I Love Creativity....but not with Surprises

A friend from Rhode Island was coming to visit for a few days and I hooked up with a local pal to make dinner plans in Nashville.  A few drinks and dinner then a tour of the Broadway honkey tonks for live music was the game plan.  Reservations were suggested at Sambuca's and at 8:30 we were there.  Interesting decor and ambiance but my first impression was a throwback to the 1980s:  Brass, ferns and countless yuppies throwing around big bucks for mediocre food. As I trust my Tennessee  friend's judgment emphatically, I hid my frown of concern but for a while I felt out of place not wearing a three piece suit with a pinky ring and pretending to be a rich investment banker. Sambuca's has rebranded the 1980's theme as "Sensually Sophisticated" and the live music and some wonderful fusion jazz was indeed welcome. The waiter was reasonably knowledgeable with enough pretentiousness to border on unearned snobbery--but again think the 80's---people liked that.  His training perhaps was obtained at a local Meat and Three.  More on him later. Sambuca's menu is that of an an eclectic steakhouse with a couple of trendy and certainly mislabeled menu items.  For instance "deconstructed sushi " as an appetizer.  The concept of deconstructed food is appalling in my opinion but more importantly isn't "deconstructed sushi," nothing more than sashimi?? Enough bastardization of accepted nomenclature, in my opinion. I noticed the Blackened Red Snapper Etouffee on the menu and decided to inquire.  Upon questioning, the waiter assured me the Snapper was fresh.  I allowed him to lie to me outright, and being in a sporting mood and wanting to see how far he would go to sell a piece of fish, I asked him to please check.  A few minutes later he dutifully returned informing me that the Snapper was fresh and recently caught out of the Gulf. Well, I reasoned, another lie as the Gulf's Red Snapper season has been closed since August 1.  OK they were going with it being blackened and in an Etouffee, and I thought,  it would be fine even if it was frozen, so there I went. Now you're right I didn't neglect the possibility of farm raised redfish-----but they offered Red Snapper not Redfish and the former are not farm raised, so I was confident I was being served frozen fish.  Just to let him know I was somehow confident that the fish was frozen, I asked if they even owned a freezer.  We both knew the answer.

At any rate, the mislabeling part comes from the use of the term "Etouffee."  The dish, although marginally passable, was served with a side of dirty rice and spinach. The fish was a fairly large filet with an unidentifiable sauce of some sort.  Although the provenance of this vitreous liquid was unclear, I was confident it did not involve a roux.  Nor did I ever see what appeared to be a "disassembled" Etouffee: A couple of shrimp, a lump or two of crabmeat and fish---with the sauce separated from its constituent components. At a minimum, they should have called it something other than an Etouffee. An "Etouffee Variant" perhaps? I hate creativity with surprises.

Interesting Way of Serving Food

Well it seems that it has been a while since I have picked on some Tennessee folk, and I was having withdrawals.....

Before moving to Tennessee I thought I was well traveled and certainly well experienced in the culinary arts---the eating part of the art that is. I have been traveling on business it seems for well over 25 years and can't think of a major city in America  that I haven't dined in. Like the Food Network's popular show Diners, Drive Ins and Dives and  I thought I had eaten in places that only few people would believe existed.  From roadside stands in Guatemala to places called EATS in the middle of nowhere, to some of the finest restaurants in America, I have been there.  Then we came to Tennessee to discover something called a "Meat and Three." Never heard of them and had no idea what they were until my sister in law, a local Tennessean, thought I was "ready" to expand my gustatory horizons.  Recognizing I was a full fledged food brat and an all around pain it the neck when it comes to food, she knew full well that I would research the restaurant's provenance, the chef and the owner before agreeing to meet her for dinner in one of "Tennessee's best."

To solve this problem and not wanting to watch me pout, she refused to tell us where we were heading and insisted that we meet in a Big Box parking lot not too far from the restaurant. We cautiously followed.  We ended up at a classic "Meat and Three."  I was told it was the best in Middle Tennessee.  I started to wonder what the worst looked like.  Well, apparently the plan here is something akin to a buffet where you pick a meat and then three or two sides.  Only here, they serve you tableside.  Meat choices involved such delicacies as meat loaf, "broasted" chicken, chicken fried steak, hams slices, etc.  You get the picture.  The sides offered were fried okra, mac and cheese, string beans (that lost their color years ago), mashed (boxed) potatoes and puree of something that once was a vegetable.  Of course the service is appropriate for the kind of restaurant it is, and they do push the desserts.  By this point, my appetite, such that it was, was long gone and I had no intention of eating more----or there again or any other "Meat and Three." Garbage by any other name is still garbage......

And Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread....

Is it me or have we forgotten our history?  Our culture? Our sense of decorum? Why is it that at too many restaurants we need to ask for bread, then butter, a tapenade or olive oil.  When it arrives, it is not bread in the sense of a fresh, yeast driven pane of texture and flavor.  More often than not it involves either something more akin to Wonder Bread or related to shoe leather as the baker, today for some reason felt increasingly inspired to expand his baking horizons with the inclusion of Gorilla Glue, seeds of some sort, marbles and small stone-like ingredients as if we as humans needed a gastrolith. He then calls it "hearty."  Go to hell.  Expand your horizons with some acid like we did in the 70's.  What is wrong with flour, yeast, water, salt, sugar and some heat  (and steam) and make some bread that has a chewy crust---with semolina on the bottom----and a hot delicate texture chock full of oolitic-like voids of absolute yumminess. Keep your raisins, apples, granola, pears, bananas, nuts, fruits, candy, tree bark, bird feet, candied fruits, organic cow turds and anything else the hell out of my bread. If my bread baker wants "inspiration" they should go to church.  Make bread---- not dessert and don't give me the "its organic, you'll love it" BS.  Hell, nicotine is organic too and I'm quite certain it is a poor addition to food.

Food Crimes

Had I been born Supreme Ruler of the World, I certainly would have outlawed many of the things currently outlawed.  Murder, mayhem, robbery, drugs (sorry, son), having sex with an ugly intern when you are the POTUS, ruining a  perfectly good cigar, etc, but I certainly would add a few. 

Misdemeanor Offenses: Punishable by up to one year of having to eat at IHOP daily.

1. Not knowing who Auguste Escoffiere is and his contibution to your dinner plate. Three month enhancement for not caring.

2. Referring to him as "Augie."

3.Thinking Mario Batali is a chef rather than a restaurateur, huckster of all things cooking related and a one man media circus. (A chef he is not---Ron Popeil watch out. "It dices, slices, cuts, chops, dyes your  hair, etc..." but it can't cook.)

4. Preparing any meal for loved ones when not knowing the difference between a cookbook and a recipe book.

5. Buffets:  offering, preparing or eating at one is a crime.

Basic Felony Offenses:  Punishable by up to 3 years of being banned from any restaurant rated one star or higher.

1. Thinking one of the four (not five) Mother sauces was named  after your mother.

2. Eating meat ---of any sort---- well done, unless you come from Texas where you are excused from knowing how to prepare meat.

3. Preparing boxed potatoes for people you claim to love.

4. Being 40 years of age and not having attended---and eaten at---- the Feast of San Gennaro in NYC.

5. Being 30 and never having eaten properly prepared and served alici.

Major Felony Offenses: Punishable by up to 10 years having to eat only food items that come out of a box.

1. Not knowing the difference between salami and salumi.

2. Selling cheap, nasty olive oil in fancy expensive bottles and referring to it as "e.v.o.o." A waste of 5, 8 or 50 dollars.

3. Speaking of Rachel Ray, admiring her as anything other than a bad actress and flippant debutante of culinary dogma and claiming to like her garish cooking while acknowledging that you will never be sleeping with her.

4. Using cottage cheese---for anything. It is really the garbage curd left over from making butter.  Munch on that with your next diet involving pineapple tidbits.

5. Substituting  Prosciutto Daniele for Prosciutto di Parma.

6.  Believing the Food Network put Giada on our screen as something other than eye candy.  Q: Why does it appear that her cleavage is somehow an important part of the recipe??? By logical extension then, if we all cooked naked would our food taste better??? Sorry, off with their nipples heads!!!!

Capital Offense: Punishment is a  lifetime of eating only in restaurants that specifically cater to pre-pubescent children

1. Putting ketchup (or catsup) on a hot dog, frankfurter or wiener.

2. Putting mustard on a hamburger or anything not a hot dog or a knish.

3. Failing to recognize an emulsified sausage or pretending you are above eating one.

4.  Thinking haute cuisine, nouveau cuisine, classic cuisine, Italian cuisine, good cuisine, or non BBQed cuisine or something other than buzzard on a plate is readily available here in Tennessee.

5.  Erroneously believing that Alabama's newest food campaign ("Possum---the other white meat!")  is a joke.

Major Capital Offense Penalty-No  food that involves olive oil FOR LIFE; NO appeal possible

1. Not knowing what a maitre fromager does.

2. Using a lobster bib when you are older than 10.  Learn to eat.

3. Eating frozen fish when you live within a 100 miles of an ocean.

4. Not knowing how to cook crustaceans.

5. Bringing untrained, whiny, screaming children to a romantic restaurant---on Saturday night no less.

Bacon: A Major Food Group?

