Entries associated with the tag "New York Times":

In Sunday's New York Times, Matt Gross checks out restaurants at (or near) seven airports to see what's worth eating. Some of the best spots, he discovers, are outside the terminal. The Atlanta airport's taxi assembly cafeteria, for example, serves great African food; at LAX you can hop on a parking shuttle to In-N-Out Burger, the uberpopular fast food chain with a cultlike following. Gross is impressed with the fare at the Dallas/Forth Worth airport and the restaurants in the new JetBlue terminal at JFK, not so much with the offerings at LaGuardia.

O'Hare, though, is the only place he discovers nary a redeeming quality:

But O’Hare — the nation’s second busiest airport, with 76 million passengers in 2007 — was easily the worst airport I visited, particularly disappointing since Chicago is one of America’s great restaurant cities. Instead of Air Alinea or Tobolobampo to Go . . . diners will find: Chicago-style hot dogs so poorly assembled as to cast doubt on the city’s architectural heritage; collard greens so bland and peach cobbler so mucoid they’d start riots on the South Side; and greasy, flavor-free cheeseburgers whose only claim to fame is that they inspired a “Saturday Night Live” sketch featuring John Belushi, a comedian renowned, of course, for his discriminating palate. I watched my fellow diners with envy: a woman who pulled a packet of Alka-Seltzer from her purse; a bald, beefy man in handcuffs who was no doubt looking forward to decades of prison food.

Listed on his roundup of places to eat are the Billy Goat Tavern, BJ’s Market & Bakery, and Goose Island Pub, which he presumably deems the best of the worst; commenters offer equally lukewarm recommendations of La Tapenade Mediterranean Cafe, the Berghoff Cafe, Cibo Express Gourmet, and Wolfgang Puck Cafe.

Mostly, though, the commenters agree that O'Hare is about as low as you can go in terms of airport food. Suggestions include cabbing it to nearby restaurants like bistro Chez Colette (in the Sofitel O'Hare) or Carlucci or, better yet, flying into Midway and eating at Harry Caray's, Lalo's, Superdawg, or Manny's Deli. According to one person (whose hatred of O'Hare is equalled only by his love for capital letters and quotation marks):

You CANNOT overstate the horror of O'Hare's "food." There is NOTHING to eat, except for stale sandwiches in the "international" terminal. NOTHING!!!!!!!

Personally, I kind of like the idea of Air Alinea. If there's anything that could make people actually want to fly through O'Hare (besides fewer delays, of course), that might be it.

No-knead bread, the phenomenon that swept food circles a couple years ago, is back in the pages of the New York Times. Since publishing the original recipe from Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery, which requires 14-20 hours of rising time, columnist Mark Bittman has been working on a faster version that incorporates more whole grain. Here's what he came up with. 

Always wanted to quiz El Bulli chef Ferran Adrià about his cooking, whether he invented what's come to be known as molecular gastronomy, or why he doesn't like that term? The New York Times's Diner's Journal is offering readers a chance to post questions for Adrià--who's in New York this week promoting his new book, A Day at El Bulli--promising that he'll answer as many as possible. Some favorites, from the bizarre to the bizarrely broad:

"I am a firm believer that eating well should be a glorious feast for the senses. Do you feel that in order to attain these results the end justifies the means?"

"Is food sexual?" 

"What do you advise for young chefs in training?"

"I would be interested in a comparison of Spanish cuisine with Mexico’s cuisine."

He doesn't appear to have started answering yet, and there are over 100 questions already. Still, your chances of getting yours answered are probably still better than of getting a reservation at El Bulli, which gets hundreds of thousands of requests for 8,000 openings each season; a 2006 Guardian article on the restaurant put the number of requests for each table at 400.

If you want to give it a shot, though, it's almost time to start making reservations for the 2009 season, which runs from mid-June through mid-December. They start taking reservations in mid-October; send an e-mail with the date you'd like and number in your party to bulli@elbulli.com (it's the only time of year they take reservations, and they don't do waiting lists). And although the information for making reservations is on the restaurant's Web site this year, Louisa Chu's blog post about it from last year is still worth reading (Chu finally ate there last week, but hasn't blogged about it yet).

