THE GURGLING COD

Friday Fun

The boys at Momofuku are all carrying on like it was the Turntable lab blog or something:
I'll be interested to know how long until Larry stops in for his free meal.

Im in yr restar4ntz eatin yr f00dz!*

In case you missed it, more evidence of the overweening power and influence of food bloggers from last Sunday's Chronic:

Just days after opening Senses, his San Francisco bistro, Teo Kridech clicked onto the World Wide Web only to find that his dream business was considered an overnight flop.   

"Senses is like a botched face lift covered with layers of poorly applied cheap make-up on a hot humid day in Biloxi, Miss.," one poster wrote on the Web site Yelp.

"The food is crap," yelped another. 

They mocked the "cheap porcelain plates," they ripped the "little butter dish from Ikea," and they derided the decor and staff. 

The posts "nearly killed my business," said Kridech, a native of France who has worked in the food industry for 25 years and spent $150,000 revamping the Senses space. "Everyone has become a food critic. They think they're real big shots. They probably can't even make scrambled eggs.

"My wife and children eat here every day," he continued. "Do you think I would serve them disgusting food?"

If you think restaurant critics from mainstream newspapers, television and magazines are tough on the food industry, you haven't spent much time in cyberspace. Online message boards, gossip columns, city restaurant guides and food blogs are proliferating and having a profound influence on where consumers spend their eating dollars. The once-genteel discipline of restaurant reviewing has turned into a free-for-all, celebrated by some as a new-world democracy but seen by others as populist tyranny.

This reaction is not even shooting the messenger -- it is shooting the mailbox. The article is generally well reported, with quotations from some SF food interwebnets types, Ben Leventhal, and Bruni himself. The reaction of the bistro proprietor in the lede reminds me of a leitmotif of Ann Landers columns in the late 1990s -- "My spouse met his or her new lover on the Internets and left me. Damn you Internets, damn you to hell!" In each of these cases, the internet provides means and opportunity, but not a motive.   If the food is not crap, then, chances are, folks will not say it is crap.** The Yelp thread in question is here. Decide for yourself.Also, working in another industry that allows for anonymous critiques on the internet, I can attest that a) folks moved to make those responses generally have anomalously positive or negative things to say and b) it is human nature to dwell on the negative comments. So a prospective diner will tend to read reviews differently than a proprietor, which is a good thing. By way of example, imagine the following conversation between two people planning to dine together:

"How about restaurant X?"

"Let me check.... wait, no, someone said something  bad about it on the Internet. Any other ideas?"

These folks would starve to death.

Two other comments cannot pass.

Everyone has become a food critic. They think they're real big shots. They probably can't even make scrambled eggs.

Well naturally. After the long permitting process, the years of apprenticeship, the daunting expense,  taking 30 seconds to open a Blogger account, why wouldn't a food blogger feel like a big shot? But this guy should stop being an asshat fire his publicist. I just finished reading Danny Meyer's book, (interesting, and more on that soon), and it is pretty clear by about page 8, that he's managed to thrive by maintaining a really exalted notion of hospitality. The essence of this philosophy might be distilled into treating people like big shots, even if empirically, they are not. Coincidentally this is the opposite of the approach Kridech takes, and hammers home with the "scrambled eggs" jape.

2) The once-genteel discipline of restaurant reviewing has turned into a free-for-all, celebrated by some as a new-world democracy but seen by others as populist tyranny.

"New world democracy" or "Populist tyranny"? Historians of the French Revolution might beg to differ, but the object to the right is viewed by some as a po-tay-to, and by others as a po-ta-to.

*Apologies to Modern Kicks. 

**There are exceptions  -- the takeaway: when  your servers sleep with patrons, make sure they return their calls the next day. UPDATE:  This story is far from over.

 

Uncle Tom's Barnyard?

