday's New York Times there was a funny piece about Jews and Chinese food by Patricia Volk. Best line: "There's an e-joke making the rounds: According to the Jewish calendar, the year is 5766. According to the Chinese calendar, it's 4703. That means for 1,063 years, it's 4703. That means for 1,063 years, Jews went without Chinese food." And this line about Chinese food in the 1950's: "Every dish contained so much cornstarch, the ingredients appeared suspended." Growing up Jewish on Long Island in the late fifties, we (just like the Volks), too, went for Chinese food every Sunday (the housekeeper's day off) to China Jade in Hewlett. There were six of us, all big eaters, but my dad would always order "dinner for five" to save money. That meant we ordered five dishes, two from Column A and three from Column B. This is what I remember eating: wonton soup, egg rolls, roast pork fried rice, spare ribs, roast pork and Chinese vegetables, shrimp with lobster sauce, chow har kew (breaded shrimp) and moo goo gai pan (watery chicken and vegetables). The egg rolls and the wonton soup came with all dinners. I thought the food at China Jade was just incredibly delicious. So when the Hewlett Public Library invited me to speak a few years ago, I went back to China Jade afterwards and ordered a combination plate. The food was awful. Taste memories really do play tricks on us. I would like to hear from readers about their seminal Chinese food eating experiences.

All the News That's Fit to Eat Part II

2006-03-26T13:55:00.000-05:00

New York Times food reporters Kim Severson and Julia Moskin (full disclosure here; I know both of them and the three of us have broken bread together) had a front-page story today detailing the growth of meal assembly centers around the country. People looking to save time and money and still put what can only loosely be called a "home-cooked meal" on their family table go to one of these centers and make "12 dinners for six in two hours for under $200." I wonder what Alice Waters, who has been saying for years that the disappearing "family meal" is one of the chief causes of the de-evolution of family life in this country, thinks about these centers, which use preassembled ingredients from mega-food suppliers like Sysco. I suppose it is a form of progress that people do sit down together at a family meal. But if they are serving pre-assembled meals (made of substandard ingredients) that are only technically homemade it seems to me these stressed out folks are only exchanging one problem for another. That is, they are eating pre-fab food assembled from lousy ingredients TOGETHER. What would be interesting to find out is whether there are centers where you can come and assemble meals made of locally sourced, responsibly grown foodstuffs to serve at home. That would truly represent progress. I think even Alice Waters would admit that. That kind of operation would probably cost more than $200 for the 12 dinners for six and would by definition segment the assembled meal market.

All the News That's Fit to Eat, Part 1

2006-03-26T10:18:00.000-05:00

For those of us who derive great pleasure from eating and talking about it, today's New York Times is a veritable smorgasboard, a feast for our stomachs, brains and heart. Let's start with Mimi Sheraton's cover story on eating in Rome in the Travel section. I've met Mimi Sheraton on a few occasions, even broken bread with her, and she has been nasty and unpleasant towards me each time. Why I don't know. That said, she often writes very well and very passionately about the lusty pleasures so many of us derive from life around the table. I still have a yellowed clipping of the piece she wrote for New York Magazine about New Orleans food many, many years ago. And her piece on eating in Rome today was Sheraton at her best. Halfway through it I wanted to jump on a plane to Rome to savor the "tiny fried croquettes of artichokes, meatballs and the like," as well as the "big, rustic chunks of oxtail" at Il Matriciano, the carbonara and fried artichokes at Matricianella, and the breads and sandwiches at Compagnia del Pane.

It's Sunday, and I'm at my post

2006-03-26T09:52:00.000-05:00

First of all it's Sunday in New York. That means it's brunch and bagels time. I wrote a bagels piece for the New York Times a few years ago, and my favorite bagels in the country back then were made by a Thai family at Absolute Bagels. After a return visit this past Friday, I am happy to report that the bagels there are better than ever. I bought a dozen mini-bagels, and though I have not had a bagel in months because of my ongoing diet (27 pounds down so far) I managed to polish off five of them in the ensuing 24 hours. Absolute's mini-bagels are paradigmatic; they are crusty and crunchy on the outside, just tender enough on the inside, and (thank God) not too sweet. For those unlucky souls who don't have access to great smoked salmon, cream cheese and bagels you can order a terrific complete New York brunch at Russ and Daughters, which has been dispensing extraordinary smoked fish and life advice for nearly a hundred years now. You can't get advice concerning your career or your love life from the Russ and Daughters' wisecracking counter people when you order on-line. That will have to wait until you visit the store. But the smoked salmon is as good as you'll find anywhere, as is the herring, whitefish and sturgeon.

A Bad Food (Not Hair) Day

2006-03-24T17:39:00.000-05:00

Today was not a good food day. I went to visit Roadfood pioneers and great writers Jane and Michael Stern at their house in Connecticut. I brought them a box of schnecken (pecan sticky buns) and a black and white cookie from Greenberg's, a classic New York Jewish bakery that is simply not very good anymore except for the schnecken and the black and white cookies. We had a blast hanging out and swapping writer war stories. When I left, Michael told me I had to go to their latest discovery,Wave Hill, a bakery that made great rustic bread. Michael said it was on the way to my final lunch destination, the new Fairfield location of the seminal New Haven pizzeria Pepe's. It was all downhill from there. First, Wave Hill was closed by the time I got there. The sign on the door said they close at noon, and I got there by 12:10 or so. I was going crazy when I got there because I could see a few loaves of bread that could have been mine if I could just get in the door. I could also smell the bread, which smelled absolutely amazing. I also called the number on the door, and, yup, I got a recording.

Then I made it to the Fairfield Pepe's by 1 p.m. or so, and there was a big line out front and it was moving very slowly (maybe not at all). I tried to open the front door to the place and it wouldn't open. It turns out it only opens from the inside because they don't want people waiting inside. Talk about a warm welcome! I managed to slip in the door when someone was leaving and I asked the man at the counter how long it would take to get a pizza to go.

He said with a completely straight face, "My next to-go opening is at 2:40 p.m."

You see the kind of preferential treatment I get because I wrote a book about pizza. I've got such clout in the pizza community that I can't even get a pizza to go for an hour and forty minutes when I arrive unannounced at Pepe's in Fairfield, CT.

The Return of Johnny Apple

2006-03-24T08:04:00.000-05:00

Last Wednesday's (March 15th) New York Times featured a cover story on Charleston food by R.W. Apple. Johnny, as he is known to his friends, had been missing from the old gray lady's pages for too long. He's one of the country's great reporters, food writers and, most of all, one of our greatest eaters. Welcome back, Johnny. We missed reading about your Falstaffian eating and drinking adventures. Reading your piece made me so hungry. I can't wait to eat the fried local shrimp at the Seawee Restaurant and the gumbo at Gullah Cuisine Lowcountry Restaurant.

99 cent pizza

2006-03-24T07:49:00.000-05:00

When I was growing up in deepest New York suburbia (Cedarhurst, LI), slices of pizza were fifteen cents. Forty years later you can pay up to $2.50 for a piece of 'za. So I was sent hurdling back to my youth when I passed a sign advertising 99 cent pizza. I couldn't pass up that kind of bargain. I ordered a slice, the Hispanic man behind the counter handed me a fresh, hot slice that needed no reheating. I took a bite. It was perfectly acceptable New York pizza, better than chain except Bertucci's. I started thinking about other food experiences across the country and what they cost. A meal at Masa in NYC costs $350 before drinks, tax and tip. That means for the same price you can get 350 slices of pizza at my new discovery. That means you can have a slice a day for for more than a year for what it ends up costing someone to eat at Masa. I then grabbed a flyer. The name of the place appears to be 99 cent Fresh Pizza. Now that's what I call great marketing, when the promise is in the name. 99 cent Fresh Pizza is at 569 Ninth Avenue (NW corner of 41st St.).

expiring blue cheese dressing

2006-03-23T18:17:00.000-05:00

Someone e-mailed me asking about the expiration date on the Point Reyes blue cheese I raved about the other day. The package I currently have in my fridge (which I bought two days ago) has an expiration date of October 24, 2006. Not bad at all for such a good product. There's really no need to worry about the expiration date, because the stuff is so fine it never lasts in our fridge longer than three days.

I'm in love with keen's chop house.

2006-03-23T18:07:00.000-05:00

I had a great lunch at Keen's Chophouse today, and I was reminded what a cool place it is. It's a zillion years old, it's all old wood and glass, there are thousands of pipes hanging from the ceiling, and the food is really quite good if you stick to the basics. I had the sliced steak, which had the minerally tang of good prime dry-aged beef. It was just the right amount of red meat for lunch, it came with a salad with tangy Neals Yard Stilton crumbled over it(I special-ordered the cheese from out friendly waiter), and the iced tea refills were free. And burger freaks should note that Keen's bar serves a terrific hamburger with fresh french fries that would be perfect if they were saltier and fried a little longer so they would be golden brown instead of off-white. You can't get the burger in the main room at the restaurant. The sliced steak was only $22, and I wasn't paying anyway, so I would describe the prices at Keens as being quite reasonable. Keens is a perfect place to eat before an event at the Madison Square Garden. It's a five to seven minute walk from the The World's Greatest Arena.

Cheap Eats in the Big Apple

2006-03-23T17:52:00.000-05:00

I may have already posted about this place, but I had another great ten dollar lunch at Peter Klein's pan-Asian storefront restaurant Chino's. Excellent crunchy fried tofu squares, a good enough Chinese chicken salad, meaty pork spare ribs in a sweet glaze, and a fine barbecued pork sandwich. And they even throw in a glass of iced tea. And hey, it's only ten bucks.

my latest addiction

2006-03-23T17:48:00.000-05:00

Still dieting, I am always on the lookout for hundred calorie packaged snacks. At my local Duane Reade I discovered 100 calorie bags of Spud Delites, made by glennys. They are potato-like baked potato crisps, and they are crunchy, crispy and just salty. Dee-lish. They satisfy carb cravings in a non-destructive way.

