Shanghai Expo 2010 - Italy

Italian is my favorite absolute cuisine. I don't think anyone else has mastered the carbohydrate quite like the Italians. For breads, you've got pizza crust, ciabatta, focaccia, panettone, etc. For rice, risotto. And pasta..... ah, pasta - a staggering array of shapes and sizes, in preparations limited only by the imagination.

New York certainly has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to fantastic Italian restaurants. Batali alone accounts for eight outstanding establishments.

The food I had when I was in Italy itself was fairly mediocre - didn't know where to go, I expect. (Though the tomatoes blew me away. You can really taste the difference when a tomato is naturally ripened in the sun. Pure bliss.)

The Italian Pavilion was, sadly, closer to my actual Italian experience than my New York Italian experience. We started with a ho-hum salad and a cured salmon dish with olive oil, orange segments, olives and capers.

We also had a potato and salt cod (baccalà in Italian) dish that confused me because I associate it so strongly with Spanish cuisine.

The lasagne was gummy and goopy. Mine is leagues better.

Very poor form, Italy.

Xinkaiyuan Hotel

Occasion: Dinner before the Zhang Yimou West Lake show

Location: Xinkaiyuan Hotel in Hangzhou, China (newkaiyuan.com)

Edibles: Our second Chinese feast of the day! Drunken chicken; marinated jellyfish; stewed bamboo and pork; spicy cauliflower; black wood ear (a type of edible fungus); raw crab; a sort of Chinese chowder; baby shrimp with vinegar; chopped spinach; baby peas; braised pumpkin

(click to enlarge - isn't Picasa Collage Creator great?)

Musings: A place clearly targeting tourists. Instead of a menu, they have photos or display versions of all their dishes. Just point and give them your money.

Dinner was a bit of a food flurry but a couple of things stood out. I thought the below dish deserved special mention. Yes, it is a dish consisting entirely of cured pork belly or as I call it, Chinese bacon. I could subsist on this dish and white rice (and maybe a vitamin supplement to ward off scurvy) for months.

Honorable mention goes to the spicy cauliflower stir-fry, garnished with chives and julienned Chinese bacon - it's the one in the silver wok. I can't think of the last time I was suprised by a cauliflower dish. It's a pretty boring vegetable but this recipe really makes it shine. (I think it's doable at home. Stay tuned for my recipe-testing shenanigans.)

[Postscript: Zhang Yimou's "Impression West Lake" is AMAZING. They built some crazy infrastructure into the lake so the performers all look like they're walking on water. A tragic love story, really interesting lighting effects, great costumes, great music. If you find yourself in that part of China, I highly recommend you check it out.]

Grandma's Kitchen

Occasion: Lunch after touring West Lake Park
Location: Grandma's Kitchen in Hangzhou (it looks like there's multiple locations on the business card, but they're all in Chinese so I can't make out any specifics)
Edibles: (from left to right, top down) sautéed baby shrimp; spicy marinated tripe; fish stew with a tomato broth; chicken gizzards; sliced pork; bean sprouts; marinated eggplant; fried tofu rolls with sweet and sour dipping sauce; spinach with dried shrimp; teriyaki beef with an egg

Musings: A 12-course feast, for about $15 USD per person. Can't beat that. The clay pot chicken (not pictured) was the highlight. We saw one on just about every table we passed, and for good reason. The chicken was moist and flavorful and had a great crispy skin - yeah, don't know how they managed that in the clay pot.

This is the kind of meal I wish I could feed to people who say they don't like Chinese food. I think what they're really saying they don't like the dreck that's served in those crappy Chinese takeout places.... which is about as far from Chinese cuisine as Taco Bell is from real Mexican. Yes, there are some challenging items - tofu products, offal - but they're prepared with skill and confidence, and taste pretty darn good. All you have to do is keep an open mind.

Mmmm... Yangcheng hairy crab

As if the almost psychotic level of hospitality he'd already shown us wasn't enough, my uncle produced a massive platter of these suckers at dinner. The Chinese mitten crab, a.k.a. the Shanghai hairy crab. Although they can be found all along eastern Asia, the best specimens are supposed to originate from Yangcheng Lake. Bourdain ate some of these crabs in his Shanghai episode, No Reservations Season Three. They're considered quite the delicacy - my own grandfather would sometimes fly to China for a weekend during the height of the season, just to eat them.

