Posts

Posted on

My Worst Restaurant Meal

This is a tough one. If I were to be objective about every restaurant meal that I have eaten, I could find something wrong with every joint in the world. From unspeakably dirty bathrooms to rancid butter or short-and-curlies in the soup to slightly overdone steak to fois gras with just a bit too much tartness in the fruit sauce — we all could find something wrong with every meal. But the enjoyment of eating at a restaurant shouldn’t be based solely on the quality of the food or the physical plant. I have many happy memories of great times at restaurants, and some of those memories have absolutely nothing to do with the food. In fact, I am sure I can pick through the cobwebs of my mind and find a few meals about which I can’t remember a single thing that I ate or drank, but I still remember them as grand times.

Of course, there must be another side to this equation. One such example was a meal that I had at The Water Club, but it was Christmas Day, so the restaurant gets a pass on that particular abomination of a dining experience. Still, just imagine a request for a serving spoon for a bowl of whipped potatoes (the meal was semi family-style) ending with the waiter walking past the table and tossing a spoon into the bowl. The spoon disappeared into the potatoes but not before splashing a few of us with some admittedly excellent spuds. And that wasn’t the worst of it. By far, the most horrific part of the evening was the irritating fact that when the food finally came, it was pretty good!

The winner of my unofficial and very personal “Absolute Worst of The Worst” contest has satisfied some stringent requirements. Obviously, the restaurant must be a serious place. I have had plenty of awful meals at diners and greasy spoons and pizza joints, but they are disqualified from the competition because of the unseriousness of the food and the trivial shock to one’s wallet when the meals are less than satisfactory. To be considered for this award, the restaurant must provide some expectation of an excellent meal, excellent service and decor that is a cut above Burger King.

I don’t know how to insert a drum roll, so you will have to imagine it. And the winner is… Chez Panisse Cafe. I love taking shots at Alice Waters just as much as the next guy. I think she is a pompous airhead who has never had a rational thought. Her pontificating about “sustainable agriculture” and “cook the season” and the rest of her Berkeley blather does nothing for the state of food in America. It is easy to cook with perfect, organic, new age, zero-footprint ingredients when you are wealthy, well-connected and have producers falling over themselves to be touted by this aging hippie. It’s another thing entirely when you actually have to work for a living and can’t afford $30 lamb and $5 tomatoes.

But in addition to being a self-important, affected jerk, she can’t run a restaurant. Or, at the very least, she doesn’t know what consistency means. The reviews of her restaurants are always positive, so obviously she is doing something right. But I have been to both the restaurant and the less formal and less expensive cafe a few times, and the meals ranged from abysmal to excellent (end rant).

The perfectly awful evening began with the waiter being snidely critical of our gall. We had the nerve to bring a child to dinner! The child in question was my perfectly behaved nephew, whose manners were infinitely better than those of the the waiter. But he got back at us by spilling a large glass of water onto the table and then didn’t clean it up for a very long time. I won’t bore you with all of the details, but some of the highlights included the following: We had to ask three times for the wine we had ordered; the pizza tasted like someone had spilled cleaning fluid on it; my nephew’s meal was cold; my meal was cold; and my sister’s meal was cold. I tried to attract the attention of the waiters using the usual technique of eye contact. That didn’t work, and neither did the more aggressive method of waving my arm in the air. They would look over and then turn away. Oh, it took 20 minutes to get the check.

Actually, this was a great meal. I love remembering the evening, because at some point, it became a farce, and we were amused, rather than angry or irritated. Had it been a conventionally good meal, I would have forgotten it almost immediately. So, thank you Alice Waters for a great time and some great memories.

Posted on

Great Combinations

They’re out there, those amazing, and sometimes odd, combinations of foods that are synergistic. I’m not talking about the 17-ingredient sauces that Escoffier touted. Rather, it’s the simple two-part unions that are fascinating and mysterious. They can be as simple as a hot dog with mustard or as expensive as fois gras with fruit. Or what we had last night (which, obviously, is why I thought of the topic), shrimp and canellini beans. “What’s that?” you say. Yes, plain old canellini beans and some sautéed shrimp, with a few San Marzano tomatoes chopped up and tossed in for color. Actually, I simmered the beans in olive oil, white wine and garlic, with a bit of salt and pepper. And we ate this concoction on top of sliced baguette rounds that we toasted just until crisp. So maybe it isn’t a pure one-two punch, but it is a simple combination that works really well. The crunch of the toasted baguette was a nice counterpoint to the creaminess of the beans and the firm sweetness of the shrimp. I added a bit of red pepper flakes (the little woman’s idea) for some zip, but that’s it. No fancy preparations, techniques, or ingredients (hell, the shrimp were frozen!), and the whole thing took ten minutes to prepare. Okay, so the toast counts as a third ingredient (but that hot dog and mustard combo also has bread), so in reality, my point makes no sense.  Some stuff just goes together well. I guess that if I were a classically trained chef who actually understood cooking, I might be able to explain this concept just a little better than I have, but I think you get the idea.

Posted on

Revisiting A Tired, Old Standard: Salmon

As I may have mentioned, I like steak. And pulled pork. And sausage. And roasted beef marrow. And cheese. And butter. Oh, I’ll admit it; I like fat. But as many of us must eventually admit, my waistline and coronary arteries are less enamored than my taste buds of those luscious lipids. Besides, there are foods that taste great but don’t have a gall-bladder-exhausting dose of fat. The default for many people when their doctors say to lose weight and cut out some fat, is fish. And the fish that seems to be one of the most popular, at least judging by what is always front-and-center in the display case and at restaurants, is salmon. But salmon is boring. I ate lots and lots of salmon in my youth. I used to dive for abalone on the North Coast of California, and then trade one or two with the fish mongers at my favorite store. And I would invariably get a big salmon (among other fun stuff) in the transaction. But after eating what seemed like tons of the stuff, it got a bit tedious. However, my bathroom scale has been agitating for a more moderate diet, so last night I dipped my toes into the salmon ocean again.

