Hey Man Nice Shot - Part 3

So all of a sudden restaurant photography - or the prohibition thereof - is a hot topic. At least the New York Times would have us believe that, according to a piece published last week: "Restaurants Turn Camera Shy." The article describes a "growing backlash" against in-restaurant food photography, citing bans imposed at places such as Momofuku Ko and Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare.

If this doesn't quite sound like breaking news to you - that's because it isn't. In fact, David Chang's ban on pictures at Ko already made the news cycle at least once before - nearly five years ago. Brooklyn Fare's no-photo policy (and no notes, and no cell-phones!) likewise has been around for at least a couple years.

People taking pictures in restaurants isn't anything new. Chefs and other diners being annoyed by people taking pictures in restaurants also isn't anything new. And while I can empathize with the sentiment, there are any number of other restaurant behaviors I find equally if not more annoying: loud cell-phone talking, sloppy drunkenness, heavy petting, lousy tipping.

So if you're going to do it, you ought to at least do it in a way that's least intrusive and offensive to your fellow diners, and also try to get the best shot possible, right? The NYT piece prompted a few good guidelines on that front: "How to Take a Picture in a Restaurant Without Looking Like a Jerk;" "Everyone: Taking Food Pictures in Restaurants is Not that Complicated;" and "Restaurant Food Photography: Is It Possible to Do It Well?" hit on most of the high points. To summarize: no flash; no tripods; no weird filters; no pictures of other people in the dining room; take your shots quickly; learn how to use your camera; don't clutter the table with equipment; and "Above all else, try not to be a dick."

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I'd been given the opportunity to try out a Sony NEX-5R camera as part of a Sony / Flavorpill campaign. I've been using it a couple weeks now, and am finding it to be a great tool to fulfill most of these commandments. Its body is actually about a centimeter shorter than an iPhone and not much wider, other than the grip on the right-hand side. Though it won't fit in your pocket with the lens attached, it is still significantly less of a space-hog than a DSLR. But it still has virtually all of the capabilities of a DSLR: full manual control, very solid picture quality, good low-light performance, the flexibility of interchangeable lenses. You'll be able to see the results soon at the Sony Store - details to follow shortly.

Hey Man Nice Shot - Part 2

Nearly four years ago when I started this blog, I thought about - and wrote about - my ambivalent feelings towards food photography. At that point, I was decidedly outside the camp of the "douchebags taking pictures of their food." Not that I had any problem with other people doing it, if done discreetly - indeed, I've always thoroughly enjoyed viewing the work product of talented photographers like A Life Worth Eating and Ulterior Epicure and Chuck Eats and Doc Sconz. I just knew I wasn't in that group and wasn't sure, even if I had such skills, that I wanted to be.

Four years later, I still feel like a complete hack of a photographer, but I'm a less reluctant one. I still don't particularly love taking pictures during a meal, but I'm grateful for having done so after the fact, to have something tangible by which to memorialize and in some ways relive the experience. There is truth to the saying that "We eat first with our eyes."

But for every gorgeous picture that captures the beauty and savor of a great dish, there are a dozen blurry, overexposed, flash-saturated, Instagram-filtered abominations that are the opposite of appetizing. I don't want to be one of those. So, if for no other reason than to honor the work of the chefs whose dishes I photograph, I have tried to improve my skills. I've learned what some of the different controls on my camera do. I bought a decent point-and-shoot with a larger sensor and a brighter lens that can shoot better in low-light situations. I even started to figure out how to use a real DSLR, when Frod Jr. got one for his birthday and generously loaned it out to me from time to time.

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The Tyranny of Choice

Poor Corby Kummer. As the food writer for a national magazine, he is stuck with the dreadful fate of being forced to endure meals (presumably on the publisher's dime) that most people will never have the chance to experience, meals which even many who can afford them can not obtain access to. Sometimes they go on for so long! And they serve so many courses! And the waiters - sometimes they don't perfectly cater to his every whim, or they're distant, or kind of awkward! But the worst thing of all is that these chefs - the ones who most people recognize to be at the very pinnacle of their craft - they just don't listen! They don't care if he wants his steak medium-well, or if he wants his sauce on the side, or if he'd rather have the tuna instead of the halibut in that next course. Those ... those tyrants!

That is the underlying theme of his latest piece in Vanity Fair: "Tyranny - It's What's for Dinner."