A close-up of my victim. A pretty cute little guy, about the size of my palm.

Now deconstructed:

It takes about twenty minutes and a lot of patience to really pick one of these guys clean. The meat is extremely fine-grained, with a subtle, delicate flavor. Good enough to eat completely unadulterated, or accented with a quick dip in some light Chinese rice wine vinegar.

While very yummy, I don't quite understand the whole to-do over these crabs. I think my west coast Dungeness (cheaper, meatier and extremely tasty all in all) could give them a run for their money.

Song He Lou

Occasion: Lunch after touring the Humble Administrator's Garden
Location: Song He Lou (The Pine and Crane), 198 Shantang Street in Suzhou (which is, confusingly, just a city and not a province)
Edibles: yin yang spinach and tofu soup (pictured above); lots of small dishes (pictured below left to right, top to bottom) - an unidentified vegetable, sautéed; another indentified vegetable, chopped, with mushrooms; honey-braised pumpkin; sautéed baby shrimp; marinated jellyfish; rice cakes with sweet and sour sauce; Chinese broccoli with soy sauce; bok choi with cured ham

Musings: As is common in the area, the meal started with a fantastic assortment of cold dishes. Mystery veg #2 (the bright green one) and the pumpkin were my favorites.

We came in at the tail end of their lunch service, after the head chef had already ended his shift, so they could only produce a limited selection of their hot dishes. I thought they over-sauced the rice cakes but I loved the bok choi, which was topped with the Chinese equivalent of bacon. Mmmm... bacon...

I enjoyed the meal and thought the food was pretty good. My folks, with their more educated Chinese palates, deemed it decent but rather primitive and rudimentary. I guess that averages out to about a "B"?

Mmmm... lotus seeds

Location: The Humble Administrator's Garden (a UNESCO World Heritgage site)

While touring the garden, we saw this lady paddling around in what looked like a wooden bathtub, selling lotus seed pods to the tourists. Of course, I had to get one.

The pod is fist-sized, and you pry the seeds out the spongy, leathery pod. Once extricated, you peel off the pale green skin and eat the white seed inside, avoiding the bitter sprout in the middle. The seed is mostly flavorless and tastes sort of like a chickpea.

This is the lotus plant: leaves, flowers and pods. It's an aquatic plant that grows like wildfire if you let it. For the eagle-eyed, one of the pods is visible in the lower left corner of the photo (click to enlarge). Incidentally, the word for "showerhead" in Chinese comes from the lotus seed pod.

Shanghai Expo 2010 - Spain

We had dinner at the Spanish Pavilion. The architecture of the pavilion itself was awesome. It was sort of free-form and Frank Gehry-esque. The entire exterior was textured with "shingles" of woven rattan.

The food was... pretty pathetic. The table wine was barely drinkable. We got a sad waterlogged salad to start, some rubbery meatballs and soggy patatas bravas to follow, and a slice of some pie or other to finish. If you know me, you'll know that a pie has to be pretty damn bad for me to forget what the flavor was. [Postscript: This meal ended up being the worst one we had at the Expo.]

The dinner cabaret show was likewise feeble, though listening to the MC speak Chinese with a heavy Spanish accent was a suprisingly enjoyable novelty.

Shanghai Expo 2010 - Norway

My crazy uncle-in-law (my dad's sister's husband's brother) found a loophole in the Expo queue system: if you make a reservation in the dining room, you can tour the main part of the pavilion directly after your meal. (Those Expo lines were no joke. The line for the Saudi Arabian Pavilion ranged from 6 to 9 hours.)

We started with lunch at the Norwegian Pavilion. The food (prepared by fursetgruppen.no) was excellent - seafood imported from Norway, skillfully prepared and presented in that spare Scandinavian way. It didn't look like a heavy meal, but it was deceptively rich and filling. [Postcript: Norway ended up serving the best meal we had at the Expo, completely eclipsing the offerings of traditional culinary countries like France and Italy.]