My moral antennae may be a bit more musketty than usual, as I'm getting ready to teach Uncle Tom's Cabin for my day job. If you have not treated yourself recently, this is the book where Harriet Beecher Stowe fulminates against the evil of slavery for six hundred pages or so. Correctly identifying slavery as a great moral evil, her position is that all the slaves should be freed. Skipping ahead to 2007, Puck may join Stowe as in the ranks of great moral crusaders. Earlier, Puck released his new animal welfare policies. And now Burger King has done the same. But there is a difference -- read and see:

• It has started purchasing 10 percent of its pork from producers that do not confine breeding pigs in gestation crates, which are too small to allow even ordinary movement. The volume of pork purchases coming from gestation crate-free producers will double to 20 percent by the end of the year.

• It has also implemented a purchasing preference for pork from producers that do not confine breeding sows in gestation crates

There's some other, stuff, but overall, it reminds me of that old spiritual, "When Israel as in Egypt's land / Let 10% of my people go." This is like that. It is better than nothing, but I ain't buying the Burger King a ticket to Stockholm just yet.  And, as the Accidental Hedonist points out, there is nothing about cows. Fuck 'em, I say. Despite dire predictions, this whole animal welfare slope does not seem so slippery after all.

Bowery WF OMG!!!

If the putatively jaded and world-weary denizens of the global capital of culture, finance and politics get so excited when a supermarket opens, what would happen if the circus came to town?

Viva La Raza?

Bourdain steps back into Ruhlman's chrome sandbox, and drops the simultaneously oafish and righteous science like only Tony can. On one hand, he sticks up for the nameless army of mainly Latino cooks who, night in, night out, actually realize the visions of the Beard honorees:

I explained that I would be an enthusiastic supporter and participant of all things Beard when and if I saw some kind of an effort to acknowledge the people who are actually doing the cooking in this country--the between 30 and 70% of restaurant employees of Mexican and Latino origin--of varying legal status. I was thinking a few bucks set aside for free para-legal advice. Maybe a widely accessible library. English lessons.

On the other hand, he gets it twisted. Rants against the Beard  are probably mostly a Good Thing, but the above rant is inspired by this affront:

We like famous chefs just fine--especially if we're handing'em the Cuisinart/Vulcan/Fiji Water Humanitarian Award--but who are these nasty cook creatures we keep hearing rumors of?"  The $400 dollar a pop awards--where, traditionally, chefs and cooks from all over the country are "invited" (in a Carlo Gambino sense of the word) to contribute food and labor and personnel for a grand tasting clusterfuck near the ceremony, were, until recently, held at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. This venue had the appropriate--one would think--virtue of actually having a fucking KITCHEN. Presumably--and I'm just guessing here--COOKS like-when laboring for free to put their restaurant's best foot forward and bring honor to their clans--to have an actual KITCHEN. You know..that place where they actually COOK? Not this year, friends. This year, it has been decided that in favor of bigger and swankier accomodations for the self congratulatory nearly all-white attendees, that the cooks can take it in their collective poop-chute. At The new venue, Avery Fisher Hall, only hot boxes, induction tops and propane burners are allowed. Reheats only!

Yah, that sucks, but it is not clear how the lack of  Garland ranges is discriminatory. I'm all for kicking against the pricks, but as Scott Norwood can tell you, when you're kicking, aim is important. Also, as predicted, some other posts in this sandbox have denounced Puck's foie ban as a publicity stunt. I think that might well be true, but Bourdain's advocacy here might well have similarly mixed motives.

Busy

But never too busy to share news like this:

THE folks who run Hooters may be the world's biggest boobs - for kissing off a chance to get Pam Anderson into one of their restaurants. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wanted to book the Hooters on West 56th Street for a private party on April 17 feting "Committed: A Rabble-Rouser's Memoir," the new book by PETA honcho Dan Mathews veggie Buffalo wings., and planned to serve But Hooters suits put the kibosh on the idea on grounds that the organization is too politically charged and controversial. A spokesman for the Chicago-owned chain said: "PETA mobilizes strong feelings on both sides of the fence. It wouldn't make good
business sense for us."
And

"[PETA honcho] Mathews, who's now looking for a more tolerant venue, told us, "Hosting the book party would have showed that Hooters is well rounded in more ways than one. We're always looking for ways to keep the 'T' and 'A' in PETA."