Save My Point Reyes Original Blue Cheese Dressing

2006-03-22T11:01:00.000-05:00

Bottled blue cheese dressings are generally a really sorry lot, so when I came across one that is truly delicious I was thrilled. Point Reyes Original Blue Dip and Dressing (which comes in a shallow plastic tub) is made from Point Reyes Farmstead Blue Cheese, mayonnaise, sour cream, lemon juice, cider vinegar, dijon, worcestershire, sugar and pepper. Nothing else, nothing to gum up the works or make it last longer. It tastes as good as any blue cheese dressing I've ever had at a fancy restaurant. Point Reyes dressing tastes creamy and tangy and, well, like great blue cheese. It costs more than Wishbone or even Marie's, but those two awful concoctions don't even deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as the Point Reyes dressing. So even at $3.99 for seven ounces it seems like a bargain. They were carrying the Point Reyes dressing at Fairway until a couple of months ago, when it mysteriously disappeared from the shelves. When I inquired about it, the manager of the cheese department told me that my beloved blue cheese dressing didn't move out of the store fast enough. Furthermore, she thought it was because of the price. I begged her to get some more in, and she acquiesced. I told her I would get on my soapbox and tell everyone I know about the wondrous Point Reyes Blue Cheese Dressing. So that's what I'm doing.

What has gone wrong at Galatoire's?

2006-03-21T18:46:00.000-05:00

Galatoire's is (or should I say used to be) one of my favorite New Orleans restaurants. I have had half a dozen meals over the last ten years, and I had never had a bad meal there until two weeks ago. I was with a bunch of restaurant critics from around the country and we just had a dreadful meal. What did we have? Mealy, dry shrimp in many forms and crab meat that tasted suspiciously like it had come from a can; Trout Almandine that was dry and tasteless; and turtle soup that tasted like Campbell's had made it. It's still a cool-looking, timeless kind of place, and it's still possible to have a great time eating there. I only hope it was an off night and not a harbinger of future meals. And, to top it off, Gilbert "Louis" LaFleur, the charming Cajun waiter (Galatoire's is known for having nifty waiters that you can ask for when you walk in the door) we had that night, keeled over and died from a heart attack the next morning. I only wish the last meal he served at his restaurant had been just a little bit better.

New Orleans Eats

2006-03-19T16:53:00.000-05:00

All right, I've said what I had to say about looking at the Katrina carnage in New Orleans. Now I'll move on to the food. I made three new discoveries this year. Stanley! (1031 Decatur, 504-)s is a fabulous new breakfast and lunch spot on Decatur Street in the French Quarter. Great banana walnut pancakes topped by a scoop of decent vanilla ice cream and some optional Louisiana cane syrup, and an even better eggs benedict-like concoction with killer fried oyters on top. The fried oysters were so good I think I will do as my friend John T. Edge does when he goes to Stanley's, have a plate of fried oysters for breakfast. I had a disappointing, tasteless roast beef with debris (the shards of meat left in the roasting pan after you take the roast beef out) po'boy at Mother's, but then I more than made up for that lousy sandwich with a transcendent roast beef po' boy from the Parkway Grill and Tavern (538 Hagan Avenue(at Toulouse), 504-482-3047. Plenty of gravy, the best hero roll I've had NO, just enough tender shards of roast beef, and a squiggle of mayonnaise, lettuce and tomato made up this paradigmatic sandwich. Finally, the sweet potato turnovers, the biscuits, and the sticky bun at L'Espiga Bakery were outstanding. The city will be back, and so will I. My advice to all of you: You should go see and eat New Orleans now. In my next post I'll talk about the more formal upscale meals I had in New Orleans. Two quick postscripts: For those people who want to take a food guidebook to the Crescent City (or just eat vicariously without leaving their house) I think Pableaux Johnson's Eating New Orleans is a beautifully written treasure trove of information and opinions. And a thank you to the reader who sent me an e-mail telling me that Gerald Ford was President from August 9, 1974 to January 20, 1977, not the early eighties, which is what I wrote in my first New Orleans post.

Sometimes you have to go beyond delicious!

2006-03-14T18:54:00.000-05:00

In the early eighties, when NYC was in dire need of some financial help from the federal government, then President Gerald Ford turned the city down flat. The next day's tabloid headline in NY was: Ford to NY: Drop Dead! After spending three days in New Orleans, I have concluded that Bush is saying the same thing to New Orleans. The devastation is so much greater than what I have seen on television. Katrina turned out to be an equal opportunity destroyer. I drove through middle-class white neighborhoods and middle class Black neighborhoods, and working class neighborhoods of every color on this earth, and it was so depressing. There is no water and no electricity and no schools open in these neighborhoods. I thought as someone who had lived through 9/11 in New York, that I could understand how residents of these neighborhoods feel. But as one cabdriver astutely pointed out to me, "There is one key difference. Almost everyone in New York had a home to go back to, whereas here people have nothing to come back to." He's right. Where is the outcry? I'm afraid Brian Williams' and Anderson Cooper's outrage on camera is not enough to bring the plight of New Orleans to light. Where is Hillary Clinton when we need her? I will talk about the state of New Orleans food in my next post. Sorry to be getting on my soapbox, but it is what I do.

sick bed food

2006-03-07T16:04:00.000-05:00

I really enjoyed Kim Severson's poignant piece on hospital food in today's NY Times, in part because I just spent the better part of two days at New York-Presbyterian Hospital (formerly Columbia Presbyterian) in upper Manhattan tending to my son, who had an emergency appendectomy. He's fine now, but it was a rough 48 hours. Within hours of the surgery, his appetite came back with a vengeance. I asked the doctor if I could go get him some great fried chicken at New Caporal, a mere ten blacks from the hospital. To my surprise, the doctor said I could get Will whatever he wanted, that by the time whatever he was going to eat made its way to his intestinal tract it would be the same. I was on my way to New Caporal when I spotted the Jou Jou Cafe kiosk in the lobby of the hospital. I was delighted to find sandwiches and salads that looked really good. I ordered a grilled Vermont Cheddar with chipotle on good bread, and a grilled mixed Italian cold cut sandwich (both sandwiches were made in one of those Italian sandwich presses). My son was thrilled when I returned to the room with the two sandwiches. His jello period had come to a premature end. So if you or a loved one find yourself at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, head for the Jou Jou Cafe kiosk. It closes at 3:30 every day, but the original Jou Jou Cafe serves the same food at 603 W. 168th Street, right around the corner from the hospital, and it's open until 4 a.m. every day. By the way, don't be tempted by a slice of pizza at Famiglia, on Broadway between 168th and 169th Sts. It's NY street pizza at its most generic. Note to Kim: The hospital lasagna didn't look too bad. The string beans looked very tired. What my son really feasted on was the wireless keyboard in the hospital room that he used to change channels, play video games, and watch movies on demand.

A Dumpling Primer in an Unlikely Wrapper

2006-03-04T08:53:00.000-05:00

In recent years the New York Daily News' food coverage has rarely made me hungry. I say that as someone who wrote the Eats column there for a few years in the mid nineties, and someone who used to really look forward to reading restaurant reviews and features by Arthur Schwartz and Daniel Young in the seventies, eighties and early nineties. But yesterday there was a piece by Jean Tang on Chinese dumplings that actually made me jump on a subway to Chinatown to chow down. Many of the places she wrote about were the usual suspects (Fried Dumpling, Dumpling Man), but a couple of them were legitimate finds. China North Dumpling (15 Essex St., 212-529-2670) is the "home of the ugly dumpling." According to Tang, "the tiny Kingdom of Pancakes (7 Allen St. 212966-5658) makes dumplings that are "hearty, with chew and flavor," and "tender beef stew in rich, peppery pork stock." Yum!

A Healthy Snack that Doesn't Suck

2006-02-28T17:25:00.000-05:00

Returning from a series of business meetings, I found myself wandering through the food market in New York's Grand Central Station. At the Murray's Cheese shop kiosk I came across a container of Largueta Almonds. Murray's proprietor Rob Kaufelt is actually a pretty good writer, so without his permission I am reciting the copy he put on the label, because it's shockingly accurate: "There are snacks you can't stop eating that you know you really need to get the monkey off your back. There are other snacks you can't stop eating, and it's no big thing. These are those snacks: artisanally produced, toasted, lightly salted and high in Vitamin E. Good for you, so chow down." I'll tell you something else he doesn't mention; these almonds are incredibly delicious, light and crunchy and addictive. So order some. You might never reach for a Planter's peanut or a Jordan Almond again.

Finally, a salmon dish to love

2006-02-26T18:53:00.000-05:00

I can't stand most salmon dishes I eat. Farm-raised salmon has a flavor and texture I find off-putting and weird. So when our friend Eric, one of the best home cooks I know, requested I bring him a pound and a half of salmon and a bunch of cilantro when we came to visit him in rural Pennsylvania, I thought about calling him and saying, "I don't eat salmon." But then I found some Wild Alaskan King Salmon at my local fishmarket, and that's what we ended up transporting to the wilds of Tyler Hill, PA. Yes, the wild salmon was almost twice as expensive as the farm-raised salmon, but it was ten times as good. Eric made the best pan-fried salmon cakes I've ever eaten, accompanied by some terrific beet tartare. The salmon cakes were golden brown and crispy and there wasn't a trace of musty, muddy salmon flavor to be found. The sweet beet tartare was enlivened by a dash of hot sauce and some capers. Without further ado, the recipes: SALMON CAKES Bake one and one-half lbs. salmon fillet, salted and peppered, on an olive oil-greased baking sheet at 375 degrees for 15 minutes. Remove and let cool. Check for random bones. Place in mixing bowl and break apart into 1-2” flakes. The salmon should be slightly undercooked.In another mixing bowl combine;1 red pepper chopped medium1 red onion chopped fine2 tbs. parsley chopped fine2 tbs. small capersAdd the salmon and then blend the ingredients together. Stir in one lightly beaten egg . Then sprinkle in 1/3 cup freshly-made bread crumbs.With a glass of cold water at your side to periodically rinse off your hands, form the mixture into individual patties, about 3” across, 1 1/2” high. They should be fairly wet. Dredge the patties in additional bread crumbs and let sit a few minutes.Heat 1 cup canola or vegetable oil in a frying pan, and add patties just before oil begins to smoke. Fry on one side about 4-5 minutes, turn very carefully, and finish them up in about 3-4 minutes. Remove carefully from the pan and place on paper towels.Serve immediately with cilantro sauce.CILANTRO SAUCEMix together in the bowl of a cuisinart, then pulse five times:2 egg yolks3 tbs. lime juice1 tsp. soy1 tsp. sesame oil1 tsp. Dijon mustardThen add:1/2 tsp. hot sauce or Tabasco2 cloves garlic, finely minced1 cup cilantro leavesPulse 10 times; then, keeping the motor running, dribble 1/3 cup sesame or peanut oil in a steady stream to make an emulsion. Add salt to taste and serve, or better, chill and serve. BEET TARTARE(adapted from a Jean-Georges recipe in the Times)Put 6 beets in a deep saucepan, cover with cold water, bring to a boil and cook 20-25 minutes. Drain, run under cold water, peel, and cut each beet into eighths. Drizzle 3 tsps. sherry vinegar over beets and put aside.In the bowl of a Cuisinart, add together 6 roughly chopped cornichons, 1 chopped shallot, 1/2 cup drained capers, 1 tsp. (to taste) hot sauce, plus 2 additional tsps. sherry vinegar. Add beets. Pulse the mixture, don’t puree, until beets are very finely and evenly chopped.Add 1 tbs. mayonnaise and let sit for several hours or overnight. Serve room temperature or cold.