If there's one local chef I'd like to see a cookbook from it's Paul Kahan. In yesterday's New York Times magazine, in a story about the charitable work of name chefs, Michael Ruhlman included an adaptation of Kahan's Sauteed Sweetbreads with Beets and Molasses. It's not the sort of thing anybody's going to whip up after a hard day in the mines--it requires lots of soaking and draining. But if you make the time for it (and I plan to) it looks like a valuable lesson in what to do with the fifth quarter [via]. Kudos to the NYT for giving a practical nod to what Chris Cosentino calls the "whole animal ethic."

This morning's New York Times story about Santa Fe's locavore magazine franchiser Edible Communities mentions the network of 33 regional titles is expanding like "kudzu," with seven more mags due to be published by fall, and negotiations in the works for a dozen more.

But looking at the company's roster it's painfully obvious that there's a dearth of midwestern regions represented (excepting Edible Twin Cities and Edible Iowa River Valley). Edible Communities CEO Tracey Ryder says that won't be for long.

"We have three parties who are all looking over the contract for Edible Chicago right now,"" she was kind enough to write this morning, in the wake of a flurry of NYT-related inquiries. "So far, no one has signed one, which really means the area is wide open. Obviously, as of this morning, we’ve had at least 6 other inquiries from the area, so it’s likely to be gone soon."

So the race is on, but who are the competitors?

Jeepers, what is with the New York Times lately? As Bayne and Margasak observed, the Grey Lady recently published a pair of dubious trend pieces based on dusty anecdotal data. What? Black people like rock and roll, you say? And now Koreans like fried chicken? Why then, people, can't we all just get along?

The piece in today's dining section states that "the popular cult of crunchy, spicy, perfectly nongreasy chicken — the apotheosis of the Korean style — is a recent development," but then quotes a Manhattan franchise owner saying said new trend has been going for 20 years. Where's the evidence? Korean chicken joints have recently opened in New York, New Jersey, and California, something the Times first sniffed back in September with this review of a Koreatown hof, a beer and chicken joint modeled on a German pub, whose ilk is ubiquitous back on the peninsula.

Regardless, Chicagoans need not go coastal to keep up with these developments. Two styles of Korean fried chicken are openly sold at the Hourglass, and Great Sea does a booming business in fried chicken crack.

In the NY Times today: "You May Kiss the Chef's Napkin Ring," a wide-ranging, Swiftian grumble from restaurant critic Frank Bruni about the unbalanced state of the fine-dining world. It's a fairly wholesale set of complaints about the dominance of Chef's wishes--in the form of what you order (tyrannical tasting menus), when you eat (9:45 seatings), how long you may take (we're looking at you, Gordon Ramsay), what you listen to (loud music)--and the subjugation of the diner's. He almost seems to be asking, "Where my cranky New Yorkers at?" He does a pretty good job of describing the milieu of restaurants where celebrity chef cookbooks line the exits and every smear of sauce comes with a lengthy murmured provenance. And lest it sound too much like a salvo in a new reductive public debate (I can imagine a tedious Mike Wallace rant about all this), toward the end he concedes the fact that many of the places he mentions--Babbo, Per Se, Joel Robuchon's L’Atelier--are places that he gave positive reviews. The food is good. Great, even. So what this is really all about is the ever-escalating tradeoff.

I'm still trying to decide how it fits in my view of things, but it's an interesting piece. The best line? "It won't be long before Hooters has a tasting menu." Bwah! "For your next course, chef is offering ailes de poulet with a trio of regional sauces and suggests, to pair, a flight of PBR..."

(Where is Bruni's review of the new Gordon Ramsay in New York? Unless I'm missing something it still hasn't appeared. What's the backstory there?)

