→ March 20, 2013
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Santa Monica and Houston eats.

This week’s episode of the Behind the Dish podcast is up, as is my piece for Insiders on potential breakout candidates for 2013.

My nationwide pizza crawl continued at Stella Rosa in Santa Monica on Tuesday night, convenient since I’d just seen Dominic Smith play around the corner at Santa Monica High School. Stella Rosa is also on that Food and Wine list of the best pizzerias in the U.S., but I thought it was just kind of average overall, a little better than the Arizona chain Grimaldi’s (related to but not owned by the same folks who run the original in Brooklyn) but not close to the others on the list I’ve tried. Stella Rosa makes the sausage for their sausage pizza in-house and they dust the pizza with fennel pollen, all of which is great, but the pizza was overtopped so that it was swimming in water – not just wet in the center, Neapolitan-style, but just watery overall, and with mozzarella that was so moisture-reduced already it became a little tough in the cooking. Their dough is more New York-style than ultra-thin Italian-style, crunchy underneath like the exterior of a baguette instead of like a cracker. They have an interesting menu of salads, so it might be a better experience with a crowd, and the attached marketplace (called “M”) offers some enormous cookies, including a chocolate chip cookie with dark chunks of chocolate and fleur de sel sprinkled on top that I may or may not have just inhaled.

I also neglected to mention the one meal I ate in Houston last week, at Bryan Caswell’s very highly regarded seafood restaurant Reef. Caswell was a guest judge on one episode of Top Chef: Texas, competed on the Next Iron Chef, and won a Food and Wine Best New Chef award … but Reef was really disappointing start to finish. The snapper in the snapper carpaccio was sliced too thickly and was very tough in parts, without enough of the tangy grapefruit agrodolce to go around. The redfish in that entree was very high-quality, but way too mildly flavored and in desperate need of a hit of acid. (Aren’t we all, though?) Even the dessert, a key lime tart with toasted meringue and fresh raspberries, was overdone – the meringue was smeared on the plate and then browned, so eating it with the tart, which is kind of the entire point of having it on the plate, was extremely difficult. I had been looking forward to this meal for a while, but every step of it was a letdown.

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→ March 17, 2013
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Minneapolis eats.

A few months ago, Food and Wine issued me a fairly direct and obvious challenge. Oh, they might have published it for everyone, but let’s be clear here – this one was aimed directly between my eyes, and no one else’s. They were mocking me, in a way, for calling myself a devotee of artisanal pizza, when, of the 48 pizzerias on their list of the best pizzerias in the United States, I had only visited TWO: Pizzeria Mozza in LA and Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix. Food and Wine, I hereby accept your challenge.

The list, which I’ve reproduced in a Google spreadsheet if you want to play along at home, is quite seriously East Coast biased, with fully one third of the pizzerias located in New York City as well as one in its suburbs, while no other metropolitan area has more than five (San Francisco has four, with two more in Oakland and Larkspur). As it turns out, two of the restaurants on the list are located in Minneapolis/St. Paul, the mini-chain Punch Pizza, serving Neapolitan-style pizzas, and the slightly less traditional Pizzeria Lola, which diverges from the classic formulation in both crust and toppings. Both are strong, but even though I’m a traditionalist when it comes to pizza, Lola’s product is better.

Punch’s model is very simple – rather than offering table service, Punch has customers order at the counter and delivers the pizzas to the table in short order thanks to the quick cooking times. They offer a large number of red (with tomato sauce) and white (take a wild guess) varieties, and also allow you to build your own, as well as offering ways to customize by adding an extra drizzle of EVOO or swapping out regular mozzarella for buffalo-milk mozzarella (do this, you probably find dumber uses of $3 a dozen times every day). The centers of the pizzas are “wet,” which is traditional in Naples (Napoli, hence “Neapolitan”) but which I think most Americans find weird and offputting. You will probably eat the center of the pizza with a knife and fork, and even as a dedicated folder of pizza slices, I am okay with this.

Punch’s crust is very thin at the center, light and puffy at the edges, with a healthy char on the exterior but not underneath (which is correct). I went with the “Rugula,” with prosciutto crudo and arugula on the basic tomato/mozzarella pizza, and while the flavors were strong across the board, the fact that the prosciutto is added post-oven meant that the pizza cooled off very quickly after reaching the table, probably by the time I’d reached the second half of it. My friend Will went for a sausage and pepper variety that had a good kick to it from cracked red pepper, not enough to call it spicy but just enough for a little surprise as you eat it. I also noticed his stayed warm longer than mine did, so maybe giving the prosciutto 30 seconds in that hot oven would have solved the problem (plus it starts to render the fat just a little bit, which is awesome). I’d call this a 55.

Pizzeria Lola, on the other hand, is a solid 65 for me. Their crust is also thin, and is even thinner around the edges than at more traditional places like Punch or Bianco, so it’s not as high or as soft. But the balance of flavors was better, even on my oh-so-not-traditional Korean BBQ pizza, with mozzarella, short ribs, sesame seeds, a sweet soy glaze, and arugula. (I really like arugula.) These slices were strong enough in the center to hold them up and fold them – I assume they also use reduced-moisture mozzarella or they press some of the water out of the fresh stuff to avoid the wet centers. I would tell you how my friend Evon’s pepperoni and caramelized onion pizza was, but he is incredibly selfish and greedy and also reads this blog which is the best part of the whole story. The caramelized onions were legit, though, deep amber, sweet, and tasting strongly of the wine they used for deglazing them. They offer chocolate chip cookies for dessert, mostly cooked beforehand, then reheated until gooey at the edge of the pizza oven, and, if you want, you can get two of them with a goblet of their own vanilla soft-serve ice cream for $5 and I strongly recommend that you do this and get some extra napkins. I also tried a beer called a Surly Furious, which sounds like the name of a bad comedian from New Zealand, which was medium in color and had a strongly nutty flavor, a little like cashew brittle. Evon also took me to his favorite pub in the neighborhood, George and the Dragon, for more beer (although their menu looked like it’s worth trying), where I tried Steel Toe Dissent, a “dark American ale” that was as dark as a porter, with heavy coffee notes, but lighter in body than most porters and stouts.

