THE GURGLING COD

Don't quit your day job

Evidently, wine is the new hot sauce:

Vince Neil (photo), frontman for legendary rock group MÖTLEY CRÜE, has announced the creation of Vince Vineyards, a joint partnership with notable wine & spirits veteran, Russ Dale. The two primary partners are joined by legendary music agent Burt Stein and plan on producing and releasing a variety of fine wines, food related products and future winery project.*

Moreover:

Blur bassist Alex James has revealed that he is ready to start producing his own cheese.

The musician, who also releases music with both Fat Les and Wigwam revealed his new plans in his regular column in The Independent.

"The more I think about cheese," wrote James, "the more I like it and the more I want some, which is why I'm taking matters into my own hands and venturing into the world of independent cheese making."

"My heart always beats a little bit faster in the cheese aisle of a French supermarket," added the star. "The Italians, too, eat more cheese than us, as do the Danes. Danish cheese is not as well known, but well worth exploring."

Danish cheese is worth exploring? Probably, but out of the mouth of a member of Bur, it sounds a bit like someone who has been interviewed one too many times, and is amusing himself, rather than an Havarti adherent. Also, to keep balance in the universe, will we see a dreadful vanity band featuring employees of Bonny Doon Vineyard and Cowgirl Creamery,  Rock Bottom Remainder stizz?
( Via Idolator.)

* You can buy the wine here, but maybe don't drink all that Petrus to make room -- someone who is not Vince Neil appears to be squatting on Vincevineyards.com, which can't be a good sign.

Say "cheese," cheese plate

 

The SF Chronicle raises the question of photographing meals in restaurants. (Via TFS) I've never been tempted to snap a picture of a plate while I'm out to dinner, but I appear to be in the minority. For me, would trumps should -- when I think about meals I have particularly enjoyed, I can't imagine how a picture of a dish could convey that. I suspect this is a function of both language and photography. Lacking a fork, I experience food through words, rather than images -- for instance, It's hard to imagine how pictures could add anything to MFKF or Liebling's adventures in France. Frequently, it seems to me that the photo functions as some sort of trophy of the meal. More generally, professional food photography, and its inevitable food stylists, has about as much to do with food as porngraphy has to do with sex, and thus the visual image distorts the experience.
    Even if you have the skill to be the Helmut Newton of hash browns, it seems to me there are still good reasons not to photograph each course of a meal. Generally speaking, a meal is a social occasion, which involves implicit contracts with the other folks at the table, as well as the surrounding table. If I were out, especially at a special restaurant, I'd move from nonplussed to actively pissed off if one of my companions halted the flow of the meal to snap shots of each course. Also, and especially if there is a flash, it is disrespectful to fellow patrons. Dining rooms are for dining. Companions and fellow diners aside, it might not be the best thing for the person with the camera. I imagine that some of the other folks who write about food who read this have caught themselves trying to turn a meal into a post before the entrees were served. Transforming experience into representations instantly is a boon of our age, but also a trap. Yes, lady at whatever they call where the Giants play taking cameraphone pics of the tv monitor just after Barry Bonds hit #715, I am talking about you, not to mention folks talking on their cell phones and waving from behind home plate at Fenway to their friends back home. Compusively turning experiences into images or texts robs them of some of their value as experiences, I think.

Turning to could from should and would, Pim offers a defense of the shutterbug:

And they are vocal about their right to snap away. Though she tries to be sensitive to restaurants' concerns, Pim Techamuanvivit, who authors the well-known blog Chez Pim (chezpim.typepad.com), has no qualms about bringing her camera: "I'm entitled to take all the photographs because I paid to eat the meal."

I must respectfully dissent from Pim. Her own statement gives the reason: "I paid to eat the meal." Exactly. A restaurant meal is not an experience as much as it is a commodity, and the purveyors of the experience have the right to control it. Unless it is carryout, you do  not own a meal on your plate in quite the same way that you own a brooch or a scarf. You are entitled to eat the meal because you paid for the meal. 

Who is it that is unwise enough to assert that they will be able to defeat the New Orleans franchise of the National Football league?

Or,
Who dat say they gonna beat them Saints?

Say what you will about bread and circuses, of the massive injustice of rehabbing the Superdome while entire neighborhoods continue to rot. All of that is true. But the fact of the matter is that losing the Saints would have been even more devastating. And this yesterday  from a New Orleans correspondent:

[We] spent a good part of [Sunday] night in a downtown parking lot setting up tents, slow cooking brisket, etc - [X. and Y.] are leaving work early so they have plenty of time to coat themselves (and me) in gold body paint. [N.] has called me three times this morning trying to figure out how to get all of his meat downtown and still ride his bike so he can get really drunk.

