→ May 26, 2007
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Otto Pizzeria.

So last Monday, my wife and I headed into Manhattan – I had a scheduled TV appearance and she wanted to hit a fabric store in Soho. We decided to have lunch and headed to Mario Batali’s Otto Pizzeria, which promised authentic, Italian-style pizzas, an enormous wine list (wasted on me, but I thought I’d mention it), and – according to at least two things I read on line – the best gelato in Manhattan. The pizza could be Velveeta served on cardboard for all I care, as long as there’s real gelato on the premises.

Unfortunately, the experience ended up reinforcing for me why I tend to avoid celebrity-chef restaurants. The food was a disappointment, and the menu was too heavily influenced by the chef’s whims, not by the food itself. It surprised me to run into this at a Batali restaurant; one reason I like his shows and his books is that his agenda seems to be a noble one: to celebrate regional Italian cuisine using authentic recipes and ingredients.

We ordered a funghi misti appetizer – mixed wild mushrooms marinated in herbs and garlic, delicious, earthy, and reasonable at $4 for close to a cup’s worth of ‘shrooms. I went with the pizza of the day, a pesto pizza with fresh mozzarella. Pesto genovese is made with basil, which doesn’t take heat very well, so pizzas made with pesto typically are cooked partway before a thin layer of pesto is added. Instead, I got a pizza with a thin crust (not as thin as the ones I’ve had in Italy) and a thick layer of bitter pesto that tasted like it contained spinach rather than basil (I asked – the waitress said there was no spinach in it). There was also very little cheese, so I was eating a cracker with bad pesto on it.

My wife’s entrée was better, as she ordered spaghetti carbonara. The pasta was really al dente – I’m all for some tooth to the pasta, but even I would have left this in the water another sixty seconds – and the sauce was done right. The one problem was that the dish was extremely salty, probably the result of the huge amount of pancetta in it.

As for the gelato … we didn’t have any. The dessert menu came – it took forever, now that I mention it, and the service in general was inattentive at best – and the list of flavors read something like this: olive oil, vanilla, pistachio, coconut, ginger, hazelnut straciatella, mint chocolate chip. I might have forgotten one, but you get the idea. Notice anything missing? That’s right – nothing chocolate or coffee. Not even tiramisu-flavored gelato, which was in every gelateria I visited on my trips to Italy. At $7 for three scoops, those flavors weren’t enough to get me to stick around.

Filed Under: Food
→ May 25, 2007
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Blood Meridian.

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is one of the most brutally violent books I’ve ever read, but in spite of that, it’s also one of the most beautifully written.

McCarthy’s prose is often compared to Faulkner’s, and while some of that is because they’re both from the South (just like every right-handed pitcher from Stanford is automatically compared to Mike Mussina), there are definite similarities in their styles. There’s a lilting quality to many of McCarthy’s sentences, even when he defies conventional sentence structure. He can be sparse with details when it suits his purpose (the novel’s protagonist is never identified beyond “the kid”), but can also fire off a stream of seemingly minute details that in the end paint a rich picture of a scene, a character, a moment. He never descends into the sheer inscrutability that scares so many readers away from Faulkner, who was an original in many ways but who’ll always be loved and reviled most strongly for his prose.

The story revolves around the aforementioned kid, a fourteen-year-old who runs away from his father (his mother died giving birth to him) to head out west and falls in with a group of mercenaries who are hunting an outlaw named Gómez while also collecting scalps of Apaches, all under the auspices of the Mexican government. And that’s where it gets violent – ruthlessly, sociopathically so. The violence isn’t disturbing because it’s graphic – it is, somewhat – but because it’s so effortless and is achieved on so grand a scale. It is genocide writ small, and it’s made all the worse by the fact that McCarthy based it loosely on the real-life Glanton gang, using Glanton’s top lieutenant, Judge Holden, as the primary villain.

