chefs

Heston Blumethal's wacky Christmas

maki — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 14:56:14 +0100

(Before we commence, a final reminder that the Menu For Hope charity event ends tomorrow! If you have not donated yet, you still have time! Think of all the chocolate!)

If you missed Heston’s Perfect Christmas Dinner, which aired on BBC Two last night, you just have to catch a rerun, or otherwise (!) try to see it. It was the craziest ‘food’ show I have ever seen, bar none, and I have seen lots of them from all over the world. Despite the rather somber mood around here these days, we were laughing out loud several times as we watched it.

The second season (series) of Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection, which ended on Tuesday (season/series 1 reviewed here) was a bit disappointing to me - I felt as though he was sort of stretching things a bit too much sometimes. But the Christmas show was just astonishing, and so much fun.

Among other things:

The guests were greeted with what looked like Christmas balls, which were actually filled with salmon mousse
Heston went to Amman to get real frankincense and myrrh, and turned it and gold leaf into a ‘Gifts from the Three Magi’ themed sort of soup
He made a special feed for the goose he was going to use for the dinner, mixing in some pine tree essence and sage and onion stuffing in the feed to pre-flavor the goose with Christmas flavors (Actually his assistant had to mix up the feed, in a cement mixer. I wonder if that was in his job description.)
He went up to Siberia to feast on reindeer (and bring some home, from a farm though)
At one point, he put a tampon in his mouth, for scientific purposes. (Note: he repeated this recently when he was on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, but he put the tampon in Jonathan’s mouth. Apparently it’s very absorbent and really affects the taste of things.)
And a lot, lot more.

The guests, which included Terry Wogan and Richard E. Grant (who is a lot of fun to watch with food since he has this strange habit of putting his face almost IN his food to sniff at it) were like children in their astonishment, which made it even more fun to watch. Here they are seated for dinner…in a sort of winter wonderland setting, to which they all exclaimed as they stepped in, “Narnia!”

It was like a combination of science, food and a Harry Potter movie.

Here are the re-airing times on the BBC:

December 21 at 3:25AM GMT / 4:25AM CET on BBC One with signing
December 23 at 2:45PM GMT/ 3:45PM CET on BBC Two

Saturday thoughts: Donna Hay, Just Bento, food blogging events

maki — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 13:50:32 +0100

The sister site to Just Hungry got discovered by several sites overnight (while I was not at the computer, as always happens in such cases) and the traffic went up about 100 x, mainly thanks to it being on the del.icio.us popular page for a while. I haven’t even ‘officially’ launched it in my mind, since I am occasionally breaking it by fiddling with the engine (Drupal, for the technically inclined) in the background, but it’s very gratifying to know that people are interested in the subject. I think it must be timely.

While Just Bento is still in its infancy, bento fans should be sure to check out two great English language bento sites, Cooking Cute, which is on hiatus right now but has lots of great information in the archives, and Lunch In A Box, which among other things has lots of great information on making kid-friendly bento lunches. Both are in my favorite food blogs list.

I had a bit of a headache this morning due to a late night, and so plonked myself in front of the TV to watch Saturday Kitchen on the BBC, a breezy weekly food programme hosted by James Martin. One of his guests was Donna Hay, a cookbook author and food stylist who has fans all over the world. There’s even a food blogging event in her honor called Hay Hay It’s Donna Day (the latest round news is here). I love her food styling as much as everyone, but her appearance in the Saturday Kitchen was a bit of a let down - mainly because she declared in the Omelette Challenge (where two guests square off with each other to make a 3-egg omelette) that she doesn’t like eggs! In my slightly groggy state I was bowled over by this statement. How can you like food and not like eggs? (She was also wearing a sort of party outfit complete with cute and impractical shoes, and flirting quite a bit with the host James Martin, but that’s sort of beside the point. Needless to say, she lost the omelette challenge by a wide margin to chef Atul Kochhar, who I really admire - his book Simple Indian is so great that it’s surpassed my Madhur Jaffrey collection to become my favorite go-to Indian cookbook. I bet he doesn’t make a lot of omelettes being an Indian chef but he didn’t complain!) I felt a similar sort of disappointment when Tom Colicchio said earlier this year that he did not like okra, though he could be excused for that since okra is one of those love/hate kinds of foods. But…eggs!

