dead sushi

you will not regret watching this trailer for dead sushi.

aloo chaat at the hanuman ghat

on the banks of the yamuna. i confess that in fact it is aloo chaat in front of hanuman mandir, which is at the bargahad ghat. which no one can deny is less euphonious.

patience's reward

while i was in new york a few months ago, alice feiring mentioned that she'd come across some deeply discounted bottles of pinot noir and riesling from domaine binner at brookline liquor mart. when tory asked if i wanted a ride to BLM on saturday, i seized the opportunity to pick up as many of the binners as i could find. while i was there, i noted many fairly old bottles of wines i would like to buy and almost no new ones. perhaps the BLM demographic is shifting. in any case, i also snagged many bottles brought in by jenny and francois that were priced to move and a few cut-price bottles of single vineyard syrah from the berkeley garagiste winery a donkey and goat.

binner is a no-sulphur biodynamic viticulture native yeast winemaker. these types of wines can be divisive: i find they range unpredictably from undrinkably flawed to fascinatingly weird to transcendently gorgeous. it is difficult to bring one of these wines to a party unless the other drinkers are natural wine nerds or extraordinarily polite.

which is a fine excuse to open a bottle before starting to write a new chapter. as soon as the cork popped free, a miasma of perfume, the stench of those giant spotted lilies that seem to show up in every funeral floral arrangement, erupted from the bottle. the reality is only a little less dramatic than that: the room smelled of lilies for hours. i vigorously aerated a glass of the stuff but the lilies would not go away. it was tannic and off-balance, undrinkable. the colour in the glass—a pale brick— suggested advanced age, but BLM had told me that the bottles had been stored for almost a decade at the bottom of a stack of cases in their climate-controlled warehouse. i resealed it and stuffed it in the fridge.

the next night, you can imagine my surprise on pouring a glass: the lilies had totally vanished and the wine was in fact becoming quite lovely. it had a light funkiness but smelled mostly of red and sour cherries and a bit of sugar. the wine was nearly totally dry but had an apparent sweetness from the fruit, and the acid had balanced itself out overnight. not only drinkable but deliciously drinkable. in the interim, i'd sent a few emails out to my wine advisors, none of whom had experienced anything like this before. a post on a wine bulletin board (remember those from the dawn of the interweb?) attracted some comments that suggested that these odd aromas might be a characteristic of binner wines and identifying some of the characteristic aromatic molecules in lilies as lower terpenes.

fast forward to 20 minutes ago, when i poured the last of the bottle. it is now a seriously beautiful wine: light-bodied but persistent, smelling of just-ripe cherries. only one bottle of the binner pinot left, but this is more evidence of a pattern i've noted of low-sulphur, native yeast wines needing long periods (sometimes many days) of cold airing to show well—for instance, brignot's envol de la fille (lovely to start, more lovely on day 5) and some of gahier's jura chardonnays (undrinkable to start, beautiful on day 3), and a lapierre 2010 morgon (brilliant on day 4). and it isn't just that off-aromas are blowing off; the perceived flavour and acid balance of the wine change as well.

a topic for further inquiry, and a call (as if we needed one) to return to a slower way of drinking wine.

seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees

for at least two years, i've been asking for dry drinks and dry wines, drinks with low or no sugar. sometimes i enjoyed them, other times it was an exercise in cognitive dissonance and unrelenting austerity.

the watershed moment was opening a 2009 clos habert (a demi-sec montlouis-sur-loire chenin blanc from chidaine) a year ago. it was balanced, precise, vinous, sappy, tender, aromatic, pure. all those good things. distinctly sweet but also richly acid, and richly acid because of the balancing sugar. not long after, i experienced some revelations of unexpected balance. and then a gradual awareness that the oxidative wines i favour are those that achieve balance by combining rich, sweet, nut aromas with total dryness and a hint of salinity: manzanilla sherry, vin jaune. balance, not sugar, is the key: a drink can be bone-dry and delicious (probably with slightly lower acid), or off-dry and delicious (sugar balanced with brilliant acidity, or tannins, or salt).

terry theise is a long-time advocate of residual sugar in wine when it makes sense and, in the realm of mixed drinks, so has senior beverage advisor jake parrott. i should listen more.

