→ October 22, 2013
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Pizzeria Vetri and Barbuzzo (Philly eats, part one).

Today’s Behind the Dish podcast featured physics professor Alan Nathan plus my thoughts on the World Series and the two Cuban free agents who just signed.

I’ve now had two meals at Pizzeria Vetri, the latest outpost of the Vetri family empire of Philly restaurants (including Vetri and Osteria), and am thoroughly impressed by their authentic Neapolitan-style pizzas and commitment to simple recipes with a handful of fresh ingredients. The pizzas come with the appropriate char on the exterior, moderate air bubbles in the exterior crust, and enough interior crust to hold together but not enough to support the weight of the toppings (which is correct, oddly enough). That exterior crust was softer than some other authentic Neapolitan pizzerias I’ve tried, but it was a net positive as it didn’t become tough once it cooled.

The margherita is dominated by the bright, sweet flavor of San Marzano tomoates, with huge basil leaves and a few dollops of fresh mozzarella, light enough that my daughter, age 7, could eat five of the six slices and still have room for dessert. I preferred the crudo, with prosciutto crudo, mozzarella di bufala, and shaved Parmiggiano-Reggiano, which had better balance across all the flavors with a slightly salty profile from the meat and the hard cheese, but the crusts on both were very good and cooked perfectly from char to center.

Vetri also offers a rotating special of Silician-style pizza (thicker crust, cooked in a sheet pan), which often reflects the chef’s caprices on that particular day. For our last visit, the “pizza al taglio” (pizza by the slice) special was roasted quince that had been cooked with red wine, along with fresh herbs including rosemary, and mozzarella and shaved pecorino romano. It was peculiar, a little like a wine-and-cheese course on top of a thick pizza crust, but the sharp crunch of the crust was the main selling point of the slice, with a little dose of olive oil like the underside of a good focaccia (which is pretty much Sicilian pizza dough cooked without toppings).

Vetri’s non-pizza offerings are limited, but they do include a Caesar salad and a “wood-fired” salad, the latter coming with roasted corn, green beans, and chanterelles, along with a generous portion of sliced prosciutto cotto and some Microplaned ricotta salata. With a drizzle of olive oil and a hint of vinegar, it’s an earthy mixture bound by the powerful umami notes of the roasted chanterelles and sweetness of the corn, and far more satisfying than I’d expect an item in the salad section of the menu to be. Vetri also offers a few dessert items and my daughter would like you to know that the fior di latte (sweet cream) soft-serve ice cream is the best soft-serve she’s ever had, although I warn you her affections can be fickle.

—

My daughter also accompanied me to Barbuzzo earlier this month, a restaurant I’d wanted to visit since coming across their salted caramel budino recipe in Bon Appetit several years ago; I’ve made them four or five times and wanted to compare my results to the real thing. Aside from a small lapse in service, the entire experience was superb, with some huge highlights from the savory part of the menu.

The kale salad was the surprise hit of the meal for me, featuring thinly sliced ribbons of dino kale (a.k.a. Cavolo nero or Tuscan kale or lacinato, it’s all the same damn leaf) tossed in a pistachio pesto dressing, served over a few slices of roasted red and yellow beets with soft goat cheese. I find kale an incredibly versatile ingredient, pairing up well with other flavors from across the spectrum, from bacon to nuts to cranberries or pomegranate arils, so I wasn’t shocked that it played well with pistachio, but was shocked by how much body the pistachios gave to the entire salad; kale can be a little tough, and a little bitter, but the broad coating of the dressing reduced the feeling that this was just a pile of leaves. The only problem with the dish is that the menu refers to it as a roasted beet salad when that is maybe the third or fourth ingredient on the list; this is a kale salad, plus some beets and goat cheese.

Although the various pizzas on the menu were hard to ignore with the wood-fired oven right in my line of sight, I went with the server’s suggestion of the pan-seared gnocchi with bacon, mushrooms, and cherry tomatoes, with no sauce but the slight glaze of the bacon fat. The gnocchi were the lightest I’ve ever eaten, strong enough to hold a brown crust from the searing but light enough that an entire plateful was more like an appetizer than a full entree (so it’s a good thing I was full of kale salad by that point). They were powerful bacon-infused pockets that crushed all other comers, the rare example of a plate delivering a bacon punch without delivering a similar blow to your gut. My daughter was satisfied with the burrata plate with several kinds of fresh tomatoes, nut-free pesto, and sliced onions along with a serving of grilled country bread (an add-on for $2), all of which was fresh across the board, even the tomatoes, which surprised me with their sweetness given the time of year.

The dessert … well, the salted caramel budino didn’t quite live up to expectations; the recipe may have changed, but there’s nothing tangy in the version I make at home, whereas something in the mason jar I received at Barbuzzo was, possibly due to the incorporation of crème fraiche somewhere along the line. I can’t say mine is better, since it’s their recipe, but I prefer it without that sour note. My daughter ordered the apple raisin bread pudding with bourbon sauce and malted buttermilk gelato, which tasted strongly of bourbon and, not surprisingly, which she loved. The only real complaint I had about the meal was the 15-minute lag between when we ordered dessert and when it arrived; to a seven-year-old, or her anxious father, that’s a long time. The bread pudding had clearly just come out of the oven, though – it was practically in flames when it reached the table – and their expediter was otherwise on the ball as everything reached the table quickly and at the right temperature. I’d love to go back and sample other parts of the menu, including the pizzas, the other house-made pastas, and the wild mushroom bruschetta and sheep’s milk ricotta starters.

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→ October 18, 2013
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Rebuild iOS app.

My Jose Abreu signing analysis is up for Insiders, and yesterday’s Klawchat transcript is up as well.

Rebuild, which is on sale this month for just $0.99, is a city-builder game with a couple of twists, a Sim City-inspired game with RPG elements and a zombie theme where your nascent city comes under increasingly frequent and intense attacks from marauding zombie hordes. After a game or two of getting my clock cleaned while I learned aspects of the game that the tutorial didn’t cover, I found it very addictive with sufficient challenge on the third level (of five) or higher.

In Rebuild, you begin with a four-block territory within a larger city that has been decimated by zombies, and your goal is to retake thirty or more city blocks and form a new government of non-zombie types, a process that involves balancing resources across multiple simultaneous demands. (There are other story-based victory conditions as well, but they’re not made explicit at the start.) You must add recruits from survivors hiding out in unclaimed blocks, feed your people, keep them happy (with churches, bars, or the occasional find of whiskey or chocolate), clear out nearby blocks by sending in soldiers, and defend your home territory from regular zombie attacks. Choosing which city blocks to claim can depend on your needs at the time – you need at least one hospital to treat injured or diseased citizens, a school to increase citizens’ skills, sufficient housing for everyone, farms for a regular food source, a laboratory or two to research new technologies, and more.

The role-playing element comes within your specific citizens, each of whom has a name and ratings across up to five separate skills: combat, leadership, building, scavenging, and science, up to a maximum of 10 in each. You can increase a citizen’s skills by arming him/her with a weapon or tool (or, occasionally, a dog), and skills increase with experience in the field. The upshot is that you must choose the right citizens for each task, including which ones to leave at home on “guard duty” for the semi-unpredictable attacks from outside zombie hordes, and which ones to put on indefinite tasks like farming, bartending, or preaching, or on long-range tasks like lab research.

Rebuild’s main twist, which wasn’t clear until I’d played it a few times on the “challenging” (moderate) difficulty level, is that the risks associated with those zombie attacks increase as the game goes on: They become more frequent, as often as every other turn, and the “danger” (risk of injury, death, or loss of city blocks) increases as you go further into the game. There are some ways to compensate, such as researching and building watchtowers, bunkers, and turrets to use around your city’s borders, but you have to start working on those much earlier in the game. Once the attacks speed up, keeping your people happy becomes more difficult as well, even if you’ve kept them fed and are using bars and churches. Striking the right balance across workers isn’t complicated, but you’re making fresh decisions every turn or two on who to send to which job.

The in-game information is solid once you know what you’re being told. I found that keeping the Danger rating, which updates with every worker assignment, at or under 25% was enough to keep my city growing without incurring much risk of loss of life or territory. The top info bar also tells you how much food you’re saving or losing in each round and your citizens’ happiness, which you’ll need to keep above 50% to finish the main goal of drafting a new constitution. Rebuild also allows you to take five citizens from one victorious game into another game at a higher level, which I think is probably critical to winning the most difficult (“Impossible”) level, because it lets you hit the ground running and train new recruits more quickly.

