THE GURGLING COD

Parkside, 5-2.

A friend we will call Addison sometimes sends things my way that he thinks will inflame my dudgeon. Not very nice. So, I greet the news of the Meyer/Williams-Sonoma premade cocktail collab with a hearty congratulations to all involved, and I raise a Parksider to toast the Mr. and Mrs. T of the new millennium. And allow me to suggest extending the brand to the 6th borough with a tiein with the original Parkside killer.

Salad Days

A feature like post-collegiate kitchen makes sense, or would if young people read newspapers. But honing your culinary chops so that you can emulate the Olive Garden experience at home? To put it another way, is this a salad or a cry for help?

Via YM.

Ron Popeil invades Sonoma ZOMG1!

Ladies and gentlemen, the VeggieChop.
 

Salad bar -- neither salad nor bar -- discuss

Manhattan media insiders tell me that nobody actually reads the Sun, which is the only logical explanation for the bit of whimsy perpetrated there recently:

Whole Foods Market bills itself as a destination for organic and natural food, and the tactic seems to have worked, as a health-conscious crowd can often be seen at its prepared foods sections — and in particular, the salad bars. Armed with compostable containers, customers can be seen loading their trays with mixed greens and an array of cooked items such as tofu, stir-fry, and chicken.

While many prepared dishes at Whole Foods can be healthful, an analysis conducted by a laboratory on behalf of The New York Sun found that filling the containers can result in a single meal containing large percentages of the Food and Drug Administration's recommended daily allotment of calories, fat, and sodium.

Well, stop the fucking presses, smack me on the ass, and call me Wilford Brimley.

At Whole Foods, which charges $7.99 a pound for food at its salad bars, containers come in two sizes that can accommodate generous portions: The smaller holds 36 fluid ounces and the larger holds 54 fluid ounces. Competitors offer containers that come in a variety of sizes as well.
Health experts, physicians, and nutritionists said it is difficult for people to sample appropriate-size portions, which they defined as one-half cup, or four ounces, of one prepared food item.
"Visually, you'd want to fill the space," a cardiac surgeon known for making frequent appearances on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," Dr. Mehmet Oz, said.
"The average person who is going to a salad bar is overeating," a registered dietician who is a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, Keri Gans, said.

By my reckoning, this is three kinds of sad: 1) Actual health care professionals rolling out the "what you don't know about ____ can kill you" gambit favored by third-place local newscasts during sweeps months 2) That there is a cardiac surgeon who is famous for his appearances on Oprah, and 3) The chilling suspicion that there might actually be readers for whom this would represent useful service journalism.

For the suspicion in #3 to be true, the semantic slipperiness of the word "salad" would have to be beyond the grasp of the average Whole Foods shopper. To review: "salad," as in "I'll just have a salad," refers usually to a lettuce-based preparation of leafy green vegetables, as such, potentially healthy.* "Salad," however, can also refer to just about any refrigerated and prepared food, such as egg salad. A "Salad Bar" usually contains some of each kind of salad item. One could a) make a salad of baby spinach and cherry tomatoes with a light splash of vinaigrette, or b) fix yourself a pail of sausage gravy, and call it a salad. As such,  the salad bar represents a series of choices, sort of like eating in general. If your idea of a light meal includes a pound of Southern Sweet Potato Salad,* not even Oprah's cardiologist can save you. 

*And the "vegan chicken delight" would delight whom, exactly? Lovers of conundrums? Those who make croutons out of the square root of -1?

Zing!

