CHUBBY CHASING

What with one thing and another (health concerns, public education, Michelle Obama’s “let’s move” campaign, and fast food joints listing calorie counts on their menus)  you may have been worrying that America is running out of ways to fill its eager, bloated craw with carbs and fats.  Fear not, Applebee’s is on the case.

After some moderately strenuous hiking in Joshua Tree last weekend we slipped into our booth in the Yucca Valley Applebee’s just as happy hour was starting, and for a mere four dollars we got a plate of Potato Twisters (that's it above), described on the menu as “A mountain of spiral cut potatoes served with spicy Queso Blanco and pico de gallo.”  Were they any good?   Well yes, though somehow not quite as good as I thought a plate of fried potatoes and melted cheese ought to be.

The menu told us the Potato Twisters came in at 970 calories.  Will you be surprised when I tell you this was designated as an appetizer and was actually one of the lower calorie choices? Other appetizers included the Cheese Quesadilla Grande containing 1130 calories, the Spinach and Artichoke Dip clocking in at around 1500 calories, and top of the shop were the Cheese Burger Sliders with fries – 1660 calories, though for an extra fifty cents you could add 60 calories worth of bacon.  Whose appetite could fail to be whetted?  And I think we can rest assured that the American heart attack and diabetes industries won’t be going out of business any time soon.

In not entirely unrelated news, if you were to go into the 99c Store on Sunset Boulevard, you could buy a brand of soda that I’ve certainly never seen on sale anywhere else, that rejoices in the name of Chubby.

As you see, it certainly seems to be aimed at children - and it certainly tastes undrinkable to this adult - and you might think it’s sending the dubious message that it’s a good thing to be chubby.  In any case, that’s truth in advertising you’ve got right there, with no suggestion that Chubby is presenting itself as part of some healthy, active lifestyle the way certain sodas do.

And in any case, I’m sure Chubby is a great preparation for adulthood, when the drinker can move on from "orango tango" to Fat Bastard wine.  I’m particularly taken with the Fat Bastard slogan “Live large, live long.”  Yeah right.  You want some Potato Twisters with that?

HOT HOT HOT

And speaking of hotdogs … Is there anything in the world sexier than the sight of a woman with a hotdog? 

Well yes, actually, I think there are a great many things sexier.  Nevertheless, there’s evidently something about a woman eating phallic-shaped food that does something strange, powerful and ignoble to the male spirit.  We snigger.  We think of oral sex.  We become foolish adolecents. (A woman with a banana would have much the same effect.)

So here are a few borrowed images of women chowing down on wieners, some obviously a good deal sexier than others, but they all share a kind of erotic playfulness.  You don’t take a hotdog seriously, the way you would, say, a slab of raw meat.  That would be sexy in a quite different way.  A hotdog may be smutty, but somehow it doesn’t really mean it.

And the fact is, sometimes eating hotdogs may not actually be all that sexy at all.  To prove it here (below) is Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas, the most famous of all female competitive eaters, seen in mid-swallow at a Nathan’s hotdog eating contest, which in fact she won.  And trust me, there are many far more troubling and unhappy images of her available.

And here’s the divine Martha Stewart bringing heft and scale to the hotdog while also managing to desexualize it.  The dog is so long it’s lost all its phallic energy and symbolism.  Martha even needs some poor male minion to hold the end of it because it’s so floppy.  

That just wouldn’t happen with Snooki.

Nor even, frankly, with Betty White.

And finally a picture by my favorite photographer, Martin Parr, that effortlessly indicates that sausages in buns may not in fact be all that sexy after all.  The title of the photograph is "Waiting For Hotdogs."  They do say that the waiting is the hardest part.

GOOD DOGS I HAVE EATEN

There are people in Los Angeles who’ll tell you that Pink's on La Brea sell the world’s best hotdogs.  I wouldn’t know.  As I get ever more curmudgeonly I find I’m ever less prepared to wait in line for things, and I’m particularly reluctant to stand in line for a hotdog.  At most hours of the day and night, certainly at any hour you might actually want to eat, Pink's has the longest lines of any restaurant I’ve ever seen.  I can understand that this might be a mark of the quality of their hotdogs, but you know, how great can a hotdog be?

