→ May 19, 2012
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Too Big to Fail + the Saturday Five.

I posted some notes on Red Sox and Cleveland high-A prospects yesterday (from a game on Wednesday), and my first mock draft of 2012 went up on Tuesday. I also chatted on Thursday.

I finally finished the audiobook of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail, an exhaustively researched look at the 2008 financial crisis from the perspective of executives inside the various investment banks that were teetering on the brink of collapse, as well as the perspectives of the various government executives trying to stave off a depression. It is an outstanding work of investigation, compiled from what I assume is an enormous number of sources, but the result did very little to explain the causes of the crisis (as in, how did these very bright bankers end up in such stupid positions?) and was a very dull, clinical listen.

By comparison, I listened to an audio version of Michael Lewis’ first book on the subject, The Big Short, which looked at the crisis from the perspectives of several investors who saw it coming and reaped huge rewards, and while it’s not as thorough and is significantly shorter, it was far more entertaining and yet also went more into the causes of the meltdown. Lewis is a fantastic prose writer, and even if that book shared some of the, um, sharpening tendencies he showed in Moneyball (the book, not the film), making his villains a little too villanous (even Lewis’ mother says of her son, “he never lies, but he tends to exaggerate a little”), it did more to at least start to explore some of the questions around how these large investment banks and AIG ended up in a state of virtual default. (Lewis’ heroes, and others like them, made the disaster more disastrous by betting on its inevitability, so their heroism is probably up for debate.)

Sorkin’s book concerns itself more with the egos of the players atop the major investment banks as they’re collapsing – Lehman, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, even commercial banks like Wachovia – and the quick, if not always perfect, thinking of Tim Geithner (then President of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve) and Henry “Hank” Paulsen (then Secretary of the Treasury, later succeeded by Geithner). I can’t fathom the amount of work that went into reconstructing all of these meetings and conversations … but the result is so clinical that it kept losing my attention. Sorkin’s retelling took some very dramatic events and made them feel drawn-out and dry. Maybe that’s a function of his prose; I’m more inclined to think we ended up with more detail than we needed.

The links…

Can you call a 9-year-old a psychopath? That piece, from the New York Times, might be one of the best articles I’ll read all year. Terrifying in its implications, yet thorough and quite neutral in its approach.

Preparing fugu, or blowfish, the deadly Japanese fish dish which most of you probably know from an early Simpsons episode. Japan is easing the requirements for chefs to earn licenses to prepare it.

This Tuesday’s special edition of the BBC Newshour podcast – the only podcast to which I subscribe – focused on the Bo Xilai affair, and it is a tremendous work of impartial analysis with enough context to get you up to speed. (Link is to the mp3 file itself.)

I had the debut of the Food Network series Restaurant Stakeout, featuring my favorite Vegas restaurant, Firefly, saved on the DVR, but after watching it for 20 minutes last weekend I turned it off in disgust. Turns out I had good reason to dislike the show, as there are serious allegations that the ‘reality’ show is largely staged.

I’m excited about Freshpaper, a small sheet of paper that naturally inhibits the growth of fungi on fresh produce, but its backstory is also quite interesting. Buying fresh berries, even in this dry climate, usually means eating half of it and throwing the other half in the compost bin. I just placed a small order and will report back on how it works.

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→ May 12, 2012
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Saturday five, 5/12/12.

Reminder: My first first-round projection for the 2012 Rule 4 Draft goes up on Tuesday. This should be interesting, with the first overall pick still very much up in the air.

Several folks have asked about the homemade chipotle mayo recipe I mentioned as my favorite sauce for fried foods; it’s just the mayonnaise recipe from Ruhlman’s Twenty (also found in his earlier book Ratio), with one or two chipotle peppers, pureed with 1-3 tsp of the adobo sauce from the can, blended into it. I love this on everything from French fries to quinoa fritters.

Two albums I’ve been listening to over the last week: Of Monsters and Men’s full-length debut My Head Is An Animal (currently $5 through that amazon link) and Portugal. The Man’s In The Mountain In The Cloud (in spite of one of the worst band names I’ve ever heard).

To the five six links…

* Massachusetts wants to outlaw food waste – at least, putting it in the trash. First restaurants and eventually residences will have to either compost or recycle it for use in biogas facilities. I’m sympathetic to the philosophy, but the cost to implement this is going to be huge – and the risk of spreading disease, especially in the summer, is substantial.

* This is old, but showed up on my Twitter feed this week: Kenji over at Serious Eats’ Food Lab says you can caramelize onions in fifteen minutes. It may just be the lighting, but those last two photos look like the onions started to burn. If any of you have tried this method, I’d be curious to hear how you fared.

* The New Yorker had one of the most even-handed takes on Obama’s public support of marriage equality this week. I doubt this is any surprise to anyone here, but I fully support equal rights for all Americans regardless of sexual orientation or gender identification.

* The distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge is, according to this op ed, a fiction.

* An NPR story on the restored vegetable gardens at Monticello, thanks in part to painstaking research into what Jefferson (an avid gardener and vegetable eater) actually grew.

* An interview with Phoenix food icon Chris Bianco. I’ve met Chris once, chatted for two or three minutes, and this interview is pretty much what he sounded like in person. “The whole point is to have fucking fun.” Amen, brother.

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→ May 11, 2012
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Waverley.

Yesterday’s Klawchat transcript is up. Next post from me will be a projection of the first round of this year’s Rule 4 Draft, going up Tuesday.

—

Walter Scott’s Waverley has earned praise from a diverse group of writers from Jane Austen to the Marxist philosopher György Lukács and was 84th on Daniel Burt’s Novel 100, all based on its status as one of the first historical novels as well as a major social document about the second-class status of Scottish people within the United Kingdom during the 1700s. Perhaps it’s my modern sensibilities or merely my age showing, but I found Waverley‘s dated prose an incredibly slow read, for the language itself, for the bland story, and for Scott’s circuitous route to every point, no matter how minor.

The novel revolves around the title character, a sort of latter-day Tom Jones whose adventures are less bawdy and more political, as he becomes wrapped up in the Jacobite rebellion and ends up fighting for Charles the Pretender in his failed attempt to restore the Stuarts to the throne. Edward Waverley is more or less cast aside by his ambitious biological father and reared instead by a Jacobite-leaning uncle who gives his ward a cursory education and encourages him to join the army to find a vocation befitting his birth. On leave from the army, he finds himself introduced first to a band of Highland bandits and then to the chieftain Fergus Mac-Ivor, who leads one of the units in the ragtag revolutionary army seeking to install the young Charles as king. It’s all a hell of a lot less interesting than this sounds, though, as the title character has very little personality of his own and is as much witness as participant in the major historical events within the book.

Waverley, fundamentally a work of historical fiction (the subtitle is “’Tis Sixty Years Since”), incorporates elements of the picaresque through side characters, from Miss Nosebag, all up in everybody’s business, to the fatuous Baron Bradwardine, who peppers his speech with bons mots from sundry foreign tongues. That makes the book a little lighter, but it’s never actually funny, and the funny-name characters (according to Roger Ebert, funny names themselves are never funny) delivery some pretty obvious jokes. The book needed some levity amidst all the grandstanding about English oppression in ol’ Caledonia and a rather uninteresting love triangle, but one-joke side characters don’t cut it.

Scott strongly emphasizes Scottish history, culture, and even dialects, sprinkling the book with Scottish-English vernacular and rendering many characters’ speech phonetically, which served as yet another obstacle to working through his sentences. He originally published the novel anonymously despite his established reputation as a poet, likely because he didn’t want to be associated with the work of verbal quicksand he’d produced. (He failed, as writers and critics apparently recognized his voice immediately.) I understand that the subject matter and his even-handed treatment of both peasants and gentry would have seemed novel at the time, but 200 years later it’s unremarkable and didn’t do anything to sustain my interest.

Perhaps I’m the last person to criticize an author for long sentences, but I imagine Scott served as an inspiration for Proust, or perhaps an excuse (“Well, if Wally Scott could go 60 words between periods, why can’t I go 80?”). The length of the sentences, the heavy use of dialect and phonetic spellings, and the fact that long stretches of the book go by with nothing happening made it a tough slog – in fact, I started reading it in the fall of 2010, put it back on the shelf, and started over last week. If it wasn’t on the Novel 100 I probably would have given up a second time, this one for good.

