Salon.com > Restaurants

Is the signature dish outdated?

Thu, 26 May 2011 20:45:00 +0000

On the subject of duck, I confess that I am a chauvinist. There is the one, true way to prepare it -- roasted, Chinatown style -- and there is everything else. But the young chef Jason Franey's version at the Seattle landmark Canlis is making me reconsider my prejudices. Brown as bourbon, the skin is like a crust, bowing over the breast, hugging it jealously. It crackles somewhere between crisp and crunch, a little like puffed rice, before dissolving into honey sweetness and black pepper heat. The meat has that deep, bass-note richness you want from duck, but is thick with flavors I can't place: complex, swirling, delirious-making.

It was early spring and it was a dish very much of the moment, the bird served with wilted ramps, spring onions, pearl onions and a sauce of cream infused with onions. A few baby spring turnips. All things with bite, mellowed by youth and cooking. As I ate, I thought, "What makes duck more delicious than onions?" And also this: "In a few weeks, when spring is gone, this dish won't be here anymore."

Mario Batali, partners sued over tips at N.Y. eatery

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:59:00 +0000

Just days after being awarded a coveted fourth star by The New York Times, the Mario Batali-helmed restaurant Del Posto is contending with a lawsuit filed by 27 workers who say they weren't paid a legal wage.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court by waiters, busboys and other staffers, claims managers at Del Posto improperly pooled workers' tips in violation of state labor laws and illegally withheld a portion of some gratuities on wine and cheese sales.

Michael Weber, the lawyer for celebrity chef Batali and partners Joseph and Lidia Bastianich, didn't immediately return a phone message seeking comment.

Tip-pooling has caused trouble for a number of New York restaurateurs in recent years, as employees have fought back in court against other celebrity chefs, including Bobby Flay, as well as their lesser known counterparts. Batali and his partners are already defending themselves against similar suits involving other restaurants.

The lawsuit filed Tuesday claims that all workers at Del Posto -- praised a few weeks ago by New York Times food critic Sam Sifton as "a pleasure that lasts, offering memories of flavors that may return later in a dream" -- were subjected to a point system that determined how much they got in gratuities.

What do we tip waiters for?

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 11:01:00 +0000

Nearly anyone will tell you that they tip their servers depending on how well they've been treated. It's an easy transaction: be nice to me, be efficient, and I'll give you more at the end of the meal.

Only it's not really so simple. Have you ever found yourself tipping a server differently because they were good-looking? Or because you were embarrassed by your dad's off-color jokes? Or even because they sassed you, but they sassed you in all the right ways?

While writing the story yesterday on the very odd (and, to my mind, very disturbing) relationship between the abusive customers and staff at a Chicago hot dog stand, I recalled an old waiter friend telling me that he liked to approach his tables with an aloofness, but also with charm, so that they would work to win his approval ... and that usually meant a bigger tip.

So I called Steve Dublanica, author of the blog and book "Waiter Rant" and the forthcoming "Keep the Change: A Clueless Tipper's Quest to Become the Guru of the Gratuity," to talk about the relationships -- and strategies -- of tippers and tip-getters.

When customers attack: America’s restaurant rage

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 15:35:00 +0000

Just stay in. It's not worth the doggy bag or the fortune cookie or the supersizing. On Saturday, Florida resident Paul Blankfield, displeased that his Olive Garden-dining neighbors included a noisy, autistic 4-year-old boy, vented his irritation by throttling the boy's father. Then on Tuesday Ohio police released surveillance video of Toledo woman Melodi Dushane going bonkers at the drive-through window over the news that the Golden Arches would be unable to accommodate her craving for Chicken McNuggets. Your kitchen may currently contain just a box of Lucky Charms and a six-pack of Sierra Nevada, but at least you won't run into these idiots.

Few among us go on face-punching, window-smashing rampages when we can't get an order of white meat and sodium phosphates; rare is the person who jumps a fellow patron at a joint whose chief enticement is unlimited breadsticks. Yet going out to eat -- whether at the local fast food joint or a swank Tribeca hotspot -- seems of late an emotional crap shoot.

The most eye-opening steak of my life

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 12:01:00 +0000

I am not a great lover of steak. I mean, I get swept up as much as the next guy in the animal appeal of sitting down to a slab of meat, the King-of-the-Food-Chain thrill of it, but frankly I get bored easily. Twenty bites into the same massive, bloody thing, it's a little painful to feel myself start dinner lustily and finish it by going through the motions, like a joke about marriage in fast forward. But the steak I had last night was truly revelatory, giving me a new idea of what beef can be, and it's just gravy that it also happened to be one of the cheapest meals I had in Paris.

How restaurant menus make you spend more

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:45:00 +0000

This past Saturday morning, the buttery sound of Lynne Rossetto Kasper's words stopped me in mid-breakfast. On her radio show "The Splendid Table," she spoke of menus being "invitations to pleasure," and there was something in that, with the sun streaming through my friend's window, that sounded wonderful and right. But her guest was William Poundstone, author of "Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value and How to Take Advantage of It," and he talked about how restaurants use menus to manipulate you into spending more money than you intend.

"Menus," he said, "are supposed to be the classic example of free choice, but menu designers have found that there're many ways of getting you to order what the restaurant wants you to order" -- the most profitable dishes, presumably.

The techniques he laid out are fascinating: a box drawn around certain items, for instance, always draws the eyes -- and attention -- there. This might mean these dishes best highlight the kitchen's skills, or, more likely, they make the restaurant the most money: The ingredient cost is low, or maybe they take the least staff time to prepare.