Two of many possible questions
1) When did righteousness and smuttyness become the new peanut butter and jelly? The whole "I'd rather go naked than wear fur" thing made sense as a one-off, but PETA seems committed to bringing the jiggle to everything they do, viz image at right. I suppose if we have to put up with cheesecake to get rid of sweatshops, we can tolerate a bit more to save the animals.

2) Veggie chicken wings? 

Milling through the Grinder

Nothing like a vacation to get those RSS feeds all backed up like Idi's hydroelectrics. A few odds and sods from Grinder worthy of note, though the commentary there remains wildly uneven.

1)

The AP is reporting that Maryland legislators will consider a raw milk bill that would allow dairy farmers to sell the good stuff directly to consumers, if not in stores.
<snip>
In Maryland, where the dairy industry has been in trouble for a few years, some are looking toward raw milk as a way to salvage the family farm. Proponents believe raw milk is a more authentic product than the pure white gallons most of us tote home from the supermarket.

Good news, I imagine, but more importantly, it's been a while since Big Daddy Kane turned up here.

2) Evidently, pork is the new black. Glad the rest of the world is joining the Cod on this bandwagon. However, this snippet raised a question:

At the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Food Editor Hsiao-Ching Chou discusses how chefs love pork belly—the cut that gets cured into bacon. “If you want to get a chef all hot and bothered,” she writes, “whisper ‘pork belly’ in her ear.” Chou says a local meat wholesaler reports that its pork belly sales have doubled in the past three months alone.

Despite the best efforts of science, each pig has one belly. So where are the extra bellies coming from? Or, more to the point, what used to happen to the bellies? More generally, it would be interesting to know how changing fashions in food, viz the offalsance of the early Oughts, affect what happens to the rest of the beast.

3) Chow throws an NYT travel writer under the bus, in an item that blends the eyerolling of a petulant teen with the pompous self-regard of Ambrose Abercombie:

But Pergament writes about injera as though it had descended from the sky in a silvery picnic basket wreathed by moon-lilies:

And at the heart of every Ethiopian meal is injera. Basically a pancake — or more accurately, a really, really big pancake — injera is made from tef, a sour-wheat-like grain that is mixed with cool water and a pinch of yeast.
<snip>

This would be a little like traveling to Tijuana and writing:

And at the heart of every Mexican meal is a tortilla. Basically a pancake, tortillas are made from wheat or corn. But unlike a pancake, this form of bread isn’t spongy, isn’t covered in syrup, and isn’t made into McGriddles.

I frequently indulge in this sort of X is like Y approach, but  this seems unfair, in that it is reasonable to suppose that many readers of the Times will not be familiar with Ethiopian food, as many of them a) own mattresses and boxsprings and b) are not in grad school. It would seem more reasonable for  Mr. Norton to congratulate himself on his cosmopolitanism.

4) In the ever-changing world of foie (that whole thing in Iraq worked out, and we cured AIDS, right?) news that it may be possible to get foie, sans gavage. I'm sure I'm not the first to make this joke, but if someone would just design an adaptor so geese can get their tiny beaks into a Graffix, this problem would solve itself.

5) Not surprisingly, Stabucks wants to crush the rebels before the start of the rainy season:

Competitors of all kinds, small and large coffee companies, fast food operators, and mom and pops … position themselves in a way that creates awareness, trial and loyalty of people who previously have been Starbucks customers. This must be eradicated.

Jebus. Once again, life imitates the Onion. The post goes on to point out that  Starbucks will let you hang out all day long writing your dissertation/novel/40 page rejoinder to a dear John letter, though "extra living room" is pushing it, as my living room's comfortable chairs are rarely monopolized by vagrants, and there is almost never a line for the bathroom. As a reminder, if you enjoy the sociability of the coffeehouse, but prefer not to suckle at the teat of the mermaid, plug a zip into delocator.net, and it will give you the closest non-Starbuck coffee spots.