I had one other meal while in Minneapolis, a return visit to Hell’s Kitchen, which I’d visited on my last visit to the Twin Cities back in 2006. I am pleased to report that the corn meal waffle is still on the menu and is still amazing, as is the house-made maple-bison sausage. They no longer serve loose-leaf teas in cast-iron pots, though. I know there are other breakfast places in Minneapolis but I could eat that waffle every morning for a year and not get tired of it. I also had an espresso from Dunn Brothers, which was a little sharp for me – not acidic or bitter, more like spicy, enough that I added a pinch of sugar, something I rarely do with the best espresso (Intelligentsia, Press, Superstition, etc.). I did want to try the People’s Organic Cafe’s coffee, but their downtown location is closed on the weekends.

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→ March 14, 2013
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More Phoenix/Valley eats.

I’m glad to report I’ve found another solid non-chain option out in the west Valley, moderately convenient to Glendale and not far off the route to Goodyear – Ground Control, a coffee roaster that has a strong menu of salads and sandwiches, located on the border of Avondale and Goodyear. I’ve only visited once so far, but the chipotle turkey sandwich, with freshly sliced roasted turkey, havarti, tomatoes, and a thin spread of chipotle mayo, came on an incredible rosemary flatbread along with a side salad for just under $10. The flatbread meant that most of what I got was filling, not bread, and when the filling is good (as mine was) this is a favorable ratio. Ground Control also offers cheese boards and gelato made in-house, if you’re not racing off to a game as I was.

Back in Phoenix, after years of hearing recommendations from locals (including some of you), I finally made it to Beckett’s Table, which is next door to the strip mall that houses crudo. Beckett’s Table’s general vibe is upscale comfort food, with a menu full of hearty dishes that often center on a rich ingredient (short ribs, dumplings, pork shanks), never deviate too far from the spirit of the dish, but use top-quality ingredients to elevate it. I had that pork shank, called a “pork osso buco confit,” and couldn’t get over how rich and yet clean-tasting it was, not heavy or fatty like I feared it might be if it wasn’t cooked long or slowly enough. I was there with my daughter, whose mac and cheese was actually made fresh (not from a box), after which she ate a sizable chunk of Joe Posnanski’s chocolate cheesecake. (I knew once he offered to share, he was in trouble.) I was impressed by the real food on the kids’ menu; it’s not smaller portions of adult entrees, but at least it’s food cooked to order that treats kids like actual people, not like pets. We started with a cheese board while we waited for Joe, which came with three small slices of a 60-day aged goat cheese, grilled pieces of sliced sourdough from a local baker, house-made cranberry chutney, and spiced nuts, all outstanding but not a great value at $15. Those of you who follow me on Twitter saw the chocolate-covered bacon s’mores, but I have to tell you it looked better than it tasted; the best part was actually the homemade marshmallows. Everything was good, but I’d order differently on my next visit.

Tuesday night, I was solo for dinner and tried Franco’s Italian Caffe on Scottsdale Road, which has found a devoted following after just a few months, partly because Franco had previously run restaurants here before moving to New York while his daughter was in school there. Franco himself is Italian-born, but the menu is more Italian by way of New York City, with fare that is heavier than the bright, clean flavors of true Italian food. The pasta erbe aromatiche, apparently a signature dish (according to my server, who was very friendly but butchered every Italian word he said), comprises strozzapretti in a sauce of prosciutto cotto fresh herbs, and white wine reduced and then finished with a thick coating of cream. My pasta was slightly overcooked, not Olive Garden level but still further than I would call “al dente,” and the sauce, while full of the flavors of the herbs and pleasantly salty, was just way too heavy. The burrata starter special was also quite ordinary, with the cheese lacking salt and the prosciutto crudo not enough to make up for it. This is good Italian-American food, but based on one dinner at each place, I think Davanti Enoteca just up the road is a better option. EDIT: Davanti closed in May of 2013.

For more eats around here, sorted by stadium, check out my Arizona spring training dining guide.

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→ March 12, 2013
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Blood, Bones & Butter.

A little admin stuff first – my new weekly podcast for ESPN, Behind the Dish, debuted today, featuring an interview with Astros GM Jeff Luhnow and a conversation with fellow writer Joe Sheehan. I appreciate the support of all of you who listened to Baseball Today and mourned its end, so I hope you’ll tune in to the new show. It should be up on iTunes today (there’s a technical problem on their end, I’m told). Spread the word.

Also, I have new posts for Insiders on Jeff Samardzija, David Holmberg, and other Cubs and Dbacks and on Yordano Ventura, Brandon Belt, Tyler Skaggs, and more.

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Gabrielle Hamilton is a self-taught and, in her words, “reluctant,” chef who achieved great acclaim for her tiny New York restaurant Prune and the honest, rustic fare she has served there for the past fourteen years, eventually winning the James Beard Award as NYC’s best chef in 2001. Her brilliantly written memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, is a masterpiece of the memoir genre, a perfect emulsion of food writing and autobiography that will make your mouth water with descriptions of food yet never shies away from critical introspection.