This is salmon prepared four ways (smoked; with lemon oil; with sliced almonds; cured) and some soft scrambled eggs.

Seafood chowder, roasted potatoes, salmon with beurre noisette and Asian-influenced cod with braised mushrooms. That chowder was thin, but a real umami powerhouse.

This is cod main - pan-fried, topped with an apple-fennel salad, with spinach purée. Also very tasty. We somehow ended up with an extra one of these so I ended up eating one and a half mains. (What? I'm on vacation.)

Dessert: fruit, a lovely lemon sorbet and a chocolate mousse. I also had a glass of aquavit. It's... an acquired taste. (I could easily imagine it being used to de-grease an engine.)

I'm happy to report I was able to fight off the food coma for an afternoon of pavilion-touring.

Menya Musashi

Occasion: The search for authentic ramen.

Location: Menya Musashi in Shinjuku, Tokyo. You can find them at www.m634.com/634/

Edibles: ramen, natch - I had the cold ramen with one pork and one egg (then had to get an extra pork - it was just so good); my mom had the regular hot ramen with one pork and one egg; my brother had the house special hot ramen with three porks

Musings: It's a tiny little unitasker shop. There are maybe twenty seats, four guys in the kitchen. A fun part of the experience is ordering from the ticket machine. (Apparently, this kind of set-up is fairly commonplace in Tokyo - this way, the cooks don't have to handle any money.)

We spent quite some time trying to figure out the options, cobbling together info from my brother's rudimentary Japanese and my mom's Chinese (the source of Japanese kanji characters). Eventually, the kitchen guys took pity on us and sent out an English-speaker to explain the machine.

As it turns out, the machine has three rows, one each for cold ramen, hot ramen, and the house special. Then the columns represent different combinations of pork and egg. The first button is one pork, half an egg. Then one pork, a whole egg. Two porks, half an egg. Three porks. And finally, three porks and half an egg. The eagle-eyed will see that there's a fourth row of buttons further down. The function of most of these remains a mystery to us (side dishes? beverages? cigarettes?), but one was the button for my desired extra piece of pork.

On a hot, swelter-y day, cold ramen REALLY hits the spot. Zaru soba is one of my favorite summer meals, but cold ramen absolutely surpasses it.

The noodles were awesome - thick and really chewy, with a little twisty texture. The pork was likewise awesome. Each piece was a hefty block of meat, luscious and fatty, falling-apart tender, with deep, rich flavor.

Below is the house special with three porks. Looks like a real winner for colder weather.

Best of all, this place was way cheap. It was really just the beer that tipped us over the $10 mark. I have never had better ramen in my life. Unlike yesterday's yakitori, this place gave me a little pang. As good as my Minca is, this is leagues better.

[Note: Japanese people eat fast! In the time it took us to finish, I think they turned the seats next to us three times. And we weren't dawdling.]

In case you were wondering how we found Menya Musashi, the concierge at our hotel had a ramen map for the neighborhood!! How cool is that?

(click to enlarge)

Momotaro

Occasion: Our first proper dinner in Tokyo
Location: Momotaro in the Ebisu neighborhood of Tokyo (description and exact location in this article)
Edibles: lots o' chicken and skewers - details below.....

Musings: My sister was in Tokyo for business last year, and got taken to this place for dinner. I figured if Sony folks would take business guests here, it must be pretty legit. It wasn't too difficult to find (look for the KFC as a landmark) and, upon entering, I was pleased to see that it was a) tiny, and b) full of actual Japanese people. We ordered the tasting menu, about $35 per person, and waited for the magic to happen.

They started out with a bang - our first dish was chicken sashimi with raw sliced onions and grated ginger. Not for the faint of heart. I was immediately excited, but my mom refused to eat it. My thought process: if they dare to serve it, they must really trust their supplier. (They used to serve chicken sashimi at Yakitori Totto. They took it off the menu a couple of years ago during the avian flu epidemic, and I've always kicked myself for not trying it when I could.)

