Blackeyedpig

Bananas: A bunch, in hand, giving you the finger.

2007-01-05T21:52:00.000-05:00

Here's a link to a very good article about the impending demise of the cavandish banana which we all know and love. Yes, the article is long and scary and raises all sorts of good questions about the food we eat and about the pros and cons of genetic tinkering with the food supply. Yes, you should read it. Find it here:

Bananas

Blue Smoke, NYC: The Burger (and a little crow).

2006-10-25T20:17:00.000-04:00

Allow me to eat a little crow. After all, I eat just about everything else. In another post I said that the Blue Smoke burger paled in comparison to another restaurant’s burger. I gave the wrong impression with that statement. I really liked the burger at Blue Smoke. I think you’d be hard pressed to find many better burgers in all of Manhattan. I also really liked the chicken wings and the craft brewed smoked lager they had on draft. I even really liked sitting at the bar. And I’ve got the pictures to prove it.

A photo of the excellent chicken wings. Not "Buffalo" style hot wings, just nicely sauced and a little smokey:

Here's the burger just brought to the table. We almost dug in before taking the picture. That arm in the background is about as good a picture of Tommy from Tommy:Eats as you're likely to get.

Here's the burger cut open in its medium rare glory. Pales by comparison to what you might rightly ask.

One curious thing was the way red wine was served at the bar. You've got to believe that they know better. Maybe there was a dishwasher strike. Maybe I'm just too picky.

Oh, they’ve got some great barbeque too, maybe you’ve heard? And jazz downstairs on the weekends. I’ve never been so I can’t tell you about that.

Blue Smoke, 116 E. 27th St. New York City (212)447-7733.

The Restaurant Curse

2006-10-24T19:14:00.000-04:00

Ever bring a friend to a restaurant you’ve raved about only to have a terrible experience? Of course you have, we all have. A friend of mine calls this the “restaurant curse”. He usually blames me, as though the mere act of my walking through the restaurant’s door caused the karma in the place to shift and the chef to suddenly lose his chops. I’ve stopped sending people I know to restaurants I like because I can’t bear to hear stories like this.

If you’ve ever read this blog before then you’re probably tired of hearing me talk about the burger at Copeland. Hell, I’m tired of hearing me talk about the burger at Copeland. I thought that the burger was “restaurant curse” proof, I figured that if it could pass the Tommy:Eats test then it was safe, above bad mojo and all that. That was before last Friday night.

I had friends coming up from Philadelphia. Friends to whom I’d raved about that burger. We agreed to meet at the bar at Copeland at 7:15 last Friday. The place was packed. I saw burgers coming out of the kitchen. I drank weiss beers and waited for my friends to arrive. Then disaster: the kitchen ran out of burgers. Ran out of burgers! How does a restaurant run out of hamburgers? It was the “restaurant curse” in all its glory.

Where do you go to eat on a Friday night in Morristown at 8 PM when Copeland has no burgers? You certainly don’t want to stay at Copeland and eat their other overpriced and underwhelming offerings. We set out for Origin, 6-14 South St. (973)971-9933, a Thai-French fusion place near the Green but got there to find a half hour wait. I’ve eaten at Origin before and while the food is good its not half hour wait good.

Desperate, on foot and hungry we settled at Provesi at 50 South St, a casual Italian BYO. Sorry to say that I can’t recommend Provesi. A cold antipasto appetizer wasn’t bad but my margherita pizza was mediocre as were my friends’ chicken dishes. Great service could have made a big difference. The terrible service that we received buried this place for me: long waits for drinks and bread brought out long after it was asked for are just two examples. Next time we’ll look elsewhere.

The Copeland Burger/A Love Supreme

2006-10-01T00:17:00.000-04:00

There’s a lot of talk about burgers out in the blogosphere. There are sites like A Hamburger Today dedicated to nothing but hamburgers. There was a documentary done about burgers. I’ve done my share of writing about burgers right here on the Blackeyedpig. Earlier this week I had lunch with Tommy of Tommy:Eats at Blue Smoke in New York City specifically to eat their hamburger. I took a train into Manhattan and killed the better part of a day just to eat a burger. It was a pretty good burger too and they’ve got some tasty beer on tap at Blue Smoke but, and this is important, their burger pales in comparison with the burger served at Copeland in Morristown.

Now this isn’t exactly breaking news. After all, I’ve blogged about how great the Copeland burger is previously, as has Tommy:Eats. However, I went back to Copeland the day after I ate at Blue Smoke and I was just blown away by how great the burger is. So why isn’t there a line snaking around the Governor Morris hotel the way the line does in Madison Square Park for the Shake Shack ? Here’s a theory: Copeland is too nice a restaurant to have street cred among burger aficionados. When people think of a place to have a great burger they think of a greasy spoon. A place like White Manna or White Mana, choose your location and spelling but both of these legendary NJ burger restaurants are both essentially dives, a place like Shake Shack, a place like the White Rose or White Diamond that we have in various locations around northern NJ. All of these places serve up a tasty burger, I’ll give you no argument, and all of them fit into our stereotype of a place to get a good burger. The diner in the famous Edward Hopper painting “Nighthawks” looks like the kind of place where you’d get a good burger.