When we’re starting out we often ask “How much flavor does this have; that way I’ll know how much I like it (or how many points I’m supposed to give it),” but as we gain more experience we start asking “How beautiful does this taste, how fine, how haunting?” And when we finally learn to relax with wine we barely think abstractly about it at all; we just know when our bodies and senses transmit the joy-signal.

terry theise

(btw: seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees)

the tuition riot

jake parrott, senior beverage advisor, intended a march for equality but it didn't turn out that way.

the tuition riot

1.5oz salers
0.75oz fresh lime
0.5oz combier

shake with ice, strain, season with a grain or two of salt.

department of dairy products

the stollen — most festive of teutonic baked goods — sits on the counter like a lumpy doorstop. part of journeyman's starving student assistance program, it is 51% butter. health dorks need not fret: it also contains cardamom, the world's third most precious spice and known to promote cardiovascular health.

stollen is an appropriate breakfast if your days are spent splitting cords of firewood as sleet pours down from a leaden sky.

useful data

jim leff deciphers the eating landscape.

all roads

it is my too-infrequent good fortune to be invited to home-cooked dinners with Pyrrhic guest lists, the kind filled with people whose discernment and taste are a source of pleasure and knowledge but are, by the same token, so refined that any attempt to contribute something to the table is an endeavour perilous to the ego. on these occasions, i sit in the corner taking notes, harmless, my ethnographic field training serving me well.

these are lovers of wine and the generous table who have been drinking widely, wisely, and secreting things away in their cellars for decades. tuesday night's table—small and richer than usual in fellow convivialists—was conducive to each person bringing interesting, delicious bottles, sometimes bottles quite a bit older than anyone without a cellar or an inheritance gets to drink. a magnum of bouzy champagne grower camille savès's carte blanche, a leoville-barton (1989), a pauillac (i forget the producer) from 1975, a hochheimer domdechaney riesling (1993), two rieslings from the late 1970s, a clos des couchereaux from jadot (1996, and with some years left in the bottle yet), and an unusual botrytised gruner veltliner from knoll (2004). i think a 2004 rebholz weissburgunder from im sonnenschein. there were others too.

over dinner, this country mouse pondered the opinion, voiced by some (though not many at the table), that "all roads lead to bordeaux." the leoville-barton was quite beautiful and surprisingly austere, with the characteristic green hatch chile fragrance; the pauillac was rich, soft, velvety, but with grip and power. contradictions are one source of complexity. you can see why captains of industry drink this stuff.

but: is bordeaux the telos of wine? maybe it's a matter of time but not for me, now. that clear, austere, cool burgundy, even before it finally opened up in the dregs of the bottle at the end of the night, was the one i poured myself when all eyes were on the potatoes. they were very good potatoes.

the architecture of taste

update, september 2015: mile end's sandwiches now appear to be slipshod execution and heartbreak. look elsewhere for sandwich perfection.

cold tuna/red onion/celery salad with hot fried capers and cold celery leaf (+10 points), self-sauced with a warm soft-center egg and lemon aioli, on warm slices of (i think) raisin pumpernickel grilled in schmaltz on the inside faces only. from mile end sandwich on bond street, an establishment run by people who give a damn about the theory and practice of sandwiches.

toasting the bread on the inside face neatly solves the problem of the toasted outside face becoming too tough or crunchy to bite through without crushing the crumb underneath.* toasting in schmaltz means that the inside face takes a while to get soggy even under the pile of tuna salad. i strongly favour seasoning with sharp bursts of flavour, so the fried capers were particularly welcome. however, there was a bit too much salt sprinkled over the top of the egg (visible above), and i would find a way to put a tasty moisture barrier under salad and aioli to prevent the dressing from oozing out. but these are minor quibbles; this sandwich is a marvel of diverse temperatures, textures, and flavours.

this and mile end's chicken salad are the best sandwiches i've had in years. (yes, they leave even the very fine po'boys and muffulettas of new orleans in the dust. it's not their fault they weren't made by sandwich nerds.)

