Ice Cream Factory smackdown in Chinatown
Ice Cream Factory smackdown in Chinatown. Same owners or will an ice cream war consume Chinatown?
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kottke.org posts about restaurants
Joel Robuchon to open Atelier restaurant in
Joel Robuchon to open Atelier restaurant in the Four Seasons Hotel in New York next spring.
20 hamburgers you must eat before you die
20 hamburgers you must eat before you die. That In-N-Out isn’t on here almost got this link disqualified from posting, but since they don’t seem to have any other chains on here, I’ll let it slide.
Eater is a new NYC food/restaurant blog
Eater is a new NYC food/restaurant blog. Looks a bit too gossipy for my taste, but that’s me.
The shitty Shitty Tipper database
Does the Shitty Tipper Database seem wrong to anyone else? I’m all for underpaid service staff venting and attempting to raise public awareness about bad tipping (which, in the absence of poor service, amounts to an unjust pay-cut determined completely by some random idiot customer). But since when is anything under 17% considered shitty? $0 on a $125 bill, that’s shitty. 15% (on the pre-tax amount, I might add) is still the industry standard, no matter how much it sucks to get exactly the minimum for adequate service.
More importantly, what gives these people the right to take someone’s full name off of a credit card (procured on the job, BTW) and put it up on the web because of some completely subjective gauge of service provided? If I’m eating somewhere, my expectation is that my credit card is being used only for payment and not for any personal use by the employees of the restaurant. If I don’t leave someone what they think was deserved, they should catch me on the way out and ask me about it. Perhaps I forgot or miscalculated. Or maybe the service was a bit off in my mind. If I left no tip, I probably talked to the manager about why I did so and they’ll be hearing about it from them. But to be all passive aggressive and get my name from my CC and post it on some internet message board…that suggests to me that maybe they didn’t deserve a good tip in the first place.
The folks at Danny Meyer’s Shake Shack
The folks at Danny Meyer’s Shake Shack go above and beyond the call of duty. When a birthday party shows up after an erroneously posted closing time, the manager has food sent over for them from the kitchen at Eleven Madison Park. Amazing service.
Molecular gastronomist Ferran Adria of El Bulli
Molecular gastronomist Ferran Adria of El Bulli has his own Lay’s potato chips in Spain. “Having eaten the entire bag, we can now report that they were noticably better than your average potato chips; the crispiness was just a little grainier than usual, if that makes sense, and the flavor more pleasant.”
Advice on paying the check at the
Advice on paying the check at the end of the meal from Waiter Rant.
With higher rents (and other factors), good
With higher rents (and other factors), good cheap food is getting hard to find in Manhattan.
Food and Wine magazine’s list of the
Food and Wine magazine’s list of the ten best new chefs in America.
Profile of Alice Waters, best known for
Profile of Alice Waters, best known for her Bay Area restaurant, Chez Panisse.
This review of Per Se mentions their non-alcoholic wine pairings
This review of Per Se mentions their non-alcoholic wine pairings. “With each course, we were given a beverage - ranging from grape juice to steamed milk - which complimented the tastes in the dish. Libby’s ‘Red Rice and Beans’ was completed by a lime margarita. My foie gras with a gossamer grape juice that was finer than most wines.”
Photos of the 28-course tasting menu at
Photos of the 28-course tasting menu at chef Grant Achatz’s Alinea.
Frank Bruni on avant guard cuisine (also called molecular gastronomy)
Frank Bruni on avant guard cuisine (also called molecular gastronomy).
Staff at The Spotted Pig restaurant in
Staff at The Spotted Pig restaurant in NYC wear shoes custom-designed for the restaurant. Can Air Batali’s be far behind?
The Modern, the fancy restaurant at the
The Modern, the fancy restaurant at the MoMA, gets two stars from the NY Times.
James Beard Award winners for 2005
James Beard Award winners for 2005. Batali is best chef, Per Se is best new restaurant, Danny Meyer is “outstanding restauranteur”.
“More big chefs are getting paid to
“More big chefs are getting paid to pitch everything from shrimp to raisins — and not telling their customers”. “The Seafood institute pays [chef Ty Fredrickson’s restaurant group] $10,000 a year to have the word Alaska in front of its king-crab and halibut dishes.”
Taste of Chinatown 2005, April 23 from 1-6pm
Taste of Chinatown 2005, April 23 from 1-6pm. Fifty restaurants are offering $1.00 tasting plates in Chinatown tomorrow afternoon. Delicious!
