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When Ronald McDonald bought a run-down house that dated back to 1795 with the intention of tearing it down to put up a hamburger restaurant, the citizens of New Hyde Park successfully got the house landmarked. Instead of cutting their losses, McDonald’s renovated the house into the nation’s classiest fast food joint.
The Cheesecake Factory has a hundred and sixty restaurants that each feature more than three hundred menu items that are served up to cool eighty million customers a year. Whether you’re a fan of the Cheesecake Factory or not, there’s no denying that — like many major chains that enjoy the benefits of scale — their product is consistent, the prices remain under control, and their efficiency is impressive. The New Yorker’s always excellent Atul Gawande wonders: What can hospitals learn about quality from the Cheesecake Factory?
Why does McDonald’s food look so much better in the ads than at the restaurant? Watch as the director of marketing for McDonald’s Canada buys a Quarter Pounder at McDonald’s and compares that to a burger prepared by a food stylist and retouched in post by an image editor.
Short answer: the burger at the restaurant is optimized for eating and the photo burger is optimized for looking delicious. (via ★interesting)
Earlier in the year I shared a lovely short film about Prime Burger, a midtown Manhattan institution.
For many of the guys that work here, the restaurant is like a second home — some of them have been slinging burgers, making shakes, and waiting on customers at this location for decades. Opened in 1938, the place hasn’t been altered since the early ’60s, and it looks all the better for it.
Sadly, as of Saturday, Prime Burger is no more, booted out by the new ownership of their building.
Prime Burger, the 74-year-old coffee shop and restaurant, run for 36 years by the DiMiceli family, is closing. And though Michael DiMiceli spoke hopefully on Friday of finding a new space in which to reinstall Prime Burger’s futuristic “Jetsons”-era d’ecor, the family has scarcely had time yet to look or to strike a deal. The small building in which Prime Burger is a tenant was sold recently, and the new owners sent the restaurant packing.
Craig Claiborne was the NY Times’ first dedicated restaurant critic, providing an example that was soon followed by newspapers everywhere in the US.
Some American writers had nibbled at the idea of professional restaurant criticism before this, including Claiborne, who had written one-off reviews of major new restaurants for The Times. But his first “Directory to Dining,” 50 years ago this month, marks the day when the country pulled up a chair and began to chow down. Within a few years, nearly every major newspaper had to have a Craig Claiborne of its own. Reading the critics, eating what they had recommended, and then bragging or complaining about it would become a national pastime.
As the current caretaker of the house that Claiborne built, I lack objectivity on this subject. Still, I believe that without professional critics like him and others to point out what was new and delicious, chefs would not be smiling at us from magazine covers, subway ads and billboards. They would not be invited to the White House, except perhaps for job interviews. Claiborne and his successors told Americans that restaurants mattered. That was an eccentric opinion a half-century ago. It’s not anymore.
A few years ago, I wrote about the first restaurant review to appear in the Times in 1859…it’s still one of my favorite posts.
Dozens of books have been written on this topic but for the less obsessive visitor to NYC, Serious Eats’ Carey Jones has written an excellent guide to where to eat when you come to NYC. The guide is arranged along a number of different vectors like “on the cheap”, “I’ll go anywhere”, and “five-star chefs, three-star prices”. Here’s the “with kids” section:
It’s sad but true that plenty of New York restaurants will raise an eyebrow if you bring in the kids. But plenty won’t! Consider spacious, friendly Coppelia downtown (Latin fare) or Kefi uptown (Greek) for great food that’s inexpensive for a sit-down spot and has enough simpler options that there will be something for picky eaters. The next morning, take the kids to Doughnut Plant (if you’re willing to sacrifice the notion of a balanced breakfast) for all sorts of flavors they’ll stare at wide-eyed. PB-loving kids will love Peanut Butter and Company for lunch, where they can get their favorite sandwich in a dozen ways. Other good options include Shake Shack for burgers or Bark for hot dogs, if you’re out in Park Slope.