Can you major in Lunch?

2006-02-24T10:25:00.000-05:00

Alice Water's piece on the Op Ed page of today's Times is required reading. She wants schools to consider giving course credit for lunch, which Alice would make into an interactive learning experience. What a delicious notion! If I had gotten credit for lunch when I was in school, I definitely would have graduated Pie Bita Kappa.

Chicken Soup's Got Soul

2006-02-24T09:52:00.000-05:00

Three months in the slurping, my chicken soup piece came out Wednesday in the Times. For those of you who don't read the Times, I am going to list my ten favorite chicken soups (I sampled a hundred) here, along with a few others I really liked that just failed to crack the top ten:
Blue Ribbon Bakery 33 Downing Street (Bedford Street), (212) 337-0404. Matzo ball soup, $7.75.
Cubana Café 110 Thompson Street (Prince Street), (212) 966-5366. Chicken soup with avocado, tomato, cilantro and yuca (cassava), $5.
Fred's at Barneys New York 660 Madison Avenue (60th Street), ninth floor, (212) 833-2200. Estelle's chicken soup, $8.
Grand Sichuan International, location at 229 Ninth Avenue (24th Street), (212) 620-5200. Chicken and pea shoots, $8.95; chicken with pickled cabbage, $7.95.
Hearth 403 East 12th Street (First Avenue), (646) 602-1300. Chicken soup with escarole, chicken dumplings and pastina, $12.
Momofuku Noodle Bar 163 First Avenue (10th Street), (212) 475-7899. Chicken noodle soup with Shanghai thick noodles, onions and scallions, $11.
New Chao Chow Restaurant 111 Mott Street (between Canal and Hester Streets), (212) 226-2590. Chao Chow wonton soup, $3.50.
Perry St. 176 Perry Street (West Street), (212) 352-1900. Chicken soup with vegetables, avocado and dill, $13.50.
Pio Maya 40 West Eighth Street (Avenue of the Americas), (212) 254-2277. Chicken soup, $3.25.
Sripraphai 64-13 39th Avenue, Woodside, Queens, (718) 899-9599. Chicken soup with mushrooms, coconut milk and galangal; Cornish hen in hot and sour soup (tom-zap), both $7.

A few others I really enjoyed:

Akdeniz: 19 W. 46th Street (bet. Fifth and Sixth Aves.) 212-575-2307; Slightly creamy chicken soup that comes to life with a squeeze of the lemon they serve it with.
Al Bustan: 827 Third Avenue (bet. 50th and 51st Sts.) 212-759-5933 Lebanese Chicken soup enlivened with the same lemon squeeze and, surprisingly, a touch of cinammon.
Azuri Cafe: 465 W.51st (between 9th and 10th Aves.) 212-265-2920; I was lovin' the chicken soup here until I put the first piece of matzo ball in my mouth. It was ice cold. So I cut up the matzo balls into little pieces and let them sit in the soup for a minute or two to heat them up. Brilliant!
Brooklyn Diner USA: 212 W. 57th Street (between Broadway and Seventh Ave.) 212-977-2280; Fine classic chicken soup with moist chicken and a toothsome broth.
Teresa's: 103 First Avenue (between 6th and 7th Sts.) 212-228-0604; If the noodles were al dente at this Polish coffee shop, this bargain chicken soup ($2.75) would have cracked the top ten.

Oreo Thin Crisps Rock: A Dieter's Secret Weapon

2006-02-23T12:41:00.000-05:00

I can't believe I haven't talked to all of you about Oreo Thin Crisps. They are a dieter's best friend. They come is 4/5 oz. 100 calorie individual bags, and what you get is a bunch of Oreo crackers (they look like chocolate cheez-its) without the cream inside. Why do I love them? Let me count the ways. They're crispy, chocolatey and not too sweet. Unlike many Oreo lovers, I do not have a passion for the grainy, sugary filling inside regular Oreos. So I don't miss the cream filling at all. Because they come in these nifty 100 calorie bags, you are automatically practicing portion control when you eat them. There are perhaps 20 in each bag, so it take you awhile to get through a bag. Lastly, they have o grams of Trans Fat and no cholesterol. They satisfy my sweet tooth and my chocolate craving. I have tried the 100 calorie bag of South Beach Diet peanut butter cookies, but they only come two to a bag, and they taste too damn healthy. So I say this to the food scientist team at Kraft Foods that developed Oreo Thin Crisps. You have the undying gratitude of dieters everywhere, and I personally think you should receive a MacArthur Genius grant. Please note: I have no connection with anyone at Kraft Foods.

How old is your beef? You'll never know.

2006-02-21T15:55:00.000-05:00

Marian Burro had a terrific piece today in the "A" section of the NY Times about yet another food process that's bound to confuse consumers. Apparently some packaged beef in supermarkets is being sold in "airtight packages treated with a touch of carbon monoxide to help the product stay red for weeks." The picture accompanying the piece is truly strange, two steaks bought on the same day, February 3rd, and photographed on February 16th. The treated steak is bright red, and the untreated steak is a mottled combinaion of brown and red. This is not my idea of dry-aging.

Paris Eats

2006-02-20T10:56:00.000-05:00

My brother Mike just got back from a long weekend in Paris (lucky him) and because he is as obsessed with food as I am, he immediately called us to tell me about two great meals he had. Le Severo is a tiny bistro that specializes in great aged Limousin beef, saucisson and frites. Those are all the major Levine food groups in one meal. Need I say more? Perhaps to counteract the effects of all the aforementioned animal fat he and his wife Carol also went to a really simple fish restaurant, Cagouille. He found both restaurants on Patricia Wells' website. Wells is the restaurant critic at the International Tribune and a terrific cookbook writer. Her Food Lover's Guide to Paris was one of the inspirations for my own New York Eats. The website is quite comprehensive when it comes to restaurants in Paris (both casual and formal), but what I miss on the website are her write-ups of bakeries and chocolatiers, which to me made her book truly swing. Otherwise the site is a superb resource and reference for Paris food.

Amsterdam Eats

2006-02-17T17:35:00.000-05:00

My friend Adam asked me for places to eat in Amsterdam. I used to go to Amsterdam on business four times a year. There's a lot of bad food in what is a lovely city. There's a great sandwich place I always used to go to called Loekie (ph:31-20) 624-4370),that has the justifiably legendary pata negra (Black Foot) ham from Spain. My friend Mark Bittman had a piece 3 1/2 years ago in the Times that mentioned a few nifty places. He talked about De Kas (ph: (31-20) 462-4562), which serves mostly local and organic food in a greenhouse surrounded by a garden; a nouvelle Indonesian place called Blue Pepper (ph:(31-20) 489-7039), owned by a Michelin-starred chef; Balthazar's Kitchen(open Wed.-Fri. only), located in the hipster neighborhood called The Jordann (ph:(31-20)420-2114 , with a single reasonably priced prix fixe menu; and De Reiger(ph:(31-20) 624-7426, a neighborhood bar also in Jordann that serves "the Platonic ideal of cafe food." Adam, do not wander into any old restaurant in Amsterdam. You will be sorry.

Post Valentine's Day Chocolate Rush

2006-02-17T08:48:00.000-05:00

Now that Valentine's Day has come and gone chocolate lovers can return to their posts without the rest of the country getting in their way. Now that I'm eating and living vicariously through my blog (I'm down 25 pounds, in case you're wondering) I'm going to talk about chocolate. Consumer Reports just came out with their chocolate ratings in their February issue. I must admit that generally I have been underwhelmed by the magazine's food ratings. I'm often struck by how antiseptic and clinical its approach is. It seems to me that CR never answers the essential food lover's question; namely, is something delicious or not? So for those people interested in DELICIOUS here are two of my favorite American chocolatiers that Consumer Reports somehow missed. Michael Recchiuti and Larry Burdick are two Americans who have mastered European chocolate-making techniques without losing their sense of humor. Their sometimes whimsical creations invariably feature great ingredients used in the right proportions. I'm particularly fond of Recchiutti's homemade s'mores (available May-Oct.), bitter chocolate and caramel sauces, key lime apples (available all year) and pears(available August-Oct.), and Burdick's chocolate mice, hot chocolate, and assorted chocolates. And come June I'm going to order some of Recchiuti's burnt caramel almonds, which I've never tried. Don't those sound outrageously good?

Tom's Barcelona Bites

2006-02-09T10:28:00.000-05:00

My friend Tom is on his way to Barcelona, so of course he asked me where he should eat. I've never been to Barcelona (a shocking admission for a foodie), so I immediately called Jeff Steingarten, who's eaten everywhere. Alexander Lobrano has a pretty comprehensive take on Barcelona food on Epicurious. Generally I find Lobrano, who has lived in Paris for almost twenty years, to be pretty reliable if a little snooty. Time Out Barcelona also devotes a fair amount of space to food, but in general I find Time Out's writers all over the world to be inexperienced and not as knowledgable as they should be. Steingarten just called, and as he doesn't have an assistant he can't find the piece in Vogue he wrote on Barcelona restaurants. But a lovely woman at Vogue named Phyllis Rifield graciously faxed me the article, whiich is from August of 2002. Steingarten told me on the phone that Cal Pep (Placa de las Olles 8 (93-310-79-61) is the one place you must go (get there early, he says, or be prepared to wait quite a while for a table). Other Tapas spots Steingarten likes are Estrella De Plata (Placa de Palau 13 (93-268-06-35), Cata 181, Valencia 181 (93-323-68-18), Santa Maria, Comerc 17, (93-315-12-27), and El Xampanyet, Montcada 22 (93-319-70-03). I'm jealous, Tom. I want a full report.

the chocolate section of the ny times

2006-02-08T09:29:00.000-05:00

Today's New York Times Dining Section seems enrobed in chocolate. Kim Severson's piece of single bean chocolate varietals is hilarious, because I think she concludes (as I have) that it's literally impossible to tell one bean from another. When she asks a chocolate sommelier (give me a break!) if he can tell one country's beans from another, he says, "Regions I can tell. Continents, at least. I'm still working on the countries." Doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. I'm desperate to try Loretta Keller's AZO Chocolate Cake. The recipe sounds ridiculously easy, and the picture in the paper is ridiculously enticing. And once I made the cake, I wish I could wash it down with a bicerin, the combination of espresso, liquified chocolate and fior de latte. But alas I would have to fly to Turin to drink one at Al Bicerin. Maybe next year.