Copeland doesn’t look like a place you’d get a good burger, it looks like the hotel restaurant that it is. A place where you need an expense account, a place where they expect you to have an expense account, a place where they don’t think twice about charging over $30 for most entrees. There are times when you need to put aside your preconceived notions and this is one of them. Put aside those preconceived notions and dig into the best hamburger you’re likely to ever order in a restaurant, maybe the best burger you’ll ever have anywhere. The secret is in the beef, the kobe beef. It’s not hard to make a good burger but it does take exceptional meat to make an exceptional one and a chef smart enough not to try and overwhelm that ingredient with lots of fancy toppings. The Copeland burger comes with cheese, bacon, tomato and lettuce, it doesn’t need to come with more. It doesn’t need to be offered in a hundred variations. It doesn’t need to come with anything at all except the home made brioche bun which holds it together and absorbs the burger’s juices.

So put aside your greasy spoon bias and give Copeland a try. If I can go to New York to eat a burger I don’t see why people can’t travel to Morristown to do the same. If you need company, I’m usually around.

Here's another look at a picture of the Copeland burger from a previous entry:

Throwdown! Bobby Flay jumps the shark

2006-08-29T18:38:00.000-04:00

Maybe this critique is unfair. Maybe I should wait for all the episodes of the show to air but at this point I feel secure in making the following statement: Throwdown! is the biggest mistake of Bobby Flay's television career. Why, because in it he comes off as a smug, arrogant bully.

Let’s back up for a minute. The premise for the show is that someone who is a great cook with one specialty, say barbeque, is invited by the Food Network staff to audition for their own show, or to be profiled on an existing show, or some such rouse that allows for the presence of the Food TV camera people without arousing suspicion. The cook invites a large group of friends and prepares to serve his/her specialty when, from out of nowhere, Bobby Flay shows up in a black SUV and throws down the gauntlet. A cook-off ensues and some “judges” are brought out to determine the winner.

What’s wrong with this? After all, Bobby shows up on the other cook’s turf and prepares the other cook’s specialty to be tasted by a crowd that is biased towards the other cook. Plus, the other cook gets to be featured on national television. Sometimes, there is nothing wrong with it at all. Sometimes the other cook has enough moxie to stand up to the NY Times 3 star (Bollo) and 2 star (Mesa Grill) chef and talk enough trash to make the whole thing fun.

The problem comes when the other cook is intimidated by Bobby Flay. I have seen two episodes of the show where this was obviously the case. The first was chowder expert Ben Sargeant who hosted a party in Brooklyn. The panic that washed over his face when Bobby got out of the SUV was obvious. Then when “judge” Rebecca Charles of Pearl Oyster Bar picked Bobby’s chowder I just felt really bad for the guy.

Worse was when Bobby took on wedding cake designer Michelle Doll. At the beginning of the show Bobby admitted to having never baked a wedding cake. Yet, there he was at Tavern on the Green, wheeling in a cake that he predicted would taste so much better than his opponent’s that he could overcome his obvious lack of skill in the cake decorating department. Ms. Doll came off as meek and even though she won the contest I still felt bad that she’d been put through the process. Did the fact that Bobby was a wedding cake making novice make for a unique challenge or raise the question of what kind of a jerk would think he could out-do someone at their specialty with only one try?

Throw down comes on the heels of the popularity of Iron Chef and its little sister Iron Chef America but those shows have an element of fun to them. The sides are evenly matched and the show, at least the Japanese version, sometimes seems to have a predetermined outcome. Who cares who wins when one professional chef bests another, anyway? It’s the look on the face of these contestants and the cock-sure attitude of the star that make Throwdown such a turnoff.

Zen Japanese Cuisine: Livingston, NJ

2006-09-20T22:33:00.000-04:00

“John at the bar is a friend of mine”

I do not know much about sushi; of this you can be sure. I do not know much about Japanese names but I will tell you that I was surprised when it turned out that the chef behind the sushi bar at Zen in Livingston was named John. I have been going here for lunch for the last few months and have enjoyed what I consider to be some of the best sushi I’ve ever had. I say some of the best because I once ate at Sushi Yasuda in Manhattan and I would put the quality of the fish I had there on a different level. For the money they charge it should be but good sushi, like any other ingredient driven cuisine, isn’t going to be cheap. You’ve got fish and some rice and occasionally something else but for the most part if the fish isn’t fresh you’re going to know it. If the fish isn’t fresh you should get up and walk away.

Now, none of this will be news to anyone who eats sushi regularly. You already know, or should know some of the basics to eating sushi: look for a restaurant that does a good business so that they sell the fish quickly, reject fish that smells “fishy”, and most importantly get to know your sushi chef and take his advice. I love to eat at the bar at most restaurants and with sushi you get to sit right in front of the chef making your food. Go a few times and you get to know him and he gets to know you. You can ask him what’s good on a given day and get to try things that you might never have known about otherwise. Leave him a nice tip, it will be money well spent.*

At Zen, I sit down and just tell the chef how much I want to spend and let him decide what I should have. We’ve been getting some yellow fin tuna, salmon, white tuna and some other fish both as sushi and sashimi along with some rolls, spicy tuna for instance, and a specialty roll or two. The chef at Zen likes to mix crunchy fish items like soft shell crab or shrimp tempura into the specialty rolls along with the uncooked fish and then add another flavor like mango or jalapeño, the idea is to give you a contrast in texture as well as taste. They haven’t had any Toro, the fatty tuna considered to be the best of the best, at Zen when I’ve been there but the other tuna has been fresh and delicious. I really like that white tuna which I’ve never heard of before and is probably a different kind of fish altogether. The portion size has been very generous and the bill has been about $25 per person including tax and tip.