The chicken sashimi was lovely, very silky and subtle. Would I eat it again? Absolutely. But it wasn't SO special that I feel the need to seek it out stateside.

A proliferation of skewers followed: gizzard; chicken oyster (a part of the thigh); knee; chicken with scallion; chicken meatball; liver with a soy glaze; chicken neck; chicken "entrails" (I still have no idea what this was).

The liver and the neck were wonderful. I don't order liver a lot, but I do really enjoy it when it's prepared well. The chicken oyster was a little greasy compared to Totto's version. Momotaro's meatball was indisputably inferior to Totto's as well. The gizzard and the knee were a tad gristle-y and chewy for my taste (I don't usually order those) but objectively well-executed.

More skewers came: bacon and cheese; bacon and tomato; quail eggs; shiitake and peppers with sauce and bonito; some other kind of mushroom, possibly porcini or matsutake. The quail eggs were surprisingly delicate and tasty.

We got a couple of fried dishes next: deep-fried chicken strips; deep-fried knee; deep-fried something cartilaginous - I thought it was perhaps the keelbone.

We got a salad with some more chicken sashimi, some cold summer rolls with a garlicky sauce and some liver pâté on crostini....

.... and finally some onigiri (rice cakes).

Whew - what a meal! I ended up being a little divided on the chef's tasting. On the one hand, we undoubtedly ate some amazing things that we wouldn't otherwise have ordered. On the other hand, I'm familiar enough with yakitori that I could have done a decent job ordering à la carte, and saved myself crunching through quite a lot of chicken knees....

Bottom line: it was a great meal and I would certainly recommend Momotaro. But I'm also quite smug for NYC that we have some amazing yakitori right here.

Top Chef DC, Ep. 8

Original Air Date: August 4, 2010

1) I've never met a world cuisine I didn't like.... except Ethiopian. Please don't offer to take me to your favorite Ethiopian restaurant. I'm allowed to not like *one* cuisine, OK?

2) Kenny, you don't need to make a duo or a trio or seven freakin' dishes for every challenge. It's not been that successful a tactic to date.
3) Wow, they really pitched some softballs on the countries. France? Italy? What about Sweden for Marcus?
4) Ed, if you're making tea-smoked duck, spring for some quality loose leaf tea. Don't use Lipton tea bags.
5) I thought Kevin would crash and burn with his whole "I don't know anything about Indian food but I'm making my own curry powder" - but he pulled it off!
6) Does Alex have short-term memory problems, or is he a compulsive liar? Between last episode's Case of the Purloined Pea Purée and this episode's veal cheeks (which he told the judges were in his dish, even though he told Tom earlier that he couldn't find any at Whole Foods), he's looking pretty sketchy.

Mmmm... roasted pork tenderloin and corn salad

Another Movie Night in the books! Yining played host this time and screened The Princess Bride. She turned over her kitchen to me and, as always, I was happy to cook in a venue where I could abandon the dirty dishes to someone else's tender loving care. Our menu:

Roasted Pork Tenderloin

For six people, I roasted two tenderloins. It's a pretty simple process. Season the meat generously with salt and pepper. Sear off in a skillet to develop a nice brown crust. Yining happened to have a little leftover prosciutto in her fridge, and I draped each tenderloin with a piece. Finish cooking in a 375° oven for about 20 minutes, until the internal temperature reads 145° on a meat thermometer.

The key to a properly cooked piece of meat is letting it come COMPLETELY to room temperature before you start cooking. I can't emphasize this enough. I've been guilty of violating this rule myself, and it invariably bites me in the ass. (Refer to the turkey debacle from last Christmas.) The science is simple: if the interior of the roast is cold, it will take a much longer time to come up to temp, and you will end up overcooking the exterior to achieve it.

Mustard Sauce

1 tbsp dijon mustard
1 small container of Greek yogurt
salt to taste

Drain some of the liquid out of Greek yogurt. To do so, line a strainer with a few layers of cheesecloth if you're a fancy cook, or two sheets of kitchen paper towel if you're not. Let the yogurt drain for 15 minutes. In a dish, mix the yogurt with the mustard; season with salt. Done.

