→ September 6, 2012
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Top Chef Masters, S4E7.

I’ve got a family wedding to attend this weekend, so I’m not chatting today or appearing on the podcast. I will probably post here once or twice as my schedule permits, and you might spot me on Twitter. This week’s recap is a little brief, in part because I’m on the move, but also because it turned out to be less dramatic than I anticipated, probably because they crammed in four head-to-head battles in the elimination challenge.

* Quickfire: preppin’ weapon time. The chefs must separate 18 eggs, grate two pounds of Parmiggiano-Reggiano, and portion five 7.5-8.5 ounce filets from a beef tenderloin without using a scale. The first two to finish get to cook using their prepped ingredients. Chris is stoked. Lorena is not. The three chefs who don’t advance become the judges.

* Chris attacks the beef first, but Kerry notices Chris’ steaks are small – and sure enough, one is under 7.5 ounces and Chris is eliminated from the quickfire. Patricia is also out with three steaks under the minimum size. How reasonable is it to expect a chef to be able to hit that narrow weight window without a scale? I honestly don’t know the answer to that.

* There’s cross-contamination everywhere. Chefs touching the raw meat and then the Parmiggiano makes me want to bleach my television.

* Hand-grating two pounds of cheese sounds excruciating. This is what food processors are for.

* Takashi passes. Kerry just barely passes. Lorena doesn’t get to finish and is enfadada.

* The two advancing chefs get fifteen minutes to cook. Kerry makes a parmiggiano-crusted filet, pounding them by hand; his pan isn’t hot enough and they start to stick. He serves them with wilted arugula and sage brown butter; Lorena thinks they’re perfectly cooked even though Kerry thought he’d overdone one side.

* Takashi sautéed his beef with a sunny-side up egg and Provençal vegetables. The other chefs are all amazed he could prep and cook potatoes in fifteen minutes. He also gets credit for cooking the meat in time for it to rest so it doesn’t bleed all over the plate when cut, but the chefs all agree his yolk wasn’t runny enough.

* Kerry wins, so (in my view) the weakest remaining chef gets immunity. Coming into this episode, I would have ranked them Chris, Patricia, Takashi, Lorena, Kerry, top to bottom.

* Elimination challenge: Sugar Ray Leonard, a celebrity whom the chefs actually recognize (as opposed to pretending to recognize one for the cameras). On a more serious note, it’s nice to see a retired boxer who still has his faculties – he was mentioned in A Naked Singularity, which includes digressions on a famous boxer who ended up with early dementia – although I can’t believe he’s 56 years old and looks 35.

* Kerry’s immunity means he doesn’t cook in this challenge at all as the other chefs go head to head. Patricia calls him a “bum” for getting to skip the challenge entirely. I thought she was kidding until she told him to “get a job.”

* Round one: Chris faces Takashi, Lorena faces Patricia, which reveals that Lorena is still rather hacked off about last week’s tiff. Patricia wants to fight Chris in the final round.

* Sugar Ray rocks the purple shirt at judges’ table. Maybe James was smart enough to ask for some sartorial advice.

* The other guest judge is Jane Goldman, who founded chow.com, one of the most useful food sites around. Their “You’re Doing It All Wrong” videos are always fun even if I don’t intend to ever cook the dish described, and while I don’t like the tone of most of the restaurant discussions on their message boards, the recommendations I’ve found there are generally rock solid.

* Chris and Takashi’s secret ingredient is bacon. Or is it just pork belly, which would be uncured? Takashi mentions emphasizing the sweetness and saltiness of the bacon, so perhaps it’s cured and unsmoked? These things make a big difference and we should have had more explanation.

* Chris makes an extra everything because Takashi is always so perfect. This turns out to be pretty significant – he has to borrow another egg from Takashi, but then later gives Takashi his extra piece of bacon because somehow Takashi (maybe forgetting that there was an extra judge this time?) ended up a piece short. Chris says he wants to win on merit, not technicalities, which I fully respect while recognizing that this would probably never happen on the regular Top Chef. It’s easier to be altruistic when you’re already among the top people in your profession.

* Chris’ dish is his take on bacon and eggs, with a “cal-mex” twist, including a corn and julienned jalapeño slaw and a wedge of avocado. Everyone says his eggs are cooked perfectly, while Sugar Ray praises Chris’ hand speed – which I thought was a pretty good insight, something a chef might not necessarily notice but a man who lived (and could have died) by hand speed would pick up on immediately.

* Takashi makes a bacon steak with caramelized figs, dried apricots, dates, orange, and fennel salad, Kerry loves the mushrooms, which somehow weren’t mentioned in the original description; I can’t believe how many things Takashi managed to cook in twenty minutes on that small station. Despite that, Chris wins and advances to the finals.

* Lorena talks about putting Patricia in her place. Their secret ingredient is also bacon.

* Patricia, who cuts her vegetables like she’s meditating with them, snipes at Lorena’s loud cutting technique; I agree, as Lorena’s method, which involves lifting the entire knife from the board and hacking quickly at the vegetables, is dangerous. I cut the way Patricia does, balancing one part of the knife on the board and rocking it to cut. Patricia finishes early and starts cleaning up her station, which might be showing off for someone else but seems to just be Patricia’s personality.

* Patricia makes a “BLT,” a bacon, leek, and tomato salad, served slightly warm. Jane loves balance of the favors, James says the leek reduction is “piercingly sour,” Kerry says it really reminded him of a BLT, and Sugar ray says it was amazing. After the judging I felt like I still had no clue what it tasted like.

* Lorena makes a potato and bacon chowder with corn and bacon soffrito. Jane says the bacon got a little lost, but loved the texture and creaminess.

* Winner: Lorena. How did she win by deemphasizing the main ingredient? Either Jane’s comment was an isolated opinion, or the criteria changed. Bacon should be the star if it’s the secret ingredient … or even if it’s not. So my bottom two ranked chefs (ranked from my living room) are both guaranteed to advance, while chefs #2 and #3 have to fight to avoid elimination.

* Finals: Chris and Lorena get sugar as their secret ingredient. This is a huge disadvantage for meat-guy Chris, who makes a zabaglione with summer fruit. Zabaglione is a sweet warm custard of eggs, sugar, and usually Marsala wine, typically served with berries. It’s cooked slowly over a double boiler and the chef must whisk it constantly to avoid having any part of the eggs scramble because it stayed in contact with the hot bowl too long.

