Roses

Here it is December the 10th and it's not only been very cold for early December recently, we've had two snows already and yet the roses in front of the restaurant are into their third bloom of the year, showing no signs of slowing down. The pink and red roses peaked 3-4 days ago so they are a little past their prime for photography, but the yellows are just hitting their stride, especially the Peace-like one just below.

It wasn't a good year for tomatoes or grapes or squash or a lot of things, but apparently, 2011 has been a terrific year for roses. Mine have had the best year ever. They're a good bit of work, but they are spectacular!

Stock Clarification Techniques

I like to try out new techniques in the kitchen every once in a while to see how they might be useful in my repertoire. Cooking is a continual process of learning for me; if I’m not learning, why am I in the kitchen? Among the new techniques that I have tried is a method for clarifying stocks into consommés. I conducted a small series of experiments over the last year to compare the new technique to the standard technique.

Because my grounding is solidly classical, I have heretofore made my consommés using a protein fining technique, adding raw egg whites or raw chicken breast to cold stock and gently heating it. As the raw protein coagulates (cooks), it traps the impurities from the stock and with reasonable care, a clear consommé emerges after filtering the “raft” of solid protein from the liquid.

Some years ago, I learned of a technique called ice filtration (or gelatin clarification) via the famous British chef Heston Blumenthal. I doubt that he invented the technique, but he is certainly responsible for bringing it to my attention and that of chefs all over the world. The technique involves letting a stock gel (either from naturally occurring gelatin or by adding more gelatin), then freezing the gel, and then letting the gel melt very slowly such that the clear liquid separates from the gelatin matrix which holds the impurities in suspension. There is no doubt that this technique is high on cool factor; it is really quite amazing to see it in action.

Both techniques achieve the desired result of a clear liquid, but there are some significant procedural differences and clearly perceptible differences in the resulting consommé.

First the technical differences. The ice filtration technique takes almost no effort on the part of the cook, a clear win for the novel technique. But the process of chilling the stock, freezing it, and letting it thaw at refrigerator temperatures takes seemingly forever, a minimum of 48 hours for a reasonable amount of consommé. And getting the frozen stock to thaw in a reasonable amount of time involves freezing it in thin sheets; this takes a lot of both refrigerator and freezer space, space that many restaurants may not have. That’s two wins for the standard technique to one for the new technique.

Now for the qualitative factors. The ice filtration technique appears to clarify the stock slightly better than the standard method based on my observation in the kitchen. Done correctly, ice filtration gives crystal clear consommé every time; sometimes it is necessary to clarify a stock a second time using the standard technique. That’s two wins apiece, a draw so far.

My experiments concluded by tasting consommés made from the same stock using the two techniques, side-by-side and blind. The ice filtration consommé has a water-like body: all the gelatin is gone from the final product. The standard consommé has a weight to it, a silkiness that the gelatin imparts, not unlike the body that glycerin gives a wine made from ripe grapes. And I find that the ice filtration consommé tastes weaker than the standard consommé. It may be that the gelatin increases my perception of flavor; in any case, I clearly prefer the standard consommé over the ice filtration consommé every time during blind tasting. On my score card, that’s four wins for the old method to two for the new. Your mileage may vary.

Food for Thought

This morning I saw a copy of Bon Appetit and it struck me that in English we have no direct translation for that term. And I thought it sad that we have no phrase for inviting people to the table and bidding them to dine well. No "bon appetit," no "mangiare bene." This explains a lot, I think, about the relationship with food in WASP-influenced America where food is something to stave off hunger and not something to celebrate. Food for thought. Tutti a tavola e mangiamo bene!

Crab Cakes

Several years ago, we had a spate of complaints about our crab cakes. They were all along the lines that our crab cakes have no flavor, that they're tasteless. After several years of no complaints, we've had another recent rash of similar complaints.

Our crab cakes are made from the best blue crab we can buy, mayonnaise, celery, parsley, panko, salt, and white pepper. That's it. Over the years, I've tried every binder known to man for holding crab cakes together (béchamel, fish mousse, scallop mousse, egg whites, sour cream, etc.) and the best binder hands down is a mayonnaise made with a neutral oil.

Crab meat has a very delicate flavor that is easily overpowered by other flavors. This is why I especially despise crab cakes containing any form of assertive bell pepper or, God forbid, Old Bay seasoning, which reeks of celery seed. Some people actually like to taste bell pepper or celery seed rather than the $18 per pound crab. If that's your preference, fine; it's not mine though.

The complaints come from one of two kinds of people. The first is someone who actually prefers to taste bell pepper and celery seed to crab. I don't understand their point of view, but they're entitled to it. I just wish they'd allow that my crab cakes are well made, just not to their taste.

The second complainant is one who does not perceive the value of expensive fresh blue crab bound with just as few additives as are necessary to hold the crab meat in a cake. These are the ones who tell me that the frozen crab cakes (that are short on crab and long on filler) at Costco are as good or better than mine. I wish these people, rather than pick on my crab cakes, would just say that mine are too expensive for them. That's really what their gripe is, so why not just say it?

In any case, the complaints are few and far between and for each, we have served thousands of other customers who have loved the crab cakes. And I'm not changing my recipe regardless of what anyone says.

When Local is Not Better

Yesterday, one of my long-time local suppliers and I parted company.

