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After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

nytimes.com

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Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#91

Post by xanderlewis »

analog31 wrote: post #41
UIUC_06 wrote: post #6

Great article. If you ask a real chef, "What do home chefs do wrong the most?" They will often say, "Not enough butter, not enough salt."

Since my mom moved to town, we've been eating at her place frequently. She uses a lot of recipes from the NY Times. They are heavy . Lots of butter, cheese, coconut milk, etc. We've asked my mom to cut those things in half. She's a very good cook, and the things she improvises or makes from memory are much lighter fare. I learned to cook from her, so my meals tend to be fairly light too. Sure, the fat and salt (and d…

> She uses a lot of recipes from the NY Times. They are heavy.

There’s a good chocolate chip cookie recipe from the NYT that I’ve used several times. Not only is it heavy, I’ve had to halve the ingredients and even then it still produces enough to satiate the Cookie Monster for probably at least a month.

As a Brit, I also had to convert all of the measurements (patent absurdities like ‘cups of butter’, ‘tablespoons of chocolate’, etc.) to grams — taking account of the variation in density, of course.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#92

Post by analog31 »

xanderlewis wrote: post #91
analog31 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since my mom moved to town, we've been eating at her place frequently. She uses a lot of recipes from the NY Times. They are heavy . Lots of butter, cheese, coconut milk, etc. We've asked my mom to cut those things in half. She's a very good cook, and the things she improvises or makes from memory are much lighter fare. I learned to cook from her, so my meals tend to be fairly light too. Sure, the fat and salt (and d…

> She uses a lot of recipes from the NY Times. They are heavy. There’s a good chocolate chip cookie recipe from the NYT that I’ve used several times. Not only is it heavy, I’ve had to halve the ingredients and even then it still produces enough to satiate the Cookie Monster for probably at least a month. As a Brit, I also had to convert all of the measurements (patent absurdities like ‘cups of butter’, ‘tablespoons o…

Some of the measurements are aided by how the ingredients are packaged. For instance, butter is sold by the pound, in boxes of 4 "sticks" that are marked as being 1/4 cup each, which ignores the density variation but is familiar to every home cook. Chocolate comes in "squares" that are some predictable amount. In fact some recipes call for squares.

"A pint's a pound the world around" is a workable rule of thumb for a lot of things, but of course you need to know when greater precision is needed. Since I don't bake sweets very often, I measure most things by eyeball. For instance my bread recipe is based on filling a glass measuring cup nearly to the top, above where the volume markings end.

Maybe it's a reaction to spending my day designing precision measuring equipment.

But yeah, it's a hodgepodge of archaic units, and quite unnerving if you hail from the metric world.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#93

Post by xanderlewis »

analog31 wrote: post #92
xanderlewis wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> She uses a lot of recipes from the NY Times. They are heavy. There’s a good chocolate chip cookie recipe from the NYT that I’ve used several times. Not only is it heavy, I’ve had to halve the ingredients and even then it still produces enough to satiate the Cookie Monster for probably at least a month. As a Brit, I also had to convert all of the measurements (patent absurdities like ‘cups of butter’, ‘tablespoons o…

Some of the measurements are aided by how the ingredients are packaged. For instance, butter is sold by the pound, in boxes of 4 "sticks" that are marked as being 1/4 cup each, which ignores the density variation but is familiar to every home cook. Chocolate comes in "squares" that are some predictable amount. In fact some recipes call for squares. "A pint's a pound the world around" is a workable rule of thumb for a…

If it was at least all in cups, it’d be somewhat more forgivable. I’ve even seen recipes using amounts of flour measured in a combination of cups and tablespoons! Actually, maybe that doesn’t sound as mad to everyone as it does to me…

Anyway, it makes more sense hearing that sticks of butter are labelled in cups. I didn’t know that! In the UK, butter comes in 250g blocks.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#94

Post by analog31 »

xanderlewis wrote: post #93
analog31 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the measurements are aided by how the ingredients are packaged. For instance, butter is sold by the pound, in boxes of 4 "sticks" that are marked as being 1/4 cup each, which ignores the density variation but is familiar to every home cook. Chocolate comes in "squares" that are some predictable amount. In fact some recipes call for squares. "A pint's a pound the world around" is a workable rule of thumb for a…

If it was at least all in cups, it’d be somewhat more forgivable. I’ve even seen recipes using amounts of flour measured in a combination of cups and tablespoons! Actually, maybe that doesn’t sound as mad to everyone as it does to me… Anyway, it makes more sense hearing that sticks of butter are labelled in cups. I didn’t know that! In the UK, butter comes in 250g blocks.