The plot didn’t pick up until I was about halfway through the book; the kid seems to take forever to fall in with Glanton/Holden’s gang, and it’s not until things start to go awry that the plot gets interesting, with the kid and Judge Holden gradually forming the central conflict that defines the last third of the book.

If you’ve got the stomach to get through several scenes of extreme – but, as TIME wrote in its summary of the book, never gratuitous – violence, then I would certainly recommend Blood Meridian to anyone who enjoys Faulkner, morality plays (even ones where the moral lines are blurred), or great American literature. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you when the scalps start flying.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ May 18, 2007
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The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball

I’m often asked for suggestions for good baseball books, and I struggle to come up with good suggestions. Many are leaden; a lot are full of the sort of cliché-ridden garbage that has so thoroughly turned me off of newspapers; and a lot are just poorly written, too. So I’m pleased to be able to offer a very strong recommendation for a new, unusual entry in the pantheon of baseball books: Derek Zumsteg’s The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball.

First, a disclaimer: I know Derek personally and have for something like seven years. We were both writers at BP around the same time, and while we definitely don’t agree on every topic, I have always enjoyed Derek’s writing. I still think if his book sucked, I’d say so, or at least I wouldn’t recommend it, but I thought the connection was something I should mention.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the book, ripping through it in two days despite the fact that I was coming down with a bad respiratory infection and read the last section while I had a fever of 102.5. Zumsteg splits his history of cheating into three sections, and unfortunately the first section – devoted to shady-but-not-really-cheating things, like groundskeepers’ tricks to help the home team – is the least interesting, although it’s certainly well-written, and does discuss John McGraw, one of my favorite historical baseball figures. But we want sordid details, like spitballs and gambling scandals, and sections two (the illegal) and three (the awful) deliver, which gave me the feeling that the book was accelerating as I read it. The section on Billy Martin, a manager I remember well from my Yankee-fan childhood, was a particular treat.

My one big criticism of the book is the lack of footnotes or endnotes, although Derek tells me that its omission was an editorial decision. It’s too bad, because the book clearly has a lot of research behind it, and I often find other interesting reads by checking out the notes or bibliography of a book I’ve enjoyed. My guess is that a lot of readers won’t mind the absence of the notes, certainly not if your primary interest is in a good, fast-moving baseball read.

Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With:
→ May 10, 2007
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The “other” chat questions…

So it looks like some other folks had questions for me.

Deadspin: 1 p.m. MLB Insider Keith Law: How come no firestorm when David Wells opens his big yap?

Because no one can understand a guy who always has two hot dogs in his mouth.

David Hume: Keith, do you resent being overshadowed by your omnipresent, nearly omnipotent brother Johnny Law?

No, but the way my cousin Acie Law IV was getting all the love the spring was really getting under my skin.

David Hume: Also, is “the long arm of the Law” really that long?

Depends on which arm we’re discussing…

Stev D: Are you just Keith if you enter international waters?

And most people just assume I’m afraid of the ocean.

Zlax45: Ask Keith what he thinks about College Baseball and how teams always screw up bunting. He says it happens every time he goes to a college game that someone hits a bunt back to the pitcher.

Bah, a serious question – no fun. But the big problem I have with college teams bunting is that it’s a high-scoring environment with horrendous relief pitching. What the hell are you doing having your #3 hitter bunt in the first inning? OK, enough seriousness.

Phony Gwynn: Keith, If I fought you, would you win?

No, you know how the song ends.

Spaceman Spiff: Keith, are you going to answer baseball related questions or is this chat only for pretentious assholes to discuss their favourite foreign language books and sushi?

PS. what’s your favourite Manuel Altolaguirre poem?

Hey, watch your mouth – there’s nothing pretentious about us. Fin de un amor.

Filed Under: Chat, Humor
→ April 27, 2007
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Cortázar, Hammett, and a nonfiction book.

Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch is a bizarre novel; the first 56 chapters represent a complete work, a single story with a single protagonist and enough pseudo-intellectual pablum to make this Virginia Woolf hater want to light the book on fire. The last third of the book comprises interstitial chapters which may be added to the story proper if the reader wants to read the longer work. A few relate to the main narrative, a few more are of the newspaper-clipping style seen in a lot of other works, but most are just nonsense. The book is quite acclaimed – someone named C.D.B. Bryan is quoted as saying it’s his favorite novel, although why I’m supposed to take the opinion of a man with three initials in place of a first name seriously I have no idea – but it was a slog, and even slowed down towards the end. The core storyline is somewhat directionless, and doesn’t really conclude in any conventional sense; the main character needs a smack upside the head, both to get him to stop talking nonsense and to get him to do something with his life. The “freewheeling adventures” promised on the book’s jacket don’t even begin until the book is two-thirds finished, and they’re not freewheeling, not terribly adventurous, and are by and large extremely boring. (Exception: a bit of chapter 51, where the main character begins working at an asylum, a scene which sparks a few laughs.) So I wouldn’t exactly recommend this one.

Cleaning up a few books I read in March: Dashiel Hammett’s The Thin Man doesn’t exactly need my recommendation. Hammett’s one of my favorite authors, with a spare style that conveys so much more than Hemingway’s more-praised sparseness (which often struck me as a bit sing-song). That said, I’d probably send Hammett first-timers The Maltese Falcon, and for readers who want a lot of action I’d recommend Red Harvest. The Thin Man is best-known for the characters it introduced to the world, Nick and Nora Charles, but the book didn’t have quite the same tension as the other two I mentioned.

Ingrid Rowland’s The Scarith of Scornello was a fun, short read, telling the true story of a simple hoax orchestrated by a teenager in 16th-century Tuscany that turned into an elaborate academic fraud and ended up altering the course of the kid’s entire life. It’s billed as a bit of a mystery, which it isn’t, because the back cover of the book tells you that the whole thing was a hoax, and it turns out that some of the teenager’s contemporaries knew it was a hoax all along, while others were more than happy to believe in artifacts that appeared to increase the glory of their region in ancient times.

Filed Under: Literature, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ April 25, 2007
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New Homestar Runner ‘toon.

Date Nite – the funniest thing they’ve posted in a year.

Filed Under: Homestar
→ April 20, 2007
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A Dance to the Music of Time.

So I’m curious whether any of you have read all or part of Anthony Powell’s novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time. I just finished the first book, A Question of Upbringing (there are twelve parts in all), and I’m hooked. There’s a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Powell’s writing, especially This Side of Paradise (not as good as Gatsby or Tender is the Night, but still brilliant), and I can see some Evelyn Waugh there as well. I actually bought volume two, A Buyer’s Market, at a used bookstore for $2, and then picked up the first part on half.com, but I’ll probably go for the three-volume sets (the only way it’s still published) for the rest of the series. Has anyone else tackled this one?

Filed Under: Literature
→ April 12, 2007
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Tapas at Toro.

So I kind of got dragged to the South End, which might as well be the other end of the earth for me, last week by a couple of friends, one of whom was on furlough (his wife and one-year-old son were on a plane back from California at the time). The destination was Toro, a be-seen tapas bar created by Ken Oringer, the chef behind Clio and Uni in Back Bay – in other words, a really famous chef around these parts.

Anyway, the food at Toro was impressive. The best dish, one that Ming Tsai raved about in a review I found after we ate at the restaurant, was a grilled maize dish. The cobs are seared to the point where the outside of the kernels is starting to blacken, after which it’s rolled in a garlic-mayo (tasted like butter was in there too) and topped with a crumbling of cotija cheese, which I didn’t even know I liked. Other hits included the shrimp in a mildly spicy butter sauce, a braised short rib served in a tiny cast-iron skillet, bacalao croquettes (a little soft inside, but not fishy, with a perfectly fried exterior) with a ring of deep-fried lemon rind, and boquerones (marinated fresh anchovies).