One central thread, Hamilton’s own relationship with food and, by extension, how much that relationship tied to her relationships with friends and family, runs through the entire book, but rather than giving a single story, Hamilton splits her memoir into a sort of triptych: one section on her childhood and adolescence, one on her stop-and-go path into a career in food (with a detour to Michigan for a master’s in creative writing), and one on her unfulfilling marriage to an Italian doctor, Michele. Food is everywhere in the book, yet the book isn’t about food. It is about Hamilton’s peculiar life, with her passion for cooking a recurring character in every episode.

Hamilton’s path to culinary stardom was accidental, but also extremely odd, not something you’d ever recommend to a would-be chef. Her offbeat family imploded when her French-born mother suddenly demanded a divorce from Gabrielle’s set-designer/artist father, ushering in a period when Gabrielle was largely left without parental supervision, a tragicomic setup that led her both into the kind of libertine behavior you’d expect from a 13-year-old without adults around and into a lifetime of extreme self-reliance. She began working in restaurants and bars, as a dishwasher or a server, and eventually working insane hours for catering outfits in New York, learning how to cook as she went rather than at culinary school. Her disdain for fussy, pretentious food gives her an opportunity for some hilarious rants; her own culinary ethos is about as far from a “chef’s tasting menu” as you can get. Instead, she waxes more romantic when describing an Italian sandwich she purchased at a pork shop in Brooklyn (unnamed, sadly) or the fresh seasonal vegetables she finds during annual visits to her mother-in-law in Rome and Puglia. Even in the final section, which details her latent disaffection with her marriage, one that wasn’t founded on love and never grew into anything more than friendly co-parenting, Hamilton still uses food as the foundation for the exploration of her own emotions.

While Hamilton infuses nearly every page with her passion for food, it’s her clear yet highly evocative writing style that sets Blood, Bones & Butter apart. She can express so much in just a few sentences, as in this passage, describing the scene at a coffee place in Grand Central Station:

I hate hating women but double-skim half-decaf vanilla latte embarrasses me. I ordered a plain filtered coffee, as if I were apologizing on behalf of my gender, and when I dug through my heavy purse to pay for it I discovered in my bag a diaper, a resealable jar of apricot puree, and one of Marco’s socks, which had somehow in the general loss of boundary and private real estate that is Motherhood, made its way in there.

That second sentence there is a thing of beauty, its odd punctuation contributing to its sense of barely contained chaos, all while we get Hamilton’s scorn for overly prissy fake coffee drinks and her exasperation at the loss of self that comes with the addition of one or more kids. When Hamilton describes her experiences in catering kitchens, or takes you through Michele’s family estate in Italy, or talks about the large family meals that bookend the story – the giant lamb roasts her father organized when she was a kid, and the family meal with her now ex-in-laws that appears in the epilogue-cum-“reader’s guide” – you can hear the sizzle of the meat as it cooks. If she’s as good of a chef as she is of a writer, Prune must be amazing.

One stray thought on the book: in a passage about women’s roles and struggles in a professional kitchen, Hamilton offers this thought:

If anything, I have come to love the men who also feel that the kitchen is abetter place when women are allowed to work in it, the men who feel that if any part of society is abused, that it demeans the rest of society.

Emphasis mine there, because that summarizes quite nicely why I will block people on Twitter who use the r-word, or a gay-bashing epithet like the word for a bundle of sticks, and it explains why I find team nicknames like Indians or Braves or that odious one that plays football in Washington so offensive. Intent to demean is not required for something to demean. Simply creating a division that sets one part of the population as “other” is demeaning. We do not name sports teams after Italians or Jews or African-Americans, after lesbians or Sikhs or the disabled, yet we think nothing of naming sports teams after Native Americans, or using words that are obvious proxies for them. (Would you see the implicit racism in a sports team called the Atlanta Slaves?) Hamilton’s praise for men who want women in their kitchens and treated as equals says much about her character, and what kind of co-worker and boss she must be, especially in an industry that often adulates alpha males with domineering personalities.

Next up: Lev Grossman’s The Magician King, the sequel to his 2009 novel The Magicians, which I reviewed that August.

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→ March 7, 2013
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The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry.

I have a new post up on Ryu Hyun-Jin and Yasiel Puig and did a Klawchat as well.

One more negative book review before I move on to one I’m really enjoying, this time on Kathleen Flinn’s flimsy cooking-school memoir The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School, in which the author tells the story of her time at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, which coincided with her engagement and marriage to the love of her life. Unfortunately, the book just isn’t very well written (in terms of prose) and the telling is so superficial that we’re not getting enough of the food nor are we getting enough of the personal anecdotes that could make a book like this a fun read even if it’s light on the cooking.

Flinn’s reason for going to cooking school is easily the best aspect of the book: Laid off from a dot-com job with Microsoft’s sidewalk.com unit (it’s never named, but if you’re familiar with the industry it’s obvious who she worked for), Flinn decided to chase a long-denied dream of attending Le Cordon Bleu, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious culinary arts programs, one she was encouraged to pursue years earlier by none other than Julia Child. Flinn’s then-boyfriend Mike encourages her to do it, even leaving his own career on hold for a year-plus to move to Paris with her and have what I imagine was the adventure of a lifetime.