Gael Greene Groove

2006-02-07T12:29:00.000-05:00

I'm in a Gael Greene groove today, maybe because she's my neighbor AND because her sexy memoir is about to come out (more about that later), so here's her late 2004 take on Parisian restaurants. I'm going to call Jeffrey Steingarten to get his latest take on Paris, and with any luck I will post it today sometime. Jeffrey is sometimes very difficult to get a hold of, but I'll do my best.

Venice Part 2

2006-02-07T12:04:00.000-05:00

I always like to compare at least two reliable and credible sources when I am about to go somewhere, so in that spirit here is Faith Willinger's take on Venetian food. Faith is a food writer and cookbook author who has lived in Italy for many years now, and I have found her to be fairly reliable. She can (like all of us) get a little too chummy with some of the people she writes about, but she certainly knows Italian food inside and out, especially northern Italian food (she lives in Florence). Her book Eating in Italy (1998) is worth seeking out, as is Fred Plotkin's Italy for the Gourmet Traveler (1996). Both books are dated but still useful. When you add all of this info up we may be, in my son's words, getting into 511 (too much information) territory, but I'd rather err on the side of too much info rather than too little.

Your Food Advisor Redux

2006-02-07T10:15:00.000-05:00

I could be telling you about how thrilled I was to get on the scale yesterday after my Monday squash game to find that I am now down 22 pounds (It's probably more like 18 pounds when you factor in the water weight I lost playing squash). But you're probably bored with that subject already. So I am going to switch gears and get back to what I do best, turning people on to the best food I've tasted AND the best eating advice from other writers I know and trust. A friend of mine just called for eating advice in Venice. In the October 2005 Travel + Leisure Gael Greene wrote a terrific guide to eating in Venice. Gael is generally right on the money when it comes to restaurants (especially upscale restaurants), and she is a terrific writer, so if you're planning a trip to Venice this is the one guide you need to have. Gael always makes eating sound like such sexy and pleasurable fun, which it is. In my experience (three trips to Venice) her take here is generally spot on, though I think she overrates Fiaschetteria Toscana. I have always had really snooty service there and pretty good though not extraordinary food.

I'm down seventeen pounds! It's a great day.

2006-01-24T08:59:00.000-05:00

I got on the scale with a fair amount of trepidation this morning. Last night I went to a party Gourmet threw for its 65th birthday at the new Morimoto at Tenth Avenue and 16th Street.
The place is completely over the top, with white gauze-like ceilings and all kinds of nutty design touches that I'll get into in another post. But great food was flowing like bottled water at one of those restaurants where they keep opening and pouring the designer H2O to get your check up;
Duck three ways on a foie gras croissant, tuna tartare laid out like a painting on a canvass, tons of sushi, kobe beef teriyaki. You get the picture. I had decided to eat dinner at this party and I tried to keep a lid on my eating. I thought I had succeeded pretty well, but I wasn't sure. It's hard to really know what you have consumed when it's all flying by you when you're standing and socializing.

So when I got on the scale and it had me down four pounds from last week I didn't believe it.
So I got off my digital scale, cleared the display, and weighed myself again. Same result!
I have now lost 17 pounds, and my goal was to lose at least 16 pounds by my birthday, which is Friday the 27th of January.

I feel particularly gratified because I have managed to lose weight during Thanksgiving and the holiday season, and while I have been doing my foodie thing judging two Iron Chef shows, writing a story for the Times which requires me to eat a fair amount of food.

I only hope my weight this morning wasn't one of those cruel aberrations you experience when you are on a diet, where you lose a lot of weight one week only to put it back on the next time you weigh yourself.

Cast Iron Chef

2006-01-13T16:44:00.000-05:00

I was a judge on Iron Chef a couple of days ago. The battle was between Iron Chef Cat Cora and Walter Scheib, who until recently was the White House chef. It was my second time judging,and this time I was able to watch the chefs more intently, as I wasn't worried about not knowing what to do. The first thing I noticed is how hard the chefs and sous-chefs work. For a solid hour they are whirling dervishes, chopping up a storm, running back and forth to the spice rack and the fridge, and moving from burner to oven to mixing bowl witout missing a grain of salt. I had never met or interviewed either contestant, and in fact I had never tasted food cooked by either one of them before the show. Scheib was unflappable (he didn't break a sweat the whole time, even when one of my fellow judges asked him if he had to cut up W's food from him) and very articulate when he explained what he tried to do. Cora was charming and energetic, and I loved her slight southern drawl. I have to say the dishes they each prepared were quite impressive, and I found myself in a quandary when I filled out the scorecard. I want to dispel a couple of Iron Chef myths. Number one, the fix isn't in, so it's not the culinary equivalent of Pro Wrestling. They don't tell you to vote for the Iron Chef. Number two, the judges don't confer whey they render their judgement. In fact, I overheard my fellow judges Ted Allen (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy) and Cady Huffman (the original Ula in the Broadway production of The Producers) talking about something, and I asked them them to repeat what they had said. They said they couldn't until I handed my scorecard in. Once I handed it in, I was amazed when I discovered that each of us had picked the same chef as the winner, with the exact same winning margin. Who won? I'm sworn to secrecy, though I can tell you that I managed to stay on my diet. In fact, I weighed myself this morning, and I lost another pound this week. Maybe it was all that walking I did from the judge's perch to the table and back. I had a great time, and I resisted the urge to say when confronted with a strange dessert strudel made with the secret ingredient, "This could be called Strange Pie for the Straight Guy."

Is peanut butter a drug?

2006-01-09T16:53:00.000-05:00

I have kicked peanut butter cold turkey. I last dipped my spoon into a jar of Jiff Creamy peanut butter before Thanksgiving. God, how I miss it. In fact, let me count the ways I love peanut butter. I love its creamy texture; I love its essential nuttiness; I even love the little bit of sugar they put into commercial peanut butter (I know many people will consider me a peanut butter philistine because I find unsweetened all-natural peanut butter a bore); I love the various and sundry ways to enjoy peanut butter: straight up with a spoon, on a single piece of white or whole grain bread, with jam or honey between two pieces of bread, on top of a scoop of vanilla or chocolate ice cream; and perhaps my favorite, with sliced bananas and a little bit of honey or jam. I need a peanut butter fix so badly. But I'm going to stay strong.

Fat Food Writer's Blues on the Radio January 4th

2006-01-04T06:22:00.000-05:00

Hey, everybody, today Wednesday January 4th I'm going to be hosting Food Talk on New York's WOR 710 am on your radio dial, from 11:00 am to noon Eastern time. I'm going to be talking about food blogging with my friend, Food and Wine Magazine columnist Pete Wells, along with recipes, neighborhood bakeries, restaurants, and anything else listeners want to call in and chat about. The number to call is 800-321-0710.

For a Fat Food Writer Every Day Really is Xmas

2006-01-03T09:15:00.000-05:00

I managed to get throught the holidays without gaining any weight. In fact, I lost a pound between Christmas and New Year's Eve. I am particularly proud of this given the amount of food that not so mysteriously makes it way to our house during the holiday season. You see, for a food writer, every day is Xmas in terms of the flow of food presents. While the rest of the world only has to resist temptation from Thanksgiving to New Year's Day every year, food writers are constantly tempted by people who send us food to sample 24-7 the entire year.

This year we received the following at our house between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day:

Buttered pecans and candied pecans from North Carolina.
Peanuts from Virginia
Six pints of Graeter's Ice Cream in Cincinatti
Six pints of Capogiro Gelato from Philadelphia.
A huge gift basket of food sent by a writer client of my literary agent wife
Samples of what turned out to be an awful low-cal ice cream.
Two kinds of pound cake.
A pound of delicious Smoked Salmon.
Three different kinds of designer chocolate
An eight pound smoked brisket from Texas.

Most of these were holiday presents from friends and colleagues. I know it sounds churlish to complain about this flow of free grub, but if you're someone who adores food who happens to be on a diet, it does make it difficult.

I am accepting all gifts of kelp and miso this post-holiday season.

Eat pears if you don't want to look like a pear

2005-12-20T16:02:00.000-05:00

I seem to be on the pear diet. I eat at least two pears a day, and I hope that when I get on the scale Thursday, I'll be down ten pounds. Not bad for a fat food writer. A ripe pear is a mighty fine food, one of mother nature's sweetest, juiciest creations.
I've been sampling different pear varieties. Bartletts are the Tauruses of the food world, an excellent, everyday eating pear, and a good bosc is a stabbingly sweet substitute for baked goods or candy. But my favorite pear currently is a red D'Anjou. It has a spicy edge that I find addicting. I am having a hard time figuring out when to eat the red D'Anjous, as the last four I bought haven't gotten much softer over time.

A couple of things I've learned about pears:

Unlike peaches and most apple varieties, pears only ripen off the tree, so I have had good luck buying hard pears and letting them ripen in my kitchen for two days.

Here's a shocker. The pears I bought at my farmer's market this past Saturday had this brown flesh close to the core. They never got really sweet, and they were really meally.
They were nowhere near as good as the pears I've been getting at my local produce market.
I'm sure that the storebought pears were grown in Washington or California to be shipped and stored, while the local pears represented the last of the seasonal bounty.

Still, when storebought pears are better than farmer's market pears, that's a man bites dog story in the food world.

The Second Grade: "You're Fired."