There are three other ways to win Rebuild, plus one win-by-losing storyline, but that’s more along the RPG lines and involves somewhat less of the city-building aspect that I most enjoyed about the game. The graphics are outstanding and the app ran smoothly most of the time, although I did experience two crashes, so I recommend using the manual save feature on top of the autosave feature to ensure you don’t lose any hard-won progress. For a buck, it’s a no-brainer.

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→ October 17, 2013
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Top Chef, S11E03.

Klawchat today at 1 pm EDT.

* We start in the stew room just after Jason’s elimination. Bret starts making excuses, and Nicholas shuts him down quickly. Seemed to me like Bret was trying to convince himself, not anyone else.

* Louis talks about having a family as if it’s not very compatible with chef life. The few chefs I know well have all said that it’s hard to find work/life balance when work is so all-consuming – six or seven days a week, often twelve-hour (or more) days, and that’s just running one successful restaurant.

* This week’s Quickfire is an elimination challenge. Dana Cowan, the Editor-in-Chief of Food and Wine, is the guest judge and may have created the challenge. We get way too much of her on this show. The magazine isn’t that great – it has always seemed dated to me, like it’s still geared toward the dinner-party era of the 1970s, and there’s too little emphasis on cooking (as opposed to dining out) in it. I far prefer Fine Cooking and Bon Appetit in that same genre. Anyway, the challenge is to reinvent a popular food trend that Dana believes is, like heroin, so passé: eggs over everything, bacon, smoked foods, and kale. She says kale only appears as kale salad or kale chips. I ate a kale salad last night at Barbuzzo. It was really fucking good. Also, the best salad I’ve ever had was at Caulfield’s in Beverly Hills and had kale, hard-boiled egg, and applewood-smoked bacon, for the superfecta. So, you know, shut it, Dana.

* Janine wants to smoke scallops, but they get ripped out of the fridge before she can grab them. Scallops would make my list of foods that are overused on Top Chef – and I’d include bacon there, as well as anything truffle, and foie. That’d be a much more interesting challenge: Make a dish that excludes all of those items (and maybe one or two more.) Janine goes for bone-in pork loin instead, but hot-smoking that fully would take an hour or more, not the 30 minutes they have for this challenge.

* Michael goes all Uncle Gus on his oysters. We’re about to see Padma eating a smoked oyster plate, with third-degree burns.

* Odd choices: Stephanie is making a pasta dish with candied bacon, using the bacon fat to coat the pasta. That’s delicious, but not inventive at all. It’s at least been part of northern and central Italian cuisine for a century or more. … Bret is a bad listener and gets a timeout for making a kale salad after Dana specifically said not to make a kale salad. … Aaron deep-fries the kale, which is going to produce something very much like a kale chip. He then overseasons it, which has to be among the top three reasons Top Chef contestants get eliminated (along with under/overcooking a protein and failing to follow explicit directions).

* With about six minutes left, we see Janine panicking because, shocker, the pork isn’t cooked. I assumed at the time she’d sear it off, both to finish cooking it (it can stay rare or medium-rare in the center) and to get some color and flavor on the outside, but we don’t see that step.

* Carrie’s dish looked the best on the screen – soft-boiled egg, hand chopped and mixed into a dressing with chili flakes and lemon zest, served over green beans. It looked and sounded amazing, and I could see putting that dressing on asparagus or even tossing it with wilted bitter greens. Still waiting for the recipe on that one.

* The judges’ favorites: Nina (Scotch quail egg, confit potatoes, leek and potato puré) Shirley (rice congee with a “perfect” shirred egg, sesame oil, and soy sauce), and the visibly nervous Stephanie (fresh pasta with candied bacon and flash-fried sweet potatoes). Winner: Shirley, who I believe called it her “get of the jail free card,” which is a delightful expression and not exactly inaccurate given the history of Top Chef immunity.

* Their least favorites: Bret, for not listening. Aaron, whose kale was totally overdressed and too salty. Louis, in whose dish the judges could barely taste the smokiness of the trout. Aaron is eliminated, saying “one mistake will send you home.” It is maybe the most common mistake of all, though: Season lightly, taste, season again. He seasoned heavily, then tasted, and couldn’t hit Undo. Bret knows he “dodged a bit of a bullet” but doesn’t seem to realize there is a bazooka aimed at his face at this point.

* Elimination challenge: Recreate one of four classic items from the menu at Commander’s Palace, located in New Orleans’ Garden District. It’s legendary for its food and for its history of churning out great chefs, including Emeril and Paul Prud’homme, both of whom will be at the dinner table along with Executive Chef Tory McPhail. No pressure here, just replicate a dish and serve it to the guy who invented it.

* Did Shirley whisper “Commander’s Palace” right before Padma announced it? Was that some kind of subliminal move? Creepy.

* The dishes: Shrimp and tasso Henican (recipe, if you’re curious). Black skillet seared (what we’d call “blackened” outside of Louisiana) trout, a Paul Prud’homme dish. Emeril’s veal chop Tchoupitoulas, with red potatoes, and Brussels sprouts. And a strawberry trio – a petite shortcake, a strawberry blood and sand cocktail, and a strawberry beignet. The cocktail is a variation on a dated but classic drink from the 1920s that included Scotch, blood orange juice, vermouth, and a Danish liqueur called Cherry Heering.

* The first thing I noticed when the chefs entered the kitchen: it’s huge. Usually we see the chefs fighting for square footage or dealing with old equipment, but this is big, spacious, and looks state of the art. I look forward to inevitable complaints about space anyway.

* Give Louis points for at least saying he read up online on Cajun and Creole foods, although given what comes next, it sounds like he might not have retained what he read.

* Stephanie, the Queen of Self-Psychouts, says she’s struggling with the biscuits. She knows it’s a 3:2:1 flour:liquid:fat ratio, but she doesn’t really understand how it works. Really, Steph? Don’t they teach basic pastry dough techniques in culinary school? Can I send you a copy of Ruhlman’s Ratio? It’s on me.

* Bret doesn’t want to fight for grill space, so he decides to grill his chops to order, after the others have vacated the grill. This feels like elimination foreshadowing.

* Mini-drama in the kitchen: First, Nina grabbed Michael’s plates by mistake, even though they had the chefs’ names on them. Michael reclaims his plates but throws her okra on the cooking table. I’m actually shocked that Nina didn’t blow up at him in the kitchen; Michael Voltaggio would have torn the guy’s head off, dumped habanero juice down his throat, and put his head back on backwards, just to make a point.

* The shrimp and tasso dishes come out first. Commander’s Palace’s current head chef Jason is also cooking each of the dishes so the judges can compare. Hugh says Michael overcooked his shrimp, while Travis didn’t cook it enough. Nina whiffed on presentation (although we know why), yet her shrimp was impeccably cooked. Bene’s sauce and Michael’s presentation were the best in those areas.

* Bret, grilling to order, is in the way as the chefs assigned the trout are plating. I don’t know if he’s just a fish out of water after some time outside of a restaurant kitchen, or editing made him look that way, but they are setting him up for a fall.

* The trout comes out and everything is underseasoned, for reasons to be fully explained later. Janine’s was the best according to Hugh, which generates moderate agreement around the table, even from the diners who don’t know what she looks like. Nicholas’ was bland and unevenly cooked. Louis’ was overcooked and dried with no taste because of no salt. Tom says they’re so paranoid about getting it right that they’re getting it wrong. Were they also panicked after seeing Aaron go home for oversalting his kale?

* More drama: Shirley’s yellow beets are gone. Thank God she has immunity or she might lose her mind. Turns out Patty took them by accident and everything’s copacetic. Pea purée this isn’t.

* Bret’s pork chops don’t have grill marks, so the meat looks boiled or steamed. Brian’s is close but his Brussels sprouts are raw. Patty’s plate has the best presentation and her veal is nicely cooked; this was a big episode for her after two down weeks to start the season. Most of Shirley’s pork chops are overcooked. Bret’s sauce is closest to the real thing, but with no sear on the meat and a messy plate, Emeril says his dishes have “no love.” Hugh starts baiting Emeril, trying to get him to go back to the kitchen with him to show them how it’s supposed to be done. This is why we love Hugh.