If you need a snack uptown, the gigantic chocolate chip cookies at Levain should do the trick (take note: these are big enough to share). Kefi’s a logical choice nearby for dinner, but if you find yourself downtown, consider Mario Batali’s Otto, where parents will appreciate the sophistication and kids will love the huge plates of pasta. (Try to make a reservation as waits can be long, which might not be good with tired kids.)
If there was a “Jason shortlist” category, I would include Ssam Bar, Shake Shack, Gramercy Tavern, Marea, Per Se, Mendy’s (chix salad sandwich), Katz’s, Ma Peche, Spotted Pig, Fedora, Joseph Leonard, Parm, Despana, Xi’an Famous Foods, Colicchio and Sons, Tia Pol, The Modern Bar Room, Pastis, Patsy’s, Morandi, Murray’s Cheese Shop, Hill Country Chix, Grey Dog, Nice Green Bo, Peter Luger, Keen’s, Artisinal, Bouchon Bakery, Burger Joint, and The Beagle. Ok, not such a short list and I’m sure I forgot some of my favorites. (via @anildash)
After Wendy’s tweeted that “Dubstep sounds like a broken Frosty machine”, illustrator Chris Piascik made this:
It took me a few seconds to notice the Skrillex-ification of Wendy. Awesome. Prints are available or you can get it on a t-shirt. (via @unlikelywords)
The Shake Shack gets a lukewarm one-star review from Pete Wells at the NY Times…the main problem was consistency.
How the burger could change lives I never divined, but on occasion it was magnificent, as beefy and flavorful as the outer quarter-inch of a Peter Luger porterhouse.
More often, though, the meat was cooked to the color of wet newsprint, inside and out, and salted so meekly that eating it was as satisfying as hearing a friend talk about a burger his cousin ate.
Even when the burgers were great, they could be great in one of two distinct ways. In the classic Shake Shack patty, a tower of ground beef is flattened against a searing griddle with a metal press and made to stay there, spitting and hissing, until one surface turns all brown and crunchy. A patty handled this way takes command of a Shackburger, standing up to its tangy sauce, its crisp lettuce, its wheels of plum tomato.
Sometimes, though, the grill cook hadn’t had the energy needed for smashing and searing. Instead the patty was tall, soft and melting, so pink inside that its juices began to soak the bun at the first bite. Good as this version was, it was anomalous.
The Shack Burger is still my favorite hamburger and sitting in Madison Square Park eating one on a warm night with friends — hell, even waiting in line for 45 minutes catching up — is one of my favorite NYC activities.
From the This Must Be the Place series, a lovely short film about the Prime Burger Restaurant in midtown Manhattan. The restaurant opened in 1938 and one of the servers, Artie, has been there since 1952.
For many of the guys that work here, the restaurant is like a second home — some of them have been slinging burgers, making shakes, and waiting on customers at this location for decades. Opened in 1938, the place hasn’t been altered since the early ’60s, and it looks all the better for it. Here the waiters and workers of Prime Burger discuss their views on their chosen profession, and the unique nature of the place itself.
(via @daveg)
Update: Over at Serious Eats, Ed Levine gives some advice on how to order properly at Prime Burger.
So why the need to order right? Because to keep up with the fast food chains, the DiMicelis started par-broiling their burgers. Par-broiling produces a less juicy burger. So when you order at Prime Burger specify you want your burger ($5.25 for a hamburger, $5.95 for a cheeseburger) made from scratch, and that you’re willing to wait the extra few minutes.
Famed pizzeria Grimaldi’s is being forced out of their space under the Brooklyn Bridge and is moving up the block…without their coveted coal oven. But now comes word that Patsy Grimaldi, former owner of Grimaldi’s, is moving into the old space with a new restaurant called Juliana’s. If I recall correctly, about half of the Grimaldi’s menu is devoted to a telling of the Patsy’s/Grimaldi’s feud…looks like they’re gonna need another page or two.
Now that the folks at Next Restaurant are done with their initial menu (Paris, 1906), they’re giving it all away in a cookbook available exclusively for iBooks. And they’re going to do the same thing for each of their menus.
Next is a restaurant like no other. Every season the menu and service explore an entirely different cuisine. Buying a ticket is the only way to get in… and the entire season sold out in a few hours. The inaugural menu took diners back to Paris: 1906, Escoffier at the Ritz for a multi-course pre fixe dinner that was described by the New York Times as “Belle Epoque dishes largely unseen on American tables for generations.”
Ok, someone needs to do this: 1. Open a restaurant (in New York, say) that features old menus from Next every three months using the Next cookbooks to plan menus. 2. Call it Previous. 3. Profit!
How do you know a natural disaster is really bad? The Waffle House is closed.
When a hurricane makes landfall, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency relies on a couple of metrics to assess its destructive power.
First, there is the well-known Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale. Then there is what he calls the “Waffle House Index.”
Green means the restaurant is serving a full menu, a signal that damage in an area is limited and the lights are on. Yellow means a limited menu, indicating power from a generator, at best, and low food supplies. Red means the restaurant is closed, a sign of severe damage in the area or unsafe conditions.
“If you get there and the Waffle House is closed?” FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate has said. “That’s really bad. That’s where you go to work.”
(via @buzz)
I haven’t seen this before, but it seems like such an obvious idea. Charles Isherwood, a theater critic for the NY Times, recently reviewed the experience of eating at the chef’s table of a restaurant as if it were theater. The restaurant’s open kitchen allowed Isherwood to critique the experience of watching a kitchen work. The review of George Mendes’ Aldea features only one sentence about the food.
The idea that drama resides only in conflict is a superficial truth. The fascinating magic of watching a high-level kitchen function lies partly in the accretion of detail, as you see the dishes being constructed in layers and with the kind of expertise that, as in a good theater production, makes the most difficult feats look easy.
Hopeful reservation makers for Chef RJ Cooper’s new Rogue 24 in Washington, DC are asked to sign a 2 page contract which defines the cancellation policy (half charge for cancellation 3 days out, full charge for cancellation day of), bans cell phones and cameras, and asks the diners to choose one of 2 tasting menus (with or without wine pairing). The contract is here. I don’t know why they use a paper contract and not a webform.
8/17 Update:
RJ Cooper on changes to the reservation contract at Rogue 24. In their defense, I don’t think having a cancellation policy is a problem, especially if it’s stated, but not always enforced, as this one was.
I get the sense that you had no idea this contract would be a point of controversy.
No, I didn’t. But it’s not any different than going to Minibar or Alinea. The difference is that Alinea has six reservationists that can handle that; we have one. Minibar has six seats; we have 52. Komi has a no camera and phone policy in their restaurant. What’s the difference? Is it going to make experience better to have a phone? … I’d rather just sit and really enjoy the experience of a place like this. Are we doing this out of arrogance? No. Are we doing it out of being hyped? No. We’re doing it to make sure you as a diner have a valued experience.
Art of the Menu is a new collection of well-designed menus by the folks who bring you Brand New. Two of the most interesting menus I’ve run across are Shopsins’ (the design of which I wrote about several years ago) and Alinea’s (the menu is an infographic).
A documentary about El Bulli offers “a rare inside look at some of the world’s most innovative and exciting cooking”.
(thx, aaron)
In this interview with Francis Lam, Grant Achatz drops some clues as to what the menu at Next might look like in the near future:
Chef Dave is really inspired by a children’s book right now, and our next menu can be entirely built on that. Or we can be an exact replica of another time and place. One menu might be from my memory: My first day at The French Laundry. It comes down to trying to be expressive. You can be expressive with a plate of food, or with the whole concept of a restaurant.
Another menu we’re planning is El Bulli. One course from each year from 1983 to 2003. I’d work with Ferran [Adria] to choose the dishes that he feels are his most significant; I’d need to get him on board with that.
That El Bulli menu? Fucking crazytown. And this is the third or fourth time I’ve heard about the “first day at The French Laundry” menu and every single time my mouth starts watering and my hand reaches for my wallet. (via @kathrynyu)
In a somewhat flawed test — e.g. part of the In-N-Out burger package was confiscated by airport security — the Shake Shack beat Five Guys and In-N-Out in a Serious Eats taste test.