There were a couple of misses, of course. The skirt steak was bland and a bit undercooked (we asked for medium, it was still mooing when it reached the table). The pimientos de padron were very bitter, which was a big disappointment because it was my first time trying them after reading about them in Calvin Trillin’s Feeding a Yen. The pan con tomate was fine, but it was just bruschetta with a Spanish name, nothing I couldn’t have in any decent Italian restaurant (not that we have that around here).

I’m told the wine list at Toro is solid, for what that’s worth, but since I drove downtown I didn’t partake.

I left not hungry, but not exactly full, for $30 or so, which doesn’t strike me as a great bargain, but is typical of my experiences at tapas places. I’m not a huge eater, but the tiny little plates never seem to add up to a full meal. So if you like tapas or want to go to a restaurant with a scene, Toro’s worth the trip, since the food itself is good. I just like a little more bang for my buck.

Filed Under: Food
→ April 8, 2007
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Florida eats (part three)

Cleaning up from that Florida trip last month…

One of my favorite restaurant types is the barbecue shack. Not the barbecue restaurant, mind you – those are fine as long as they’re not chains – but the actual shack, something I’ve only encountered in Florida to date. The usual model is two small buildings by the side of the road, a small smokehouse where the actual Q happens and a shack nearby where orders are taken and food is served. There is never indoor seating, and the menu is extremely limited, as it should be. My all-time favorite barbecue shack is Big Ed’s in Dunedin, right near the Blue Jays’ spring training ballpark; the late Bobby Mattick tried it once and raved about it, so I tried it and was hooked. Big Ed’s still serves the best pulled pork I’ve ever had, anywhere.

Less than a mile from our hotel on this trip stood another barbecue shack, this one called McCray’s II. I went with my usual meal, a pulled pork sandwich and a side of barbecue beans. The pork was good, with a light smoke flavor and plenty of moisture left in it, so that the sauce was just for added flavor rather than to cover up the fact that the meat is dry. The beans were a disappointment – one trend I noticed in Florida was the tendency to cook many foods to within an inch of their lives so that their texture blows by al dente and ends up mush. Perhaps it’s a nod to Florida’s older population. Perhaps people down there just overcook everything by habit. Either way, it’s not good eats. But the pork was worth the trip.

Found a surprisingly good New York-style pizzeria in Palm Beach Gardens, called Giovanni’s, just off I-95. I’m a big fan of pizza in general – anything except Chicago/deep-dish, which is just a typical (dare I say it) American more-is-more approach to pizza – but having grown up in New York, I have a particular fondness for that style of thin-but-not-too-thin crust. Giovanni’s was solid, good crust with a crisp bottom below a soft dough that still had some softness to it; a sauce that didn’t taste like sugar; and the right amount of cheese. They also do a very nice garden salad, with artichokes, roasted red peppers, and sun-dried tomatoes on top of field greens. A medium cheese pizza and the salad (which serves two to three) came to about $17.

While down in Miami Springs to see a high school player I stumbled on a Thai place that was actually about to close for the afternoon, but turned out to be a gem. Rama Thai and Sushi appears to be mostly Thai, with a tiny sushi bar with only 3-4 stools, so Thai was what I went for. I had a lunch special, which was a huge bargain: $7 got me a miso soup, one fried spring roll (vegetarian, I think), and a just-right serving of pad thai. The pad thai was different, less sweet than I’m used to (that’s fine) with an earthy undertone, which I think came from cumin. I wanted to be polite and let them close up for the afternoon, but I have to mention that the cop sitting at the next table went for a very intriguing dessert of fried dumplings. He knocked off two plates, amazing since he looked like he weighed about 120 pounds.

