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

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).

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

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

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:

Zen Japanese Cuisine: Livingston, NJ

“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

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

Throwdown! Bobby Flay jumps the shark

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.