→ October 3, 2007
→ By

Pittsburgh eats.

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

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

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

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 The salmon croquettes on the menu had been replaced by chorizo croquettes, but the finished product was very greasy and the contents weren’t whipped or puréed smooth as they would be in proper croquettes; I ate one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

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

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

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , ,
→ September 26, 2007
→ By

Sleepwalking Land.

When it comes to it, we take stock in the middle of our existence and ask ourselves: do we have more yesterdays or more tomorrows? What I wanted was for time to slow down, to stop like the wrecked ship.

One of the various lists of books I’m working through is the twelve greatest African books of the twentieth century. Mia Couto’s Sleepwalking Land is the fifth I’ve read of this list, and it’s probably the most abstract of the group, but also features the most advanced plot, with two stories intertwining and perhaps – depending on how you interpret the book – connecting as well.

Couto was born in Mozambique, although unlike the other eleven authors on the list, he’s white. He lived through the country’s independence and the resulting seventeen-year civil war, between the country’s first government, a Soviet-aligned Marxist government that shut all the country’s religious schools, and a pro-democracy guerrilla group, RENAMO. Sleepwalking Land tells the story of that civil war by focusing on its effect on the population, eschewing any depictions of actual warfare.

The novel contains two narratives. One tells the story of a pair of refugees, an old man and a young boy he has saved from a refugee camp, who take up shelter in a burned-out bus, where they find a suitcase containing the notebooks of a dead man whose body was found nearby. The young boy reads the stories in the notebooks to the old man, with unusual consequences for their immediate environs. Those notebooks tell the story of Kindzu, whose life story appears to be part allegory for the history of Mozambique, but with a focus on what has been lost through colonialism, civil war, and corruption. He is guided by a dwarf who came from the heavens to a woman named Farida, who gave up her son to adoption many years earlier and begs Kindzu to try to find him. Kindzu’s search for Gaspar yields the occasional clue but he never seems to get close to his quarry, symbolizing the way innocence, once lost, can’t be regained, but along the way he meets many villagers and acquaintances of Farida, whose stories further depict the horrors of civil war.

Couto’s style makes heavy use of magical realism, while his prose mixes the simple structures of African literature (like Things Fall Apart) with the more poetic and metaphorical style of Western literature. It was an easy read, although I couldn’t shake the feeling that a lot of the symbolism was flying over my head due to my unfamiliarity with the history of Mozambique. (For a more detailed and informed review of Sleepwalking Land, you might want to read the New York Times review of the book.)

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ September 22, 2007
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Fraternity.

“The heart,” he said, “is a dark well; its depth unknown. I have lived eighty years. I am still drawing water.”
“Draw a little for me, Dad.”

I found John Galsworthy’s 1906 book Fraternity via a book trail: One book mentioned another book which mentioned this book. I’ve had pretty good luck with book trails in the past; one of my best finds via a book trail was discovering Booth Tarkington by a mention of one of his novels in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise.

Fraternity itself is a quirky book, something of a satire of upper-middle-class attitudes towards the lower classes in turn-of-the-century England. The plot of the book revolves around the slow-burn relationship between Hilary, the emotionally estranged husband of Bianca, and a young model named Ivy who comes to pose for a portrait Bianca is painting. But the book itself is more concerned with the way that the extended family of which Hilary is a part views “those people” – the truly poor, but also simply the working classes, the less fortunate but not poor (like Ivy), and the riffraff who inhabit the parts of London where decent folk simply aren’t seen.

Galsworthy showcases a dry wit, sprinkling the novel with smart-assed rejoinders and silly names (the pious, loyal butler named Creed; the socialite named Mrs. Talents Smallpeace; the intimidating activist named Mary Daunt), and also treating the upper-class denizens of the book with just a touch of disdain for their snobbery. The story moves along quickly, in part because of copious amounts of dialogue – both real and imagined, as Galsworthy likes to describe facial expressions with quotes that explain what the person might be thinking – and also because of the various minor subplots among the various characters in Hilary and Bianca’s family. It’s a minor work of literature that for whatever reason seems to have been swept aside, perhaps because of the wave of more serious English novels that followed in the 1910s and 1920s.

Filed Under: Literature
→ September 20, 2007
→ By

Cleveland eats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed Under: Food
→ September 18, 2007
→ By

Empire Falls.

The moral of this story is that I need to listen to my readers when they recommend a book, because they’re two for two so far. The most recent successful suggestion is Richard Russo’s Empire Falls.

The book’s jacket describes Russo as a “compassionate” writer, which sounds like something that some halfwit in marketing came up with after reading two or three pages of the book, but it turns out to be an incredibly apt description of the way Russo creates and develops his characters. Empire Falls is set in a declining mill town in Maine, and the plot centers on the slightly hapless Miles Roby, manager of the Empire Grill, father of a teenaged daughter, en route to a divorce from his longtime wife Janine, who is leaving him for Walt Comeau, the “Silver Fox” who owns the local gym and is forever challenging Miles to an arm-wrestle. His daughter, Tick, is having her own troubles, including an ex-boyfriend with anger issues, a classmate with a terrible family life and who never speaks, and difficulty dealing with her parents’ divorce, which she squarely blames on her mother. And Russo has populated the town with a number of other characters, all surprisingly well developed despite limited screen time, from Miles’ kleptomaniac father, Max, to the young and possibly gay Catholic priest Mark, to the omnipresent town matriarch, Francine Whiting, who has Miles and perhaps the rest of the community by the balls. Yet with perhaps the sole exception of that last character, everyone in the book is presented with some degree of compassion or at least understanding – people are shaped by their circumstances, some of which are beyond their control, and while many people manage to overcome disadvantageous backgrounds, it’s too easy just to pile blame on those who can’t or won’t.