However, that sense of adventure just never comes through on Sharper‘s pages. There’s a rote sense to Flinn’s days in school – go in, cook, screw some stuff up, take the food home – that we don’t get any of the color of the school itself as we did in Michael Ruhlman’s seminal The Making of a Chef, yet we also get only the slightest feel of life as an expat in Paris, or of the terrific romance between Kathleen and Mike. Side characters are painted in two dimensions, and sometimes one, like their overbearing, freeloading houseguests from Seattle, a lesbian couple who seem to be on the verge of a breakup with every interaction. I closed the book with no clear picture of who anyone was except for Kathleen herself, and even she came through in a faded image, driven by hackneyed life advice more than an abiding passion for food. (I’m sure she has that passion, but it never comes through on the pages.) Flinn’s habit of ending sections and chapters with awful cliches – “Sometimes, the places life takes us can be so unexpected” or “I wonder if graduating higher in the class rankings is worth the price she may ultimately pay” – is grating and indicative of a broader writing style that reads like it was written by someone who hasn’t read enough great writers, who believes that this is how you craft a story.

If this subject interests you, I can’t recommend Ruhlman’s book highly enough, as it balances the food and the educational experience very well against the fascinating personalities with whom he went through the school. I just found Flinn’s book paled in comparison and was much harder to push through given the weakness of the prose.

Next up: I’m just 50 pages into Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter and it’s amazing, extremely well-written and, thus far, a compelling story.

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→ March 6, 2013
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Loving Frank.

Nancy Horan’s Loving Frank falls in one of my least favorite categories of fiction – historical fiction written about real, well-known personalities, where the author is putting words in the mouths of people who likely never said or did anything of the kind. Frank of the title here is Frank Lloyd Wright, and the novel tells the story of his affair with Mamah Borthwick, a married woman who was friends with Wright’s first wife and eventually ran off with Wright, living with him until her murder at the hands of one of the family’s servants. Little is known of their affair’s details beyond scurrilous reports in contemporary newspapers, which pounced on the controversy, stalling Wright’s career in the States for years; Borthwick left few letters behind, leaving little direct evidence of her character and personality. The result is that Horan has fabricated two impossibly good characters in Borthwick and Wright, building a romance between them that feels antiseptic for its simplicity while glossing over the very real matter of both parties abandoning their young children for several years while they pursued their relationship and careers in Europe.

Borthwick and her husband, Edwin, hired Wright to build them a house, and during the process she and Wright developed a relationship around their shared interests; in Horan’s retelling, both were married unhappily to spouses who could not satisfy them intellectually, so the affair is primarily one of thoughts and emotions rather than physical attraction. Horan depicts Wright as demanding and somewhat temperamental, but also incredibly sensitive, a hard-driving boss who is tender and loving when he leaves the office – surely an idealized version of the actual Frank Lloyd Wright, who couldn’t have just left his haughty nature at work when it suited him. Borthwick was, in reality, a translator for the early European difference feminist Ellen Key, a secondary relationship Horan also explores in the book, similarly endowing Key with so many positive traits (and a way with words that just sounds artificial on the page) that she is hard to accept as a real-life character. Borthwick’s feminism contrasts with her desire to follow Wright, and eventually she must make small albeit significant choices between her affair and her wish to have an independent identity and career, but Horan can hand-wave these away because the pair did end up residing together at the origianl Taliesin in Wisconsin, a home Wright built specifically for the two of them.

The false tone of the text poisons it from the beginning of the book, unfortunately, and Horan seems to have too much affection for these superficial characters to recognize that, by lionizing them, she ends up demeaning them instead. Borthwick leaves her children far too easily – leaving her husband, an amiable provider who only wants a homemaker rather than an independent thinker, is much easier to understand – with too little remorse or guilt or even plans to maintain relationships with the children while she’s traveling with Wright and eventually studying on her own in Europe. An emotionally evolved woman like this fictional Borthwick would realize the deleterious effects of abandoning her two young children at their ages, and, more to the point, she’d miss them so powerfully that leaving with Wright and staying with him for months would have been excruciating choices. Horan needs to get Borthwick on that boat with Wright and almost dismisses Borthwick’s maternal instincts because they’re inconvenient. I found it difficult to avoid judging both characters harshly for leaving their children like that; I cannot imagine a situation where I’d leave my daughter for a year or more with barely any contact beyond an occasional letter. When you’re a parent, your child comes first. Even if the marriage is unhappy, you don’t have to flee the continent and forget your children to pursue a separate romance.

Borthwick’s murder by a Barbadian servant who never explained his “motives” (although, given the nature of the crime, he must have had some sort of psychotic break) provides Horan with a comfortable out for her story as well – it almost feels like the visitation of a divine judgment on Mamah for her abandonment of her family, and if it hadn’t actually happened, I’d be criticizing this as a needless and small-minded morality play. Instead, it’s just one false note after another, characters built around real people who were probably nothing like what Horan wanted them to be. It’s bad enough that Mamah and her children died such a horrible death; don’t spit on their graves by using them to project your own personal fantasies as well.

Next up: I’ve finished Kathleen Flinn’s The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry and have just begun Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef.

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→ March 5, 2013
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They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

I had a post this morning on Taijuan Walker, Nolan Arenado, and some other M’s and Rockies. No game for me today, but thanks to all of you for your well wishes after hearing that my daughter’s stomach virus sent us to the ER last night. She’s fine now, but everyone’s exhausted, of course.