From his perspective, the economy has hurt his sales to the point where my restaurant was the only one in this small town still to buy his product and the economy has severely reduced the amount of his product that I can sell before it goes bad. Moreover, it was a long drive for him to deliver to me. From my perspective, the quality of his product has been slipping to the point where I had refused to accept or pay for an increasing number of deliveries.

So really it came as no surprise yesterday to get a phone call from him saying that he couldn't afford to deliver to me any longer. I was at the point of making the call myself. I'm also sure that he didn't want to deliver any longer because it had to sting when I had to reject his product, even though I was very nice about it.

When we had discussed the quality of the product, he would say over and over, "But none of my other chefs have a problem with it." Unfortunately, because his other customers are not nearly so quality focused as I am, my entreaties to him to improve the quality of his product fell on deaf ears. It happens.

Fortunately, I have another supplier who is 100% attuned to delivering the highest quality product possible. And I can get this extraordinary quality product for the same price that I have been paying to my now former supplier. The downside: my backup supplier is not local.

I really do want to buy locally. It's been a hallmark of my restaurant for the better part of a decade, long before it became fashionable to fly the local flag, and so it pains me to have to part company with a longstanding local supplier. But when local is not better, I don't have a choice.

On Bread Pudding

Bread pudding: I woke up thinking about it this morning. Call it a gift or call it a curse: we professional chefs seem to be preternaturally prone to ponder food at all hours of the day. And today, my first waking thoughts were of bread pudding, no doubt in large part because I must make another one today. The current dulce de leche pudding has found such favor with customers that we cannot keep it in stock. In fact, I've never seen a dessert fly so fast.

It seems unusual that bread pudding would be hugely popular at a fine dining restaurant because it is a quintessentially homey, comfort dessert. Part of its appeal no doubt is that once you tuck into a dish of ultra-creamy bread pudding, there is no doubt that you're eating dessert. There's no feeling of guilt in destroying the post-modern composition on your plate, no wistfulness at pulling down that sculpture in chocolate that some pastry chef slaved over, no, no remorse at all about digging deep into that bowl of warm, cozy goodness. Except perhaps that fleeting remorse about one's ever increasing waistline. But that can wait until tomorrow, this bread pudding is so damned good that there's no stopping until the bowl is clean!

Bread pudding is also probably so popular because it is somehow deeply rooted in our psyche. In my case, there is no doubt of it. Every time I think about bread pudding, I think about my maternal grandmother. Near the end of her life when I was nearing the end of college, I would make the three-hour drive to spend the odd weekend with her. I loved these visits and she loved them too. She would slave away cooking for me and being no slouch at the table, I would eat all she fixed for me. Toward the end of her life, I could see how much of an effort, how painful it really was to cook for me, but how much pleasure she took in seeing me eat.

The meal that she would cook for me was ritualized by my final year in college: fried rabbit (technically smothered rabbit, first browned then cooked in gravy), turnip salad (the greens of turnips cooked slowly with side meat, cured but not smoked pork belly), crackling corn pone (white cornmeal, lard, crispy cracklings of pork skin, and hot water, shaped into submarine shapes and baked), and for dessert, bread pudding.

My grandmother's bread pudding was not like mine. Hers was a very quick dessert made of store-bought sliced white bread buttered and spread with jelly or jam, strawberry being my favorite, the slices overlapping one another in the bottom of a flat pan, with a custard of milk, sugar, vanilla, and eggs poured over. Twenty minutes later and I was a very, very happy young man.

My bread pudding today is an amazingly rich and decadent affair that bears scant resemblance to hers. I've taken her concept of bread pudding and tweaked it over decades and although the familial resemblance is still there, my pudding is a very different beast, but not so different that it doesn't resonate with customers the way that my grandmother's resonated with me.

My grandmother died before I could return the favor by cooking for her. How I wish I could share a bowl of bread pudding with her! She'd be tickled!

Sticky Business

I got to thinking about food stabilizers today. You know the backlash about unpronounceable words on the ingredients lists of certains food products. I got to thinking about this while reading the ingredients list of a certain brand of commercial ice cream that I really like. The list states that the ice cream contains guar gum and carob bean gum.

And this got me to thinking about the xanthan gum that I keep on hand in the kitchen for certain sauces. The tiniest amount of xanthan gum in a tomato sauce can bind the water in the sauce and keep it from bleeding all over the plate. So what role do the guar and carob bean gums play in ice cream?

It turns out that these stabilizers, including locust bean gum, sodium alginate, and carrageenan, do the same thing for ice cream that xanthan does for my tomato sauce. They bind the water and reduce water mobility, so that when the ice cream goes through temperature fluctuations, there are no big pockets of water to form the large ice crystals that we don't like in ice cream.

These stabilizers are all naturally derived from various plants. So I wonder sometimes what the fuss is all about. If we can make a better product using them than we can without them, why not? Food for thought.

Yuck

Given that it's a rainy and slow Tuesday, I'm playing with ideas for a tasting this weekend. People often ask me if I ever make food that is not good and the answer is not often, but today, I made something that was just not good. It sort of surprised me because when I imagine flavor combinations in my head, they usually work out. However, I was leery enough of this idea that I tested it out well in advance.

I was musing about fresh sardines today. And sweet and sour. And prosciutto. And the grill. Sweet, sour, salty, fishy: it sounded like a good start to a dish.

The idea was to debone the sardine and stuff it with a strongly sweet and sour mix including pine nuts and golden raisins, wrap the whole in prosciutto, and grill it. The execution was trivial and the possibilities for presentation were great: the proteins in the prosciutto shrink when heated and cinch the fish into a tight cylinder that can be sliced into rounds for presentation.