2005-12-17T08:14:00.000-05:00

With the diet going very well, last week I decided to once again talk about food instead of eating it, by agreeing to talk to a class of second graders about pizza. Because I didn't think seven and eight year olds would understand the intricacies of the effect of the immigration laws on the formation of the multi-ethnic pizza culture in America, I decided that since I was speaking to them at one in the afternoon I would bring two kinds of pizza to the class and talk about their similarities and differences.
Pretty simple and straightforward, right? But when I picked up a message on my voice-mail the night before my scheduled lecture, I knew it wasn't going to be just another school presentation. "Ed, this is Sara*, Bobby's mother. Could you please call me?" I don't know anyone named Sara who has a child named Bobby, but being a responsible citizen, I returned the call. Sara turned out to be the mother of a child, Bobby, who was in the class I was going to address. Bobby, his mother explained to me, had severe food allergies (when I asked for specifics, she replied only that his allergies were "deep") that would preclude him from eating pizza. She asked me if I could possibly refrain from bringing pizza into the class. I explained that I was quite sensitive to Bobby's plight, that I had friends and family whose children also had bad food allergies, but that I didn't know how else I could engage a class of second graders in a discussion of pizza. She acquiesced. "If you decide you have to bring pizza to the class, just let me know by 11:00, so I can make something special for Bobby so he won't feel bad about the other kids eating pizza." I got off the phone and congratulated myself on defusing a potentially sticky situation deftly. I was a little worried I was turning into Larry David (Curb Your Enthusiasm) without knowing it.
At 10:15 the next morning I called Sara's house to alert her to my pizza-bringing intentions. Her husband answered, and when I said I was just calling to tell his wife that I would indeed be bringing pizza, he said, "Well, I don't think you can do that. Sara spoke to Bobby's teacher, and I think the teacher decided that it would be best if you didn't bring pizza to the class." He then gave me his wife's cell phone number. When I spoke to Sara she told me that if I wanted to appeal the "no pizza" decision I could speak to the teacher directly.
I called Sally the teacher, who explained to me that if Bobby ate the wrong thing, it could be a life-threatening situation. I guess by this point I was getting really annoyed, because my response was not exactly statesman-like. "I'm not trying to kill the kid,' I said with more than a trace of irony. Sally then explained that the class had already discussed what they would ask me, so there would be plenty of things to talk about without bringing pizza into the classroom.
Being that it was an hour before I was supposed to be addressing the students, I agreed not to bring the pizza.
I then returned a few phone calls and prepared to leave the house to get to the school, a fifteen minute subway ride away. When I got off the phone I noticed I had a message on my voicemail. It was from the head of the parent author committee, the woman who had initially contacted me about speaking to the class. "I'm afraid your presence will no longer be required at the school. I'm terribly sorry about the late notice, but in light of the morning's events the teacher felt like your presence would bring some unwelcome controversy into the second grade. If you would like to speak to me, call me back. But I'm afraid this decision is final."
I called her back, and she explained to me that Sally the teacher thought there was too much bad feeling left over from the pizza/no pizza controversy to let me address the class. "B-but,' I stammered, 'I've talked to many school groups before without incident, and I'm kind of upset that I'm being fired by a second grade class." She explained that there was nothing she could do, that her hands were tied, as the school's policy was to let teachers make decisions of this nature.
So there you have it. I got a pink slip, not from Donald Trump or Martha Stewart, but from the second grade at a progressive private school.
I suppose I have to look at the bright side. It took my mind off food for a couple of hours.

*All names have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty.

Not the Last Temptation for Ed

2005-12-14T10:47:00.000-05:00

When you're a food critic on a diet you're subject to more temptations than one could possibly imagine. Add those temptations to the array of holiday gatherings and the food that accompanies them, and you have a recipe for diet 911.

Last Saturday was a perfect example. I ate lunch with my brother and his wife at the tiny but wonderful pan-Mediterranean bistro August, on Bleecker Street in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. My brother had a German pancake stuffed with caramelized quince and topped with powder sugar. Delicious! My sister-in-law had a frittata topped with skordalia, the Greek potato and garlic puree. Virtuous me opted for the Greek yogurt parfait topped by cherries soaked in Burgundy. One diet disaster averted, three to go.

We went early to a dinner thrown for our artist friend Mike Sells, whose thought-provoking and disturbing exhibit just went up at the Jason McCoy Gallery at 57th Street and Madison Avenue in NYC. There were lots of great-looking cheeses on hand, but I managed to stay an hour and just have one pretzel.

Dinner was with old and dear friends at a Tuscan restaurant, Beppe. The food was a little disappointing there (I have had many wonderful meals there in the past), but as I know the owners, they sent out every dessert they serve to our table. I tried to take one spoonful of each (panna cotta, warm chocolate cake, pineapple upside-down cake, homemade s'more, a cheesecake, and an assortment of ice creams), and for the most part I succeeded.

After dinner everyone else at my table went home, but I went to a party for some friends of ours, Kathryn Kellinger, a food writer, and Lee Hanson, her chef husband. Their table was full of roast baby suckling pig (one of Lee's favorite recipes) and various and assorted cookies (Kathryn loves to bake). Once again I managed to resist.

These are certainly not going to be the last temptations I am confronted by as I try to lose 40 pounds, but I figure it's a pretty good sign that I managed to resist most of the goodies put before me.

Mallomars dreams

2005-12-11T10:59:00.000-05:00

When you're on a diet, and you love food as much as I do, you find yourself living (and eating) vicariously through other people's experiences and stories. Last Thursday New York Times reporter James Barron wrote a hilarious and sharp-eyed piece about mallomars, those superb chocolate-covered marshamallow cookies only available in the cooler months. His lead: "Proust had his madeleines. Douglas Boxer had his Mallomars." He then goes on to write: "like Beaujolais nouveau, Mallomars are not a year-round delicacy....Mallomars return to supermarket in the fall after a warm-weather break. But Mallomars connoisseurs do not celebrate by holding tastings of the new batch or by calling friends to announce "les Mallomars sont arrives."

Barron called me for a comment on the story, but I returned his call after the story was put to bed. I told him that he should have gotten a quote from Alice Waters. After all, Alice, as a huge proponent of seasonal foods and cooking, should appreciate the seasonal nature of Mallomars, even if it is a packaged, processed food made by Kraft.

Barron then goes on to pose a series of cosmically hilarious Mallomars questions:
"What is the singular of Mallomars, anyway?"
"If they can produce chocolate that can survive in Saudi Arabia, why don't they do that with Mallomars?"

Now I really like Mallomars, though I'm not as passionate about them as many of the people Barron interviewed. But when you're on a diet, a Mallomar (I have made an executive decision that Mallomar is singular) sounds just about perfect.

Diets Try Men's Souls

2005-12-05T10:32:00.000-05:00

I have now walked past my wife's scrumptious lemon-glazed pound cake ten times in the last eight hours, and so far I have been able to resist its siren call.

The cake was left over from our dinner party last night, which severely tested my diet discipline. I made two recipes from Mario Batali's excellent new book, Molto Italiano, and both were huge hits with the crowd we had assembled. The Winter Caprese salad, slow-roasted (for two hours) Roma tomatoes, Buffalo-milk mozzarella, toasted pine nuts, a dab of pesto, and a basil leaf, was a fine starter. I was amazed that the totally cardboardy winter Roma tomatoes were transformed by the slow-roasting.

The main course was a braised (in red wine and tomato sauce) pork butt that had been browned in a paste of garlic, pancetta and Italian parsley. The 7 1/2 hunk of pork cooked on the stove for four hours, so by the time we served it, it was as tender and flavorful as the best barbecue.
In fact, I decided it WAS Italian barbecue.

The pork was accompanied by a celery root puree my wife made from a BassSerena cookbook, Serena, Food and Stories.

I tried to watch my caloric intake by not having seconds and eating very little of the cheese and bread we served beforehand. I also made sure to eat a couple of pears and an apple in the course of the day, which was mostly spent shopping and cooking. I also had a bowl of cereal for breakfast and two pieces of whole-grain bread and a piece of American cheese (Deluxe, not the cheese food crap) for lunch, so I wouldn't be starving when our guests showed up around seven.

I had lost five pounds going into the dinner, and I will get on the scale Wednesday to see if I can maintain my weight loss momentum. Oh, yeah I broke down and had a couple of bites of the lemon pound cake tonight.

fatsos need flavor

2005-12-02T22:35:00.000-05:00

No matter how well you dress up vegetables for me, I have to have some red meat to go along with them. So when I had to meet someone for lunch in a part of New York City that has very few good restaurants I opted for Keen's Chop House, a venerable red meat palace that's been around more than a hundred years. It was by far the most interesting option available to me and my lunch companion.

I thought I showed great restraint at Keen's. I resisted the bread basket completely. I had nary a fried potato or a fried onion ring. I got the lunch-sized sliced sirloin steak, a mere eight ounces of fine dry-aged prime beef, instead of the one pound dinner sirloin. I asked for green beans instead of the french fries that come with the dish, and I started with a salad. I thought I was being downright abstemious. I skipped dessert entirely. It was a very low carbohydrate lunch (just the handful in the green beans).

For dinner I had two hot dogs, no buns, and a couple of slices worth of pizza topping. My sweet was a pear.

We'll see what the scale says tomorrow.

The First Day is the Hardest

2005-11-30T13:10:00.000-05:00

The first day of a diet is always the hardest. Everything you think about food-wise seems so damned appealing. And for someone like me, who knows where almost every great morsel of food is in New York (and a lot of other places for that matter), it's almost unimaginably difficult to move about in my fair city and not duck into that great apple turnover place I just passed.

So yesterday was tough. Breakfast was cereal with 1% milk and Equal, and a fine Bartlett pear. Lunch was two small slices of multi-grain bread topped with egg salad, with a third slice of said bread with a measured tablespoon of peanut butter and a teaspoon of jam, and another pear.

I played squash after lunch, and according to my heart rate monitor, I expended 700 calories doing so. Not too shabby.

At 6:30 I went to a book party for Hidden Kitchens, the terrific book written by NPR's Kitchen Sisters, Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson. There temptation was everywhere. Forget about all the passarounds that appeared every few seconds. There were mini-hamburgers made on a George Foreman Grill (which believe it or not plays a significant role in the book). Outside a food truck was doling out portions of pepper steak and jerk pork and curried chicken, macaroni and cheese and peas and rice.

So did I resist, knowing that I was going out to dinner after the party?

I did pretty well. I had one bite of one of the mini-burgers and a few bites of the jerk pork
and the pepper steak. It certainly could have been a lot worse.

At dinner at Onera, my favorite New York Upper West Side neighborhood restaurant, I avoided bread, dessert and just about every carb temptation I encountered.

I had some terrific raw fish preparations as an appetizer and then a delectable piece of swordfish flavored with orange, raisins and olives, surrounded by cauliflower.

All in all, I would say it was a fairly promising first diet day.

