→ November 13, 2007
→ By

Picking on Bill.

I’m an avowed Bill Simmons fan, but I have to point this one out:

Reason No. 12,349 why I love the NBA: In honor of Friday night’s historic Yi-Yao matchup, I successfully convinced the Sports Gal to order Chinese food and watched the first quarter while eating General Tso’s Chicken.

Um, Bill, General Tso’s Chicken is about as Chinese as I am. Maybe less so. (Sugar has always been expensive in China since the country had to import it, so it’s very unlikely that they would have used it in a savory dish like this one. The leading theory is that the dish we know was invented in the US in the 1970s.) Next time, try the twice-cooked pork belly if you want to get your zhen zhongguo fan on.

Filed Under: Food, Humor, Media
→ November 12, 2007
→ By

Disneyworld eats.

The perks of working at a Disney subsidiary include discounts at some Disneyworld restaurants, and stays at hotels on the property when I have to go there for business. Since the GM meetings were held at a hotel just outside the northern entrance to Walt Disney World, I stayed at the Animal Kingdom Lodge and ate all my meals within the property (thereby putting my per diems back into the company).

Raglan Road is by far our favorite restaurant in Walt Disney World. A celebrity-chef venture involving Kevin Dundon, one of the top celebrity chefs in Ireland, and amed after a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, Raglan Road pretends to be an authentic Irish pub, but in reality it’s far too upscale in décor and food – not that either is a bad thing. The Guinness on tap is served at just the right temperature (that is, not too cold), and the upscale twists on some classic Irish comfort foods are excellent. Their shepherd’s pie is pretty close to the standard recipe, with a generous portion of lightly spiced lamb/beef mixture sitting below whipped mashed potatoes. Their take on bangers-and-mash includes a small dollop of their beef stew as a sauce, and the pork sausages (bangers) are outstanding. Even the Irish soda bread (no raisins!) and the olive-oil-and-Guinness-reduction that come before the meal are excellent. And the “bread and butter pudding,” served with butterscotch sauce and crrème Anglaise, is easily the best bread pudding I’ve ever had, with the bread still firm despite a thorough soaking in custard, and both sauces good enough to drink straight from the creamers.

We ate several meals at Boma, the buffet-style restaurant at the Animal Kingdom Lodge. Breakfast was mostly straightforward, with a mix of standard American breakfast fare (nothing special) and some African-influenced dishes, including a sausage-and-biscuit skillet dish with a spicy light-brown sauce and fluffy Southern-style biscuits that was out of this world. They also offer a “jungle juice” – just a blend of orange, pineapple, and guava juices – that tastes mostly of guava, which is fine by me because guava juice is naturally very sweet. Their pastry selection is strong, with scones, apple turnovers, banana bread, and four kinds of muffins (the orange bran muffins were the best), all clearly baked that morning or overnight.

Their dinner buffet has a huge menu of choices, leaning more towards African food (or African-influenced food), including bobotie (a South African tamale pie, with an egg topping and dried fruits mixed in with the meat), Moroccan couscous, cardamom-spiced pork, carved prime rib (get the ends), fufu, and so on, as well as some American choices for kids and fussy eaters. Their signature desserts are “zebra domes” and “tiger domes,” little fondant-filled chocolate domes with a hint of liqueur, but we preferred the chocolate mousse and the peach crumble (a touch heavy on the nutmeg, though). I was most impressed by the fact that the savory dishes are strongly flavored, unlike a lot of restaurants aiming for a broad market, and I never had to reach for the salt shaker.

The problem with Boma is that it’s not cheap – $26 per adult for dinner, $17 per adult for breakfast – and unless you’re a huge quantity eater or you have an employee discount, it probably won’t pay. Also, if you’re going for dinner, make a reservation ahead of time, as they’re sold out most nights. One minor bonus – about half the staff come from either north Africa or sub-Saharan Africa, and we chatted up one server from Botswana, asking her if she was familiar with Alexander McCall Smith’s books to see if they presented an authentic picture of the country. (Answer: She hadn’t read the books, but told us they had just filmed a movie based on the first book right near her apartment in Gaborone.)