But the flavor! Yuck! The fish totally dominated the stuffing to the point where I could barely taste it and the combination of the salty pork combined in the worst possible way to produce wave after wave of revolting fishiness. Yuck!

Don't look for this on a menu any time soon!

Gourmet Magazine: Requiescat in Pace

1968. It might have been the summer of love or the year of all things psychedelic to some, but for me, 1968 was the year that I started reading Gourmet magazine on a monthly basis. I probably owe the writers whose prose graced the magazine a great debt, for no doubt, I learned a vast amount of vocabulary reading their works. I certainly owe them for their insight into food, cooking techniques, and cultures.

In those days, the magazine was the tale of two cities, New York and Paris, but to a kid from Virginia those places might have well been the moon. As a kid, I remember reading Along the Avenues (all things New York) and Paris Journal (ditto Paris) and wondering what it must be like to experience such things as I read.

Gourmet followed me through high school and to college where—it may surprise you to learn—that the small format magazine with its gorgeous food photos stood in stark opposition to all the copies of Hugh Heffner's finest laying around in the dorm. It was fitting to have Gourmet and Playboy on the same table, for Gourmet's photographers were the originators of what we now call "food porn." Many of the photographers, and Romulo Yanes foremost, are geniuses at what they do and I am happy that Gourmet provided a forum for their work. My life is richer for having looked at their pictures.

After I left high school, Gourmet went through a muddled phase in which it couldn't decide whether it was food journal or lifestyle magazine and yet the sparse food writing was often so brilliant that I couldn't stop reading it, despite the near decimation of the magazine after Condé Nast bought it.

Gourmet had an ugly period in which it became all advertising and little content in the early Condé Nast period, yet there was that one inspired article about kebabs in Afghanistan that kept me coming back month after month.

And in the last decade, Ruth Reichl had seemingly wrested the magazine back to a steady course and had finally made the magazine relevant again. The column Kitchen Notebook always spoke to my heart as a chef. Though it was not always so over the decades, in the last five years, I have looked forward to reading the magazine each month. Kudos, Ruth.

And now we must say goodbye. My profession dictates that I am not a great follower of the news and I learn much of what goes on outside my restaurant kitchen from my employees. And yesterday when one of my line cooks told me of the demise of Gourmet, I was in disbelief.

Gourmet has been one of the constants in my life. I'm 47 now and have been reading it for 41 of those years. I'm profoundly saddened by this turn of events in a way similar to when Julia Child died. I owe both much for my culinary formation. Requiescant in pace.

A Good Server is Hard to Find...

We've been looking for a new server here at the restaurant for months with no success. They are extremely hard to find. Not one in a hundred has the smarts and the customer service skills to handle our daily changing menu, vast wine list, picky (I mean this in the best sense of the word) and highly educated customers, and our demanding SOB of a chef (that would be me).

The server pool is really thin out here in the middle of nowhere Virginia. A case in point. Kenny and I went out for some sushi for lunch yesterday; he was already sitting at the bar when I arrived. As I approached the sushi bar:

Server: Can I get you something to drink?
Ed: A really, really big bottle of water.
Server: Seriously?

I rest my case.

Seviche/Ceviche/Cebiche

What got me going on this article was a question from a friend who asked, "Do you spell seviche with an 's'?" when we were chatting about that dish that we both adore. She spelled it ceviche and I spelled it seviche. They're both correct and so is cebiche and I happen to think that all of them are corruptions of escabeche (which itself has myriad spellings and corruptions). Language is crazily fluid and cannot be corralled and who cares anyway as long as we understand one another?

But this is all an aside for the real idea behind this post. I think most of us foodies are familiar with this dish, raw fish marinated in citrus. Most references state that the citrus "cooks" the fish, with cooks always in quotes (from the epicurious.com food dictionary: The action of the acid in the lime juice "cooks" the fish, thereby firming the flesh and turning it opaque). This got me pondering about cooked versus raw, the very semantics of two states that we take very much for granted. Or to ask it in a more straightforward manner, what does it mean for something to be cooked?

This leads to many other questions such as "Does the transformation from the raw state necessarily imply the application of heat?" Gee, I'm a professional chef and somewhat of a language pedant and I haven't a clue. So I set about finding an answer, as if such a fundamental question can have but a single answer.

But before I move on, let me just limit this discussion to the physical transformation that happens when food changes state from what we call raw to what we call cooked. The subject would otherwise be fairly boundless. If you don't believe me, ask yourself the following questions:

Am I cooking when I remove heat from sweetened cream and make ice cream?
Am I cooking when I whisk together oil and vinegar in that emulsion that we call a vinaigrette?
Am I cooking when I salt sliced raw cabbage and leave it at room temperature so that it undergoes lactic acid fermentation and becomes sauerkraut?

First stop, a few dictionaries of the English language. The majority such as the compact OED are fairly abolute: cooking is preparing food for consumption by application of heat. A few others such as Merriam-Webster, no doubt wanting to avoid absolutist traps, give more grey definitions along the lines of cooking is preparing for consumption especially by application of heat. Hmmm. A lot of leeway here.

So I decided to consult my well read copy of Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking which generally has the answer to most of my questions culinary. And what did I see in his discussion of seviche but the quotes around the verb cook? Subsequent reading in McGee leads me to understand that the acid in citrus denatures (breaks down) proteins in a way similar to what happens when you apply heat to those same proteins. But it also clear that because of the lack of heat, no Maillard reactions happen and those reactions produce the browning and flavors that we associate with being cooked.