* The dessert course turned out to be the best of the four, with only Sara falling short of the mark as her beignet wasn’t good and her shortcake tops fell apart.” Carrie nailed the biscuit (shortcake is just a biscuit with cream as the liquid) and her cocktail. Justin’s was very good across the board; Lally Brennan, of the family that owns Commander’s Palace, says, “I’m thinkin that boy might’ve made a beignet before.” Steph’s cocktail and biscuit were good; Hugh says it’s a better biscuit than the original, which flusters Chef McPhail slightly. Everyone says the chefs nailed this course, which is nice to hear so early in the season when the emphasis is (justifiably) on mistakes.

* Dana says she is a “whipped cream whore.” Moving right along…

* Tom’s summary of the worst dishes: The chefs made “basic cooking mistakes.” Justin nailed the beignet. Steph’s beignets weren’t great, but the biscuits were “awesome” (Hugh). The shrimp dishes where largely too acidic for a plate that demanded balance across sweet, sour, salty, and savory. The biggest strugglers: Bret, whose pork was overcooked without grill marks and who served sloppy plates; Louis’ underseasoned trout; and Carlos’ overblackened, underseasoned trout.

* Top three: Justin, Stephanie, and Nina, so two from the dessert course and just one from the three mains. Justin wins, probably for having the fewest mistakes? The camera shows Stephanie smiling for him, but Nina on the edge of a scowl. I’m hoping the win gets Stephanie a boost of confidence, as her pedigree should make her one of the best chefs on the show, but she just comes off as a chronic worrier.

* Bottom three: Louis, Carlos, and Bret. Louis made the spice mix for the whole group, then didn’t retaste his own food. But didn’t anyone in the group taste their food and notice it had no salt? You can’t miss that. Carlos knows he had the skillet too hot but had no recourse. Bret didn’t get the meat on the grill early enough and, to his credit, acknowledging all of his mistakes here. He sounds like a man who knows it’s time.

* Bret is indeed eliminated. Louis’ mistake this time might have been bigger, but Bret’s errors had been compounding over three episodes. Tom said there were “too many mistakes on that plate” and Emeril says he showed “poor time management.” Bret goes into the stew room, says they made the right call and he understands why. I can’t snark a guy who goes out with dignity like that.

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→ October 16, 2013
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Top Chef, S11E02.

Sorry this is so delayed, but I had no free time in Arizona to watch the show and write it up. Anyway, I posted two more Fall League columns, players who exceeded expectations and players who fell short. I also have a column up explaining my disdain for the term “clutch”, and I had Dirk Hayhurst as a guest on this week’s Behind the Dish podcast.

On to the show…

* The show starts with a Quickfire that begins right after Ramon’s elimination: Prepare a gumbo, based on your heritage, and begin that same night at the house using a slow cooker. The chefs get 15 minutes the following day to finish, and the winner gets immunity. The judge is Leah Chase, the 90-year-old “Queen of Creole Cuisine” and owner of Dooky Chase restaurant in New Orleans, which has been open since 1941.

* Michael, one of the two local chefs on the show, says in New Orleans, “if you don’t have gumbo on your menu you’re going out of business.” I believe that, but I’ve also had some very mediocre gumbo down there, so it’s important to have it on the menu but not as important that it be good.

* Aaron asks another chef, “is gumbo like a velouté base?” It’s not – velout´, one of the five mother sauces in French cuisine, involves a very light roux, while gumbo requires a dark roux for its characteristic flavor. I don’t know how a professional, US-born chef could be ignorant of this. It’s not an obscure dish.

* I clearly couldn’t host the Top Chef contestants in my house because there aren’t enough outlets.

* Carrie is going for an Iowa/Trinidad blend, reflecting her mixed roots, but the result looks more like broccoli soup. Jason, who lost his Polish-born mother when he was just three years old (and yeah, now I feel bad for the guy), makes one with cabbage, pork shanks, beets, and potatoes as the thickener.

* Michael hates his gumbo so he dumps it out and starts over. Pretty ballsy to do that even though the lost cooking time is significant. It’s a sunk cost, though – you can’t get that time back, so continuing with a crappy dish just because you’ve spent a lot of time on it is a bad strategy.

* At judging, Aaron misses the opportunity of a lifetime when Padma picks up a shrimp from his dish and says, “Did you want me to put the whole head in my mouth?” The correct response was, “No, Padma, just the tip.”

* The bottom three dishes belonged to Jason, primarily for the dried beets; Michael, whose revised drunken-chicken with dirty rice didn’t seem to be gumbo at all; and Patty, whose mofongo-style dish with plantains aslo seemed to be not-gumbo. Then we get Jason calling it “bullshit” in the confessional and I’m reminded of why I didn’t like the guy in the first place. I knew it wasn’t just the douchey hair.

* The top three were Carrie’s green gumbo (coconut, green mango, and buttery corn crumble), Aaron’s shrimp heads, and Shirley’s with braised pork belly. Carrie wins, despite her concerns about the color, when Leah says it reminds her of the gumbo z’herbes she makes for Holy Thursday. Carrie gets immunity from cruci … er, elimination.

* Elimination challenge: Food trucks! Susan Spicer of Bayona restaurant is the guest judge. I don’t know who she is and her pants look ridiculous. Other than that, great to have you here, Susan. She can’t measure up to Leah, who says “the Pope quit” but after Katrina “I had to keep going.” I’m surprised the chefs didn’t fight over who got to take her home. Anyway, the chefs are cooking for Habitat for Humanity volunteers who appear to be working in the Lower Ninth Ward, which was the hardest-hit area during Katrina, probably because the whole area is four feet below sea level (and the levees didn’t hold).

* Padma splits the chefs up into five teams. The yellow team does a taco truck with ceviche and some kind of fried food, all very smart and traditional for a truck. The blue team does a “surf truck” and Jason is talking some health-food nonsense about giving the volunteers “sustained energy throughout the course of the day” as if what they really want is a Clif Bar and a Red Bull. The green team is going Mediterranean; the three women all volunteer Louis for service duty because of his smile, which I guess is dreamy or something. The red team is going for a Miami-Caribbean theme and four of the chefs are completely ignoring Bene.

* Patty recalls when Hurricane George hit Puerto Rico in 1997 and she didn’t have electricity for six months. If you thought the response in Louisana was slow, think about the second-class status of a U.S. commonwealth or territory.

* Bene has been relegated to sous chef and it’s not clear why the others chefs have no respect for him at all. I don’t know if it’s because he’s goofy (he is) or if he said something off camera that convinced them that he’s not that good, but he has to stand up for himself and make sure there’s an item that he can claim as his own.

* Carrie wants to make empanadas but can’t find a rolling pin at Whole Foods, so she buys a giant bottle of wine and chills it for a makeshift, very cold rolling pin that will keep the fat in the dough from melting while she’s working with it. That’s pretty clever.

* Nicholas and Jason are trying to make sure that Patty/Bret don’t “overthink the dishes.” I’m just going to say that they should have spent more time thinking about their own dishes instead, as Jason’s salmon rolls, which he rolls up ahead of time so he can spend more time chatting up the volunteers, are going to get very soggy as they sit.

* To the food … The yellow team serves a dorado (mahi-mahi) and shrimp ceviche with tomato from Travis and Brian, a beef and pork curry empanada with mangos from Carrie and Aaron, and tilapia tacos with chipotle aioli and cabbage from Carlos and Aaron. Everything seems to be a hit, including the volunteer’s comment “whatever this yellow stuff is, it’s good,” which sounds far worse without context.

* We need to chip in and buy Tom a better hat.

* The blue team serves Jason’s salmon hand roll with quinoa and a honey mustard miso; Nick’s spiced shrimp with a watermelon/tomato sauce; Bret’s coconut ceviche with snapper and scallop as well as hot plantain chips; and Patty’s tuna slider with crispy pancetta, avocado, and tomato. The negatives start early here – Jason’s rolls are soggy and soft, Bret’s plantains are way too hot and the dish isn’t well seasoned, Patty’s tuna isn’t well-seasoned and the tomatoes were somehow off.