Next up: I just finished Graham Greene’s tragicomic spy novel The Honorary Consul this morning.

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→ May 8, 2012
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50/50.

My ranking of the top 100 draft prospects for 2012 went up earlier today for Insiders. Twenty-two of them now have full scouting repots, with more to go up over the rest of the month.

—

Last year’s independent comedy 50/50 seems to have garnered little notice outside of some positive reviews, even though it’s quite funny and never as depressing as the premise would indicate (and perhaps not as dark as it should have been). Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as a 28-year-old public radio reporter who discovers that a pain in his lower back is actually caused by a tumor on his spine, a rare form of cancer with a survival rate that gives the film its title – yet despite that morbid plot, the film mines substantial humor from all aspects of its protagonist’s experience.

Adam is in a dysfunctional relationship with a somewhat self-centered artist when he gets his diagnosis, but it’s his best friend Kyle (played by Seth Rogen) who rallies, with well-intentioned if not always well-executed attempts to keep Adam’s spirits up through the diagnosis and treatment. Adam’s girlfriend, who doesn’t seem to be that into him before he gets the news, isn’t quite up to the task (and is easily the film’s worst-drawn character, although neither of the other two female characters is all that well fleshed-out), while his therapist, Katherine, is still in grad school and is lost when her sessions with Adam veer off script, and his mother, played affectingly by an almost unrecognizable Angelica Houston, is mostly around to get on Adam’s nerves.

Gordon-Levitt carried Brick and was superb in a minor part in Inception, so it’s no surprise to see him excel here as an overly sensitive, slightly meek guy who gradually comes out of his shell while facing his own mortality. But Rogen, who helped produce the film (based on the true story of the experiences of Rogen’s friend, writer Will Reiser, with a similar cancer diagnosis), stole more scenes than anyone else as the loud, boorish, very crude best friend who also happens to care more for Gordon-Levitt’s character than anyone else in the film, even more than Rachael. I’m sure Adam’s mother cares for him, but she only appears in a handful of scenes and is more of a nuisance than a loving parent until the very end of the film – and even then, Kyle takes center stage when the doctor discusses the results of the last procedure. (I wonder if Reiser was working out his issues through the script here, or how his mother felt about her portrayal.) Anna Kendrick fares much better here than in Up in the Air, putting her great talents for appearing flummoxed and looking vulnerably cute to much better use here as Adam’s therapist, yet she’s still overshadowed by Rogen’s character and ends up short on screen time given how important her character is to the plot.

The problem with 50/50 is that it’s only a witty dark comedy, nothing more. The cancer is merely a plot device for exposing how the patient’s relationships with friends and family change once he receives the diagnosis – but only the humorous aspects of the changes, not the subtleties. I have no problem with cancer being played for a laugh, but when the film was over, I thought of a dozen ways in which the film had fallen short, from Mark’s father’s dementia to the way the film made chemo almost seem easy to the fact that every female character was two-dimensional. It’s a funny film, and it’s a well-acted film, but the script was too superficial for it to have any lasting impact with me.

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→ May 5, 2012
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Saturday five … er, eleven, 5/5/12.

I chatted on Friday, and wrote a piece on the Royals’ poor start on Tuesday and on the Yankees’ next move after Rivera’s injury yesterday. My top 100 rankings for this year’s draft will go up on Tuesday, May 8th, with a first-round projection to follow on the 15th.

Since I couldn’t post a Saturday five last week (I was barely online all weekend), here are eleven links of note for the week:

* The New Yorker on close, or too-close, ties between Stanford and Silicon Valley, and on the death of Adam “MCA” Yauch.

* Ernest Hemingway writes to F. Scott Fitzgerald after reading one of my all-time favorite novels, Tender is the Night.

* No, there is no ”Curse of Chief Wahoo”, but this overtly racist image – and the racist team nickname that goes along with it – should be retired as relics of an intolerant age best relegated to the historical dustbin.

* An excerpt from Jeff Himmelman’s upcoming book about whether Woodward and Bernstein used a grand juror as one of their sources on the Watergate scandal.

* I’m not comfortable with an athletics staffer at a state university actively campaigning for discrimination against members of the LGBT community. Fortunately, neither is my colleague Gene Wojciechowski, who wrote a piece about Nebraska’s assistant football coach, Ron Brown. The Kansas City Star has also weighed in with a similar yet more pointed op ed ahead of Brown’s anticipated testimony Monday against an anti-discrimination bill.

* Another interview with the Days of Wonder guys about putting Ticket to Ride on the iPad.

* Over 100 major California chefs have signed a petition opposing the state’s upcoming foie gras ban, while proposing more humane standards for raising geese and ducks for foie gras production. I think Alton Brown said it best on Twitter:

And he didn’t mention all the unnecessary, “prophylactic” antibiotics we shove down animals’ throats.

* NPR weighs in, rationally, on the small controversy over ”tuna scrape,”, responsible for over 200 cases of salmonella over the last two weeks. My issue with tuna scrape, and spicy tuna rolls in general, is that you’re not getting high-quality fish. The point of sushi and sashimi is to appreciate the fish itself; in spicy tuna rolls or similar preparations, the fish can be of very low quality and you’ll never know the difference. Don’t trust any meat item where the cook can hide substandard product under other ingredients, like a spicy sauce.

* Mark Bittman of the New York Times weighs in on the brewing fight over school-provided breakfasts, and how Big Food wants to further enrich itself by delivering junk food to food-insecure schoolchildren.

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→ May 1, 2012
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Las Vegas eats, 2012.

I was in Vegas with the family for a good friend’s 40th birthday weekend (or, as we chose to put it, her 39.99999….th birthday), and managed to sneak in two meals at places I can recommend.

Border Grill, located in Mandalay Bay near the hotel’s aquarium, first came to my attention via Top Chef Masters, where Mary Sue Milliken, one of the restaurant’s two founding chefs, won one of season three’s least ridiculous challenges (the fast-food challenge) with a recipe for quinoa fritters that I’ve made probably a dozen times at home since the show first aired. As it turns out, the Border Grill added quinoa fritters to the menu, which was enough to get us to try the restaurant since it’s the rare food item all three of us love.

Those fritters were excellent, larger than I expected and much softer inside without losing any of the crisp exterior – clearly I need to cook my quinoa a little longer, or with more liquid, before cooling it to make the fritters. They’re served with a mildly spicy aji amarillo aioli (although I find they work even better with a homemade chipotle mayonnaise, since the fritters themselves are so mild in flavor). We ended up ordering only smaller plates because the fritters can be so filling – two plates of fritters, one of green corn tamales, and a ceviche duo. The tamales were very sweet with a soft, rustic texture, rather than the mealy masa texture of most of the tamales I’ve ever had. The ceviche duo was half successful; the Peruvian style ceviche, with garlic and ginger, served on a tortilla chip, was phenomenal, but the baja ceviche was overwhelmed by one ingredient – I think it was mustard – and the fish just disappeared under the sauce. I like raw fish preparations that highlight the freshness of the fish itself, but between that heavy sauce and the fine dice of the fish, I couldn’t even tell what the fish was, while the Peruvian version was much more balanced (aside from perhaps a little too much red onion). My daughter also had a quesadilla that was clearly made with a fresh homemade tortilla; I’d offer her opinion, but I don’t think she’s ever met a quesadilla she didn’t like.

The dessert special of the day was mango upside-down cake, served with a quenelle of mango sorbet, and I don’t see why that isn’t a regular menu item printed in large bold letters; the cake was a little sticky-sweet on its own, but if you could get the sorbet and cake all together in one bite, the tanginess of the sorbet (from orange juice, I think) balanced out that sweetness so that the predominant flavor was mango rather than sugar and butter. I happen to love mangos for their complexity – they’re sweet, but with a savory component that reminds me of carrots, so you don’t find yourself beaten over the head with sweetness – and this cake highlighted the fruit perfectly.

–

I also took the family to Cafe Bouchon, located in the Venetian, for Sunday brunch and ordered something I hadn’t tried before, Bouchon’s take on chicken and waffles, not exactly authentic but one of the most memorable breakfast items I’ve ever had. The chicken is roasted rather than fried, a half bird, the breast still moist, the skin a rich brown and well seasoned, with a hunter’s sauce (a brown sauce made from red wine and mushrooms) on the side. The waffles contained bacon and chives and were airy and crispy and probably contained about a pound of butter, but really, waffles are supposed to have too much fat for any reasonable diet, because that’s what makes them awesome. Bouchon also had a special beignet of the day, filled with raspberry filling that tasted not of sugar but of fresh raspberries, the type of detail I’d expect from a restaurant founded by a chef known for his meticulous approach to cooking. We overordered a little bit, in part because my daughter came down with a cold and we just wanted to ensure there would be something on the table she’d like, but there was nothing on the table – not even the apricot jam or the fresh epi-shaped country bread – that was less than perfect. One caution: It ain’t cheap, but it is decadent.

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→ April 26, 2012
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Husk, Vin Rouge, Customshop.

Today’s Klawchat transcript, and today’s Baseball Today podcast.

—

Husk, located in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, was named the best new restaurant in the country for 2011 by Bon Appetit magazine, just the best of a host of accolades earned by chef Sean Brock (formerly of McCrady’s). I had lunch at Husk, which isn’t the full experience (with a very different menu from what they serve for dinner), but loved their local-seasonal-artisanal approach to traditional southern cuisine.

Husk has a giant blackboard right by the podium showing where the restaurant obtained all of its main ingredients, from proteins to dairy to eggs, with most sources quite local, in either South or North Carolina. I overordered a little, but rational portion sizes meant I didn’t end up with a ton of food left over. The catfish, lightly dusted with cornmeal and quickly panfried, served over a broth of tomatoes, several beans (including lima beans), and pea shoots, was superb, easily the best catfish I’ve ever eaten, with none of the ‘fishy’ flavor most people would associate with that fish, instead playing up what a mild, slightly sweet-tasting fish it can be when sourced properly. The skillet of bacon cornbread was also superb, rich, crispy on the bottom from the skillet and the bacon fat, with flecks of bacon throughout; this may have been gauche, but I found it quite useful for dipping in the tomato broth underneath the fish. For dessert, Husk had a special item, a blueberry crisp with local berries, a very thin layer of buckwheat granola on top, and a quenelle of lemon ice cream; overall the dish was far less sweet than most desserts, with a tangy/sweet combination that kept the blueberries at the center of the dish.

Service overall was very attentive, if a little peculiar. When I told the server it was my first time at the restaurant and asked for her recommendations, she actually recommended the cheeseburger, saying it was “the best thing on the menu.” That may be true, but is that really what I’m here for? I’ll get a burger at a great burger place. I went to Husk for the chef’s innovations in southern food. And I hope eventually to get back there for dinner, preferably with a few months’ notice so I can actually get a reservation.

–

A few weeks back, I had a postgame meal in Durham at Vin Rouge, another discovery from Bon Appetit because the restaurant had participated in a charity dinner in Raleigh that was covered by the magazine. I tweeted at the time that their bacon confiture – a bacon, onion, brown sugar confection served with thick slices of country bread – was on the short list of the best things I have ever eaten, and I admit I haven’t stopped thinking about the dish since then. It overshadowed the meal itself, trout amandine that was slightly overcooked in the kitchen and became very overcooked on its way to me because the trout – the whole fish, or about two meals for me – was still folded in half and thus continued to steam itself until I opened it up. The mashed potatoes on the plate, however, were divine, with God-knows-how-much cream/butter and a perfectly smooth texture. As a wine bistro, Vin Rouge doesn’t have much of a beer selection, which isn’t so much a complaint (did I expect anything different) as a comment for those of you who, like me, prefer barley to grapes. I will return, just with a different choice of entree.

–

Kiley McDaniel and I went to Charlotte’s Customshop last night at the suggestion of a reader (I apologize, I don’t remember who passed it along). Their concept is great – local sourcing, in-house preparations (such as duck- and chicken-liver pate) – but the execution wasn’t there last night. The braised pork belly had great color on the exterior and the ale and cider reduction was a perfect complement, but the meat was tough and some of the edges of the belly were actually charred. The roasted half-duck special had a crispy skin dusted with Chinese five-spice powder, but again, the meat was overcooked and tough, refusing to separate from the bones. They have a solid selection of charcuterie items – we went with Speck, Manchego (with honey), and drunken goat (with quince paste) – and the bread pudding (with sliced apples and caramel sauce, albeit with some over-roasted walnuts) was generally strong. With ingredients this good, the finished product felt more disappointing for the lack of execution because it could have been phenomenal with a more deft hand.

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→ April 25, 2012
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The Tin Drum.

In case you missed it, I did a redraft of the first round of the 2002 Rule 4 draft for ESPN.com yesterday.

Günter Grass’ novel The Tin Drum stands for critics as one of the greatest novels in German literature, ranking 39th on The Novel 100, 70th on the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels ever written, and ranking fifth on this list of the best German novels of last century. Reading it for leisure doesn’t quite measure up to reading it as literature, and I believe a good number of allusions flew over my head due to my unfamiliarity with German (and Polish) history, but I hope I can recognize a novel’s greatness even if I wouldn’t say I loved reading it.

The drum of the title refers to a toy drum received by the narrator and main character, Oskar, for his third birthday. Oskar, precocious, cynical, and perhaps delusional, claims his personality was fully developed at birth, and at the age of three he stages an accident to prevent himself from growing physically, giving him an unusual vantage point for seeing and fooling the world, as he can play the innocent child to escape from mortal danger (even as he sends others, including both of the men he suspects of being his biological father, to their deaths), and uses that ruse to survive the German invasion of his hometown of Danzig/Gdansk, the assault on the Polish Post Office, Kristallnacht, World War II, and its immediate aftermath.

Oskar is mischievous, often devious, and has a strong instinct for self-preservation that he executes with one of his two great skills, using his voice to shatter glass, often to get what he wants but sometimes merely for the pleasure of destroying (although he might actually view it as creating, as a form of art). His other skill is to communicate via his drum: By playing the instrument, he can tell extensive stories and communicate his desires even before he’s able to speak – and he can pretend that he’s unable to speak for years beyond the point when he’s learned to do so.

Aside from the rampant symbolism – the drum, art, glass, aromas (Oskar has a hypersensitive sense of smell), Oskar’s obsession with his heritage despite its lack of clarity, and more – the brilliance of The Tin Drum is its use of humor and picaresque elements to lampoon Naziism, the church (and its complicity with the regime), and the willingness of so many Germans to go along with the regime. The book is sometimes crude and bawdy, but it’s in the service of dark, biting humor that tears apart Grass’s targets, such as the Nazi soldiers rotely building a wall and entombing small animals in it. You may often wish to avert your eyes (the horse’s head scene comes to mind), but these passages tend to be the book’s most powerful both on initial reading and after the book is done.

That said, it’s a tough read for two major reasons. One is simply that German syntax, even in this new, improved translation, doesn’t read that well to my English-reared mind. The other is that Oskar rambles, leading me to question whether he’s all there mentally or might even be unreliable as a narrator, producing long passages where nothing happens and I felt like I was reading in circles. The lengthy gaps between passages of action, or humor, or even dialogue, made it a tough slog, especially the final 100-150 pages – ordinarily a time of acceleration as the plot nears its conclusion. With The Tin Drum more of a history of a fictional character than a traditional linear narrative, there are no major plot points to resolve, and Oskar only undergoes one significant (albeit very significant) transformation in the book. It’s a cerebral novel where Oskar has some realizations but generally refuses to grow up, drawing not just from the picaresque tradition but from coming-of-age novels as well.

Next up: Alan Bradley’s second Flavia de Luce novel, The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag.

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→ April 21, 2012
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Saturday five, 4/21/12.

My Tuesday column this week was on six relievers who should be starters, and I played the host to guest Chris Sprow on Wednesday’s Baseball Today podcast. And there’s the transcript to his week’s Klawchat. My post on Charleston and West Virginia prospects should be up this afternoon.

* Bob Woodward on investigative journalism and the Internet. I’d say I found this shocking, but the students in question were Yalies, after all. On a more serious note, though, I think this speaks, albeit in an overdramatic way, to the importance of old-school, first-person journalism, and perhaps an excessive faith in the cult of the amateur online.

* Amazon’s pricing war with publishers over e-books. Of course, I prefer dead trees, but I’m also a big amazon proponent, so some of what I read here was dismaying.

* The fight to preseve 35mm in a film industry increasingly pushing towards digital recording. Boogie Nights called this fifteen years ago.

* Yahoo!’s Dan Wetzel takes the NCAA to task over transfer bans. Frankly, the idea that a player has to sit out a year when transferring bothers me more than anything else. They’re not employees bound by non-competes. They’re not employees, period, according to the NCAA.

* Animal Antibiotics: FDA Asks Drug Companies To Limit Overuse Amid Health Concerns. I’ve got a better idea: Stop buying antibiotic-fed meat. If demand drops, or if demand for antibiotic-free meat rises (supporting higher prices), we’ll see a reduction in their use – and factory farms depend on antibiotics to allow them to crowd their animals in unsanitary and inhumane conditions.

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→ April 17, 2012
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Atlanta, Macon, Greenville, & Baton Rouge eats.

The marquee meal of the trip was Top Chef All-Stars winner Richard Blais’ new “haute doggery,” HD1, located in Atlanta. I went with the Eastbound and Down dog, given its baseball theme and the presence of pulled pork as one of the toppings on the hot dog, along with sweet mustard and cole slaw, and it didn’t disappoint. As you’ve probably heard (I’ve said it enough recently), I ended a ten-year boycott of hot dogs with this meal; I gave them up because, as I told Chef Blais when he came on the podcast last month, in most cases you just don’t know what you’re eating when you get one. I’d also had too many mediocre or worse hot dogs and found that I always felt lousy after eating them, so the easy solution was to just cut them out. HD1’s hot dog was worth making the exception, bringing back a lot of (possibly constructed) memories from childhood – this is what I think a hot dog at the ballpark used to taste like, even though I know it was certainly never this good.

The pulled pork worked surprisingly well as a supporting player, bringing smoky and savory elements that made the final product more complex, so it felt more like real food as opposed to fast or junk food, while the thin layer of mustard gave the sandwich a much-needed sharpness. The waffle fries come with a sweet/spicy maple-soy dressing that defied my palate’s expectation of sweet/salty/sour (that is, ketchup); most potatoes aren’t that flavorful, so the bold sauce works really well on the blank canvas, although I ended up adding salt to mute the sweetness (I love maple syrup, but it is really sweet). The homemade pickles were actually the better of the two sides – large chunks with a subtle yet strong spicy finish. I was there just before 2 pm on a Wednesday, so the place was pretty quiet, but I like the décor and the vibe – the seating is mostly communal – and with a pretty broad menu that features various sausages (I’d like to try their Merguez, made with lamb), at least one vegetarian option, a good beer/wine selection, it seems like a good place to head with a group.

I followed several reader recommendations to hit Atlanta’s Antico Pizza, serving thin-crust, wood-fired pizzas reportedly in the tradition of Naples, itself the pizza capital of Italy (although regional variations abound). Antico’s pizzas are very good, a 55 on the 20-80 scale, a little too spongy in the crust, with high-quality toppings cut way too large for the pizza; the fennel sausage itself was fine, but balls of sausage the diameter of a half-dollar are too big for any kind of pizza, much less a thin-crust variety. That sausage is the star player on the San Gennaro pizza, along with sweet red peppers, cipolline onions, and mozzarella di bufala, a classic combination that, while tricky to eat, brought a solid balance of salty and savory flavors on a spongy dough.

They make several claims that they’re serving “authentic pizza napoletana,” and while what they offer is good, it’s not authentic. There are fairly specific guidelines on what authentic Neapolitan pizza comprises, including a thinner crust than what Antico offers (it should be 0.36-0.44 cm thick, specifically), a wetter center, smaller toppings, and usually fresh mozzarella rather than what I assume was the low-moisture mozzarella Antico used on the pizza I got. This is more a Neapolitan/New York-style hybrid, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Antico offers a very reasonable value ($21 for one pizza that was two meals’ worth of food for me) for what is at heart an artisanal product, but it’s not as good as Scottsdale’s ‘Pomo, which is actually certified as authentic (take that for what it’s worth – I may be Italian by descent, but I lack faith in any sort of Italian authority) and meets the requirements for authentic pizza napoletana. And ‘Pomo isn’t even the best pizza in the Valley.

Macon eats were generally unremarkable; the best meal was at the Bear’s Den, offering southern comfort food in a meat-and-two format, with the fried chicken at least above-average (very crispy crust, not too greasy) but the fried okra very disappointing (crust was soft, inside wasn’t evenly cooked) and the cornbread dressing somewhere in between. Breakfasts at Market Street Cafe and at Jeneane’s were both generally disappointing; Market Street Cafe did have a decent biscuit, but that’s about it. I did have a place in mind in Baxley, Georgia, where Byron Buxton plays – K&L Barbecue, where they serve the meat on a baked potato – but the game ran over three hours, by which point the restaurant was closed, and I can’t imagine I’ll ever be in Baxley again.

Moving on to Greenville, SC, one of the coolest towns I’ve come across in all of my travels – in less than 24 hours I was thinking about whether I could live there, and leaning towards ‘yes’ – after leaving the gorgeous Fluor Field and hitting Main Street at around 10:15 on a Wednesday night, I was shocked to find few parking spots open, plenty of people milling about, and a number of bars and restaurants still open or just closing up. I ended up at Stellar Wine Bar, which offers a small menu of appetizers, tapas, and entrees, and what they do offer they do very well. The server was a little thrown by my open-ended request for suggestions – I told her I eat just about everything and wanted to try two smaller plates rather than one entree – but eventually gave me her five favorites, from which I chose two.

Their veal “paté” is actually a terrine of seasoned ground veal wrapped in bacon and sliced thinly, served with crisp slices of pretzel bread (termed ciabatta on the menu, but that’s not what I got on the plate), spicy whole-grain mustard, diced white onions, and cornichons. It was a tricky dish to eat – the cornichons had no intention of cooperating with my plan to get every element into one bite – but, even as someone who prefers meat dishes hot rather than cold, I was impressed by the layering of flavors and the perfect seasoning on the meat, although the presence of cold, soft bacon on the outside didn’t do much other than hold the thing together (sort of).

The diver scallops over cauliflower puree were perfectly seared, perhaps slightly overcooked in the center but not to the point of toughness, and the cauliflower puree was light and a bit creamy, giving a richness to contrast to the lean scallops. For dessert, I took the server’s suggestion of the flourless chocolate torte (over chocolate mousse or bread pudding), which was dark, rich, had a hint of cinnamon, but was a little too dense, to the point where it was hard to cut or chew.

For breakfast, Marybeth’s promised a slightly more upscale take on basic breakfast items, with my meal somewhat hit or miss. The scrambled eggs with goat cheese and basil were made to order but so massive (it had to be at least three eggs, probably four or five) that they were overcooked on the edges while soft in the center. The hash browns, however, were superb, perfectly browned on the surface, soft and fluffy inside, and not greasy in the least. Just add salt and go.

Final stop was Baton Rouge, good for one meal and one dessert. The meal was very ordinary, Sammy’s Grill on Highland (a reader rec) – the gumbo was thin and the grilled shrimp po’ boy, while made with very fresh shrimp, desperately needed some kind of seasoning. Also, they didn’t hollow out the bread, which I thought was part of the definition of a po’ boy, although I could be wrong about that. Dessert was better, at Rue Beignet, apparently the upstart in competition with Baton Rouge landmark Coffee Call; the beignets (a photo of which I posted on Twitter) were extremely light and airy inside, crispy and brown on the outside, although without the powdered sugar they didn’t have much flavor beyond that of “fried dough” – not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that. They also served the obligatory weak cafe au lait, which I would never drink anywhere except in Louisiana. One warning – Rue Beignet isn’t open as late as Coffee Call, but they did serve me even though I arrived just a few minutes before closing.

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