The Animal Kingdom Lodge has one quick-service restaurant, called the Mara, offering all three meals. The Mara has a large refrigerated case with drinks, yogurts (packaged and in parfaits), puddings/cakes, and so on, and they offer a short menu of hot foods. Their breakfasts were greasy, and the dinner selection wasn’t great except for one option – the roasted half-chicken with (hot) couscous, a Moroccan-style dish that was delicious albeit a bit overcooked. They offer French fries or a cold couscous salad as side options for their other dishes, like hamburgers and fried chicken strips. It’s buried within the hotel, so it’s not worth seeking out.

The Earl of Sandwich is a Panera-style sandwich place at Downtown Disney, and they serve panini on a homemade English-muffin bread that is out of this world. The list of sandwich options is huge, but the fillings are mostly pre-sliced or pre-cooked; I went with a Caribbean jerk sandwich with chicken (pre-cooked), bell peppers, sliced banana peppers, and a jerk sauce that turned out to be mayo-based. But the bread was delicious, and my wife liked her Caprese salad sandwich, which had just the traditional fresh mozzarella, fresh basil, and sliced tomatoes, with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The Earl also offers salads and wraps, and for breakfast they have egg sandwiches and yogurt parfaits.

While we were down in Orlando, the Epcot Food & Wine Festival was just wrapping up its six-week run, so after the GM meetings ended we took the afternoon to check it out. The World Showcase part of Epcot is lined with food stands and a few shopping kiosks representing every country with a permanent pavilion, as well as separate stands for Spain, Chile, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Oklahoma (Native American foods), India, Poland, Turkey, Greece, and the Champagne region of France (selling wines and champagne truffles). Just about everything we ate was good; the portions are very small and run $2.50-$6 for savory dishes and as little as $1.50 for desserts. Hits included “shrimp on the Barbie” (grilled marinated shrimp) from Australia, mofongo (mashed yucca with pork cracklings) and more grilled shrimp from the DR, a beef empanada from Argentina, and spanikopita from Spain. The papas con chorizo from Spain were more like a stew with a heavy tomato flavor, and the “boxty” potato pancake from Ireland was greasy and lukewarm, although the six-ounce Guinness hit the spot. I didn’t try the bobotie at the South Africa pavilion, but I did have it at Boma, and it was excellent despite the presence of raisins. My wife gave high marks to the chilaquiles from the Mexico stand, but since they were smothered in cheese, I passed. The apple strudel at Germany tasted great but the dough became a bit tough from sitting for so long, and the ginger ice cream at China was very good; we never go to Epcot without slipping into the Patisserie at the France Pavilion for a chocolate mousse. The Food & Wine Festival ran from September 28th to November 11th this year, and I hope they expand it next year so it doesn’t overlap so perfectly with the MLB playoffs.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , ,
→ November 3, 2007
→ By

Jupiter/West Palm Beach eats.

So I was down in Jupiter for a high school showcase event – bit of a dud, really, but I had to go at least once to check it out – and hit a few new places while revisiting two spots I went to in the spring.

En route to West Palm Beach airport, I had a layover at Reagan Airport in DC, and noticed a Five Guys burger stand, which was named the best food outlet at that airport in a recent Portfolio.com article. So I went. And I ate. For airport food, it’s off the charts, and I’d rate it above In-n-Out in the fast food burger category. The fries are the key – hand-cut, like In-n-Out’s, but thicker, and a regular order comes with more fries than I could eat in a sitting. The burgers are thicker than In-n-Out’s, of roughly equivalent quality, but because they only cook burgers well done, the patties start to dry out, which one can compensate for somewhat with extra ketchup, but it’s not the same thing. There is also a Five Guys in Palm Beach at the Legacy Mall, on PGA Blvd, which I hit on the way back to the airport to head home. (One side note: Five Guys was apparently named DC’s best burger by some publication that apparently doesn’t know its ass from its elbow. I can name two places within five miles of my house that serve better burgers – thicker, juicier, and cooked to order. There’s no way Washington doesn’t have some pub or diner that serves a quality half-pounder.)

Actually in Jupiter, then, I hit two new (to me) places in a strip mall right near the Cardinals’/Marlins’ complex, on the north side of Donald Ross Rd between Central Blvd and Military Trail. The better of the two was Pyros Grill, a funky, upscale fast-food place that serves “bowls” and wraps where you go down a checklist of ingredients, pick what you want, and it’s heated and served to you. The dishes are built around a “protein” – marinated steak, chicken, or black beans – and you can add various condiment-veggies (like scallions or cucumbers, but not more nutritious vegetables like broccoli) and choose a sauce. I went twice and ordered the same thing both times, the “Big Kahuna” bowl, which includes your choice of meats, scallions, cucumbers, onions, and a pineapple-teriyaki sauce. It was delicious, but a regular bowl wasn’t enough food for lunch, so I’d imagine most folks would want the large. I’d also like to see the food served a bit hotter; the meat is obviously cooked and chilled, then reheated before serving. Anyway, it was a boon to find a healthy option so close to the ballpark.

