In For A Nickel

Some dishes are of such indisputable excellence that their appearance alone is capable of arousing a level-headed man's degustatory powers. All those who, when presented with such a dish, show neither the rush of desire, nor the radiance of ecstasy, may justly be deemed unworthy of the honors of the sitting, and its related delights - Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

I have often described the Western New York restaurant community as small and incestuous. It is. But, at the time I started my cooking career, there were few opportunities to hang with other cooks. They’d gather after shift at places like Mother’s, a downtown location. That included my Chef, Dan Welch. But I lived in the suburbs and was a cook at suburban restaurant. I often walked to work.

My after shift activities with local co-workers was heading to Rooties for beers and Wings (and to my mind they were the best Wings in Buffalo – and there was a really HOT bartender)

Remembrance of Things Past

I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either – Jack Benny

Yesterday afternoon, I was winding down after work and getting ready for a “date night” of Pho with my wife. A flag popped up on Facebook telling me that there was a message in the local Chef’s group. A message from Dustin Murphy one of the best young cooks in town, now at the helm of one of the areas better restaurants. You don’t get a perfect 10 from The News if you aren't putting out good product.

His message was simple:

“Anybody wanna kick it with some cool dudes tonight? We're down a guy!”

Do Not Rue The Day

Nouvelle Cuisine, roughly translated, means: I can’t believe I paid ninety-six dollars and I’m still hungry — Mike Kalin

I have been to Rue Franklin. It was 25 years or so ago. I haven't been back. I have lived in Buffalo on and off since 1976 - spent most of my adult life here. Throughout most of that time, the Rue was the number one destination for fine dining.

There were challengers. Oliver’s with its parade of  great local cooks. The Hourglass, with WNY’s best wine cellar. All the others mere pretenders.

My Dinner With Andrew

Yes, we are bored. We're all bored now. But has it ever occurred to you Wally that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing, created by a world totalitarian government based on money, and that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks? and it's not just a question of individual survival Wally, but that somebody who's bored is asleep, and somebody who's asleep will not say no? - Andre Gregory

I really look forward to the weekly Gusto section in the Buffalo news. It used to come on Fridays, now it’s on Thursdays. Trish likes that better. Me, not so much. It disturbs my wa.

I’m not addicted to the whole thing, just the first half – the half with criticism and reviews. I don’t necessarily use them to make up my mind about anything; I just like criticism as a literary exercise. I enjoy reading the thoughts of the person writing the review. Then, if I ultimately see, or hear, or read the item reviewed I can compare my own thoughts with the reviewer. Got that?

Reviewing the Situation

The highway is replete with culinary land mines disguised as quaint local restaurants that carry such reassuring names as Millie's, Pop's and Capt'n Dick's. - Bryan Miller

On Thursday, March 21, 2013 a restaurant review under the byline of Andrew Z. Galarneau, Food Editor of The Buffalo News, appeared in the weekly Gusto section of the paper. That review was of a local outpost of a national chain.


The food world did not burst into flames.

I thought the review was a hoot.

Others disagreed.

Let’s get this out of the way.  I have made my feelings about restaurant reviews plain here and elsewhere. Also, Andrew is a friend. Whatever limited insights that may have given me have been overtaken his recent writings in the News. He has let us know his thinking about the job of a restaurant reviewer, and his job in particular.

When a friend asked me what I thought about this review I said that I found it quite humorous. He did not share that sentiment and apparently others agreed. His objections were centered, on the fact that a national chain is not a local restaurant and should not be given what amounts to free advertising. My response was simply “it is here, and it is a restaurant”. That response seems a bit trite in hindsight. So I will attempt to address my thoughts on this matter in an open letter to that friend.

An End Of It

But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. – Anton Ego

It is finally over.

After nearly 40 years as the Restaurant Reviewer/Primary Food Writer/Dunsel for the Buffalo News, Janice Okun is finished. The finale didn’t come easily. The saga seemed to have more false endings than the Return of the King. Her first retirement came in 2009 when the primary food writing duties were turned over to Andrew Galarneau. Andrew, a friend, was denied the title of Food Editor and Ms. Okun retained the reviewing duties.

The Best Meal I Ever Had

Uttered upon awaking at 2 am in a freezing hotel room in the Park Plaza in Toronto.
Me: Will you marry me?
Trish: Uh-huh.

This is the story of the best meal I have ever eaten.

Not the most important meal – that was two nights later, a romantic dinner for two at the Hillebrand Winery. The most meaningful meal was the meal I cooked to impress a girl and set me on the path to cooking. My favorite meal is easy, an authentic Chinese banquet with friends which will be the subject of my next post.

