When restaurants are in beta, should they
When restaurants are in beta, should they be charging you full price for dinner?
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kottke.org posts about restaurants
Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bakery is set to
Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bakery is set to open in the Time Warner Center on March 6. They’re going to “serve various breads, pastries, and cookies of the highest quality” as well as “sandwiches, salads, soups, and even hand-made chocolates”.
A look at the special Valentine’s Day
A look at the special Valentine’s Day dinner that White Castle offered yesterday. Tablecloths (well, not cloth exactly), candles, menus with a scripty font, table service, and a crystal candy dish. Awesome. More photos on Flickr.
Local competition
Church of the Customer takes a look at how a Northern California restaurant called Cyrus competes with The French Laundry in attracting local customers, particularly those from wineries with big expense accounts for entertaining clients:
1. Match your competitor’s exceptional quality.
The food at both restaurants was cooked perfectly and beautifully presented. Both delivered flawless service. By matching the quality of its better-known competitor, Cyrus removes the primary barriers of opposition.2. Allow your customers to customize.
The French Laundry offers three prix-fixe menus of nine courses each. Cyrus allows its customers to choose their number of courses and the dishes.
Local competition still matters. You usually think of restaurants like The French Laundry as competing on a national or international level. Over the years, Keller’s flagship has made several short lists of the best restaurants in the world. But as this article demonstrates, having to compete for the same pool of local customers can drive competitors to achieve a high level of excellence, higher perhaps than they would have achieved without that competition, and that excellence could lead to wider recognition. Even companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon who compete on a global level and don’t interact with their customers face-to-face still have to vie with each other for local resources, particularly employees.
Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals were to hang
Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals were to hang in the then-new Four Seasons restaurant in NYC. How did they come to hang instead in the Tate Modern in London?
NY Times food critic Frank Bruni spends
NY Times food critic Frank Bruni spends a week “undercover” as a waiter at a Boston restaurant. “People are hungry, and then they’re drinking. Two of the worst states that people can be in.”
Haven’t tried it out yet, but SeamlessWeb
Haven’t tried it out yet, but SeamlessWeb At Home seems like a good site for ordering Manhattan delivery (i.e. lunch/dinner) online. Plus, you get 20% off your order from some places.
Neat information design on the menu for
Neat information design on the menu for Alinea. The size, positions, and darkness of the circles on the menu represent the sweetness/tartness, size, and flavor intensity of each course.
Update: Better photo of the menu here.
New York magazine enters the NYC dining
New York magazine enters the NYC dining fray with a listing of the best 101 restaurants in the city. Only two got their highest (5 star) rating: Masa and Le Bernardin.
Adam from Slice documented all of the
Adam from Slice documented all of the pizzerias on his 8.2 mile walk to work this morning (more). (thx, janelle)
Ferran Adria of El Bulli has written
Ferran Adria of El Bulli has written the world’s most expensive cookbook; it retails for $350.
The advantages of being in the weeds
eGullet recently interviewed author Michael Ruhlman and he had this to say about what he liked about working in a professional kitchen:
You can’t lie in a kitchen — that’s what I like most about it. You’re either ready or you’re not, you’re either clean or you’re a mess. You’re either good or you’re bad. You can’t lie. If you lie, it’s obvious. If your food’s not ready, then it’s not ready. If you’re in the weeds, its clear to everybody — you can’t say that you aren’t. So I love that aspect of it. I love the immediacy of it, the vitality of it.
I’ve worked in a number of different places over the years and the ones I ended up liking the least were the places that allowed people (myself included) to hide. Some companies just have way too many people for the amount of available work. Other times, particular employees have a certain status within the organization that allows them to determine their own schedules and projects. Deadlines are often malleable, meaning that work can pushed off. Inexperienced or nontechnical managers might not have a clue how long a task should take a programmer…budgeting 2 weeks for a six-hour task that seems hard buys one a lot of blog-surfing time. Companies with coasting employees are everything a kitchen isn’t; they just feel slow, wasteful, lifeless, and eventually they suck the life out of you too.
Lunchtime in Saigon
We had a couple of notable lunches in Saigon. The first was at Quan An Ngon. The owner of this establishment found the best street food vendors in Saigon, offered them a steady wage, and brought them all under one roof to form a restaurant[1]. When you arrive (and after waiting for 10 minutes or more at this busy place) and are shown to your table, you pass the various cooks preparing their street specialties. The waiter was super-quick in taking our order so we didn’t get too good of a look at the menu, but we managed to have an excellent lunch.
A couple of days later, we checked out La Fenetre Soleil (the link is in Japanese, but the photos are good). As you probably know, France ruled Vietnam for about 100 years and the influence can be seen in several aspects of life there. La Fenetre Soleil feels quite French (circa 1940), mostly due to the architecture of the building and the deliberate styling of the proprietors. There are a few tables, but we sat in two ridiculously comfortable stuffed chairs and lunched on banh mi with cold drinks. A very cool place to chill out and have a small meal or a drink…comfortable enough to lounge for hours.
[1] A great idea, BTW. I wonder if such a thing could work in NYC?[2]
[2] Or some other city somewhere else. I live in NYC so I spend a lot of time (publicly and privately) wondering if things I notice elsewhere could work where I live.
From eGullet: one week in Saigon, a
From eGullet: one week in Saigon, a rambling, verbose, meal by meal report.
Where to go for the top eats
Where to go for the top eats in Saigon, including best French, pho, and banh mi.
Pancakes in the dew
For our first lunch in Saigon, we met up with Graham from Noodlepie, a Saigon-centric food blog. We cabbed it from our hotel to Quan Co Tam - Banh Canh Trang Bang to have one of his favorite Vietnamese dishes, banh trang phoi suong (literally “rice pancake exposed in the dew (at night)”). Here’s the outlay:
It’s a simple dish; just boiled pork wrapped in thin rice paper with an assortment of herbs, pickled onions & carrots, cucumber, and raw bean sprouts. As you can see from the photo (or the much better photos that Graham took on a previous trip), the plate of herbs that they give you is quite impressive and varied; one smelled like lemon, another like fish. All wrapped up and dipped in fish sauce, it’s delicious and simple.
Afterwards we headed to the market, Graham for dinner fixings and us for some browsing around. Before we parted, he treated us to a sugarcane & lemon drink (mia da) and a pennywort smoothie (not as bad as I’d thought for something that tasted like salad through a straw). Thanks for the nice lunch, Graham!
Anna’s Cafe
Just got back from dinner at Anna’s Cafe (118 Soi Sala Daeng). I had the grilled chicken with garlic and pepper and Meg got tom kah gung (the coconut and galangal soup that we learned how to make in our cooking class, except with shrimp instead of chicken). The reviewers at Fodor’s didn’t like Anna’s, but we thought it was pretty good. Anna’s also seems to be the place in Bangkok to go for your birthday…we heard Happy Birthday sung five different times while we were there.
Fried chicken and gum
We stopped for lunch today at Tonpo, which is right on the river near a water taxi stop. The heat is brutal here, especially in the middle of the day, so the breeze from the river was quite refreshing. One of the dishes we ordered was fried chicken wrapped in pandanus leaves:
The fried chicken was excellent, some of the best I’ve had (I think we’re venturing out tonight to get more at this place Meg heard about). But do you see that sauce next to the chicken? It tasted exactly like Bazooka bubble gum, swear to god. Fried chicken and gum, a match made in heaven.
Street food in Bangkok
We’ve been eating a lot off the street[1] here in Bangkok. On our morning and afternoon walks to and from the Skytrain[2], there are one-person food carts each serving up a particular little snack for 5-10 baht[3] apiece. It’s a good grazing situation; lunch yesterday lasted about five hours[4] and consisted of some orange juice, a thai iced coffee, pork balls on a stick, grilled chicken on a stick, some sort of sweet coconut custard thing, chrysanthemum juice, some noodles that very much tasted like ramen (with pork), more sweet coconut custard things, some peanut crepes…
[1.5 hour interlude for a foot and thai massage[5] that I quite enjoyed and Meg quite didn’t]
…fried dough balls, pork and pineapple on a stick, a bag of orange soda, pork crepes with tiny egg[6], and dessert tacos. Altogether it was maybe US$6 for the two of us (and my dad ate some too).[7]
I love eating this way and it was something that was sorely missing in HK.
[1] From street vendors, not literally off the street.