Speaking of food blogging events - I feel rather bad about this but I am giving them a pass for the forseeable future. Even the one I started, Food Destinations, is on hiatus. What with starting another blog and other issues I just can’t find the time for them. I really appreciate getting invites to various events but…something has to give, unless I can magically increase the number of hours in a day, or figure out how to get by on 2 hours of sleep per 24 hour cycle. (Sometimes I get it down to 3, but it makes me cranky.)

I'm rather tired of the cult of the celebrity chef

maki — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 08:13:55 +0200

Celebrity chefs have been around for some time now, but they seem to have exploded all over the place in the last decade, mainly through food related TV shows.

The restaurant food world is becoming similar to the world of fashion. There are the actual restaurants, most of which are too expensive for the majority of the population - people without generous expense accounts or oodles of money - other than for a rare treat. These are the couture studios (as in real couture, not ‘couture’ as it’s used to describe anything that’s not a plain t-shirt these days) of the food world. Then you have all the merchandising, from cookbooks to dodgy cookware to frozen dinners bearing a chef’s name. Those are the perfumes and bags and H & M special-designer label lines of the food world.

Unfortunately, but perhaps inevitably, a lot of the time the supermarket products bearing those star chefs’ brands are pale shadows of the ‘couture’ level food at the restaurants. The Gordon Ramsay chocolates I got last year at Waitrose in England were vile. The Jamie Oliver ‘herb mixes’ that are even sold here in Switzerland come in useless self-grinding plastic bottles and are laughably overpriced. And there’s that horrible cement mortar and pestle bearing his name. The various chef-endorsed prepared foods I’ve tried are nothing special in any way. But as people become more exposed to the Celebrity Chef, the sale of such items will probably keep growing.

Oiling the whole machine and providing Publicity and Exposure are food reality shows and the like. I used to enjoy these shows quite a bit, and they formed a large part of my TV watching schedule. But now, I’m getting tired of them. I understand that chefs these days are supposed to be rock stars or something…but you know, a lot of them are just boring (or worse…plain annoying), aside from their cooking skills. For many of them I just want them to limit themselves to the ghost written cookbook and be done with it. But I suppose even a poorly rated TV show gets more eyes than a book.

I feel over-exposed to all these Celebrity Chefs, to the extent that I want them all to go away, for a while anyway. I’m inclined to seek out the un-celebrity chef who quietly produces great food. Or just stick to my own cooking.

Everyone's favorite steakhouse is at the Penthouse Executive Club?

maki — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 18:04:14 +0100

Frank Bruni gives the steakhouse at the Penthouse Executive Club a pretty entertaining one star review. “Hmm, where have I heard of this place before” I thought, and rummaged through my stacks of recorded food shows. Ah, celebrated don’t-call-it-molecular-gastronomy chef Heston Blumenthal paid it a special visit on his TV show last year, to show his drooling mostly British viewers er, great looking meat. I mean the aged sides of beef, of course.

Anthony Bourdain, guesting again on Michael Ruhlman’s blog, think it was a purposeful slam at Jeffrey Chodorow of Kobe Club, another Manhattan steak house, which was given a really bad no-star review, to which Mr. Chodorow protested via a full page ad in the Times . (Tempest, teapot.) I have this yet to be expressed publicly (or at least not on this blog) disdain of Americans and others who like to show off by serving up huge hunks of wagyuu/Matsuzakagyuu/Kobe beef (usually all meaning the same thing), which was meant to be served in delicate thin slices. But anyway, I must say I’m much intrigued by the Penthouse steak. If only they could screen off the fleshpots. I may be 75% vegetarian, but great, aged steak, something I have on the average about once every 2 years, is one of those things that make me not want to go all-veg.

TV: Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection

maki — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 02:23:58 +0100

Heston Blumenthal makes aerated chocolate with a vacuum cleaner, among other things

Just by coincidence, the day that we visited The Fat Duck, its chef/owner Heston Blumenthal's new series on BBC Two premiered. Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection is an idiosyncratic 30 minute show that showcases his quirky personality and cooking style perfectly.

The purported aim of the show is to recreate some classic British dishes. At the start of each episode he declares that he disagrees with people who call his style of cooking "molecular gastronomy". He says it's just "good old-fashioned cooking". Well, if using liquid nitrogen for instant-freezing ice cream, using elaborate scientific equipment at a university laboratory to analyze the makeup of the flavors of golden syrup, and making aerated chocolate using a whipped cream bottle (the kind you insert CO2 capsules into), a Space Saver Bag and a Dyson vacuum cleaner is old-fashioned cooking, I guess he lives about 200 years in the future. Or on another planet. He doesn't really look like a scientist, but rather like a nerdy kid with square glasses who likes to experiment with his chemistry kit, and who never quite grew up. He has a quiet sense of joy in what he does that's really fun to watch.