Fat food writer's blues

2005-11-30T10:11:00.000-05:00

I admit it. I've gotten fat. I was a fat kid, and I got even fatter in college. Of course I tried the Atkins diet in college, and I did lose a lot of weight, but I also came down with what I believe is the only known case of scurvy in this country in the last fifty years because I stopped eating citrus fruits, as the late doc atkins instructed me to do, and I neglected to take the vitamin c he suggested.

After college I came to New York and worked in the music business. I succeeded in losing 65 pounds right after I got to Gotham, and I managed to keep it off until I started writing about food.

Now, thirty years after I took off all that weight, I find myself at a similar weight crossroads. I weigh even a little more than I weighed in college, and I hate myself for it. I tell myself it's impossible to be a food writer and lose weight, but that's bullshit.

So I am embarking on my own personal weight-loss program based on everything I've read in recent years.

I'm going to focus on eating lots of protein and vegetables and limit my carbohydrate intake. The carbs I'll eat will be whole grains and fruits like apples and pears. I will try to limit my fat intake to good fats like olive oil as much as possible, though I know I can't go off bacon cold turkey. Lastly, I am going to practice portion control and I am desperately going to try to avoid stupid, wasteful calories like potato chips and cheap, bad cookies, which don't even taste good.
Oh, yeah, I'm going to try to limit my peanut butter intake significantly. I can go through a jar in three days if I don't watch it.

I already play squash three times a week, and I am going to try to do something else two days a week, either swim or use an elliptical trainer.

I'm too embarrrassed to tell all of you what I weigh now, but suffice to say I need to lose forty pounds minimum. I will keep all of you abreast of my progress every three days. I don't think I can deal with getting on the scale every day.

Sincerely,

Your fat food writer.

strawberry fields not forever

2005-11-28T17:43:00.000-05:00

Thanks to our friends in the Bush administration, methyl bromide, a pesticide banned all over the world because it depletes the earth's protective ozone layer and can harm the human neuro system, is still used in the good old USA on tomatoes, strawberries, peppers, and, yes, even Christmas trees. Merry Christmas to you, too, Karl Rove. Makes you think about going all organic, doesn't it?

The Turkey that Came in from the Cold

2005-11-25T08:31:00.000-05:00

Another Thanksgiving has come and gone, along with the usual assortment of mini-triumphs and mini-disasters that always seem to accompany this most food-centric of holidays. I have been brining my turkey the last few years, which in and of itself causes many problems in a NYC apartment. We have a small fridge, so finding a cool place to brine the turkey in overnight is always an issue. This year I decided to brine it on a friend's penthouse terrace in our building.
I placed the turkey along with ten gallons of water and two cups of salt in a plastic storage bin I bought at my local hardware store, and deposited it on the aforementioned terrace at 6 p.m. the night before Thanksgiving. At midnight I logged on to get my e-mail and also checked on the weather. Winds of more than 20 mph were forecast for NYC and vicinity that night, and those winds began to prey upon my usual pre-Thanksgiving anxiety. We went to bed around 12:15, and I found myself thinking about the turkey flying off the roof and killing or maiming some innocent bystander in for the Thanksgiving Day parade (our apartment is just a few blocks from where the parade begins). So after tossing and turning and considering this possibility for about an hour I decided to take the turkey in for the night. I took the elevator up to the penthouse and brought the turkey in from the cold and wind. I was relieved not to find anyone sleeping in the apartment (my friends were in Rome, and I hadn't told them I was going to brine my turkey at their place, so I was more than a little concerned that I was going to walk in to find friends of theirs staying there). I had already rehearsed what I was going to say: "Don't be scared. I'm just a friend and neighbor taking my turkey in from the cold."
I brought the turkey in and put it and some of the brining liquid in a big pasta pot in my frend's fridge. I took the plastic container with the rest of the now-bloody brining liquid back down to our house, and put it in our bathtub. Armed with the knowledge that my turkey was not going to wreak havoc in anyone else's life that night, I slept like a baby.
Oh, yeah, the brined turkey was magnificent. Even the white meat was tender and moist.
And even though there was an incident at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade which slightly injured two people, I knew that my turkey wasn't responsible.

turkey tumult

2005-11-17T09:48:00.000-05:00

Given that I read on-line every major newspaper's Thanksgiving-obsessed food section this past Wednesday on SauteWednesday, I feel compelled to share with all of you my Thanksgiving menu.

I buy an Eberly Farms Organic Turkey and brine it overnight. This year I hope to avoid last year's catastrophe, which resulted from buying a cheap styrofoam cooler to brine the bird in. The cooler broke and there was a flood of salty brine water all over our kitchen.
Other years I've bought Kosher turkeys and Murray's free-roaming turkeys, and had good luck with both os those as well. Just try to avoid buying a Butterball. They have a strange unnatural taste, probably from the crap that is injected into them. The most fashionable turkey to buy this year is a heritage bird. They're much more expensive than even my organic bird, but they do have a more intense and distinct flavor. If you like dark meat, this is the bird for you. If you haven't ordered one by now, you're probably out of luck. Every website that is selling them appears to be sold out.

I use the Silver Palate Cookbook recipe to cook the turkey with a few modifications. I've tried the high-speed roasting technique advocated by Barbra Kafka with mixed results. Here's a turkey roasting primer I came across in the Washington Post. Personally, I just use the Silver Palate recipe, brine the sucker, and turn the bird once halfway through the roasting process, I get moist, flavorful dark and white meat, crispy skin, and an altogether delicious bird.

I make a cornbread-sausage stuffing with apples also inspired by a Silver Palate recipe from the same, above-mentioned book. I make it easy on myself by using bags of cubed Pepperidge Farm corn bread stuffing and mix in both sage sausage and Italian sweet sausage, freshly cut apples, walnuts and some fresh herbs thrown in just to keep me from feeling the wrath of Alice Waters.

I usually make two kinds of potatoes; sweet potatoes with maple syrup, butter and heavy cream, and George Germon's equally decadent recipe for mashed potatoes. George's recipe is in Cucina Simpatica, the wonderful book he wrote with his wife Joanne Killeen. I've made the sweet potatoes with both fresh sweet potatoes and canned sweet potatoes in light syrup, and they're great either way. When in doubt stir in more cream or butter into the pan, and you will never go wrong.

My wife insists we have something green, so we either have brussels sprouts that I roast at 450 degrees with lardon (thick bacon cubes) or a broccoli puree made with plenty of grated Parmigiana Reggiano or Grana Padana.

For dessert, I just gather pies from various sources. If you want to be intrepid and make pie, I would advise buying a copy of Humble Pie, Anne Dimock's brilliant treatise on my most favorite dessert in the universe. I've never made a pie using her recipe, but I've tasted pie she's made, and she might be the best pie baker on the planet.

Happy Turkey Day to all! But I'll be checking in before Thursday in any case.

Strange Brew

2005-11-16T19:21:00.000-05:00

This just in from Denise Neil of the Wichita Eagle, by way of SauteWednesday.

The hipster soda company Jones has stocked Target with their Holiday six pack.

It includes (and I kid you not):

Brussels sprouts soda Ms. Neil claims that "it resembles a bottle of watered-down antifreeze, but antifreeze probably tastes better." One of her tasters described the soda as "the most disgusting consumer product ever invented."

Turkey and gravy soda: About this one she said, "If you're really inclined to drink your poultry, you'd be better off putting your own Thanksgiving bird in a blender."

Wild herb soda: One of Ms. Neil's tasters said of this one: "It smells good but tastes like flat gymnasium sweat." Isn't all gymnasium sweat flat?

Pumpkin pie soda: Said Ms. Neil, "We had high hopes for this yummy-sounding drink, but they were misplaced."

Cranberry soda: "The only consumable soda of the bunch...and was not nearly as fun as the others."

And I thought the cel-ray soda my dad drank was pretty disgusting. Compared to the above flavors, cel-ray is a cola.

I'm on my way to Target as I'm writing this to pick up a Jones holiday pack.

turkey toons

2005-11-15T18:35:00.000-05:00

http://www.msn.americangreetings.com/view.pd?i=382219626&m=1652&rr=y&sou

This will make anyone's Thanksgiving merrier.

I have only one question: Is it a heritage turkey?

Rudolph the red meat steer

2005-11-15T12:12:00.000-05:00

This is going to be the first in a series of posts that I hope will help those holiday gift givers who want to give the gift of deliciousness.

I crave red meat regularly, and though I don't eat as much of it as I would like (the food health police have even gotten to me), there are still times when only a steak will do. And I don't think I'm alone in this regard.

Peter Luger's is still my favorite steakhouse in the country, though I must admit I haven't been to Bern's in Tampa, which some folks consider superior to Luger's. Luger's owners still regularly go down to the wholesale meat market in NY to pick out their meat, and they still dry-age their meat longer than just about anyone. Reservations are hard to come by at Peter Luger's , so I am happy to report that now you can order Peter Luger's steaks on the web. It's expensive, but worth it.

Even more expensive is the dry-aged American Wagyu (Kobe-like) steaks Lobel's, perhaps the priciest (and best) butcher in the country, sells. As far as I know, they are the only outfit anywhere that takes a Kobe-style steak and dry-ages it, and the results are almost scary good. It was simply the best steak I have ever tasted, and hard as this is to believe, worth the hundred dollar price tag.
For less expensive Kobe-like beef Snake River Farms sells a very fine hunk of pseudo-Japanese cow. I particularly like the Zabuton cut. It sounds like the name of a cut of meat from outer space, but it's mighty tasty. For the definitive story on Kobe beef, check out Russ Parsons' Los Angeles Times story.

My beloved Diet Coke now sucks

2005-11-13T12:46:00.000-05:00

I bought a couple of 1.5 liter bottles of Diet Coke for my benefit pizza party. I practically spit out my new first swig.

Diet Coke now has a metallic, unpleasantly sharp and sweet taste. It tastes exactly like Diet Pepsi now.

What have they done to my beloved Diet Coke? Why did they feel the need to mess with something that was so perfect?

Is it different? The label now proudly trumpets the fact that it's sweetened with Splenda.
Was this always so? I don't think so. I believe I have to start a movement to bring back the old Diet Coke.

As of this moment I no longer have a diet cola to call my own.

Can someone enlighten me about this very important, pressing issue?

Pizza with a Cause

2005-11-12T16:18:00.000-05:00

My wife and I had a benefit pizza party for the Goddard Riverside Community Center, which offers housing, counseling and a place to go for the elderly and people of all ages in need in my neighborhood in New York. Forty people paid $125 a person to eat pizza at our house, so I wanted to make it special so that they would think they would get their money's worth.