* Lorena backs into a three-item dish, making a flourless chocolate cake that doesn’t seem to be cooking fast enough, so she makes a dulce de leche sauce and serves it with caramelized walnuts and seared (and thus also caramelized) pineapple. Patricia and Takashi think making the chocolate cake was foolhardy, but they end up cooking correctly so Lorena serves everything.

* Chris’ dish gets dinged for a touch too much salt, but really, Lorena won this because she made three things and they were all very good. That’s $10K for her charity.

* Patricia and Takashi battle to avoid elimination. Secret ingredient: chicken livers. Patricia makes a warm asparagus salad with chicken liver and prosciutto, James complains – really, his voice can’t merely criticize, but always complains, almost whining – that his liver was undercooked, while Jane says it was perfect and Krista liked the clean pure favors of the dish.

* Takashi sears his livers and serves them with crispy prosciutto strips and pickled red cabbage. Jane praises the combination of textures and the aesthetic appeal of the dish.

* Patricia wins, so Takashi ends up eliminated. Takashi had already won $20K for his charity, so while I would have preferred to see Kerry go, it was a pretty successful run for him. Chris points out that Takashi cooks “better French food than the Frenchies.” I still say Chris and Patricia make the finals, but with Takashi gone I’ll go with Lorena over Kerry for the third spot.

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→ September 4, 2012
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Bread and Tulips.

Bread & Tulips (Pane e tulipani) was a huge success in Italy when it was released in 2000, sweeping their version of the Academy Awards and even earning “official selection” status at Cannes and at the Toronto International Film Festival. Yet it’s actually a light, tender-hearted comedy about second chances in life and love, especially where kind souls are involved. (It’s available on Netflix Instant video as well.)

Licia Maglietta plays Rosalba, a harried, unappreciated housewife who, while touring ancient ruins in the Italian countryside with her fatheaded husband and their two sons, ends up left behind at a rest stop, for which her husband blames her even though he failed to notice she was missing for a few hours. (He’s a real peach, the lone one-dimensional character in the film, but at least one used to good purpose as the plot’s main punching bag.) On a whim, she hitchhikes to Venice, a city she’s always wanted to visit but has never seen, and through another series of misfortunes ends up settling there, taking a part-time job, and rooming with an Icelandic waiter, Fernando (played by Bruno Ganz), who has to delay his plans to hang himself due to his unexpected houseguest.

The film marries two old movie tropes, the bored housewife making her escape and the stranger in a town of lovable eccentrics, in a way that shouldn’t work as well as it does. The script’s beauty is that it presents these various oddballs as they are, in favorable lighting but without commentary and often without much definition. Fernando’s neighbor, the “holistic masseuse” (and perhaps lady of the evening) Grazia, ends up in an intrigue involving the hapless plumber-turned-detective Constantino, who should be the story’s main antagonist as an extension of Rosalba’s husband but ends up winning our affection because of his determination and ineptitude.

Bread and Tulips is sweet yet seldom sentimental, and if it’s a little unrealistic at times, it’s more to avoid getting bogged down in the mundane details of a woman just taking off without much cash or means of support. There’s a fair amount of slapstick humor along with some good situational gags, such as Rosalba’s husband asking his mistress to iron a shirt or two for him, while Giuseppe Battiston handles the clownish role of Constantino in a way that engenders sympathy for him as even he tries to ruin Rosalba’s fantasy.

The only false notes in the film, to me, were the dream sequences, in part because they’re not set off from the film in any clear way, and in part because they felt like a clumsy method of demonstrating Rosalba’s own inner turmoil at her abandonment of her family obligations. Awake, she seldom shows any guilt, and relishes her freedom, her independence, her ability to put herself first and revisit long-dormant dreams, including an apparent passion for music that resurfaces when she finds a disused accordion in the wardrobe of the room she rents. The dreams seemed forced, as if the writer or director felt that we needed a reminder that she’d fled her family or that she at least loved her two sons.

Roger Ebert’s review of Bread and Tulips praised the film, but contains one line in the first paragraph that I found shocking to the point that I was slightly offended by it:

Not a classic beauty, not a ”movie star,” but a 40-ish dreamer who’s just a little overweight, with the kind of sexiness that makes you think of bread baking, clean sheets and that everything is going to be all right. 

Man, I like Roger Ebert, but this is a seriously cracked view of beauty. Maglietti – who was around 45 when the film was made – looks gorgeous as soon as she gets to Venice and out of her frumpy-mummy clothes, spending most of the film in flattering sundresses that would certainly have exposed her as “a little overweight” if she had had any weight over. And I’m not even sure where to go with Ebert’s opinion on what’s sexy about an attractive 40-year-old woman (or about the type of women who bake bread?). Besides, if everything’s going to be all right, maybe you’re doing it all wrong.

What Ebert might have said was that Maglietti’s sex appeal is paired with a youthful visage that makes her seem more approachable, not just for the audience, but to lend credence to the idea that strangers in Venice would just take to this woman, offering her a place to rent, a part-time job, or help keeping her location a secret from her husband (who seems to want her back to take care of the house, not to be his wife or lover). Maglietti doesn’t look close to her age in this role, playing a woman in her late 30s with a cuteness that renders Rosalba’s personality as something even younger. She carries the film, with plenty of help from her supporting cast, in the kind of romantic comedy that would never be made by a major U.S. studio because it relies too much on tired tactics like strong writing and actors who bring their characters to life.

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→ September 3, 2012
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The Descendants.

I’ve been less motivated to watch all of the 2011 nominees for Best Picture than I was the previous year, with a few films in this year’s batch in which I have absolutely zero interest (The Help and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) and the winner, The Artist failing to meet expectations for me – to say nothing of the time I’ve spent watching rookie league games the last two months. I finally got around to watching The Descendants this weekend, and I’m struggling to find a credible reason why it wouldn’t beat out The Artist in a fair fight, one based strictly on the quality of the films rather than what I presume was a nostalgia move.