Horace McCoy’s novella They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? reads like an extended film treatment, a la Graham Greene’s The Third Man, which is what it actually was, although in McCoy’s case the film wasn’t made until long after his book was published and he had already died. The film earned nine Academy Award nominations, a record for a film that didn’t get a Best Picture nod, with Gig Young* winning the award for Best Supporting Actor. While it deviates somewhat from the book’s plot, both revolve around a dance marathan that exploits desperate would-be actors and hangers-on in Hollywood in the 1930s, all run by a sleazy promoter who takes advantage of the contestants to line his own pockets. (Disclaimer: I haven’t seen the film.)

*Young eventually killed himself and his wife of one month in 1978; his final film, Game of Death, was also Bruce Lee’s final film, compiled from unfinished footage shot before Lee’s death from a cerebral edema in 1973.

The sparse 120-page book is more a showcase for McCoy’s bleak, hard-boiled writing style and worldview than for any depth of plot, although there’s enough story here to sustain you through its 30,000 or so words. The book opens with Robert confessing to the murder of Gloria, essentially pleading no contest, after which we get the full story of how they met and how he came to kill her. The two are in Hollywood trying to land bit parts as extras – Gloria wants to be an actor, assuming she wants to be anything at all, while Robert wants to be a director, although it’s not clear he knows what that entails – and meet on the street after failing to earn parts that morning in their auditions. She mentions that she’s heard of a dance marathon being held with a small cash prize and the chance to be noticed by some Hollywood big shots, so he reluctantly agrees, mostly because he has nothing better to do.

The marathon is a rough, demeaning endurance contest, with dancers pushed to the limit by the unscrupulous organizers, including a bizarre nightly racing “derby” in which the losing couple is eliminated from the marathon, and a staged marriage designed to court positive and negative attention from the local press. Gloria is quickly revealed to be depressed and hopeless, picking pointless fights with other dancers and wishing aloud that she were dead. Robert is more interesting in going along to get along, but he’s just as aimless as Gloria, without the rage or hopelessness. When the contest ends in tragedy and the dancers are all sent off with a pittance for weeks of effort, Gloria pulls out a gun and tells Robert that she wants to kill herself but doesn’t have the guts, an ending foretold from the beginning of the story.

The book’s introduction says it was well-received in existentialist circles in France while it was derided or ignored in the United States until decades after its publication, and the connection to Sartre and Camus is apparent – but McCoy writes with a fire that the classic literary existentialists, so bent on telling us that everything is pointless, always lack. They Shoot Horses has an angle of suspense even though you know it ends in Gloria’s death, which to me reads as a rejoinder to existentialism: That life ends in death does not mean it lacks all meaning. We can know the ending of the story and still find interest in the journey. McCoy’s message isn’t uplifting – after all, his main characters are all devoid of purpose – but it’s not inherently nihilistic, since Gloria, the most hopeless character of all, is shown in the most unflattering light.

Next review: Nancy Horan’s Loving Frank.

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→ March 4, 2013
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The Night Circus.

I have new draft blog posts up for Insiders on Marco Gonzales and Alex Balog and on Ryne Stanek. I also held a Klawchat last week.

Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus mines its source material pretty heavily, stealing the circus idea itself from Ray Bradbury’s seminal book Something Wicked This Way Comes (#29 on the Klaw 100) while also borrowing from Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (#17) and relying on the hackneyed chosen-ones motif found in far too much fantasy and science fiction, including, of course, the Harry Potter series. Morgenstern layers her own imagination on top of these familiar settings, crafting an immersive scene rich with color and detail, but the main storyline never lives up to the standard set by the novel’s background details.

The circus of the title appears only at night, without warning, moving from town to town as if by magic (or actually by magic), creating a furor wherever it goes and leading some fans to follow the circus around the globe like red-scarved Deadheads. The circus itself is just the stage for a battle between two magicians who are themselves pawns of their mentors – a girl trained from age five by her father, a boy adopted near the same age by a rival – in a fight to which they are bound by a magic tie that is never explained. As you might imagine, the two opponents eventually fall in love, an attraction forbidden by the rules of the game they’re unwillingly playing, and one that leads to unfortunate consequences for the other pawns, real people who work in or around the mysterious circus.

Romeo here is Marco, a young boy adopted from an orphanage by the mage Alexander, who takes him in specifically to raise him for this challenge, which may last for years and promises no other purpose for the contestants’ lives. His Juliet is Celia, taken in by her father, Prospero the Enchanter, after her mother commits suicide; Prospero, having no apparent emotional attachment to his daughter, sees in her the gift of magical ability and pledges her for the next challenge with Alexander, a game the two have apparently been playing for centuries. His lack of empathy for his own daughter receives no explanation, nor do we learn about Alexander’s motives – this is merely an academic or philosophical fight over the nature of magic. There’s a battle going on, and the two protagonists fall for each other, which seems to shock Prospero and Alexander because they’re blind to human emotions.

Where Morgenstern excels is creating the setting and background characters that exist behind Marco and Celia and their puppet masters. The precocious twins Widget and Poppet were born into the circus just as it began and grow up over the course of the book into its secret masters, learning much about its running from the inside even as the adults who populate it are largely unaware of its greater purpose – all except the contortionist Tsukiko, whose appearance comes without explanation until much later and whose understanding of the challenge exceeds that of all others. Morgenstern crafts two parallel narratives that don’t coincide in time until the end of the novel, when the battle and romance between Marco and Celia reaches its resolution and the fate of the circus lies in the hands of the twins and their new friend Bailey, one of the circus’ biggest fans.