Clearly the In-N-Out burgers making their trans-continental trip by plane would be at a disadvantage to the made-fresh-in-the-same-city burgers from Five Guys and Shake Shack, so in order to compensate for this, we made the decision to handicap all three burgers by the same amount. After a careful synchronization of watches, burgers were ordered from their respective establishments at precisely 1 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time (that’s 9 p.m. EST, 6 p.m. Pacific) and not tasted until the following morning.
I used to be a big In-N-Out fan (their burger is still a great fast food burger), but the slightly more upscale Shack Burger is my favorite burger in the whole wide world…it is indeed, as the article states, “a marvel of beefy engineering”.
A.A. Gill has a hilarious and epic review of L’Ami Louis in Paris, which he dubs “the worst restaurant in the world”.
What you actually find when you arrive at L’Ami Louis is singularly unprepossessing. It’s a long, dark corridor with luggage racks stretching the length of the room. It gives you the feeling of being in a second-class railway carriage in the Balkans. It’s painted a shiny, distressed dung brown. The cramped tables are set with labially pink cloths, which give it a colonic appeal and the awkward sense that you might be a suppository. In the middle of the room is a stubby stove that also looks vaguely proctological.
Kenji from Serious Eats went to In-N-Out, found a willing employee accomplice (“Awesome! I’ve been waiting for this day ever since I started working here!”), and proceeded to order one of everything off of the menu, the well-known secret menu, and the not-so-well-known super secret menu.
That should make you feel better about yourself when you tuck into the meat and cheese fest known as the Flying Dutchman — the ultimate Atkins-friendly menu item. Two slices of cheese melted between two burger patties. No rabbit food, no wimpy buns, just pure protein and fat. Want to kick up the manliness by yet another factor? Ask for a Flying Dutchman Animal Style and they’ll add a scoop of diced onions to the cheese. Pickles and spread will come on the side, so you’ll have to add them yourself. “I wish we could add the spread and pickles for you, but it’s just too messy for the cooks,” explained an apologetic Thomas. The result definitely wins the award for messiest menu item of all time.
At MoMA on Friday and Saturday: screenings of a German documentary on Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli.
For six months of the year, heralded chef Ferran Adrià and his team of experts concoct new dishes for the 30 course menu of the world famous El Bulli Restaurant. Here we watch their behind-the-scenes process, an artistic laboratory of tasting, smelling, designing and carefully recording each new idea, then selecting their top choices.
The NY Times has a preview of Grant Achatz’s and Nick Kokonas’s next restaurant Next. [Insert elaborate Who’s On First routine with a nice mise en place pun here.]
The two of them — the spare, driven artist and the comfortable, fluid patron — evoke a modern Michelangelo and Medici, bonded by mutual trust and now locked into a very public artistic endeavor. With Next, Mr. Achatz is operating at a level of creative and financial freedom enjoyed by very few artists and only a handful of chefs in history.
And this line got me more excited than I should admit:
A menu might be designed around a single day — say, the Napa Valley on Oct. 28, 1996, the day Mr. Achatz started work at the French Laundry, where he remained until 2001.
The slideshow has some photos of the food.
I tweeted earlier this evening about the Buffalo wings blue cheese dip I made for tomorrow’s football festivities and a couple people were wondering about the recipe, so here you go. Legend has it this is the original recipe from the Anchor Bar (aka the birthplace for Buffalo wings), clipped out of a Buffalo newspaper by Meg’s mother in the 70s and copied out longhand in Meg’s recipe notebook.
2 tbsp finely chopped onion
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 cup finely chopped fresh parsley leaves
1/2 cup sour cream
1 cup mayonnaise
1 tbsp fresh-squeezed lemon juice
1 tbsp white vinegar
1/4 cup crumbled blue cheese
Salt, black pepper, and cayenne pepper to taste
Combine. Chill. Me? I did the onion and garlic first and then added the lemon juice and vinegar and let that sit while I measured out the mayo and sour cream. Salt and peppers after everything else is mixed. Tastes great! Go Buffalo!
Instead of getting his own TV show, David Chang is making a series of iPad apps and printed journals (published by McSweeney’s no less).