In the same strip mall is Thai Garden Palace (at least, I think that was the name, but Google Maps says it’s “Thai Grand Place”, so what the bleep do I know). I expected the place to be authentic, given the décor and the heavy accents of everyone working there, and maybe the food was authentic – but I’ve never had pad thai arrive as noodles sitting in a pool of sauce. The ingredients were fresh, and the chicken was cooked properly, but it was more like a noodle soup than a noodle stir-fry. The chicken-and-shrimp dumplings were large and full of both meats, but had very little flavor of their own and required both the “special” soy sauce that came with it (which tasted like every other soy sauce I’ve ever had) and a shot of the hot sauce on the table.

The revisits were a mixed bag. I went back to the Gelato Grotto in Palm Beach Gardens, and I was disappointed. I’m pretty sure the problem was that the freezer cases were too cold, so the gelato was hard and the flavors were dulled. I went with dark chocolate and toasted almond and just didn’t get a lot of taste. I also went to McCray’s II, the little barbecue stand on 45th Street in West Palm, at about 7 pm on a Thursday night, and they were out of pulled pork and BBQ beef, so I went with the ribs, which were very good – tender, could have come off the bone more easily, with a nice mild sauce with a hint of pepper to it. I’m still not sure why barbecue often comes with toasted white sandwich bread, though.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , ,
→ October 17, 2007
→ By

Airport food.

No, it’s not a complaint, but an article listing the best food options at 18 airports. I can vouch for two of these. Figs, found at New York’s Laguardia Airport, also has three or four locations in the Boston area, and I’d give them the nod for the best authentic Italian-style (ultra-thin-crust) pizza I’ve had outside of Italy. If the arugula and caramelized onions pizza is on the airport location’s menu, I recommend it – it’s outstanding.

Legal Sea Food is usually my lunch option at Logan Airport as well. I can’t say I’m thrilled with the prices – tough to get out of there for under $18 including tip – but it’s good-quality fish. Their crab roll sandwich includes a ridiculous amount of crab, and there’s just a thin layer of mayo on the roll (as opposed to enough mayo to drown every crab from Maine to Cape Hatteras). The fried fish sandwich is also a good value; both sandwiches are around $12.

I have a stopover in Atlanta on an upcoming trip, and if I can get to Paschal’s I’ll report on my findings.

Filed Under: Food
→ October 13, 2007
→ By

Phoenix revisited.

Not much new to report on for this trip to Phoenix. I made another visit to the Phoenix Ranch Market – still the best burrito with carnitas I’ve ever had, for just under $5, as well as phenomenal Mexican cookies (40¢ each) and aguas frescas, to Honey Bear’s BBQ, and to the Gelato Spot (try the coconut gelato), as well as the obligatory stop at In-n-Out. The new spots I hit weren’t much to rave about:

