Diancecht

i am just a teensy envious and looking forward to reading about your future adventures these photos are glorious 🥰

hubby was visiting family in southern new jersey this past week and came home today…so this was his welcome home lunch: insalata di funghi, sedano e parmigiano reggiano; minestrone; pear tart with almond cream. the tart was from boho petite (2146 chestnut st (pierce)).

rigatoncini all’amatriciana

this was a wonderful read. thank you, @Simon

she’s their interim critic while the powers that be are looking for pete’s replacement. i was kinda hoping you’d weigh in. 🤣 i almost tagged you when i posted that article.

i wonder what you think about her inaugural effort: The menu is a lesson in regional Indian food and the creative possibilities contained within it. It defies preconception or oversimplification, neither strictly traditional nor fusion. Mr. Khanna makes a version of galouti kebab, a silky-on-the-inside, crisp-on-the-outside patty from the northern city Lucknow. But he subs out the traditional mutton filling with mashed kidney beans, stuffs them between two slices of fried lotus root and serves it all atop walnut-radish raita. Think Oreo in structure, with an uncanny depth of flavor. Bungalow’s ghee roast, a dish in which meat is typically cooked in fat until meltingly tender, is built around plantains, enhancing their richness and sweetness. The peels are turned into a smooth, tangy ketchup that sings. Strained yogurt encased in shreds of kataifi and deep-fried — Mr. Khanna compared the technique to frying ice cream in dough — is unexpectedly, and pleasantly, as sweet as it is savory.

lol

fried egg sandwich with aioli, arugula, and chile crisp on an onion bialy…from wise sons first time i’ve had a bialy. i see more of those in my future.

oooh

miso shiru with shiitake mushrooms and wakame; oyakodon (chicken and egg over rice); asazuke; unsweetened iced tea.

salmon and ikura rice (japanese rice cooked with konbu and salmon, topped with ikura and scallions); miso shiru with tokyo turnips and turnip greens; tomato no nimono (peeled early girl tomatoes simmered in dashi, shoyu, and hon mirin, then chilled); cucumber and wakame seaweed salad with sesame vinaigrette; turnip asazuke (quick pickled turnips with konbu, salt and sugar). and for dessert, peaches and blueberries with a little lemon juice and a pinch of splenda.

from the review in 2010: Vitello tonnato, the classic summery antipasto of chilled sliced veal served alongside what amounts to a deep cloud of tuna-infused mayonnaise, with a few fried capers strewn about for salty crunch, is here offered as advertised, no more. That is right for the room and its aesthetic: silky tuna sauce and thin folds of veal, just as the grandmothers made, unchanged by time or fashion. A carpaccio of beef with a small tangle of wild mushrooms and delicate Parmesan chips is likewise flavorful, likewise welcome, as are thinly sliced artichokes with soft baby arugula swaddled in bracing lemon, with more of those cheese chips. Micro-greens, those biosphere wonders too easily overcome by dressing, here stand up to little croutons and welcome a soft-poached egg, if not crisped prosciutto in the role of bacon or pancetta. Is an appetizer of seared scallops with white asparagus and black truffle a good use of $18? That’s a question to wrestle, and there’s no correct answer. It’s the culinary equivalent of wondering whether Ferragamo shoes are worth the scratch. If they are to you, they are. The scallops are certainly well cooked.

you can see some of this in a short interview he did in 2022 with brooklyn magazine. “The longer I’ve been on the job the more I look at the flip side of that which is the power to shine a light on some place that can maybe use more attention,” he says. “It has become much more interesting to me to get out there around the city and get into neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens that are not yet on the radar but deserve to be.”

he did an “ama” (short for ask me anything) on reddit a little over four months ago.

i just came across that because i was thinking hmm, pete is leaving the nyt critic job…i am sure there are interviews he’s had recently and voilà!

here’s an an excerpt from an interview that pete did with the sporkful back in 2019 when you click on that link, scroll down and click on “view transcript” to see the transcript of the podcast 😉 ——————- A: “I mean, I'm still very — I mean, I still have a very kind of ... [SIGHS] uncomfortable relationship with like the .... you know, the power that The Times confers and it's not — and I don't mistake it for my own power.” Q: “But that power, at least as long as you have the job, you're connected to it. I wonder if having that kind of power for a number of years changes a person.” A: “I mean, I've changed in a lot of ways in this job and I don't know how many of them have to do with power. I mean, I think about ... I think about things more carefully. And I think about how to use the power, I suppose. Like I think when I first started the job, I had the feeling that in a sense it was a consumer service that The Times was willing to spend this money on these really expensive restaurants to tell people what's worth it. And that that was a good use of money. And I don't think that's quite so important anymore. And I'm more interested in kind of where I sort of shine the spotlight of The Times than I am and where I spend the money of The Times. So I'm more interested in getting some attention to places that can't afford to buy attention. For example, you know, last night, we went to a Puerto Rican restaurant. I want to be able to tell people Puerto Rican food actually matters in New York City. We have a big Puerto Rican community and some delicious, delicious Puerto Rican restaurants. And it's been a long time since I've heard anybody talk about one of them, and I'm excited to be able to do that. That's the kind of power I find myself more interested in now than just, you know, can I can I make Thomas Keller stay up at night.”

how restaurants have changed I’m at the end of 12 years as a critic who ate in and reviewed restaurants constantly. Of those years, I probably spent two solid months just waiting for the check. I ought to be in favor of anything that speeds up the end of the meal, but Blackbird’s new checkless exit gives me the creeps. It is just the latest in a series of changes that have gradually and steadily stripped the human touch and the human voice out of restaurants. Each of these changes was small, but together they’ve made going out to eat much less personal. Meals are different now, and our sense of who we are is different, too.

tuna mayo and wagyu beef tartare 🧐

yesterday’s lunch: raw and cooked salad; tomato with vinaigrette, mozzarella; italian fruit salad

i think you can get much better from a store like cowgirl creamery or molinari’s there is one “ball” left which we’ll use for insalata caprese tonight.

we bought some mozzarella today at this cheese vendor at the ferry building farmer’s market and some crunchy cabbage kimchi onions, tomatoes, herbs, cauliflower, zucchini, peaches, melon, lettuces, string beans, swordfish

…I started 30 Minute Meals. It was a three hour course where you were given six versions of five different recipes. Over the course of three hours, we would go through the basics of how to make all this stuff. Then in theory, you could go home and make a month's worth of food without repeating yourself. That got picked up on the local news, and then the local news got me onto a local public radio station. My friend called me one day, all of his guests had canceled and he said, "Can you bring over a hot plate and make food in the Radio Control Room?" I said, "Well, I think that's completely illegal, but sure." So I made 30 minute jambalaya in his little Vox Pop Studio at the Albany Public Radio Station. There was a man named Lou Ekes who knew the Vice President of Food Network, Bob Tuschman, who teaches at NYU right around the corner. We do classes together to this day. We hang out together with his peeps. But that guy got a call from Lou. This guy said, "I don't know who this girl is, but she makes 30 minute meals, and she's doing it on the radio. I can't even see her, but it sounds fun." rachael ray interviewed by kim severson in 2022 click for the podcast 😉 the transcript is the first link

i googled and didn’t see anything 🤷🏻 it’s a podcast, so this episode will be around for a long while if you miss it for whatever reason.

if only that were true. i looked and there doesn’t seem to be one.

off topic: here’s your chance to hear sam sifton speak. slightly over 47 minutes “can we debate that veritas was a three star restaurant?” 🤔 lots to talk about in this interview.