Los Angeles, Part 1

From time to time, a man has to reconnect with what's really important. In these latter days, it is easy to get caught up in the nonessentials-- finishing collards with balsamic vinegar, truffled grits, watching Rach on Youtube, and so forth. But too much of that sort of thing is not good for the soul, and a time comes where a man must turn aside from such vanities and get back to basics. A man needs to find a place where they still make hamburgers out of food, where the local food section will teach you how to make classics like brown veal stock,  where a handshake is a man's word, and where the people live simpler, more connected lives.
I was lucky enough to find this place. It is called Los Angeles. Both on and off the blog, Angelophiles as diverse as Addison and J-Grizzle had commended the Los Angeles burger culture to me. The cinetrix and I managed to hit two ends of the spectrum, Pie N Burger in Pasadena, and an In N Out that was a Leinart scramble away from the rental car return. In their own ways, both were impressive. Pie and Burger is an institution, but comes a little pricey at around seven bucks for a fastfood sized burger.* But I'm still thinking of it with fondness. In what I gather is the normal presentation, the burger comes with a variant of Thousand Island dressing, and in a little paper corset holding the whole contraption together, which is useful if you can manage not to eat the paper. Pie and Burger was also the site of one of the more remarkable server encounters I've had in 07: Pie and Burger rocks a vaguely nostalgic vibe with the decor, but it seems to be the retro born of not ever redecorating. One exception is a giant plasma screen near the back. When we visited, accompanied by gracious hosts the Turtles, said plasma screen was displayng -- wait for it -- the Yearling.** (Click through for spoilers, which will explain our party's consternation.) We were in a booth, and watched with some trepidation as a dad and young son took stools directly in front of the screen. (We'd arrived about the time that Flag started getting into the 'baccy.) As we settled up, we observed to the waitress that it seemed like kind of a harsh vid for the Pasadena lunch crowd. She begged to differ and then proceeded to articulate a fairly involved argument that the title "The Yearling" was a metaphor, referring equally to the boy Jody and the fawn. Our waitress did not appear to be waiting tables between auditions, but rather seemed to be a diner  lifer who probably turned at her birth to face the OB who delivered her, took a pencil from behind her year, and said "what can I get you, hon?" So the film analysis was a bonus.

In N Out is a better-known institution, with multiple locations, all in Cali, I believe. (Long may the regional cult chain wave). I'd been told in no uncertain terms that this was the one can't-miss LA food item. That may be pushing it, but even at 10:30 in the morning, it was in many ways a more interesting meal than our Sunday Supper (deets to follow):

1) We were not the only people there. Even allowing for third shifters having a second breakfast, how many people eat burgers at 10:30 AM?

2) The burgers were tasty, and set the cinetrix and I up for another long day on the wrong side of airport security. The presentation was much the same as Pie N Burger, though the patties were smaller and not as succulent. (For testing purposes, I had a Double Double, and did not try any of the fancy ordering tricks I'd heard about. [Next time, Animal Style.]) The secret to the burger seemed to be that In N Out makes them out of food. You could watch burgers and fries being assembled to order, out of buns, patties, lettuce, tomatoes and condiments. It tasted like a combination of recognizable elements, rather than a congealed lump that eats like a tallow-flavored fruit (see Big Mac).  Alice Waters and In N Out have more than a stretch of I-5 separating them, but I could not help wondering if the general betterness of produce in Cali as opposed to the East Coast explained some of the joy of this burger. The fries were good, and there were not an obscene amount of them. The meal I had at In N Out was a foray of a glutton epicure trying to squeeze one last experience into a trip, but Angelenos can eat like this all over the place, and it is no big thing. Conversely, New York experiments with selling real hamburgers at a reasonable price have resulted in hysteria, lines, bribes, and webcams. If Los Angeles is a hyperbolic exaggeration of the rest of America, but a popular New York burger spot is a  hyperpbolic exaggeration of an LA staple, somewhere, Baudrillard is asking for fries with that.