Instead of cooking the same old recipe, I tried to duplicate something that I had eaten at a wonderful restaurant in San Francisco called Aqua. It was a salmon steak, but they skinned and boned it, and cooked it gently in a simple sauce. It was great, and didn’t taste anything like what I expected. Skinning is easy, but I had to pull out a pair of pliers to remove the tiny bones near the spine. I also carefully cut the spine out of the steak, and was left with two halves, which I rolled together to make a round steak about 4 inches in diameter. I put a thin silicone band around it to keep it from falling apart while I cooked it, and then I made a simple marinade of vinegar, honey, mustard, shallots and cayenne pepper.

The toughest part was deciding how to cook it. I didn’t want a typical grilled or sautéed steak, but I do like a bit of color. So I split the difference and sautéed it briefly, just enough to brown the flesh a bit, and then popped it into a warm oven for another five or six minutes.  It turned out very well. The  flesh was moist and tender, and had a delicate flavor that I certainly wouldn’t associate with salmon. Because the steak was uniform, it cooked perfectly, without the overdone parts that I find really unpleasant. The extra few minutes of preparation was definitely worth the trouble. To complete my transformation into a metrosexual, I sautéed snap peas with a bit of lime juice as a dressing. My wife loved them. I wasn’t as happy. Oh well, nobody’s perfect.

Posted on

A Lighter Touch

I am a fan of big, bold flavors in my food and grand gestures in the kitchen to match. A blazing hot pan, a 3-inch ribeye, big lobsters, 500-degree ovens, triple-cream cheeses…I could go on and on. There is something exciting about seeing a huge hunk of meat, not too many cuts removed from primal, sitting on the counter waiting to be cooked. And huge clouds of billowing smoke wafting through the house always has been, in some weird way, appealing to me. Of course, the old and easy trick of using artery-clogging amounts of fat (my favorites are butter and duck fat) to improve the flavor of a dish is an integral part of my repertoire (and that of most restaurants). So, I surprised myself when I decided to prepare a subtle (for me, at least) meal as a birthday celebration for a relative. Okay, seared tuna is not a delicate dish, but in fact, tuna is not a boldly flavored food. I served the seared tuna on a bed of turnip and potato purée and garnished the tuna with a spoonful of sautéed leeks. And damn, it was good! This is one of the things that separates me from real chefs: the ability to understand and appreciate how different foods go together. I sort of fell into this one and still had to do a bit of testing to make sure that the resulting combination didn’t taste like old socks soaked in cod-liver oil and garnished with match heads.

The point, if there is one, is that with some work and study (and a bit of luck), we can make dishes that work as well as those that come out of the best restaurant kitchens. I am not suggesting that they will be as well executed, but we can, at least, be in the same league. Or maybe just get bumped up to the Majors every once and a while.

Posted on

Alien V

This has very little to do with anything. But I love the Alien movies (not number 3), and I got a chuckle out of this.

Posted on

Long Distance Eating

Aside from the smart-assed comment at the end, this article, by Joel Stein in Time, is exactly what I think about the whole “eat local” crap that rich chefs (yes, Alice Waters, I’m talking about you) with too much time on their hands have been peddling to unsuspecting foodies for years and, recently, everyone else . I touched on some of these ideas in an earlier post that was actually critical of the global transportation system that can’t get me fresh tomatoes that actually taste like something other than soft baseballs. But Stein’s point is valid, rational, and pretty amusing too.

Posted on

Garden Cafe (Brooklyn)

I will eventually write a real, but amateurish review of this lovely little restaurant, but for the time being, I had the best venison I have ever had outside of New Zealand. The meal was impressive, reasonably priced, and the tiny kitchen puts to shame some of the most highly regarded restaurants in New York.

Garden Cafe
620 Vanderbilt Ave. (Prospect Pl.)
Brooklyn, NY
718-857-8863

Posted on

Recipe Time Or Real Time

One of the things that frustrates me when I try new recipes is the almost universal inability on the part of most cooking editors to gauge correctly the time it takes to complete certain steps in a recipe. I’m not talking about baking a cake, or roasting a chicken; they seem to be able to figure those times accurately. I am talking about the throw-away times like: sauté onions on medium-low until golden brown, 20 minutes. Or, Cook
until the pancetta is crisp and the fennel is caramelized, about 20 minutes (That one is from an otherwise wonderful recipe for a caramelized fennel and pancetta salad). The problem is that vegetables have wildly different amounts of liquid in them depending on season, length and method of storage, variety, and probably dozens of other reasons. And for them to caramelize, they first have to lose most of that pesky water. So writing confidently about how it takes twenty minutes to caramelize onions is just silly. And irritating. And unnecessary. Why not just say something like: sauté onions until caramelized. It takes me 20 minutes, but your mileage may vary. And the same thing goes for cured meats. One batch of pancetta for the fennel salad crisped nicely in 30 minutes. The second batch didn’t crisp as nicely in spite of nearly 35 minutes in the oven.

I understand that recipes are written for everyone, and that people need some sense of what they are getting themselves into before they start a dish. But by stating a seemingly inviolate number, aren’t they suggesting, at least implicitly, that you are a failure if you can’t sauté those onions in 20 minutes? I know that these cook book authors are, in many cases, accomplished and talented chefs. And I don’t cook their dishes to compete with them. So why don’t they appreciate that and write recipes that are closer to reality?

PS I am guilty of this laziness too. I reread some of my own recipes and, yes, I am an idiot.