This news of the famous Wine Spectator scam of 08, reminds me of a different piece of fake news:
Zing! I Just Got You With Another One Of My Trademark 'Complete Lies'
If you try hard enough, you can perpetrate a scam on just about anyone. If the purpose of the scam were to reveal some sort of fraud perpetrated by WS, it might have a point, but WS seems to be pretty clear about what each level of recognition, as WS editor Thomas Matthews explains. Granted, collecting a fee like this in return for a certificate is a bit of a racket, but it's a racket restaurants are under no obligation to join. I was chatting with a chef/owner recently about this business who told me he'd never opted in, saying "If you want to write about my wine, write about my wine, but I'm not going to pay for it." For an encore, perhaps Robin Goldstein will create Tammy Everett, a fictitious student from New Trier, and get her into Who's Who Among American High School Students

Lawyer fail?

The seemingly deathless "fail" meme gets on the food bandwagon with Failfoods.com. Some are amusing, but at the end of the day, it's not that hard to find a picture of food that's unappetizing. More interesting is the logo. Is anyone in Austin paying attention?

What a crock

It's been a while since we looked in on the Madness that is Williams-Sonoma ( beetubs, this week's posts, at large , skew v. West Coast, WTF?), but to be sure, the brain-damaged elves have been busy in their workshop. It's a repush of the $250.00 crock pot, now advertised as the magical indoor device that can produce BBQ. The receipt for the short ribs is reasonable enough (Except for the $13.00 BBQ sauce.* I think I'd rather pay for sex than buy BBQ sauce from a mail order outfit in California.) But you can braise short ribs until Daniel Boulud shows up at your house wearing nothing but a toque and a smile,** and you still won't have BBQ. Heck, you can ask these guys, but BBQ is a noun, and not something that happens in a crock pot. This sort of indifference to meaning damages the whole enterprise. If they are this careless w/ BBQ, who's to say that the potholders are not actually rags soaked in kerosene?

And it's spreading -- reader Chapman passes along news of the Slider Station mini burger sensation. Considering that the slider urge usually hits when one is too drunk to cook for oneself, this one is an accident waiting to happen.

*And calling a BBQ sauce "Southern style" is about as useful as calling a wine "European style."
**8-10 hours, usually, depending on the wind.

Do I dare to eat a $8.00 $4.50 peach nectarine?

Some folks in the city by the bay are in a bit of an uproar over a dessert at Zuni that was nothing but a nectarine on a plate, with a price tag of $8.00 $4.50. A couple of things to point out.
1) The response from Zuni:
 Yikes! If the customer who posted this photo was charged $8.00 for the nectarine it was definitely an error. We would love the customer to contact us with their receipt and we would be more than happy to refund the entire amount for the fruit. Checking our menus, the Blossom Bluff Summer Grand nectarine was on our dessert menu from July 29-31st for $4.50
It's reminiscent of a famous anecdote about the good hit-no field baseball legend  Babe Herman. Some friends were criticizing his fielding skills, claiming that on more than one occasion, he had been hit on the head by a fly ball. He disputed the claim, and vowed that if he ever got hit on the head by a fly ball, he would quit baseball. His friends asked him if getting hit on the shoulder counted, and George thought for a minute and said "No, on the shoulder don't count." $4.50 is still a bit pricey for a stonefruit rolling around on a plate, not as embarrassing as getting hit on the head, but still embarrassing.
2) Zuni's Judy Rodgers cut her teeth at Panisse, and this kind of thing has been a part of Alice Waters's deal since before the Gator roamed left field at Fenway. Angela Carter, for one, was unmoved:

The cook-proprietor of 'Chez Panisse', Alice Waters, says in her Introduction: 'I bought Elizabeth David's French Country Cooking and I cooked everything in it, from beginning to end. I admired her aesthetics of food and wanted a restaurant that had the same feeling as the pictures on the covers of her books.' It seems an unusual desire, to create a restaurant that looks like a book-jacket, and most of the cooks from whom Mrs David originally acquired her recipes would think it even more unusual to learn to cook from a book instead of from Mum. But all this must spring naturally from the kind of second-order experience that lies behind the cult of food. Alice Waters is a girl from New Jersey who earned her culinary stripes by resolutely cooking her way through a compendium of French recipes assembled by an Englishwoman, using ingredients from Northern California and serving them up to the me-generation in a restaurant named after an old movie. The result is a Franco-Californian cuisine of almost ludicrous refinement, in which the simplest item is turned into an object of mystification. A ripe melon, for example, is sought for as if it were a piece of the True Cross. Ms Waters applauds herself on serving one. 'Anyone could have chosen a perfect melon, but unfortunately most people don't take the time or make an effort to choose carefully and understand what that potentially sublime fruit should be.' She talks as if selecting a melon were an existential choice of a kind to leave Jean-Paul Sartre stumped.