So I am back to square one. I don't know if seviche is raw or cooked or in some hybrid state. But I do know that I love it and that it's just the perfect summertime dish. Here's a recipe that I devised after one that a Mexican prep cook made for me once upon a time. The thing that I took from him was the celery, sliced crosswise into kidney shapes,which adds great texture to the dish. The tequila is my own thing. I make this from scraps of flounder when we are running flounder as an entrée. Any mild white fish will do nicely.

Three Citrus Tequila Flounder Seviche

3 cups diced flounder, about 1 pound
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
½ teaspoon toasted and ground cumin
¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes
1-½ tablespoons guajillo chile paste*
½ medium red onion, minced
2 green onions, sliced
1 large celery stalk, sliced crosswise into kidney shapes
2 cloves garlic, minced
Zest of one blood orange (or regular orange)
Zest of one lime
Zest of one lemon
Juice of two blood oranges
Juice of two limes
Juice of one lemon
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon gold tequila

Mix all ingredients well and let marinate under refrigeration for at least two hours. Serve cold in a martini glass rimmed with cumin salt and garnished with blood orange.

*To make guajillo paste, reconstitute toasted and seeded dried guajillos in warm water until soft. Drain and blend with sufficient fresh water to make a paste. Pass through a strainer to remove any skin and seed bits.

Farm to Fork 2009

I was fortunate enough to clear my schedule yesterday afternoon so that I could attend the Farm to Fork symposium at Long Branch. My thanks to Juliet Mackay-Smith of Locke Store and Marjorie Lewis for their hard work in organizing the symposium.

I must say that I was really surprised to see about 200 people in attendance, not just the usual ones of us who believe that the shorter the path from the field to the table, the better. In fact, this was the biggest thing that I took from the symposium, that so many people paid to attend, welcome news indeed. And a few of the attendees were customers of the restaurant although I don't suppose that is very surprising.

I was saddened that I was seemingly the only area restaurateur/chef in attendance. I know some of the others were busy, but it seems like some days I am carrying this banner all alone. In a side note, I was really disgusted by a recent article in the Winchester Star talking about how a new restaurant uses local and organic products. The only thing local about that restaurant's products is that the Sysco warehouse is within 100 miles of here. Every restaurant it seems wants to talk the talk, yet how many chefs do I see at the farmers market day after day? There are only three of us and we know who we are; the rest are all poseurs.

[Before you think that I am Sysco bashing, let me say that I am not. I have a great many friends who work at Sysco and they are committed people largely doing good things by their customers. In fact, their efficient distribution mechanisms may well be a part of the farm-to-fork distribution solution.]

This was my first experience in hearing Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm speak, although I've eaten his delicious chickens for years. His "big agriculture is evil" mantra is a little strident for me, after all, big agriculture has fed this country for decades, yet he makes some compelling points.

The other thing that I took away from the symposium has to do with distribution of local products. I know first hand how hard it is to go and get these products or to have them delivered, so distribution has always been a key concern for me. What I never thought about until yesterday was that all these small producers driving around making small deliveries are inefficient and waste a lot more energy in delivering goods than do the Syscos of the world. Food for thought. Just how do we improve the efficiency of the small farm distribution mechanisms?

Finally, I went to the symposium in hopes of hooking up with more local producers. While they may have been there, there was no mechanism for getting all the anonymous attendees introduced to each other. Maybe next year.

One attendee approached me afterwards and asked something to the effect that the problems seem so vast, how do we get started? And I replied that it is a lot like climbing a mountain. Standing at the bottom of K-2, if you constantly focus on the summit, you might find it a very daunting proposition to get there. Yet, if you assemble a team of climbers and each focuses on getting just a little bit higher, you can get there. Which is to say that we can all contribute to building a better food system, one little step at a time. Remember that next time you need groceries. Stop by the farmers market first. You have choices and your choices matter.

Timing Courses and Miracles

Last night after dinner, we were standing around talking about timing courses, pondering the eternal question, "When should the next course be served?" This question, like so many others, has no one correct answer. Each table has its own answer (and often each person at that table has a different answer) and expectation. Deviate from that expectation and the customer will not have as positive an experience as we would like. Deviate significantly and your service will be labelled as poor, even though the timing of getting food to the table rarely has much to do with the service staff.

Some people want their food out of the kitchen as soon as possible (especially at lunch when time is limited); others want to linger. I'm a lingerer. I like to have food come out of the kitchen slowly so that I have time to relax and get ready for the next course. I really don't like my next course on the table as soon as the previous one is cleared. But in Winchester, I'm definitely in the minority; this town wants its food on the table now.

At One Block West, it's on the shoulders of the front of the house staff to pace the meal for the customers. And it's a tricky job to interpret just what pace the customers want and relay that to the kitchen. My hat is off to those servers who do it well.

In some restaurants, the kitchen dictates the pace of the meal: I know very highly regarded restaurants that put up a course every 20 minutes unless the servers tell them to slow down. While that may work for them, it doesn't work for me. I was a customer a lot longer than I have been a chef and I've always looked at it from the customer's point of view. The customer sets the pace; so at my restaurant, the servers pace the meal. And our average customer wants his next course on the table not more than about five minutes after the preceeding course is cleared.

What can cause the timing to be longer than the table would like?