[2] Auto traffic is awful here…traffic jams everywhere. So we’ve been using the Metro (subway), Skytrain (the elevated train), and the river taxis to get around. They get us to most places we need to go. There are motorcycle taxis available, but we’d rather not split up on the journey. Two/three-person motorcycle-powered rickshaws called tuk tuks are also available, but we’ve heard conflicting reports of the usefulness/sketchiness that we’ve opted out of them altogether.
[3] It’s about 40 baht to a US dollar. A meal at a small restaurant with tables on the street cost us around US$5 for the two of us, including gigantic beer.
[4] We started out at Aw Kaw Taw market, walked over to Chatuchak market, and then to the area around Sala Daeng.
[5] The massage was around US$7 per person. I want one every day.
[6] Onto each crepe, the cook cracked a tiny egg. He made up about 10 for the woman ahead of us and cracked 10 tiny eggs, one for each crepe.
[7] To those who say they can’t afford to travel, I say to you: stop making excuses. If you’ve got the income and leisure time to be spending time reading this blog, are sufficiently motivated, and make it a priority in your life[8], you can certainly afford it. The most costly item is the plane ticket, but if you watch for deals and are flexible in where you want to visit (maybe you go to Brazil instead of Thailand), you can get over here for less than you might think. And once you’re here, you can get by on $20 a day, including lodging. Travel is cheaper here as well, buses and trains are always an option, and there are several low-cost airlines that serve the region. It requires a little effort and intrepidity, but low-cost international travel can be done.
[8] This is the big sticking point for most people, I think. If you choose to have a family or focus on your career or pursue a costly photography hobby, you might not have the money or flexibility to travel this way. But that’s a choice you’ve made (on some level)…and I would argue that if you’re 30 years old, you can arrange to make an overseas trip once every 3-5 years, and that’s about 7-8 trips by the time you’re 60.
Arrived in Bangkok
Quick note to say that we’ve arrived in Bangkok, which I think is going to be more our speed somehow. Not that Hong Kong wasn’t nice, but something about here feels better. We had a really chatty taxi driver on the way in (wish I’d gotten a photo or recorded some of the conversation, but I was too busy trying to keep up with his wall of words)…we learned a bit of the Thai language, that Pepsi is more popular than Coke here, and not to trust doormen. “Never go eat seafood where the doorman tell you to go eat seafood. Is too expensive. He get a commission. Go Chinatown, find your own.” And then when we drove up to the hotel, he spotted the doorman and his eyes narrowed…”there he is, the doorman,” and gave us a look of warning.
After checking in and showering, we met up with my dad, who took us for a typical Thai meal in a small, unassuming restaurant. Green mango salad, pork with spring vegetables, and a coconut milk soup with shrimp and mushrooms (it came in what looked like a bundt cake pan, with a small flame in the middle to keep the soup warm). Then we walked around a bit, orienting ourselves to the city. All the street food looked super good, and lots of bargains to be had at the night market (including about 15 different kinds of “pussy” listed on a card I had shoved in front of me on Patpong street). More to follow.
Dim sum bargain
The day before yesterday, we went for dim sum for lunch again…can’t get enough of those meat-stuffed buns and pastries. This time, we cleverly arranged to bring some locals along so we’d have a little better idea what was going on food-wise. Or rather, they cleverly arranged to meet up with us. A couple of days into the trip, we received an email from a couple of HK high school students, Denise and Christine. They just happened to be working on an article about blogging for a school magazine that gets published once a year, and wrote to see if they could interview us. We agreed — on the condition that we treat them to dim sum — and off we went on Saturday to the Chao Inn on Peking Road in TST.
We ordered a variety of dim sum, including a Chaozhou specialty dish (made of beef…it looked a little like headcheese), which after an initial taste by everyone at the table, was left for the wait staff to collect. We also had some shrimp dumplings, BBQ pork buns, sticky rice (and beef?) wrapped in lotus leaf, spring rolls, and some rice noodle dish I’m forgetting the exact ingredients of. We chatted about food, blogging, teen life in Hong Kong, movies, etc. They attend an English-speaking school, so their English was quite good and the conversation flowed easily. A favorite conversational tidbit was that when you buy fake electronics in Hong Kong, they ask you which logo you want on it (Sony, Panasonic, NEC, etc.) and then affix the proper sticker. Awesome.
Thanks for the nice lunch, girls. I hope you got what you needed for your interview.