* Janine, in response to a question about doing construction work: “I’m pretty good with my hands.” Is this whole season just going to be “male chefs giggling at anything Janine says that might have a double meaning?”

* The red team serves Janine’s cold gazpacho with pickled shrimp; Justin’s lobster and crab fritter with corn puree and bacon jam, which Tom comps to a funnel cake and is the item I most wanted to reach into my television and grab; Nina and Bene’s jerk chicken sandwich with mango and crispy plantains; and Michael’s ricotta with burnt honey, stone fruit, and toasted coconut. The judges seem mixed on Janine using ginger in the gazpacho. Michael’s dessert gets raves, and it was the only dessert anyone served, which is often a plus for the chef.

* The green team offers Steph’s crispy chickpeas (falafel) with watercress and radish salad, Sara’s tuna burger with watermelon rind pickles, Shirley’s spicy grilled lamb salad, and Louis’ “amuse” … which was just a rectangular block of watermelon on a lemongrass stick? Is that really all he did? I mean, I don’t want Louis to strain himself or anything, but that seems a little basic.

* Judges’ table: The yellow team wins, and blue is on the bottom, no surprise either way. Green team was the runner-up. The judges describe the red and blue teams’ plates as “strange choices” that weren’t “as well thought-through.” That doesn’t line up with the comments we saw about the red team, though; the only real criticism was directed against the blue team and it seemed like the guests and judges liked several red team plates.

* It’s clear right away the the empanadas were the winning dish, although the judges liked everything the yellow team offered. Making the dough on the truck was the key to the dish and to impressing the judges, so Carrie completes the sweep of the episode. Maybe Jason should have put his salmon roll in a Pop-Tart instead.

* Speaking of Jason, he’s in a good emotional frame of mind for Judges’ Table: “if they’re constructive, I’ll be nice. If they’re rude, I’ll be rude back.”

* When Bret says he thought they were in good shape because they had leftovers – which means that diners didn’t come back for seconds – Padma looks at Bret like he’s the dimmest bulb in the chandelier. It’s like when you put together something from IKEA and you have a few unused screws when you think you’re done. Those aren’t bonus pieces.

* Three of the dishes were real duds. Bret’s ceviche wasn’t cold enough to begin with, wasn’t seasoned correctly, and the tostones were too hot to pick up (they’re the utensils with which you eat the fish). The tomato on Patty’s tuna slider was apparently awful and Tom was so pissed off about it that, if he were still wearing that hat at judges’ table, it might have caught fire. (Which wouldn’t have been a bad outcome from a fashion perspective.) Jason admits that rolling up his salmon early was a mistake, but says he didn’t realize it at the time he was doing it. Even Nicholas’ dish fell short due to the wasabi peas. Tom says “details” are where they went wrong, but these weren’t minor details – if I got warm ceviche in a restaurant, I’d send it back.

* Jason is eliminated. I’m shocked – he certainly wasn’t the worst chef in the room, based on what we’ve seen, and I thought the questions about Bret’s ceviche, from high temperature to insufficient acidity, would have bounced him. Jason says he’s “bitter and angry” and in this one case I can’t blame him, even though he comes off so badly on TV.

* Am I alone in thinking we haven’t seen a strong favorite or two? Paul and Kristen had already separated themselves somewhat by this point in their seasons, but I don’t see anyone like that yet. Carrie is the easy choice for now, based on these wins and what I’d call moderate ambition with her cooking, but what she’s made so far hasn’t been wildly inventive like Paul’s dishes or immaculately intricate like Kristen’s. After Carrie, I’ll go with Carlos (gut feel pick) and Stephanie for the top three, with Shirley also a consideration, and Brian and Travis both in the “haven’t seen enough” bucket. Bottom three: Patty, Bret, and Bene.

* Can’t wait till tonight’s episode, which I believe marks the return of Hugh Acheson. Plus, yellow beets are the new pea purée.

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→ October 14, 2013
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Arizona eats, October 2013 edition.

My first Arizona Fall League update went up on Thursday afternoon. The next one will go up on Monday morning … that is, a few hours from now.

I had a bittersweet experience in Arizona last week, my first extended trip there since we moved out of the state in June. The pleasure in seeing Fall League games, catching up with some friends, and visiting old haunts couldn’t surpass the feeling that all of that – plus the spectacular weather – was no longer mine, that the drive south on the 101 was no longer to my house, that winter was waiting for me on the other side of the trip. (I define winter as “not summer.”) I did manage to distract myself by hitting four new restaurants while I was on the ground there, at least.

Crêpe Bar in Tempe is the new brick-and-mortar place from the chef behind Truckin’ Good Food, and you know they’re serious about food when you see they use coffee from heart roasters in Portland, Oregon. Turns out they have a real barista who pulls a damn good shot of espresso, and the drip coffee earned raves from my friend Sam. Crêpe Bar also offers cold-brewed coffee, which they prep daily and allow to steep for about 24 hours, as well as V60 and Aeropress pour-overs, so it’s worth going if only for the coffee. As for the crepes, I’ll just point out that I had a crêpe with vanilla custard, strawberries, toasted slivered almonds, and some 55% Valrhona chocolate, and you’ll just be jealous.

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Located in the Bespoke Inn in Old Town Scottsdale, a mere 12-minute walk from Scottsdale Stadium, Virtu Honest Craft just made Esquire‘s list of the 18 best new restaurants in the country, and it might be the best restaurant in the state of Arizona now – something I wouldn’t say lightly, having tried and loved crudo, Citizen Public House, Pizzeria Bianco, cibo, and others. Virtu’s food was just a slight cut above its competitors, offering inventive plates that played with flavors and textures in clever ways with visually appealing presentations. Kiley McDaniel met me for dinner, but was a little late, so I ordered one of the happy hour crostini options, with piquillo pepper jam and manchego cheese, a great twist on the ordinary fig jam or quince paste crostini concept that brought a hint of spice and less straight sugar to the bite. Then the gluttony began in earnest: the chef sent out a large antipasto plate with three cheeses, truffled salami, Sicilian olives, and marcona almonds, as well as honey to pair with the blue cheese. That was free (I think all the early tables got one), but came out after we’d ordered two starters and two entrees, so things got out of hand quickly. The chef’s snack starter is almost a meal in itself: A pile of hand-cut French fries tossed with sausage, mozzarella curd, and what I think was a sweetened balsamic reduction, topped with an over easy egg. We also went with the item that the Phoenix New Times’ Chow Bella blog highlighted, the grilled asparagus with duck egg, bacon candy, peppered feta, and foie gras hollandaise. The chef’s snack was comfort food, hearty, salty, fatty, and of course a little heavy, while the asparagus plate was like brunch for dinner, bright colors leading to brighter flavors if you could manipulate everything into one bite, which wasn’t always easy.

For the mains, I went with the smoked duck, which came on a smashed plantain with small grilled chunks of foie gras and pomegranate arils. Kiley ordered the seared scallops, served on a pumpkin/onion mash with a white chocolate beurre blanc. I think we both preferred the scallop dish, which was better executed across the board, with perfectly-cooked sea scallops paired beautifully with the fall flavors of the squash and onion; my only comment here is that the dish needed a finish of acid, even something as simple as lemon juice (although I imagine a place like Virtu would instead go with a yuzu foam or a champagne vinegar gelée). The duck itself was cooked nicely but smoking duck does rob you of the glory of crispy duck skin, and the plantain mash had been cooked a second time on a griddle to provide that crispness, a process that made it too crunchy and even charred the edges a little bit. The proteins seem to be standard here but the sides change at least every few weeks depending on what’s in season; I’d recommend whatever they’re doing with scallops and would trust in the chef beyond that.