As I mentioned earlier, it is rarely the server's fault that food does not arrive quickly at a table. But, it does happen on a busy night that after clearing the appetizer course that the server or the assistant fails to fire the entrée course. I generally see the appetizer dishes coming back into the kitchen and will ask what table they're from if I'm not told. There's really very little excuse for the server not firing a table, but if you have ever waited tables, you know that on a busy night, your head is spinning with the next 10 things that you have to do right now. My hat is really off to good servers; they make a nearly impossible task look easy.

But when I'm busy plating, picking up food for one or more tables, or have my back to the door, a table getting cleared and not fired can get by me. As a failsafe, I can also see that a ticket is not progressing normally across my rail. That's when you'll hear me screaming for a runner to give me a status update on the table and woe unto him or her who does not hightail it into the dining room and get me an answer in the next 45 seconds.

I kind of pity this poor bastard, because if it is really busy, servers are going to be asking him for stuff in passing, he'll get flagged down by two tables needing something, the telephone will need to be answered, somebody will spill a drink that needs to be mopped, and he'll have the chef screaming at him if he isn't back in the kitchen in fifteen seconds. And you thought working in a restaurant was an easy job!

I've also seen tables get slowed down because the server forgot to turn in a ticket or a server in her haste will set a ticket down on the counter and it will blow off and under the counter before anyone notices. We are a small restaurant that uses handwritten tickets: a point-of-sale system makes no sense when our menu changes every day. And I surely don't miss going to bed at night with the racket of the ticket printer going off in my head.

From my station in the kitchen, I can see part of the dining room and as often as I can during service, I step out into the front server station to survey the tables. I'm running the seated tables against what my ticket rail tells me. If I spot a table without menus and without food and for which I don't have a ticket, I know there's a potential problem. Often, they've ordered cocktails and dinner and have asked the server not to fire the ticket until they've finished their cocktails. But I have caught a couple missing checks this way. The servers involved no longer work for me.

As for tickets blowing off the counter, we require the servers to hand them to the expediter (usually me) before leaving the kitchen. And that's about it for the servers causing delays.

Sometimes the food doesn't arrive at tables as expected because the tables have unreasonable expectations of when it should arrive. This usually happens when the table does not order a first course. When a table orders a first course, this gives us the time to start cooking things that take a long time so that they can be cooking while the table enjoys its first course. For example, roasting one of our really large 8-ounce quail stuffed with foie gras and prunes takes about 20 minutes, about 25 with resting time. If a table orders this dish without a first course, it's going to be about a half an hour before it arrives at the table.

In our point-and-click world of instant gratification, a half an hour is an eternity and surely the restaurant's service is pathetically slow if it can't get a quail on the table in less time. So, we discuss cooking times in our pre-shift meetings and I warn the servers of the potential issue when they bring in tickets like this. We try to anticipate this at the table and to set expectations about when the food will be out: "The quail takes about a half an hour, perhaps you'd like to order an appetizer to tide you over while you wait?"

Sometimes we fail to meet expectations because the tables don't tell us that they're in a hurry. We can expedite food through the kitchen, but only if we know that you want it to happen. So, if you're in a hurry, let us know. But be serious about it. I have seen way too many times a table inform us that they're in a big hurry which generally causes us to fire the second course at the same time as the first course, only to have the table dawdle over the first course for 20 minutes. In this case, we bring the second course to the table when it's done even if the first course is not finished. If we trashed the second course and recooked it, chances are very high that the table would finish the first course immediately and then be fuming at us for taking forever with the second course. Don't cry wolf. Be very explicit about your needs, as in, "We need to leave at 7:45 to catch the 8:15 show."

Sometimes tables confuse us. This past weekend, a table pre-ordered chocolate soufflés for their third course. They dawdled forever over their first course, so we slowed the soufflés down, even though they take about 25 minutes to cook. Normally, we'd start the soufflés just about the time that the second course goes to the dining room, so that they would be on the table about five to ten minutes after the second course was cleared. Rather than lingering over the second course as they had the first, the table bolted their second courses and the plates came back to the kitchen just as we were firing the soufflés. About fifteen minutes later and ten minutes before the soufflés were done, the host of the party informed the server that they were getting "impatient." All I can say is that we did our best to match the pace of the table.

Sometimes, one customer will spoil everything for the entire table. At times, we offer vast bone-in beef rib steaks known as Cowboy Steaks. Cowboys are so big that they take about a half an hour to get to medium rare. And well done cowboys are on the grill over the hour mark. We now refuse to cook cowboys over medium out of self defense as the following story illustrates.

We seated a table of eight people, all separate checks, and one of the guys ordered the behemoth cowboy well done. The server informed him that it would take over an hour on the grill and he replied that he didn't mind, but from the expressions on the faces of the other diners, it was clear that they did mind, but steak guy was oblivious. The server reported that they were OK for the first half an hour, but even though we kept them supplied with loaf after loaf of bread, the grousing started. By the time the food finally arrived, the whole table was in a really foul mood, starving no doubt, and grumbling vociferously about how slow the service was. It didn't improve the mood at all that all the tables around them got food in a timely manner. And in the end, the table punished the server both verbally and by tipping poorly.

That's it for the servers and the customers mucking about with timing the courses. Most of the time, the problem lies with the kitchen. Remember that if you feel like stiffing your server because the "service" was slow. The server is pretty much at the mercy of the kitchen in the vast majority of cases.