• Cien Agaves is a sort of upscale tacos-and-tequila place in Old Town Scottsdale that opened just over a week ago. I was there during Happy Hour, when all of their tacos are $3. The lobster taco is supposedly their best (ordinarily $7), but the lobster meat is chopped rather finely and is heavily spiced, so the delicate flavor of the lobster is obliterated. The fish taco was excellent, with the fish perfectly fried with a cornmeal breading and just a small amount of the lime-cilantro sauce. The shrimp taco carried some of the same spices as the lobster, but shrimp can better withstand that level of flavor and heat. But the main problem with Cien Agaves is their lack of quality control. I ordered a grilled corn side dish – one ear at $3 – and what came was a bland ear of corn, grilled inside the husk, then opened and doused in butter with a heavy dose of cayenne pepper. And the first corn that came out had a rotten spot on it. The server took it back, brought another one out five minutes later, and explained that he had to throw three others out that had similar rotting issues. Not exactly a confidence-booster – and the corn wasn’t taken off the check. They’ve been open for a week; they won’t be open for a year.
• Tacos al Caporal is a tiny Mexican place in a strip mall on Country Club Rd in Mesa. It looks like a family-run operation, and no one there speaks English, although all of the items on the menu will be familiar to anyone who’s eaten at an Americanized Mexican place. The tacos here are $1-$1.50 each and are very small; they’re served just as meat on corn tortillas, and you can fix the tacos yourself at a small “salsa bar” that has green and red salsas, chopped onions, and shredded lettuce, all sitting on a bed of ice. The taco al pastor was a particular hit, although the carne asada and carnitas tacos were also good. They offer two or three flavors of aguas frescas, including a not-too-sweet tamarind. The only worry here is that the place was empty on a Wednesday night around 6 pm.
• Bandarang, in Mesa on Country Club near Route 60, has received some positive writeups online, but the food was bland and their lunch special setup leaves a lot to be desired. The chicken in sweet basil sauce had a lot of red chili flakes in it, but no heat, and no real basil flavor other than the leaves served as garnish. The white jasmine rice that came with the dish had been cooked at least a half-hour previously and kept warm, and the side dishes that come with the lunch special (fried rice, fried wontons, and vegetarian pad thai) are all kept lukewarm on a side table to be served buffet-style. They seem to draw a good crowd, so there’s some turnover, but my rule of thumb is that if it’s not hot, it’s spoiled.

But seriously – go to Phoenix Ranch Market. It’s cheap, it’s authentic, and it is ridiculously good.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ October 4, 2007
→ By

Kitchen Nightmares: Original recipe versus extra snarky.

The American version of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, just titled Kitchen Nightmares, is off to a solid start in the ratings, so we’re likely to be treating to quite a bit more swearing and family drama over the rest of this season. Although it’s entertaining, it can’t hold a candle to the BBC original.

The main difference revolves around food: the original version did, and the American version doesn’t, with food almost an afterthought in the way the U.S. show is edited and presented. It’s clear that Ramsay spends some time – perhaps a lot of time – in the kitchens of the restaurants he visits and in redesigning the menus, but the show gives us almost none of that content, instead preferring to show us arguments (which are many and varied) and “confessional” clips, the staple of the American reality show perhaps known as the best opportunity for the morons in each show to either 1) claim that they didn’t actually excrete the shit that hit the fan or 2) show some fake tears.

Episode #3 (The Mixing Bowl) was a perfect example. The restaurant’s manager, Mike, is an obvious fraud; Gordon sniffs him out in about ten seconds (although Gordon was outright hostile at that point, making fun of Mike’s weight, which I thought was out of bounds and out of character for the BBC version of Gordon) and at the end tries to convince the chef/owner to fire the guy. Mike spends all his confessional time either claiming that his various screw-ups weren’t his fault or crying. I understand that the producers and editors can make someone look bad through selective editing, but they can only make you look bad if you do bad stuff. I’ve been in my share of restaurants, and the only time I’ve had a chef or manager sit down at my table to chat was when it was a relative of mine. Mike was sitting down left and right, and giving out 50% coupons. You can cry all you want and claim it was some teenaged waitress’ fault, but it doesn’t take a lot of tricky editing to make you look bad.

But what we saw remarkably little of in this episode was actual cooking. The BBC version emphasizes the food; nearly every restaurant Gordon goes to is failing because the food isn’t made from fresh ingredients, is too complicated, or outright sucks. (“What the fuck were you thinking when you put apricots in the mashed potatoes?” has become something of a running joke in our house – well, at least when my daughter’s in bed.) The show shows a lot of the food, both before the revamp and after, and the bulk of what Gordon is shown doing is either working with the chef or creating a new menu, and usually we get a healthy dose of both. There’s certainly some drama on the BBC version, with chefs walking out and one episode with a hilarious bit of sibling rivalry, but what we’ve seen in the first three episodes here trumps the worst of the BBC series.

The production of the U.S. version also leaves a bit to be desired. I could do without the confessionals, which add nothing other than showing that Americans – at least those who work in restaurants – are immature little twits. (In other news, Kitchen Nightmares is the #1 rated show in France.) The free restaurant makeovers are a bit of a joke; in the British version, most of the improvement comes from hard work, not hitting the decorating lottery. And Gordon feels a lot more scripted. Not only is he generally more ornery, but even his asides to the camera seem like they’ve either been written for him or they’re the result of numerous retakes. The spontaneity of the original isn’t there. Finally, the U.K. version’s final segment, running five to seven minutes, includes a second visit by Gordon to the restaurant about a month after the initial trip, and he often has to review some of his major lessons or to just air someone out a second time. And sometimes business is just wonderful and it’s all hugs and roses (and f-bombs). But the U.S. version skips that; just one of the three episodes has had a real second look, two weeks after Gordon left and without Gordon there at all.