George Clooney plays the starring role as Matt King, a successful Hawaiian attorney whose wife, Elizabeth, suffers a serious boating accident at the start of the film, leaving her comatose and eventually without hope of recovery. Matt’s two daughters, the wayward Alexandra and the sassy Scottie, were already struggling before the accident, and the situation is made worse when Alexandra informs her father that Elizabeth had been having an affair. This revelation launches Matt, with Alexandra’s help, on a quixotic quest to identify and confront the man who has cuckolded him, only to find that he, too, has a family likely to be devastated if the adultery is unearthed. It’s clear as this storyline unfolds that this is not only Matt’s way of dealing with his two-headed grief, but a way that his remaining family nucleus can come back together and try to heal as a single unit, rather than three individuals drifting apart on a sea of sorrow and hurt.

None of the film’s characters, even side characters like Alexandra’s sort-of-boyfriend Sid, ends up one-dimensional, a rare trick in a movie with this many people in pivotal roles. The film could easily have demonized Elizabeth’s paramour, and while he’s hardly a good guy, he’s more than just a dark presence around the story’s periphery. Elizabeth’s father similarly appears with a purpose but with a severe underlying pain that governs his anger towards Matt and Alexandra, anger that presents Matt with a difficult decision near the end of the film. I had a little trouble with Judy Greer as the oblivious wife of Elizabeth’s lover, although that was primarily because every time she talked, I pictured Cheryl from Archer (whom Greer voices brilliantly).

The movie’s subplot, however, has all of the sentiment and overstatement that the main plot lacks. Matt is the sole executor of the trust overseeing the 25,000 acres of “pristine” land on Kauai that must be sold before the trust dissolves in seven years, and most of the various cousins involved in the trust want to sell out to a developer who’ll build a resort, golf course, and and other commercial properties, making the cousins instant millionaires. I doubt I need to explain what course Matt ends up taking, although the film offers minimal explanation for it beyond his soliloquy at the time he makes it (in which he acknowledges that he has no immediate solution to the problem caused by the rule against perpetuities); the parallel between his attempt to save the land and his newfound attention to the consequences of his actions and his similar efforts to save what remians of his family is obvious and forced, the one false note in a film that otherwise succeeds on how often it feels true.

George Clooney excels in the role of Matt, although I did find it hard to accept one of the most famous actors in the world in this sort-of-everyman role – doesn’t everyone around Matt realize he looks a lot like George Freaking Clooney? – and the attempts to frump him up a little, like tucking in his shirts, greying his hair, making him run oddly in flip-flops, and so on, only emphasized the disconnect between the character and the actor, much like Cary Grant in his final film role, Walk, Don’t Run. Clooney is at the point in his career where any performance in a serious film that isn’t worthy of an Oscar nomination is a surprise, so I was far more taken by the performance of Shailene Woodley, making her feature-film debut as Alexandra, who begins the film away at a reform school where she’s supposed to be getting help with substance-abuse issues. Her character develops far more over the course of the film, sometimes in mildly surprising ways, as she goes from spoiled, snotty, justifiably-angry daughter to her father’s main emotional supporter and partner-in-crime. Woodley had to show more range than any other actor in The Descendants, from the heartbreaking scene where she learns that her mother isn’t going to recover to the just-as-heartbreaking scenes at the end where the family says goodbye – delivering subtle grace notes like her movements as she brings her younger sister into their mother’s room – enough that I’m surprised she didn’t receive more attention come awards season. With that kind of ability and the requisite beauty (Hollywood accepts no less), Woodley looks like a star in the making.

Of the four Best Picture nominees I’ve seen so far, I’d put The Descendants on top, ahead of Hugo, which I loved but which didn’t have the subtlety of The Descendants and relied more on fantasy to drive its main plot forward. That’s not necessarily bad, but I think it’s harder to make a great film while trying to keep the characters and story firmly grounded in reality, and of course The Descendants couldn’t fill space with special effects or long flashback sequences. The Descendants also found significant humor in the cracks between the darker sequences in the film. Both movies make The Artist look like paper-thin in comparison.

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→ September 1, 2012
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Gun, with Occasional Music.

I did a final blog post on Arizona Rookie League prospects yesterday, including the Cubs’ big bonus baby Juan Paniagua; some other Cubs, Rangers, and Royals prospects; and notes on Tyler Skaggs and Jacob Turner.

—

Back in December, reader JD recommended Jonathan Lethem’s 1994 novel Gun, with Occasional Music to me, saying:

It’s the best and funniest modern (well, futuristic) noir I’ve read — Chandler and Hammett by way of Philip K. Dick and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And it’s shorter than a playoff game, to boot.

All of which is pretty accurate – the various pull quotes from critics include two that mention the Dick/Chandler combination, but Lethem’s dystopian hard-boiled detective novel is also more wryly funny than either writer was, and occasionally a little too wrapped up in its own sci-fi stylings (although so was Dick’s Ubik). It’s one of the most interesting books I’ve read this year, and certainly one of the quickest, including a clever twist in the final third of the book that differentiates it from the standard (and slightly hackneyed) hard-boiled format.

Lethem’s detective, Conrad Metcalf, is a drug-addicted “private inquisitor” – but the drug addiction isn’t a big deal, as everyone in the novel is using “make,” a blend of drugs provided for free by the government and customized for each individual, including components like Forgettol, Acceptol, and Addictol, as an actual opiate of the masses to keep everyone in line. Citizens also carry around magnetic cards that track their “karma points,” which can be increased or, more commonly in this book, deducted by formal inquisitors from The Office, the Gestapo-like police presence that stands in Metcalf’s way as he tries to help a client who’s been set up by the Office for a murder he didn’t commit – one that pushes his karma down to zero, threatening him with this new world’s equivalent of prison, cryogenic suspension. Oh, and Metcalf is being dogged by a trigger-happy gunsel who just happens to be an evolved kangaroo.

The rich details of Lethem’s dystopian world start to overwhelm what is, at heart, a straightforward detective novel, one where Metcalf starts investigating one case and ends up enmeshed in a conspiracy to cover up one crime that eventually involves a second murder, Metcalf getting knocked unconscious*, and a web of lies and suspicions of adultery that doesn’t clear up until the penultimate chapter. Even though I felt little or no sympathy for any of the characters involved in the crime, Lethem layered enough complexity into that part of the story that the story maintained my interest level right to the end, both to see how the crime took place (I didn’t figure it out) and how Metcalf’s own side story would be resolved.

*If there were a hard-boiled detective story drinking game, the detective taking a blackjack or other blunt object to the back of the head, describing the carpet as it approaches is face, and waking up somewhere else would be worth two shots.