Couple of not-so-great places to report on: Greek Taverna in Vero Beach looked promising, but the food was lousy. I went with a chicken kabob – I know, the gyro might have been a better choice – and the chicken had a bizarre texture, as if it wasn’t fully thawed when it was placed on the grill. Back in West Palm Beach, Jasmine Thai over on Haverhill Road promises “authentic Thai cuisine,” but while the tom yum goong was outstanding, the sauce on the pad thai clearly had peanut butter in it, making it sticky and way too sweet. The best part of that restaurant was the clientele, which that day included a man from southern China who was haranguing the waiter with descriptions of China and monologues on why people in Fujian never get sick (part of it is that they eat soup twice a day, or so he said), and an apparent heroin addict who had a loud conversation on his cell phone about some TV station that wanted to interview him that night. Good stuff.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 26, 2007
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Florida eats (part two)

Second update:

The best find of the trip was probably Jerk Town USA in West Palm Beach, a small Caribbean place right off West 45th (and close to my hotel) which offers good food in large quantities for not much coin. I ordered their $7.99 “small” jerk chicken platter, which was anything but small: probably a half-pound of meat, mostly white with a little dark, spicy but not obscenely hot. The platter also included a large mound of red beans and rice, with a subtle coconut flavor that really took it to another level; a warm cabbage slaw; and two maduros, which (QED) is one secret to getting a good review from me. Great value, great food, no way you could leave there hungry, especially with a “large” option on the platters.

Caspian Grill in Plantation was one of the better high-end (relatively speaking) restaurants I hit. The restaurant’s iced tea is brewed to order and was excellent. I ordered a combination plate that included two kabobs, one of chicken and another of a spiced ground meat mixture. The plate was huge – the chicken alone was probably two servings – and came with a huge portion of plain basmati rice that had obviously just been steamed, although it could have used a little flavoring. The chicken was perfectly cooked, but a little dull (I know, it’s chicken, it’s dull as a result of a few decades of corporate blanding efforts), while the beef mixture was outstanding. The combo dish was $16, plus $2 for the iced tea. If I end up there again, I’ll go for the beef-only platter ($11) and try the hummus ($5), which ought to be outstanding in a Persian restaurant – or a sign to head in the other direction.

Sushi Rock in Coral Gables was solid, despite the odd atmosphere (the “Rock” refers to rock music, with an eclectic mix of music piped in and some musicians’ portraits on the walls). The salad was huge, a bit overdressed but very good. I went for a simple lunch of salmon nigiri, unagi nigiri, and a spicy tuna roll. The salmon was good, definitely fresh, but maybe a bit bland. The unagi was outstanding, although in my experience, as long as it’s not ice cold, it’s usually good. The spicy tuna roll was a disappointment; the spicy sauce was vinegary, not spicy, and it was kind of dumped on rather than integrated with the fish. When I ordered, I asked if the spicy tuna was made with mayo, and I’m pretty sure that the waitress who said no said something about “kimchi,” which would explain the tartness.

Aleyda’s, a “Tex-Mex” place in West Palm Beach on Okeechobee, was a huge disappointment. Although the menu leans more towards the Mex side of Tex-Mex (a Good Thing™), the food was bland and the portions skimpy. I ordered chicken fajitas – not my norm, but they claim it’s their signature dish – and there was little to like. The chicken was overcooked when it reached the table, a problem that only got worse as it sat on the hot cast-iron skillet, and it had little to no salt on it. The yellow rice that came on the side was hard, like it had come from the bottom of the bowl or had been sitting out for a while. And the side of guacamole that came with the dish made us laugh – it was less than a tablespoon’s worth. To make matters worse, the service was terrible, starting with the hostess giving us a broken highchair and continuing with the waiter disappearing from when the food was delivered until long after we’d finished. The live cockatoo and amazons in a cage out front was a plus, at least from my 10-month-old daughter’s perspective.

Another dud: Mamma Mia in Boynton Beach, a restaurant I had actually been to before, but not since 2000. The veal piccata was overcooked and slightly greasy, the side of pasta was cooked to within an inch of its life, and the salad was drowned in dressing. The portions are huge, and that’s why they pack them in, but the quality isn’t there.

One more update after I get back to Massachusetts…

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , ,