→ April 3, 2013
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Reno eats.

I was only in Reno long enough for two meals, leaving first thing the morning after the game at the University of Nevada (which I wrote about here), and was a little disappointed that a city where gambling and tourism are the two main industries didn’t have more to offer food-wise. I’m still in Atlanta till tomorrow and will have another food post up on that shortly. In the meantime, check out this week’s episode of my Behind the Dish podcast.

The better of the two meals I had was a reader suggestion, Campo, an Italian restaurant on Sierra that offers pastas, thin-crust pizzas, and house-made charcuterie, using lots of locally-sourced ingredients, so very much my kind of restaurant. They boast of accreditation from the authority in Naples that awards the “VPN” (Vera Pizza Napoletana) badge, but I’d say this is more evidence of how dubious that term is. Campo’s pizza is fine, but not terribly authentic – the crust is by far the best part, thin with the right amount of charring around the edges (but not underneath), probably a little less airy on the rim than it should have been but otherwise boasting good texture. I went with the basic margherita pizza, which had far too much sauce and somewhat too little cheese; the sauce tasted very sweet, like it was made with overripe tomatoes, and the cheese was moisture-reduced rather than truly fresh mozzarella. The server must have thought I was an oddball for scraping so much of the sauce off the pizza, and one of the slices actually had no cheese on it at all – just sauce on dough. The charcuterie was more interesting and even the “small” plate ($12) was generous, featuring mortadella, prosciutto crudo, prosciutto cotto, pork rillette, a hard salami with a name I didn’t catch, a few cubes of pecorino romano, mustard (which he referred to as “our” mustard, so I assume it didn’t come from a jar), and a few pickles, including green beans and garlic. Everything was good, with the prosciuttos and the rillette particular standouts; the worst thing I could say was that the salami was tough because of how thickly it was sliced. I found it the absence of any prosciutto on the pizza options on the menu to be odd, and, since I just ate them together instead, the saltiness helped balance out the sweetness of the sauce. If I end up in Reno another time, I’d try Campo again but would give the pastas a shot rather than another pizza. I do recommend it.

Burger Me is apparently owned by the group behind Campo, and earned mention from Esquire for serving, in their opinion, the best burger in America, as well as showing up on “Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives.” I ordered the specific burger that Esquire cited, a bison burger with BBQ sauce and jalapenos, but it just wasn’t anything special: a high-quality burger that was too lean and didn’t have big flavor except from the peppers. The fries were also ordinary – please, people, if you’re going to open a gourmet burger place, the fries are not a damn afterthought. It’s so easy to just hand-cut the fries in back – In-n-Out seems to have no problem doing this – and when I get cheap fries that went from freezer to fryer at a burger place that is trying to sell me on their quality, I want to hire Lionel Hutz and sue them for fraud. I’d skip this stop

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→ April 2, 2013
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Richard Blais’ The Spence.

I have a new draft blog post up for Insiders on Clint Frazier, and the new episode of my Behind the Dish podcast is also up.

I had one of the best culinary experiences of my life at Richard Blais’ The Spence, located right near Georgia Tech’s campus (and, amusingly, very close to The Varsity). Chef Blais appeared with me on an episode of the Baseball Today podcast last year and we’ve kept in touch since then, so when I mentioned to him I was coming to Atlanta, he set up a tasting menu of sorts for me for Monday night. (I missed Richard by about a half an hour, but as I was walking out, I bumped into another former Top Chef contestant and fellow sports fan, Eli Kirshtein.)

Needless to say, this was a lot of food, but there wasn’t a mediocre dish among the set. The menu featured a lot of the playfulness that characterized Blais’ cooking on Top Chef, especially messing around with textures and presenting foods in unexpected forms, and the flavors were consistently balanced yet powerful.

I can’t even get to the menu items without mentioning the bread – parker house rolls, incredibly light, served with homemade coconut butter with flaked sea salt. I could have licked the board clean of the butter. It seemed foolish to eat bread when I knew a lot of food was coming, but I couldn’t let that butter leave the table alive.

The Spence’s menu has three main parts: Small starters, somewhat larger starters, and full entrees. I got two of the small starters, Blais’ take on oysters and “pearls” as well as fried olives stuffed with cheddarwurst. The oysters were absurd, in a citrus/cucumber juice/vermouth bath with little pearls of frozen horseradish and crème fraiche. (I’m doing most of this from memory, so my apologies if I get an ingredient wrong.) I’ve mentioned before that I’ve long had a fear of raw oysters, since Long Island had a major pollution problem when I was growing up there, but this is the second time I’ve had them at a high-end restaurant and I see the appeal now. The texture was perfect and there was plenty of acid to balance out the mellow saltiness of the mollusk, with those late bursts of heat as the horseradish pearls melted. It comes on a bed of smoked sea salt as well if you want more of a briny/salty flavor, although I thought the oysters were perfect as is. The fried green olives were very briny, so they balanced out the oysters well, although I concede green olives aren’t my favorite color (Kalamata uber alles).

Next up was the bone marrow, served with bread crumbs, finely diced tuna tartare (brunoise style), and two fried quail eggs, along with grilled bread to carry the load. I’ve never met a bone marrow dish I didn’t like, and this was perfectly cooked, just to the point where I could start to spread it on the bread but without losing its texture entirely, and the cold tuna, providing the fresh ocean flavor, gave little hints of contrast to the heavy, earthy flavor of the marrow. Quail eggs are very trendy right now – really all non-chicken eggs seem to be – and here their main advantage was that they fit perfectly on the marrow bone.

The dish that had me laughing out loud was a beet-cured kampachi crudo with freeze-dried horseradish and chicharrones – the kampachi was sliced thinly and shaped like roses on the plate, which worked beautifully with their pink flesh and with the surrounding leaves on the plate. I love crudo fish dishes, so this was right in my wheelhouse, and the beet cure just imparted a hint of flavor to the fish without masking the flavor of the fish itself. The horseradish was sprinkled on the plate like snow, so I would drag the fish in it a little (kind of like dipping your sashimi in soy sace), while the chicharrones, which looked like chunks of puffed rice, were too big to incorporate into the main bite. This was my favorite dish of the night, for what that’s worth.

Then came the pork terrine, another item I’ve learned to appreciate over the last year or so, served with a celery root jam, spicy mustard, and pickled zucchini, plus some more grilled bread. The jam was the star, sweet, lightly acidic, with a hint of spice – ginger, I think – with a texture like what you’d expect if you candied celery root and pureed it. It was a little tricky to assemble the dish with the pork, jam, mustard, and pickle all in one bite, but the balance of savory, sweet, tart, and spicy was spot on.

I got to try both of the pasta dishes, the english pea cavatappi with bacon, peas, and a little mint gremolata, as well as the squid-ink pasta with a pork meatball and a very light tomato/black pepper sauce. I could eat that cavatappi all day – I adore fresh English peas (even growing them in our backyard garden and shelling them with my daughter), which pair beautifully with cured pork, and the pasta just exploded with the flavor of the legumes. The squid-ink pasta was overshadowed a little by the perfect meatball on top, and the sauce was very black peppery, but it was perfectly al dente and I admit my inner kid thinks black pasta is very cool.

The one item I tried off the entrees section was the duck, which I would have ordered if I had had the choice anyway. It’s served sliced with blood orange slices, bok choy, and a puree that I believe contained both charred eggplant and a little chocolate. Duck, orange, and bitter greens is another classic combination, but the puree on the side was the twist, giving a smoky/bitter component that balanced the sweetness of the duck and the orange sauce. I did find the duck slices varied a little in how they were cooked, and since I’m an oddball who prefers his duck a little more cooked than most people do (I just don’t like meats cooked rare, because they taste “cold” to me), this worked out well as I could attack the more cooked slices first. I do want to know what they do with the duck legs though – could there be a confit dish coming on a future menu?

The server suggested the fried brussels sprouts side dish, which comes with fried green beans and a Thai vinagrette. The vegetables are fried plain, without breading, so they’re naturally sweet from all of the caramelized sugars on the exterior; the dressing is just lightly spicy and provides a dark, acidic note to balance out the sweetness.

Andrea Litvin, the Spence’s pastry chef, came out herself to deliver the dessert, the carrot cake, served in little cork-sized pieces with frozen dollops of crème fraiche, tiny meringes, violet leaves (from her own garden) and shaved drived carrot strips. It’s very typical of everything I ate at the Spence in that it looked unexpected, but there was a familiarity to the flavors when you got all of the components in a single bite. I don’t love carrot cake but this was moist and dense and not cloyingly sweet, and the frozen crème fraiche pastilles were amazing, a bright contrast to the richness of the cake. Litvin was also kind enough to answer some questions about making French macarons, my current bugbear in the kitchen as I can’t seem to get enough height on them. She’s up for the Food and Wine Best New Pastry Chef honor in the east region, and you can (and should!) vote for her here.

And finally, I nursed a cocktail through most the meal – the Sailor’s Crutch, containing dry gin, lemon juice, falernum syrup, and soda. I’m a dedicated rum drinker, but I could happily consume a Sailor’s Crutch a day and give up the demon spirit for a long time.

Full disclosure – they wouldn’t let me pay for the meal, and much of the staff came by to chat, so this was an extraordinary experience on many levels. I did see the prices, and I think it’s reasonable for the kind of food they’re serving, comparable to what I’d pay in Phoenix (at Citizen Public House or crudo) and less than I’d pay in New York or LA. Everything I had was wonderful, so I’d recommend it highly even if I had paid full fare.

I should also mention that I bought Blais’ new cookbook, Try This at Home: Recipes from My Head to Your Plate, about a month ago and have had great success with it so far. I need to try more recipes for a full review, but the sweet potato gnocchi were a big hit, even with my daughter who otherwise doesn’t like sweet potatoes.

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→ March 31, 2013
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Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry.

My last spring training dispatch, on Cubs prospect Pierce Johnson and Giants prospects Adalberto Mejia and Mac Williamson, went up this morning for Insiders.

B.S. Johnson was an avant-garde writer who wrote poetry, plays, and novels that earned minimal recognition during his brief lifetime – he killed himself in 1973 at age 40 – but have since acquired a substantial following among academics and fans of absurdist and post-modern fiction. I hadn’t heard of Johnson at all until finding a passage that discussed his works, specifically the use of metafictional techniques in Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, in James Wood’s How Fiction Works about a year ago. Christie Malry is bizarre, a portrait of the sociopath as a young figment of the author’s imagination, an heir to James Joyce and Flann O’Brien and a forerunner of Jasper Fforde.

Christie Malry is an 18-year-old narcissist and malcontent who believes that the world is out to do him harm, even in such clearly impersonal acts as putting up a building where he might want to walk if the sidewalk were a little wider. His first job at a bank, which he takes to be closer to the money, bores him, but he eventually discovers accounting and the system of double-entry bookkeeping developed in the late 1400s by the Franciscan frier Luca Pacioli, whose book on the subject is quoted several times in Johnson’s work. Malry decides to create a general ledger of his life, counting assaults against him as debits and undertaking acts of terrorism against society, starting with hoax bomb threats and escalating from there, as a way of balancing the books.

Johnson’s approach to the book has the air of calculated carelessness, such as when he says that the death toll from Malry’s biggest attack was just over twenty thousand, because “this was the first figure that came to hand as it is roughly the number of words of which the novel consists so far.” Johnson engages in dialogues with Malry, and has other characters lament their own use as pawns in the novel to further the plot without any significant development – especially Malry’s mother, who tells her back story to explain some of Malry’s behavior and then dies because she has exhausted her purpose. The arbitrary values Malry assigns to various slights are much higher than the value he places on the death of another person, which is just over a pound a head. Malry’s girlfriend is only named the Shrike, the name of a family of birds often called “butcher birds” because they impale insects on plant spikes or thorns as a form of food storage.

Johnson’s suicide shortly after the book’s publication means we won’t get a full explanation of some of the thematic questions in the book, one of which, for me, revolves around the recurring element of food. Most of the scenes revolving around Malry and other characters eating depict it as merely an act of sustenance, but Malry’s accounting job for a firm that handles catering and mass-production of processed sweets, leading him to the idea of using poison as a weapon to balance the ledger, which, reflecting my own philosophy on the subject, struck me as an unsubtle jab at the unhealthfulness of processed foods.

The novel does have a serious theme beneath its absurdist surface. Malry’s actions reflect a general refusal to live in society – a repudiation of the social contract from someone who was given no choice about participating in it in the first place. In a world of limited choice, Malry makes one of the only choices he feels like he can make, and one of the only ways he can reject the existing order. He did not opt in, and he believes this is the only way he can opt out. Because he feels no empathy, and places no value on any life but his own, he has no compunction about the growing tolls of his “credits,” but even so discovers that he can never quite balance the ledger and even these acts of terror don’t remove him from the system. Is life meaningless? A zero-sum game? Or do we all end our days with a pile of bad debt that we must write off without ever balancing our books? Johnson avoids answers but shines while asking the questions.

Next up: Tom Rachman’s 2011 novel The Imperfectionists, recommended by a reader right after its publication, which so far has been nearly perfect.

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→ March 30, 2013
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The Grifters.

I’ve got a draft blog post up on Braden Shipley and Aaron Judge, as well as a post with predictions for the 2013 season.

Jim Thompson’s 1963 novel The Grifters is my first encounter with his work, a neo-noir novel that draws from the prose style of hard-boiled detective novels but brings it outside of the detective genre, instead focusing on the cons themselves with barely a shamus in sight. The three main characters are all tied together in simple ways, but Thompson develops them each so deeply that the result is like a modern, dark Greek tragedy, written by someone who read too much Raymond Chandler. (Note: One cannot read too much Chandler.)

Adapted into the 1990 film of the same name by Donald Westlake, The Grifters centers on Roy Dillon, a mid-20s artist of the “small con,” little tricks designed to yield up to $100 that won’t attract too much notice from the police. His indifferent, manipulative mother Lilly is herself involved with the mob, as she has been for years, now helping them rig the betting against longshots at the track. Roy avoids most lasting relationships, as part of the life of the grifter but also a consequence of a childhood with a sociopathic mother, yet ends up involved with Moira Langtry, who is also on the make but whose motives aren’t immediately clear. When one of Roy’s small cons leaves him nearly dead and in need of convalescence, his mother makes her move to reestablish herself in her son’s life – for her own purposes, of course.

Roy is the far more developed character in the book, working from an independent sense of morality, wary of his mother yet unable to fully sever ties with her, but Lilly is far more fascinating – the mother who’d eat her young and who only views others as tools for her own advancement. (It cracks me up that the actress who played Lilly in the film, Anjelica Houston, is now the voice of the overly sweet Queen Clarion in the new Tinker Bell movies.) We get Lilly and Roy’s backstory through flashback chapters intertwined with the present time, which tracks Roy’s injury and recovery, and which allows Lilly to introduce Roy to the seemingly innocent nurse Carol, an immigrant who is reluctant to discuss anything of her past.

Thompson had to have been at least somewhat thinking in terms of Greek tragedies, especially Oedipus, when writing The Grifters, as the elements are too obvious for this to have been inadvertent. The incestuous undertone to Lilly and Roy’s relationship becomes clearer the more we watch the two interact, especially since sex is Lilly’s primary way of manipulating men, either to get what she wants or to get out of trouble. The three elements Aristotle identified as critical to the tragic plot – reversals of fortune, recognition, and suffering by one or more protagonists – are all present, especially in the two-part conclusion, the second half of which even surprised me. Greek tragedies often come across today as pedantic and dull, but Thompson uses both the plot and taut syntax to keep the tension high from the hit Roy takes the stomach in the first chapter to that final confrontation that lays everyone’s motives bare.

