Augieland

Thoughts week ending 9/8/06

…I am not sure who the people that come to Augieland are, but I assume some of the more regular readers are from my neighborhood since most of the stuff I write about happens within 20 blocks of home. For a very loose and somewhat wide guide of the neighborhood I refer to you can simply look at the map of the 66th assembly district in New York. Well, neighbors and readers, it is time to get civic.

If you ever made it to the Blind Tiger Ale House at its old digs you know it was awesome – a true sawdust-on-the-floor seedy little place that took beer very very seriously. (In the interest of disclosure I entered their chili contest last year and lost to a bar employee so I am clearly biased against the place). It was one of the few actually great and real New York bars left. In the vein of Stoned Crow on Washington Place and Johnny’s on Greenwich, it was a place that welcomed and enveloped the neighborhood, unapologetically being a bar for people comfortable in their skins looking for camaraderie in the diverse city; catering to people who actually live here, who don’t really care what brand shoes you are wearing. It was a place that was pure NY in that if you loved good beer you were part of the Blind Tiger, and that was all it took.

The Blind Tiger was driven from its home at 518 Hudson by the current inflationary trend late last/early this year. According to a letter Eater published from the Blind Tiger, the biggest reason they have been given by the license board for not having their liquor license approved for their new place in our neighborhood is a letter the State Liquor Authority received from our Assemblywoman Deborah Glick. On her web page in the ’06 neighborhood update, Ms. Glick bemoans this exact dilemma of the people and places of character that make the Village and the rest of her district so wonderful being driven out by rising prices, making it seem strange that she would be trying to stand in the way of such a salt of the community place relocating within the district.

I have to assume that Ms. Glick had never actually been to the old Tiger and is basing her reaction on words like “beer” and “bar.” Well, being one of Deborah’s constituents and a Blind Tiger customer I have decided to:

1) sign the petition
2) call her office (212 674-5153)
3) email ([email protected]), and
4) write (853 Broadway Suite 2120 New York, NY 10003).

I hope you will do some of the same. Let Assemblywoman Glick know that we are independent people who want independent establishments and that our celebration of character and individuality is what has always made our community wonderful. The Village has always been home to revolutionary people and places and in a city of ever- spreading mediocrity where places like the Caliente Cab Co. have taken hold, Blind Tiger and places like it are both important and revolutionary. Tell Assemblywoman Glick that if she can find it in her heart to accommodate a new place called Pardo’s that represents itself as “The No. 1 Peruvian Rotisserie Chicken Chain” just around the corner from the Tiger’s new location at 281 Bleecker Street (where it is functioning as a coffee shop while awaiting approval of its liquor license) we should have to open at least one home-grown beer bar.

In the meantime, please go buy some coffee at the Blind Tiger (a lot and often). They are going to need income to fight the good fight…

… Almost across the board I find that beets, especially red beets, taste like dirt. It’s something I have come to accept and even expect as part of their flavor profile. My copy of The Organic Cook's Bible claims that all root vegetables, including beets, express terroir more than other vegetables and that this flavor of dirt indicates nutrient deficient soil, a concept that has caused me to move the credit for the couple of times I have had non- or less soily ones from a chef’s skill in cooking to his skill in sourcing. Red beets appeared in our CSA allotment this week and Wife simply roasted them (for about an hour in a 425 oven on tinfoil in their jackets) peeled and sliced them and put them on a salad. Our CSA is organic and in general I find their food most flavorful, but these beets are ridiculous, absolutely perfect. Anyway, this must also have something to do with the crazy weather this year as well as their nutrient dense organic compost, so I strongly suggest you seek out your favorite organic farmer in the NE of America and buy beets. After years of learning to accept the flavor of mud, these are life changing stuff…

… The truths and the statistics as I believe them are that raw milk is safe when produced by small farms from grass-fed cattle and that it tastes far better than pasteurized milk, therefore I consume it on a very regular basis. This article in the Daily Mail suggests that studies in Great Britain are showing strong evidence that it may also be why I haven’t suffered from seasonal allergies. Ha! Anyway, I’ll keep drinking it for its taste, but apparently if you suffer from hay fever or eczema you may want to stop cycling through uselessly small non-drowsy levels of Claritin and just partake in a couple glasses of raw cow’s milk (realmilk.com can tell you where to get it). Definitely don’t tell Schering-Plough, they will have the USDA shutting us down in seconds…

…Dude, what the eff???

Roll and Dough, 260 methillian stars

Once you give up nationally franchised restaurants you lose a couple of things. You probably won’t have a general opinion of honey mustard, or frozen mudslides any more. You also lose strange sugary temple headaches from scarfing strange amalgams of salt, fat, and sugar while in motion. Sadly, also lost is the ability to walk into a place and grab a small, round easily handled food that combines salty, sweet, and savory in a manner that drives you to eat two to three times more than you should from two hands let alone one while walking or driving, with no more commitment required on your part than an exchange that takes a little less than one total minute and costs a little less than two total dollars. That is, before the bing store opened.

About four months ago, walking down West 3rd street I saw a 10-foot blow up of a Times article about bings in some foreign land like Brooklyn, and a sign informing that a spot offering them called Roll and Dough would be opening soon. Then, about a month ago, I popped in on opening day, had free samples of a couple of traditional fried flour dough dumplings and bought four savory bings. In an attempt to encourage me back, I was given a sweet red bean dessert bing as well. I don’t remember exactly which dumplings I had or even the exact bings; I was simply left with the sated feeling of having gluttonously devoured four similar, yet singular, deeply flavored dishes in about five bites each (the first two barely contacting my teeth at all), being encouraged to return by the staff, and having paid for the whole experience with a ten dollar bill and gotten change.

Each bing is coated in sesame seeds of black and white, in what I assume is a pattern to differentiate their fillings. Inside, they are like a good meat pie filling – thickly liquid sauces with pieces of meats and in some cases vegetables inside. The net result is a profound and distinctly Asian flavor.

Since then I have stopped by a couple times and have decided that this place is pretty awesome. Like all the truly fast food offerings out there, bings are a small handheld circular food, favoring salty and savory flavors with an occasional slight touch of sweet and/or sour and/ or spicy and an artificially satisfying feeling (which I assume is caused by MSG or some other flavor enhancer).

In the ultimate tribute to their fast foodness, I am willing to bet that one bing has more than enough calories to qualify as a fitting snack and that two or three would definitely count as a full meal (or two, if you were on Weight Watchers), yet somehow it is quite easy to take down four or five. These tiny little buns blend the high and low, sharp and round, and unctuous and clean ends of the flavor spectrum into tiny little packages. Whatever you can jam into food that makes one eat like a starved lab rat in an experiment they have done, and since there are only two outlets so far you can give them your money knowing it stays in or close to the community and supports food diversity and authenticity.

Nowadays I limit myself to one bing a visit, usually the spicy pork. For the first time, though, I would suggest gorging: it is fun, filling, cheap, and may work as a jarring restart to the sense memory imprinted on your brain that makes you smell fries and Big Macs when they are on TV and you are in your living room.

Japonais NY: 471 banausicillian stars

In Neil Gaiman’s book “Good Omens” any audio cassette left in a car for a fortnight automatically morphs itself into a copy of Queen’s Greatest Hits. Much like the ill-fated tapes destined to blare the Bohemian Rhapsody, it would seem any empty space in New York with more than one hundred continuous feet spontaneously bursts forth as a “somewhere in Asia/somewhere else somewhere, fusiony but more on the Asian influence side” mega-restaurant featuring modern décor and a techno trance soundtrack.

This trend in New York dining has an intersecting set with another one – that of other American cities sending us their more successful franchises (L’Altelier, Buddakan and so on). In the dead center, AnB in our Venn diagram, is Japonais. Someone obviously forgot about a couple of feet on the north side of 18th street between Park and Madison because red vinyl chairs, flagstone tiles, and an undulating ceiling of blond wood beams have sprouted forth in a local incarnation of Chicago’s popular Japonais, complete with a lounge area, a cocktail list with way to many drinks ending in –tini and drum machine driven trance music blended into the background. If the Gramercy Park area was jealous of Nobu 57, Megu, or Morimoto they now have Japonais – the idea behind the newest comer being that genius may be achieved somewhere in the combination of an authentic sushi bar and a proper French kitchen (I can't remember what the first "fusion" food was but this version did not sound groundbreaking to me).

Originally Angelou and I were going to have dinner around 6:00 PM, in the end we sat at 7:30 joined by Lifeson, a change and a delay that the staff handled both graciously and efficiently. Besides testing the bounds of customer courtesy, this afforded us an opportunity to have a couple of appetizers and cocktails wich are vodka sake and fruit juice combinations, and get a feel for the bar space which is actually pretty cool and very convivial (I made friends with a guy waiting for a blind date while I waited for my group) and I imagine is actually more fun in larger groups.

Starting with the cocktail list and moving through the rest of the menus are separate sections of Les Spécialités de la Maison; the scope gets even narrower as the servers tell you which of these are suggested by the chef. In the absence of a chef’s menu I decided to focus on these areas when making my selections, here is what we had:

Kani Nigiri 2pcs spicy baked king crab: very highly recommended by the chef it was better warmer, as it was served. The sauce coating this dish was fatty which managed to dumb down the crab’s sweetness a little. Overall a pleasing flavor in spite of a homogenized quality.

Waygu Carpaccio thinly sliced wagyu beef with yuzu and dark soy ginger sauce: dressed and topped with lemon zest, micro greens, chives, and toasted garlic. The toasted garlic took center stage from the other flavors, which was ok because it went well with the lemon and the sanguine beef but made the rest of the components seem kind of senseless.

Eight Samurai Tartare lobster, scallop, dungeness crab, tuna, octopus, salmon, bonito, and botan ebi served with Japanese fried taro and lotus chips: The menu declares “Our unique menu is designed for sharing” which this dish belies. Eight separate chopped fish are served on Chinese soup spoons differently and sometimes well complimented (I didn’t see the sense in the curried octopus, but loved the quail egg and black sesame in the tuna). The starchy thickness of the tartares made the thin chips useless for scooping them, leaving the three of us to use chopsticks to scoop bits onto the chips. This is a pretty dish and it tastes pretty good but if you intend to share it, share it with someone you are comfortable at least double dipping chopsticks with, otherwise get it as your only appetizer and enjoy it yourself.

Sashimi Japonais otoro, whitefish, botan ebi, and zuke sake: If you are going to throw your hat into the current ring of sushi masters offering food in New York your sashimi better be of the highest quality, and this was; almost perfect examples of each fish in each case.

Ebi Ebi panko shrimp topped with shrimp and wasabi tobiko sauce: as good as I imagine a shrimp tempura roll will ever taste.
Tuna Tuna Salmon salmon roll topped with sliced tuna and avocado wasabi tobiko sauce: pretty straightforward large-gauge roll rested on a very light avocado purée.

Toban Yaki Seafood oysters, sweet shrimp, king crab, and clams served with yuzu butter: This dish was a total miss. All the fish ended up tasting the same and not necessarily good and most was well overcooked. The only real dud of the evening, it had none of the genius possible of this type of cooking and dropped into all of the pitfalls.

House Smoked Waygu Rib Eye 10oz grilled rib eye served with truffled miso potato purée, grilled asparagus and kirin beer fondue: all around very good flavors and exceptional beef, the purée and fondue were both a little tan and again kind of homogenous, thicker than they seemed to need to be; the texture was way short of ethereal but the flavor was quite agreeable.

The food at Japonais is satisfying, even pleasing, while somehow feeling safe. The closest dish to amazing was the smoked Waygu, the prices tended to the higher side of fair, and the room is best described as convivial. Japonais fits squarely in the middle of the list of places I would take a group of out-of-towners looking for a scene, keeping in mind I don’t much care for actual scenes. Japonais seems a solid stepping stone restaurant; if you need a place to take a person who sees the dragon roll as the ultimate in sushi preparation this is the perfect place to go and have quite a nice meal.

Thoughts week ending 9/1/06

…So Bayer, a German company, has crops of GMO rice growing in America. I assume this is because GMO’s are’nt allowed in the EU, as well as in most of the rest of the world. The decision makes sense of course because besides being one of the few places that can buy food that has had different poisons spliced into its genes, we are happy to offer our entire ecosystem to multinational chemical companies to try stuff out on. Why not?

Anyway in this case, Bayer was playing around with three different versions of a rice that has a bacteria spliced into its genetics in order to make it poison-proof so that agri-business can dump unbefore seen amounts of poison on ceral crops. Sounds exactly like the miracle we need, right? We will never know, because years ago Bayer gave up on it and never finished it’s approval process.

“Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns announced late yesterday that U.S. commercial supplies of long-grain rice had become inadvertently contaminated with a genetically engineered variety not approved for human consumption.”

So something that is not supposed to be in our food is in our food.

“Bayer CropScience of Monheim, Germany, had provided information to the Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration indicating that the rice poses no threats to human health or the environment.”

So we are not worried because the guys that have done the contaminating tell us not to worry.

“Johanns said he did not know where the contaminated rice was found or how widespread it may be in the U.S. food supply. The agency first learned about it from the company, he said, after it discovered "trace amounts" during testing of commercial supplies.”

We would have no idea if the company didn’t come clean about their screw up, and even that they have now done the first half of our job, we have decided it doesn’t really merit much of an understanding.

“Johanns acknowledged that the discovery could have a significant impact on rice sales -- especially exports, which are worth close to $1 billion a year. Many U.S. trading partners have strict policies forbidding importation of certain genetically engineered foods, even if they are approved in the United States.”

The USDA, whose primary job it is to insure that we can safely sell our food, knows little other than that we may not be able to sell huge amounts of our food, thanks to this little screw up.

“If we become aware of any new information to suggest that food or feed is unsafe, we will take action," Johanns said.”

We feel confident that the guys that screwed it up in the first place are the right ones to look out for the best interest of our farmers and our consumers and will trust them to handle decisions on how to handle this going forward.

So here we are, years after Bayer stopped caring about this certain frankencrop, and it is polluting the rest of our crops, which in turn makes the affected crops un-sellable in most of the world. Whether or not they are unhealthy for us seems beside the point, a trifling matter to be ignored. Do any of the rest of you feel like we might as well find out exactly how many of each of our tax dollars go to this agency and withhold them next April 15th???

...Once faced with the contention that it was cheaper to buy some burritos from Taco Bell than anything else by a friend in college, I countered with my evaluation of the cost effectiveness of a pound of pasta, a head of broccoli, some garlic and some olive oil. Some simple kitchen skills can turn the advantage to the consumer when looking for healthy/ fairly-priced food. Here are some pretty reasonable thoughts regarding how to get real food into the lives of people in a lower income bracket…

…I know this is convoluted and a tough way to get there, but this article from the Times proves to me that an open market is the way to make food better. In spite of the enormous subsidies given to corn in America, these farmers and consumers have managed to find each other and are improving their respective situations. I am sure it won’t take long for this to get all screwed up, by the government looking to help big business compete with the smaller farmers and muddying up what grass-fed means as they are already doing with organics. But at the moment, in an open un-tampered market, this seems to be working well, even if you need to learn the name of a good maker and not be lazy and just trust truth in marketing (but would you buy brand-less clothes?)…

…Turns out not all Chicago politicians are boobs; some are just slow to act. Mayor Daley finally comes out about the silliest legislation ever…