Read that last sentence again -- this is a professional adult with college-age kids who is spending the bulk of a weekday morning figuring out how to feed all of his people, get drunk, and not kill anyone on the way home. Remind me again why there is not a Nobel Prize for tailgating? This is the mixture of generosity and profligacy that makes New Orleans New Orleans. And one of the folks mentioned above was working at Charity for days after the storm. Without the Saints, no gold body paint. With the Saints, it will be harder for the rest of the country to forget about New Orleans. I am not sure when the Super Bowl will return to New Orleans, but just now, the Saints have a better record than the last four Super Bowl teams, so perhaps an NFC championship game will do in the meantime.  

Sublime Ball?

Most reviews of  home canning cookbooks do not provoke the mixture of fascination and dread  I associate with the sublime, but evidently the new Ball is not most home canning cookbooks:

But this cookbook is great for novices too because its breezy, fast-paced jump-in-and-do-it approach makes the techniques of home canning immediately accessible. And when you have a crop of peaches waiting to be processed, you don't want to spend three days figuring out how to make jam.

Taking a cue from computer program tutorials, the authors dispense with the scary-sounding introductory material about bacteria and spoilage that everyone skips over anyway and instead propose that the newcomer learn by doing one of five basic recipes: strawberry jam, mint jelly, simple "house" salsa, traditional corn relish or pick-a-vegetable dill pickles. Each introductory recipe illustrates certain principles that are fully delineated in a back-of-the-book section on the science of preserving.

I suspect that this reviewer may be doing the prospective reader a disservice. Every single member of my immediate family is known to pickle, and judging by the lack of swollen or slimy jars in the pantry, nobody skips the bacteria and spoilage material. Living in a world where rudimentary knowledge of Excel is viewed as a Promethian feat, I don't spend much time with computer program tutorials, but I'm pretty confident you can't get botulism from a laptop, so a different approach might be warranted here.  That said, as a new owner of a lawnmower, a glance at the manual confirimed my intuition that none of my extremities would benefit from exposure to the mower blade, and I did not read through all of the possible opportunities for SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH my purchase created.*
    If the new Ball manages to convey the requisite food safety information without jading the reader, it would be a noteworthy feat, and a milestone in cookbook design. Especially where there are food safety issues, cookbooks tend to be maddeningly redundant, repeating the same information for autoclaving jar lids for the geen salsa as for the red salsa on the adjacent page. Even outside of this particular application, there are too many cookbooks that devour pages reiterating techniques -- in particular, the Raichlen grilling book I have has the same sequence of photos every time a receipt calls for a two-level fire.
        Beyond its management of the mechanics of canning, the receipts described sound interesting and much more cosmopollitan than in most pickling cookbooks -- the traditional Ball Blue book contains few receipts that would be out of place as condiments on Bronco Nagurski's training table, but here we have litanies of chutney, and a Vietnamese carrot and daikon pickle, which brings that dream of Bahn Mi at home one step closer--and, evidently, receipts for homemade mustards and preserved limes. This sounds as if it might be the new killer app in the world of pickling and canning books -- Putting Food By is a classic, but many of the receipts have the miasma of home ec/extension office about them. When I get my hands on a copy, I will confirm or deny this impression.
*As an indicator of how far we've come, in the summer, I have occasion to use a Ike-era Hahn lawnmower, whose safety equipment consists of a faded sticker saying "USE COMMON SENSE."

Rivington Street Freezeout?

Good to know that the Israelis and Palestinians are getting along, Iraq's enjoying bucolic peace, and spinach is safe to eat, because it frees us all (esp. the Cod, evidently)  up to bloviate about trendy restaurants on the Lower East Side. Megnut gets in the act with an account of a recent dinner at Freemans, infants in tow, where the service left something to be desired. Babies in restaurants (esp. in NY) brings out the commenters like no other, with a fairly even split between the banning-children-under-35-from-the-island-of-Manhattan camp, and the insisting-on-the-right-to-change-a-toddler-in-the-Per  Se-dining-room camp. You can get some sense of both positions trawling the comments. I've tried here and there to stake out some middle ground on this issue, but the specific case of Freemans raises a different, and more complicated question.*

The service described seems bad, but not  Amnesty International bad.  Certainly it was bad enough that it seems it will discourage the members of this party from returning to Freemans. I do not know if this is the case, but what if that was exactly what it was supposed to do? It may well be, as some commenters suggested, a server having a bad day, but it is also at least possible that a restaurant that relies heavily on a certain je ne sais quoi might prefer not to have the custom of parents with infants in tow. Might the management of a place like Freemans wonder if having four adults and two kids come in at 6:30 would convey the impression to the diners rolling in at 8:00 that it was no longer the Hernando's Hideaway of the oughts?

I do not  know if this is the case, but if it is, it raises the larger question what restaurants can do to encourage the kind of patrons consistent with their vision, and discourage those who are not. Certainly, it would be illegal (though not unprecedented) for patrons of one race to get deliberately bad service -- if you see your establishment as catering to a certain crowd, and parents are not part of that crowd, and you feel that your regulars will decamp to the next spot if they see Cheerios on the floor -- is it justifiable to discourage those patrons?