The dystopian aspects varied in their effectiveness. The “make” was at the top of the list, both because of its veneer of plausibility and because of its increasing relevance to our dependency on Big Pharma (and I say this as someone who depends on them myself). The evolved animals are largely props beyond the kangaroo, who could just as easily have been human. The “babyheads,” children with evolved brains but immature bodies, seemed to serve no purpose whatsoever. The karma cards, once you get past the RPG experience-points feel, also feel somewhat prescient, written seven years before the Patriot Act and the start of our era of no-fly lists, monitoring of electronic communcations, and other erosions of privacy in the name of increasing security. It’s dark but feels more madcap than paranoid, even though there’s a clear paranoia underneath the surface. If you can gloss over some of the slightly siller sci-fi trappings of Gun, it’s a fast-paced detective story with enough of a serious underpinning to elevate it above the various pulp authors who’ve tried (and mostly failed) to repurpose Chandler and Hammett into different eras.

Next up: Alessandro Piperno’s The Worst Intentions, which, after reading about 40% of the book, I would call an Italian version of Portnoy’s Complaint.

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→ August 31, 2012
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Lost Cities app.

I’ve been touting the physical version of Lost Cities, Reiner Knizia’s easy-to-learn two-player gateway game, for about two years now, because of its combination of simple mechanics, modest strategy, and portability, even though it has a little more luck or randomness than I like in most games. The iOS version of Lost Cities is now out, from the same developers as the best-of-breed Carcassonne app, and as you might expect the Lost Cities app looks tremendous and plays very easily and quickly, with just a few minor glitches.

The entire game of Lost Cities revolves around a single deck of 60 cards, containing 12 cards in each of five colors: cards numbered 2 through 10 as well as three coin cards that allow a player to increase his/her bet on that color. Players build “expeditions” in each color by placing cards in increasing numerical order, so once you’ve placed the 4 card in one color, you can no longer place the 2 or the 3 (and must hold or discard it). Each player’s turn consists of playing or discarding one card, and then drawing a card from the deck or any discard pile. You receive points for an expedition equal to the sum of the card values in that expedition minus 20, so you can receive negative points if you don’t place enough cards in a column. Placing one coin card (before you place any numerical cards) doubles your gain or loss, placing two coin cards triples the result, and placing three quadruples it. There’s also a 20-point bonus for placing eight or more cards, including coins, in a single column. Since there is only one card of each number/color combination, the game’s decisions revolve around when to play a specific card – do you play it now, or hold it to see if you can get an intervening card first? Do you hold certain cards to keep them away from your opponent? Do you draw from the deck to move the game closer to the end, or draw from a discard pile to prolong it?

The app version has incredibly bright, clear graphics, enough that it plays well on the small iPod/iPhone screen, with a very sensible layout that makes it easy to see what’s been played, including coin markers next to the current score in each column. That ability to see the current score is probably the biggest advantage the app version offers over the physical version – the math in the game isn’t hard, but it’s easier to make quick decisions when the running tallies are there in front of you. (It can be a little disconcerting to see a -40 or -60 when you’ve played coin cards but no number cards in an expedition, though.) The app offers four AI players, one comparable to a box of rocks, one very challenging, and two in between. It also comes with a set of thirty in-game achievements that serve as tutorials on mechanics and on strategy, with the higher levels forcing you to handicap yourself in ways that will force you to think about the game a little differently. Online play is available, but I haven’t tested it out yet. I have played over 100 games against AI opponents, with most games taking under five minutes. It’s addictive enough that my daughter complained I was playing it too much.

The main glitch in the game is the proximity of the discard pile to your expeditions, making it far too easy to accidentally place a card in the wrong place. While your placement isn’t final until you draw another card, either from the deck or from a discard pile, if you move very quickly, which I found I was able to do after just a game or two, you’ll likely make a wrong move along the way because it’s so easy to put a card in the wrong place. Obviously there’s a user error element there – if I would just slow down, I wouldn’t make these mistakes – but I’d prefer to see more space between the two areas, perhaps by relocating the discard piles to the center of the board, which is how the game is set up if you’re playing the physical version. I’ve also caught the weaker AI players making what appeared to be extremely bad moves, such as playing coin cards late in the game when the probability of reaching the 20-point threshold in that expedition is very low, so once you’re up to speed on gameplay you will probably just want to face the most difficult AI opponent.

One of the best aspects of the migration of advanced boardgames to iOS has been the high-quality implementations, since the audience is still somewhat of a niche market, willing to pay a few bucks for every title released in this space. The Lost Cities app takes a fun if very simple game and gives it a high-class makeover for iOS, with tremendous graphics, plenty of replay value thanks to the game’s random element and one very strong AI player, and the potential for online play – another top of the line electronic version that matches or even exceeds the quality of the original.

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→ August 30, 2012
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Top Chef Masters, S4E6.

Today’s Klawchat transcript is up. Still waiting on that blog post I mentioned on the podcast.

This episode might have had the worst first half and best second half of the season for me, although I had the rare personal connection to the elimination challenge to increase its appeal to me.

* Quickfire: Make an ‘aphrodisiac’ dish. Guest judge is something named Dita Von Teese and the winner gets $5k and immunity. This challenge seems designed to embarrass multiple people involved.

* Really, Art, no one cares about your dreams, and no one thinks you’re psychic because you dreamed about chocolate.

* Patricia referring to “hoochie mama outfits” in her obviously-scripted description of who Dita Von Teese is – are we really supposed to think she’s up on the biggest celebrities in the burlesque scene – was another highlight in a season of classic chef quotes, followed later by her “bend over, baby!” during judging.

* Blenders are hitting the floor all over this place. I haven’t seen this much shattered glass since I watched the first season of Breaking Bad.

* Art makes floating islands (large meringues floating in a pool of chocolate sauce) and starts tossing around bad jokes about breasts. Also, did you know he’s gay?

* Lorena keeps talking about sexy. She brings the sexy, she puts the sexy in her food, she has all the sexy on the plate, even Prince thinks she says “sexy” too much.

* Awful Chris makes seared foie gras with fig and champagne sauce. Of course he does. And of course it’s awesome.

* Seriously chefs, Von Teese is just not that hot. I had no idea who she was before this show – apparently she was briefly married to Marilyn Manson, which says a lot right there – but found her mostly sad. The forced double (or sometimes single) entendres, the pouty expressions, the fake breasts … I don’t know what happened to that woman when she was younger, but the whole act screamed “bad self-esteem” to me. Meanwhile, Curtis, who is wearing more makeup than Von Teese is, can’t stop blushing and ends up completely tongue-tied.