Soup dumplings, part 2
Finally procured some dim sum here in HK (with more to come tomorrow). On a recommendation from Arthur, we hit Spring Moon in the Peninsula Hotel. After getting some oolong tea that smelled like apricots (which we later learned was also organic), we ordered the following:
From right to left are the xiao long bao with scallop (soup dumplings with scallop), the steamed green chive dumpling with minced shrimp, and rice noodle roll with chicken and spinach. Not pictured is the baked BBQ pork puff (the pastry had impossibly little flaky layers) that we started with.
And for dessert, Meg had the mango pudding and I went for the deep fried egg yolk buns. Arthur hyped up the mango pudding:
People that know me have heard me hype this up forever: there is a good chance that this place has the best mango pudding in the world. No exaggeration. You can also get the mango pudding in the lobby lounge, or get it room service if you’re staying at the hotel. I remember the first time I tried it, I was staying there, and we got mango pudding like every day. It’s just so damn good, I can’t even describe it. The texture is moist, not too rubbery, perfect mango flavor… it’s just awesome. If you’re EVER in Hong Kong, you must at least go to the Peninsula lobby and try this out. You won’t be dissappointed.
And according to Meg (who admittedly might not have extensive mango pudding experience), he’s not wrong. Now, being a Minnesota State Fair veteran, deep fried is something I do know a lot about, and those egg yolk buns (when you cut into them with your fork, they look like eggs; white bread surrounds a deep yellow bread center) were fantastic…somehow light and rich at the same time.
BTW, if you’re heading to Hong Kong (and elsewhere in Asia) in the future, you should check out last week’s Asia thread. Lots of great suggestions in there; thanks everyone.
Soup dumplings in Hong Kong
Went to dinner at Xiao Nan Guo last night, a Shanghaiese restaurant in Central (level 3 in the Man Yee building). Meg had a little trouble with her entree (a hairy crab), but Grandma’s BBQ pork belly (or something like that…I should have written it down) that I ordered was pretty good.
We also had an order of “chef’s special steamed pork dumplings”, which we guessed (correctly!) were soup dumplings. They looked quite similar to ones we’ve had in NYC (@ New Green Bo, Grand Sichuan International, and Joe’s Shanghai), but the broth inside was a lot lighter and the dumplings were more delicate (meaning that they tended to break before we could get them into our spoons and slurp the yummy juice). Very tasty…I could get used to the lighter soup, but I still prefer the NYC ones. I think we’re off to find some dim sum today, so we’ll see if we can drum up more soup dumplings.
(Also, after lunch yesterday, we picked up some pastries on the way back to the hotel from the MTR. I had some maple syrup bread and Meg had a milk French toast bun. I’ve found the bread here in Hong Kong to be great, something I didn’t expect before we got here.)
Spoon
Soon after we arrived, we discovered that Alain Ducasse — fresh off his 3 star grade in the NYC Michelin Guide — has a place in Kowloon quite close to where we are staying called Spoon. Thinking of splurging a bit on dinner, we went to check out the menu (fish choices shown below):
Turns out that Spoon is somewhat like Craft in NYC…you mix and match entrees with different sauces and sides. Here’s how they describe Spoon:
The menu is not organized in a usual progression of first course, main course, cheese and dessert, but reflects a concept that allows each guest to tailor make his/her own meal. Each section is divided into three columns, allowing guests to mix and match their own main course, sauce and accompaniments. Ducasse says “everything is proposed and nothing is imposed”. With the idea of having something for everyone, the menu includes Asian, Western and vegetarian dishes.
One of things I like about eating out is placing myself in the hands of a chef who knows what he’s doing. I’m not sure my curried yams with truffled bacon in Hollandaise sauce would compare favorably with whatever a chef picked by Alain Ducasse would prepare for me to eat. As interesting as it looks, we may have to skip it and check out Felix at the Peninsula instead…you can take a whiz while looking out at the city.
Restaurant critic Alison Arnett on how her
Restaurant critic Alison Arnett on how her job works, including how she stays so thin when she eats for a living, her best meal, and the reviewing process.