The style and subject matter reminded me of Chandler and Hammett, as well as They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, which I read in February, but the strongest resemblance was to James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss. Crumley’s novel is more violent and has less of the classical elements of The Grifters, but I wouldn’t be shocked to hear that Thompson had influenced Crumley’s work, especially since Crumley was in college and graduate school when two of Thompson’s most significant works, this novel and Pop. 1280 were first published.

Next up: B.S. Johnson’s manic metafictional absurdist novel Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry.

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→ March 22, 2013
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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.

I’ve got a fantasy-themed post up today, answering questions from ESPN.com’s fantasy editors about divisive players for fantasy owners in 2013.

I hadn’t heard of Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down until I encountered a reference to it in Alison Hoover Bartlett’s The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, in which she mentions it as one of her four favorite narrative non-fiction titles. I wasn’t sure how compelling the story of a Hmong girl with severe epilepsy who got caught in the cultural divide between her family and the American doctors who treated her would be as a 300-page novel, but Spirit is so thoroughly researched and so perfectly balanced that it turned out to be as engrossing as any non-fiction book I have ever read.

Lia Lee is the Hmong girl at the center of the book, born with a terrible case of epilepsy that caused massive grand mal seizures, one of which led to irreversible brain damage when she was four that left her in a vegetative state for the remainder of her life. (She died in September of 2012, shortly after the book was reissued for its 15th anniversary.) The conflict at the heart of the book swirls around Lia in the time between her birth and that neurological catastrophe; in those four-odd years, the doctors tried an increasingly aggressive course of treatment that Lia’s parents didn’t fully understand and with which they didn’t entirely comply, while also pursuing traditional Hmong treatments (what many of us would consider “woo”) along with or sometimes in place of what the doctors prescribed. This clash of cultures, exacerbated by a then-unbridgeable language gap and socioeconomic factors, led one doctor to accuse Lia’s parents of child abuse for their passive refusal to administer the prescribed medications, after which she was taken from them and placed in foster care for about a year. Not long after she was returned to the custody of her parents – with full support from the foster family that took her in – she suffered the massive seizure that effectively ended her life, although she remained in that vegetative state for fifteen years beyond it.

The phrase in the book’s title is the translation of the three-word Hmong phrase that refers to the disease we know as epilepsy, as the Hmong don’t have an exact word for it. In Hmong culture, many diseases and disorders we know to have clear physical causes are treated as ailments of the soul; Lia’s parents believed that the seizures were the result of one of her sisters slamming a door, which scared Lia’s soul out of her body, after which they had to try to coax it back in using methods like animal sacrifice. Fadiman’s greatest trick in this book is providing total balance between the two sides of the debate – it would be far too easy to paint the Lees, and the Hmong in general, as animist twits believing in superstitious nonsense that modern science should have killed off a few centuries ago. Fadiman never questions the scientific reality of epilepsy, but gives credence to the Lees’ beliefs as they affected their own perspective on Lia’s illness, treatment, and the final catastrophe, while also extrapolating from that to discuss the Hmong experience with the United States in general, from their time in the CIA’s secret army in Laos to their resettlement here starting in the late 1970s. The only real villain here is our government, which was happy to sacrifice thousands of Hmong men but did little to take care of this oppressed minority after the communist Pathet Lao overthrow the country’s monarchy and began a genocidal campaign that wiped out up to a quarter of the country’s Hmong population. (Laos remains one of the world’s only communist states, and, not coincidentally, is also extremely poor.) These detours into the history of the Hmong and their experience as immigrants to the U.S. add some needed context to the story; the Hmong left behind not just their homeland but their entire way of life, which revolved around self-sufficience through agriculture and the broad support networks of extended families (called “clans”), and then were resettled into unfriendly environments ranging from Minneapolis to Merced, California, where Lia’s parents lived. Fadiman touches briefly on a deep sense of betrayal among the older generation of Hmong, who felt that they were promised things by the U.S. for their aid during the war(s) against the communists and received very little of what was pledged.