I admit I have stood in line for hotdogs at Dodger Stadium in order to buy Dodger Dogs and beer, but that was only because I had no choice: a baseball game being incomplete without them, and in fact the line moved pretty quickly.  Here the objection was the price.  A man shouldn’t have to remortgage his home in order to be able to buy a hotdog and a beer.  At least the Dodger Dog is big, though not nearly as elegant as it appears in the image above.

The last hotdogs I ate at home were cheese dogs, which sounded like a good idea at the time, hot dogs with a vein of liquid cheese running through them – they don’t have those back in the homeland.  I thought they were genuinely foul, as though the dogs had developed some kind of disease that created hot yellow pus.  We still have them in the freezer and I want to throw them out, but the Loved One hates to waste food (as in general do I) and she insists a moment will come when cheese dogs are exactly what we want.  I continue to doubt this.

All this has made me doubt whether I even like hotdogs.  So when my pal Scott suggested going to the new Coney Dog on Sunset Strip for some Detroit-style hotdogs, I was game enough, but my hopes weren’t quite as high as they would have been if he’d said let’s go to Petrossian and sample some caviar.

Scott hails from Detroit and he assures me the Sunset Strip version is authentic enough.  A Coney Dog, I now know, consists of a beef hotdog covered in chilli, with some raw onion and a line of mustard.  As for why this is a Detroit-style Coney Dog, rather than say a Detroit Dog, well that’s because the inventor, George Todoroff, was a Greek immigrant who arrived in Michigan by way of Coney Island, and opened his restaurant, Todoroff's Original Coney Island, in 1914 actually in Jackson rather than Detroit.  Perhaps he thought the name Coney Island smacked of metropolitan fun.  In any case, imitators sprang up in the surrounding area, including Detroit, and I guess that Detroit just has better name-recognition than Jackson. Of course there are local variations, and local rivalries, but I gather that a truly authentic Detroit dog has to have beef heart in the chilli, and the dogs have to be Koegel Viennas.  I can’t swear that the Sunset Strip outpost reaches this level of authenticity.

There was no line and no wait, which was a very good thing and I’m happy to say I was served two of the very best hotdogs I’ve ever tasted.  You may think, given my prejudices this isn’t a very high hurdle, but they were genuinely good.  I had a Coney Dog, and for comparison an LA Street Dog, wrapped in bacon and scattered with jalapeno slices. Not least of the attractions was the bun, and the bun is so important.  It can easily taste like cotton wool, these actually tasted like bread.

To make it thoroughly authentic, Scott drank a Faygo Original Redpop but I contented myself with a “craft beer” (when did that stupid term gain currency?)  Incidentally, the menu describes the LA Street Dog as the “opposite” of a kosher hotdog, not by any means anti-Jewish, just wrapped in bacon.  I suppose it would be equally the "opposite" of an halal hotdog.  That's all right then.

ROLL WITH IT

The biggest problem with eating in New York is that there are so many restaurants, both high and low, and so little time.  And certainly when you hit on a bad one you feel doubly resentful; not only are you eating terrible food, but there are thousands of restaurants serving better.

Knowing that I didn’t have world enough or time, and since a great many restaurants have a little stash of takeout menus hanging outside, I found myself starting a collection.  I realize that in some ways this is an absurd thing to do, like the two soldiers in Jean Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers who go off to war expecting to bring back a fortune in looted treasures, but in fact return with a collection of postcards.  Still, absurd or not, I picked up dozens of these menus and they are now part of the Nicholson Gustatory Archive.

Some of the menus are rough and ready, done cheaply and inelegantly, but some take a real pride in their design and, I think, compete with each other both for form and content.  I guess the idea is that if a restaurant puts a lot of effort into its printed menu then it’ll put a lot of effort into its food, though admittedly there may be a flaw in this logic.

Here is very small sample of restaurants offering sushi on 2^nd and 3^rd Avenues.  My favorite, design wise, is definitely Jing Bo Sushi (above).  Nothing says good Japanese food like a fish wearing a toque. And I rather like the bubbles on Aquamarine (below).