I haven’t deleted my Season Pass to the U.S. version, in spite of all of these flaws. I like Ramsay and I want to hear what he has to say between f-bombs. I’m also strangely riveted by one particular type of drama – seeing what an unaware or meek boss will do with an employee who is lazy, incompetent, or both. And I hold out hope that they’ll cut the gimmicks and let Gordon and the food rule the show. Gimmicks wear thin, but good food never does.

Filed Under: Food, Media
→ October 3, 2007
→ By

Pittsburgh eats.

I lived in Pittsburgh for two years while I attended the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon – that’s car-NEH-ghee, people, not CAR-neh-ghee – but we lived in Shadyside and my wife worked in Squirrel Hill, so we didn’t spend much time in downtown Pittsburgh. Of course, the fact that downtown Pittsburgh was kind of a dump didn’t help either, but at least that has improved since we left town in ’99.

My one dinner outside the press box was at Seviche, a new “tapas” place on Penn Ave. Since I wasn’t starving, tapas sounded appealing, and I thought I might get some authentic seviche for my trouble. While that may have been a logical assumption, the folks behind Seviche take a fairly substantial liberty with their namesake dish. What they call “seviche” is actually raw fish, more like a Japanese sashimi preparation than an actual seviche. Seviche is raw fish that is chopped and marinated in a citrus-juice mixture for hours or even days; the acidity of the marinade denatures the proteins in the fish, “cooking” it without heat, and of course killing any little beasties that might call the fish flesh home. I sat down and saw the chefs preparing the seviche (the kitchen is half-open to view), so I asked the waitress what the story was, and she told me everything was prepared to order. Um, no, that’s not seviche, sweetheart, and you’re going to kill someone if you’re not careful.

Anyway, she swore up and down that she eats the stuff all the time and hasn’t gotten sick, so I tried their “traditional” seviche with tuna. The fish was indeed very, very fresh – I was not aware you could get fish this fresh in Pittsburgh, but between this place and Nakama on the South Side, someone has figured out how to obtain it – but the sauce was overpoweringly tart. That may be a way to compensate for the lack of marinating time, but it made the dish a little tough to eat.

I ordered two other dishes, both of which took some liberties with authenticity. The salmon croquettes on the menu had been replaced by chorizo croquettes, but the finished product was very greasy and the contents weren’t whipped or puréed smooth as they would be in proper croquettes; I ate one of four and left the rest. The barbecued-pork and queso blanco “empanadas” were probably the best-tasting dish; the pastry was delicious and the pork was smoky but still moist. However, by serving one large empanada sliced into four pieces, the chef let half of the heat out of the pastry and it was already lukewarm by the time I got to piece #3; they also get points off for listing queso fresco (which I really like) on the menu and substituting queso blanco without telling me.

Café Richard is a small sandwich shop with short hours located in the Strip District, on Penn near 21st Street. A side project of the chef behind Nine on Nine, which I am told is a highly-regarded fine-dining restaurant in the ‘burgh, Café Richard is cute, done up to look something like a little French boulangerie, and it has a fairly extensive menu of sandwiches. I went with the pan bagnat, a classic sandwich of southern France that is a salade Niçoise on a split baguette or bun, and that is typically pressed or weighted down for a few hours so that the vinaigrette really penetrates the bread. Well, Café Richard got most of it right, using good olive oil and very clean-tasting anchovies, but the sandwich was made to order and not pressed at all, so the bread was a little tough when a real pan bagnat is softened by the oil and vinegar. Great value at around $9 including a bottle of water.

I also revisited one of my old haunts from my Tepper days, Pamela’s, a local chain of greasy-spoon diners best known for their breakfast potatoes and their huge, thin pancakes. I went to a new location (new to me, at least) on the Strip both mornings for breakfast. The first meal was excellent – standard EMPT meal, but it’s all about the potatoes, a hybrid of hash browns and potatoes Lyonnaise that are soft and delightfully salty in a food-Gestapo-run world. On day two, though, whoever was manning the flat-top was a little liberal with the butter, and the pancakes – delicious with their trademark crispy edges – were drenched in the butter that greased the stove, as were the eggs I got alongside them. I probably should have sent them back, but I was in a bit of a hurry and just ate what I could. I can vouch for the pancakes, at least at the Shadyside location (on Walnut Street), which are usually outstanding and don’t need to be wrung out before you can eat them.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , ,
→ September 20, 2007
→ By

Cleveland eats.