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Otro Cafe is the newest spot from Doug Robson, the Mexican-born (really) chef behind the menus at Gallo Blanco and the Hillside Spot. Otro’s menu is simple – a few taco items, a few tortas with the same meats you’ll find on the taco menu, a few Mexican street-food starters, and a full bar. Kiley joined me for this meal as well, so we split the elote callejero – roasted corn on the cob with paprika, cotija cheese, and a little mayonnaise, which the server will shave off the cob for you tableside. I also ordered the small guacamole because Kiley is a misanthropic devil-worshipper who hates avocadoes. Both were superb, just simple and fresh items with big flavors thanks to the tomatillos in the guacamole or the salty-tangy burst from the cotija in the corn. For tacos, we each ordered the same trio (tacos range from $2.50 to $3.50 apiece) – the pork “al pastor,” the carne asada, and the grilled marinated shrimp, all of which were excellent. The carne asada was my favorite, even though I’m generally not a big steak eater; Otro uses seasoned grilled ribeye, chopped and topped with lettuce, an aji (chili pepper) aioli, cilantro, and guacamole. The shrimp was second, marinated in achiote and topped with red and white cabbage, chili pepper, and more guacamole, all outstanding although the shrimp ended up in the background beneath the spice and acid of the cabbage/chili slaw. The pork al pastor was still good, served with salsa verde, a little pineapple, and more cilantro, although I missed the better bite of the steak and, well, that was the only taco without guacamole and it was going to suffer by comparison. Otro also offers a number of small side dishes, including two rotating options from local farms/CSAs, for just $4-5. Some items are $1 off at happy hour so the two of us got out of there for under $30 combined and had probably consumed too much food.

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The Gladly is the new venture from the group behind Citizen Public House, focused a little more on cocktails and small plates and less on the mains that made CPH our favorite spot for an elegant dinner out. The Gladly’s chicken liver pate starter, where the liver is blended with pistachio nuts, was by far the best item I had, and while I’m not sure eating a half-cup of the stuff at one sitting was the wisest nutritional move for me, that is what I did because it was too good to pass up (especially with whole-grain mustard and pickled onions to add to the crostini). The Brussels sprouts starter might be a meal for a vegetarian, as it’s served on a plate of creamy white-corn polenta; I prefer Brussels sprouts a little more cooked than this, as they were still too bitter at the center and hard to cut, but the combination of the sprouts and the grits was excellent. The one dish I didn’t love was the duck ramen – five-spice duck “ham” served in a giant bowl of miso broth with ramen and pea greens. The broth itself was a little bland, light on salt but also lacking any clearly defined flavor, and while I love duck prosciutto, its flavor was muted after sitting in the hot miso broth for a while. I’d love to give the Gladly a second shot, preferably when I can indulge in the drink menu, but also to try some of the other small plates like the paprika-cured pork belly, or the pigstrami sandwich, which turns my favorite starter at CPH into a smoked pork butt sandwich with a Brussels sprout sauerkraut as the slaw.

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As for repeat visits, I had breakfast at the Hillside Spot three times and everything was just as I left it, from the chilaquiles to the pancakes to the chocolate chip cookies, so good job there. I also went back to Matt’s Big Breakfast which remained top-notch and swung by Giant Coffee (owned by Matt) and had a great espresso there. Saigon Kitchen in Surprise was a little disappointing, but only in that the bun with chicken I ordered came with these giant pieces of lettuce that got in the way of the noodles and other vegetables that were sort of buried at the bottom. I did have the hilarious experience of watching the seventy-odd woman next to me send back a bowl of pho (soup) that was hot enough for me to see the steam from a meter away because she claimed it wasn’t hot enough.

Some places I wanted to try but didn’t have time to visit: the Welcome Diner, La Piazza Locale, and Bink’s Cafe, all in Phoenix proper, and Altitude Coffee Lab in Scottsdale. There’s always spring training, I guess…

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→ October 7, 2013
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The Killer Inside Me.

I’m off to Arizona for some Fall League scouting this week, so barring a rainout there won’t be a chat or podcast, and dish posting may be sporadic.

I’m a huge fan of noir films and novels, starting with the hard-boiled detective novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler but, having finished both of their canons, moving on to darker crime novels like those of Jim Thompson, whose The Killer Inside Me is the third and most unsettling of his novels I’ve read so far. The basis for a 2010 movie starring Casey Affleck and Jessica Alba, the novel delivers exactly what the title promises: It’s a first-person account of a sociopathic deputy sheriff whose solution to almost every problem is to kill whoever’s causing it.

Lou Ford is the narrator and killer in question, a cliche-spouting officer of the law who has a troubled background that has limited him to low-level police work, even though he has the intelligence of his father, a successful doctor who may have recognized that his son was mentally unstable. Ford’s narration is of dubious reliability, and he only gives us glimpses of his history of violence, but is more transparent when describing his predicament when an attempt to exact revenge on the town’s wealthy industralist backfires on him (in part through his own duplicity). Every solution he conceives involves violence, usually committed by him but pinned on someone else. After a few deaths too many, however, the facade he’s constructed starts to crumble as he realizes his bumpkin act isn’t fooling the powers that be any longer.

Thompson utilizes violence as a literary tool, as a window into “the sickness” inside of Ford and as a physical manifestation of the character’s inability to properly process negative emotions such as frustration or insecurity, largely avoiding lurid descriptions of Ford’s actions. Thompson largely avoids the question of a first cause, other than a hint that Lou may have been abused when he was a teenager, and focuses instead on the character’s almost robotic responses to difficult situations. He’s the pre-Anton Chigurh, but with a complexity that McCarthy’s arch-villain lacked, showing glimpses of emotions directed at others (through the lens of his own well-being, of course) and a wry sense of humor in between the spasms of violence.

The Killer Inside Me functions as a perverse character study, but its main appeal is its suspense – will Ford continue to kill with impunity, or will the various authorities stop him – and if they do, what kind of fight will he put up before he’s caught or killed? Ford even confesses to another murder he believes he has to commit – whether for practical reasons or due to “the sickness” is unclear – well before it takes place, then takes his time getting around to it, as if he’s enjoying toying with the reader’s emotions, or merely enjoying reliving the murder in his own mind.

The hazard of any novel that uses first-person narration where the narrator is the central character (and probably an unreliable narrator too) is that other characters become two-dimensional because we only see what the narrator sees, or what he wants to tell us. Thompson conveys the sense of a net closing in on Ford in part through the sheer number of characters whom Ford suspects have figured out his ruses, yet none of them has any depth because of the limitations of Ford’s own perception of others and their emotions. Ford is textured and at times opaque, but Thompson gives us a character who doesn’t describe other characters well because he can’t understand their emotions other than fear.

I didn’t enjoy The Killer Inside Me as much as the similar pop. 1280, which is more nuanced in its portrait of a ruthless killer, or The Grifters, which revolves around confidence men double-crossing each other in a study in sociopathy. Thompson’s ability to portray these half-people, consumed only with themselves and unable to feel anything for others, is disturbing in its realism, but that darkness is an essential ingredient in noir and, I admit, part of what I find so compelling in his novels.

Next up: I’m about a third of the way through George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and knocked off Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native last week.

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→ October 5, 2013
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Pandemic iOS app.

The biggest iOS boardgame app release since June’s appearance of Agricola came this past Thursday, as the leading cooperate boardgame Pandemic was released for the iPad, bringing the same tension as the boardgame to a pass-and-play app with a slick, intuitive interface. If you don’t mind failing to save humanity over and over around your occasional successes, this is the app for you.

If you haven’t the physical version of Pandemic (which I reviewed in December 2010), it’s a different kind of game than most boardgames you’ve ever played. Two to four players work together to try to win, rather than competing. The board is a map of the world with various cities on it, connected by lines that indicate travel routes. The ‘enemy’ here is disease – four of them, each affecting a different region of the world and threatening to spread out of control and wipe out the human race. Cubes represent diseased populations in various cities, with one to three per location; when a city with three cubes in it acquires another one through the draw of a card or a spreading infection, an “outbreak” occurs and new cubes go into each city that connects to the original one. Eight outbreaks means you’ve lost. You can also lose if you have to place all 24 cubes of any specific color (one color per disease), or if you exhaust the deck of city cards before curing all four diseases. It’s difficult and cerebral, requiring you to make numerous decisions, often balancing short-term needs against long-term goals.

There is a way to win Pandemic, however. Each player collects city cards, two per turn, that can be used to cure a disease – five city cards of the same color, sent en masse to the discard pile while the player in question is in a city with a research station, cures that disease. In the meantime, however, players can go from city to city, removing cubes to try to hold off outbreaks. Each player has a specific role that gives him/her a special ability, such as curing a disease with just four cards, building a research station in whatever city he’s on, or moving other players around the board. There are also four special cards that allow the player to skip new infections for a turn, build a research station, remove one city card from the infection deck, or move one player to any place on the board. And the players’ deck also includes Epidemic cards, each of which triggers a new three-cube infection in one city while also raising the infection rate on a sliding scale that starts out at two cities per turn and eventually reaches four. You can adjust the game’s level of difficulty, which affects the number of Epidemic cards in the deck – from four (easy) to six (heroic).