The conclusion of that central storyline remains a question mark for me as I considered the book after finishing it. To avoid spoiling it, I’ll say that Morgenstern doesn’t do anything too obvious with the main characters, nor does she choose a complete copout where the terms of the challenge are somehow voided so everyone can live happily ever after. There are vague hints earlier in the book of how the romance/challenge will end, but not enough to make that resolution logically consistent with the rest of the novel. As a result, the conclusion sits in that gray area where it wasn’t cheap or cliched, and yet wasn’t clever enough to feel satisfying on an emotional or intellectual level.

The Night Circus does read very quickly, as Morgenstern crafts visually compelling scenes and has a deft hand with the tension dial, creating sufficient narrative greed to help me race through the book. I wish it were a more original work, and that the story lived up to the quality of the settings, instead of feeling derivative and almost unfinished for the way she wrapped up the central plot.

I’m about three books behind on reviews, so I’ll try to post at least one of these a day this week until I catch up to what I’m reading now, which is Kathleen Flinn’s The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School.

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→ March 4, 2013
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Phoenix-area eats, March 2013 update.

I hope by now you’ve seen my spring training dining guide for this year, but of course, this is a month when I try a lot of new places because I’m out of the house for games. Here are a few places I haven’t reviewed on the blog previously, and I’ve updated the guide where appropriate.

I’ve been to Davanti Enoteca in Scottsdale twice now, once for lunch and once for dinner, with the latter the far more memorable experience. The restaurant’s publicist had urged me to try their linguine con riccio di mare e granchio, pasta with sea urchin and crab. (Riccio di mare literally means “hedgehog of the sea.”) The sea urchin, which sushi fans among you know as uni, is in the sauce, an umami-filled buttery coating that’s just barely enough for the pasta and small pieces of delicate crab meat, a phenomenal and, for me, entirely new dish that was only marred by a few bits of crab shell. Davanti is the only place in Arizona that I’ve found that serves white anchovies, known as boquerones in Spanish; here they’re served as fillets, lightly marinated and presented with pecorino sardo, marinated olives, and a small salad of arugula and celery. The bruschetta varies daily; on Saturday it was goat cheese, arugula, small crispy bits of prosciutto, and a light balsamic glaze, nicely balanced with the creaminess of the cheese and peppery arugula balancing the salty-sweet prosciutto. I’d skip the honeycomb focaccia, which the server recommended highly – it’s flat, Ligurian-style, almost cracker-like, with a soft cow’s-milk cheese inside, but overall I found it pretty bland. Dessert was also disappointing – they were out of my first choice, the mille foglie (misspelled as “millie foglie” on the menu, which sounds like a supporting character in a Nero Wolfe novel), and my second, the peanut butter mousse, had a great texture but no flavor. For lunch, they offer a small selection of fresh sandwiches, including an authentic porchetta, served with rapini, aged provolone, and hot peppers (a lot of them), for a very reasonable $9. EDIT: Davanti closed in May of 2013.

On Friday night, I tried Federal Pizza in CenPho – that’s what the cool kids call central Phoenix, apparently, although to me that’s just “downtown” – with Nick Piecoro and a colleague of his at the Republic. After a 90-minute wait for a table, the pizza had to meet a pretty high standard to satisfy me, but it did, better than ‘Pomo in Scottsdale and on par with Cibo, which surprised me given how strong both of those pizzerias are. Federal’s crust is soft and spongy, thin but not Neapolitan-thin where the center often can’t support the toppings, but also not as strong and cracker-like as Bianco’s is. The two pizzas we ordered arrived with plenty of char on the exterior but not underneath, which is good. I went with the Brussels sprout pizza, with manchego, large bits of bacon, and a hint of lemon; Nick ordered the meatball pizza, with house-pulled mozzarella, tomato sauce, and basil. Both were excellent, although I preferred the Brussels sprout pizza for its novelty and for the great combination of the roasted sprouts, which have a little sweetness when they’re caramelized, with the saltiness of the bacon (a great friend to basically all things green) and the Manchego and the acid from the lemon. Nick’s friend, Amy, ordered the roasted vegetable board, which was both very fresh and very generous, with more cauliflower, roasted to a nice shade of brown on the cut sides, than I could ever eat at one sitting.

I never wrote up crudo, although it’s on the dining guide and I’ve recommended it to many of you individually. Crudo’s menu has four major sections: four or five crudo (raw) seafood dishes that give the restaurant its name, four plates built around fresh mozzarella, four pasta/risotto options, and four grilled proteins, as well as a few sides. Nearly everything my daughter and I ate here was outstanding; she loved the fresh mozzarella with bacon relish, I couldn’t get over the quality of the albacore (with apple, truffles, and black garlic) in the crudo preparation, and we both adored the crispy pig ears appetizer and the squash dumplings with pork ragout (this was in November when that was seasonal). They also feature desserts by the great Tracy Dempsey, and, again sticking with the fall theme, we had an apple tart with crème fraîche that was superb, especially the crust which was firm when you cut the tart but shattered in your mouth so all of that imprisoned butter could burst forth as you bit into the apple. If I were trying to impress a woman on a date, this is where I’d take her.

Further out here in the east valley boonies, I tried the new Whiskey Rose Saloon BBQ location in south Chandler, which they promise will be the first outpost of many … although I doubt it, as the food was pretty mediocre across the board. They are smoking the meats, but there was very little smoke flavor anywhere to be found, and what we got – I went with Phoenix New Times/Chow Bella food critic Laura Hahnefeld and her husband, Jay – was not very hot when it reached the table. About the best I can say for the food is that nothing was overcooked to the point of dryness, but none of it had much taste, and the amount of fat left on the brisket was kind of shocking. The conversation clearly outpaced the food here. By the way, Laura also has the skinny on the awful makeover of Distrito in Scottsdale’s Saguaro hotel.