* The bottom two: Art’s, which looked like a mess but also suffered because von Teese doesn’t like chocolate that much (so why was it offered as a star ingredient?); and Lorena’s, which von Teese loved but said wasn’t sexy, sort of like The Black Album.

* Favorites: Kerry’s seared tuna with uni, soy, and aromatics, because uni are gonads or something; and Takashi’s chilled oyster with sea urchin and yuzu truffle vinaigrette, which was “slippery and sexy and adventurous.” Takashi wins for a dish that apparently had the texture of a vagina. That’s basically what they said, right?

* Elimination challenge: Out comes Saipan Chutima, chef/owner of perhaps the best Thai restaurant in the United States, Lotus of Siam, which I’ve visited three times and reviewed here. The chefs are asked to put their own spins on classic Thai dishes and will work as one team to open a restaurant in the TC kitchens, each producing one dish while collaborating on service. They’ll dine at Lotus of Siam to prepare.

* The chefs all seem to agree that this challenge is a bit ridiculous between the cuisine and the time to open a place; I don’t doubt the validity of their complaint, but since they’re not cooking live bugs this year, I think they kind of got off easy.

* One dish comes out with pork blood, so Awful Chris proposes to Saipan on the spot, ignoring the fact that her daughter Penny is the attractive one. Meanwhile, Lorena is studying the dishes like a scientist, poking and prodding; if someone had put a live ingredient on one of her plates to move when she poked it, she might have hit the ceiling.

* They go shopping in two stores and once again can’t coordinate to save their lives. Too many alphas. Awful Chris probably shouldn’t be the translator, either.

* Patricia is full of quips this week, saying to Art after he tosses a whole bird at her, “Come on, that was a girl’s throw!” She’s making seared duck breast with masaman curry, grilled eggplant, and green pineapple, then later decides to tear Lorena a new one for using half of the twelve burners. Assuming that was as out of nowhere as it seemed on TV, Lorena had a right to be pretty hacked off at Patricia for that one.

* Meanwhile, Kerry turns expediting into rocket science, mumbling about a fake ticket and confusing the hell out of the chefs working the line. When Awful Chris eventually takes over so Kerry can cook his own dish, he starts expediting like he means it.

* Lorena offers her take on tom kha gai with a pisco chicken soup with galangal, coconut, lime, and cilantro – the judges mostly loved it aside from the garnish, which Grubby Alan said wasn’t edible, and a later complaint that Lorena didn’t poach her chicken in the flavored broth, which seems like a more serious error to me.

* Takashi does a yellow curry with crispy fried noodles. Penny loved the flavors, while Saipan, who suddenly looks like someone just offered her a plate of rotten onions, is unimpressed. Perhaps asking chefs to make versions of Saipan’s dishes for Saipan wasn’t such a hot idea.

* Next course: Awful Chris does his take on beef larb, making a tartare version with 21-day aged sirloin and using most of the same ingredients in larb. Francis particularly liked it, although he felt the flavors were a little understated, to which Awful Chris responds that he wanted the beef flavor to come through most strongly. Saipan is unimpressed and says her two-year-old grandson puts better larb in his diaper.

* Art kind of ignores the challenge, which I’m sure is okay because did you know he lost a lot of weight? His cashew-crusted chicken and crispy rice salad with lemongrass-lime vinaigrette gets mehs all around. Apparently he didn’t grind the nuts enough and I’ll just let that one sit there for you all.

* Final course: Kerry is cooking too slowly, so Patricia ends up tossing the dishes she’d prepared for the judges’ table and firing new duck breasts so theirs will be ready at close to the same time. Unfortunately, she undercooks the new breasts, and James even sends his back to ask for a new one. Meanwhile, Kerry gets high marks for his braised pork belly with mustard greens, Thai spices, and a taro root purée, for which even Saipan offers a grunt of praise.

* Afterwards, Patricia smokes Kerry with a sarcastic “thank you,” and he genuinely feels bad about the whole thing. I think Patricia’s response to stress or anger is to let it all out at once, after which she feels better because the emotion is gone – but she’s oblivious to the effect that her lashing out has on the people around her, which can be lasting. Her dish gets some of the lowest marks of all during judging.

* Aside: The service might have been a little slow, but did anyone else think the comments from the diners on the slowness of the service felt forced, or even scripted? If you’re getting a free meal from these chefs, are you really complaining that your entrees are taking twenty minutes to arrive?

* Back to judging, James seems to make the most salient point of all, that the signature flavors of Thai cuisine (let alone the northern Thai cuisine of Lotus of Siam) were missing. I think he was about to say the chefs’ output was as authentic as the Thai Chicken Wrap at Panera, but Saipan brandished her Kom Kom vegetable knife and put an end to his comments.

* Top dishes: Chris and Kerry. Chris was more adventurous in concept than Kerry and wins the $10K for the Michael J. Fox Foundation, bringing his winnings to $26K total. Kerry does get praise from Curtis for turning taro, one of Curtis’ least favorite ingredients on the planet, into something not just edible but pleasant.

* Bottom: Lorena, Patricia, and Art. Art’s was kind of bland and boring, so he’s tearing up again (drink). Lorena went for presentation but not function, and the photo of her dish, with a whole red chili pepper on top, is a little odd to look at. Patricia’s curry wasn’t intensely flavored, and of course, she botched the duck.

* Patricia hesitates to say why her duck was off, although she’s trying desperately to telegraph to the judges that someone else made her screw up. Curtis then aggressively pushes Patricia to throw whoever it is under the bus. She looks at Kerry and more or less guilts him into confessing, so credit to him for owning up to it when, ultimately, she made the choice to serve it when she knew it wasn’t done (which she admitted to Kerry post-judging).

* Elimination: Art. It’ll make for a less interesting kitchen, and perhaps less interesting recaps; he certainly led all the chefs in personality this season. He seems quite understanding and wasn’t thrilled with his dish; I wonder if fatigue plus exasperation at a challenge so far from his comfort zone did him in. Of course, at this point they’re whacking a good chef every week. I kind of hope his prediction that he and new BFF Lorena open a restaurant together comes true. I’d go.

* I’m still looking at Chris, Patricia, and Takashi for the final three, although I fear Patricia is fading.