Phoenix' Chris Bianco, who I think makes the best pizza in the world at his Pizzeria Bianco, sent me fifteen pizzas UPS Next Day, and the pies arrived in perfect condition. Actually, some of Chris' housemade sausage had fallen off what he calls his Wise Guy pizza (also made with smoked mozzarella and caramelized onions), but I took care of that problem by eating all the loose sausage pieces. Anthony Mangieri, who may just make the second best pizza in the world, sent up ten pies from Una Pizza Napoletana, his shop in New York's East Village. Anthony's pizza is sublime. It has a slightly lighter crust with less body, and he is such a purist he does not have toppings on his pizza other than different combinations of buffalo mozzarella, tomato sauce, and fresh cherry tomatoes.

Because I always worry about people at our parties not having enough to eat, we had ten pizzas delivered by three other killer New York pizza makers, Lombardi's, Totonno's and Adrienne's.
So we had five of the pizzerias in the country represented at our apartment.

For starters my friend Mike sent over forty figs stuffed with blue cheese wrapped in prosciutto (he also sent over a salad) made in the kitchens of his contemporary Greek restaurant, Onera.

Mark Buzzio, one of the great salami and sausage makers in this country, donated platters of his incomparable salami, braesola (air-dried beef) and mortadella, made at Salumeria Biellese, his unprepossessing storefront right near Madison Garden.

For dessert we had cookies from a great baker, Yura, and amazing ice creams and sorbets from one of the country's best gelato makers, Jon Snyder of Laboratorio de Gelato.

To drink, Josh Wesson of Best Cellars sent over a case of white and red wines.

I guesss I shouldn't have worried about people not having enough to eat. I counted all the pizza slices up, and I came up with a figure approaching four hundred slices for 40 people to eat.
That's ten slices a person. I guess that's enough.

Thanks to everyone to donated their handmade food, and to everyone who forked over $125 to eat pizza with us. I think you got enough to eat. And just in case you didnt, we sent everyone home with a pizza to go.

Milk Run

2005-11-09T11:25:00.000-05:00

Kim Severson's piece in the New York Times this morning on organic milk is must reading for anyone interested in the organic food movement. Kim is a terrific reporter and a fine writer as well. Full disclosure: I have had lunch with Kim a couple of times, and I write frequently for the Times. She articulates and amplifies some of the issues I raised in my previous post. A few years back Jeff Steingarten and I did a blind milk taste test on our television show. We only tried one organic milk, Horizon, and unlike the Times taste testers, we didn't particularly like it.

More on the state of organics shortly.

Organic, schmorganic

2005-11-07T08:10:00.000-05:00

At my local farmer's market last Saturday a well-dressed woman came up to my friend, farmer Jim Kent, and asked "Are your pears organic?" Kent smiled the smile of someone who has been asked that question a couple of hundred times in the last month or so. "No, they're low-spray, but they're not organic." The woman moved on, in search of something that would make her feel good about buying.

The organic movement is in full flower. Which, overall, is a very good thing. But it seems to me that the woman was asking Jim the wrong question. The questions she should have been asking revolve around whether Jim is a responsible steward of the l75 acres overlooking the Hudson River ninety miles north of Manhattan that his family has been farming for the last 150 years. She should have asked whether he nurtures and takes care of his soil and grass and land in such a way that both the land and the people that eat Jim's fantastic apples, pears and Concord grapes are left better off than before. She should have asked what Jim is doing to make sure what he grows will sustain us and his land and his family for generations to come.

Organics have become the holy grail of the post-Granola hipster set. But what should be their holy grail is the sustainable agriculture movement. Sustainable agriculture is what will sustain both the people of this country and our farmers long after the organic pod people have moved to their next cause and their next fad.

Jim Kent happens to be a wonderful steward for both his family's magical piece of land (which I have visited) and our stomachs. His Concord grapes and his apples and his pears are so good leading chefs all over New York leave their kitchens long enough to pick up stuff at Jim's booth (Jim doesn't deliver). And his mom's plum torte is pretty damned good, too.

So next time you visit your local farmer's market, don't get hung up on labels. Take the measure of the people selling you apples in other ways. Get to know them, and you'll end up buying the man or the woman and not the apples.

turnover turnover

2005-11-05T09:30:00.000-05:00

A great turnover is a rare and wonderful thing. And in New York, there is only one truly great turnover, made by Madeline Lanciani in her easy to miss Tribeca neighborhood bakery, Duane Park Patisserie (179 Duane St. bet. Hudson and Greenwich Sts. 212-274-8447). Her turnovers are buttery and flaky, with firm but not overly sweet fruit inside. I can never choose between the apple and the cherry, so I end up getting one of each. I feel guilty about buying two such decadent creations, so I end up rationalizing my purchase. I'll just bring one home to Vicky, I say to myself. But I know the chances of one of the turnovers making it home intact are nil. Sure enough, by the time the Number 1 subway reaches Times Square, only four stops from home, the turnovers are both gone. I toss the empty butter-stained white bag into the trash and hang my head in shame. Another failed exercise in restraint.

michelin madness

2005-11-04T11:02:00.000-05:00

I went to the ridiculous party Michelin threw for its new New York Red Guide to hotels and restaurants. There were lots of chefs there. In typically haughty French fashion,, the invitation requested we wear ties (I'm surprised they didn't require Hermes ties). The French chefs like Eric Ripert and Jean-Georges Vongerichten were there to accept congratulations for their 3 star designated restaurants. Other chefs and restaurateurs were there to get a copy of the guide to see if their restaurants even rated a mention. It was rather strange, really. After some mediocre passarounds we had to stand through two self-congratulatory speeches from Michelin executives about how thrilled they were to finally bestowing their wisdom on restaurants in America. Today, New York, tomorrow Grand Forks seemed to be the gist of what they were saying. Finally, an hour in, actors dressed as waiters carrying copies of the guide on trays made their way down the final ramp of the Guggenheim.

Thirty seconds after the guides were distributed, the place started emptying out like a movie theatre after a bomb threat.

When I got home and leafed through the guide, I was struck by a number of things, some obvious, some not.

First, under the obvious category, the Michelin inspectors turn out to be completely Franco-centric. The only restaurants to get three stars were either French (Le Bernardin, Jean Georges, Alain Ducasse) or French-inspired (Per Se). I supposed this is the food equivalent of the Russians judging their own figure skaters at the Olympics.

But the New York dining scene is so rich and varied, even more so than Paris, and the criteria and the methodology and basic point of view of the Michelin inspectors are so outdated and antiquated, why should we be surprised that the Michelin inspectors don't get food in New York and America as a whole. After all, they've proven in the past that they don't get French food and they don't get Asian food and they don't get Spanish food, so why should New York be any different.

Until the Michelin Guide inspectors acknowlege that New Yorkers specifically and Americans in general don't give a rat's ass about how fancy the stemware is and how haughty the maitre'd is, and that what we care about is eating serious, delicious food in an unpretentious, comfortable setting, the Michelin Red Guides in America will be irrelevant to the great majority of us unwashed Americans.

And on a personal note, I am outraged that Papaya King and Una Pizza Napoletana didn't receive a single star. This is not right!

pizzaholic ravings

2005-11-02T08:22:00.000-05:00

You'd think someone who'd just spent a year eating a thousand slices of pizza researching a pizza book would be sick of 'za. Then why do so many of my posts revolve around pizza.

I went to Lombardi's last night and was struck by how much the pizza has changed there in the last few months.

The crust is thinner and a little less pliable and yeasty than it has been in recent years, and it's a marked improvement over the thicker crust with clumps of unbaked dough that has all too often marred the pizza recently at Lombardi's.

The toppings are still superb: fresh mozzarella, great pepperoni, pancetta, sausage and house-roasted peppers.

It's actually a miracle I enjoyed the pizza at Lombardi's so much, because on my way there I stopped to try the new taco place around the corner from Lombardi's, La Esquina, 106 Kenmare St. Tel: 646-613-1333. I tried three tacos, the carne enchilada, made with grilled pork, cilantro, onions and a not incendiary pineapple-habanero salsa; a cochinita pibil, pulled pork, shredded cabbage, pickled onions, and japapeno; and a chorizo taco with potatoes, shredded cabbage, and salsa verde. The tacos were okay, nothing more((surprisingly bland), but they weren't a bad appetizer before pizza.

Or maybe I should just think of the pizza as a chaser for the tacos.

Grandma Pizza in the Hood

2005-10-31T11:31:00.000-05:00

I am a huge fan of what is called Grandma pizza, a thin-crusted Sicilian-style pan pizza that's really popular on Long Island.

In Manhattan, where I live, Grandma pizza has been very hard to come by.

Maffei on sixth avenue and 22nd Street makes a good Grandma slice, and Adrienne's, a new place in on Stone St. in the Wall Street area (I'm warning you right now. Stone St. is one of those downtown NY streets that's impossible to find), makes a superb Grandma slice.

And now, New Pizza Town (2196 Broadway (corner of 78th St.), 212-769-2323, a mere three blocks from my Upper West Side apartment, has started making creditable Grandma pies. They're certainly not as good as Adrienne's, which are made with really good mozzarella and high quality tomatoes. But they are pretty damn fine, fine enough that I've been eating Grandma slices at New Pizza Town three times a week for the last month.

For a definitive look at Grandma pizza, check out Erica Marcus' piece in my book, Pizza: A Slice of Heaven. She not only tells you its origins, she also tells you where to get it on Long Island.

Batali's Greatest Hits

2005-10-28T06:28:00.000-04:00

Every year Mario Batali donates a progressive dinner for the fundraising auction at my son's former school. This year the winning bidders and I had an antipasto course standing at Otto, three small pasta courses (preceeded by a tiny salad) at Lupa, and a main course and dessert at Babbo. Full disclosure: Mario, his wife, and I are friends. We have known each other for ten years.

Even at 6 p.m. Otto was a noisy swirl of activity. Twenty-somethings were everywhere except our table. We had three cheeses, served with honey dotted with little pieces of black truffle (stupendous), six little bowls of delicious vegetables and a wooden platter of salumi that featured excellent salami, prosciutto, testa (housemade headcheese) and loma, cured pork loin.

At Lupa we started with a tiny hill of spectacular pear and watercress salad studded with pomegranate seeds. The pasta courses were cloud-light gnocchi with sausage, a linguine with clams made with a basil sauce that had no cheese or nuts, making it unpesto-like, and finally a garganelli with a pork braciole ragu with black truffles. All three pastas were exemplary, marred only by the kitchen's tendency to use a little too much ground black pepper.