* architectonic problems like these should keep the owners of high-priced sandwich shops awake at night, yet we are continually beset by sandwiches with fatally flawed construction: breads so resilient that biting through them causes all the filling to splay out in disarray, tomatoes sliced too thickly to be severed in a single bite, fibrous vegetables left in large pieces, dressings of insufficient or excessive viscosity, meats cut along instead of across the grain. the list is depressingly long.

chicken salad

update, september 2015: mile end's sandwiches now appear to be slipshod execution and heartbreak. look elsewhere for sandwich perfection.

the mile end sandwich shop on bond street presented this, the best and nearly the most expensive chicken salad sandwich i've ever had: a modest quantity of light-mayo white meat chicken salad, fresh dilled cucumber slices, pickled and fresh red peppers, and gribenes, on thick challah toasted only on the inside faces. normally, the crunch in a chicken salad sandwich comes from little pieces of celery in the salad. here, pillowy softness from the bread, crunch from the cucumbers and gribenes. cool salad, warm gribenes. a textural marvel demonstrating, again, that the quality of a sandwich lies in an architecture of contrast and an awareness of how it unfolds through time.

la colmena

the honey bee is a single-location, family-owned grocer in mexicantown, detroit. other than its jaunty logo of a perky bee in mexican garb holding a pepper, it is also virtuous for selling tamales made in-house: a dozen of the same stuffing (your choice of braised pork, chicken, or jalapeno cheese) for $7.99. while tamales freeze well and are a handy midnight snack, the tamale-buyer's perennial problem remains: how to get a variety of tamales without buying more dozens of them than is prudent? while i stood before the counter smelling the piercing orange flower fragrance of nixtamalized corn, surveying the offerings, and wishing for a bag of mixed tamales, a fellow-shopper mused aloud: "it'd be so nice to get a mixed dozen of the pork and the cheese." to which the counter-lady replied: "we can't break those dozens, sorry." turning to my crestfallen fellow-shopper, i said, "would you like to hear a great idea for tamale distribution that will likely result in a pareto improvement?"

useful notes: 1) putting the bag down on a case of canned beans makes it easier to count hot tamales, 2) when transferring a hot tamale from one bag to another, do not pick it up by the twisted end, and 3) tamales don't look like they ooze enough to merit double bagging, but they do.

astro

astro pulls ritual, sightglass, and handsome, and makes hot chocolate with askinosie in a long, high-ceilinged space in detroit's corktown. it felt like being back in san francisco but with friendlier people behind the bar.

the morning after sandy

barismo san jose v60, frangipane; 67F and cloudy.

mission chinese

i was looking for a shirt and found, as well, the new york location of mission chinese food (on orchard street, a few blocks south of houston; conveniently close to doughnut plant, where the filled square doughnuts are the only things worth getting and they are very much worth getting). at 2pm on a thursday afternoon, there was no line. if you are planning to visit, bring a crew of at least four people. the food is good and everything inside is tinged with red from the aggressive lighting programme.

mysteriously, the manhattan mission chinese is better than what i remember of the original in san francisco. and even though it is its own entity on the east coast, the chinese name printed out front is that of the dingy lung shan chinese food shop that it shares space with on mission street. these refinements combined with traces of history, i suppose, are how legends grow.

nearly there

[from the archive]

R&D in food is frustrating in ways that are not obvious (or, perhaps, even frustrating) to anyone outside that quite small domain. above, a new dish when it was "90% there."

one of the chefs had made particularly rapid progress: just a few days of work and a couple of flashes of intuition had brought his side project from an offhand remark by the head chef to a refined set of preparations with unusual but complementary flavours. everyone thought it was on the verge of being polished enough to make it onto the regular menu: an astonishingly quick development process. being so close, why not try it out for a visiting Important Chef of great renown dining in the restaurant tonight?

there is great excitement, and much needs to be done to prepare enough of the ingredients to serve everyone in the Important Chef's party. our protagonist, the R&D chef, comes in early on his day off to prep and will stay through dinner service to personally cook the dish. there is stress, there is pressure: the Important Chef is Very Famous in some circles. our protagonist feels the mixture of privilege and dread from having an opportunity to show his quality to "someone whose food i've idolized for years." mid-day, the head chef joins our protagonist and the rest of the R&D team to work out the presentation and plating of the dish. after an hour, they have gotten nowhere. no presentation seems to work, and they are running out of the laboriously prepared ingredients. there is no time today to make more.

several other special courses have been prepared in Important Chef's honour and, with less than an hour to go before he sits down to dinner, the team decides to pull this new dish from his already overstuffed menu. so that the ingredients are not wasted, some friends of the house who are also dining tonight will get it at their table instead. the word "crestfallen" is not inappropriate in this situation. our protagonist is packing the prepared ingredients from his R&D lab bench to bring them over to the service kitchen. as he walks out the door, he calls over to me: "in your notes, you could write down that 'he was a little upset at burning his day off to not cook this new thing for the Man Himself."

nearly there, but no cigar.