Things that are making you happy*******food and drink edition******

[Piobaire]

Just be glad you don't have to deal with the stress of work relationships.

I have been quite stressed this week, thank you very much.

Is your mushroom guy not returning your calls?

 

[mgm9128]



or any relationships for that matter.

Don't speak too soon. I am cooking dinner for 10 women in their mid-sixties tomorrow night, some of whom may be single!

 

[indesertum]



Don't speak too soon. I am cooking dinner for 10 women in their mid-sixties tomorrow night, some of whom may be single!

whatever you do make sure you dont tell conne

 

[erictheobscure]

Castelvetrano olives

 

[tdangio]



pot luck at the office tomorrow (don't ask - this is the post-TARP world we live in). 95% of people just give money and use the pool to order out, but I will be bringing a double recipe of the now famous sweet potato pancakes from Plenty. And I will be the office hero, at least until I get drunk and once again start to make lacross jokes to the new girl from Duke.

Hey now, that case was thrown out, and the DA was disbarred and filed for bankruptcy. Plus, the accuser is now planning on representing herself in her murder trial...

http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/10/08/2399243/mangum-wants-to-represent-herself.html

 

[mgm9128]

 

[impolyt_one]

Ate a home cooked Korean meal at a friend's place last night. I brought a bottle of chablis and a bottle of chianti. The food was all really perfect to my tastes, it was delicious. I felt it was rare because I normally don't eat homecooked Korean food and if I did, I would worry there'd be things I wouldn't care for, but last night there was a huge spread of things and every single one was seasoned nicely and didn't overuse the fish/seafood component intended for fermenting kimchi, all of it was delicious. The kimchi was delicious too, I want to go back and eat some more this week. Grandma and parents and an uncle were all there to see the baby, I've never been to an Italian family dinner but I imagine what I had last night rivals that.

 

[mgm9128]

Bacon and cheese potato cake from Simply French. Served with a big salad. Highly recommended.

 

[Cary Grant]

Didn't snap a pic.. but had these exquisite foie gras/duck breast meatballs last night. New-found respect for the meaty balls

 

[munchausen]

Grilled swordfish tonight and for the first time ever I neither undercooked it nor overcooked it. I feel like a champion today.

 

[Rambo]

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/...tml?pagewanted=2&smid=fb-share&pagewanted=all

GUY FIERI, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square? Have you pulled up one of the 500 seats at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar and ordered a meal? Did you eat the food? Did it live up to your expectations?

Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? When you saw the burger described as “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC (super-melty-cheese) and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche,” did your mind touch the void for a minute?

Did you notice that the menu was an unreliable predictor of what actually came to the table? Were the “bourbon butter crunch chips” missing from your Almond Joy cocktail, too? Was your deep-fried “boulder” of ice cream the size of a standard scoop?

What exactly about a small salad with four or five miniature croutons makes Guy’s Famous Big Bite Caesar (a) big (b) famous or (c) Guy’s, in any meaningful sense?

Were you struck by how very far from awesome the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are? If you hadn’t come up with the recipe yourself, would you ever guess that the shiny tissue of breading that exudes grease onto the plate contains either pretzels or smoked almonds? Did you discern any buttermilk or brine in the white meat, or did you think it tasted like chewy air?

Why is one of the few things on your menu that can be eaten without fear or regret — a lunch-only sandwich of chopped soy-glazed pork with coleslaw and cucumbers — called a Roasted Pork Bahn Mi, when it resembles that item about as much as you resemble Emily Dickinson?

When you have a second, Mr. Fieri, would you see what happened to the black bean and roasted squash soup we ordered?

Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste? The watermelon margarita? Any idea why it tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde?

At your five Johnny Garlic’s restaurants in California, if servers arrive with main courses and find that the appetizers haven’t been cleared yet, do they try to find space for the new plates next to the dirty ones? Or does that just happen in Times Square, where people are used to crowding?