*A little bigger than a slider, but much smaller than a thickburger, perv.

**Rated G! (With "some intense scenes," they do mention.) What could be better family fun than watching some kid snuff Bambi?

Puckish

Update: The editorial page of America's paper of record agrees. It's like we speak each other's unspoken language.

Some news out of airport concessionaire/celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck's camp:

WASHINGTON, DC (March 22, 2007)—The Wolfgang Puck Companies have implemented an historic animal welfare program that's the first of its kind. The Humane Society of the United States applauded Wolfgang Puck's nine-point program aimed at raising the bar on farm animal treatment and curbing many of the worst cruelties associated with factory farming. These new standards cover all Wolfgang Puck lines of business including fine dining group restaurants, express franchises, catering and events, and consumer products.

So far, so good, according to the press release from the Humane Society. But Puck's precepts are a bit odd in their expression:

Wolfgang Puck's nine-point program, created in conjunction with The HSUS and Farm Sanctuary, will be fully implemented for all Wolfgang Puck companies, starting with the 14 fine dining restaurants, by the end of 2007. The nine include the following:

1. Wolfgang Puck has now eliminated foie gras from the menu of all of its dining establishments. Foie gras is produced by force-feeding ducks or geese to the point where their livers swell up to ten times their normal size.

2. Wolfgang Puck will not use eggs from laying hens confined in battery cages. Caged laying hens are kept in such restrictive conditions, they cannot even spread their wings.

3. Wolfgang Puck will not serve pork from producers who confine breeding sows in gestation crates. These cruel devices restrict animals from even turning around or performing many of their other behaviors for nearly their entire lives.

4. Wolfgang Puck will not serve veal from producers that confine their calves in individual veal crates. This inhumane intensive confinement practice prevents calves from even turning around or walking for months on end.

5. Wolfgang Puck will feature delicious vegetarian options on its menus, as many consumers who want to eat well and humanely look for these selections.

7. Wolfgang Puck will send a letter to the companies' chicken and turkey meat suppliers indicating its interest in Controlled Atmosphere Killing,* a slaughter method involving dramatically less suffering than typical methods.

I wish that he'd had the sack to come up with one more precept, so we could have Wolfgang Puck's Ten Commandments2.0.** These are laudable precepts, by and large, but it's hard not to think that LA Eater might be on to something with the notion this is a way to perk up a flagging brand. Most notably, Puck's sensible production-side dictates get pushed behind the consumption-oriented,  literally headline-grabbing foie gras ban. As I've opined elsewhere, the foie ban is kind of like being involved in a Papillion breed rescue organizaton. You are mitigating suffering, but a very small spectrum of the suffering that humans inflict on animals.  It is, because of its class connotations, the softest target imaginable for PETA, et al. To their credit, the NY Times got it,  focusing on the larger animal welfare issues related to Puck's move, while the LA Times was blinded with foie.  On the other hand, any effort to remove foie will  spark caterwauling from folks like Ruhlman and Snack, generating pub for Puck's empire.***

*See also Ottawa Modified Death.

**It is fun to rewrite the originals in this style:

"Wolfgang Puck will not make unto Wolfgang Puck any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."

Wolfgang Puck will not covet Wolfgang Puck's  neighbour's house, Wolfgang Puck shalt not covet Wolfgang Puck's neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is Wolfgang Puck's neighbour's.

***For the record, I like foie gras. I'm against banning it,  but largely because I think the specter of gavage is a red herring drawing attention away from much larger scale animal welfare issues. Come to think of it, if I ran PR for Tyson, I'd propose covertly funding anti-foie campaigns as a way to keep PETA out of the hen house.

Reluctantly

I share the following, with misgivings,  fearful that this collage may have been assembled for the wrong reasons, but it is a Friday. Stay tuned for a return to PHC. A reserved tip of the fin in the direction of commenter and codpadre New Orleans. Update

Update: A similar compilation  is here. I suggest opening either one, then  just letting the audio run in the background. Via TFS.