There is waitress service at Zen as well and I’ve found it to be prompt and the waitresses to be very helpful. There are other menu items but I haven’t had anything other than the fish so I can’t comment. It looks to be the usual Japanese sushi menu. I’ve never gotten the feeling that there’s a special menu for Asian customers, something that makes me crazy, but I could be wrong about that. The restaurant is tucked into the corner of a strip mall anchored by a Pathmark and an Olive Garden. If you’re in the area go and sit at the sushi bar. Humming that Billy Joel tune is optional.

Zen Japanese Cuisine
277 Eisenhower Pkwy
Livingston, NJ 07039
(973)533-6828
No website

Sorry, no pictures.

*There is an excellent essay in Steven Shaw’s Turning The Tables about how to pick a sushi chef. “Stash” hits most of the highlights but his advice to start by ordering some Toro sashimi would have you headed for the door at Zen, something I’d think you’d end up regretting.

Huntley Taverne: Summit, NJ

2006-09-11T15:38:00.000-04:00

Here’s another example of why bar dining can be such a rewarding experience. I was at the Huntley Taverne in Summit for dinner last Tuesday. It was a cold, rainy night. The kind of night when you know the summer’s coming to an end. I had gone to the Huntley to check out their burger. When I was at the bar at Roots Steakhouse another patron had talked up the burger at the Huntley. I’d sent him up to Copeland in Morristown for their must have burger and now I wanted to see if his tip checked out. I hear all the time that this place or that has a great burger, most of the time I find these tips to be a waste of time. Also I’d recently had the burger at the Trap Rock in Berkeley Heights, one of Huntley’s sister restaurants, and I was unimpressed.

So I’m at the bar waiting for my burger and I notice a bottle of whiskey on the shelf that I haven’t seen before. I ask the bartender, Kevin, if I can take a look. The bottle turns out to be Rock Hill Farms Single Barrel Bourbon a brand I’m unfamiliar with. Kevin and I start talking about whiskey. We both agree that summer isn’t the season for whiskey drinking. I tell him that I’m more of a scotch guy, myself, and we start talking about that. We talk single malts versus blends and I tell him that I’m a Johnny Walker Black guy. He tells me about going to a Johnny Walker tasting and asks if I knew that Johnny Walker Gold is an older version of their red label while Johnny Walker Blue is an older version of the black. I confess to never having had either of these whiskeys and Kevin pours me a small taste of the ultra expensive Blue along with another small taste of the Black just to see if I can appreciate any real difference. Maybe the Blue label is a little smoother, a little longer on the finish but for the most part I can’t see spending the extra money. The offer of the free mini scotch tasting is the kind of smart gesture that can turn the casual customer into a life long patron.

Here's a picture of that Rock Hill Farms bourbon:

Back to the burger; the Huntley burger is very good. The fries that come with it are even better, crisp and salty and served in their own free standing metal cone. I’d stay away from the “truffled” version of those fries, all they do is splash on some truffle oil and who really wants that on their fries, anyway? The burger comes in several different variations; I had mine with blue cheese. The cheese turned out to be too strong and I took it off half my burger. The cheese did work great with the scotch, however, so if you go….

Huntley Tavern
3 Morris Ave
Summit, NJ
(908)273-3166

Baird Farm, N. Chittenden Vermont

2006-08-21T10:40:00.000-04:00

Vermont: the Green Mountain State. Vermont: land of Maple Syrup. Vermont: ah, the joy of being on a family vacation. Long car rides leading to factory tours of Teddy Bears and Ice Cream. Did we hit every tourist trap in western Vermont? You bet we did. Or if we didn’t I’d like to know the ones we missed.

On two of those car rides we noticed signs for the Baird Farm. I made a point of stopping there on our way out of town and I’m glad we did. The setting was right out of one of Christopher Kimball's letters from the editor pieces at the beginning of every Cook's Illustrated. We pulled up an unpaved driveway and came face to face with a German Shepard. Before there was time to wonder what to do, Mr. Baird came out of the farmhouse with a smile and a wave. The dog turned out to be very friendly, unless you were one of the cows in the barn which the dog delighted in barking at. We walked the grounds for a few minutes, showed the kids the cows and then went in to the farmhouse to buy some maple syrup.

Now we’d had ample opportunity to buy syrup before on the trip. Every tourist stop in Vermont sells syrup. The Calvin Coolidge Presidential homestead sells maple syrup. The Vermont Teddy Bear Factory sells maple syrup. Ben & Jerry, well I’m not sure if they sell maple syrup, I was in a tie-dye daze and riding a sugar buzz from too much ice cream at the time. The gas station sells maple syrup. The Maple Museum with their exhibition hall as excuse for a gift shop of course sells maple syrup. Maple syrup is to Vermont what slot machines are to Las Vegas.

I wanted to buy syrup from the source and the Baird Farm fit the bill to a T. Mrs. Baird thanked me for buying the syrup from them and I told her that we had sought out someone like them to spend our maple syrup dollars with. We took home a quart of Vermont Grade A medium amber syrup which was my favorite. Turns out its most people’s favorite too. We also bought a jar of the maple butter which isn’t butter at all just maple syrup whipped up into a spread. We talked with the Bairds, petted the dog, got back in the car and went on our way.

Here's a picture of the Baird Farm sugar house taken from their website:

One interesting thing about maple syrup is that it’s all made the same way. There are four grades: Grade A Fancy, Grade A Medium Amber, Grade A Dark Amber and Grade B. There is no effort made to distinguish the syrup beyond this point. No one ever says that their trees produce a superior sap or that one producer is more skilled than another. This isn’t like wine where someone is aging his syrup in a special oak barrel while someone else is aging his in a stainless steel tank. There are just a set of guidelines as to what qualifies each type of syrup and that’s that. I’m surprised that some marketing genius hasn’t come along and tried to carve out some niche beyond the real Vermont Maple Syrup tag that we see at any decent pancake house across the country but to my knowledge this hasn’t happened, yet.

Check out the Baird’s website. They ship syrup anywhere in the country and the prices are very reasonable for what you get. You also get the satisfaction of knowing your money is going directly to a farmer and that’s something you can’t get at any tourist trap that I know of.

Baird Farm
65 West Road
N. Chittenden, Vermont 05763
802-483-2963

Fresh Eggs

2006-08-03T22:29:00.000-04:00

Have you ever had a fresh egg? A straight from the farm egg from a chicken not raised in a box and never allowed to realize that its legs were made for walking? I’m not sure that I ever had until recently. Even though I was buying organic eggs at Whole Foods I’m still not sure. I’d heard chef’s on TV talk about fresh eggs; had vendors at farmer’s markets try and sell me their “fresh” eggs but I’d always thought that an egg was, well, an egg.

Then I was reading Bill Buford’s Heat and came across the following passage on pages 182-83:

“Which was why I was in Porretta. It was also why I’d got so interested in the egg, because, on my first morning, watching Betta prepare the dough, I saw that an egg was a modern pasta’s most import ingredient, provided it was a very good egg, which was evident (or not) the moment you cracked it open. If the white was runny, you knew the egg had come from a battery-farmed animal, cooped up in a cage, and the pasta you made from it would be sticky and difficult to work with., exactly like the unhappy batch Betta produced one evening after Gianni fell asleep, having had too much wine at lunch, and failed to buy eggs from the good shop before it closed and had to drive to the next town to the cattivo alimentarii, the nasty store, and pick up a dozen of its mass-produced product. The yolk was also illuminating. The nasty store’s were pale yellow, like those most of us have been scrambling for our urban lives. But a proper yolk is a different color and, in Italian, is still called il rosso, the red bit, arising from a time when you ate eggs in the spring and summer, the egg season, and they came from grain-fed, half-wild, not just free-ranging but virtually proprietorial chickens that produced a yolk more red than yellow, a bright primary intensity that you can see today if you’re lucky enough to get your eggs not from a supermarket but a local mercato or a small farm.”

“A battery-farmed animal” boy, that phrase got me. I decided that I need to try and find out what all this fuss was about. I know a guy who raises chickens for their eggs and asked him if I could buy a dozen. He wouldn’t sell them to me, said he’d give them to me instead. I like to pay people for what I get but he insisted. I ended up splitting a dozen with another guy in my office.

I took the eggs home and it was like reading from that Buford passage verbatim. There was the white not too runny and the yolk, standing up straight and proud looking more like orange zest than orange juice. How did these eggs taste? Like nothing I’d had before. I had to have more. I called the guy up, no more eggs right now. The chickens were on strike. Actually, I think the chickens just weren’t producing enough for him to spare.

I became obsessed. I went to the Madison Farmer’s Market. I bought “fresh” eggs from a vendor there. I took home the eggs and cracked them open only to find a runny white and a lemon yellow yolk. What was going on? Had I just bought the same eggs I could have gotten at the A & P and paid twice as much for a dozen? I went back the next Thursday and asked the farmer. I didn’t want to accuse them of selling mislabeled eggs so instead I asked if their source for the eggs was reliable. I explained what had happened. The farmer looked at me, I looked back. “No one’s complained” she said. I wonder what she thought I was doing.

Next I ended up at someone’s house in Basking Ridge with a sign out front advertising fresh eggs. By now I’d done some reading. I knew that you really shouldn’t wash a fresh egg too thoroughly until just before you crack it. There is a protective coating on an egg that when washed away causes eggs to spoil faster. Commercial operators wash their eggs and then spray them with a mineral oil to help prolong shelf life. I also found out that you can tell the color eggshell a chicken will lay by looking at the color of its ears.* Why I needed this information I’m still not sure but it is interesting.

The Basking Ridge eggs were better than the eggs from the farmers market. The white had a better consistency but the yolk was still yellow. I was looking for what Buford described as “il rosso” and I wasn’t finding it. The refrigerator was filling up with eggs. I thought about making egg salad.

I went back to the guy who gave me the first eggs and asked him what made his eggs so good. No real surprise that it’s a combination of feed and lifestyle. The chickens are free to roam his yard during the day. They return to the coop in the evening to sleep and to be protected from the neighborhood fox. The feed is a combination of marigold petals, sunflower seeds and ground oyster shells. The egg yolks get some of that orange color from those marigold petals to be sure and the oyster shell helps make the eggshell sturdier. The feed is all organic, he said. I wonder if there is such a thing as organic oyster shell.

The good news is that more eggs are on the way. He’s just acquired some more chickens and come September he promises the eggs will be plentiful. Now if I can just figure out how to get him to charge me.

Until then I’ll be on the lookout for another source. Once you’ve had a really good egg there’s no turning back. There are other people in my area selling eggs from their homes. I guess I’ll be ringing some more door bells. Egg salad anyone?

*The information on eggs came from Shirley Corriher’s Cookwise, pages 192-195.

Roots Steakhouse: first impressions

2006-08-03T08:37:00.000-04:00

I went to Roots Steakhouse in Summit on Tuesday night with high expectations. There is no good steak-chop-seafood house in all of the Union/Morris/Somerset County area that I know of and with Roots being owned by Harvest Restaurant Group which manages four other terrific restaurants in the area I had high hopes.

Roots more than met my expectations, it exceeded them. It is hard to believe that this restaurant has only been open for a few days. The service was flawless. The food arrived quickly and was cooked exactly to order. I never had the feeling that they were still getting their act together.

More importantly, the food was outstanding. I started with the beefsteak tomato salad with caramelized onions, olive oil and sea salt, garnished with fresh basil. The tomato is cut up, dressed up and then stacked back up. I deconstructed it and ate it in slices. The mix of the sweet onion and the salt and that fresh basil helped the tomato which was just shy of its peak. Still this was a very good salad and a good way to start a dinner, especially on a hot night.

For my entrée I had the 16 oz. dry aged sirloin steak. I ordered it cooked rare and it came out cooked rare with a nice outer crust. It was also absolutely delicious. The same quality steak I’d expect to have at a top flight steakhouse in NYC like Sparks. The steak is $35.95 and comes a la carte. For a side dish I had creamed spinach which was also excellent. I have to admit, I was trying to recreate the meal I’d order if I was at Peter Luger in Brooklyn: tomato and onion salad, rare steak, creamed spinach. There are no hash browns on the menu but there are mashed potatoes and also a “colossal” baked potato. All side dishes are $5.95. After having a steak this good it will be hard to justify driving back to Brooklyn anytime soon.

If you’re planning on going I’d suggest calling for a reservation, (908)273-0027. The restaurant was crowded on Tuesday night. Very crowded when you consider it was their third night being open and that it had been 100 degrees on Tuesday. I got the last seat at the bar at 7:15 and I was among several diners who had their meal there. This had two distinct advantages: first, was the high quality of service I received from the bartenders who are a credit to the establishment. Second, the diner sitting next to me gave me one of his lamb chops, a thick loin chop cooked medium and, again, nicely seared on the outside. One of the best lamp chops I’ve every eaten in a restaurant and since you get three of these chops in the order the value is outstanding.

Roots Steakhouse is an expensive restaurant but I think it is a very good value. I don’t think you could serve food of this quality and charge low prices. This isn’t Arthur’s and it isn’t the Outback. Maybe the only hope of keeping the line from running around the block will be the pricing. With a menu with such great choices, steak, chops, 3-5 lb. lobsters, raw bar etc. its hard to imagine this place won’t be packed every night. The area certainly can afford it and the area certainly has been longing for this type of place. I plan on going back and soon. See you at the bar.

Roots Steakhouse Summit NJ: ready to open

2006-07-28T23:45:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-20T22:29:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-19T22:59:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-13T23:17:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-08T15:02:00.000-04:00

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.

Half Time, beer paradise in Poughkeepsie

2006-06-28T13:00:00.000-04:00

There are several things to like about Half Time, Poughkeepsie’s beer mega store. First, of course, is the unbelievable selection of beer, over 1400 varieties. Second, is the mixed six pack policy; like a mixed case of wine except for a smaller quantity of beer. With so many varieties to choose from it’s nice to be able to do a little mixing and matching. Third and something that really sets Half Time apart is the availability of beer on draft for purchase. That’s purchase to drink at home not in the liquor store though it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a little tasting that goes on in the parking lot. This isn’t typical keg beer either. Its specialty brews from craft brewers, stuff you aren’t going to find in bottles even in a good liquor store. Here’s a list of examples from the Half Time website.

Here’s how that works: you buy a “growler” from Half Time, or you bring your own, and you fill it up every time you come in. A half gallon container costs somewhere between $10 and $20 depending on the beer and you thought there was no good reason to live in Poughkeepsie?

How do you shop in a store with 1400 beers when you live 100 miles away? You need a strategy; here’s mine. I look for a brewery I know makes a good product and that I can’t easily get at my favorite local liquor store and then I buy as many varieties as I can. This weekend it was Stoudt’s, a microbrewer from Pennsylvania. Taking advantage of that mix and match policy I picked up 5 different varieties in 2 six packs. Holiday weekend coming and I need to be ready. Only bought those 12 so don’t plan on inviting yourself over, okay?

I also picked up 2 four packs of the new Sam Adam’s historic beer collection. This looked interesting and like the kind of thing I wasn’t likely to find on every corner. Nice story about these beers here.

If you like good beer and you find yourself anywhere near Half Time be sure to make the trip. It’s worth a detour, even a lengthy one.

Half Time, 2290 Route 9, Poughkeepsie NY (845)462-5400

A Pepsi and a bag of Cheese Nips

2006-06-21T22:48:00.000-04:00

Oh, the things we do for our kids. Last night was my 5 year olds dance recital. It was also Tuesday night, the night I usually go out for a quick bite after work. So there I was at Raritan Valley Community College in the auditorium with 979 other parents, grandparents, siblings etc. waiting to see my daughter perform for 5 minutes in a show that lasts 2 hours. Now this isn’t as painful as this:

However, when I consider that I could have been at the bar at Copeland having this:

I have to wonder.

What I did have was a can of Pepsi and a couple of Cheese Nips. I bought the Cheese Nips for my 2 year old who I knew would eat all the grapes I’d smuggled in to the auditorium before his sister even made it on stage. The Cheese Nips were the best of the worst of what there was at the concession stand, not too messy and lots of little bites. We watched my daughter and then spent the rest of the performance wandering the campus eating those little crackers with their unnatural orange color and artificial cheese taste. My son loves them. Doesn’t every little kid?

The Best Lunch in Florham Park

2006-06-14T16:24:00.000-04:00

What I like: The Cuban sandwich
Where: Tasserts Restaurant, 176 Columbia Turnpike, Florham Park, NJ.
Phone: (973)822-3712
Website: Tasserts

The best lunch in Florham Park is at Tasserts, a restaurant tucked into the corner of a shopping plaza on Columbia Turnpike. The chef has high aspirations at Tasserts, just check out the ingredient list on the menu, but the thing that keeps me coming back is the Cuban sandwich. I can’t decide what I like better, the chipotle sauce, the caramelized onions, the Niman Ranch pork or the crusty bread made in house but this sandwich is a killer.

Now when you look at the pictures you’ll notice there’s no ham in the Tasserts Cuban. I guess this makes it less than authentic. Half way through one of these baby’s and you won’t care about authenticity. You’ll be reaching for water to cool down the bite from that chipotle sauce. As another blogger put it “f* the ham” and he hadn’t even had the sandwich yet. For $10 I can’t imagine a better lunch value and the sandwich comes with fries. You can substitute a small salad for those fries if you want. I do this sometimes; a little delusion I have about trying to eat in a more healthful way.

Looking at the menu I noticed they now offer a Kobe burger which I haven’t tried. The burger that used to be on the menu wasn’t listed as Kobe beef and it was good but not as good as the one at Copeland. Tempting as trying that burger is I’ll be hard pressed not to order that Cuban the next time I go back.

Scranton PA, Culinary Wasteland

2006-06-12T23:45:00.000-04:00

“We didn’t come here for the food.” I say this to myself over and over like Dorothy at the end of the Wizard of Oz. “We didn’t come here for the food”. Say it enough times and it almost makes up for how horrible the food I had over the weekend in Scranton was, almost.

Well, we didn’t come for the food. We, and by we I mean my wife’s family, go to Scranton every spring for a visit. Her family is from Scranton; Dunmore actually, though an outsider would be hard pressed to tell the difference. We stay in the local Holiday Inn, go to a Red Barons baseball game, take a guided tour down memory lane, my father-in-law’s memory, and this year we had the unfortunate addition of scattering my mother-in-law’s ashes in the cemetery.

We’ve got six little kids in tow, ranging in age from 8 to 2, so we have to consider them when picking places to eat. Also, most of the family does not share my food obsession. They think I’m a food snob; maybe they’re right. Still when I think about what we ate this last weekend it’s a wonder the locals don’t starve to death.

We started Friday night at La Trattoria, 522 Moosic St. (570)961-1504, a red sauce joint whose claim to fame is all you can eat pasta. Eat 2 lbs. of spaghetti with meatballs in a sitting and not only do they give you the meal for free, they give you a meal a month free for a year. You don’t even have to eat the meatballs they told me, or the salad that comes with every entrée, you can take those things home. Just power down those 2 lbs. of spaghetti with a sauce so sickly sweet as to be the food equivalent of maudlin and you can come back 11 more times for more of the same. I’ll pass. Best thing about this place is the neon sign on the roof which spells out “Rasta Man” instead of Pasta Man. Maybe if you smoke enough weed you could eat those 2 lbs. of pasta.

What’s up next? A bad breakfast buffet at the Holiday Inn, 200 Tigue St., Dunmore, (570)343-5171. Now, we had this coming. We’ve eaten here before and the food is never any good. The hotel is convenient and the kids love the indoor pool. Just don’t look around too closely, as my brother-in-law said the place is on its last leg.

Best meal of the weekend? No doubt here, it was hot dogs at the Red Barons game. Now this wasn’t good ballpark food, the hot wings I got were cold and those hot dogs weren’t the kosher dogs I would get at a Yankee game but they did have decent beer on tap and the people at Lackawanna Co. Stadium go out of their way to treat you well. They just opened a “party deck” over the left field fence and they were serving up carved roast beef, ham or turkey sandwiches for $7, too bad I found this after I’d eaten those wings and a dog.

What was the worst meal of the weekend? No doubt here either, Coopers Seafood House, is a landmark and is almost always packed. The décor is a mix of Scranton photos from years gone by, Americana kitsch and various marine life scattered about the restaurant in drawings or hanging from the wall. Where else will you find a cardboard cutout of Captain Kirk pointing you towards the restroom in the same room with a giant whale? The place has a certain charm, I guess but the food is awful and expensive. Scranton, land locked northern PA. Coal mining town and seafood restaurant don’t seem like a natural mix, do they? I had fish and chips thinking it was a safe bet. I was wrong.

All was not lost, however. Just before heading for home we stopped at the Krispy Kreme, 511 Moosic St. right across from La Trattoria for some doughnuts. I’m a big fan. I ate my jelly filled glazed doughnut as we pulled into our driveway. It was good to be home.

The $17 can of tuna fish: a lesson in retail marketing

2006-05-20T23:31:00.000-04:00

I like the Zingerman’s catalog. I look forward to receiving it the way I look forward to getting all the food magazines I subscribe to. I think of Ari Weinzweig as the Richard Thalheimer of the food world. I even sent a $27 coffee cake to a friend’s mom as a get well gift. She, being old school, knew I’d been robbed, that even if it was the greatest coffee cake ever baked it couldn’t be worth the $42 including shipping that I’d paid. I was ignorant of this fact. I was charmed by Zingerman’s and I would have continued to be charmed and continued to shop there if it hadn’t been for a $17 can of tuna fish.

The tuna in question was Ortiz “Ventresca” tuna fish. A canned version of toro and written about in such a way by Mr.Weinzweig as to make not ordering a can almost an unthinkable act. Hell you could save $4 by ordering 4 cans for a measly $64 and this tuna was so good that I was actually considering doing this. Keep in mind that these prices are before shipping, so that $17 can of tuna is really a $20+ can of tuna by the time you get your hands on it.

The problem is that Ortiz sells Ventresca tuna fish in the supermarket. I found it in Wegman’s in Bridgewater, and I found it for $8.99, yeah, $8.99, a 47% savings over the Zingerman’s price. Now I’ll grant you that Zingerman’s probably doesn’t buy things at the same price that Wegman’s does and so they have to charge more but almost double?

Ari, you marketing genius, here’s a lesson: don’t try to hit homeruns on easily shopped items. I’ve learned this in my business. You can make a huge mark up on that coffee cake but you’ve got to be competitive on the tuna because when you get caught, and trust me with the internet you’re going to get caught, it raises doubts about everything else you sell.

By the way, that tuna is great; great for canned tuna that is. I’m not sure it’s worth even the $8.99 price for less than a pound but it was worth trying. Go to Zingerman’s, it’s a fun place to shop if you’re into food. Just think twice before buying anything.

Firecracker Calamari at An American Grill

2006-05-18T22:59:00.000-04:00

A Dish Worth Driving For

What: The “Firecracker” Calamari
Where: An American Grill, 246 Rt. 10, Randolph NJ (973)442-9311.
Website:

I think it was Milton Berle who said “I know I good joke when I steal one”. Same applies to restaurant dishes. The firecracker calamari at An American Grill in Randolph might well remind you of the Santa Fe calamari at Tim Schaeffer’s in Morristown. It should, AAG owner Lou Reda will admit, when he’s in the mood, to having lifted this dish from “the Beer Chef”. Reda will insist that he played around with the dish and improved on it and maybe he’s right. I haven’t been to Tim Schaeffer’s in a long time but I do remember having this dish there and liking it.

Now I go to AAG at least twice a month to eat calamari, talk with Lou Reda and whomever else might be in the bar and drink some Mark West Pinto Noir by the glass or some Hacker Pshcorr Weiss Beer. You can only taste four things: sweet, sour, salty and spicy and this dish hits them all. I love the saltiness of the kalamata olives and the capers, the sweet and sour notes of the balsamic vinegar, the sweetness that comes from the tomatoes, and the heat from whatever kind of peppers they’re using, the crunch of the perfectly cooked calamari. The secret of this dishes’ success is time. That’s what Lou’s told me. You can’t move the calamari around in the pan too much or it won’t get crunchy enough. Whoever they’ve got working in the kitchen has learned this lesson. I can’t think of any time I’ve ordered this and been unsatisfied.

So go and go soon. I don’t make recommendations lightly. This is the kind of dish worth driving an hour for. There’s lots of other good food at An American Grill, a lamb sandwich lunch special comes to mind, but I really haven’t ordered anything but this calamari in months. Go there and find out why.

Piyaz: Turkish White Bean Salad

2006-05-05T23:55:00.000-04:00

Piyaz: Turkish White Bean Salad

Here’s a simple dish made with cannellini beans that’s great for warm weather. I got the concept from a recipe in John Thorn’s Simple Cooking. I’ve made this so many times that I’m not sure if I’m still being true to his version. My rendition does get the seal of approval from my Turkish brother-in-law so it can’t be that bad. Here’s what you need:

1 18oz can* of Cannellini beans
¼ cup of extra virgin olive oil
1 large clove of garlic, or more to taste
1 large green bell pepper
½ large red onion
flat leaf parsley
lemon juice
kosher salt
red pepper flakes

*The exact size of the can of beans will vary slightly by brand, for example Goya has a 15.5 oz. can and Progresso a 19 oz. one. This will make little difference in the finished product.

In a bowl large enough to hold all the ingredients pour in the olive oil and add the red pepper flakes, using as much or as little as you like depending on your tolerance for heat. Remember, red pepper flakes lose intensity with age so try to use fresh ones.

Mince the garlic along with the kosher salt and work together into a paste on your cutting board. How much kosher salt? A pinch should give you enough grit to work the garlic to the desired consistency. Add this mixture to the oil.

Chop the green pepper and red onion into a small dice and add them to the mixing bowl. Could you use a white or yellow onion here? Yes, but part of the reason to use the red onion is for the contrast in color to the white beans and the green pepper.

Take the can of beans and add them, liquid and all, to a small sauce pan and bring them up to a simmer. You do not want to bring the beans to a full boil. When the beans have begun to bubble remove them from the heat, strain off the liquid and add the hot beans to the mixing bowl. Cover and let the mixture sit at room temperature for at least one hour.

Just before serving add the lemon juice and parsley. How much of each you use depends, again, or your taste. I start with the juice of half a lemon and start tasting. The Turkish brother-in-law says that the use of a lot of parsley is what makes this dish uniquely Turkish but I’ve gotten by without it in a pinch. What I like best is the mixture of the creaminess of the beans, the heat of the red pepper, the crunch of the green pepper and onion, and the way the raw garlic lingers after you’ve finished eating.

Brunch at the North Maple Inn

2006-04-17T08:33:00.000-04:00

North Maple Inn
Where: 300 North Maple Ave. Basking Ridge, NJ 07920.
Phone: 800-953-8033
Website: www.northmapleinn.com
Setting: Modern Hotel restaurant or ballroom.
Service: friendly and attentive
Best meal: brunch

Why you should go: the brunch here is a great value for a traditional hotel brunch. The price per person is under $40. The restaurant is crowded for holiday brunches on Easter and Mother’s Day but it is not packed. For all those occasions where you need a place for brunch this provides a good alternative to other hotels such as the Short Hills Hilton. If you are bringing children the value is even stronger: kids 5 and under eat for free and older kids are charged $12 each. They even have visits from the Easter Bunny on Easter Sunday.

Food was all good, not great, about what you expect for this type of service. Smoked fish platter along with peel and eat shrimp; omelet station; carving station; chafing dishes filled with breakfast meats, others filled with lunch entrees and vegetable sides; a table filled with breads, bagels, muffins. All this topped off by a dessert station including make your own sundaes and pastries which, typically, look better than they taste. On one visit there was a crepe station but this was not repeated this Easter.

Service was excellent. Juice, coffee and water were brought out frequently and plates were cleared with the same speed. Special requests were handled quickly and graciously. Our table needed to be reconfigured to accommodate a wheelchair and this was taken care of immediately.

The hotel and its grounds are beautiful and beautifully maintained. After eating there is a courtyard where, weather permitting, you can soak up some sun and let the kids run off some of the pent up energy from all that sitting and all those trips to the dessert bar.

A special note: this hotel is owned by Pfizer and Pfizer employees receive a 20% discount off the entire check. For those lucky enough to be able to take advantage this makes a good deal even better.

The hotel is conveniently located right off Rt. 287 at the North Maple Ave exit and is directly across the street from the Verizon office building which was formerly AT&T’s headquarters.

At the bar: Copeland, Morristown

2006-04-19T11:23:00.000-04:00

Copeland
Where: The Governor Morris Hotel, Morristown, NJ 07960. 973-451-2619
Website: www.copelandrestaurant.com
Setting: Well appointed hotel restaurant, recently redone.
Service: Not what it should be for a restaurant with these aspirations.
Best dishes: Copeland Burger, Raw Bar, Papardelle Ragu.

If you go: eat at the bar. Order the burger and a cold draft beer. I like the Brooklyner Weiss but be warned those taps are frequently malfunctioning. Why, explanations abound but none make much sense. The bartenders bemoan the fact that they spent a fortune on a fancy system complete with refrigerated lines but it seems to rarely work right.

I’ve eaten in the dinning room but come away disappointed. Copeland would like to be a high end restaurant. They certainly charge high end prices. They serve an adventurous menu that changes seasonally and they have a raw bar with lots of choices. The service did not measure up to the food however. There were long waits between courses and the wine cellar was poorly inventoried. It took three tries to find a bottle of wine that they had in stock on one visit.

The bar, despite the tap issues, is a winner. It is comfortable and the service is quick if somewhat standoffish. The burger is the shinning star. For $12 it should be but it delivers: a big, juicy, well cooked piece of wagyu beef topped with cheese and bacon, lettuce and tomato on a fresh made brioche bun and served with homemade French fries. It has been a hit on every occasion. Copeland being a hotel bar has a transient nature to it: you won’t find many regulars and this may explain the attitude of the bartenders. Steer clear of those empty suits with their Coors Light’s, order that burger or maybe some oysters and you’ll be well served.