Michelin Preseason, BA 10, Soleil shrugged, Nguyen to HK, tanda time, and more...
Family Meal - Friday, August 17th, 2018
Hello Friday,
And hello from Taipei, where – apologies for the typos, but – I am going to have to cut proofreading short because I can’t quite tell you how out of place I look tapping on my laptop in this clubby hotel bar. In my best Mitch Hedburg: I can’t tell you where I’m staying, but it starts with a W and ends there too.
Let’s get to it so I can get out of here…
Michelin (pre) Season – Selection dates for Michelin’s 2019 U.S. guides are out and as follows:
D.C. Bib Gourmands will be announced on 9/6; Stars out 9/13. Chicago Bibs on 9/19; Stars 9/26. NYC Bibs on 10/30; Stars 11/6. SF Bibs on 11/20; Stars 11/29.
Print copies go on sale 2-5 days after the stars are announced in each city, and I’m sure there’s good reason for that, but it’s also just enough time for most people to forget that they care about owning the actual guide, when there’s, you know, the world wide web. Full announcement here.
The Lists – Bon Appétit’s Hot 10 Best New Restaurants in America list came out right after I hit send on Tuesday, but ICYMI, in particular order: 1) Nonesuch, Oklahoma City; 2) Maydan, D.C.; 3) Ugly Baby, Brooklyn; 4) Freedman’s, L.A.; 5) Nyum Bai, Oakland; 6) Nimblefish, Portland, OR; 7) Che Fico, S.F.; 8) Yume Ga Arukara, Cambridge, MA; 9) Drifters Wine, Portland, ME; 10) Call, Denver.
Tell (DC) PR – Eater DC has a new Facebook group.
The (career change) Profile Treatment – There’s new maître d in LA, per Brooks Barnes in the NYT: “Something was different about the famed Tower Bar on a recent visit. Wait. Could it be? Was that ... the former Condé Nast editor Gabé Doppelt, a publishing stalwart trusted by Anna Wintour and trained by Tina Brown, behind the hostess podium? ...‘The idea of coming back to publishing was so horrific to me,’ she said. ‘And then the phone rang, and it was Jeffrey Klein. We’ve been friends forever. He sounded frantic — Jeffrey being Jeffrey. And he said, “[legendary maître d] Dimitri Dimitrov is leaving, and I don’t know what I’m going to do.”’ The changing of the Tower Bar guard amounts to an earthquake in the Los Angeles power dining scene, on par with the 1993 departure of Bernard Erpicum from Spago, or perhaps Craig Susser’s decampment from Dan Tana’s in 2011.”
The (pastry prof) Profile Treatment – “Melissa Coppel, who is 37, runs Atelier Melissa Coppel, a small chocolate school in an unglamorous strip mall in western Las Vegas, that shares the parking lot with an orthodontics office and a law firm. But with her meticulous, colorful style of making chocolates and more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, she draws pastry chefs from all over the world who want to learn by her side.” Full profile from new NYT CA restaurant critic Tejal Rao in the NYT.
The Close – Per Eater NY, “Greenwich Village restaurant Omar’s La Ranita and its private nightclub Omar’s has closed. The space at 21 West Ninth Street opened in 2013 and is best known for drawing a celebrity-studded crowd, including Madonna, Marc Jacobs, Katy Perry, and Bella Hadid.” And also in Eater NY, “Yet another celebrity chef has shuttered an NYC restaurant: Scott Conant, a regular judge on popular Food Network show Chopped, has closed his Flatiron Italian restaurant Fusco.” And in LA, after four years in development and two years of operations, “Spring, the highly lauded French fine dining restaurant from Tony Esnault and Yassmin Sarmadi, will close some time in the next few weeks.”
The Media – The Washington Post’s Tim Carman was out in SF recently, and a few people wondered if that might mean he was poking about the Chronicle critic job. Turns out, he was poking around the future of critics in general, but the resulting piece, originally headlined, “Is the era of the white male critic coming to an end?”, did… not go over as planned in the food media world. Criticism centered around the framing of any potential change as a hardship for white men (hat tip: Korsha Wilson tweet), which led to both a change in the headline (now: “Have we reached a fork in the road for food criticism?”) and a change of some wording (hat tip: Khushbu Shah tweet) from: “Should editors overlook white male critics in favor of men and women of color, who would bring fresh perspective?” To: “Should editors strive to hire men and women of color, who would bring fresh perspectives?”
It was obvious to me in reading the piece that Carman was trying to say that these changes were a good thing, and whatever moves can be made to increase equity at the table are the right ones. But if there’s ever an argument for equity at the table, it’s that line coming from me, a white guy: “It was obvious to me…”.
P.S. Let the record show that when asked if she might consider taking on one of the recently opened high profile critic roles, Soleil Ho responded with an Elmo shrug. She’s running.
A Good Get (for HK) – Via Grubstreet, “Chef John Nguyen has left Hanoi House, the NYC East Village restaurant that’s been called (by Grub Street, and others) the best Vietnamese restaurant in New York. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean he’s going to open another Vietnamese restaurant in the five boroughs. In an email sent this morning, Nguyen writes that he is leaving New York for Hong Kong to work for the Black Sheep Restaurants group.”
Tanda Time – Washington City Paper’s Laura Hayes has a great explainer on the informal savings systems that doubles as a fun list of all the concurrent tandas going on in the District, and their varying rulebooks: “Tony & Joe’s on the Georgetown waterfront has two tandas running simultaneously. Server Joey Tipan organizes a small one with 11 colleagues. Participants contribute $100 per week, and each week a different person takes home the $1,000 pot ($1,100 minus the $100 they put in)…. They call it ‘luck pot’ at [Baan Thai], and kick things up a notch by introducing a bidding component in place of randomly drawing numbers to determine who gets the money in what order. Ten participants contribute $300 every two weeks. When it comes time to disburse the money, those who haven’t won yet write down how much they’re willing to pay to take the pot home that day… bids typically range from $5 to $15. On subsequent weeks, the winner has to pay $300, plus whatever they bid, until the cycle is over.”
And last but definitely not least – Quite possibly the greatest restaurant scene ever in a movie: Aretha Franklin making sure Matt “Guitar” Murphy knows he better THINK.
And that’s it for today. Thanks for bearing with me for this bar edition, and thanks again to everyone who sent tips on Taipei!
I’ll see you here Tuesday for next Family Meal.
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