(I prefer the strong tang of Greek yogurt, but you can also use regular yogurt. You just have to strain out more liquid since it's runnier to begin with.)

Confetti Corn Salad

I thought the sweetness of summer corn would go great with the pork. In the fall, roasted apples with rosemary would be a nice side too.

6 ears of fresh corn, raw, with the kernels sliced off
2 red or orange bell peppers, de-seeded and diced
½ red onion onion, diced
a big bunch of cilantro, chopped
½ stick of butter
a splash of cider vinegar
S&P to taste

Sauté the corn kernels in the butter. You can cook the onion and the peppers or leave those raw for texture - your choice. Whatever you cook, let it come to room temperature before you toss in the other ingredients (to avoid inadvertently cooking them too).

This makes a gorgeous, colorful salad. Leftovers are great the next day.

Mascerated Berries

Strawberries these days are usually huge and picture perfect - and taste like nothing. For long-distance transportation, strawberries are picked early and ripened with ethylene gas in warehouses. If you cut one open and the bright red color is only skin deep, that's a sure sign. A sun-ripened berry is red all the way through.

To inject some flavor, I usually toss sliced strawberries in dark brown sugar and let them sit for a while before eating. This process is called masceration. A fancier version is below:

strawberries
blueberries
a drizzle of honey
a splash of port

Chop the strawberries. Combine with half the blueberries. Roughly mash the other half of the blueberries and add. Season with a good drizzle of honey and a splash of port. Let mascerate for at least half an hour, up to overnight. The pectin in the mashed-up blueberries with create a sort of glaze with the juices and the honey and port impart great flavor.

We served the berries with Costco mini brownies. Alternatively, spoon over angel's food or pound cake, yogurt or ice-cream.

Gerald and Mike, you're up next!

Top Chef DC, Ep. 7

Original Air Date: July 28, 2010

1) Ironic that they chose to offer $20,000 to the winning chef on a challenge that's based on ethics in lobbying.
2) From the looks of their proteins, The Palm strikes me as one of those really outdated restaurants still serving stuff that was cool in the '80s. The humongous steaks, 4lb lobsters? Very passé.
3) Nobody loves lobster more than me. Nobody. But when a lobster gets to 4lbs, I think it's earned its right to live. (Not to mention, they don't even taste as good as the little ones.)
4) As soon as I heard Andrea's plan for a vanilla-mustard sauce, I thought, "That takes more finesse than you've got, girlfriend." And I was right.
5) Did Alex steal Ed's pea purée? I think not. Too many cameras and people around for him to risk it.
6) I see Wardrobe's back on track - nice look on Padma for the Quickfire.

Otafuku

Occasion: Post-dinner snack with Winnie
Location: Otafuku on 9th between 2nd and 3rd
Edibles: Combo C - six pieces of takoyaki (described by on the menu as "hot savory wheat flour balls with a chopped piece of boiled octopus inside") and a half order of yakisoba (fried noodles)

Musings: A popular and busy food stall across the street from Robataya. (Methinks they get a fair bit of business from the restaurant's still-hungry diners.) They serve basically three things - the two things in our combo, and okonomiyaki, a sort of Japanese pancake.

Combo C was a wallet-friendly $9, and big enough to share. The takoyaki was topped with teriyaki sauce, some other creamy sauce, and bonito flakes. I wasn't crazy about the takoyaki - too soft and gluey for my taste. The yakisoba, however, was excellent. Studded with bits of shrimp and octopus, accompanied by a little pile of julienned pickled ginger, it was piping hot and flavorful. Yum.

The yakisoba is definitely worth a replay, and I will probably try the okonomiyaki next time as well. A good addition to the cheap eats repertoire.

Robataya

Occasion: Dinner with Winnie
Location: Robataya on 9th St between Stuyvesant and 2nd Ave (robataya-ny.com)
Edibles: grilled egglant; grilled onion; lamb chops; duck; Kobe beef; snow crab rice (they were out of our other choices - miso cod, smelts, portobello mushroom)

Musings: Robataya provided what, to me, is the quintessential Japanese restaurant experience: the food was exquisitely prepared, but the portions were miniscule and it was incredibly expensive. (Come to think of it, that's the quintessential NYC restaurant experience too.) Each item was between $5 (onion, eggplant) and $13 (Kobe), and typically was about four bites of food. To get a filling meal, I'm guessing you'd have to spend more than $100 a person. If you're looking for an Asian tapas sort of meal, I much prefer Yakitori Totto.