Not much for good eats in downtown Cleveland, unfortunately, but the real overriding theme was mediocre service. I’m not saying bad service, or rude service, just a lot of indifferent service.

First meal was at Fat Fish Blue, at the corner of Prospect and Ontario, serving a sort-of Cajun menu – sort of because they’ve supplemented a lot of Cajun classics with some other dishes more befitting a casual-dining chain. I stuck with the classics and was one for two. The chicken-and-sausage gumbo was a disappointment; the flavor was OK, with a lot of andouille, but the gumbo was thin (meaning that the roux was underdeveloped), and the bowl was about 1/3 gumbo and 2/3 overcooked and not-all-that-hot rice. The shrimp po’boy, on the other hand, was almost dead-on, with the only flaw being the cook’s failure to scoop out the doughy part of the French bread, which is de rigueur for an authentic po’boy. The fried shrimp were perfectly breaded (cornmeal with a little black pepper) and not even a little bit greasy, and the remoulade on the po’boy was delicious, although mayonnaise is more traditional.

Breakfast the next morning was at the Inn at Coventry, which won the Citysearch readers’ poll this year for Cleveland’s best breakfast. It’s a good value, but the food didn’t blow me away. The best thing I had was their popular “blues and chews” pancake, with blueberries and cashews; they get bonus points because you can order just one cake as a side. The pancake was a little flat but had a great butter flavor. The eggs etc. were all ordinary. This was, however, the best service I received at any restaurant on the trip.

For lunch on Wednesday I decided to hit Lola, the downtown restaurant by Michael Symon and I’d say one of the two best-known (to outsiders) restaurants in Cleveland at the moment. Lola offers kicked-up comfort food, and they have a lunch menu with a great you-pick-two option. I went with a chickpea salad and a chicken-salad sandwich on flatbread, and both were very good. The salad included chickpeas, rocket (okay, arugula, but “rocket” sounds so much better), yellow onions, and a few julienned pieces of japalenos; the chickpeas were a little undercooked, and the whole thing was overdressed, but the taste combination was excellent. The sandwich was served on a fresh pita; the chicken salad was slightly spicy (curry powder, perhaps) and it included pickled onions and julienned red peppers. I wouldn’t change a thing about it. So here’s my mediocre-service story: I sat at the bar and asked for sparkling water to drink, which is my usual. The bartender doesn’t tell me that they only sell it in liter bottles, and I end up paying $5 for just one glass of the stuff.

Wednesday’s dinner was at Zócalo, a pseudo-Mexican restaurant right across from Lola. I knew I was in trouble when the chips and salsa came and the chips were glittering with grease. The entree was no better. Avoid.

Thursday’s breakfast was a small adventure; I walked to the Second Street Diner only to find that it no longer exists, so I wandered back over to Euclid and went to Sammy’s, a little lunch-counter/greasy spoon tucked in the National City building. I went for an EMPT, and while the bacon (already mostly cooked, just reheated to order) and potatoes were nothing special, the short-order cook takes his egg-scrambling very seriously. He has a tiny metal bowl and a two-tine fork just for the purpose, and when he scrambles the eggs, he gets his whole body into it. The eggs were perfectly cooked, soft, fluffy, but totally cooked through. And it’s just nice to find the occasional place that still cooks eggs to order.

I picked up a sandwich to go from the Juniper Grille, and when I said I was there to order something to go, the waitress who greeted me immediately changed her whole demeanor to make it clear I was a second-class citizen. The turkey club wrap was good and came with potato chips that tasted like they were fried in-house, but I was left with something of a bitter taste from the way that waitress and another one inside treated me.

Last bite before I left was the Strickland’s frozen custard at the Jake. I’m a big frozen custard fan, since it usually has an ultra-smooth texture, but this stuff was a little icy and grainy.

