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."
Try replacing your salt shaker with 1:1 kosher salt to MSG.
After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table
171–180 of 180 posts
Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is beautifully written
Thank you! I've never fancied myself a good writer; I feel like, on a personal level, I can identify the beauty in things. However, I tend to have a hard time putting it to paper in a way that I feel conveys how I feel. But I'm working on it!
We all see the writer in you, wanting to get out!
It's nice to be able to convey your feelings to your audience through writing, but great writers go further.
The world needs great writers, because they are travel guides. They guide us to visit places we couldn't reach alone. Worthwhile places that would go unvisited and unknown without our guides.
That's why "Kitchen Confidential" is such an amazing book. It's a travelogue.
When Gay Talese wrote "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold", he didn't write a profile of Frank. He was inviting us to go see Frank with him, to sign up to the great adventure of finding out who Frank really was.
If you would like to be one of our guides, I thank you.
Study the book "On Writing", by Stephen King, and begin inviting us to your travels!
Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You won't achieve wok hei on your stove This is simple untrue. There is many, many YouTube videos explaining how to achieve wok hei (鑊氣) at home with a non-commercial gas-fired stove and a cheap wok. For any readers unfamiliar with the stir frying technique called wok hei, read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wok#Cooking
I know very little about Asian cooking of any kind, but I seem to remember being told that wok hei produces enough smoke to be extremely unpleasant to have inside a residential building - to the point that even when people do want to use wok hei at home they would choose to have a setup in the garden rather than the kitchen. If my memory/understanding is not wrong, then that adds to the idea that people won't achieve…
> wok hei produces enough smoke to be extremely unpleasant to have inside a residential building
Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taco Bell doesn’t use butter, AFAIK.
Neither do many major cuisines, like Mediterranean, Mexican, Thai, Japanese and Chinese. Is butter really the problem here? Because to me it sounds like the problem is habitual over-eating.
Japanese cuisine absolutely does use butter, just not nearly as much as other cultures.
Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table
#175Earlier 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…
There are certain foods that you can not reasonably make at home or are just extremely fussy and a huge waste of time to make at home. You won't achieve wok hei on your stove, your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods, restaurants in your area will get priority from suppliers over what you find in the grocery store and even most farmers markets, and th…
Re: oven temps, I seem to recall seeing a link here maybe a decade ago about a guy who figured out how to get his oven hot enough for certain pizza routines by basically breaking the handle on the cleaning cycle or something.
Does anybody else remember this? Or am I crazy?
Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because you need a fryer What? There are many, many YouTube videos explaining how to make "fast food" style french fries (double fried, and all that) at home, without a fryer.
And it's probably not reasonable that the average person who gets McDonalds fries (which are indeed good and better than most, if not all, of the "fast casual" joints) will do those things. Not that frozen supermarket fries in a deep fryer are an especially heavy lift and they're mostly good enough (with reasonably fresh oil) for hamburger and fries.
McDonalds fries can be somewhat achieved by adding beef flavor (authentic or vegetarian sub) to the fries. It’s like the easiest hack to better homemade fries, IMO.
Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Super cool path, man. I'm envious in many ways. Any favorite restaurants in NYC which folks on HN may not have heard of?
Absolutely! Recommending restaurants may be the unofficial New Yorker pastime. As a best practice, I recommend checking some of the Eater.com lists before visiting any town. They don't always hit the mark, however you can get a pretty good feel for the restaurant scene by what they are reviewing. I'll put a mix of genres below. But I'm more than happy to answer any others. Ugly Baby (Carrol Gardens) is my favorite Th…
Amazing! Thank you for the deatiled answer, I've added all these to my Google Maps list for when I'm back in the city. I've walked by Minca a bunch of times, next time I'm going in for sure.
Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table
#178Earlier 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…
Where are you people eating that you feel gross? And what are you ordering? I promise you, eating out does not and should not need to be anything like you are describing.
How old are you?
5-10 years ago I would have agreed with your comment, but once I hit my 30s I started to feel gross if I ate a bunch of donuts, super duper greasy food, etc.
As the years progress more and more food makes me feel a little yucky afterwards, not just the blatantly obvious incredibly unhealthy ones.
Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
You cannot get the same leoparding on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside with a 5 minute pizza. If you are talking about normies than probably no, they cannot tell the difference but if you are detail oriented you can tell the difference. My setup at home is a 20kg pizza steel and pre-heat it in the oven at max temp for at least 1 hour. Even with all that thermal mass I find the later pizzas take longer to…
Real question: I see a lot of YouTube videos bragging about "leoparding" (spots on the bottom). Does it really matter? My point: Can you cook a pizza that tastes just as good _without_ "leoparding"? > My setup at home is a 20kg pizza steel and pre-heat it in the oven at max temp for at least 1 hour. Sheesh. This is my second complaint about endless YouTube videos about the "perfect pizza at home": What is the carbon…
All of the electricity produced in my area is hydroelectric so the carbon footprint is minimal on a per unit basis.
There are much bigger fish to fry when it comes to carbon footprint such as how often you fly and what motor vehicles you drive which use orders of magnitude more energy than a pizza.
At some level baking becomes an art form — a way to channel your efforts into a form of mastery. Does the leoparding make a difference? Probably not. It is the aesthetic and demonstration of mastery which makes leoparding desirable, much like how people desire perfectly manicured lawns and gardens.
Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Super cool path, man. I'm envious in many ways. Any favorite restaurants in NYC which folks on HN may not have heard of?
Absolutely! Recommending restaurants may be the unofficial New Yorker pastime. As a best practice, I recommend checking some of the Eater.com lists before visiting any town. They don't always hit the mark, however you can get a pretty good feel for the restaurant scene by what they are reviewing. I'll put a mix of genres below. But I'm more than happy to answer any others. Ugly Baby (Carrol Gardens) is my favorite Th…
I am also a member of the hospitality -> tech club. in fact, I used to be the GM of one of the restaurants on your list!