His assertions about all the recipes being recipes that he 'wants you to attempt at home' aside (we roll on the floor, or in my case the sofa since I'm suffering from a streaming cold at the moment, whenever he says this), the show is really entertaining, and I think does give some insight into how the molecular-gastronomy approach to fine cooking works. In the second episode which aired last night, he went about de-constructing what makes a Black Forest gateau, and then re-constructing it step by step: chocolate layers in two different textures, kirsch-flavored cream, sour cherries. The final touch, he said, was to spray the air just before eating the gateau with some kirsch. It may all seem a bit ridiculous, but it does make sense: we don't just eat with our mouths, we eat with our eyes and our noses too.

Black Forest gateau, Heston Blumenthal-style, on a chocolate-wood-grained base, with spray atomizer of kirsch

It's also about obtaining the finest ingredients possible - something that home cooks may aspire to, but not always be able to achieve. In the first episode, he puts together 'bangers and mash' (a classic British dish of sausages with onion gravy and mashed potatoes). He finds the finest pork from an old fashioned kind of pig whose meat tastes like apples. Though, I have the say the one thing about those bangers that had all my friends who had watched the episode chortling in disbelief was the toast water. (He makes some toast, then soaks it in water to obtain 'toast water', which is added to the sausage meat. The toast is then discarded, and he adds rusks, which are sort of like dry toast anyway, as filler.)

Anyway, if you're in the UK or have access to BBC Two (in Switzerland it is in the Digital package offered by love/hated Cablecom), be sure not to miss the rest of the episodes. Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection airs on Tuesdays at 8pm British/9pm Central European time. If you live elsewhere be sure to look out for this on your local BBC outlet. The web site has some clips from the show, and there is a companion book out in both the U.S. and the UK.

TV: Fear of Fanny - resurrecting Fanny Cradock

maki — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 18:24:30 +0200

Mark Gatiss as Johnnie and Julia Davis as Fanny Cradock on Fear of Fanny

Fear of Fanny is the second in a series of biopics being aired by BBC Four this month. This time, the subject is Fanny Cradock, who ruled as a TV chef in the U.K. in the '60s to the '70s.

I've had a long standing fascination with Fanny Cradock, so I was really looking forward to this portrayal of her. All in all, it didn't disappoint - Julia Davis (the star of Nighty Night) seemed to capture Fanny's bossiness and brittleness very well. The makeup people did a pretty good job too. Below on the left is Julia Davis as Fanny, and the real Fanny, who was an early advocate of cosmetic surgery.

What I liked the most about Fear of Fanny was the way in which Johnnie Cradock was portrayed. He was the stooge and henpecked husband on the TV shows, and I'd even assumed, wrongly, that he just played the part of Fanny's husband. Despite the fact that they couldn't get married since her first husband was still alive (and she wouldn't/couldn't divorce him), Johnnie was really her husband in the truest sense, and supported and helped her throughout their 50 + years together. He must have really loved her, because she must have been a fairly impossible woman to live with.

The important events of Fanny's television career are faithfully reproduced, such as an interview on the Michael Parkinson show (with some clever splicing in of a young Parky with Julia as Fanny), an infamous show where a BBC journalist visits their house for dinner and is served an assiette de fruits de mer (a seafood platter, mostly of shellfish), some of which was still sort of alive and moving, and her very first cooking show for the BBC with the producers commenting on what makes her so compelling to watch. Most of all, it portrays the one TV appearance that was to be her downfall, where she totally humiliated a woman who had won a competition to prepare a banquet. Fanny expressed such horror at the poor woman's menu, and put her down so horribly, that the public turned on her, and her career as a television cook was abruptly over. (She did continue to write after that.) Julia Davis' version is not as nasty perhaps as the original, but it captures the horror of the moment very well.