Is it the #firstworldproblems nature of the gripe that rankles me so? Possibly. After all, I understand that not everybody loves tasting menus. Indeed, it's a point of contention even within my own household.^[1] But it somehow sounds so much more entitled and precious coming from someone whose job is to write about food. Even more so than that, it's the willful blindness that stuck in my throat after reading it. Kummer fails to consider any reason for these "totalitarian" tasting menus other than chef ego, and is equally dismissive of any possible pleasure for the diner, only seeing "subjugation to the will of the creative genius ... followed, eventually, by stultified stupefaction."

But is Mr. Kummer on to something? Is there really a nefarious and growing trend of tyrannical chefs forcing terrified diners to submit to unwanted, 40-course dinners, like some sort of human gavage? Let's examine the evidence.

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"The List" - Where to Eat in Miami - Updated

Back in February, with some trepidation, I added a new feature to this blog: "The List" - a compilation of my own most frequently voiced responses to the question, "What are the best places to eat in Miami?" For reasons I explained back then, I've always struggled to name "favorites," as so much depends on mood, preference and appetite any given day.

Still and yet I ventured forth, and of course, promptly infuriated many readers with both my inclusions and omissions. And to make it even worse, as the list sat there growing old and stale, at least a couple of the places listed up and closed.

Well, once more unto the breach.

"The List" has been updated. What's more, it's been broken down a bit into:

"The Short List" (Go to these places. You will have a great meal and a great experience);

"The Not-So-Short List" (A bakers' dozen of favorites - many are "everyday" restaurants where I'm a regular, others may be visited less frequently, but all are places I readily recommend);

"The Long List" (Solid "neighborhood" joints, restaurants that maybe do one particular genre of food particularly well, and places that particularly capture Miami's local flavor); and

"Notable Omissions" (Restaurants I've just not eaten at often enough or recently enough to feel like I know them well, but want to. Several are places that that have put on great special event dinners but which I need to revisit to try the regular menu).

As always, suggestions and feedback welcomed.

Goes Around ... Comes Around: Double Feature Edition

I ate at two new restaurants this week. I’ll need to make return visits to give a complete assessment of the food, but just from looking at their menus I could tell something about both of them: they kind of want to be other restaurants.

First, Tikl. Or, to be more precise, Tikl Raw Bar Grill. Where the menu is divided into “snacks,” “raw,” “small” and “robata” sections, rounded out by a couple “large” dishes. Where said “raw” dishes feature creatively flavored seafood crudos, the “small” items are an eclectic mix of tapas style dishes, and the “robata” items include meats, seafood and vegetables with a mish-mash of Asian and Mediterranean flavors. Where the menu puts the main ingredient of a dish in boldface, followed by a lower-case list of the other ingredients separated by slashes.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is almost exactly the same menu format as Sugarcane. Or, to be more precise, Sugarcane Raw Bar Grill. Which has a menu divided into “snacks,” “crudos,” “tapas,” “robata grill” and “large plates” (though Sugarcane also offers sushi and sashimi). And which just happens to be one of the most popular and heavily trafficked restaurants to open in Miami the past couple years.

In fairness, though, Sugarcane uses a slash between ingredients on the menu. Tikl uses a backslash.

Now, to really be fair, I should point out that while the menu format at Tikl is clearly copied from Sugarcane, the dishes are not. Even if it’s in the same style, the particulars are certainly different. And none of this ultimately has anything to do with how well they’re actually executing what’s on that menu. But it’s impossible to look at Tikl’s menu and not realize that it’s trying to be the Sugarcane of Brickell.

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Goes Around ... Comes Around - Etxebarri Edition

Clearly I'm not the only fan here in Miami of Asador Etxebarri, the wonderful temple of grilling in Spain's Basque Country that I visited a couple years ago:

Gambas de Palamos, Asador Etxebarri, Axpe, Spain, September 2010

Florida Soft Shell Shrimp, Tuyo, Miami, Florida, July 2012

Mejillones a la Brasa, Asador Etxebarri, Axpe Spain, September 2010

Mediterranean Mussels, The Bazaar, Miami, Florida, July 2012

State of the Union (of Miami Dining)

I'd been a bit despondent of late over the closing of a couple of my more favorite Miami restaurants. It is, of course, a known fact that the restaurant business is a brutally difficult one. Restaurants - even successful ones - don't live forever, and relatively few have the staying power to last more than a few years.^[1] But that still doesn't keep me from becoming attached, especially to places that do things right.