One weekend recently, we were down several employees because of illness. On a Saturday night, I was running the kitchen by myself and I had a line cook on dishes. The front of the house was really thin too, or I would have pulled an assistant back to the kitchen. I had no time to plan for this; it just happened. Fortunately, or so I thought at the beginning of service, the weather was foul and the reservation book was very light. Easy enough for a skeleton crew to handle.

Wrong! The front door opened and tables started walking in seemingly out of nowhere. Servers were bringing multiple tickets to the kitchen at the same time. I can move food out of a kitchen and for the first 90 minutes of service, I held my own, but at the point where I had tickets hanging on my rail for all but two of the tables in the restaurant, even my maniacal pace wasn't enough. Tables were having to wait about seven minutes longer on average for first courses and about fifteen minutes longer for second courses. Fortunately I was only in the deep weeds for about 45 minutes. Often, when a kitchen is slow, it's because it's short staffed.

At other times, food has to be recooked. A table will linger a lot longer than expected and we will have to pitch their food and start over. This causes a delay in the second course. Sometimes the table doesn't mind and sometimes they do. It's really a crapshoot.

And we do goof in the kitchen. One of the downsides of handwritten tickets is that sometimes we cook the wrong food, as in we cook a rockfish rather than a rack of lamb because we read "rock" on the ticket instead of "rack." That doesn't happen very much any more because we go over this situation in the pre-shift meeting and try to clarify the ticket with the server before the server gets out of the kitchen.

And handwritten checks let the servers write where they will. Sometimes for large parties, if the party orders out of order, the items ordered can end up at random locations on the check. One server in particular is prone to putting the last seat of the party all the way down at the bottom of the check where the dessert course generally goes. And in our haste, we miss that item and have to hold up the entire check while we recook it. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it's generally my fault. Now that I have worked long enough with this server, I'm much more prone to go through his check with a fine-toothed comb for big parties.

And, stuff just happens in the kitchen. The grill flames out and leaves nasty soot all over something and we have to pitch it and start over. Or as a cook turns to plate a piece of fish, another cook bumps his arm and the fish ends up wrecked against the floor tiles.

In all these cases when we screw up in the back, I believe in honesty with the customers. I tell the servers to let the customers know that we dropped the fish, that we're sorry, and we're recooking the check as fast as possible. Sometimes the servers tell us that the customers are so engrossed in conversation that they will never even notice an extra seven minutes for us to put up the food. But most of the time, customers appreciate the honesty.

So far, I have only touched on events that cause the food to be delayed to the dining room. But as I mentioned when I talked about my own dining preferences, it can be an equally grievous sin to get the food to the dining room too fast.

I must confess that on a really busy night, our natural instinct in the kitchen is that we just want to get that ticket off the rail, especially towards the end of the night when we are beat and just want a cold drink and to get off our feet. That's when we have to reign ourselves in and slow down.

Besides making customers feel rushed when the next course is served just as the previous one is being cleared, it creates havoc for the service team. The servers need time to change out silverware for the next course, to do wine service for the next course, and so forth. Jamming the food out of the kitchen ruins their service dance.

Knowing all the things that go into creating a great experience and all the things that can and do go wrong with timing food to the dining room, sometimes when I step out of the blindingly bright, overly noisy, and insanely hyperactive kitchen into the dimly lit, peacefully quiet, and calmly romantic dining room, I'm often amazed that customers are oblivious to the chaos that we have been through and I'm shocked as hell that we have pulled off yet another miracle. Here's to all of you out there in the miracle business!

On Salt and Pepper

Yesterday during lunch I had the opportunity to observe several tables as they received their food. At three different tables, one of the guests on receiving his food immediately grabbed the salt and pepper mills and even before tasting the food, ground salt and pepper all over it.

Why wouldn't a guest at least taste the food before seasoning it?

As a chef, shouldn't I feel slighted that customers assault the food in this manner?

Over the years, I've seen firsthand that we all have tastebuds that vary remarkably. And so to answer the question, I'm not slighted when customers do this. That's why there are salt and pepper grinders on the table in the first place. Although it is beyond me why people don't taste before seasoning.

This reminds me of the flap years ago when the late and quirky Jean-Louis Palladin at the Watergate Hotel in DC refused to put salt and pepper on the table and refused to let the servers bring salt and pepper to the customers. I liked the man, his food, talent, and passion, but not his resistance to letting customers season food at the table.

Sure, when I send food to the table, I've sent it out how I want it seasoned, but seriously, what is the big deal if customers reseason it? As long as they don't complain about my seasoning and as long as they are happy, I'm happy.

Because seasoning is so subjective and palates are so widely variable, there is no one correct seasoning level. Knowing this, the only thing that I can do is make food that tastes good to me. But over the years, I have also learned to trust my palate. If it tastes good to me, experience shows that it is going to taste good to the vast majority of my customers.

Young chefs everywhere, learn to trust your palate. And just look the other way if your customers add more seasoning. They're not questioning your ability, just making things to their liking.

A Tale of Two Nights

Last night was one of those odd nights in this business, a night in which we either loved or hated the tables, no in between ground. It was one of those nights where it was just slow enough that I got to visit with every table. There was an hour when I was tied to the kitchen, but I either got to visit with each table at the beginning or at the end of their dinner.

I like visiting with the tables. I get to catch up with friends, meet new friends, hear some amazing stories from customers, check on the food and service quality, and probably most importantly, to thank customers for their business and to let them know that I am a hands-on owner who cares.