Mr. Chang said that he had talked to television networks about doing a program, but that this offered more freedom and more possibilities, as well as providing research and development for his restaurants. “We were able to go a little deeper than we could have on TV, without being constrained by the networks,” he said. “They wanted yelling. They wanted everything but education.”
Your move, Kokonas.
Chef John Fraser’s new NYC restaurant will be designed to be open for only nine months…until the building it’s in is demolished. Some other unusual things about the restaurant: diners set their own tables, chairs are from eBay, and it’s funded in part via Kickstarter.
With little more than two weeks before the planned opening, he was still formulating the initial menu and pricing. For one appetizer he envisioned a Gruyere, leek and potato veloute; for another, Arctic char in aspic. For entrees he was mulling a pork cheek, a veal shank, Dover sole for two. These would probably be served as part of a three-course prix fixe for $58, he said.
Nothing too unconventional there. But beyond the plate, he said, anything goes. Although he’ll take reservations, he’s bypassing the Web service Open Table (too cumbersome). And he’s curious about having a marching band stomp through some night. Obligatory resourcefulness has given way to revolutionary thoughts.
It’s called Finesse and it’s available at any of Thomas Keller’s restaurants.
The theme of the 64-page first issue is history, so Keller and co. have collected stories — and the expected gorgeous photography — all about the Laundry and every aspect of the restaurant: longtime staffers, former cooks, journalists.
Ruth Reichl and Michael Ruhlman pen articles. Chefs of all kinds make cameos. But it’s more than that — the magazine also highlights lesser known, yet essential parts of the French Laundry machine, like the wine producer who partners with the restaurant to create the Cuvee French Laundry.
McDonald’s in the Czech Republic has introduced a line of NYC-themed hamburgers, including the Wall Street Beef and SoHo Grande:
Grilled beef, spicy salami pepperoni, cheese, crisp, with cheese sauce and salsa mexico-tion in the bun, cheese.
Mmmm?
Over at Edible Geography, Nicola Twilley has a fascinating interview with Alan Stillman, the founder of TGI Friday’s and Smith & Wollensky. Stillman started Friday’s because, essentially, he was interested in meeting girls.
I wanted T.G.I. Friday’s to feel like a neighbourhood, corner bar, where you could get a good hamburger, good french fries, and feel comfortable. At the time, it was a sophisticated hamburger and french fry place — apparently, I invented the idea of serving burgers on a toasted English muffin — but the principle involved was to make people feel that they were going to someone’s apartment for a cocktail party.
The food eventually played a larger role than I imagined it would, because a lot of the girls didn’t have enough money to stretch from one paycheque to the other, so I became the purveyor of free hamburgers at the end of the month.
I don’t think there was anything else like it at the time. Before T.G.I. Friday’s, four single twenty-five year-old girls were not going out on Friday nights, in public and with each other, to have a good time. They went to people’s apartments for cocktail parties or they might go to a real restaurant for a date or for somebody’s birthday, but they weren’t going out with each other to a bar for a casual dinner and drinks because there was no such place for them to go.
Kenji Lopez-Alt learns the secret to the perfectly poached eggs at Maialino. They basically use the Momofuku slow-poach technique and then finish in a simmering water bath.
Eater has an interview with Gabe Stulman and Jim McDuffee, proprietors of Joseph Leonard, on how the first year of their West Village restaurant went. Watching the chefs make such good food out of such a small kitchen an impressive spectacle.
The limitations that we have are, I think, severe. We don’t have a freezer, anywhere. We don’t have ice cream or sorbet, we don’t have anything that needs to be frozen, it’s all fresh, fresh, fresh. We’ve got refrigerators touching each other over there. We’ve got ten burners, two ovens, a fryer and a salamander. That’s what most people have as a prep kitchen. It’s really impressive when I look at how we’ve got five seafood entrees, five meat entrees, thirteen appetizers, all done with these varying, beautiful techniques and preparations. I tip my hat to everything that Jim and the team in the kitchen have been able to pull off.
It took awhile for my wife and I to warm up to it, but Joe Leo is our go-to neighborhood restaurant now. On our one child-free night out a week, we generally end up there.
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