But in fact it’s the contents that really draw me.  What all these restaurants have in common is a section on their menus offering special sushi rolls.  This is where invention can run wild. The Jing Bo is probably the most modest, but even they feature the Dynamite Roll and the White Christmas Roll. 

Iron Sushi (above) ups the ante a little with the Mexican Roll and the Beat Box (Hako Sushi).  Aquamarine starts to get a little wild with the Galapagos  Roll (no, it doesn’t contain turtle), the Sea Dragon Roll (ditto, no dragon), and the Fantasy Roll.  But for sheer inventiveness it’s hard to beat Aji Sushi.

The Aji serves rolls named the Kiss of Fire, the Mango Submarine, the Better Future Roll, the Greenly Green Roll, and It’s a Shocker Roll.  Whether any of these rolls are actually as exciting as the names, is hard to tell, though now that I’m home I’m kicking myself that I didn’t go into Aji and order the Sex on the Beach Roll: “shrimp tempura, spicy tuna inside top of white tune, avocado and caviar.”

Ah well, there’s always next time.  The chances are I’ll probably be in New York sometime in the next twelve months, although as we know, a year can be a very long time in the life of a restaurant.

WATER DISPERSION

So we went to New York and, among other things, we ate at WD-50, home of Wylie  Dufresne’s brand of molecular gastronomy, though he prefers not to call it that. The restaurant is in a part of the Lower East Side where not so long ago no sane person would dare set foot.  Now it’s a desirable area and there were a bunch of bars and restaurants near to WD-50 that looked very inviting.

WD-50 itself was austere but very welcoming, especially the staff, and our waiter was very keen to know if we were allergic to anything: the first time I’ve ever been asked that in a restaurant.  It was tempting to say, “Only to deconstruction,” but I resisted.

It seemed that everyone around us was having the tasting menu.  Call me a fool, but I never enjoy tasting menus.  They seem to contain the components of a meal without being an actual meal, as if you went to see a band play and instead of performing actual whole songs, they just played tiny, one minute snatches of their greatest hits. Ok, no doubt some bands do precisely that.

So the Loved One and I each had a starter and a main course (not being huge fans of dessert) and we were glad we did, because looking around at the other tables, it seemed as though the menu-tasters were being served small smears of something or other on tiny plates.

For starters we had aerated foie with plum jam and sliver of pickled beet, and  peekytoe crab in a hotdog bun.  Then there was duck breast with black sesame dumplings, and Iberico pork with spaetzle.  In each case there were plenty of other ingredients too.  I didn’t take pictures of the food because I didn’t want to appear like a rube, or worse still like a blogger, but the Internet shows that others have had no such inhibition. 

It was absolutely great.  I don’t know if this is a measure of whether we chose badly or well, but our meal lacked most of the knee-jerk molecular bells and whistles, and was decidedly light on the liquid nitrogen and the spherification.  But the one thing that absolutely stood out - and it was a small thing in its way - the peekytoe crab came with “salt and vinegar chips,” miniature potato chips the size of a cornflake and so rich and subtle in flavor and texture that you wanted to eat a pound of them.  I couldn’t help thinking that there are chefs in the world who could base entire careers on those things.

Actually, one of the most impressive things abut WD-50 was that you could peer into the open kitchen and there, quite visible was Wylie Dufresne, working steadily and unobtrusively.  It’s always good to know that the big name chef is actually in the kitchen, and not off doing some reality TV show.  And best of all, he didn’t come out and work the room for applause, the way certain celebrity chefs insist on doing.  

But if you want evidence of just how far and wide this whole molecular business has gone, on our last night, wandering happily and without great expectations around the Flatiron District, we happened to find an appealing looking restaurant called Gravy.  We knew nothing about it but I now know that it describes itself as the “first New Southern restaurant in New York City.”  And here, as well as the grits and the gumbo there were some decidedly molecular touches.  The crab bisque came with a fennel foam, the Long Island duck came with an egg cooked sous vide.  