The iOS app is an outstanding, faithful adaptation of the game that plays quickly and easily with only one very minor technical glitch through over a dozen plays (with no crashes). The interface is very clear and crisp, although the city names might be a little tough for some players to read without zooming in. (It helps to know your world geography here.) The screen has to deliver a lot of information at once, but the division of information across four side menus is easy to follow once you know the rules – all players’ cards in the right-hand menu, card history on the left, the current player’s cards and potential actions on the bottom, and the overall stats up top. Moving around is easy, as the game highlights cities to which the current player can move and confirms any move that would require the disposal of a city card. You can also undo your last few moves with a click of the undo arrow symbol in the upper left.

The one technical glitch I mentioned was minor – I have had a few instances where the app wouldn’t allow me to open the right-hand menu showing which city cards the players held, but could exit to the main screen and resume the game to open the menu again. I have noticed an unusually high probability of an epidemic card appearing in the first first turn, which makes the game harder to win; I actually had a game end after only two of the four player-roles had a chance to go, because a series of outbreaks in the red (Asia) region used up all 24 cards, thanks to an epidemic on the first turn. Such unwinnable games are a part of Pandemic, although in my experience with the physical game, they’re pretty rare.

Pandemic is a game meant to be played in person, with lots of communication between players, so I didn’t mind the absence of online multiplayer; slowing this game down would also reduce the tension that’s a key part of why it’s fun. (Although my daughter might question that; after playing alongside me twice, she asked, “What’s the point of this game? Losing?”) The game also has no AI component; if you want to play solo, just choose the number of roles you wish to play and handle them yourself. That also means there’s no downtime: You are always in the process of doing something or deciding what to do, and never waiting on an AI player or an online opponent (or partner). For a competitive game, the lack of online multiplayer would be a drawback, but I don’t see it as one here.

The game doesn’t include either of the available expansions for the physical game, although I imagine those will eventually be available as in-app purchases. Its current price of $6.99 is about par for a high-end adaptation of a popular game, in line with the popular Ticket to Ride or Small World and with the more complex Agricola. If you’re into the physical version of Pandemic, or want a game for your iPad that is very challenging with high replay value, this is a must-have.

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→ October 3, 2013
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Top Chef, S11E1.

I have a column up on the Royals’ success dilemma, plus postseason picks, and I chatted today as well.

Top Chef returns to New Orleans, great news because it’s a disadvantaged city still on its way back from the natural and human disasters of 2005, and because Louisiana is home of two of the only truly American cuisines – Cajun and Creole. Hugh Acheson does not appear on this week’s episode, but he did appear on my podcast and talked about the season. He also promised that we’ll get a Cochon challenge, which is huge news as that restaurant is insanely great.

So we meet the chefs, starting with the man voted sexiest chef in Lake Nobody Cares, Jason, who looks like a douchebag and admits it, but claims he can really cook. If you want to convince people you’re not a douchebag, losing the pink shorts would be a good start. Then we meet Janine, an Australian chef who refers to herself as “not so ugly,” a rather stunning contrast in ego to Jason, as she is rather better than not-so-ugly – but more on that later, once the boys start acting like boys around her. Also of interest is Stephanie from Boston’s No. 9 Park; she tried out with her roommate/colleague Kristen last year, but was bounced in the qualifying round while Kristen went on to win the top prize.

On to the cooking…

* No quickfire this week. Instead, we get a giant elimination challenge, where the chefs are randomly assigned one of three non-traditional proteins – gator, turtle, and frog – and must cook a dish featuring that item to be plated and served at a giant shindig in a Bayou swamp. To me that says they should be thinking more Cajun than Creole if they’re trying to play to the audience. The guests get bead necklaces and are asked to give one to the chef who created their favorite dish of the evening. The three chefs with the most necklaces end up in the top, and the three with the fewest go on the chopping block.

* Two of the 19 chefs begin with immunity because they won a mini-competition of ten New Orleans chefs to earn their spots on the main show. One is Justin, from La Petite Grocery, and the other, Michael, is from the French Quarter stalwart Galatoire’s, so we’re not screwing around here.

* The whining starts early as Michael drives one of the carloads of chefs on their shopping trip and points out some of the sights of the city, only to have Travis grumbling in the back that he just wants to think about cooking. You’re in one of the greatest food tourism cities in the country. Don’t be afraid to relax the sphincter and enjoy it, big guy.

* Bravo runs a live TV poll asking viewers which they would prefer to eat – gator, turtle, or neither, with gator winning in the last update. I’ve had gator and frog, but never turtle. The whole tastes-like-chicken thing gets old fast, because chicken itself has two tastes – dark meat, which usually offers flavor and texture, and white meat, which usually tastes like drywall. Saying “it tastes like chicken” is tantamount to saying “I’m not going to be bothered to think about what this should taste like.” If you cook gator, and it tastes like chicken, congratulations! You suck at this.

* One common thread as we continue to meet the chefs: The boys are cocky and the girls are self-effacing. Think that has a little to do with how we raise our children? The first female chef here to tell any of the men to go shit in his tocque will be my new favorite. I’m secretly hoping it’s Janine, though.

* I should point out that I’ve never cooked any of these proteins, so I have no idea what the challenges are beyond the tendency of such meats to dry out or toughen, but I was floored to see the raw turtle meat, which was the color of a burgundy wine. Michael is treating his like a cube steak to tenderize it.

* Another interesting background – Nina, the daughter of John Compton, the former Prime Minister of St. Lucia and one of the leaders of the country’s independence movement in the 1970s. She speaks of Top Chef as if it were the Olympics and she her country’s flag-bearer. She’s making a curry dish in a nod to her background and grinding the turtle meat into meatballs to mitigate its toughness.

* And then the testosterone kicks in, as we get comments on Janine wearing short shorts and sandals in the kitchen while we see a few of the straight male chefs trying (and largely failing) to flirt with her. I’m guessing that she’s immune to weak game having spent her professional life in male-dominated kitchens, but hey, stay classy, fellas.

* Chef Douchey-Douche, who slipped and wiped out on the floor earlier in the show, cuts his finger right as Tom enters the kitchen to do his walkaround.

* Sara works at Taste of Shoyu, a Japanese restaurant at Minneapolis-St. Paul airport (note to self for the 2014 Futures Game), bringing “real food” to the airport, after several yaers working for Wolfgang Puck as executive chef at two of his restaurants.

* Patty is running into trouble with her output, worrying that she may not have enough servings of her gator rillettes. She’s actually pretty good-looking herself, but all the talk is about Janine. I wonder why that is…

* Ramon is making turtle soup with a Thai dashi, but makes an obvious mistake when he tries to cool the dashi more quickly by dumping a bunch of ice in it, thus watering it down. Why not put it in a larger bowl or pot that is full of ice, so it cools (and maybe even reduces a little more with the last bit of evaporation) without dilution? Is it possible that a professional chef knows so little of basic chemistry that he gets this wrong?

* When Emeril walks into the house the next morning, did everyone clap for him or for the beignets? Because, really, while it would be fun to meet Emeril, I would absolutely trade that opportunity for two beignets. Well, maybe two beignets and a cup of coffee.

* The chefs arrive at the swamp to find they have to build their own cooking stations, including setting up the gas grills. I hate these physical-strength challenges, as they’re a pretty clear disadvantage for at least some of the women in every season. What are we accomplishing here? Is it just so we can watch Sara nearly blow herself and a few nearby chefs up as fire starts shooting out the Venturi tubes?

* Patty is scrambling, moving to a plan B – making a pan sauce with “a gumbo flavor profile.” I don’t see how that’s possible in this short a period of time, since the fundamental flavor of gumbo comes from the roux, which takes 30-60 minutes to make.

* Nina thinks her curry came out too spicy and makes a chutney to balance it, which just sounds like a strong way to show more of her range and increase the dish’s complexity anyway.