The bonus materials

The best part of this 'season of famous women in food' on the BBC for me is not the dramas themselves, but all the extra programming that's been on around that theme. There has been a programme hosted by "Fat Lady" Clarissa Dickson-Wright about Hannah Glasse, a best-selling cookbook author from the 18th Century, and an interview with Marguerite Patten, the first TV cook. They are also showing the 2002 documentary series, "The Way We Cooked", which profiles six TV chefs who were, or are, hugely influential at that time in Britain - Delia Smith, Keith Floyd, Fanny Cradock, Graham Kerr, Gary Rhodes and Jamie Oliver. (I first saw the Fanny/Graham episode a couple of years ago when Margaret very kindly send me a video tape of it. I've treasured that tape every since but it's great to finally have a digital version of it for my archives.) The Fanny/Graham episode has a clip from the original Fanny-disses-poor-woman-and-English-cooking incident and it's interesting to compare it with the version in Fear of Fanny.

And, for Fanny fans, a great bonus is that they are showing two of her original shows, in all their glory (the second one is airing tonight). I don't actually remember watching Fanny on TV since her heyday was before my time, so it's fascinating to see the real version of her. She's like a very authoritative, slightly scary teacher, with a twinkle in her eye and an outrageous sense of style - her face is pulled tight, eyebrows halfway up her forehead, caked in heavy makeup, her hair carefully coiffed, topped off with with a huge ribbon. She's more out there than many drag queens. (She also named her dog Mademoiselle Lolita Saltina Cradock.)

Her sense of style, or arguably the lack of it, extended to her food. She loved color and making a splash. She was really I suppose reflecting her times - the '60s and '70s were after all a very splashy, colorful period in design and everything else. Why not colorful food?

These are the kinds of foods associated with Fanny in peoples' memories, even though she gave lots of advice and recipes for much less outrageous looking food:

Piped cream colored with green vegetable coloring. (She also went in big for blues and pinks, like blue-dyed deviled eggs.)

A chocolate gateau, almost smothered with brightly colored edible flowers made from marzipan or fondant. Matches her dress!

Some of her colorful ideas are sort of usable today though, such as this 'chequerboard' of toasty bits covered in caviar and smoked salmon.

She was really presenting food for her audience in a sense - the'60s and '70s, and even the '80s, were big on formal home entertaining, and inviting the boss over for a big Dinner Party. So she was teaching the anxious housewife how to make food that would impress. I think we do far, far less of that kind of dinner-to-impress kind of thing these days, but back then it was pretty big. I remember my own mother doing it in England and New York (it was different once we moved back to Japan, but that's another story). One time, my parents invited over the Big Boss (the president of the parent company) for dinner when he was visiting England. My mother put out such an elaborate spread that when it was all done and the Boss had left, we found her collapsed on the kitchen floor, totally exhausted.

I have several Fanny Cradock books, and while she did indeed present a lot of outrageous food, and was firmly and often hilariously Franco-centric (in her world, Escoffier was God, period), she was also very aware of the budgetary and time restraints of her audience. I keep on saying that I will write more about her recipes and I will, I will. At the very least, she is still a fascinating creature to behold, and I'm glad that Fear of Fanny has brought her out into the limelight again.

Fear of Fanny is re-airing at these times:

October 29, 10pm BST / 11pm CET, BBC Four
October 30, 12:45am BST/ 1:45am CET, BBC Four
November 2, 9pm BST/ 10pm CET, BBC HD
November 2, 10:20pm BST/11:20pm CET, BBC HD

Isabella Beeton, Fanny Cradock, and Elizabeth David on the BBC

maki — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:32:09 +0200

Julia Davis as Fanny Cradock in Fear of Fanny

The BBC is broadcasting biographical dramas based on the lives of three of the most famous women in food and cooking this month. First up is The Secret Life of Mrs.Beeton (Monday October 16th, BBC Four). Isabella Beeton was a truly remarkable woman, who produced a bestselling book on cooking and household management and gave birth to four children, before her death at the age of 28. She's still probably the most influential cookbook author in Britain to this day - her books, albeit heavily 'revised', are still in print today

Next up is perhaps the woman I'm most fascinated with, Fanny Cradock. Fear of Fanny (October 23, BBC Four) is a dramatization of the life of the woman who was the Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith of the 1950s through the '70s. She wrote cookbooks, a newspaper food column, and was the host of her own tv cooking show, together with Johnny Cradock, who played her henpecked husband. (They only actually married much later.) She was hugely influential in her heyday, but has since become almost forgotten except for her preposterous appearance and imperious attitude. I am not sure if this new drama is going to revive her reputation or bury her in the 'kook' category even further, but I'm looking forward to it anyway. I've written about Fanny Cradock briefly before; since that post, I've collected several of her cookbooks, including the 96-part magazine series that accompanied one of her TV shows. Someday I hope to find the time to compile more about her.