A lot of the dishes are cooked out front by two chefs. There's an incredibly elaborate staging area with all the proteins and veggies laid out. The chefs use long paddles to reach the raw materials and to serve the cooked dishes. If you're able to reserve a seat at the bar (we were not), it looks like it would be a good show.

I thought the Kobe beef was the weak link of the things we tried. It was barely seared and the rich veins of fat in the meat were still cold and solid. Everything else was good, and I only wished that there was more of it.

The snow crab rice ($15) was the highlight for me, really fragrant and hearty. I'd come back for just the rice and a beer. (Incidentally, snow crab is C. opilio - the stuff they fish on Deadliest Catch.)

The Meatball Shop

Occasion: Dinner with Ben
Location: The Meatball Shop on Stanton between Allen and Orchard (themeatballshop.com)
Edibles: the special "Bolognese" meatballs with spaghetti marinara and the chicken meatballs with seasonal greens and mushroom gravy

Musings: Meatballs are awesome. They just are. They probably rank around #4 on my list of all-time favorite eats - #1-3 being bacon, pie and lobsters. (I reserve the right to shuffle and revise this list at any time.)

I stumbled across a review for The Meatball Shop while clicking around on the interwebs and the idea of it just wouldn't leave my mind. Luckily, I was meeting Ben for dinner. I knew I could talk him into it. (And I did, easily.)

Like many other unitasker food places in NYC, The Meatball Shop was mobbed. We put down our name and went across the street to Móle for a margarita and a carnitas taco appetizer. The taco turned about to be somewhat ill-advised. On the one hand, I was starving and it was delicious, as always. It did, however, take up the room that might otherwise have been occupied by gingersnap ice-cream sandwiches for dessert. Oh, well. Next time.

(I'm pretty sure the hostess forgot about us, even though we left a cell number, but we were seated about 15 minutes after we circled back.)

Ben and I had a split vote on the meatballs. I really liked the special "Bolognese" ones, made with beef, mortadella and carrots. $11 for four meatballs and a "side" of spaghetti. The spaghetti was clearly a grocery-store-quality dried pasta, but cooked to a nice al dente.

Ben, who was skeptical about the chicken meatballs before dinner, ended up preferring them in our second dish. Called "Everything but the Kitchen Sink" on the menu, it's three meatballs with your choice of sauce served over market greens. $8 for that one. I found the assortment of greens, frankly, weird: we got sautéed spinach, some uncooked arugula, collard greens, broccoli and some corn shorn off the cob. I found the chicken meatballs slightly rubbery and a little heavy-handed on the fennel but Ben loved them.

If I have one criticism about the menu, it's that you can't mix and match meatballs (they have four kinds plus a daily special). I get that "one of each" orders would be a pain, but I think you should get to choose two kinds with an order of four.

All in all, an enthusiastic thumbs up. The food and drinks (we each had a pint) were very reasonably priced and the vibe was fun and casual. There are lots more meatballs in my future, for sure. Will budget stomach space for the gingersnap ice-cream sandwiches next time.

Luke's Lobster

Occasion: Post-movie (Despicable Me - awesome!) brunch with Robert and Yining
Location: Luke's Lobster on 7th St between 1st and A (lukeslobster.com) [Note: There's another location on the UES.]
Edibles: Yining and I had the lobster roll combo (with a drink and chips); Robert ordered one each of the lobster and crab rolls and was nice enough to let me have a nibble of the crab

Musings: Didn't match up to Pearl or Mary's in my book. First, the lobster meat in the roll is mostly lesser quality claw meat. Second, while there was a nice dill dressing on the lobster, there was no mayo - which is essential for me. Robert and Yining both liked it well enough and didn't miss the mayo at all, so it definitely depends on your personal tastes.

I liked the crab roll a lot - VERY generous with the crabmeat - and would definitely come back for that. (Ditto the shrimp roll, which nobody got but it looks great in the photo.)

Just so you know, the tiny shop has a couple of stools and some counter space for you to eat in but it's really more of a takeout place.

Top Chef DC, Ep. 6

Original Air Date: July 21, 2010

1) Why was foie gras on that Quickfire table? Way too easy! Someone had to cook duck testicles!!
2) When Tamesha, with her dead eyes, interviewed that she wanted to strangle Amanda with her bare hands, I was kinda scared for Amanda.
3) Ah, Tamesha - defeated by the scallop. Second only to dessert as a Top Chef Waterloo. I don't think she was the worst chef standing; unfortunately, she chose to suck on a day when the format really worked against her. I can see why Group B chose Kenny for the block, but there was no way the judges were going to send a strong contender home so early.

[P.S. Bravo, how about not putting a huge picture of the eliminiated cheftestant on your website? Spoiler much? Give people a couple of days to get to their DVR'ed shows!]

Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip

by "The Waiter" (now known to be Steve Dublanica)

My review: 3/5 stars

High stress, high turnover job with demanding customers, where you kinda get hooked on the money. Hmmm.... sounds like a job I used to have.

Maybe it's place I am in my life right now, but I found this book to be less about restaurants, and more about the bigger questions of life, love and career that we all face.

All in all, not quite as entertaining as Kitchen Confidential but worth a read. Happy to lend you my copy, which I found secondhand myself.

"The crowds pile in the door, and my section fills up instantly - two six tops, two deuces, and a four. I take care of the two tops first. The six tops are chattering away, so I have time to get to them. I cocktail and special the deuces, head over to the four, ask what they want from the bar, then loop back to the two tops and grab their dinner order. I walk briskly to the POS computer, key in the data, make the four top's alcoholic chemistry experiments, and drop them off. The six tops' heads are swiveling on their necks looking for the waiter. I hit them next. I take all their drink requests - wine and martinis - and take the four's dinner order on the return trip. The bell rings. The deuce's apps are up. The door chimes. It's a reservation. The hostess is gone, probably in the bathroom. I drop off the apps, greet the new arrivals, and seat them. Racing to the wine cellar, I grab two bottles of wine, return to the service bar, make six martinis, deliver the drinks to the first six top, run back, grab the bottles of wine, one red and one white, and pop them open at the other six. I tell the bus girl to bring an ice bucket. The kitchen bell rings furiously. The four's apps are up. The door chimes. More reservations. Where the hell's the hostess? The deuce signals for more bread. The lady at the four top needs another cosmo. Do you take Discover? What are the specials? I'm allergic to rosemary. Does this have to have garlic? Can you make me a veal Parmesan? It's hot in here. Can you do something about the AC? The phone rings. I glance at the caller ID. It's Fluvio. I decide to ignore it. He spent thousands of dollars installing video cameras; let him see what's going on for himself.

Suddenly, I feel a tug on my shoulder. It's Beth. She has tears in her eyes.

"What's the matter?"

"The computer's not working."

"Oh shit," I say, my sphincter achieving maximum compression."

Top Chef DC, Ep. 5

Original Air Date: July 14, 2010

1) Some pretty graphic stuff in the Quickfire - crabs being chopped in half, still twitching, Ed is baking them alive, someone's boiling them alive. Though I guess I shouldn't talk, lobster serial killer that I am.
2) Best line of the episode - Angelo: "Well, I had crabs. It just brought back bad memories." HA!
3) Tim's dish was basically my default roasted veg for, like, every dinner party I have. He should have thrown some apples in there, or an interesting spice. Something. You're a chef, dude. Also, the care you take when you cut something that you intend to serve that way is very different than when you intend to purée it. I can't believe he thought he'd sneak that by the judges.
4) Broccoli couscous - I like it. Simple, visually appealing. Will probably be appearing at a dinner party in the near future.
5) More love for Eric Ripert. It's obvious he knows food and has high standards, but he's always so measured and diplomatic with his comments. I want him to talk foodie to me. And he's a snazzy dresser too!