I don’t think I could pick “a” memorable meal. There are too many; with family, friends, loves past and present (The Thanksgiving of whipped cream and juggling wine bottles? Cooking in Catskill with mega chopsticks?) I have had a variety of tasty meals. - here and elsewhere - too many to name.

This was the best.

Local Gems

Have I  mentioned before that I do not do restaurant reviews? - Scotty Harris

I don't. But I do talk about restaurants I go to. Especially something interesting.

Just south of here is the intersection of Dodge and North French Roads, the very location of the girl's alma mater Dodge Elementary. Take the left on North French and head out. Past Transit it becomes County Road, and then Hunts-Corners-Akron (what kind of street name is that?) until it ends at Rte. 93 in Akron. This is our standard route when traveling East. Take a right and cut over to the Thruway. A left gets you there too, via the Res for gas.

We go this way often. We know the landmarks along the way: the bus barn; the tree farm; the giant mosquito sculpture; the horse farm located right by the graveyard (turning the game of "bury your horses" into a giggle-fest). Reliable Propane always makes me muse about an "Unreliable Propane". Sounds like a Simpsons gag.

Earlier this year we were returning from my homeland of Pittsford when we discovered something new along the way - what appeared to be a trailer and some tables in a small clearing beside the road. We were traveling at nice clip, but Trish and the girls were pretty sure the sign saying one of my favorite things: BBQ.

The Tale of Peta Rabbit

Freely adapted from a story by Andrew Galarneau, Food Editor of the Buffalo News and with apologies to Beatrix Potter.  Are you sitting comfortably?

Once upon a time, upon a time there
were four little Rabbits,
and their names were--
               Breakfast,
          Brunch,
    Lunch,
and Peta.

Weekend Food Porn

It was a weekend filled with good food, starting with London Broil on Friday. That meant steak and eggs for breakfast. The girls were at the drive-in, so we enjoyed our favorite simple meal - a collection of cheeses, some cured sausages, a crusty batard, and a chilled Cava. While watching The Dark Knight and an Eddie Izzard concert on DVD.

This morning was the usual bagel breakfast with lox and mimosas.

So why do I bring you this information. Because among these great meals was a lunch on Saturday we will long remember. Ellie had been raving about Suzy-Q's Bar-B-Que Shack for weeks, and she is developing a taster to be trusted. You can see menu here, but it is an abridged one - it dosen't have the details, or the humor, of the actual menu.

All you need to know is stated on the real menu:

We SMOKE fresh every day. We will close earlier if we get hit hard and run out of fresh cooked BBQ. Your best bet is to call ahead, 'cause when it's gone it's gone, and so are we.

You walk in the door and smell the smoke, and are heartily welcomed. Ellie had the piglets. Trish the Lil' Hogger, and I had the Pulled Pork, Memphis style. Alison had grilled cheese. She is a work in progress.

It was wonderful. Great, now I have no excuse for not visiting my mother-in-law!

Wasted Breath

Ahh, but the strawberries that's... that's where I had them!
- Lt. Cmdr. Philip Francis Queeg

My personal motto is: Life's Too Short Too Eat Bad Food. I preach that gospel here and in person. Sometimes the the point gets through; most times it is like pissing in the wind.

This is a tale of the latter.

My wife Trish was at a Board meeting last week, at a local restaurant - the kind of place you want for a Board meeting. Good, competent food, I wouldn't choose it for a night out, but my parents would. So imagine Trish's delight when the salad came out with the usual mixed greens, sliced onions, some carrot garnish, dressed with a nice appropriate vinaigrette. But no tomato. In it's place, sliced strawberries.

Now I am not going on a rant here about winter tomatoes. I will by a decent Roma tomato during the off months for sandwiches and burgers. I have found that a salsa made with Redpack petite diced tomatoes is better than one made with an inferior supermarket stuff. If I really crave it, I will pay a premium for a high quality greenhouse fruit.

A restaurant like this can't do the latter, but instead of tossing on some flabby sliced of pink styrofoam tasting "tomato" on top, this Chef chose strawberries - in season in the US.

When Trish expressed delight at the exchange she found the number that missed, or even required a pink plastic piece of "tomato" disturbing.

We don't just have show people that they can make, eat and enjoy good food, we literally have to de-program the of decades of thinking that bad food is expected and even desired.

We have a LOT of work!

Is it wasted breath?

Western New York Local Restaurant Week

An event worth supporting, and many friends are participating, especially in these times. I plan to.

Find out more here and here.

Oh my God, they killed Molinaros! ...You bastards!

Well, just the nearby location.

After years of questing for a local pizzeria we could love, Molinaro's of Lockport opened nearby. It was love at first bite, and they hadn't let us down . . . until last night.

Look, I love making pizza with the girls in all our pizza incarnations, but there are times when you just have to order out - like when my back really goes out and the idea of standing at the stove is less appealing than a root canal. Like yesterday.

So, we called Molinaro's and just got a machine. Over and over again. Ultimately went back to our next favorite: Ying's ( a bizarre place that does Chinese, Italian, Greek, Mexican . . .). It's in the same strip mall as Molinaro's, which has, in fact, closed. It is getting replaced by another local brand, and we are keeping our fingers crossed.

Arrgh!

Dining in San Antonio - Day 2

We started the day with some trepidation. The evening before, at the bad BBQ place, the person sitting next to us recommended a local tradition for Tex-Mex called Mi Tierra. The trepidation was caused by the fact that this gentleman was enjoying the bad BBQ. He had traveled to SA for it.

But he was a Hispanic- American, and that has to count for something in a recommendation, don't you think?

So we started off the day with one mile jaunt to the Mercado (Market) District, the kind of place tourists go to find stuff for their kids, or if you really need a Chilli Pepper Kippah, as at right.

Mi Tierra may be the first restaurant to challenge Salvatore's of Buffalo for an excess of kitsch, all in a Tex-Mex way, but the food was everything I had hoped for. The Ranchero sauce was a perfect blend of flavors. The flour tortillas a revelation, warm, and fluffy even.

When hot sauce was requested by me, it came not in a bottle, but two ramakins of housemade salsa, one rojo and one verde. Yum.

We ended up making a second hike to the Mercado that afternoon, after a visit to the Alamo, and stopped at La Margarita, a sister restaurant. If you look at the photo, only the right hand third of the bottom shelf is not Tequila. We had a frozen margarita that went down nicely, and it wasnt the last time I would be there!

Dining in San Antonio - Day 1

Before I get to San Antonio, a brief word about our layover at Newark. When you have a lengthy layover stuck in an Airport, your food choices can be limited. But our hopes were raised by a neighbor at the school bus stop who told us there was a diner type place with a decent burger at Terminal C. (For the record there was also a steak house with dry-aged ribs and short loins on display, and a Tex-Mex place which seemed redundant considering our destination, don't you think?). The diner was The Garden State Diner.

Yes it's a chain, but I draw a distinction between a local chain like Ted's and a national chain like the Olive Garden. This falls into the latter category.

Irrespective of that it was a good burger at a good price, and a decent meal for an Airport meal.

We got into SA at about 5:30 Central Time, checked into the hotel and met some of the friends we'd be spending the next few days with. We wandered a bit about the Riverwalk (part wonder, part tourist trap). About 7:30 we were really hungry, and the aroma of BBQ beckoned. Texas BBQ was one of the goals on this trip - this wasn't it.

I have said before that I don't do restaurant reviews, so I am not going to identify this place. A
Google search will give you the answer. The meats were properly cooked. The sauce sucked. There is debate in Texas as tho whether the sauce is slathered on the meat or served on the side as a condiment, but nothing I have ever read expresses a description of Texas BBQ other than the Wikipedia definition:

"Texas sauces are tomato based, less sweet than Kansas City and spicier, and are not generally used during cooking, but are used as a table sauce." Look, this may have been an old family recipe, handed down through the generations, but it was sweet and cloying and it looked and tasted an awful lot like Cattlemen's or another foodservice brand.

When you trimmed the sauce off the brisket, it was lovely. And the hot links, minus sauce, were quite good. The sauce gets a big thumbs down.

Oh, and the restaurant was a chain!

But the day did introduce a new friend:

Shiner Bock!

An Act Of Worship

And not a pleasant one at that. I have mentioned before that I do not do restaurant reviews. Oh I may have occasion to go on a rant about the chef vs. blogger/reviewer issue, the unfair nature of judging on a single visit or the silliness of arbitrary rating systems in reviews. I might even discuss disguises, but there will be no reviews. I just have no interest.

In large measure it is because I don't think you can do reviews without being able to do a bad review. Look, I have had bad experiences in restaurants and I have even walked out on occasion - but the people in restaurants work HARD, and often for not a lot of cash. I just couldn't do a bad review, even under circumstances like this.

Saturday my kids were doing an overnight at Grandma's Saturday, so that my wife and I could attend a Hunter's Hope fundraiser, with Jim in attendance of course. So we did some fun things. We stopped at the Lexington Co-op for some quinoa, among other things, and then to Delish! to see Deb and Stephanie, two old friends in the culinary quarries.

Then we decided to go to lunch at an ethnic restaurant. It had been well recommended by friends who know of our tastes, as well as by the News for a restaurant of this type. The place was packed. We were not impressed, and it was clear that we had made a mistake -- the stuff we ordered off the lunch menu seemed to pale in comparison to what others ordered from the regular menu. Oh well.

The punchline is that we get to the Hyatt, dressed to the nines, and find ourselves a mere two tables from Jim Kelly, local hero (ok, so he led us to four consecutive superbowl losses). As I am walking around looking at the auction I star to feel weird. After my second bite of salad I am about to biff (no it wasn't the Creamy Caesar dressing). I asked Trish to take us home.

Bottom line - I spent much of the next 24 hours worshiping at the porcelain altar. My wife, who doesn't get even those virulent strains of disease emitted from our nations elementary schools succumbed a bit.


Was it a foodborne illness? Who knows. But there is one that follows this pathway - short onset and a relatively short duration. More important, this particular variety is most often stems from something we both ate.

So, could you review it. Nah. More importantly would you go back to try the "real stuff"?

I think I would go for that - as long as I wasn't meeting Jim Kelly later. I still want that autographed picture and bears for the girls!

Out to Sea

Well, Thursday night was a simple Buffalo style hot dog dinner - quite nice. The weather screwed up my after birthday "Tapas" party on Friday - the power was out most of the day. But we did uncork the Galantine I made for New Year's and froze. I'm sure there were aspects that deteriorated in its stay in the freezer, but it tasted quite good.

But my real treat was a meal I had long looked forward to - a dinner alone with my wife at the recently opened Sea Bar. Don't worry - I promised not to do restaurant reviews and I am not about to start now, but nothing stops me from mentioning a venue that did something special.

Many might consider Buffalo a culinary wasteland. They would be wrong. Western New York and Southern Ontario have plenty of good food and great cooks. But, in my humble opinion the best of the best is Mike Andrzejewski. Mike has been part of the restaurant scene in Buffalo for over 30 years, starting as a busboy, and working his way to be chef at some of the area's finest eateries: including Rue Franklin, Warren's and Oliver's. He's done several events at the Beard House in NYC.

It would be presumptuous of me to claim to be Mike's friend, but the camaraderie of the culinary world at least allows me to be more than just a mere acquaintance. I first met Mike at a "Taste of the Nation" event for SOS at the Adam's Mark in 2000. Mike was happily going from station to station with jello shots - treating even a line cook with respect.

The second time was also a fund raiser. Mike was about to open his own restaurant, Tsunami, but took the time with his partner to assist at a fund raiser for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, featuring Buffalo's own Alfred Portale. It was this event that shaped my culinary future in a couple of ways, not the least of which was Mike insisting to one of my owners that he was "Just a Cook". That has been my Mantra since.

In the fall of 2002, shortly before Fredi opened with me as chief cook and bottle washer, Trish and I celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary at Tsunami. Fred arranged for the champagne, Mike dazzled me with his cooking.

In August 2oo5, Mike was riding his cycle home from Tsunami when he wiped out. He spent some time in ECMC (a place I know well from my 1994 fire), and lost his leg. A lot of local cooks helped out to keep the restaurant afloat, though he ultimately let it go.
But, in the interim, with medical bills rising, some of those same cooks arranged a benefit dinner at Kleinhans Music Hall. My part was minimal, I got some local restaurants to cough up gift certificates, but I did attend as a paying customer, with Trish, Fred and Maggie. I saw many old friends, and had great eats. I didn't get a chance to talk to Mike much (his mouth was full when I got to him) but he seemed overwhelmed by the turnout - more than twice what was expected.

Last spring we found out Mike was teaching at the culinary arts program at ECC. He and his students put on a luncheon for the public which Trish and I attended with Fred. It was a lovely time, and also when I found out about the potential of working on Vine Dining - the magazine which is to come. Through work on the proto-mag, I heard that Mike was opening Sea Bar, but I didn't have a chance to get there until this past weekend.

The dining experience? Wonderful. Mike even comped us our first taste of Sparkling Sake - a delight. Sure, there can be a wait - no reservations - but it's the kind of food worth waiting for (and if you bring a cell phone, you can wait at the bar of the Trattoria Aroma next door).

My only regret: if there were ever a cook who should have an omikase offering on the menu it is Mike! I would love to just let him "do us" in the culinary sense. The place was packed, so he probably doesn't need this, but Good Luck Mike!