Conversely , if Hary Dean Stanton and Grace Jones walked into Freemans (without babies) they still might find something to complain about with the service. Good food/terrible service seems to be par for the course.Thus, beyond the freezeout hypothesis, it is also entirely possible that the usual Freemans experience might stimulate a persecution complex in parents/diners who are ready to attribute any perceived deficit in service to anti-breeder bias.

Megnut  concludes:

In my experience, and as Mr. Bruni's review demonstrates, a great restaurant is more than just its food. It's a welcoming environment that sets you at ease. It's a place that treats each and every guest with respect, whether they're a big-time restaurant critic or a few friends stopping in for an early dinner with babies in tow.

This maybe Ms. Hourihan's definition of a great restaurant, but it is a definition that is her own. Le Bernardin, for instance, is not known for offering a "welcoming environment that sets you at ease" unless perhaps if you are Henry Kissinger, and Sirio Maccioni has made an entire career out of treating each and every guest with a different amount of respect. In its own way, Freemans is snooty and exclusive, and it has flourished because of this approach -- if you don't want to be part of this peculiar scrum, there are bunch of other spots to eat in the area.
*Thanks to the Hav for pointing out this thread.

She showed me the beach, gave me a peach, she said she liked the ocean

Is it possible for a whole restaurant to smell like Ishtar? Also, if your opening is choreographed by a "PR giant," shouldn't they be able to create buzz more positive than "Ninja with bikinis"? DJ spinning energizing tunes from a 16-foot lifeguard tower notwithstanding, has there ever been a restaurant with less going for it than the Hawaiian Tropic Zone? Eating even a passable meal here would be astonishing.  Playboy cobranding aside, the Hawaiian Tropic brand as a restaurant fosters an ineluctable comparison to Hooters, which would be hard for an otherwise compelling spot to overcome, but the Hawaiian angle is not reassuring. Hard not to imagine a latter-day Trader Vic's with more exposed midriff. If anyone made it past the velvet rope, I would welcome details, but until then, I will continue to recoil in fear from the idea of a pork chop braised in Captain Morgan served by a tanorexic.

Add Balthazar

FOC, and proud aunt, CAAF, sent along the Grub Street Q&A with her nephew, and Balthazar waiter, Nathan Frye, which includes the following tidbit:

Do any famous people know you?
Björk comes in a lot. She gets the brook trout and salad niçoise. Matthew Barney once got the steak au poivre and some kind of dramatic dessert.

This particular combo makes sense for Björk. Not hard to imagine her tucking the trout into the salad nicoise, picking up the plate at an angle, and singing the song that the trout sings in the stream. On the other hand -- Matthew Barney eats steak? Cooked steak? From a cow? I'd hoped for so much more.

Guaranteed personality

A quiz:

Living out West has infected me. I am a slave of the advertisements and the shameless style of spending money. I have a good car, yet I want a separate car, of a different shape, for those times when I feel a different way about myself. I even want a third car, of a third shape, for a time in my future, that I should hope for, when I feel a third way about myself. And oh the colas. They are never content with their colas. They add cherry, and vanilla, and then coffee flavor, and they take away the sugar, like a magician pulling away the tablecloth, and change the logo artwork, and keep you ever dancing, dancing, like a madman on a red-hot conveyor belt to hell; if you don't dance in place and always buy more strange new soda then you'll fall on your side and be whisked off to the scalding white-hot pits of brimstone and sulphur. That is what it is like to get out of bed each day in California.

Who said it?
A) Evelyn Waugh
B) Peter H. Cropes
C) Noel Coward
D) Theodor Adorno

Add Freemans

Thanks to On The House, Eater readers get a glimpse of the cast staying up to read the reviews after the big show:*

At the end, Taavo was the one that called it. Ten years in architecture and fashion has given him a healthy dose of skepticism when it comes to critics. He didn’t stick around to see how the review came out, but he texted me later, “Critics have been slamming the Stones for decades, but they like making music and people like listening to it. Our food is simple, but people like it.  We’re not trying to be Phillip Glass.”