I’ve also been remiss in failing to mention Queen Creek’s San Tan Flats, which is more of an experience than a restaurant, offering basic grilled fare like burgers, steaks, and chicken breasts with Jack Daniels sauce, but in an outdoor venue with fire pits (bring your own marshmallows … no, really, we do) and live country music. Located on Hunt Highway just east of the end of Ellsworth Road, San Tan Flats gets pretty jammed on the weekends but it’s very kid-friendly and the food is adequate for an evening of hanging out with friends, with the three of us eating there for under $40 unless there’s alcohol involved.

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→ February 28, 2013
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Top Chef, S10 finale.

I think there has been and will be as much discussion about the finale’s format as there will be about the result, which is somewhat unfair to the two chefs, but, in my opinion, a little unfair to the format itself. Switching to cooking live in front of an audience and serving the judges one course at a time for what appeared to be on-the-spot decisions was somewhat reminiscent of Iron Chef, although that show’s “live” judging element was merely a trick of the cameras anyway. This Top Chef format was far more transparent than previous finales (and than Iron Chef) because viewers could see the judges’ decisions on each plate and heard detailed opinions from a majority of the judges on each. It also insulated the judges from outside interference, accusations of which have appeared in the past, prompting vociferous denials from Tom. The end result of the format change was a greater emphasis on the food, which is what we want, right?

The main criticism I heard from you on Twitter was that the new format reduced suspense or drama because at the 52-minute mark, when the show went to commercial, it was obvious who had won because there wasn’t time for the opposite result. Given how much criticism the show took this year for the elimination of Kristen, which was painted (rightly or wrongly) as a move to raise interest in the show and in Last Chance Kitchen at the expense of choosing the best chef, I’ll gladly take a reduction in drama in exchange for feeling like the best chef won – and understanding why she did so.

On a related note, does Stephanie Izard go into therapy now? Her entire identity has been cut in half!

* It is so odd that Top Chef is now a brand (or sub-brand) of frozen food. Is that not kind of antithetical to the idea of the show? Chefs get sent home for using frozen or previously-cooked ingredients.

* On to the show – Brooke and Kristen come out from back stage and seem overwhelmed by the space and the size of the crowd. One advantage neither mentioned: They have tons of space to move and for the heat to dissipate. Each has chosen two teams of three sous chefs from eliminated chefs. Brooke goes for skills, choosing Stefan, CJ, and Kuniko (great choice). Kristen says she just wants “good people, no egos” and takes Sheldon, Josh, and Lizzie. Sheldon and Lizzie might have been the two least egotistical chefs of the season, and all three of hers made it very far in the competition. Editing can be misleading on something like this, but I thought Kristen’s team was humming the whole night – we saw no discord, almost to the point where they were quiet, like they’d worked together for ages. Brooke’s team wasn’t loud, but we saw more of them, which is usually not a good sign.

* The format is a five-course meal, judged one course at a time, so the first chef to win three courses wins the title. I’m surprised no one is agitating for a best-of-seven format. Meanwhile, chefs from smaller markets are arguing for a one-course play-in meal.

* The only restrictions beyond time are that the chefs must use scallops in the second round and red snapper in the fourth round.

* Brooke says she’s “going for bigger, bolder flavors.” Kristen is going for “simple and clean, nicely executed, and pretty.” I don’t know that either of these is a clearly superior game plan, but Kristen does “simple and clean” like Greg Maddux “threw strikes.”

* So three hundred people are there to watch three hours of cooking? That’s longer than any of this year’s Best Picture nominees. I hope the conversation was good.

* Gail points out to Stephanie Izard that there will finally be another female Top Chef. Seth Macfarlane is still waiting for the nude scene.

* Brooke’s pig ear salad sounds amazing, and she has it on her menu at the Tripel. I need a report, people.

* Kristen says that at Stir Boston she’s typically cooking for just ten people. I can see why cooking for such scale would be intimidating – look at how many plates they had to do for each course.

* I love how the sous chefs are all so clearly into it even though it’s not their fight. Some of that is professionalism, much of it is probably love of food, and I’m sure a small part is that everyone likes the two finalists. Is there a tradition where the winner buys her sous chefs something, like a quarterback taking the offensive line out to dinner?

* The food! Course one: Kristen does a chicken liver mousse with frisée, mustard, prunes, hazelnuts, and pumpernickel. Emeril loves the mousse and chicory, calling it “very classic.” Tom says mousse was well seasoned. Gail loved the mousse, velvety airy texture, but also admits (in so many words) to being a bit of a chicken-live mousse harlot.

* Brooke serves that crispy pig ear and chicory salad with a six minute egg, apricot jam, candied kumquats. That sounds amazing, probably better in the description than Kristen’s, but it sounds like CJ overcooked enough of the pig ear strips to knock it down a peg. Hugh says the salad dressing was really balanced and that Brooke has a real knack for that.

* The vote: Kristen gets votes from Hugh, Gail, and Emeril and wins the round. I don’t know if that meant she got all three, or if we just saw the three who voted for her.

* Brooke’s scallops are huge so she cuts some in half and begins searing them, which seems to me like a big risk of overcooking them. For years I was just so-so on scallops, but I’ve had several great scallop dishes recently – one at the Catbird Seat in Nashville and one at Citizen Public House here in Scottsdale – and I’m finally coming around.

* Stefan’s harassment of Kristen always kind of annoyed me, even though she seemed cool with it, but his trash-talking here, when he tells Kristen he chose light blue “for the baby’s bedroom,” did make me laugh, mostly because of how he baited her.