Sustain, in Midtown Miami, was one of those places for me. It wasn't the best restaurant in Miami; it wasn't even the best of the farm-to-table, sustainable-sourcing themed restaurants in Miami (Michael's Genuine remains the category-killer of that genre).^[2] But it was a good restaurant. The menu balanced the accessible (fried chicken, burger, pizza, all done quite well) with the exotic (roasted marrow bones with pineapple jam, turnip "carpaccio"). The execution was solid and improved with just about every visit. The staff was friendly and knowledgeable, the cocktails were outstanding, the wine list assembled by Daniel Toral offered some of the best sub-$50 selections in town, the music was great. The Sunday brunch they rolled out shortly before closing was becoming a regular ritual for us. It was the kind of place I could go to the bar and grab a snack, or bring a group of family and friends, and everyone would leave happy. And yet Sustain was - well, unsustainable.^[3]

Michelle Bernstein's Sra. Martinez in the Design District was another place that kind of broke my heart a little when I heard it was closing. We were at Sra. Martinez the night after it opened in December 2008 for Mrs. F's birthday, and we were there again the night before it closed earlier this month. Both were outstanding meals, and we had many more in between. There is a long list of dishes from Sra. M that I will pine for if they don't resurface somewhere else: the crispy artichokes with lemon aioli, the eggplant drizzled with honey, the duck and foie gras butifarra sausage with gigante beans, the marrow bones with eel and apples, the egg yolk "carpaccio." But Chef Bernstein has always understood the magpie-like nature of the Miami dining market, the constant attraction to the latest shiny object, and I don't see the Sra. M closing - after a 3 1/2 year run - as a failure so much as a step towards yet another reinvention. Still, I will miss it.

Since I started writing this blog 3 1/2 years ago, I've been feeling increasingly positive about Miami's dining "scene." Though still prone to either chasing the latest trend (food trucks, Momofukian Asian mash-ups) or sticking with the tried and true (steakhouse, generic Italian), the restaurant population these days overall is much more diverse, much more open to creativity, than when I started keeping track.^[4] Yet I was still led to wonder: were these closures just the usual market forces at work, or the sign of something bigger? So my co-conspirators in the Cobaya underground dining group, Chowfather, Steve BM, and I gassed up the Cobaya Bus and took it out for a spin to assess the state of Miami dining.^[5]

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Goes Around ... Comes Around: Spanish Edition

We periodically devote our attention here to the task of tracing how food ideas and trends migrate their way from restaurant to restaurant. As we noted way back when,^[1] sometimes the phenomenon is the result of "homage" or "inspiration;" sometimes it's "copying" or "plagiarizing," the lines between which are not always easily drawn. Every once in a while it may actually be a case of genuinely spontaneous independent creation.

Often, what prompts these reveries is the audacity of a chef who claims to have "invented" a dish. Almost invariably, such braggadocio is unwarranted. There is, in fact, very little that is truly new under the sun, and very few culinary creations can legitimately claim to be so completely untethered to what came before as to constitute an "invention."

That apparently doesn't stop Chef Alex Raij: ["Alex Raij on Copycats and Surviving in New York."]

I'll bet I'd really like Chef Alex Raij's food. For several years now, she's put together menus of pretty authentically Spanish tapas dishes for New York restaurants, first at Tia Pol, then El Quinto Pino, then plumbed more deeply the depths of Basque cookery with Txikito, and most recently opened La Vara, which explores the even more esoteric Moorish-Jewish-Spanish food connection. I love all that stuff, and by most accounts, she does it very well.

So why the compulsion to shit-talk other chefs? In the recent Eater piece, Chef Raij simultaneously (1) claims "first" for several dishes; and (2) complains that several other chefs (specifically, Ken Oringer of Boston's Toro, coming soon to NY, and Miami's Michelle Bernstein) have "stolen" dishes, either from her or others. Specifically:

You say that before you opened Tia Pol, no one was doing certain things that are now common.

No one was doing a current expression of tapas. I wanted to dispense with all the Spanish dishes that were on every menu. No one was doing patatas bravas or shishito peppers. Nobody was making bikini sandwiches or pintxos morunos. No one was eating romesco sauce. I'm resentful, in some ways, but not regretful.

...

What bothers me is when people get called innovative when they've taken someone else's idea. Toro is coming to New York, but he straight-up took the uni panini from us. I know he took it, and he knows he took it. It's one of the few original things I've created in my life.

...

Michelle Bernstein took that Bar Mut dish and then got called a creative genius by Frank Bruni.

...

What bothers me is when people don't credit where they took it from. When we borrow something, we give credit and name the restaurants we love in the menu.

Let's take each of those in turn.


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Vote or Die(t)

We've been sticking to the restaurant write-ups for the most part here at FFT, but every once in a while things come up that seem worth passing along. Fresh on the heels of some local recognition in the form of several 2012 James Beard Award semifinalists^[1] - Yardbird for Best New Restaurant, Hedy Goldsmith (Michael's Genuine) for Outstanding Pastry Chef, Jarrod Verbiak (DB Bistro Moderne) for Rising Star Chef of the Year, and Clay Conley (Buccan), Paula DaSilva (1500°), Jeff McInnis (Yardbird), and Jose Mendin (Pubbelly) for Best Chef: South - Food & Wine magazine is opening its annual "Best New Chef" listings up to the riff-raff. A hundred chefs from among ten different "regions"^[2] are up for selection by popular vote as "The People's Best New Chef."

As one who labors for recognition of the local talent when it's warranted, I encourage you to make your own opinion known. The South Florida candidates are:

• Kevin Cory (Naoe) - read my thoughts on Naoe.
• Jeff McInnis (Yardbird) - read my thoughts on Yardbird.
• Jose Mendin and Sergio Navarro (Pubbelly) - read my thoughts on Pubbelly.
• Horacio Rivadero (The Dining Room) - need to try.
• Simon Stojanovic (Altamare) - read my thoughts on Altamare.

You can vote here: Food & Wine People's Best New Chef : Gulf Coast Chefs

While we're at it, a question for you readers. Lately I've focused my energies here on restaurant write-ups, rather than "news," openings, events and the like.^[3] Candidly, I figure most everyone that's reading this particular niche publication is already on the same mailing lists as me, and you're either getting the same e-mail blasts or are reading about them somewhere else shortly afterwards. Even if you're not scouring Eater Miami and Short Order yourself, you can always check the "Blogosphere" columns on the right-hand side of FFT and read the same exact fluff stuff that I'm reading. Or, if you're the kind of person who gets all your political news from The Daily Show - like me - you can get your food news in funny and easily digestible weekly doses over at Miami Restaurant Power Rankings.

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"The List" - Where to Eat in Miami

I'm often asked "What are the best places to eat in Miami?" It's a fair question, given that it's kind of the primary subject matter of this blog. And yet I rarely have an immediate answer. Instead, I'll typically pose a number of follow-up questions in response: What kind of food do you like? What neighborhood? What price range? Are you a  local, or a visitor looking for "local flavor"?

I've always struggled to name "favorites" because my own answers depend on many of the same questions, my mood, my appetites any given day. But I do, of course, find myself going back to the same places, and recommending the same places, fairly frequently. So why not make a list?

This list is driven by other considerations as well. The blog format generally is a good thing - easy to use as a writer, easy to access as a reader - but it puts an undue emphasis on recency. Except for a few posts which seem to have some SEO traction (the "Best Cuban Sandwiches in Miami" post is perennially popular), most of what gets read is the most current posts. That's not necessarily the easiest way to find the most interesting, or the best, restaurants I've written about over the past three years (Food For Thought just had its three-year anniversary earlier this week). There's a "Restaurant Row" column of every place that's been covered on FFT, but it's entirely unfiltered and there are now nearly a hundred South Florida restaurants and food trucks on that list.

When I've gone to visit other cities, I've often wished that the local food writers would do something similar to whittle down their own lists. So this is my version: "The List - Where to Eat in Miami".

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Goes Around ... Comes Around - Gray Lady Edition

It seems somehow a bit petulant to start a new year off on a sour note. And yet ...

While doing a little archive-diving for an in-the-works review, I stumbled across a New York Times review of Gigi, the Midtown den of pork buns and noodles that opened in the summer of 2010. The NYT review begins:

Many restaurants are born when a chef has a concept. Gigi in Miami’s Wynwood district started with a concept in need of a chef. Last year, the restaurant’s owner, Amir Ben-Zion, placed an ad on Craigslist seeking a chef who could turn out "cutting edge, high performance, Asian-inspired and freshly prepared cuisine" that is "affordable, innovative comfort food for the modern, educated, discerning palate."

Which actually sounded kind of familiar. Then I remembered why. Because nearly a half year earlier, I'd written this:

Sakaya (Richard Hales), Chow Down (Joshua Marcus) and American Noodle (Michael Bloise) each started with a chef's own vision, and were very much personal projects. Gigi came about things from the opposite direction: Gigi was a concept in search of a chef to execute it. Amir Ben-Zion, who also runs Bond Street and Miss Yip on South Beach, Sra. Martinez in the Design District, and the Bardot nightclub right down the street from Gigi in Midtown Miami, placed a Craigslist ad looking for a chef about six months before the restaurant's opening. The ad was not lacking for hype: "Its cutting edge, high performance, Asian inspired and freshly prepared cuisine is affordable, innovative comfort food for the modern educated discerning palate."

I guess since Gigi was stealing its concept from New York's Momofuku, a little inter-city turnabout is fair play?

SOBEWTF, or WWUED?

Maybe I'm not the best person to comment on the South Beach Wine and Food Fest. Truth is, I haven't been to an event in years. I still recall going when it was primarily a wine tasting in a tent on the Florida International University campus, but those days were some time ago. My most recent experience was to take my spawn to a "Kidz Cooking" event a few years ago, in which we got to watch Giada DeLaurentiis demonstrate how not to finish a single dish in an hour.

Over the years, the SoBeFest itinerary has become increasingly dominated by "TV Personalities," which I suppose is fine for those people happy to pay just for the opportunity to stand near them, perhaps in ways the personalities don't necessarily enjoy. But the experience doesn't come cheap. The keynote dinner events - the "Q"^[1], the "Burger Bash," the "Best of the Best," and the "Tribute Dinner"^[2] - are priced between $225 and $500 a person. And while they feature some pretty impressive names, when I think of the meal(s) I could buy for that kind of money, I just can't bring myself to join the teeming hordes. I mean, for $500 a person I could fly to New York, have the tasting menu at Eleven Madison Park or Le Bernardin or Daniel, and still have a good bit of money left for the wine.

There are several lower-priced events, however, and when you consider the prospect of paying as much as $1,000 for you and your significant other to have dinner, suddenly $95 per person starts to look incredibly reasonable.

Consider, for instance, "Party Impossible," hosted by the hammer-headed, resume-fudging Robert Irvine and presented by Epicure Gourmet Market. This event on the roof of the 1111 Lincoln Road parking garage "showcases Epicure Market, Miami’s answer to Dean and Deluca" and presents "the gourmet meats, cheeses, breads, soups, pastries, prepared foods and much more that can only be found in this vivant store in SOBE and in Sunny Isles."^[3]

What's it going to be like?

"Expect to walk around like you would a grocery store, with one major exception, instead of pushing a shopping cart, you’ll be holding a glass featuring the hottest spirits from the Southern Wine & Spirits portfolio."

Who would want to do that?

"This event is perfect for locals who can’t get enough of Epicure’s delights and bon vivant out-of-towners who have heard the buzz for years."

SoBe Fest grand poobah Lee Schrager is particularly excited about this one, saying:

"We're basically recreating an afternoon at Epicure [Gourmet Market] -- all the best prepared foods you can find in market will be there."

So. It's just like going to the grocery store and eating the grocery store's prepared foods, except you get to pay $95 per person for it.


You know how else you can get an experience like that? You can go to Epicure Market. Which, I know, seems like it would be really hard to do. But I'm going to let all of you "bon vivant out-of-towners" in on a little secret that only us locals who are hopelessly addicted to Epicure know: Epicure Market is literally directly across the street from the venue for this $95 event.

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Aged Stone Crabs, Anyone?

I've generally done my best to ignore the recent glut of dining "deal" sites. "Groupon" is just a tremendously unappealing-sounding name, and there is usually way too much fine print for me to pay much attention to the various other incarnations. Besides, in food as in life, what sounds like a "too good to be true" deal often is, and many other folks are doing a fine job pointing that out, including Ryan Sutton with "The Bad Deal," and closer to home, Chowfather with his "Jilt City" experience at STK Steakhouse. There's also been plenty of discussion of whether participation in these deal sites is really any good for the businesses either.

But they don't seem to be going away any time soon, and even almighty Google is getting into the act with "Google Offers." Still in "beta," the inaugeral Google Offer for Miami was a $69 signature meal at Joe's Stone Crab, featuring a choice of stone crabs, steak, chicken or salmon, open beer and wine service, side dishes and dessert. Of course nobody in their right mind goes to Joe's Stone Crab for the steak, chicken or salmon (at least not for $69 - though the fried 1/2 chicken for $5.95 remains one of the all time greatest deals in the food universe). It's all about the stone crabs, a seasonal and usually pricey item. Indeed, Google Offers claims the dinner is a "$135 value."

Even better, the "exclusive, private dinner" scheduled for October 10 lets you kick off the stone crab season early, ahead of all the shmoos waiting until the restaurant officially opens nearly a week later.

There's just one hitch: by law, the season for harvesting stone crabs in Florida doesn't start until October 15. The Florida Administrative Code says:

The season for the harvest, possession and sale of stone crab claws shall be from October 15 through May 15, each year. No person, firm or corporation, shall harvest, or have in his or her possession, regardless of where taken, or sell or offer for sale, any stone crab of any size, or any parts thereof, from May 16 through October 14, each year, except for stone crab claws, placed in inventory by a wholesale or retail dealer as defined in Section 379.414, Florida Statutes, prior to May 16 of each year.

If you're eating stone crabs on October 10 - they've been on ice for the past five months.

In other words, Joe's Stone Crab just convinced 400 people to pay $70 for last season's stone crabs. There's a reason they've been in business 99 years.

A Little Bird Told Me (Twitter for Restaurants)

A local restaurant recently used Twitter to do a very smart thing: it asked its followers how they thought the restaurant could more effectively use social media like Facebook and Twitter to better serve its customers. My response was perhaps a bit harsh:

More tweeting of daily specials, menu updates; less retweeting of every single tweet mentioning you, no matter how inane?

But it's a pretty accurate encapsulation of my thinking on what is a very worthwhile question to ask; worthwhile enough that I thought it was worth expanding upon.

Some qualifiers: I'm not a PR person. I make no claim to being a social media expert. In fact, I do my best to ignore and avoid stuff like Foursquare and really have never taken much of a shine to Facebook either for that matter. But I like Twitter.

So who am I to have anything to say here? I'm a diner. A diner who is on Twitter and reading your restaurant's Twitter feed. (In fact I've got a list with every Miami restaurant I know of that's on Twitter). For whatever it may be worth, I know what I like to see and don't like to see in a restaurant's twitter feed. So here are some "dos and don'ts" from one diner's perspective:

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My 7 Links

One of the consequences of the immediacy and constancy of social media is that content tends to get buried under the neverending avalanche of information. A blog post that is more than 24 hours old won't even be seen in many peoples' RSS readers. Some good writers have given up on their blogs entirely, finding it more convenient and effective to communicate their thoughts in 140-character Twitter bursts, the epitome of ephemera. What any of us were saying last month, let alone last year, often gets lost in the electronic ether.

I'm usually wary of anything that sounds like a chain letter, i.e. "Do this and then ask another five people to do it." But I'm a big fan of recycling, including recycling blog content. I was also honored to have been nominated by Doc Sconzo (one of the people who indirectly inspired me to start this blog) to participate in something called "My 7 Links" started by the Tripbase website, the idea of which is "to unite bloggers (from all sectors) in a joint endeavor to share lessons learned and create a bank of long but not forgotten blog posts that deserve to see the light of day again."

I enjoyed reading Doc's 7 links. Here are the results of my own dive into the archives:

Most Beautiful Post: When I first started this blog, I had very ambivalent feelings about food photography. I'm a writer, not a photographer. Aside from not having any photographic talent whatsoever, I also was concerned with the dissociative effect of taking pictures - that the obsession with getting the right shot can separate you from the experience of actually enjoying a meal. There's also the "douchebag taking pictures of his food" issue.

For better or worse, I've gotten over it. As much effort as I can put into describing food, much of the dining experience is often visual. So even if you can't taste the food over the internet, at least you can see it. And while I'm still a rank amateur photographer, I've tried at least to get to the point that my pictures will not embarass the people who created the food. I also recently upgraded my equipment, and have learned a bit more about how to operate it, and have been excited about the results.^[1]


It still pales compared to the work of genuinely talented photographers like Doc, Ulterior Epicure, A Life Worth Eating, and ChuckEats, but I'm not entirely ashamed of the pictures I took on a recent trip to Portland at Le Pigeon:

Le Pigeon - Portland, Oregon - August 19, 2011

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Genuine South Beach?

Down the block over at Miami Rankings, there's some concern over the recent announcement that Chef Michael Schwartz of Michael's Genuine Food & Drink will be taking over the restaurant (and all F&B) at South Beach's Raleigh Hotel. South Beach, with its fancy cars, glitzy hotels, and abundant breast implants, may seem a potentially less than "genuine" move. This, no less, right on the heels of the news that Schwartz is also taking over Jonathan Eismann's recently closed PizzaVolante spot in the Design District to open Harry's Pizzeria (named for the chef's son, who is still a bit too young to be working a regular shift on the pizza oven).

I understand the concern. And I have no particular love for South Beach myself. But I think some of the worry is misplaced.

The success of Michael's Genuine since it opened in 2007 was and remains a significant development in Miami restaurant history in a number of respects. Along with Michy's on Biscayne Boulevard, MGF&D marked a shift of the center of Miami's restaurant universe away from South Beach and over to less colonized areas of the mainland. It was (and is) dedicated, perhaps more than any other local restaurant, to the "farm to table" ethos, before every restaurant started throwing "organic," "sustainable," "local" and "artisan" (occasionally even "artesian") into every menu description. It was (and is) geared as much, if not moreso, to locals than to tourists, with a menu that changes regularly and always seems to have a couple new items, even for regulars. It was (and is) a place that's popular because it is comfortable rather than scene-y, and both the food and the atmosphere achieve an "upscale casual" vibe that is the way more people want to dine these days.

But it's not necessarily the only trick in Chef Schwartz's bag either. When he opened a second Michael's Genuine in Grand Cayman, I think the goal was simply to duplicate what he'd already done here in Miami at an off-shore outpost. I don't think that's what he'll do at the Raleigh, separated from the mothership only by a 15-minute drive across Biscayne Bay.

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Goes Around ... Comes Around: Italian Edition

In a piece that will be appearing in this Sunday's New York Times magazine (apologies to anyone shut out by the new paywall), former NYT restaurant critic Frank Bruni writes of the latest obsession of the New York trendsetters, Torrisi Italian Specialties. I've heard very good things about Torrisi, and I'm intrigued by the thesis of the piece, which is that Torrisi's unorthodox grab-bag approach to culinary traditions represents a new direction for Italian - or, maybe more precisely, Italian-American - food.

Having said that ... the couple of examples he gives of culinary brainstorming that supposedly reflect Torrisi's "fierce and sometimes mischievous creative itch" sounded mighty familiar.

"What about repackaging scungilli along the lines of escargots?"

Hmm - you mean like Michelle Bernstein's escargot-style baby conch that she was serving back in 2007 at Michy's?

"Italian-Jewish would be the term for a Passover-pegged riff on porchetta that the group deliberated at even greater length. Porchetta is a classic Italian pork roast, but they wondered aloud about substituting lamb. And, for a glaze, what about using Manischewitz, a semisweet kosher wine? Would the nuances be right?"

I dunno, maybe you could ask Ilan Hall, who was doing Manischewitz-braised pork belly when he opened up The Gorbals in 2009.

Va Intorno ... Viene Intorno

Route 9 Revisited - What Does It All Mean? - UPDATED

The short version of the Route 9 / Miami New Times review kerfuffle, now that all the facts anyone is willing to disclose (and some they maybe didn't want to disclose) appear to be out: Miami New Times posts a fairly harsh review of a two-month old restaurant to its website; owners complain and note several factual errors, express concern that critic never actually visited or relied on information provided by a chef from a soon-to-open local restaurant; newspaper briefly pulls review from website; the next day, newspaper reposts review with several factual errors corrected; editor acknowledges that critic dined with another chef, that they "are old friends and once had planned to write a cookbook together," but says that concern over influence on review "doesn't hold water;" categorically denies that the critic didn't dine there. Meanwhile, the same day, the Miami Herald posts a fairly glowing three-star review.

Having had a chance to digest, and at risk of prolonging the discussion past the point of utility, I have some further questions and thoughts:

(1) Should a critic dine - for a review - in the company of a chef from another local restaurant? The Association of Food Journalists' Food Critics Guidelines doesn't expressly speak to it. The Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics only vaguely says that journalists should "remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility." My initial reaction was that, while it is unlikely to "compromise integrity," it could well "damage credibility." In my day job, it's what we call the "appearance of impropriety."

I'm confident that New Times' critic, Lee Klein, is able to form his own opinions; but I also understand how a restaurateur could feel that opinion was influenced by the presence of "competition" - particularly, competition that had been identified as a "difficult table."^[1] The notion that a critic doesn't take into account fellow diners' opinions is unrealistic; any claim that Klein doesn't do so is belied by the fact that he has previously described his dining companions' views in his reviews.

I found New Times editor Chuck Strouse's dismissal of these concerns - because the other restaurant is 20 minutes away, and was not yet opened - a bit too blithe. I might have felt differently if Klein's fellow diner, Chef Klime Kovaceski, worked at an established restaurant that had already been reviewed. But that's not the case: his restaurant, Trio on the Bay, is opening the same week that this review dropped (something he could easily know since he was eating with Klein a week before), and it's not unreasonable to think that any buzz from a positive review for Route 9 might take away from Trio's opening week buzz.^[2] Again, I'm not saying that's the case, I'm only saying that it is understandable how such an impression could be made.

But it was interesting to me that in an informal twitter poll, most diners and chefs who responded were not bothered by it. The typical response was that "Integrity, honesty and personal opinion should dictate." With that, I completely agree. Speaking of which ...

(2) Should Lee Klein be writing about Chef Kovaceski's restaurant? To me, this is a no-brainer, but one that has slid beneath the radar as discussion has focused on the Route 9 review. We now know that Lee Klein and Chef Kovaceski are "old friends," and are close enough that they "once" had plans to write a book together (the cached version of Kovaceski's website referred to those plans as recently as a couple weeks ago).^[3] Klein has already done two posts on Kovaceski's new restaurant on the New Times Short Order blog: a puffy preview piece back in February, and just a few days ago, a "First Look" promising even more posts next week. Is there any circumstance where a journalist should be writing about the restaurant of an "old friend," without at a minimum disclosing that relationship? Seems to me Klein shouldn't be writing about Kovaceski's restaurants at all. And I wonder, if this all hadn't come out, if Klein would have been writing a review of Trio a couple months from now. Speaking of which ...

(continued ...)

In Defense of "Foodies"

I know, I know. Not exactly a title I ever expected to write. I hate the infantilistic word "foodie," am often less than enamored by those who self-identify as such, and don't particularly relish having it applied to me either. And yet, a recent, bilious polemic in the Atlantic monthly, "The Moral Crusade Against Foodies," has done the unthinkable: it has inspired me to come to the foodies' defense.

Though subtitled "Gluttony Dressed Up as Foodie-ism is Still Gluttony," and using as its platform several recent food-related publications (Anthony Bourdain's "Medium Raw," Gabrielle Hamilton's upcoming "Blood, Bones & Butter," Kim Severson's "Spoon Fed," the "Best Food Writing" compilations^[1]), as well as older works like Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma" and Jeffrey Steingarten's "The Man Who Ate Everything," the piece seems less about gluttony, and more an outraged indictment of the very notion of writing about food at all. It's clear where this is going from the very start: "We have all dined with him in restaurants: the host who insists on calling his special friend out of the kitchen for some awkward small talk." In other words: if you actually know a chef, you must be a douchebag. It's all downhill from there.

B.R. Myers is unhappy when people pay too much attention to their food; he's unhappy when they eat mindlessly; he's unhappy when food writers care about sustainability and animal living conditions; he's unhappy when they don't; most of all, he's unhappy when people actually care enough to write about food.^[2] Which of course might make you wonder why he chose to write about food books at all. In Myers' moral universe, it appears that any interest in food as a subject of writing whatsoever equates to gluttony, making it ever so easy to indict the entire genre. The proclaimed "moral crusade" is undoubtedly the right reference: Myers pursues his task with all the grimly self-satisfied smugness of a soldier doing battle against the infidels.

In doing so, his diatribe suffers from any number of logical fallacies, but the most egregious is the repeated over-generalization from specific examples, even when the evidence against such generalizations is staring him in the face. To him, "foodies" are one monolithic tribe, such that the voice of any one speaks for the whole. Chefs, food writers, and eaters all get tarred with the same broad brush as being members of a "unique community" of "so-called foodies." It takes him little time to conclude that "In values, sense of humor, even childhood experience, its members are as similar to each other as they are different from everyone else." This is, of course, patently ridiculous. In what universe do the caustically snarky Anthony Bourdain or the deadpan Gabrielle Hamilton share the same sense of humor with the primly self-righteous Alice Waters or the wryly analytical Michael Pollan?^[3] Prove to me that Alice Waters even has a sense of humor!

(continued ...)

Where Should I Eat Now?

Just for the sake of something different, I've added a new little "gadget" to the blog. Up in the top right corner, there's a section called "Where Should I Eat Now?" What is it? Well, it hopefully is at least somewhat self-explanatory: it's some suggestions in answer to that perennial question. But it's also sort of a hodge-podge of at least a couple different ideas.

On one hand, the inspiration comes from a suggestion I read somewhere in the Twitterverse, that local/regional food bloggers ought to maintain a list of the best restaurants in their area, for easy access to traveling gastronauts. Of course, this isn't actually such a list. I always struggle when it comes to the superlatives, naming the "best" this or the "top" that. Often it's just a matter of what kind of mood you're in. Bourbon Steak may be the best steakhouse in town, but that's of little significance if you're craving sushi. So this is not so much a "best of Miami" list (for that you can hit up Miami Restaurant Power Rankings or the periodically updated "Eater 38") but more of a personal culinary mood ring.

Another inspiration comes from Carol Blymire's old French Laundry at Home blog (she's now moved on to the equally delightful Alinea at Home), where she also used to keep a running diary of what she was eating. Of course, I'm not actually doing that either. A little too much information, and besides, not every meal is one worth recommending to others. Sometimes this list will include the places I've just been to; other times it may be those I'm hankering to visit, or those that may have dropped off the radar for no good reason. Most often it'll be some combination of all of the above.

"Where Should I Eat Now?" will get updated every week, as long as I remember to do so. The hope is that it will provide some inspiration to you when that question comes up.