Filed Under: Food
→ September 14, 2007
→ By

Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

So I’ve gotten hooked on a BBC show (seen on BBC America on DirecTV) called Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. The commercials originally sold me on it because it looked comical, but it’s more than just funny. The premise is that foul-mouthed celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay is invited to visit certain failing restaurants around the UK (invited by the restaurants’ owners, that is) and spend a week there to try to straighten them out. Needless to say, these restaurants are universally – to borrow one of Ramsay’s favorite expressions – in the shit. The food is usually horrendous. The menus are overcomplicated and overlong. The kitchens are terribly run, and often not even clean.

The episode I caught last night – “Clubway 41” – was one of the more shocking ones. The Blackpool restaurant had won an award as the best restaurant in the town from the local tourism board, but Ramsay found the food disgusting, from the salmon, strawberry, and watercress salad to the pork medallions in a brie and nectarine sauce with parsnip crisps (which Gordon managed to bend in half without breaking). It turns out that the chef had gone to culinary school in the 1970s and hadn’t been in a kitchen since, leading to a rough exchange between Ramsay and the chef where Ramsay airs him out for his inability to perform basic cooking tasks like making a casserole or cooking mussels. Ramsay went back several months later, only to find that they’d cancelled their dinner service after just eight weeks; he tries to relaunch it based around simple-to-cook comfort foods and short-order meals, but the restaurant appears to have closed not long after that. There was some controversy over this episode, as the chef-owner and the tourism board both took issue with how they were depicted, but I find it hard to be sympathetic to a chef who clearly can’t cook and who admits that the food on the night of the first relaunch was prepared by the TV show’s chefs, not by himself.

I just find the fact that these complete kitchen incompetents think they can run a restaurant kitchen amazing, and the lack of common sense on the part of most of these owners and chefs – like the one owner who wouldn’t pay her chef for prep time and bought all ingredients at the local Tesco – provides for a lot of unintentional comedy. And the best news of all is that there’s a U.S. version coming, debuting Wednesday night at 9 pm on Fox, just called Kitchen Nightmares, with at least one controversy already underway. If you like cooking, the restaurant business, or f-bombs, I highly recommend you watch it.

Filed Under: Cooking, Media Tagged With:
→ September 8, 2007
→ By

Salt.

Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History is something of a must-read for culinary buffs, whether your interest in food is in cooking it or merely in the eating thereof. Kurlansky does a solid job of explaining how the history of civilization, both in the West and several countries in Asia, has been directed and altered by the search for and use of salt.

The word “salt” actually refers to more than just sodium chloride, although that is the salt that plays the largest role in the book. A salt is one of two products of the reaction between an acid and a base – the other being water – and several other salts make appearances in Salt. Ancient Egyptians recognized that there were real differences between various salts, even if they didn’t understand the chemical compositions; natron, a naturally-occurring compound containing sodium carbonate, sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), and sodium chloride, was used in mummification as well as in curing foods. Different types of culinary salts often served as measures of status, and the drive for whiter and whiter salt up until the last twenty years serves as a stark contrast to today’s marketing of pricier gourmet salts like French grey salt, black salt, and alaea red salt.

Salt also drove a number of scientific and technological advances. The curing and preserving process is obviously a major part of the book, since it determined the economic prowess of several European nations and is a major reason the Basques were able to survive as an independent people despite the fact that they have always been ruled by others. But some of the discoveries and advances are more surprising: Natural gas was discovered by the Chinese, who noticed that some salt miners would mysteriously lay down and die in certain spots underground, and that the same substance causing the deaths also appeared to be causing the sudden, massive explosions that plagued those mines. They eventually identified it as a fuel and figured out how to harness it, something which every home and professional cook should appreciate.

Kurlansky largely lets the tale of salt tell itself, although it might be a stretch to call it a tale, since there isn’t a single narrative thread as you might see in a biography. The book is more a collection of anecdotes and mini-histories in chronological order, with the bulk of the book spent on ancient uses of salt and on Europe’s mercantilist period. For a quick read, it’s packed with information, although I thought he gave somewhat short shrift to the aforementioned rise of artisan salts, instead focusing on the rise of Big Salt and the consolidation of the world salt industry. One note to fellow sticklers: Kurlansky’s grasp of grammar and vocabulary leaves a little something to be desired, and even his editors didn’t catch every stray comma or word error (e.g., using “parley” for “parlay”), but the mistakes weren’t frequent enough to get under my skin. Okay, maybe a little bit.

Filed Under: Cooking, Nonfiction Tagged With: ,