At Babbo I had the pork chop, made with richly marbled Berkshire pork, two and half inches high, and brined to maximum tenderness. If there's a better pork chop on the planet I haven't had it.

Dessert was a cavalcade of pastry chef Gina DePalma's creations: pumpkin cheesecake, cranberry and pecan budino (spice cake) topped with cinammon ice cream, the pistachio-chocolate semifreddo, a saffron panna cotta, and a selection of six ice creams and sorbets served in three pairs of shot glasses.

Babbo is still my favorite restaurant in New York. It has the kind of glow and energy level that every restaurant in the world aspires to. You feel good just being there, sitting, eating and drinking with friends, being well-attended to, even as the music cranks louder and louder with every passing hour.

columbus, ohio 'cue

2005-10-26T08:33:00.000-04:00

My visit to my son wasn't a complete culinary washout. We actually happened on a decent barbecue joint five minutes from the Columbus, Ohio airport, City Barbecue.

Decor: Roughhewn wood walls with black and white pictures of classic barbecue joints around the country.

Service: Self-service with very friendly and efficient people who take your order and your money and then assemble your order on trays.

'Cue: Fine, slightly chewy St. Louis-style ribs slathered in sweet sauce. Tender, smoky brisket with no crunchy exterior. Dry pulled pork with plenty of crunchy exterior. Surprisingly fine barbecue chicken, with plenty of smoky flavor and tender meat. My quarter-chicken was so big it must have been fed steroids.

Sides: Decent cole slaw that tasted fine on the pulled pork sandwich, lackluster potato salad and excellent, super-crunchy hush puppies. Corn pudding and french fries on the table next to ours looked so good I was sorely tempted to reach across the table with my fork and spear some. Decided not to as the sides belonged to some very big dudes.

Con-'cue-sion: Not the barbecue joint of my dreams, but a great find nonetheless. Barbecue made by people who care and know about 'cue.

Gambier, Ohio Eats

2005-10-24T10:33:00.000-04:00

Just got back from a weekend visting my son in Gambier, Ohio.

It was great to see my son, who seems to be doing really well.

Trying to find something good to eat in and around Gambier was another story entirely.

Friday night we went out to a hotel restaurant in a nearby town that someone had posted a favorable review of on an website.

It was goddawful. It served a lot of frozen, pre-portioned food with a smattering of ill-conceived chef's creations thrown in.

Saturday lunch was at an Amish restaurant (Knox County, where Kenyon is situated, has a large Amish population). I have had lots of good homey Amish meals in my life, but this was not one of them. Even the pies were awful, and the Amish are known for their piebaking ability. I wanted to order one slice of each of the fifteen pies offered, but my wife refused to let me do that, claiming it was wasteful. Thank God I didn't, because the three slices of pie we had, along with an apple crisp that was markedly inferior to school cafeteria food, had cardboard crusts and sickly sweet fillings.

Saturday dinner was at the Gambier Grill, and I rather enjoyed my grilled chicken, cheddar and bacon sandwich, though the roll was soft enough to use as facial tissue.

Sunday lunch was the highlight. We ate at the coffeehouse on campus, The Middle Ground. The patty melt, made with organically fed beef, was terrific, and the espresso milk shake was rich, creamy, and most remarkably, not too sweet.

Wal-Mart Eats

2005-10-22T11:38:00.000-04:00

Visiting my son at college in rural Ohio, I found myself in a Wal-Mart for the very first time.

We don't have Wal-Marts in NY, where I live, so when I walked into the football field-sized Wal-Mart in Mpount Vernon, Ohio, I felt like I had entered an alternate universe.

I of course wandered over to the food aisles, where I found pints of Haagen Dasz for a dollar less ($2.74) than my local supermarket in NY.

I also bought an eclair snack pie for fifty cents, which was absolutely dreadful.

But the iced cinnamon buns weren't bad, and they were four for $1.25.

I didn't go for the Papa Murphy's take and bake pizza, which looked really lousy.

I'm still pondering the significance of Wal-Mart Eats.

I Think I'm Turning Japanese

2005-10-20T17:09:00.000-04:00

Have you ever noticed how many generic Japanese restaurants there are?
Where I live, in NYC, there are hundreds of Japanese joints serving dry as dust chicken teriyaki, california rolls made with 3 year-old crab stick (you have to figure that something called crabstick is not going to be good), and watery miso soup.

That's why it was such a thrill to find Momoya, a very fine neighborhood Japanese restaurant in NY's Chelsea section. Here the chicken teriyaki was made with moist chicken thigh topped by properly seared skin, housemade teriyaki sauce, and somewhat improbably, carrots and new potatoes. If only the miso soup was warm, there would be nothing to complain about.

Momoya: 187 Seventh Avenue at 21st St. 212-989-4466. Go to http://menupages.com for a look at Momoya's menu.

bargain killer lunch

2005-10-19T17:03:00.000-04:00

I ate lunch with friends at Chino's in NYC (173 Third Ave., 212-598-1200, and had one of the great bargains of our time.

Ten bucks buys you any two of 21 dishes offered daily.

There were three of us, so we splurged and bought four $10 lunches, so that we could sample eight dishes.

We had: Exotic Seaweed Salad with cucumber and avocado, Crackling Calamari salad with miso lime vinaigrette, Crispy Tofu with sesame wasabi soy sauce, Steamed shrimp dumplings, Barbecued spare ribs, a Mahi Mahi Teriyaki sandwich with lemon grass, mild kim chee, cilantro and not very hot hot mustard, a roast pork sandwich on a toasted bao bun and Seared Tuna Summer Rolls.

There wasn't a loser in the bunch. The Mahi Mahi and the Pork sandwiches rocked. For the whole menu go to http://menupages.com and type in Chino's.

peanut butter chronicles

2005-10-19T16:38:00.000-04:00

Does everyone agree that peanut butter is a perfect food? It's high in protein, it's sweet and savory and it's got optional crunch or smoothness.

I like the straight freshly ground peanut butter I get at my local gourmet store, but I must say I miss the sugar in Skippy and Jiff, which leads me to my next question:

Am I a Skippy man or a Jif man?

After many years of being a Skippy person, I have recently switched to Jif.

And I gotta say it does taste a little more peanutty.

This is me

2005-10-17T08:07:00.000-04:00

This is a photo of me after I've just had a great apple turnover.

I Write for Pie

2005-10-16T17:52:00.000-04:00

I write for pie. So when writer Anne Dimock offered to pay me in pies for writing the introduction to her just published pie tome, "Humble Pie: Musings on what lies beneath the crust( www.amazon.com)", I took the bait, or should I say the pie. Ann sent me two rhubarb pies, made with rhurbarb she grew herself, in late July. They were unbaked and frozen, then carefully wrapped individually in waxpaper and newspaper. I made the first one as soon as it arrived, even though my wife thought I was insane baking pie in the stifling New York July heat. In fact, as I remember, at one point she forced me to turn off the oven fifteen minutes after I had put in the pie. I managed to escort my wife out of the kitchen, and then turned the oven back on. Even after suffering from pie bakeruptus, the pie was amazing, with the flakiest crust imaginable and the just sweetened enough rhubarb firm and moist. So on the occasion I mentioned above when I bought the doctored ribs to our friends and neighbors, I decided to break out the last Anne Dimock pie, even though it had been sitting in the freezer for almost three months. It turns out it didn't matter. Once baked to perfection following Dimock's instructions, the pie was just as good as the one we had consumed months earlier. Her book, by the way, is a delight: funny, well-written and wise. It occasionally veers towards the precious, but Dimock knows just when to pull her prose back to reality.

2005-10-15T17:17:00.000-04:00

A friend recently sent me three racks of ribs from the legendary Dreamland Barbecuehttp://www.dreamlandbbq.com. As I live in NYC, a veritable barbecue wilderness, I need mail-order barbecue to satisfy my deep barbecue cravings. We heated one rack of the pre-cooked ribs according to the instructions on the package. Unfortunately, one bite into the rack, we realized that these ribs were as tough as a University of Alabama linebacker (both the original Dreamland and the U of A are located in Tuscaloosa, Ala). We were supposed to bring the other two racks over to a friend's for dinner, so I decided to do some serious barbecue doctoring. I put both racks or ribs in a big pasta pot and covered them in three different kinds of barbecue sauce. I then let those suckers cook for five hours in the barbecue sauce and finished them by putting them under the broiler for two minutes to give them a little crunch back. The ribs were transformed into a falling apart tender pieces of pig heaven. So if you ever get Dreamland to shipt you some ribs, use my technique. I bet it's foolproof.

Dessert review

2005-10-15T05:02:00.000-04:00

So how were the desserts? Well, it was hard to judge the banana coconut cream pie from the Little Pie Company (link) because my wife managed to flip the pie upside down as she carried it into our host's house. So it instantly became a banana coconut cream pudding with pieces of crust dispersed throughout. But it was really good pudding. The chocolate ganache cake from Soutine (link) was impossible to cut cleanly, but the external bittersweet chocolate glaze was excellent if a little thick, the chocolate ganache inside was obscenely rich, and the cake was surprisingly dry and crumbly. The real surprise of the three was the coconut cake from Greenberg's coconut cake. The icing was coconut-flavored whipped cream (yum!) and the cake was light and moist. I had thought Greenberg's had gone precipitously downhill ever since the founding Greenberg family sold the business ten (?) years ago, but this was a damn fine cake.
I bought all three desserts as research for my next big New York Times piece, which is going to be on neighborhood bakeries.

Dessert Circus

2005-10-14T17:37:00.000-04:00

I was asked to bring dessert to a dinner party tonight. I went a little crazy, buying three desserts from three bakeries. I was in Grand Central Station, so I went down to the food court on the lower level and bought a banana cream coconut pie from the Little Pie Company. In general I like but don't love LPC pies, but the banana coconut cream pie is pretty fine. My second spot was Soutine, the postage-stamp-sized bakery on West 70th Street. There I bought a prettily decorated chocolate cake with a chocolate ganache filling. Then I went to the new branch of Greenberg's on 76th and Broadway, where I bought a small coconut cake.

I'll post again after I try each one.

Les Halles lunch.

2005-10-14T14:45:00.000-04:00

I just had lunch at Les Halles for the first time since Anthony Bourdain became the dissolute rock star chef. Although my lunchmate warned me that the food was not very good, I was actually surprised that my hangar steak came as ordered with damn good fries. And the iced tea refills were free. All in all I would give the lunch a solid B.