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→ August 29, 2012
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A Naked Singularity.

Sergio de la Pava’s sprawling, ambitious novel A Naked Singularity took an unusual route, albeit an increasingly more usual one, to the broader marketplace, appearing first as a self-published title in 2008, finding a small but dedicated online following, and eventually attracting the attention of the University of Chicago Press, which published it this May to largely positive reviews. I received a complimentary review copy around that time and just worked my way through it this month. It is at times darkly funny, cynical, twisted, and bizarre, reminding me of other works from Junot Diaz to Zadie Smith to Aravind Adiga, brandishing a new American hysterical realism that, while often uneven, grabs you by the throat and forces you to pay attention.

The novel centers on Casi, an inadvertently-named young public defender in Manhattan who enters the book having never lost a case, only to find his 12-0 record in jeopardy, which flashes him back to the career of the (real) Puerto Rican boxer Wilfredo Benitez, who was on top of the world until he wasn’t, leading to a rapid and ignominious decline. Casi finds himself entangled in his usual mess of near-hopeless cases as well as pro bono work on an appeal for an Alabama death-row inmate of well below-average intelligence, while his friend Dane (who never seems to appear when anyone else is in the scene) tries to convince him to participate in a can’t-miss heist, stealing $10 million (or more) by intercepting a drug deal that involves one of those hopeless clients. He also has to cope with a bizarre immediate and slightly-extended family who wink in and out of his non-working life, as well as an even more strange group of neighbors living upstairs, one of whom is convinced he can make Ralph Kramden become real by playing episodes of The Honeymooners nonstop on his DVR. And that just scratches the surface of what transpires across the book’s 678 pages, some of which becomes increasingly divorced from reality as the novel goes on – hence the ‘hysterical realism’ tag, which I first heard in reference to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, a novel on which I had mixed feelings but have often found myself pondering in the four years since I read it.

Aside from Casi himself, all of the subplots in the novel revolve around the theme of justice, and its only occasional, arbitrary connection to the law and the judicial system. His indigent clients have their sob stories, some more sobby than others, but are largely treated by the system as widgets to be processed as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Ramon De Leon, the client who knows about the huge impending drug deal – which also involves a very large man known as La Ballena, or The Whale – is trying to manipulate the system, which is hungry for headlines and career-making deals, for his own benefit, working with lawyers from the district attorney’s office who are eager to swallow any story he feeds them without regard to its veracity. The Alabama death-row case gives de la Pava some room to criticize the hilariously stilted system of “justice” in that state, where judges may impose the death penalty by overruling juries that have voted for life without parole, one of only three states that allow such atrocities. Casi has a conscience and a strong sense of justice, and his rising awareness of the gap between that sense and the actual level of justice meted out by the system causes him to become slightly unhinged, especially in the novel’s final third, where he and Dane execute their heist plan, after which Casi is subject to a series of kangaroo-court hearings at work, is pursued by a corrupt detective straight out of central casting, and bumps into a new neighbor who has to be seen to be believed.

There are some off notes in the novel, even beyond the handful of typos. De la Pava always capitalizes the word Television, without a modifier, although even in 2008 it had already started to lose its grip as the dominant force in our culture, to be replaced (for now at least) by Internet. The vignettes involving his family often felt tacked-on, and had they disappeared from the story the main plot wouldn’t have suffered any for it, the kind of bulk-forming narrative that an experienced editor might have excised. De la Pava also had to get the long meaning-of-life soliloquies that seem to plague every new author today out of the way; if I never have to read another chapter where a bunch of fictional twentysomethings debate the existence of God or the virtue of altruism it will be too soon. Dostoevsky and Trosky covered this ground a century and a half ago. Can we all please just move on?

My tastes in fiction tend more toward classic novels and straightforward narratives, so A Naked Singularity was a clear departure from the norm for me, and it’s often compared to three postmodern classics that I have yet to read (but intend to hit soon): The Recognitions, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Infinite Jest. If those appeal to you, or if you like novels that, while a little unpolished, are broad and experimental with a liberal dose of humor, you may enjoy A Naked Singularity even more than I did.

Next up: Still ripping through Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music.

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→ August 28, 2012
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The Golden Notebook.

I’ve got a piece up today previewing the top 30 prospects for the 2013 draft.

—

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me. That’s what people really want, if they’re telling the truth.”

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, #48 on The Novel 100 and part of the TIME 100, is apparently a landmark in feminist literature as well as a rumination on the empty promises of communism, written by an author who had herself become disillusioned with both the philosophy and the British branch of the Party. Lessing attacks the novel’s traditional structure with a post-modern twist, weaving five narratives together across roughly 600 pages before the book culminates in one short story that attempts to reconcile fact with her protagonist’s own literary voice, a structure that challenges as it confuses.

That protagonist, Anna Wulf, is a divorced mother of a young daughter and a once-successful writer who has spent years unable to write a follow-up to her one novel, a wartime story that was commercially and critically successful and now spawns a series of comical attempts by English and American producers to film a bastardized version of it that takes its name but scarcely any of its plot. Anna and her best friend, Molly, are both little-c communists who have drifted out of the party and are gradually sliding into a passive socialism, which becomes a central conflict between Molly and her ex-husband, a successful financier, over their joint custody of their son, Tommy.

The golden notebook of the title doesn’t appear until the end of the novel, but we do read four other notebooks Anna has kept over the years, recounting her experiences with a group of white communist activists in Rhodesia, her time in the British Communist Party, an unfinished novel based on her own doomed love affair with a married man, and a more traditional journal where she records more mundane events as well as dreams and conversations with her therapist. The golden notebook represents her attempt to use fiction to bring together all four narratives as well as the more recent events of her life with Molly and a love/hate affair she has with an American communist who fled the blacklist and McCarthyist movement.

The one other distinguishing feature of The Golden Notebook is its unusually frank and graphic depictions of sex and biological functions, not unusual today but certainly so for the era in which it was published, particularly since its author is female. I imagine the novel was shocking in its time, although I was more surprised at how perfunctory the descriptions of sex were, not just anti-romantic, but clinical and sometimes even violent. The passage on menstruation is just as graphic, so while I saw it as an obvious metaphor for her own anger over societal prescriptions on gender roles, I also found it shocking to see a female writer write something so critical of her own female-ness, even if it was solely in a biological sense.