There is something to this analogy, but not everything. Bruni's labored swan dive/degree of difficulty gripe seems to miss the point. Yes, Grant Achatz might offer an interpretation of Devils on Horseback where prune leather was carved into the shape of pentagrams, and served with a dusting of hoof and brimstone, but this ain't that place. Sometimes folks want to hear "Jumping Jack Flash," or, I suppose, "Satisfaction."**

And yet. If in, fact, if there are still critics paying attention to the Rolling Stones, I doubt their gripe is that Mick and the lads do not sound enough like Philip Glass. The beef may be that the Stones have been at it for too long, but if Freeman's were a person, it would still be wearing Pull Ups. In fact, the most damning criticisms Bruni had were for the service, not the food. Based on un-recent experience, the environment of Freemans is not one that encourages people to be excellent to one another, and I imagine spending the duration of a shift, rather than a meal, would only exacerbate this feeling. In any case, if you are running a spot serving twelve-dollar mac & cheese in an alley on the Lower East Side, attitude is an important part of the equation. It is not hard to imagine that the very same hauteur and discomfort*** that keeps the masochists/dedicated followers of fashion coming back for more would be calculated to antagonize a representative of the midtown power elite straying far from the soothing confines of the Time Warner Center. Ultimately, I suspect that this will pass, and that not much Bruni could say could deflect the trajectory of a place like Freeman's.That said, if the Bruni review humanizes the service at Freemans a little but, that's not bad news.

*I feel as if this scene is a staple of many films but can't think of a specific example. Help.
**If I ran Freeman's, the whole staff would be wearing t's tonight that say "Satisfactory." (Admittedly, I thought the same gambit was lame when Julie Powell boosted Mr. Badthings Domino's diss for her slug, but that's diffferent.)
***My visit predated the expansion, so I imagine that the feeling that waiting for a table is like scrapping for a rebound with Maurice Lucas may have diminished.

Jules et Frank

The Gurgling Cod can no longer ignore the glaring truth. Jules, of Brunidigest fame, is no thorn in the side of the man universally acclaimed as America's most powerful restaurant critic.

Frank brings home the leftovers from Per Se.

In fact, as the Hardy Boys might say, Frank and Jules are "in cahoots." Diner's Journal was one attempt to extend the Bruni brand, but how much easier to co-opt the Bruni Digest by predigesting the reviews? For instance, in today's surprising bageling* of Freemans:

Behold Freemans, where the new Lower East Side, Appalachia, a British hunting lodge and a suburban 1950’s dinner party all converge. It’s the kind of unlikely restaurant you’d sooner expect to find in a David Lynch movie than in reality, but here it is, and here it’s been since the summer of 2004, at times pretending to shun attention as a cunning means of getting it.

and

Earlier this year it grew to about 105 seats, including bar stools, from 60. It subsequently overhauled its kitchen, which had been entirely electric, with new equipment and gas lines. Literally, Freemans is now cooking with fire.** Metaphorically, not so much.

not to mention

If cooking were a sport involving a pool, a springboard and numerical degrees of difficulty, nearly everything Freemans does would be a swan dive. There’s not a triple flip in the bunch.

As Alice Waters might tell you, with prose this ripe and juicy, you don't need to do much with  it -- a bit of time with Google Image search for requisite images of diving pigs, Eraserhead costumes, maybe a toothless Appalachian, and voila. Frank sets, Jules spikes.

This is the signal Frank uses for "Satisfactory."
This is print/web synergy at its finest. By producing such remarkable verbal images, week after week, Frank makes it easy for Jules, so folks read Frank through a Jules filter, thereby the extending the range of  the (did we mention?) Most Powerful Restaurant Critic in America.

Jules and Frank celebrate their dominance of New York food media.
Speaking of print/web synergy, the flip side of this relationship may be the curiously asynchronous and asymmetrical dynamic between the Bruni review, and a new feature at Eater, On the House,  a weekly column by William Tigertt of Freemans, which debuts with a diary of being reviewed by the Times. For folks who read reviews, the narrative of the process of being reviewed is of interest (protracted, and almost entirely non-anonymous). Part II conjures this moment:

It makes me sad to think that tomorrow night I will sitting in my office in front of a computer clicking reload on the New York Times webpage until carpal tunnel syndrome sets in. I would much rather be carousing dive bars with my co-workers, self-medicating our jitters, and celebrating whatever victories and setbacks the past two years of New York has thrown at us.

Even before reading this entry, I felt that Freemans deserved better than the "not as good as the Spotted Pig" collar Bruni threw, but this image of exhausting yourself hitting refresh is a useful reminder that even at a spot as calculated as Freemans, there are people and livelihoods involved. On the other hand, the concluding disclaimer (from Eater, not Tigertt)

This story was filed before anyone in the Freemans organization had knowledge of how many stars the Times would award. It should in no way be seen as an anticipatory rebuttal to the review.

has precisely the opposite of the intended effect--it certainly seems to be true, but makes you wonder. In a linear print environment, I might have read On The House first,  then looked at the review when the newsboy pedaled past and lobbed the print Times at my door. But as I imagine many folks do, I woke up, looked at the Times online, then worked my way through the blogs I subscribe to, until I came to Eater. Reading the disclaimer after the review made Tigertt's entire effort seem more defensive than it deserved.

*In the good old days, when midtown salarymen ventured below Houston, they took bagels, rather than left them.

** Gas. I know.