Fadiman began writing the book as a magazine article that was never published, starting her research in the late 1980s almost a decade before the book’s initial release in 1997. In addition to reviewing 400,000 pages of medical records, she went back and spoke to as many of the principals involved in Lia’s care as she could, including the main doctors who treated her, the social worker who was most heavily involved with the Lees, and the Lees themselves, becoming so involved that Lia’s mother, Foua, began to refer to Fadiman as one of her “daughters.” (Including Lia, Foua had nine surviving biological children, most of whom went on to attend college in the United States and to find jobs and incomes that evaded their parents’ generation after the migration.) The book came out at a time when the idea of holistic medicine was still viewed as a concept from the fringes, never taught in schools and barely practiced in hospitals (according to Fadiman’s accounts). Since then, it has become more popular in academia and in practice, with The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down a part of the process of teaching doctors to view the patient as a whole rather than strictly the disease or disorder. Yet I think the book’s core lesson goes beyond medicine; while many of you will read the book as I did, with an inherent bias towards the doctors who employed sound science while banging their heads against the wall of parents who refused to follow the regiment of pills that might have saved their daughter’s brain, Fadiman does a tremendous job of showing us how and why the Lees distrusted and feared American doctors and Western medicine, a gap that the doctors should, in hindsight, have worked harder to close.

Fadiman writes at an extremely high level, never talking down to the reader and avoiding inserting herself too much into the story. I did notice a few odd word choices – referring to one person as having an “exiguous crewcut,” or the frequent use of “hegira” to describe the Hmong’s exodus from Laos, an accurate word that I’d never seen before – but otherwise the book was extremely readable and moved as quickly as any novel, especially in the intense, often heartbreaking depictions of Lia’s neurological crises. Even when you know the eventual outcome is tragic, Fadiman manages to infuse the situations with tension through precision, painful passages of details that put me in the room with Lia, her doctors, and her bewildered parents. In some ways, it’s a terrible story, but one that needed a wide telling like this to help us all expand our cross-cultural understanding.

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→ March 20, 2013
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The Magician King et al.

I have a new draft blog post up today, discussing two potential first-rounders I saw as well as former Mets draft pick Teddy Stankiewicz. Also, the Kindle edition of the indispensable cookbook Ruhlman’s Twenty is just $3.03 right now.

* The Magicians, Lev Grossman’s fantasy novel that was also a parody of popular fantasy novels, is one of my favorite books of the last ten years for the way it weaves (largely affectionate) satire of Harry Potter, Narnia, and Tolkien into an original story. In that book, Quentin Coldwater, an ordinary teenager in New York City, goes through a familiar series of events, becomes a wizard, and ends up visiting the land of Fillory, which he always assumed was fictional. Crossing the chasm into the world of magic and into this alternate reality brings with it all sorts of unanticipated problems, with some tragic consequences along with the successes and adventure.

Grossman followed that book up with a sequel, The Magician King, which he intended to be part two of an eventual Magicians trilogy. It does suffer a little from Middle-Book Syndrome, but that didn’t bother me as much as the split narrative that gives a lot of attention to the back story of one of the secondary characters from the first book, Julia. Denied admission to the magic school, Brakebills, that accepted her friend Quentin, Julia went through a difficult period of anger and depression, along with intermittent attempts to learn magic on her own, a path that ultimately brought her great pain even as she succeeded.