Snack has the scoop on which NYC
Snack has the scoop on which NYC restaurants got how many stars in the new Michelin Guide. Ducasse, Jean-Georges, Le Bernardin, and Per Se got top honors…Daniel and Masa must be a little disappointed with only two stars. (via afb)
R.W. Apple on the Las Vegas
R.W. Apple on the Las Vegas dining scene and has great things to say about Joel Robuchon’s return to haute cuisine. “During the tryouts preceding its official debut, the restaurant served the best food in Las Vegas, by a decisive margin, and some of the very best French food I have ever eaten on this continent.”
The URL of Sandwich
Although the sandwich was named so after an 18th century British Earl, its invention dates back to a rabbi who lived in the first century B.C.. In my short history, I’ve eaten more than my fair share of sandwiches and while I can’t consider myself a true connoisseur, the humble sandwich is one of my favorite things to eat and the ultimate in comfort foods.
The keys to a good sandwich are the three Bs: bread, balance, and…ok, there’s only two Bs, but they’re important. Aside from the main ingredient (turkey, tuna, chicken salad, etc.), the bread has the power to make or break a sandwich. The first thing you taste when you take a bite is the bread, so it had better be good and it had better be fresh.
Balance, or how the various parts come together to make a whole sandwich experience, is even more critical than the bread. Too much meat and the sandwich tastes only of meat. (The “famous” delis in NYC are big offenders here…the amount of meat in their sandwiches is way too much. These are sandwiches for showing off, not consumption.) Too much mustard and you overwhelm that beautiful pastrami. The mighty sandwich should not be a lowly conduit for your mustard addiction; why not just eat it straight from the jar? If you’ve got a dry bread, add a slice of tomato, a little extra mayo, or save it for tuna or egg salad. If you’ve got a lot of bread (a Kaiser or sub roll, for example), you’ll probably need more of everything else to balance it out. Make sure the ingredients are distributed evenly throughout the sandwich. You should get a bit of everything in each bite…it’s a BLT, not just an L on toast. If the sandwich maker is doing his job right, you should be able to taste most of the ingredients separately and together at the same time.
Here are a few sandwiches I’ve enjoyed over the years. I haven’t included any of the ones that I regularly make for myself because they’re pretty boring, although IMO, they’re right up there with any of these.
In college, when my friends and I got sick of eating on campus (and had the money to do so), we’d venture across the street to Zio Johno’s, a little Italian place with good, cheap food. At first I just got the spaghetti or lasagna, but one time I tried the Italian sub they offered and I was hooked. The key was the super-sweet sub roll; my measely $3 was enough for both a savory dinner and sweet dessert at the same time. I’ve never found anywhere else that uses bread that sweet.
I’ve lived in NYC for three years now, but I haven’t run across a steak sandwich that rivals the one I used to get on my lunch break at The Brothers’ Deli in Minneapolis. Fried steak, fried onions, and cheddar cheese on a Kaiser roll with a side order of the best potato salad I’ve ever had[1].
Surdyk’s (say “Sir Dicks”) is an institution in Northeast Minneapolis (say “Nordeast”), the finest liquor store and cheese shop around. They also had good croissants (say “Qua Sawn” or “Cross Aunts”) on which they put fresh ham, Swiss cheese, lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise. Mmm.
There’s nothing I like more than a good BLT, and Specialty’s in San Francisco has one of the best I’ve had. Secret ingredient: pickles. Also, they didn’t toast the bread, which I usually frown upon, but it worked well anyway.
As for New York, I don’t live close to any good delis, but when I worked in Midtown, I used to zip over to the food court below Grand Central and hit Mendy’s. Their chicken salad is top-notch; the chicken is good quality and it isn’t overwhelmed by the mayonnaise. I’m usually not such a fan of rye bread, but their rye (it’s a light rye) is fantastic and goes very well with the chicken salad. The salami is good too. I usually have half a sandwich with a cup of their chicken noodle.
Do you have a favorite sandwich? Know of any good NYC sandwich spots I should check out?
[1] Although Meg has been making this warm garlic potato salad lately that is a serious contender for the top spot.
Great post about Florent, a restaurant in
Great post about Florent, a restaurant in the Meatpacking District, on the occasion of its 20th anniversary. I love the NYC/SF map mash-up and the photo of James Earl Jones enjoying a cup of coffee and a newspaper at the restaurant. (via eater)
Photos of the new fall menu at
Photos of the new fall menu at Alinea in Chicago, helmed by chef Grant Achatz. Looks weird, decadent, and delicious. (via afb)
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