* Padma admits she’s never been to a swamp. Did they hire two people just to keep the mosquitos away from her?

* Steph notices Douchey-Douche’s “air about himself.” More like hydrogen sulfide, I’d guess. He’s acting pretty douchey about being done early.

* Tom is not a fan of okra. I love okra. Tom is wrong.

* To the dishes: Bene (who said he wanted to be the first “Top Gay Chef”) makes a turtle croquette with cauliflower puree. Nina’s finished dish is a curried turtle meatball with chayote slaw and chutney with raisins, earning huge praise even from the judges. Janine makes an “alligator BLT,” gator confit (in duck fat, dear God I love this woman) with a tomato jam on the side. Aaron does a duo of turtle, one confit with pickled eggplant, the other in a ragout served over tagliatelle.

* Shirley steals a recipe from her mother-in-law for “turtle tea,” a soup with goji berry and chinese slaw. Carrie does a cold dish, poached frog legs with an oyster emulsion and cold zucchini salad. I believe her dish was the only cold one, which could be an advantage since the air in the swamp was apparently so humid you could chew it. Carlos serves gator rilletes with fennel and pickled red onion relish.

* Note to guests: Giving Janine beads will not get her to flash you.

* Michael serves up fried gator, with sauce piquant, slaw, and basil. Sara goes for a “general Tso’s” gator, deep fried with smoked chilis, pea shoots and herbs, and pickled vegetables. Padma takes a bite and drops a “holy shit that’s hot.” If she says it’s spicy, you know it’s damn spicy. Ramon’s braised turtle with thai dashi and shaved radish is already getting panned for lack of flavor. Big shock there. Patty’s Cajun-style gator with yucca puree doesn’t look like much, and I don’t see how she could have developed those flavors in such a short time.

* Douchey-Douche does a frog’s leg croquette with roasted eggplant and a fennel salad. Steph confited her frog’s legs in butter and served with a spinach and watercress puree, which made me think of glasswort (a.k.a. sea beans) and how they’d be a perfect garnish for any of these dishes.

* Nina looks like she has a million beads, which is pretty telling. Ramon has almost none.

* The big twist this year: The chefs get to watch the judges deliberating, and it doesn’t seem like the judges hold back at all even though they’re being watched. I imagine that will be very, very awkward, but also potentially useful for chefs who take mental notes on their own dishes and what judges do and don’t favor in others’ dishes.

* The crowd loved Nina’s, Sara’s (despite the heat), Carrie’s, Shirley’s, and Janine’s. They didn’t favor Aaron (Tom said pasta suffered from sitting around too much), Patty (gator wasn’t treated as well), Carlos (toast was quite soggy), Ramon (dashi didn’t have flavor), or Bene (mushrooms weren’t cooked properly). Nothing terribly shocking on either side there, I think.

* Top three: Carrie, Nina, and Sara. Sara brought a lot of heat and cooked to the audience. If I had a surprise it was her making the top three despite a dish that had the Spice Queen dropping s-bombs on camera. Nina says she’d heard that turtle is tough, so she made a bite-sized dish that would become tender when cooked in the sauce. Carrie thought on a humid and hot evening, a cold dish would be refreshing, but she was the only chef who presented a cold dish and it may have helped her cause. Nina wins. That makes sense given what we were shown, but she’ll have to show she can cook outside of her genre as the show progresses.

* Bottom three: Patty, Aaron, and Ramon. Aaron said he ran with the pasta idea, but didn’t think of how the time and place would affect execution, earning him a scolding from Tom. Curtis said he wouldn’t try to do homemade pasta in a swamp for 150, period. Tom thinks it could have worked if done in small batches. No one mentions that he might have been better off doing one preparation well rather than two poorly.

* Ramon’s dashi was bland. Tom’s face when Ramon says he added ice was priceless, and I think his quote, “that’s just bizarre,” was just the best he could get out of his mouth while he was still in shock. At this point, I was certain Ramon was toast, and then Emeril said of the dashi, “it’s not a cocktail!” and I was sure.

* Patty says she changed concept midstream, broke up her rillettes, and at the end it was just pounded-out gator meat. Tom’s surprised she got a dish out the way she described her experience. I don’t know if this was poor planning or poor execution, but I can’t imagine she’s very long for the show either way.

* Ramon goes. Right call. Last Chance Kitchen is back, and maybe he’ll think more about cooling techniques before his first battle.

* One last note on this episode: The previews for the rest of the season focused mostly on positive moments, not behind-the-scenes drama; even the negative bits were more about dishes not working or chefs appearing stressed, rather than Project Runway-style sniping and bickering. Good for them. After all, I’m just here for the food.

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→ October 2, 2013
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Polvo’s Siberia and a new music update.

Top Chef judge and acclaimed Georgia chef Hugh Acheson joined me on yesterday’s Behind the Dish podcast, talking about the show but also about growing up an Expos fan, the decline of the stolen base, and the rise of coffee culture in America. Acheson’s first cookbook, A New Turn in the South, came out in 2011, with more to come next year.

On to the music… The North Carolina-based band Polvo were part of the underground noise-rock scene in the 1990s, along with Helium, Steel Pole Bath Tub, Superchunk, and other similarly out-there groups that would likely have found wider commercial acceptance if they were recording today. Polvo’s music was intricate and layered, earning the label “math rock” according to the All Music Guide (although I don’t think I ever heard that term when it was current), with lengthy tracks, shifting time signatures, and songs that included different movements as you might find in classical compositions – different enough that you think you’re listening to a different song only to find you’re five and a half minutes into the last one.

After a long hiatus, Polvo reformed for a comeback album in 2008, took another long break, and released their sixth album, Siberia, this Tuesday. It’s more focused than 2008’s In Prism without losing the sprawling sensibility that has always marked their sound, a more mature approach that brings more melodic elements to the album’s best tracks without losing its experimental feel or the densely layered style that has always marked Polvo’s work.

* Full disclosure: I received a review copy of Siberia from Merge Records a few weeks ago.

Although regular readers among you know that I’m a little bit of a short-attention span listener, I found Siberia‘s longest tracks its most memorable, especially the 6:24 opener “Total Immersion” and the centerpiece, “The Water Wheel,” which might as well be two or three songs in one. “Total Immersion” marries a heavy guitar sound with low-register vocals to create an aural experience to match the song’s title, almost drowning the listener in a wall of noise that would make most thrash artists jealous. “The Water Wheel” manages to change direction at least twice within its eight minutes, while also making the best use of the two-pronged guitar attack that Polvo makes anywhere on the album – the two axes work together even when they seem to be the on verge of outright conflict. If Sonic Youth had morphed into a jam band, this is the kind of song they would have churned out.

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Those aren’t the only strong tracks on Siberia, although they’re my favorites. The album’s shortest track “Changed” still manages to pack in several tempos, from a dissonant, Sonic Youth-like (or early Weezer) jangly guitar riff giving way to a chunkier sound behind the song’s sort-of-chorus and an outro that sounds like later Led Zeppelin. “Light, Raking” winks back at the early-90s grunge period (more Mudhoney than Pearl Jam, though) before the surprise addition of a keyboard line behind the chorus, which is followed by a flat-out weird bridge where it sounds like someone is detuning the guitars as they’re being played. Polvo even seems to work in a slight shade of country-rock on the meandering “Blues is Loss,” where their past affection for Middle Eastern and South Asian sounds also makes a brief appearance.

Siberia still isn’t a commercial record, as that’s just not something you’re ever likely to find on a noise-rock record unless the band makes a wilful turn toward the mass market. It’s challenging music because it rewards your attention with its complexity and frequent changes of direction,

* I mentioned Superchunk, who are back with, I Hate Music ($5 there via amazon), just their second album since 2004, featuring what I think is their best single since 1995’s “Hyper Enough,” the musically upbeat “Me & You & Jackie Mittoo,” which opens with a much darker sentiment than the music would lead you to expect: “I hate music – what is it worth?/Can’t bring anyone back to this earth.”

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* I don’t have much to say about Lorde’s hit “Royals” other than that it’s remarkable that a 16-year-old could write better lyrics, with more imagery, than nearly every adult songwriter working in American pop music today. I don’t even love the song for its music, but I love the creativity it shows – and after CHVRCHES this is my daughter’s favorite alternative/pop track right now.