That pairing – triumph and tragedy, elation and pain – underpins both of the books in the series so far, something Grossman spells out more explicitly this time around when Quentin, setting off on an inexplicable sailing expedition within Fillory that lands him back on Earth when that’s about the last thing he wants, is told that becoming a hero can include tremendous sacrifice. This quixotic mission, which Quentin can’t even fully explain to himself other than to say that he feels like he has to do it, takes Quentin, Julia, and their crew of Fillorians to the barely-known Outer Island, and eventually beyond it to After Island and eventually to the End of the World, all in search of a set of Golden Keys that will save the known universe from the wrath of the gods, apparently themselves magicians of a higher order (although Grossman leaves their true nature somewhat unclear, likely wishing to avoid delving too much into the metaphysical) who wish to end the use of magic by mortals.

Grossman created and developed a strong set of characters in the first book, much as J.K. Rowling did when setting up the universe of Harry Potter in the first book in that series. In The Magician King, however, the only development we get is Julia’s through her history, as none of the few new characters we encounter is around for long enough to get that kind of development. I think ultimately that’s what made this feel like the second book in the trilogy – the story was still compelling, just a touch less so than the first book’s, but the character development and growth is largely absent. Quentin’s progress is halting until the book’s climax, and the others are just along for the ride.

That climax might not sit well with readers who loved the first book, but I think Grossman made a wise choice in how he wrapped up the story, at least for now. A big part of the first book’s appeal to me was in how Grossman would create a situation that would feel familiar, often directly recalling something from one of those great fantasy series I mentioned above, but would subvert it through an unexpected or unorthodox resolution. The Magician King is no different – very little is expected here, as triumphs can turn into tragedies in the space of a few sentences. There was one specific aspect that I would have preferred to see Grossman omit, an act of sexual violence that was horrific not just as it was described but for the way the act thoroughly debased the character who was victimized. Rape and sexual assault are valid tools for the fiction writer but should only be deployed when absolutely necessary. This time it wasn’t.

I think The Magician King will stand much more strongly when we get the third book in the series, given how many open questions remained at the book’s conclusion. It isn’t as thin as The Two Towers or, crossing genres, The Empire Strikes Back, stories that seemed to exist primarily as bridges from part one to part three. This book could easily stand on its own if we didn’t have quite so much of the Julia sideline in it. If you enjoyed The Magicians, this is a must-read.

* I’ve also read two other books recently in series I’ve enjoyed, Jasper Fforde’s The Woman Who Died A Lot and Alan Bradley’s I Am Half-Sick of Shadows. Fforde’s book, the seventh in the Thursday Next series and likely the second-to-last as well, follows the literary detective, still recovering from the assassination attempt from book 5, reentering the workforce in a reduced role, even as Goliath Corporation is as determined as ever to figure out her secrets and probably kill her once they’re done with her. Their plans involve sending out synthetic Thursdays that look and sound like the real thing to try to con her friends and family into revealing confidential information. At the same time, the town of Swindon is grappling with news that the Almighty’s recent series of smitings will reach their town in a matter of days, a problem that Thursday’s polymath daughter, Tuesday, is trying desperately to solve. The story is clever, as always, but I have noticed over the last three books that they’re becoming much less funny. The old jokes are wearing off and Fforde seems to be struggling to replace them. Fforde’s site indicates we won’t get book eight, which I think will be the end of the series, until at least 2016.

* I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, the fourth book in the Flavia de Luce series, has nothing to do with MLB’s postseason, but is another murder mystery involving the world’s most precocious prepubescent amateur chemist and detective. This time around, the murder occurs at Buckshaw, the estate of Flavia’s father, as half the town is snowed in during a charity performance by members of the cast of a film being shot at the house that week. There’s a surprising lack of chemistry in the main story here, as Flavia largely figures it out by deduction and old-fashioned snooping, although we get far more insight into the character of Dogger and hints of thawing from Flavia’s sisters, which I hope will continue in the next book, Speaking from Among the Bones, just recently out in hardcover.

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→ March 20, 2013
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Santa Monica and Houston eats.

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

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

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

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→ March 17, 2013
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Minneapolis eats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ March 14, 2013
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More Phoenix/Valley eats.

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

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

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

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

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→ March 12, 2013
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Blood, Bones & Butter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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