On the positive side last night, we had a few tables of regulars with whom I got to catch up. And we had a large table of young ladies celebrating a 30th birthday, a table that requested a cheesecake. I haven't made one in 20 years, but by all accounts, mine included, the marbled chocolate cheesecake was a hit. Just like riding a bike—you never forget!

And on the negative side, a guy apparently brought a date to the restaurant to break up with her. Guys, some things are not fit for public places, and breaking up with your girl is one of them. It was so awkward for us to see how miserable she was, running frequently to the restroom to deal with the tears. You wasted your money on what could have been a good dinner and I'm sure that neither of you will ever be back, given that my restaurant is now a place of bad memories. And, you made all the staff and the tables around you highly uncomfortable. Thanks for ruining our night in addition to your own.

But the loser of the night award goes to a woman who walked in with some sort of malfunction. It was clear from the outset that she was not happy. No doubt, she was probably in an evil mood and that mood followed her into the restaurant. We all have days like that; just ask my staff about my mood on Tuesday morning after wrestling with computer problems all morning. So, I know all about being grumpy. But what I don't understand is her reaction to my table visit to see how their evening was progressing.

As I will do frequently, I approached the table and because the couple was not conversing and they were both looking at me, I asked, "May I get you anything else?" Not only is this an invitation to ask for more butter, to let me know that your opaque olive oil cruet or teapot needs a refill, that you really would like another glass of Port that you weren't sure about when the server last visited, and so forth, but it is also an invitation to talk about anything you want to. And if you don't want me around, I'm bright enough to recognize that, to thank you for dining with us, and to move along to the next table.

When I asked that question, the woman's face contorted into something resembling a snarl. The man assured me that they needed nothing. After that look, trust me, I wasted no time in moving to the next table.

After service, the server told me that the woman subsequently inquired who I was and then told him to relay to me that I should never ask a table if they needed anything else. Too bad for her that she came to a place where the owner is actually present and cares about customers and their experience. Next time, she should go to some random chain where they really don't care. This is one piece of grumpy advice that I will always remember, but never follow.

But on balance and despite the best efforts of the two bad tables to ruin my night, the good tables prevailed and I went home happy knowing that we had done a good job.

It's Food not Intellectual Property

With the imminent release of my new electronic cookbook, I have had a couple people ask me about copyright issues as relates to cookbooks and recipes, especially as it pertains to an electronic cookbook that can be ripped off really easily. After all, we've all heard about famous cookbook authors ripping off recipes from other sources.

The law is pretty clear and pretty murky at the same time. A mere recipe, that is, a list of ingredients and the process of combining them, is generally not copyrightable. A novel industrial process of combining or cooking those ingredients might be patentable and a gee whiz name for a recipe (that is other than the obvious) might be trademarkable, but protecting the basic recipe, well, it's not happening. That's the clear part of the law: ripping off published recipes, while not ethical, is not illegal.

The murky part is what happens when you combine a recipe with several others to form a unique work called a cookbook. The overall work can likely be copyrighted: most courts would hold that nobody has the right to take your cookbook, put a new cover on it, and represent it as theirs. And of course, all your text surrounding the recipes is yours too. But as to the individual recipes in the book, they are documentation of the steps in a process and the Copyright Act is pretty clear about not protecting such things.

And I'm actually glad of that. Having been involved in intellectual property lawsuits in the computer software business, I've seen firsthand the chilling effect on creativity that IP lawsuits can have, and the kitchen is a place where we need all the creativity we can get. Moreover, I've seen what BS the patent examiners at the USPTO will let people patent.

As an example, they let Smucker's patent the crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich back in 1999. Actually, the USPTO did something much more egregious than that. They let Smucker's patent any crustless sandwich, if you can believe that, the stuff that we made for our kids long before Smucker's ever decided to pursue their patents. Only after serious litigation did the USPTO cancel all the claims under Smucker's original ridiculous patent.

Speaking of ridiculous claims, Lebanon announced plans back in the fall of 2008 to sue Israel for stealing Lebanese dishes such as hummus, baba ghanouj, and tabbouleh and marketing them as their own. This falls in the category of "Are you serious?"

As the title of this post says, "It's Food, not Intellectual Property." There's no intellectual property in food. The Lebanese didn't invent anything, nor has any cook in recent memory. Even Ferran Adrià and acolytes haven't invented anything, as novel as it may appear on the plate. They're merely taking well known industrial food processes and bringing them into the restaurant kitchen. He knows this and has been very gracious about teaching the rest of us his tricks.

Everything that we do in the kitchen is based on what endless generations of cooks have done. For example, my cookbook includes a recipe for Persimmon Salsa. Granted it's not all that common a recipe and I had never heard of anyone doing it before me, but it would be ridiculous of me to think that I had invented anything. And a quick Google of "persimmon salsa" shows nearly 2000 references, most of which I am sure antedate my recipe.

Seriously, all I did was substitute one fruit for another in a sauce that has been around for centuries. That's not invention; that just what curious cooks do and have done since time began. Also, the recipe is there for the reader's convenience. You can imagine how useful a cookbook would be if a recipe called for a half a cup of Persimmon Salsa, and then referred you to some other book that you don't even own for the recipe, simply because somebody else had claimed ownership of the idea of Persimmon Salsa.

So, I give you my recipes willingly. And I hope that you will take them, modify them to make them your own, and pass them along. I learned from others and if you learn from me, I hope others can learn from you. Of course, if you don't modify the recipe significantly, it's always friendly to say "adapted from ...."