Bacon, in my opinion, should be a major food group in and of itself.   (They should put me in charge of rearranging that stupid pyramid, but we'll discuss that in another post.) We have regular bacon, whatever that is, thick cut, slab, fake, real, flavored, smoked, streaky, green, Irish, Canadian, Italian (pancetta) and even bacon made from parts not from the much maligned pork belly.  A few tips on nomenclature.  Bacon is made from the pig's belly, at least here in America.  Bacon not made from the belly is so labeled, like jowl bacon, which is made from the pig's cheek, also known as guanciale.  Bacon is cured and smoked.  Pancetta is cured and dried---but not smoked. Canadian Bacon is the loin also known as back bacon---not the belly. Irish bacon is  from the loin and is similar to Canadian bacon, but not quite.  Streaky bacon is what folk from the UK call American bacon.---which you really can't find in America. Green bacon is not quite bacon---just cured pork belly---unless it is green Irish bacon, which really isn't bacon at all, as it is the loin and also known as back bacon.  Got that?  Now makin' bacon is easy.  I learned after experimenting with  recipes found in Michael Ruhlman and Brain Polcyn's Charcuterie. It is truly not hard to cure and smoke some of the best bacon you've ever eaten.  Start with a piece of pork belly.  Now if your not fortunate enough to live near an organic pig farmer, don't go nuts looking for it, just head to a local Asian market---but buy the best you can find---nice milky white fat with enough meat to make it worthwhile.  Cut it in 1-2 pounds squares, cure it for 5 to 7 days in the refrigerator and smoke for a few hours and you'll never be burdened with that store bought stuff again.  Now, this sounds easy but there are many ways to cure bacon, with an unlimited array of spices, flavorings, ratios and many more ways to smoke it. Make sure the internal temperature of the belly hits 165 in the smoker and you're all set. Lots and lots of recipes and formulas out there--and there are few limits.   I leave that to folks to experiment with.  My first bacon venture tasted more like a salt lick than bacon, but experimentation and trial and error helped.  Whatever you do, never cook bacon in a microwave---it's just wrong and should be a food based capital offense.

Now if you want to learn about bacon, go here or here or here or here or here, but for $30..00 Charcuterie will teach you all you really need to know.  There  are even fairs, clubs and bacon groupies out there.  Contrary to what a cardiologist may say to you, massive amount of salt and pig fat are good for you. Really. I wouldn't make that up.  Think about it---if cardiologists are so darn smart why is heart disease still the leading cause of death??? Cardiologists are really the folk that could not get into podiatry school. Go ahead eat the bacon, ignore the docs.

Food Trends and Things That Keep Me Up at Night

It seems to me that anytime someone wants to take a bad culinary idea and make it universally accepted, they call it a "food trend."  Many of these so called trends are just bad ideas on a plate.  Take, for instance, the gourmet, upscale, overpriced  "mac and cheese" often offered as an ala carte side for $12 bucks. Bad idea.  Mac and cheese, in my opinion, has to be made by my mother (now deceased) or from a box.  Now Mom's had no ingredient that cost more than .50 cents and the box stuff costs in toto around .50 cents. One restaurant I frequent makes their version out of gnocchi and 4 imported cheeses to justify the cost. Melisse in Santa Monica offers a $95.00 plateful of mac and cheese---the truffle is free, I guess. Bad trend.

How about "foam as food?"  Foam belongs on beer. Period.  Tapas---small undersized portions are now called Tapas. Tapas are a wide array of snacks and apps served in classic Spanish cuisine---it is not dinner or an excuse to under size food and overprice the menu.  If you are not Spanish you should be banned from selling Tapas. If I wanted small food I would head off to White Castle.

Four choices of bottled water at a price equal to a decent vino is a bit much.  I'm sorry but NYC has the best tap water on the planet; Cleveland the worst. Sell the $12.00 water there.

Buffets have always been a nasty, nasty trend and getting worse.  If they can ban smoking, polyunsaturated fats and artificial color, why can't they ban buffets as nothing more than a giant bin of germs spewing off people's dirty fingers and kids drool. How about the little street urchin that takes a giant sneeze right on the puree of unidentifiable vegetables????  Plus who in the world can cook 8245 items at one time and make them edible.

Wagyu burgers and hot dogs.  The noble Wagyu  line was not nurtured to become a hot dog.  This is just wrong as probably invented by the same folk that claim Wagyu and Kobe are synonyms. 

Children in fine restaurants annoy me more than just about anything on the planet. Until these untrained critters of devastation can control their puking, throwing and screaming reflex, they---and their parents ----should be banned by any restaurant that doesn't advertise with an animated character.

My daily rant is over--for now.

Learn to Drink Like A Brazilian

With the 2016 Olympics heading to Brazil, we Americans  will have a few years to get accustomed to drinking a Caipirinha, the popular and admittedly nearly lethal drink of Brazil.  The Caipirinha is Brazil's national drink and is made with Cachaça, sugar, muddled limes and ice.  Obviously, variations exist with the use or addition of other fruits but the Cachaça is the constant. Cachaça, is distilled from sugar cane and aged in oak or other casks for years.  The sugar cane is fermented and distilled then, of course, aged. Cachaça, used for the Caipirinha is generally raw in that it is not aged or aged for a short period of time. Hints of the Mojito sans the mint come to mind, probably due to the related bloodlines of rum, molasses boiled from sugar cane and Cachaça, made from sugar cane.  As we get closer to 2016 I expect to see more more establishments offering up this superb cocktail.  Although drinking responsibly should be everyone's goal I suggest that more than one of these is not being responsible.  It seems that these have the habit of making the face go numb then sabotaging good judgment.

Life is Too Short for Bad Coffee.

Not caring for store bought coffee, I roast my own.  Once you drink fresh roasted coffee---properly roasted, de-gassed, ground and brewed, there is no going back to store bought.  IAll other offerings becomes what I call "bad brown beverage" as I can not defame the name "coffee" with an attribution to the floor sweeping passed off as the product sold in markets.  Inferior beans, improperly roasted,  and invariably stale is not coffee.  Even Starbucks, lovingly known in the home roasting circles as CHARBUCKS or CHAR$, doesn't hold a candle to home roasted coffee.  Now Stumptowns  or Peets does offer a well roasted, well brewed cup of Joe, but again no comparison to home roasted.  I buy my "greens," as they are known, from Sweet Maria's in Oakland, Although there are a great many places to get quality beans, Tom of Sweet Maria's takes most of the guess work out of purchasing by offering his extensive cupping profiles.  After the initial outlay for a roaster and a good burr grinder, most home roasters find that ther price per pot decreases significantly.  First, greens are cheaper generally running for $4.00-7.00 per pound. No premium well roasted coffee approaches that price and besides all roasted coffee is stale within 4 or 5 days (at best) and ground coffee is stale in 10 minutes---vacuum cans notwithstanding. Second, you save a fortune by not drinking $6.00 per cup boutique, gas station, fast food or any other offering of bad brown beverage pawned off as coffee. Third, you get to steer clear of those punked out, twentysomething, vendi-speaking, condescending brats who think they are baristas because they know how to work a superautomatic espresso machine or an idiot proof Clover.   Few of these charmers really know the difference among a ristretto, lungo, machiatto, Americano or cup of brewed Kopi Luwak.  (Throw a lever espresso machine and a Reg Barber tamper in front of them and watch them whine and wince.) That's worth the price of admission right there. Once you have fresh roasted, fresh ground and properly brewed coffee (use a Technivorm) it is impossible to go back. It takes me 20 minutes every 4 or 5 days to have great coffee.  Not a bad investment of time.

Oops, Maybe There is Fine Italian Dining in the South

With relatives coming to town, the family grouped up and headed out to Volare's in the Opryland Hotel for dinner last evening.  Since it was an Italian restaurant and we ARE south of the Mason Dixon line, I had my concerns, but others made the arrangements and I was prepared for a "grin and bear it" dinner. Boy was Iwrong.  There was nothing to grin and bear---just grin and grin and grin.   Since we have three family members that work for the hotel, a private room was graciously arranged bu one of my BILs.  The staff was nothing short of perfect and the the sous chef sua sponte prepared a salume and formaggio plate along with an assortment of hand prepared condiments that were second to none.  The highlight, in my opinion, was the mozzeralla de bufula, topped with a ricotta curd suggested to be topped with an Hawaiian Black Lava Sea Salt.  Uncanny.  A special was the braised short ribs and ravioli di patata with white truffle oil.  Now, not really a fan of such oils (overrated, overused and over priced) I rarely pass up an offering of short ribs in the fall . Each bite was more succulent  than the previous one and the ravioli was dense, flavorful and matched the hearty short ribs perfectly.  Hmmm, maybe I have been too hard on the Nashvillians......