Lastly, there is a rebroadcast of Elizabeth David: A Life in Recipes (October 30th, BBC Four). I saw this some months ago - it was okay, though not great, and seemed to put a lot of emphasis on her love life and very little on why she was such a best selling and influential food writer. It's interesting to see how she has fared in recent times compared to Fanny Cradock though: while Fanny Cradock is little more than a historical footnote, and as far as I know none of her books are still in print, Elizabeth David is revered by current influential food writers and personalities like Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver, Alice Waters and Nigel Slater as being a pioneer. Ironic, since both of them were at the end of the day doing the same thing, more or less - re-introducing post-war Britain to good (meaning, European with a heavy leaning on French) food. Maybe if Fanny hadn't had so much plastic surgery, or appeared on TV, she's be a food icon too. And granted, Elizabeth David was a better writer. (And yes, the differences go much further.)

In any case, if you are interested in food and British history these three dramas should make for fascinating watching.

Why Hell's Kitchen is not a real food show

maki — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 16:42:16 +0200

It's a lazy Sunday afternoon (mainly because I'm avoiding the task of Defrosting the Freezer...more about that later) and I'm sitting here contemplating TV Reality Cooking Shows.

Someone who had read my rather detailed reviews of Top Chef, as well as my adventures following the BBC Masterchef challenges, asked me recently why I didn't do similar reviews of Hell's Kitchen.

Hell's Kitchen is yet another reality competition show that is ostensibly about cooking. Star chef Gordon Ramsay pits two teams together in the kitchens of a mockup restaurant, where the contestants must learn to be able to serve the diners with food that's up to Chef Ramsay's standards. It originated in the U.K. on Channel 4, before Fox took Ramsay and the show concept over to the U.S. (There was a second season of Hell's Kitchen on Channel 4 with two 'celebrity' chefs replacing one Ramsay, but it was unmentionably awful so let's forget it ever happened.)

One reason I don't talk about Hell's Kitchen is simple - I can't legally view new episodes here while I'm in Switzerland. I'd have it get it via nefarious means (you know what they are, and if you don't, don't bother). I did catch a couple of episodes when I was in New York in July, and they also showed the first season on ITV, which I can get via satellite.

But the main reason I don't talk about Hell's Kitchen is that to me it's not a real food show. The only food part about it is the restaurant setting.

In Top Chef, the preparation and creation of restaurant quality food was at the center of the show, despite the reality show trappings. That's what made it interesting for me. The other aspects like the inter-dynamics of the personalities and things were fun to watch and talk about too, but above all, the demonstrated ability of the chef-contestants is what made it worth watching from a foodie point of view. The same attraction holds true for Project Runway: although the personality clashes and Jeffrey being mean to Angela's mom and things make for good drama, the highlight of the shows are when Tim Gunn is walking around critiquing the designers in-progress work, and then seeing their final creations go down the runway. It's thrilling in a way to see how Michael can turn a piece of plastic into an elegant looking shrug, just as it was fun to gawk at, and discuss the merits of, Stephen's artsy platings.

What Hell's Kitchen is about is mostly Gordon Ramsay's outrageous personality. Then, there are the often silly little human dramas that go on as on any reality show. There are glimpses of the contestants' creativity or lack thereof, but too few of them to really count. I can't remember any of the food invented by the Hell's Kitchen contestants; the only food I do recall from the show are a couple of ones that they had to serve in the mock restaurant (that the chef wannabes keep on screwing up), such as Ramsay's famous Beef Wellington. But we know already that Gordon Ramsay is a world class chef with several successful restaurants, so of course any dish he's specified has to be good. No drama there.

So what we are left with is mainly is the sight of the mostly hapless chef wannabes-contestants running around like frightened chickens while Gordon Ramsay hurling a stream of abuse at them. It's fun to an extent, but not really enlightening or anything. Hell's Kitchen may draw a bigger audience than Top Chef (I don't know if it does, but it is a network show while Top Chef is on a cable channel), but that doesn't mean it's worth watching from a foodie point of view.