* Wild Cub’s “Thunder Clatter” wins the award for “song I didn’t want to like, but can’t help myself.” It’s too damn catchy.

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* Heavy English’s “21 Flights” is a focus track right now on Sirius XM’s Alt Nation/XMU, which does trigger my inherent skepticism of anything the music industry wants to push on us … but it’s actually a pretty good song, the first single from a band that rose from the ashes of Envy on the Coast. Marrying the staccato guitar style of late-70s punk/art bands like Gang of Four with neo-soul choruses you might associate more with Fitz and the Tantrums, “21 Flights” is a rousing stomper that forges a different kind of indie-rock aesthetic.

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* Speedy Ortiz’s “Tiger Tank” (currently free to download from amazon) reminds me quite a bit of Helium, whom I mentioned earlier – Polvo’s lead guitarist eventually joined Helium while he was dating lead singer Mary Timony. Speedy Ortiz also has a female lead singer and intentionally dissonant guitar lines. I think Pavement comparisons are also inevitable, thanks to Sadie Dupuis’ off-kilter vocals style, where she sings the verses like she’s about to fall down a flight of stairs.

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* Washed Out’s “All I Know” is a major improvement over his first single, “It All Feels Right,” which felt like it went on for fifteen minutes with no purpose. It’s amazing what a faster tempo and a keyboard sample can do.

* Terraplane Sun’s “Get Me Golden” fell out of the 1960s into 2013 with its handclaps, rising vocal harmonies, and Hammond organ. I get a similar vibe from Temples’ music, especially their one minor hit, “Shelter Song,” but Terraplane Sun does that revivalist sound better.

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* The band-of-brothers (three of them, to be precise) Ceremonies releases their debut EP next week, but lead single “Land of Gathering” has been out since the spring. It’s a curious mix of heartfelt, folkish verses with high-flying Beach Boys-style choruses, over a rapid two-step drumbeat that gives way to a slower, tribal percussion pattern that backs up those verses. It’s like a new, new New Wave.

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* Dirty Projectors – “Gun Has No Trigger.” So retro it should be played on an 8-track.

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* Regina Spektor – “You’ve Got Time.” I can’t be the only one who saw her name and assumed she was related to Crazy Phil, right? Anyway, the singer of the theme to the series Orange is the New Black is actually a Russian emigre, no relation to the Wall-of-Sound guy, and she’s been recording music for a decade but is just now breaking out on the strength of this stop-and-go energy rush of a single.

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* The Colourist’s “Little Games” reminds me a lot of another of my favorite alternative-pop tracks of the year, Smallpools’ “Dreaming,” pairing sunny vocals with tightly-produced guitar and keyboard lines. “Little Games” opens up its production behind the chorus with more reverb to the rhythm guitars to add texture to the overly-polished vocals.

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* I hated the Orwells’ “Mallrats,” but their newest song, “Who Needs You” (from the EP of the same title), puts their snotty-rock approach to better use, ditching the most annoying elements and allowing the inherent pop songcraft to make its mark.

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* I received a review copy of Panama’s three-song EP Always, which will be released later this week. The Australian quintet produces electronic-pop music that shows off lead singer Jarrah McCleary’s background in classical piano, with a sound similar to Yeasayer but a slower, more soulful vibe. The title track should show up quickly on alternative radio thanks to the catchy chorus and the little piano flourish that follows it.

* Wikipedia – which is never wrong – describes the Faeroese band Týr as “folk-metal,” although to my ears their sound is more melodic death metal (“melodeth”), sung without the silly screaming or growling that ruins a lot of extreme metal for my ears. I hear way more Iron Maiden, early Metallica, or thrash-era Testament here than any more modern influences, and while I might ordinarily scoff at these Viking-hero lyrics, when you’re from the Faeroe Islands you get a free pass. “Blood of Heroes” is the lead track from their latest album and would likely make Eddie the Head proud of what he’s wrought.

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* Havok’s “Give Me Liberty … Or Give Me Death” is such a close homage to early punk-thrash efforts like Agent Orange, Sacred Reich, or Corrosion of Conformity that when I first heard it I assumed it was some deep track from the mid-1980s I’d never heard before. I enjoy throwbacks like this, although they can get old quickly because the formula is too familiar.

* Stuff I already reviewed: CHVRCHES’ The Bones of What You Believe and Arctic Monkeys’ AM. Still to come: new Arcade Fire.

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The Bones of What You Believe.

The Bones Of What You Believe (iTunes link), the debut album from the Scottish electro-pop act CHVRCHES, dropped today, over a year after their first single came out and a good eight months after I first encountered them on a promotional sampler from a publicity firm the band no longer uses. Three of the album’s tracks have received heavy airplay this year on alternative radio, including Sirius XMU and Alt Nation, so much of what’s on the new album is familiar, but the deeper tracks show greater breadth than you’d get from just listening to the singles, with many harbingers of more promising material down the road.

CHVRCHES is, by and large, the Lauren Mayberry Project, as the 26-year-old singer and erstwhile music journalist dominates the record (and their live shows) with her piercing vocals and impassioned delivery. Singing largely in the first person – more on that in a moment – Mayberry projects a variety of personae across the ten tracks where she handles the lead vocals, occasionally coquettish but more often strong and fearsome, sometimes even stalkerish (“We Sink” has a chorus that starts with “I’ll be a thorn in your side/Till you die” … all righty then), in contrast to her diminutive stature and high register. She elevates some of the filler songs to a different level, and the half-dozen radio-worthy tracks all stand out in large part because of what her vocal style brings to the table.

The band’s music draws heavily from early 80s new-wave influences, particularly Yaz, the short-lived project involving Vince Clarke between his tenures in Depeche Mode and Erasure, but drawing from other sources as diverse as Kate Bush and Prince (whose “I Would Die for U” they used to cover during live shows). CHVRCHES love their synths and they’re not ashamed to put the keyboards front and center of nearly every song, without filling the space between the melodic synth lines and the drum/bass with layers of added noise, meaning that Mayberry’s vocals and the lead keyboard lines are the stars of every track where she sings. That’s most pronounced in “Gun,” the most recently released single from the album, where the counterpoint between Mayberry’s top-register vocals and the descending keyboard lines underpins the conflict she’s describing in the song’s lyrics (where the gun is, fortunately, of the metaphorical variety). When they try a little more layering, like adding reverb to Mayberry’s vocal lines on “Lungs,” the melody remains strong but her voice and charisma are blunted, to the detriment of the overall track.

The album’s lyrics lean heavily toward first-person narratives, which Mayberry makes more powerful with a style that makes it sound like she’s singing directly to the listener, whether she’s threatening you as she does on “We Sink” or is proclaiming herself to be the “Night Sky.” The strongest track lyrically, as well as musically, is the single “The Mother We Share,” which careens to and fro with tempo and volume changes to match the chaotic anti-romance of the lyrics, where Mayberry describes being “in misery/where you can seem/as old as your omens.” Several songs here are built around a single compelling image or metaphor, like “Gun” or “We Sink.” Others run too short and lack that tangible center, such as the catchy “Recover” or the lesser track “Tether,” where the lyrics don’t stand up as well – although Mayberry’s Scottish pronunciation of “don’t” in the chorus of “Recover” is incredibly endearing.

Mayberry cedes vocal duties on two tracks, which robs them of the urgency she brings to the other ten, and was made worse in concert when Martin Doherty took over lead vocals for a song and was off key (as he was when providing backing vocals behind Mayberry). The show I saw, at Union Transfer in Philadelphia, was otherwise outstanding, although it was odd to hear Mayberry’s chatter between songs, almost sounding nervous and dropping f-bombs as if she was trying to show the crowd that, despite her pixie-like appearance, she was fierce. When you sing with a passion that could damascene steel, you don’t need to act fierce. Fierce will list you as a reference.

The Bones of What You Believe is a deep, intense pop experience that doesn’t demean its audience, but at the end of its twelve tracks, I was also left with the feeling that this was more of a coming out party for Mayberry than for the band as a whole. Her presence overwhelms sections where the music feels unfinished or even amateurish, a contrast that was even more stark when I saw them live. Whether the music catches up to the force of her character or she leaves the group for greener pastures, she’s destined for bigger things than this otherwise very solid debut album.

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