Lick your finger and stick it in the air; two lifestyle articles last weekend (AP and New York Times) lent their imprimatur to basic ideas about America, food, and the media.  What d'ya think? 

Students are seduced by the glamour of high-profile chefdom into disillusionment!  It's official, the glut is here. In "Celebrity chefs boost culinary schools," the AP reporter talks to culinary school grads who are disappointed by the life waiting for them on the outside. It's hard to imagine how anyone could not know, despite (as the article predictably cites) Emeril and rachaelray, that professional cooking is an extremely demanding, traditionally thankless profession (part of its Bourdainian glamour, yes?), from which even the possibility of serious perks has emerged only recently, and those as unlikely as the usual rich-n-famous odds. However, this article also claims some students are having a hard time finding work, period, to support themselves after school. One recent California culinary school grad (named Cuisinier!), unemployed and in debt, says, "When they're trying to get you enrolled in these programs, they tell you you're going to come out making top dollar. I've just been way disappointed." Tim Ryan, president of the CIA, demurs, noting that, "We spend a lot of time before we admit students to make sure they understand the realities of the industry and don't come in all starry-eyed with unrealistic expectations." 

The article doesn't shake out all the relevant issues, despite some interesting statistical fluffing (in the last ten years the number of cooking schools has doubled, but most food service jobs are held by fast-food workers). It is, however, much ado about the current glamour of  food celebrities, and depicts an America in love with its chefs. One sociologist is quoted: "It's becoming rarer to cook amongst young, urban professionals. We're watching TV and reading books about beautiful food."

But wait. Maybe the AP's definition of "chef" is just too broad.  According to the NYT, Americans want their food media served by people just like them! The first line of "Food for the People, Whipped Up by the People" reads: "If you wanted to appear in a food magazine or publish a cookbook in 2006, to star in a television cooking show or increase the traffic on your Web site, your best move was clear: don’t be a chef." The piece is a year-end look at changes in the food media landscape, arguing that it's not chefs who dominate the media anymore, but regular people/"the people" (à la Time mag's "Person of the Year" choice). "It was the year the people took back the food. Expertise was out." The article cites as evidence phenomena such as changes in presenters at Food Network from chefs to caterers/personalities (Batali out, DeLaurentiis in), the popularity of user-driven recipe sites and comfy magazines like Taste of Home, which has "about 3.5 million subscribers, more than Gourmet, Food & Wine and Bon Appétit combined," and is (according to their editor) "proud to be the comfortable shoe, not the stiletto, of food magazines. A lot more people wear comfortable shoes.”

I'm not sure there really is such a change evident in all this so much as an increased polarity amongst general increasing interest, period (appropriate somehow, during the Bush regime). There's always been a kind of high-end/low-end dichotomy in the food media. It's interesting to ponder, despite the fact that the polarity does often encourage the very tedious and cyclical (what I call) Sandra Lee Debate, in which foodies are elitist stressed-out snobs and crappy food made with McCormick seasoning mixes means you understand what's important. And no in between.

New York Times political--latterly, food--writer R.W. Apple Jr., died October 4, ensuring a long lifespan for the word "Falstaffian" in newspaper obituaries everywhere. Apple, a legendary figure in appetite and talent, was an Akron native and wrote well about Chicago (which he called "the most characteristically American city"), including one well-known recent piece about hot dogs.

According to a brief article yesterday in the Times' Sunday magazine (subscription required), the night before he died Apple sent an email to food writer Jill Santopietro, who was looking for example of "great American pancakes." According to Santopietro, he wrote that (yes, American pancakes were overrated and) he didn't have his notes, but she "might try the Bongo Room, in Wicker Park, north of Chicago.” The Times piece then includes the Bongo Room's take on cornbread-cranberry pancakes, which Santopietro recommends, noting, "As was often the case with food, Apple was right."

No word yet on whether or not the Bongo Room plans on capitalizing (tastefully) on this deathbed recommendation, as it were, or if that's just a fancy of my tacky imagination.