Incidentally, Ramsay has two other U.K. produced food shows: Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, and The F-Word. The F-Word is some sort of talk show/cooking/variety thing which I can't stand watching, but Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, where the Big F*er goes around the country trying to fix failing restaurants, is really entertaining and thought provoking. It is shown sometimes on BBC America in the U.S., so try to catch it if you can...or use those mysterious nefarious measures. I don't think they could bring the Kitchen Nightmares format to the U.S. though...Gordon Ramsay would probably get shot by someone at one of those restaurants-to-be-made-over people in the first 30 minutes. (Update: If you are reading this you probably know that the format was imported to the U.S. Aside from the frequently awful fakey editing and the highly annoying narration, it's basically the same as the original.)

(P.S. We finally settled on a new refrigerator, and should get it delivered this week. Thus the need to Defrost...not one of the fun tasks to do in the kitchen...)

[Update:] Here is a link to a news story about Gordon Ramsay winning a libel suit against a U.K. newspaper that ran an article claiming the production crew of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares had faked an episode of the program.

Craft and 'wichcraft: two sides of Tom Colicchio

maki — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 22:34:01 +0200

Yes, I admit it - my intensive viewing of the Top Chef reality show gave me a renewed interest in Tom Colicchio. I have been to Gramercy Tavern, but I'd never had a chance to go to Craft, which presumably is his more personal vision of what American cuisine should be. I'd also never made it to 'wichcraft, his growing mini-chain of take-out sandwich joints.

Yesterday I ended up having a Tom Colicchio Appreciation Day. We already had dinner reservations for Craft, and we happened to pass by Bryant Park around lunchtime.

'wiches and more

Bryant Park, which is behind the New York Public Library on 42nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, used to be a really nasty place, but has been totally transformed in the last decade or so. It's now arguably the most attractive small park in the city, and a true oasis in this noisy and hectic part of the city. 'wichcraft has 4 small booths at the Sixth Avenue end; one dedicated to sandwiches, one to coffee and pastries, one to ice cream, and one to soups and salads. There are plenty of chairs and tables around at which to enjoy the goodies.

Since it is after all called 'wichcraft, we headed straight for the sandwich booth. The booth itself, shaded by big trees, is one of the prettiest food booths I've ever seen.

The sandwich selection is not huge - about 12 in all, some cold and some warm. (Their menu is on their web site.) I decided to go for the onion fritatta on a ciabatta roll, and my lunch buddy went for the pastrami on rye bread; this one was basically a pastrami panini (a grilled/pressed sandwich). These sandwiches are pictured in the photo at the top of this article. The verdict was mixed - we both loved the frittata sandwich, though it was just a trifle greasy. The pastrami, while tasty, was a bit too greasy, and also quite small. It didn't really compare favorably with the myriad of good pastrami sandwiches available around the city. The lunch buddy was still hungry after devouring that plus a big bite of my frittata sandwich, and went to order a second sandwich, the grilled gruyère & caramelized onions on rye bread.

This was was quite tasty - maybe even more so than the frittata, though it was close. It was a bit heavy on the onion and light on the cheese.

Instead of another sandwich, I decided to have a chocolate cupcake. It came in this adorable plastic container - which is basically an upside down plastic cup container, but putting the logo sticker on the bottom and presenting it so is a neat idea.

The cupcake itself, a glorified version of a Hostess cupcake, was dense, moist and delicious.

I think the biggest problem with 'wichcraft in New York is that this is a city that simply abounds with good to great delis and sandwich places. 'wichcraft to me seems just a tad too pricey in that context. The sandwiches are very good though, and the concept of standardized, freshly made sandwiches, salads and related items that are several cuts above your average fast food, should be a successful formula. The packaging of the product is very attractive - and you can't discount the power of attractive design...just look at Starbuck's. I can imagine a 'wichcraft in upscale shopping malls all over the country. They already have a mall location in their Las Vegas branch (you do know that the Las Vegas Strip is one big mall, with some casinos) and their San Francisco store is going to be in a mall too.

Incidentally, Top Chef fans may remember the sandwich challenge in Episode 7, won by Harold. [Edit: As Kymm points out in the comments, it was Miguel who came up with the deconstructed falafel sandwich idea.] The "chopped chickpea" sandwich on the current New York menu sounds a bit like that the falafel sandwich. Otherwise though the menu is a bit thin on really vegetarian options, though there are a couple of cheese based sandwiches.