Bad news! Chefs discover the Internet

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:18:00 +0000

Watch out everybody! Chefs have discovered this internet thingy -- and they're pissed off! In today's New York Times, Julia Moskin delves into an emerging, and highly entertaining new internet phenomenon: The chef flame war.

As Moskin writes, many chefs are increasingly using Twitter, blogs and other websites to get even with people who are getting on their nerves. They're hitting back at critics (Kitchen Cabinet member Amanda Cohen took to her website to rebut her restaurant's New York Times dining section review). They're sniping at each other (NY restaurateur Joe Dobias attacked superstar chef David Chang, Baohaus' Eddie Huang called one of his competitor restaurants a "hellhole"). They're striking back at uninformed bloggers (LA chef Ludovic Lefebre's wife, Kristine, reduced one food blogger to tears by pointing out that her husband's tuna tartare isn't "underdone," that's the way it's meant to be), and taking user-reviewers to task (California chef Jason Neroni's Twitter stream: "Yelp is for cowards.") Oof. It's like the Wild West out there!

Battle of the fat-fetish restaurants

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:03:00 +0000

To call something the saddest news of the month this early in February isn't saying much, but I suspect the gloom I feel after reading reports of a lawsuit between two American fast food restaurants will last at least through Presidents' Day.

The Heart Attack Grill in Chandler, Arizona ("A Taste Worth Dying For") is suing Heart Stoppers Sports Grill in Delray Beach, Florida for stealing its ideas. The Heart Attack Grill, whose menu features single through quadruple bypass burgers (one beef patty for each bypass), "flatliner fries" deep fried in pure lard, unfiltered cigarettes, and Jolt Cola, filed a lawsuit against Heart Stoppers that, according to SlashFood.com, "outlines about 30 ways Heart Stoppers is similar, including signs with EKG heart monitors on them, waitresses dressed as nurses and offers of free food to patrons weighing more than 350 pounds."

Yes, that's right, free food for people who weigh more than 350 pounds. The Quadruple Bypass Burger packs an estimated 8,000 calories (which presumably doesn't include a side of flatliner fries), and this, enough calories for four full days, is free to anyone who weighs over 350 pounds.

Requiem for a (ridiculous) restaurant

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:20:00 +0000

The year-round Christmas lights are off; the topiary of King Kong goes ungroomed. The closing of Tavern on the Green, an outlandishly flamboyant restaurant in Central Park with famously awful food, might seem to be notable only to students of the New York restaurant scene. And yet, day after day, I find myself reading about its history, its bankruptcy, and now, the auctioning of its property. People are coming out of the tri-state woodwork hoping to land some of the most outrageous décor pieces since the tsars stopped dropping acid. Some of them, maybe many of them, are building homages to the restaurant in their homes. With fandom like that, I knew I had to see the restaurant at least once, even if it meant crashing the auction. I had to find out what inspired such loyalty.

$650 for New Year’s Eve dinner?

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 02:29:00 +0000

All things considered, this isn't really the happiest of New Year's Eves for the restaurant industry. Despite what Ben Bernanke says, the economy still feels grimmer than a Tiger Woods family reunion, and restaurateurs continue to be hit hard (especially high-end ones) by America's newly frugal lifestyle. Back in the pre-recession years, New Year's Eve allowed many restaurants to turn a hefty profit — with elaborate, and often very expensive, multicourse prix fixe menus — but this year, it may not be easy. After a grim 2009, the food research firm Technomic predicted that restaurant revenues would fall again in 2010, and ominously, a recent British survey found that 80 percent of people plan on spending New Year's at home.

Shake Shack expands, home-made turducken, Ezra Klein on junk food

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:17:00 +0000

In today’s New York Times: Good news for fancy-burger fans! Shake Shack, Danny Meyer's much-loved burger-and-custard stand, plans a massive, slow expansion over the next five years. By the end of that period, if all goes well (and, of course, nothing is guaranteed in the current economy), there will be 20 Shake Shacks across the United States -- and even one in, of all places, Kuwait. In case you haven’t yet experienced the Shack, which has both delicious food and highly entertaining vibrating meal “pagers,” you’re in for a treat.

The NYT also covers a delightful Pittsburgh wedding tradition – where, instead of a wedding-party-supplied wedding cake, guests arrive for the venue carrying tins of home-baked cookies. It's a custom with uncertain ethnic origins (possibly Italian, Eastern European, or Greek), but may have started in the Depression as a way to spread out the expense of a wedding. At the end of the night, guests swoop in with napkins or containers to take home their share of the leftovers. In a time of hyper-commercialized weddings, this kind of down-home communalism sounds both quaint, totally fun – and perfectly suited to our depressed economy.

Last rites for Tavern on the Green, banned fruit, and blue-cheese cookies

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:10:00 +0000

Highlights from today's newspaper food coverage:

Today, the New York Times visits the soon-to-be dismantled and sold Tavern on the Green, the legendary and legendarily overpriced restaurant in New York's Central Park best-known for its topiaries and passion for Christmas lights. For a time the country's most lucrative restaurant, the Tavern's failure is one of the most high-profile restaurant closures in recent years, and Kay LeRoy, one of the owners, ex-wife of the Tavern's founder and former TWA "air hostess," gives a thoroughly entertaining tour of the restaurant's many knickknacks and artifacts -- including a chandelier from 1790, a 3-foot German carved monkey, and a topiary of King Kong (which was, of course, debuted by Fay Wray). The article's accompanying slide show is an oddly moving tribute to a very different, more luxurious time (i.e., 2007).