The Fat Duck, a UK restaurant known
The Fat Duck, a UK restaurant known for its “molecular gastronomy” approach, has nabbed the top spot in Restaurant magazines best of list. El Bulli is #2, French Laundry is 3rd, Per Se is 6th, and several other London spots made the top 20.
Nominees for the 2005 James Beard Awards announced (PDF file)
Nominees for the 2005 James Beard Awards announced (PDF file). Nominees include Steingarten, many Minneapolis journalists, Blue Hill at Stone Barnes, Per Se, Keller, Boulud, Danny Meyer, Dan Barber. All five best new restaurtant nominees are in NY.
Your moment of information design zen: the Shopsin’s menu
Two years ago, Calvin Trillin wrote an article for the New Yorker about Shopsin’s, an eccentric eatery in the West Village with about 9 billion menu items:
What does happen occasionally is that Kenny gets an idea for a dish and writes on the specials board — yes, there is a specials board — something like Indomalekian Sunrise Stew. (Kenny and his oldest son, Charlie, invented the country of Indomalekia along with its culinary traditions.) A couple of weeks later, someone finally orders Indomalekian Sunrise Stew and Kenny can’t remember what he had in mind when he thought it up. Fortunately, the customer doesn’t know, either, so Kenny just invents it again on the spot.
Shopsin’s has moved to another Village location since the article came out, but they’ve still got that big old menu. If you dare, feast your eyes on a tour de force of outsider information design, all 11 pages of the Shopsin’s General Store menu.
You want chicken fried eggs with a side of pancakes? Page 6. On page 1, there’s gotta be 100 soups alone, including Pistachio Red Chicken Curry. I lost count after 40 different kinds of pancakes on page 10. In amongst the kate, gregg, tamara, and sneaky pete sandwiches on page 2, you’ll find the northern sandwich: peanut butter & bacon on white toast. There appears to be nothing that’s not on the menu, although I looked pretty hard for foie gras and couldn’t find it. If they did have it, you could probably get it chicken fried with whipped cream on top.
On page 8, page 11, and the front of their Web site, you’ll find the restaurant rules:
- No cell phone use
- One meal per person minimum (everyone’s got to eat)
- No smoking
- Limit four people per group
On that last point, the menu has something additional to add (page 4):
Party of Five
you could put a chair at the end
or push the tables together
but dont bother
This banged-up little restaurant
where you would expect no rules at all
has a firm policy against seating
parties of five
And you know you are a party of five
It doesn’t matter if one of you
offers to leave or if
you say you could split into
a party of three and a party of two
or if the five of you come back tomorrow
in Richard Nixon masks and try to pretend
that you don’t know each other
It won’t work: You’re a party of five
even if you’re a beloved regular
Even if the place is empty
Even if you bring logic to bear
Even if you’re a tackle for the Chicago Bears
it won’t work
You’re a party of five
You will always be a party of five
Ahundred blocks from here
a hundred years from now
you will still be a party of five
and you will never savor the soup
or compare the coffee
or hear the wisdom of the cook
and the wit of the waitress or
get to hum the old -time tunes
among which you will find
no quintets— Robert Hershon
Love it, love it, love it, and I have to get my ass over there one of these days.
Jones Diner
Anil has some thoughts about Jones Diner, my favorite NY restaurant (having been to a total of about four), and points to a Village Voice article about its possible closure.
Meg and I saw a “don’t close us down” petition on the counter when we stopped in last week, but I didn’t know the story behind it until I read the article. I hope it doesn’t get shut down. Jones Diner is part of that neighborhood’s culture and history. Cities need places like that…they add diversity, character, culture, and history to the neighborhoods in which they are located.
Andrew Glassberg, one of the folks trying to build an upscale modern diner in place of Jones Diner, asserts “we are all about eggs and burgers [and we] want that classic diner feel”. He’s missing the point; it’s not just about the type of food or some carefully crafted & marketed “classic diner feel”, it’s a lot more than that. When we were there the other day, about five minutes after we had ordered, a man walked in with hellos to both men working behind the counter, obviously a regular. Four minutes after that, way before we got our food, the man dug into a turkey dinner which he hadn’t ordered, but which they knew he wanted anyway. That’s just a taste of what places like Jones Diner give you in the context of a neighborhood that a modern diner just can’t.
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