And then you get the dinner menu, and you wonder from which other restaurant they swiped their menu.  Chicken breast stuffed with goat cheese in a bearnaise reduction, or words to that effect.  Mint-crusted New Zealand rack of lamb.  Et cetera.  It is, to use a word I picked up on my last trip to Ye Jolly Olde Englande, a gastropub, only with really good food.

We hadn’t gone for a while because, being a bar, smoking was permitted, and while they had an area labeled “No Smoking” it was about as effective as setting up a ring of buoys just offshore and marking that area “No Water”.  We used to go every now and again in olden days, but after Carolyn’s arrival, it was stricken from our dining list for the obvious health reasons.  However, Ohio voters passed an indoor smoking ban late last year, so we could once again eat and breathe.  Everybody woohoo!

Only when we arrived and asked for a table on their newly opened outdoor patio, we were told Carolyn wasn’t old enough to be seated there.  We could eat indoors, but the patio was off-limits to anyone under the age of eighteen.  This baffled us just a little all by itself, and then we turned around to behold a pre-teen boy sitting at the bar, eating a sandwich and drinking a Coke.  At least we hoped it was a Coke.

We brought this oddity (and, if I’m not mistaken, violation of Ohio state law) to the staff’s attention, and were told that he was seated there because they were so busy.  But no kids on the patio!  No no!  That would be, um, whatever they feared would come of allowing children to eat at an outdoor table.  The apocalypse, no doubt.

So we ate at The Tavern Company a little way down the street, where they were more than happy to have us sit wherever we liked, indoors or out—the presence of a smallish, well-behaved child notwithstanding.

I think we’ll keep to that seating arrangement for as long as the policy at Brennan’s remains.

For those of you in or near London, I’ll be at a Geekminidinner the evening of Tuesday, 14 August 2007, which you can read a bit more about over here.  (Apparently, I need to print out an article I wrote a while back and staple it to Ian‘s forehead.)  Come on ’round and join us!

About four and a half hours after that starts, I’ll be missing (in both senses of the word) the Cleveland area Web Standards/Web Design Meetup.  Once left for dead, this group has come roaring back thanks to the tireless efforts of a COBOL dude who is much less scary than his profile photo would seem to indicate.  He does run the Ubuntu Satanic Edition, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.  Seriously, he’s a great guy.  I have never once heard him say “SATAN!” in a deep growly voice, no matter how many times I ask.

The point being, 18 people have already said they’ll be at the Meetup, and you should absolutely add yourself to that list.  Assuming you will actually be there, of course.

As for London, I don’t know how many will be there, but probably not as many as the Cleveland gathering.  Hey, it’s okay, folks.  Don’t feel down about it.  Not everyone can be as cool as Cleveland.  We’ll do our best to have a good time regardless.

“Hey, that’s our oven!” I blurted out.

Kat and I (okay, mostly Kat) recently decided that enough was enough, and that our old oven had to go.  It was a Jenn-Air that came with the house, and frankly, it was either not very good in the first place or else had just been beat all to hell.  Cramped, dark, and uncalibrated—and with an unreadably worn set of control dials to boot—it was time for the warhorse to go.

After a good deal of research, Kat settled on a GE JK955 electric double oven, which we were relieved to find fit almost exactly into the space where the old oven was, once we removed a couple of drawers.  It’s got all kinds of toys and features that would send any food-porn addict straight into overdrive, including a built-in probe thermometer.  It even has a nice warm proofing function, which is one of the reasons Kat picked it.

There is one thing about it that cracks me right up, and that’s the Sabbath mode.  Seriously.  When you put it into Sabbath mode (the display reads “SAb bATh” when you do so), it will help you observe Orthodox Jewish law as regards the Sabbath.  Really!  See, you’re not allowed to do any work on the Sabbath, which includes things like turning lights on and off.  Ovens fall under that restriction as well, which makes cooking dinner a bit tough.  However—and here’s the funky part—you get off the hook if you don’t directly cause the work to occur.  If the work happens indirectly, then you’re okay.

So when the oven is in Sabbath mode, you input the temperature and cook time you want.  Then you press start, and for a random amount of time that ranges from 30 seconds to a minute, nothing happens.  Then the oven kicks on.  Ta-daaa!  Indirect action!  Sure, you pressed all those buttons, but the random time delay is enough to get around your religion’s restrictions on Sabbath work.  It’s all, pardon the term, kosher.  Check out the Wired article about the man responsible for Sabbath mode, if you don’t believe me.

I’m still trying to decide if this letter-of-the-law approach lessens my respect for Orthodox Jews’ conception of religion, or if I have more respect for their pragmatic willingness to hack the problem.  I think it’s the latter.  Apparently there’s still no progress on a molecular screen that will prevent the insertion of porcine products into the oven, so I guess some things are still up to the individual.

So not only do we have a frum oven, but without realizing it we had settled on the same model that A.B. himself uses, which is about as weighty an endorsement as we can imagine.  (Of course, his is the larger unit, but that’s okay—ours fills its space very nicely, thank you.)  The degree to which this makes us feel all smug and superior is probably cause for alarm.  If you hear our friends are getting ready to stage an intervention, well, that’s probably why.