* Am I the only one who tends to forget that Kevin Sbraga was a Top Chef? Granted, that whole season had probably the least talented crop, but he did win it.

* Brooke talks more about her phobias, which I’m glad to see, obviously. Exposure therapy is huge.

* Michael Voltaggio with the quote of the night: “I’m jealous, dude. I wanna be down there.” The fact that someone who has already won this title and had real-world success as a result could see that pressure-cooker environment and want to grab a jacket and throw down speaks volumes about his makeup, both positive and negative.

* Round two: Brooke serves her seared scallops over a salt cod-potato puree, crispy speck, a black currant and mustard seed vinaigrette, ground juniper, and deep-fried romanesco (a brassica closely related to broccoli). Tom likes the combination of flavors, works really nicely, his scallop perfectly cooked. Brooks says salt cod is her favorite flavor, which would have made a lot of sense if Top Chef were held in 1896.

* Kristen does a sort of crudo preparation, a quick-cured scallop in citrus and lavender, served with with bitter orange, Meyer lemon, and apple. It looks gorgeous, although I’ve never had a cured scallop of any sort. General praise here too, with Padma saying the dish left Kristen nowhere to hide but that she did the scallops proud. If they hadn’t been cruelly ripped from their shells, that is.

* Voting: Brooke gets votes from Gail and Emeril. Kristen gets votes from Tom and Padma. Hugh is the tiebreaker and goes … Brooke. So far, this is pretty TV-friendly, and we’re down to a best of three.

* The chefs have 34 minutes until they need to serve the next plate, which is the first time (I think) the clock has been explained to us. I was kind of confused from the start of this episode – that was probably my main complaint.

* Kristen says she’s going to taking a trip to Korea with some of her winnings to see where she came from – she mentioned in a previous episode that she was abandoned as a baby and was adopted by a couple in Michigan. In an era where international adoptions have become terribly expensive and endlessly controversial, it’s good to have a positive example offered as a counterpoint to the horror stories in the media.

* I can’t believe Brooke made chicken wings. They’re too damn hard to eat, with so little meat relative to the skin and bone. I buy whole chickens a lot but I save the wings for stock. They’re just not worth effort.

* Round three: Brooke serves vadouvan-spiced fried chicken wings with a sumac-yogurt tahini and pickled kohlrabi fattoush. Past winners are saying it’s “ballsy” to serve something so plebeian in a Top Chef finale, although the way she served it was ambitious. She tells Hugh she wanted to redeem herself from the fried chicken challenge, but was this the way? With wings? Emeril loves it but Tom is a little iffy on the side salad.

* Kristen serves a celery root puree with crispy bone marrow, bitter greens, stewed mushrooms, and barely cooked radishes. Emeril keeps raving about the “earthy tones.” Padma’s wasn’t hot enough. Gail liked it. Tom seems unsure of stewing the mushrooms rather than roasting them for caramelization, as she did earlier this season when she won an elimination challenge for making mushrooms and fried onions as side items.

* Kristen gets votes from Emeril, Tom, and Padma, so she’s one away from the win. Padma voting for Kristen despite the temperature issue was a little bit of a surprise.

* Kristen says she practiced her red snapper dish before she got here and was most confident in this course.

* The producers covered the King Arthur name on the bag of flour with duct tape, but really, if you bake at all, you know that logo and color scheme. I would be surprised if they’d used any other brand.

* Michael Voltaggio again with the great quote, saying Top Chef has “made eating out cool.” Even if that’s kind of an exaggeration, I do think the show’s effect on popular culture, especially our culture of eating, is a huge positive, economically and gustatorially.

* Stefan is distracted by a female fan asking about the location of his restaurant. I assume she’s a plant from Kristen. It would have been even better if Tammy 2 was available.

* Round four: Brooke serves a braised pork cheek and seared snapper with a collard green slaw, pomegranate seeds, and sorrel puree. Hugh’s snapper perfectly cooked, and loves collards as an alternative to kale. Everyone praises the sorrel but no one seems to know how to pronounce it.

* Kristen does a seared snapper with leeks, little gem lettuce, tarragon, uni, and shellfish nage. So Gail says she found the leeks a little harder to eat because they were slightly stringy, and Hugh absolutely smokes her with five words: “I’m good with a knife.” I wonder if Gail knows who the Marlins’ shortstop is.

* Brooke offers what I thought was a pretty gracious comment: “I want to prove I wasn’t winning because Kristen wasn’t around.” You know, everyone who watched was probably wondering about that – at least, would some of the challenges have been closer? – but Brooke didn’t have to acknowledge Kristen in that way.

* Kristen gets Gail, Emeril (who was obviously torn by the knowledge he was about to help eliminate Brooke), and Tom, making her the tenth Top Chef winner, the second female winner, and the first of Korean descent. I wonder if this would be news in Korea, where, according to some prior contestants on this show, cooking isn’t seen as a highly respected profession yet.

* Brooke is disappointed, and it has to suck to spend so much time away from your family only to come up just inches short. She might be the best positioned runner-up to benefit professionally and financially from her time on the show, since she had several weeks as the clear leader while Kristen was in the relegation bracket. Speaking of which, Kristen thanking Tom “for having this whole Last Chance Kitchen thing” belongs on the highlight reel.

* I only watched a little of the follow-up show, but Sheldon won the fan favorite voting and earned a $10k prize. He was apparently talking to Andy Cohen from Maui via a tin can, but I’m pretty sure he said was going to use the money to “pimp up his 2014 Avalon.” At least he’s honest, man.

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