If a customer shows up with a reservation at one of your two Tex Wasabi’s outlets, and the rest of the party has already been seated, does the host say, “Why don’t you have a look around and see if you can find them?” and point in the general direction of about 200 seats?

What is going on at this new restaurant of yours, really?

Has anyone ever told you that your high-wattage passion for no-collar American food makes you television’s answer to Calvin Trillin, if Mr. Trillin bleached his hair, drove a Camaro and drank Boozy Creamsicles? When you cruise around the country for your show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” rasping out slangy odes to the unfancy places where Americans like to get down and greasy, do you really mean it?

Or is it all an act? Is that why the kind of cooking you celebrate on television is treated with so little respect at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar?

How, for example, did Rhode Island’s supremely unhealthy and awesomely good fried calamari — dressed with garlic butter and pickled hot peppers — end up in your restaurant as a plate of pale, unsalted squid rings next to a dish of sweet mayonnaise with a distant rumor of spice?

How did Louisiana’s blackened, Cajun-spiced treatment turn into the ghostly nubs of unblackened, unspiced white meat in your Cajun Chicken Alfredo?

How did nachos, one of the hardest dishes in the American canon to mess up, turn out so deeply unlovable? Why augment tortilla chips with fried lasagna noodles that taste like nothing except oil? Why not bury those chips under a properly hot and filling layer of melted cheese and jalapeños instead of dribbling them with thin needles of pepperoni and cold gray clots of ground turkey?

By the way, would you let our server know that when we asked for chai, he brought us a cup of hot water?

When you hung that sign by the entrance that says, WELCOME TO FLAVOR TOWN!, were you just messing with our heads?

Does this make it sound as if everything at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar is inedible? I didn’t say that, did I?

Tell me, though, why does your kitchen sabotage even its more appealing main courses with ruinous sides and sauces? Why stifle a pretty good bison meatloaf in a sugary brown glaze with no undertow of acid or spice? Why send a serviceable herb-stuffed rotisserie chicken to the table in the company of your insipid Rice-a-Roni variant?

Why undermine a big fist of slow-roasted pork shank, which might fly in many downtown restaurants if the General Tso’s-style sauce were a notch less sweet, with randomly shaped scraps of carrot that combine a tough, nearly raw crunch with the deadened, overcooked taste of school cafeteria vegetables?

Is this how you roll in Flavor Town?

Somewhere within the yawning, three-level interior of Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar, is there a long refrigerated tunnel that servers have to pass through to make sure that the French fries, already limp and oil-sogged, are also served cold?

What accounts for the vast difference between the Donkey Sauce recipe you’ve published and the Donkey Sauce in your restaurant? Why has the hearty, rustic appeal of roasted-garlic mayonnaise been replaced by something that tastes like Miracle Whip with minced raw garlic?

And when we hear the words Donkey Sauce, which part of the donkey are we supposed to think about?

Is the entire restaurant a very expensive piece of conceptual art? Is the shapeless, structureless baked alaska that droops and slumps and collapses while you eat it, or don’t eat it, supposed to be a representation in sugar and eggs of the experience of going insane?

Why did the toasted marshmallow taste like fish?

Did you finish that blue drink?

Oh, and we never got our Vegas fries; would you mind telling the kitchen that we don’t need them?

Thanks.

Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar

POOR

220 West 44th Street (Seventh Avenue), (646) 532-4897, guysamerican.com.

 

[itsstillmatt]

So it makes you happy that the NY Times has gotten so poor that it has turned its restaurant review page from something admirable to snarky, blog-writing ****? Since he started there have been signs that the once useful restaurant review section was becoming something else, but now it seems that there is no doubting it.

 

[gomestar]

the blog-style isn't the worst part. It's the fact that they went there in the first place.

 

[itsstillmatt]

The whole thing is just another incredibly sad reminder of what your local paper has become. His entire tenure is, really.

 

[mgm9128]