The story revolves around Miles Roby’s divorce and some of the events in his life that the arrival of the actual legal event (as opposed to the end of his marriage, which happened some time prior to the book’s opening) sets in motion. He has spent twenty years of his life at the restaurant, forever awaiting the day when Francine Whiting will give him the restaurant, probably through her death, which doesn’t seem all that imminent. Russo tells Miles’ story through intermittent flashbacks and changes in perspective, revealing in stages the history of the Whitings, Miles’ family history, and even some of the stories behind the other characters. And since the town is so small, all of the stories intersect at multiple points with other stories, characters run into other characters, and in very thin sheets Russo gives us more and more details on each of them.

The book also reads as an allegorical history of small-town New England, which is dotted with slumping or failing former mill towns that have never really recovered from the end of the area’s textile industry. Empire Falls residents continue to cling to hopes that the mill will re-open and that those who remained will get their old jobs back, remembering, perhaps, good old days that weren’t all that good, and that aren’t coming back even if the town does find a new industry.

The story finally turns in its last fifty or so pages on the one real event of the book, the external stimulus that shocks Miles out of his emotional stupor. It was foreshadowed for a while in the book, but Russo handled it deftly and quickly, almost as if he disdained writing about action when he had dialogue and introspection to write.

A couple of quick notes:

  • This is the seventh winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction that I’ve read, and it’s been a mixed bag. Beloved and To Kill a Mockingbird are among my favorite novels, but Independence Day was disappointing, and I thought The Shipping News managed the twin feat of being vulgar and uninteresting.
  • I was helping out at the Tepper School of Business’s table at an MBA recruiting event on Sunday, and had my copy of Empire Falls sitting on the table. One prospective student noticed it hidden behind a sign, pointed, and just said, “Great book.” Turns out he’s a Mainer and thought that Russo did a fantastic job of capturing the culture of the state’s small towns.
Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ September 14, 2007
→ By

Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

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

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

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

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

Salt.

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

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

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

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

Filed Under: Cooking, Nonfiction Tagged With: ,
→ September 7, 2007
→ By

Those Holiday Inn commercials.

So in first place on the list of “worst current commercial campaigns” has to be the Holiday Inn ads with the three blond guys making fools of themselves, right? What exactly is the message that Holiday Inn is trying to send here?

  • “Only dorks stay at our hotels.”
  • “If you don’t want to talk to people like these guys, stay somewhere else.”
  • “Holiday Inn: We’ll make you uncomfortable in every sense of the word.”

Avis did something like this a few years ago, albeit not quite as bad, with their campaign “What if we didn’t try harder?” After which, you’d get 15-20 seconds of a customer having a very bad experience at an Avis rental car outlet.

Marketing and advertising are certainly inexact sciences, but to me, a good ad should have two or three things: recall, a positive message about the brand or product, and perhaps a call to action depending on what the commercial is advertising. The worst ads have great recall but leave the viewer with a very negative impression of the brand or product. The Holiday Inn ads are unmistakable – as soon as I see any of those three idiots on the screen, I’m flying for the remote – and they’ve made it clear to me that Holiday Inn is the antithesis of cool. And yet these ads have been running for over a year, and I’m sure we’ll be inundated with them again in the playoffs. Good luck cleaning up that brand image after you’ve spent a year and a half defecating all over it.

Filed Under: Media
→ September 5, 2007
→ By

The Yankee Stadium squirrel.

I can take partial credit for this picture. I was at the game last night, and when I saw the squirrel on the scoreboard, that caption was the first thing that popped into my head. Thanks to Chris for executing my artistic vision.

Filed Under: Humor
→ September 2, 2007
→ By

Peach pie.

OK, this post isn’t really about peach pie, although it’s inspired by the one I made today, using probably the last of the local peaches we’ll see up here this year. I’ve made a peach pie every August for five or six years now, but it used to be more work than it is now because dealing with the peaches was such a pain in the ass. Making peach pie requires removing the skin from the peaches – something you don’t have to do to make peach preserves, which I also do every year – and taking the skin off a peach used to be as hard as taking a nickel from Carl Pohlad.

The classic technique, found in both Joy of Cooking and Baking Illustrated, involves scoring the skin, blanching the peaches for one to two minutes (“blanching” means sticking them in boiling water), and then shocking them in ice water to kill any residual heat and prevent the peaches from cooking. This was a potential mess, since the peach skins didn’t always come off easily, the flesh underneath would always soften (trouble if the peach was already ripe), and you’d have two more things to clean.

So the real purpose of this post is to recommend a kitchen gadget. For Christmas of ’05 I got a Mario Batali serrated peeler as a gift, and I use it almost exclusively for one thing: peeling peaches. It’s also supposed to be wonderful for peeling tomatoes and plums, but who the hell peels plums besides Jack Horner’s mom? Anyway, the serrated peeler makes quick work of the peaches required for a pie, and I’d say saves me 15-20 minutes of prep, plus the cleanup time, not to mention all the swearing and aggravation that usually ended with me peeling the damn things with a paring knife anyway.

There’s also an Oxo version that’s $2 cheaper; I’ve got several Oxo products, including two straight-bladed vegetable peelers, and they do offer a good grip, although I find it annoying that the slits on the sides trap water in the dishwasher. I’m guessing there’s no real difference in how they perform, since I’ve never had a problem with any of the Oxo items I own.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: