Roots Steakhouse Summit NJ: ready to open

I stopped in to the Huntley Tavern tonight to have a beer while waiting to pick up a couple of pizzas across the street from Joe’s Pizza. I’d include a link to Joe’s but their website plays that Andrea Bocelli song, you know the one, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop it other than hitting the mute button so I’ll just give the address and phone number at the end of this post. The pizza is good; good if you don’t have to drive more than 10 minutes but still good.

Anyway, I ran into Chip*, one of the owners of Huntley Tavern, on my way out the door and I asked him about Roots Steakhouse, his soon to open restaurant in downtown Summit. Would there be any dry aged beef on the menu? Yes, there is a dry aged sirloin. Along with another sirloin, a filet, a porterhouse for two, a bone in rib-eye, prime rib, etc. Will the place be ready for business on Monday? Well, probably. They were doing a trial run tonight and they may be open for business tomorrow night. I should have asked if they do lunch. A dry aged sirloin steak would make a mighty fine lunch for the blackeyedpig on Monday afternoon.

Roots Steakhouse will be the fifth restaurant for the Harvest Restaurant Group. The others are The Trap Rock Brewery (no link available) in Berkeley Heights, The Huntley Tavern in Summit, 3 West and Ciao located side by side in Basking Ridge. I have eaten in all of these restaurants and the food, the décor and the service are all of excellent quality.

*In an attempt at full disclosure I should mention that I once sold carpet to Chip for the private party room at the Trap Rock. That carpet has since been replaced and I didn’t get the job. I only wish the Harvest Restaurant Group was as good a customer of mine as I am of theirs.

Roots Steakhouse: 401 Springfield Ave. Summit NJ (908)273-0027.

As promised above: Joe’s Pizza, 101 Springfield Ave. Summit NJ (908)522-0615. I just checked that song is still playing. What are these people thinking?

When I google the Trap Rock I end up at a porn site, very strange. Here’s the address and phone number: 279 Springfield Ave. Berkeley Heights NJ (908)665-1755.

Andrea Bocelli song playing on an endless loop or teen porn site, choose your poison.

The Best Peaches They'd Ever Eaten

My parents returned recently from a trip to Italy. They went to Siena for the famous horse race, the Palio di Siena. Then they went on to Florence. When they returned all I wanted to know was how the food was. The answer surprised me. Instead of hearing about how they’d had great steak in Florence they both told me that they’d had the best peaches they’d ever eaten.

This puzzled me. Why would you need to fly across the Atlantic to find a great peach when we have such good fruit right here at home? Then I was reading a piece over at Ed Levine Eats about white apricots and I was reminded of the answer. Consider this from John Seabrook’s 2002 New Yorker article on David Karp, the Fruit Detective:

“Most food writing is about cooking--it's less about the ingredients than about the rendering of those ingredients, and the consuming of them in communal settings. Karp is interested in the primal act of tasting--eating fruit right from the tree, vine, or bush. ("I'm not a foodie," he says. "I'm a fruitie.") His goal is sensual pleasure, but he has a rarefied idea of what fruit should taste like. The particular kind of taste he's after is one that the nineteenth-century writers on fruit described as "high flavor"--a fecund, almost gamy taste that, according to Karp, has been all but lost as fruits have been bred for mass production and long-distance shipping. "High flavor is the flavor of a pheasant, hung until high," he said. "You bite into the fruit, you taste the sugar, the texture, the acidity, and there's an almost overpowering aroma. That's what fruit should taste like. But Americans don't know that, because most of the fruit we eat is trash fruit." A real peach, allowed to ripen on the tree, is too fragile to withstand the rigors of a cross-country journey by truck or train, and so breeders have created low-acid, high-sugar peaches, which can be picked when they're still very hard but still taste sort of sweet.”

I remember reading this article when it first came out and I thank Ed Levine for the link that let me re-read it. I recommend the article both for the subject and the writing.

I was at the farmer’s market today in Madison. I was looking for locally grown peaches. There were some that had a sweet smell but were hard as rocks. Maybe in a week or two they’ll be ready to eat. If anyone has a tip on where to find great locally grown fruit I’d love to hear about it.

Define Frequently

Used the men’s room today at Livingston Bagel and was struck by this sign:


Now I want to go on record that I’ve eaten at Livingston Bagel hundreds of times and have never gotten sick or thought that the place was unclean. Still, you get an uneasy feeling seeing a sign like this in the bathroom. Just how frequently is frequently? Is it every time you’ve used the bathroom or only sometimes? The fact that the sign itself looks unclean doesn’t help matters any. Remember that Seinfeld episode where Jerry’s in the bathroom with Poppy?

Livingston Bagel is still the best “appetizing” store in Livingston and in a town with such a large Jewish population that’s saying something. Recently renovated and expanded my only real complaint is that the line moves too slowly. Today for lunch I had the “carne asada ensalada” pieces of flank steak served over a tossed salad with roasted peppers and cheddar cheese. Not your father’s appetizing store, especially if your father kept Kosher. There’s no ham on the menu, so I guess you could say its “Kosher style”. The best nova in Livingston but I do think the bagels at Bagels 4 You, just a few doors down on Northfield Rd., are better. Just don’t get killed backing out of their parking lot into heavy traffic.

Livingston Bagel, 37 E. Northfield Rd. Livingston (973)994-1915.

Bagels 4 You, 69 E. Northfield Rd. Livingston

Book Review: Heat by Bill Buford

Excerpt from Heat pg 313:

"When I started, I hadn’t wanted a restaurant. What I wanted was the know-how of people who ran restaurants. I didn’t want to be a chef: just a cook. And my experiences in Italy had taught me why. For millennia, people have known how to make their food. They have understood animals and what to do with them, have cooked with the seasons and had a farmer’s knowledge of the way the planet works. They have preserved traditions of preparing food, handed down through generations, and have come to know them as expressions of their families. People don’t have this kind of knowledge today, even though it seems as fundamental as the earth, and it’s true, those who do have it tend to be professionals-like chefs. But I didn’t want this knowledge in order to be a professional; just to be more human."

This passage comes at the end of Bill Buford’s Heat and is, in part, the answer to a question put to him by Mario Batali. It is also the answer to what has been written over the previous 312 pages. The book starts out with Buford’s tale of working as a “kitchen slave” in the Babbo kitchen. It reels you in with its biography of “Molto” Mario during the book’s first half. Then it chronicles Buford’s travels to Italy where he learns to make pasta and be a butcher, first of pigs and then of cows. But, ultimately, it is about food and our relationship to it. How modern life and the demands of the modern consumer have altered both what we eat and how we eat.

Heat documents a dying craft in a world too busy to notice. Consider the following passage also from near the book’s end (page 301):

"Miriam, who can’t get a pastina to roll out the dough, no longer makes handmade pasta. When her daughter takes over, will she roll it out by hand? In Tuscany, you can’t get the meat at the heart of the region’s cooking, so Dario and the Maestro found a small farm that reproduces the intensity of flavor they grew up with. How long with that taste memory last? The Maestro will die. Dario will die. I will die. The memory will die. Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season."

A pastina “is a local woman who makes pasta”. Miriam ran a restaurant in Italy and Buford had tried to work for her as an apprentice. Dario and the Maestro were the butchers who Buford did apprentice for. Dario is the “Dante quoting butcher in Tuscany” mentioned on the book’s front cover. This is all for clarification.

I highly recommend Heat. I would not have done so after the first 100 pages. I would have pointed someone to Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential instead because up to that point both books are so similar. Both pull back the curtain on the frenetic life of New York restaurant kitchens. It is only later that Heat becomes so much more. Buford is a great writer, read some of those sentences above, read them and weep. I know I do. It is discouraging to read words like that when you want to be a writer. Discouraging and enthralling.

Coca Cola Blak and Hunt's Ketchup

Cleaned out my refrigerator the other day and threw out the two remaining bottles of a four pack of the new Coca Cola Blak that I’d bought. Two bottles left because I wanted to make sure that the stuff was as wretched the second time around as it was the first. Bought this when it first came out on the theory that anything that sounded as bad as a mix of Coke and coffee might actually be good. Kept the rest of that four pack around for another couple of months thinking maybe the stuff would gain some notoriety the way those smokeless cigarettes from RJ Reynolds did back in the 1980’s. Then I remembered that this product came from the same people who gave us the New Coke and threw the rest out to make room for something edible.

Found this great cartoon about Coca Cola Blak through Google images, thought I’d share it with you:



Speaking of the New Coke, Cook’s Illustrated ran an article on ketchup in their latest issue and named Hunt’s the best tasting ketchup on the market. Having always been a Heinz man I’m suspicious. I know that the folks at Cook’s Illustrated are well intentioned, that they have no axe to grind, no dog in the fight, etc. but I also know that Pepsi always outperformed Coke in those taste tests and that the people at Coca Cola were so worried by this that they benched the world’s greatest soft drink and replaced it with some sweet swill that had, apparently beaten Pepsi in the same kind of tests.

I’m an open minded guy. I’m willing to change. I’ll buy a bottle of Hunt’s Ketchup. If I switch brands you’ll be the first to know.