Both foam and egg (and indeed the bisque and the duck) were perfectly good but you couldn’t help thinking they were the modernist equivalents of the carved raddish and the tomato rose: fancy little touches that didn’t have much to do with the real business of the food.  None of this, I hastily add, applies to the cooking of Wylie Dufresne.  When he cooks, he seems to really mean it.

THE SOLANUM AND I

It seems that I’ve been eating experimental potatoes.  I was at the Hollywood Farmer’s Market last week (the market was in Hollywood, the farms were not) and bought some interesting-looking spuds, patterned with purple and gold swirls. They looked like this:

I was told they were called Lakers’ Bakers, i.e. the colors resembled the uniform of the Lakers basketball team, so that’s probably a name that’s unlikely to fly in the rest of the country. 

They’re grown by Weiser’s Family Farms, and apparently they’re the invention of an (as yet) unnamed potato breeder, “an experimental numbered selection.”  It seems Weiser’s are a little uneasy about the legal implications of using the Lakers name.  They were once calleded Zebra potatoes, which sounds confusing to me: wouldn’t you expect them to be black and white?  And sometimes they’re now referred to as Pinto potatoes – which still seems to beg a lot of questions.  What’s being invoked now?   The bean, the horse, the car?

I understand there are about 5000 varieties of potato in the world, of which I can probably name 10, and my local supermarket sells about 3. Did someone say

“dwindling biodiversity”?  Even the Yukon gold, which sounds like an ancient enough name, has only been around for about 30 years.

Having got home with my Lakers’ Bakers (or whatever the heck they’re called) I didn’t feel much in the mood for baked potatoes so I decided to roast them.  The beauty, as you see above, is only skin deep.

And the yellow and purple effect disappears completely as they cook, but then a rather wonderful thing happened to the skin during roasting, it became crisp and brittle, like a very well cooked piece of chicken skin.  It probably did no harm that I was cooking them in goose fat.

We did make a slightly half-hearted attempt this year to grow some Cranberry Red spuds. Having a garden that deer regularly amble through means that planting anything edible in the ground is pretty much doomed, so we grew them in a tub on the deck.  Things seemed to go pretty well – the seed potatoes sprouted, they grew, nice flowers appeared, (Marie Antoinette used to wear them in her hair), then they shriveled, which I understand is OK, but then we were left with a few tiny, tasteless spuds, about the size of Brussels sprouts.  Not exactly nature’s bounty.  Probably best to leave it to the experimenters.

MENU MADNESS

Last week I went to the launch party for Jim Heiman’s book “Menu Design In America, 1850-1985,” a title that speaks for itself.    It was held in the Taschen bookstore in Beverly Hills.

 The party coincided with Jim’s wedding anniversary, 38 years married to the divine Roleen, and the mood was suitably celebratory.  Some of the food was provided by the Beverly Hills Cheese Store, and knowing how much they charge for their cheese it seemed there must have been a grand’s worth of the stuff. 

Pizza was provided by Wolfgang Puck, and the man himself put in an appearance, somehow looking even more like himself in person that in photographs, if that makes sense.  (These photographs here are from the Taschen website).  Not for the first time, I wondered how Mr. Puck have got on in his career if he’d been called Fritz or Johan.   Nobody forgets a Wolfgang.

A while back, I interviewed Jim about the book for Gourmet Live – and that interview will be appearing in due course, though I think not any time soon.

One of the things that didn’t make it into that piece was a discussion about nudity on menus.  Jim said that when he started collecting menus he was amazed by just how raunchy certain designs were.  

His explanation was that in the late 19^th and early 20^th twentieth centuries restaurants were largely male preserves.  Women, at least decent women, weren’t to be found in restaurants so menus could be as explicit as they liked.  There were “ladies” to be “offended.”

Even so it comes as a surprise to find the menu below showing a semi-naked woman, a giantess I suppose, with multicolored liquid (some kind of cocktail?) pouring from her breasts and a group of tiny men below catching it in glasses. 

I don’t know exactly what went on in the French Casino in Chicago, but something tells me it can’t have been nearly as much fun as the menu suggests.