For more reading, I refer you to "Can a Recipe be Stolen?" by Joyce Gemperlein writing for the Washington Post and "The Patented Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich" by Anna Shih writing for Gastronomica.

Vaut le Déplacement

A customer whose visits from Leesburg require a 40- to 45-minute drive paid me a great compliment last weekend when she said to me, "C'est vaut le déplacement." The literal translation is that it is worth the trip or drive, worth going out of one's way. It's the unspoken part of this comment, however, in which the great compliment lies. This phrase alludes to the famous Guide Michelin which rates restaurants on how worthy they are of going out of one's way to dine. And for the compliment, I thank her.

More and more of our customers come out of their way to dine with us. When we do a scatter plot of telephone area codes of our reservation book, we see naturally that our highest traffic is from the local area code. The other large concentrations of customers come in descending order from Northern Virginia, the DC metro area, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia. I want to thank all these people for going a long way out of their way to dine with us; a lot of them are driving 2 and 3 hours to get here.

We'll do all we can to keep it worth going out of your way.

Cooking with Gas

I am a great reader and collector of old cookbooks. Recently, a friend dropped by two bound volumes of a Parisian cooking journal, what passed for a magazine in those days, one from 1900 and the other from 1901.

I didn't have a whole lot of time to start reading, but I did leaf through them a bit and after getting through a few months of journals, something struck me. Each month, there was a column entitled Cuisine au Gaz or Cooking with Gas in English.

It's very hard to remember in this day and age that cooking with natural gas (or more likely methane?) was a new technology in the Paris of 1900. Think about that next time you turn on the stove!

Act Like You Meant to Do It

Monday night, we taped a couple more cooking shows for WVPT in Harrisonburg. In the first 20-minute segment, I demonstrated a little Nueva Cocina Cubana with my version of Camarones con Mojo.

This dish has a moderately sophisticated presentation with an absolutely smooth black bean soup in the well of a very large soup plate, a tostón (plantain fritter) in the center of that, with a persimmon (for want of decent mangoes right now) salsa on the tostón, surrounded by three shrimp that had been marinated in mojo (a sour orange, garlic, and oregano marinade), with a little mojo drizzled over the top.

I had intended to perhaps dot the black bean soup with a little thinned out sour cream, but the host of the show in placing the salsa on top of the tostón let a single piece of persimmon fall into the soup. She worried on camera that she had ruined the presentation. Nonsense. I got a few more pieces of persimmon and strew them about the soup and said, "Always act like you meant to do it!"

Everybody, lighten up in the kitchen. It's just food. If it doesn't go exactly as you planned, act like it did and laugh about it.

For those of you looking for a recipe, it is included in my new cookbook due out in just a very few short weeks.

On Guns and Restaurants

I must confess that I don't pay political issues much mind—sure, the Virginia restaurant lobby keeps me well apprised of the doings in Richmond, but I give most things political scant notice. I have a restaurant to run and that is two-and-a-half full-time jobs.

But wanted or not, sometimes politics intrude into my life. Just yesterday, the local TV station sent a reporter by to interview me about guns and restaurants. Not wanting to miss any face time on TV, I had to say something. ;)

The reporter's visit reminded me that our silly season is back. Yes friends, once again, it's time for the annual wrangle in the Commonwealth of Virginia between the legislature and the governor over concealed carry of handguns in establishments licensed by the Virginia ABC, that is, restaurants and bars.

It is currently illegal to carry a concealed weapon (not just a handgun) in such establishments and last year, the legislature voted to make it legal. The governor shot this down [pun intended] and the legislature didn't have enough muscle to override the veto. This year is looking very déjà vu.

I own a gun and I admit that I love shooting poor defenseless skeet, not that I am any good at it and not that I get out to shoot more than a couple of times a year. I don't belong to the NRA. I'm not a rabid second amendment type: it is clear to me that a private citizen has no legitimate need to possess an AK, machine gun, etc.

And, if the government does take away your right to possess an AK, it's not the beginning of that mythical slippery slope that sees the government further infringing your second amendment rights.

That said, I think I stand pretty much where the average American does on this issue.

Now back to the brouhaha in Richmond. Open carry is already permitted in Virginia: you can legally openly carry a weapon into restaurants and bars. To my mind, concealed carry is not terribly different from open carry, so the proposed legislation is largely symbolic—yea or nay, it isn't really going to make a huge difference. My understanding of the proposed legislation is that the carrier has to declare the weapon and may not consume alcohol, which makes it absolutely no different from open carry.

The gun control lefties don't want concealed carry in the worst way and the second amendment righties want it in the worst way and the rest of us in the middle are asking, "Don't we have bigger issues that our legislators should be tackling?"

Regardless of your position on this legislation, you have to admit that adding guns to an alcohol-fueled environment is not a great idea. In fact, it's a terrible idea.

Individual business owners in Virginia, regardless of the prevailing carry law, are free to permit or prohibit weapons in their establishments. Because mixing alcohol and weapons is a terrible idea, I prohibit all weapons—not just guns—open or concealed, except for those carried by peace officers performing their duties.

Bottom line, I leave my gun at home when I come to the restaurant. I expect you to do the same. Regardless of the law, a restaurant is no place for a gun.

This is my reaction to the reporter showing up at my restaurant yesterday and my explanation of the no weapons policy at my restaurant. Be forewarned: we are not going to debate gun control issues on my restaurant blog. Take it elsewhere.