Eating at Zuni is one of the things I'm looking forward to most about a December trip to SF. That, and the Habermas throwdown, but I digress. I'm looking forward to eating there, because I enjoy the Zuni Cookbook so much. What I enjoy about the Zuni cookbook is the relentless focus on how to cook particular dish -- cooking out of it can leave you feeling harassed, as when you have to shift red onion pickles back and forth between boiling water and ice water three times, or dry the inside of the chicken you will roast three days later -- but the results are often remarkable. This focus on technique makes the lone Zuni book much more compelling than the raft of variously authored books under the Panisse brand. Ingredient-driven food is great, and Waters is the lioness of this movement, but here, the heir's dessert apes Alice's worst inclinations towards mystifying the foods she champions.

The Freeze

Mr. Addison, longtime commenter and FOC commented on a previous post to the effect that The Freeze, were, in fact, superior to Mission of Burma. More rocking? Yes. More influential? No. In any case, here's a tune by them that also offers a useful mnemonic for remembering the hometown of the current NBAchampions. The pic to the left is of their LP with the cover  by Edward Gorey, which as you might imagine, is eBay catnip.

Michael Bauer: The antithesis of Jedediah Springfield

By some accounts, Michael Bauer has the kind of make-or-break sway over SF restaurants that Frank Rich used to have over NYC theater. Unlike Rich, Bauer gives the appearance of working in concert with the local  Convention and Visitors bureau. A whisper that the Bay Area is not the epicenter of American gastronomy sends him running to the keyboard like he's Hobbes, and it's a can of tuna. His recent effort is par for the course:

California is a culinary gold mine.The state grows the food that feeds the world, and the Bay Area nurtures the chefs who prepare it. Many national dining trends have their roots here, and it's where dedicated food lovers and chefs from around the country come to play and get inspired. Great cooks are everywhere - at a neighborhood bar, in a modest storefront restaurant and at haute cuisine white-tablecloth venues. But the Bay Area's visionary chefs are more than great cooks; they are people who have made Northern California an epicurean epicenter. Today and in the next two Food sections, I'll profile 20 of these innovators who have helped change the way we eat.

It's a three-part listicle, but whatever, it's August. More striking is the rhetoric, which seems cribbed from an article in a Southwest Airlines inflight magazine, where they talk about all the exciting things to see and do in some town you wish you could afford not to have to fly through. The list includes Alice Waters, Tony Gulisano, Paula LeDuc, Thomas Keller, Cindy Pawlcyn, Craig Stoll, Emily Luchetti, Charles Phan, Jeremy Fox, and Gerald Hirigoyen.As Grub St. points out, other than Keller and Waters, these are not folks who have reached the level of influence where,  say, folks outside of San Francisco have heard of them. Paul Bertolli pops up in part two, but Bauer continues to bat around .200 in terms of names that are recognizable to a non-SFer who reads a lot about food.
It's the kind of thing that's easier to see when it's the mote in someone else's eye, but Bauer ultimately does SF a disservice with this kind of parochial boosterism. It's the same kind of folly that lead a younger Cod to champion some of the more obscure bands of his native Boston, (say, 8th Route Army) which undermined his advocacy of legitimate giants, like Mission of Burma. Bauer's inflation of SF chefs makes it seem as if he is writing about a much smaller town. It's cheerleading that leaves the reader with a profound sense of disembiggenment.