Crafting American cuisine

I just love the atmosphere of Craft. The dining room is not too large, nor is it over-decorated in the way some other restaurants in the city are. It was pretty full when we got there, and quite lively, but the noise level is not so high that you have to shout at your dining partners. The piped in jazzy-swingy music adds to the convival atmosphere. The lighting is also quite dark but not so dark that you have to peer at your food to see what you were eating. It's a very adult place, but still young.

I also love the whole concept of fairly small portions of food, each dish served on its own plate, that you are encouraged to share. Whenever I eat out I share anyway, but it's a bit more relaxing when the restaurant says it's a good thing to do so.

The menu itself, printed on a single sheet of landscape mode paper, is divided into four columns: the first column is first courses, the second is main dishes, and the last two columns are side dishes. As someone who usually likes and remembers the side dishes more than the main meat or fish, this made me smile too. At our very friendly (yet not over-friendly, important that) waitress's suggestion, we ordered a first course each, a main each, and two side dishes. This was just the right amount, even though we were starving since got there at 9:30. (We had an earlier reservation, but there was a flash rainstorm in the evening yesterday that drenched us from head to toe.) The wine list was fairly reasonably priced, extensive and interesting. We had a very nice, dry rosé from North Fork, Long Island, by the way, which fitted very well.

Okay, so what about the food? Well, it was very good. It's quite obvious the chef is using fresh, in-season ingredients. The highlights for me were the beet salad, a colorful melange of red, yellow, white and spiral-colored chiogga beets, and the fava bean side dish which had macadamia nuts in it. We also had an artichoke salad with duck ham and cheese, scallops, sweetbread, and salt cod and eggplant risotto. For dessert, we had an assortment of ice creams and sorbets, and a sour cherry almond tart. A very nice touch was the blueberry muffins we received as a going-home gift of sorts. They were delicious for breakfast.

It was all excellent, really - but did it reach orgasmic heights? Well, no. There was an unfortunate tendency to give just about every dish a sort of sweetish-sour flavor for one thing - I suspect an overuse of balsamic vinegar and maybe ponzu. I can understand that with the salads, and possibly with the sweetbreads, but the salt cod and eggplant risotto, the only dish that was actually bit of a disappointment, also had that flavor. There was a bit too much sameness to everything. I think that may be why the fava beans stood out for me, because they didn't have that flavoring. If I were a Michelin critic (one that's not overly biased towards French cuisine, mind you) I think I would give the place one star, or maybe make it a provisional one star worth revisiting next year.

Still, I would go back there again in a heartbeat. If you have overseas guests and you want to take them to a really good restaurant that serves top notch American cuisine, you can't go wrong with Craft.

So, all in all my Tom Colicchio day was pretty successful, and tasty. It's very interesting to see how a chef's vision is being played out from different vantage points and price ranges.

Technorati Tags: craft, newyork, nyc, restaurants, tom collicchio, wichcraft

Women's History Month: The Women Who Have Influenced My Food Life

maki — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 20:14:44 +0100

March is Women's History Month, and today, March 8th, has been declared as International Women's Day. The theme of Women's History Month this year is Women: Builders of Communities and Dreams.

I do not know of a more significant way in which women build community and nurture our bodies and souls than through food and cooking. While men have figured much more prominently in the world of professional/public cooking (and continue to do so), most of the public figures in the world of food that have had the greatest impact on me have been women. So here is a short list of the women who have most influenced the way I approach food, and what they have meant to me.

Julia Child

Cookbook author, television personality

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Julia Child was instrumental in causing a revolutionary change in American kitchens, when she published the first edition of Mastering The Art of French Cooking in 1961. I encountered her many years after that, via her 1980s PBS cooking series Dinner With Julia.

The appeal of Julia Child was that she was a very homely, and homey, lady. She was very tall, and hunched over a bit over her stove and cutting board, her outfits were rather dinner-lady like, and of course she always had that "impeccably clean towel" about her person. She had a distinctive slightly fuzzy, lilting voice, and a perpetual twinkle in her eye. At first she was mostly just entertaining to me. But when her old series The French Chef was rebroadcast on some channel in the 1990s, I was in a position and frame of mind to spend time really watching and studying them. I was amazed at how technically proficient she was, and how clear her explanations were of classic French techniques. Through The French Chef, I learned how to make a proper omelette, assemble a proper cassoulet, fold a puff pastry so that it realy puffs, and many other things that I would have otherwise never have been able to do.