The narrative structure of the novel makes sense given where Lessing is taking us, but I found it incredibly confusing because of the shifts in time and the use of metafiction that is itself a thinly-veiled rendition of an actual life event belonging to the novel’s central character. It’s a hard book to put down for a day and return to without some thought as to who’s on the stage and in what time period the current scene is taking place. As someone who reads quickly, I found that offputting, even though Lessing’s efforts to converge all five narratives in that final bit of metafiction in the golden notebook are ultimately successful and likely part of why this novel remains a critical favorite.

I also found the metafictional Anna much more difficult to empathize with than the “real” Anna, who is herself flawed but more able to view her own decisions clearly, because the fictional version is the authoress of her own destruction within the book. The fact that her paramour is a lying cad can’t excuse her from failing to see that her involvement with a married man who has no intention of abandoning his wife – and whose wife is clearly suffering from her husband’s infidelities – or from the consequences when he inevitably flees from the affair as well.

The Golden Notebook fits in with many of the critically-acclaimed novels I read from these “greatest books” lists, an intelligent, thought-provoking, well-written book that deals with the larger (or largest) issues in life, but ultimately falls short on plot and character. I never felt driven to find out what was going to happen with the central characters, and the one Big Event within the book is dealt with swiftly enough that it becomes secondary to Anna’s journals. That all makes it a good book in terms of quality, but not one I’d be driven to read again.

Next up: I just finished Sergio de la Pava’s strange, often darkly funny debut novel A Naked Singularity (just $5.13 on Kindle) and have started Jonathan Lethem’s sci-fi hard-boiled detective novel Gun, with Occasional Music, the latter an old recommendation from one of you.

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→ August 23, 2012
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Top Chef Masters, S4E5.

Today’s Klawchat transcript is up, and I wrote up the Under Armour All-American game for the draft blog.

* Quickfire: Cook for the Indigo Girls, who look old. The B-52s were a weird enough choice, but why the Indigo Girls? They’re judging a group of the best chefs in the country? The challenge is to prepare two related dishes, one with meat, and one vegetarian, with $5K and immunity on the line.

* Takashi tells an interesting story about lacking a fridge in his house while growing up, so they’d get tofu from the “tofu guy” coming by the house. That seems like such an incredible anachronism today … and yet something that we’ve lost too, that kind of contact with our food sources, and the idea of cooking food that was just picked or butchered or in the case of tofu lightly processed.

* Awful Chris, usually the most off the wall of everyone, goes pretty straightforward with a beef bordelaise and a portobello version, both with the same sides. That feels a little like a punt to me – the same dish twice with only one ingredient change? I get substituting portobello – which is just an overgrown cremini and, to my palate, a fairly bland mushroom – for beef, but the mushroom requires different treatment and works with different flavors than the steak does.

* Kerry’s chicken with olives and herb flan with olives looked as boring as hell. Is there a less interesting protein in the kitchen than chicken? I try to cook it as infrequently as possible because unless you marinate it for hours, chicken breast has marginally more flavor than wallpaper paste.

* We get what I think is our first outright failure of the season when Patricia tries to play Beat the Time … and loses, failing to get her broth into her pho bowls in time for judging. At least they allowed her to serve the broth after judging, although I don’t see why, on Masters, they couldn’t just allow her to finish plating after the time while disqualifying her from consideration for the prize?

* Art mentions that he’s from the south. Drink.

* Anyway, the three favorites are Art’s, Takashi’s, and Lorena’s. Art makes two pot pies and his vegetarian version, wild mushroom and arugula with a “Parmesan” and cheddar crust, looked and sounded way better than the regular chicken version with a cheddar biscuit crust, which sounded like something you’d get at Cracker Barrel. My one quibble with Art’s vegetarian version is that it lacks protein, so it’s kind of weak for a main course. I do make pot pies in the winter and usually add some kind of legume, like lima beans, to balance the nutritional content. Lorena goes with arepa dumpling soup with queso and a chicken salad arepa – again with the chicken, but still, arepas rock. Takashi wins with two agedashi tofu (deep-fried tofu cubes) dishes, one with pork and ginger, the other with eggplant and other veg. Obviously I didn’t taste any of these, but I can’t imagine a fried tofu dish coming close to an arepa or a pot pie for pure satisfaction. That’s $15K for Takashi and am-munity per Curtis.

* Elimination challenge: Playmate Holly Madison is having a cocktail pool party and wants a brunch buffet, but with canapé sized dishes and no garlic or onions. Why don’t we just get her views on vaccines too? Chefs have two hours to cook plus an hour to plate the next day.

* Art mentions that he’s gay. Drink.

* Art and Awful Chris are bickering. Drink.

* Thierry is struggling with temperature on the flat top. Note to future Top Chef contestants: Bring an infrared thermometer. I don’t care if you have to smuggle the thing into the kitchen in your underwear. You will be glad you had it.

* To the food. Art makes a turkey burger on a biscuit with a garlic chutney. Holly identifies the garlic as ginger before Curtis sets her straight, so I guess a box of rocks is actually smarter than a pair of cans. Judges love it.

* Thierry makes a croque-madame with bechamel and tomato vodka shooter. Judges can’t figure out how to eat it. The sauce is visibly congealed, almost like melted cheese, and the bread is slightly burned. This was just a poor choice by Thierry – he thought “brunch” but didn’t consider execution. A croque-madame is a croque monsieur with a fried egg on top; he seems to have made a croque-monsieur with a bechamel that he has thickened with eggs, and it’s just a fiasco. That sounds really heavy and disgusting to me, just weight upon weight with no bright flavors.

* Kerry makes a corn and crab fritter with red pepper coulis. Krista’s was slightly underseasoned and slightly overdone, but I do think he had the right brunch vibe with those ingredients.

* Lorena says she “put all the sexy (she has) in this dish.” I’ll take two, then. She makes buñuelos, fried dough balls filled with cheese that I thought were more of a Christmas/New Year’s dish, with fresh berry compote and white chocolate and vanilla sauce. James raves about the custardy texture inside the crisp outer shell. Sounds like Sexychef knows her frying.

* Patricia is massacring her braised pork shoulder and says she can never get “that two handed chopping thing” down. She’s calling this barbecue, which it’s not – there’s no smoke involved. Her pulled pork on toast is a mess; James says the sauce is boring and dull, and the judges all agree the bun was toasted too far in advance and tastes stale. Holly loves the meat. I have no other comment.

* Awful Chris serves a skewer with watermelon, “tuna bacon,” tomatoes, and pistachios, plus some unidentified citrus zest visible on the screen. It’s the most complex dish so far in terms of concept and ingredients. Holly gives it props for being relatively healthful. The criticisms here and at judges’ table strike me as very nitpicky. The flavors may have been slightly unbalanced, but there’s nothing actually wrong with the dish in execution or in the combination of elements.

* Takashi makes a sheep’s milk yogurt panna cotta with fresh berry compote and almonds. One of the guests doesn’t know what a panna cotta is, but knows that the fruit is in a compote. All righty then.

* Art mentions the weight loss. Drink.

* James is undressing and/or ogling the various (apparently waxed?) young men around the pool. Had Curtis done the same with some of the ladies, this would have been offensive, right? I don’t care what team you play for; let’s just treat everyone equally.

* Judges’ table: The favorite dishes are from Takashi, Art, Lorena, and Kerry. Apparently Holly said off camera (or pre-editing) that she liked Art’s dish even with the garlic. The biggest raves seem to be for Lorena’s and she wins $10K for the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, giving her $15K so far.

* The bottom three are Thierry, Patricia, and Chris. Thierry’s sauce thickened after leaving the kitchen and the toast was burned. James says pulled pork (Patricia’s) should be fine and feathery in texture, but I disagree – that’s Carolina-style and I find it unpleasant and stringy. Properly smoked meat should still have some of its meaty characteristics yet can be served in larger chunks because the meat itself is tender from the long, slow smoking process. Awful Chris’ dish didn’t resonate with the audience, and the exhibitionist said it was overspiced. Was the challenge to please the non-discriminating pool crowd or the judges? Krista points out that his dish had soft and chewy textures but no crunchy element, which is the only really legitimate criticism I hear on this.

* Elimination: Thierry leaves. I thought Patricia would go based on the comments, but I also think she has a better chance to win the whole thing, so I’m glad she stayed. Thierry’s concept just wasn’t right for the setting. He says, “The chef in the hat is leaving” while acknowledging that he “was totally on the wrong planet” with trying to make a croque-whatever for outdoor, small-bite service.

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→ August 21, 2012
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Chicago eats.

I wrote about Bryce Harper’s struggles today for Insiders, and about Twins prospects Miguel Sano and Eddie Rosario yesterday. My post on Saturday’s Under Armour game should go up in the next 24 hours.

If you follow me on Twitter, you saw my photograph of 2 Sparrows‘ maple bacon donut, which is on the short list of the best things I’ve ever eaten, not just for the bacon, but for the absolutely perfect donut at the heart of the $4 dish. The maple glaze is very sweet, like pure maple sugar, so the donut beneath it has little to no sweetness of its own, instead shining for the crispy exterior and a soft, light interior. The bacon crumbled over the top is house-cured, with the salt well balanced with the glaze’s sweetness, and some texture contrast with the soft donut. I admit the plate seemed a little gimmicky, but the execution across the board is tremendous.

The duck confit hash was less successful, however, primarily because of texture – every item in the hash, which is mostly duck and sweet potatoes, is soft, with the duck actually the least so, even slightly tough in comparison to everything else in the dish. I also find duck meat in general and confit in particular slightly sweet, at least relative to any other protein, so the combination with sweet potatoes felt unbalanced.

My dinner with Old Hoss Radbourn on Saturday night was also a huge hit, as we went to The Purple Pig, a restaurant that promises “cheese, swine, and wine.” We went heavy on the swine, going for pork liver paté, fried pig ears, and the “JLT,” with pig jowl standing in for the bacon – as well as two vegetable dishes and dessert. Dish by dish:

* The pork liver paté was unreal – as smooth as a dessert mousse, with a pronounced smoky undertone and a thin layer of high-quality olive oil on top, served with thick slices of grilled country bread. The server even brought more bread so we could finish every last bit of the paté, and even though I’m not even a huge fan of liver, I’d order this again in a heartbeat. The dish is one of a handful of “smears” they offer, including one made from lardo, cured pork fat that melts into whatever hot item is underneath it.

* I would never have guessed I was eating fried pig ears if I didn’t know going in what we had ordered. They’re slow-cooked, julienned, then quickly fried like french-fried onion rings, served with fried kale, pickled cherry peppers, and a fried egg on top. The pig ears have just a hint of tooth to them, but aren’t tough, and the frying makes the kale crispy while setting its deep green hue. It’s like the perfect bar snack for food snobs like me – and with a Belhaven stout in front of me I had no trouble finishing my half of the dish. You can find the recipe if you want to try this at home.

* The JLT was incredibly awkward to eat, but when I could get all the flavors into one bite, it was masterful, with huge flavors all in perfect balance. The jowl is the pig’s cheek meat, cured like bacon but thicker and much more tender; those of you familiar with regional Italian cooking may have had it as guanciale. The heirloom tomatoes are sliced nearly an inch thick, which contributed to the construction issues, although they were extremely bright and provided the one sweet element in the dish. The duck egg … perhaps I’m a philistine, but I doubt I could have identified this as a duck egg rather than a chicken egg, and either way, a runny egg makes every dish better. The lemon aioli tasted more like a cold bearnaise sauce, providing the one acidic element, while frisee adds a slightly bitter note. As a whole, the dish has a complex mixture of colors, textures, and flavors, and if it was a little easier to eat it would have scored an 80 for me.

* The broccoli with roasted garlic and anchovy vinaigrette was another winner, with the broccoli also roasted and the umami-filled vinaigrette coating the vegetables (florets and I believe julienned stalks) perfectly, but without the fishy taste the description might lead you to expect. The charred cauliflower with toasted breadcrumbs, cornichons, and parsley was our least favorite of the five dishes, even though it might have been the prettiest thanks to the use of green and purple florets; the flavors were all muted and compared to the strong flavors in every other dish it felt bland.

* Both desserts were excellent; the mixed berry crostada had a textbook flaky/tender crust that could have stood on its own, while the salted caramel soft-serve ice cream was very smooth and had the complexity you expect from that flavor, even if it’s become a little hackneyed at this point. I’d take the crostada over the ice cream just because it was more unusual. Good call by Hoss on this place, especially since I figured there was even money we’d end up at a brothel.

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