Yeah, especially since the density of flour varies. All the home bakers I know either weigh their flour, or eyeball it like I do and live with the imprecision.

I'd just let the flour mound over the top of the cup by a bit to make up for the tablespoons. ;-)

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#95

Post by nullhole »

rgovostes wrote: post #11

My favorite is his 2015 review of Señor Frogs in Times Square: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/dining/senor-frogs-review... The following year The New Yorker wrote a profile of him which features some of the backstory. "Is it possible to say with a straight face that Señor Frog’s is a better restaurant than Per Se? Can you get those words out without collapsing under your own idiocy?" https://www.newyorker.com/mag…

So that's what "Señor Tadpoles" was a reference to.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#96

Post by ghaff »

dredmorbius wrote: post #22
polar8 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eating in restaurants is terrible for your health. Here's a study that finds a 49% increase in all-cause mortality risk for those who frequently eat meals prepared away from home. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33775622/ I have stopped eating out completely as I always feel gross and tired after a restaurant meal vs energized after home-cooked food. I think it's mostly due to cheap oils in quantities you would never…

Does that control at all for type of restaurant, both by market segment (e.g., fast food vs. sit-down fine dining), and by cuisine (e.g., "American" or "steakhouse" vs. various ethnic or vegetarian menus)? Because I could see a lot of variability amongst those. And without controls, the study will default strongly toward fast-food, doughnut shops, pizza, burger / franks stands, and the like. Several of which have pro…

I also suspect that a lot of the people who are eating out in restaurants all the time are on planes a lot and at late business dinners, many of which are determined by "safe" customer choices like steakhouses. (Though, without further info, I also suspect to it defaulting to fast food on an absolute basis.)

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#97

Post by egberts1 »

BariumBlue wrote: post #28
shalmanese wrote: post #3

Right when FiveThirtyEight launched, they did a brilliant piece of content strategy in that one of their very first pieces was a quest to find the best burrito in America [1]. Anna Maria Barry-Jester self reportedly "traveled more than 20,000 miles around the United States and eaten 84 burritos in two rounds (to say nothing of the dozens of extracurricular burritos I polished off)." I was glued to the series as it pl…

> Part of what made it so enthralling to read was this grand act of human perversity that a single woman would endure This is part of why I enjoy watching a couple of RuneScape YouTubers. The sheer time commitments they put in for seemingly minor gains is like gore but for amputating off their own time effort & energy and throwing it into a bottomless maw.

I hit my limit at 83 mining in Runescape.

The grind sure is relentless!

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#98

Post by spyspy »

elliottcarlson wrote: post #79

Last spring, I was at my friends new at the time restaurant, when he let me know that Pete Wells was at the table behind us (and how important this night was for my friend) -- I noticed the sheer amount of food - pretty much the entire menu - that was coming and going from that table. I didn't even put it in to perspective how demanding that was on the body, since all I could think of was how I wish I had his job tas…

Wells has said he often dines with multiple people in order to be able to try multiple things on the menu. of course The Times is picking up the tab. I guess being a restaurant reviewer is like owning a boat - it’s tough on you but your friends love it.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#99

Post by ghaff »

I'd also comment that, in general, even though I've had jobs with tenures that many HN readers would consider ridiculously long, I mostly settled into the decade +/- space outside of a couple (of short) "events" outliers. Even with making some changes along the way sometimes, that ended up my been-there/done-that range.

Obviously people are different but that has been my experience.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#100

Post by pixl97 »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #20

Couldn’t the negative effects of 4 rich meals a week be countered by eating healthier the rest of the time and having a consistent exercise routine?

Exercise burns far less calories than most people think, add a travel lifestyle to it and you'll never burn those calories.
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