Of her books, The Way To Cook is my absolute favorite. As the title says, it really does teach you how to cook so many things, and not just French. The numerous Master Recipes scattered throughout the book, which describe foundation recipes on which so many recipes are variations of, makes so much sense to me that I've adopted a similar approach here. My copy was given to me as a Christmas present back in the early '90s, and though I've moved about 4 times since then, it has always travelled with me.

M.F.K. Fisher

Essayist, author

I have written extensively about Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher before. She's one of the main influences in the way I approach food, and how I aspire to write about it. Her writing is restrained and elegant, yet her love of food and wine is unmistakable. Many of her lighter-hearted works show that she had a wicked, if not sometimes twisted, sense of humor too. If you have never read her works, you are depriving yourself.

And by the way, her gingerbread recipe in How To Cook A Wolf is light and yummy. I have yet to get up the courage to try the survival sludge though.

Katsuyo Kobayashi

Cookbook author, TV personality

Katsuyo Kobayashi is unknown outside of Japan, with the exception of her Iron Chef appearance back in 1994. (She beat Iron Chef Chen hands down in Battle Potato, by the way.) Katsuyo Kobayashi was "just an ordinary housewife" with an extraordinary knack for making cooking fun, efficient and tasty. She is a cookbook author and longtime fixture on the long-running NHK TV cooking series Kyo no ryori (Today's Cooking). She has a bubbly personality; when she's on the screen, it's like I am watching my mother, except that Ms. Kobayashi loves to cook. (My mom is a good cook but it's not a passion of hers.)

Like Julia Child, Katsuyo Kobayashi has the gift for explaining cooking methods so that they easy to understand. She's also a treasure trove of kitchen hints: one that I remember in particular is when she explained on one Kyo no Ryori show that the way to cut peppers easily if your knife wasn't very sharp was to cut it from the non-skin side. Her books also show how to put together a complete meal, and what goes with what - a detail that's so often omitted. She is my primary source of inspiration for Japanese home cooking, aside from what my mother and aunts passed down to me.

Japan is so trend-oriented that Katsuyo Kobayashi is not as "in" as she used to be. But she's passed on her gift to her son, Kentaro, who is one of the hot young food personalities right now. Still, I prefer his mother any day. It would be wonderful if some of her books could be translated to English. The problem may be deciding on which one, since to date she's published more than 150 books. There is also a line of kitchen products bearing her name. I have her dove-shaped silicon pot scraper, and it's marvelous.

Alice Waters

Chef, cookbook author, restaurant owner

My connection to Alice Waters is rather indirect. I've never been to her famed restaurant in Berkeley, California, Chez Panisse. But there is absolutely no denying that the kind of cooking she advocates is what I try to follow myself: using foods in season, using locally produced food. It's a bit harder for me to follow this all time, since at the moment for instance locally produced vegetables mainly means members of the cabbage family. Also, the food of my heritage (Japanese) has to be shipped to me in some form. But I try to stick to her philosophy as much as possible, especially when it comes to seasonal produce. No pears in March or strawberries in November!

Nigella Lawson

Cookbook author, journalist, TV personality

Nigella Lawson is the Food Goddess to so many people; she brought sexiness to the realm of food with a vengeance. I have to admit that I had a hard time getting over her image. Once I finally broke down and got a copy of How To Eat, her first book, I was a convert. I have all of her books now and love every one of them.

Nigella Lawson is a descendent of sorts of British writers such as Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson, who educated their readers about the pleasures of food, especially those from exotic (to British readers) locales. Where she has broken new ground is in making previously maligned American-style food sexy and appealing. One of her most famous recipes is for a ham cooked in Coca-Cola, which has been known in the American South for decades. It's not haute cuisine but it sure is tasty. The very fact that she is British, I think, has made it easier for her to validate this kind of food to American readers, who often have a sort of inferiority complex about their own cuisine in comparison to say, French food.

All of the recipes I have tried from her books have been excellent, with a more-ishness to them. Her writing has an intensity that shows that she is a true foodie.

This is a very short list, and I've omitted many other women who have shaped my food life in one way or another, such as Elizabeth David, Delia Smith, Marcella Hazan, Jane Grigson, Madeleine Kamman, Silvana Franco, Ruth Reichl, Fanny Cradock, and yes, even Rachael Ray and Martha Stewart. I would love to see other people's lists - if you do decide to write one up, please maki[at]makikoitohNOSPAMDOTcom

Technorati Tags: alice waters, julia child, katsuyo kobayashi, mfk fisher, nigella lawson