Why am I bringing this up?  Because several people, upon hearing about this party from the bloggers and other guests, have expressed interest in holding their own version of the party.  To which I say: hey, you slackers, come up with your own damn party idea!

I’m kidding.  I kid!  You should absolutely feel free to copy the idea, or come up with your own variant.  Here’s the not-quite-a-recipe we follow for this event.

• We invite just about everyone we know, regardless of how close or far away they live.  In fact, we put an invitation in the mailbox of every house on our block, and it’s a semi-lengthy block, so in many cases we’re inviting people we don’t know.  That’s okay.  The people we know are always welcome to bring people they know, but we don’t.
• The party has a start time, but no end time.  The format is open house: people come when they can, and leave when they like.  We start at 3:00pm on a weekend day, and usually the last guests are out the door by 9:00pm.  The first year it went a bit later, and people still speak in hushed and shuddering tones of the “Truth or Dare Jenga” game that was played that night.
• The time of year is important.  Bread and soup in the middle of summer doesn’t work nearly as well as it does in winter.  Being in the Northern Hemisphere, which puts the holidays in winter, is a bonus, but not crucial.
• We state right on the invitation, and as many times as we can think to do so, that guests should bring nothing but themselves and some good cheer.  No gifts, no bottle of wine, no food.  We haven’t yet started a policy of turning away gift-bearers, but we’re considering it.
• Children are welcome.  They were even before we had our own, but this is key if you want to draw families.  Which we do.
• We get help from our friends.  We have cooks beforehand, and a cleanup crew after.  This is essential, because otherwise we’d never be able to manage it.
• We use paper plates—nice heavy laminated paper, but paper nonetheless—and styrofoam cups with plastic spoons for the soups.  This makes cleanup a whole lot easier, plus it means we don’t have to buy place settings for 128, or worry about dropped bowls shattering.  We’re seriously thinking about going to small styrofoam bowls next year, but the principles basically the same.

Okay, so those are the parameters.  The content, though, is what brings ‘em in:  we provide five pots of soup and from five to seven loaves of bread, each one cooked entirely from scratch.  Here’s this year’s lineup.

• Soups:
  • Sweet curry soup
  • Black bean soup
  • Tom yum goong (a hot Thai soup; recipe available over at The Obscurarium)
  • Matzo ball soup
  • Pumpkin soup
• Breads:
  • Cornbread
  • Challah
  • Eggnog bread
  • Oatmeal bread
  • Gingerbread (the real stuff, not the thin house-building kind)

To make things extra-tasty, we try to coordinate soups and breads.  For example, this year we made gingerbread because it seemed like a good match for the pumpkin soup.  (And wow, was it ever.)  Similarly, the cornbread was an excellent partner to the black bean soup.

Remember: these are all cooked from scratch.  The closest we’ve gotten to pre-made soup was the year we had clam chowder, when we bought the clams in cans.  The  breads are all done from first principles, even the cornbread, which is made with real cornmeal and not a bunch of boxes of Jiffy corn mix.  Nothing wrong with Jiffy, which I love, but it just doesn’t yield the kind of hearty, rustic cornbread we were after.

This sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but that’s why I made the point about having friends help.  In the past few years, we’ve set things up so that each pot of soup has its own sous chef.  (This year, the soups were actually chefs’ choice, so that made them rather less sous-y, I admit.)  Cooking starts around 10:00am, with all of us gathered in the kitchen chatting, laughing, tasting, and adjusting as we cook.  It’s noisy and cozy and smells amazing, and honestly is more fun than the party itself, at least for us.  It’s a shame that the cooking experience doesn’t scale up to a full party, or else we’d just do that.

In addition to the soups and breads, we also set up a cheese board with several different varities, crackers, summer sausages, and grape clusters.  For drinks, we provide eggnog (both spiked and unspiked) and hot mulled apple cider; and for dessert, a selection of petit fours and candies.  But those are reflections of our profound yuppiehood, and not really integral to the core party experience.

Once everyone’s left besides the cleanup crew, we start washing and storing any leftovers (this year, there were hardly any) and doing a post-mortem of which offerings were popular, and why.  This stage is a lot quieter and more reflective than the cooking part, but it’s no less enjoyable.

I’ll throw open the comments to observations from guests from this and previous years, and questions from anyone who’s curious to know more. 

In a menu full of good things, one of my favorites is their Notso™ Fries (“They’re notso common!”).  To make a plate of Notso™ Fries, you first pile up some cottage fries, which are those little round crinkle-cut jobbies.  To the fry pile, you then add a whole bunch of cheese.  Then crumbled bacon, and I think more cheese.  The whole plate is then broiled until the cheese is golden, and just before serving you plop on a generous dollop o’ sour cream.

It’s like a heart attack on a plate.

I had long thought that this wonderful dish represented, in some sense, the apex of cholesterolicious cooking, but this morning I discovered that I was wrong, that the fine folks at Yours Truly had gone themselves one better and given us…

The Notso™ Omelet.

Substitute hashbrowns for the cottage fries but keep everything else the same, stuff the result into a three-egg omelet, and put the sour cream on top.

Oh yeah.

Her first sushi—I was so proud.  We know she liked it, too, because after demolishing the first piece, she grabbed another one and ate most of the contents.

<tear type="joyful" />

(And did I have the camera with me?  Of course not.  One of the other daddies had a camera phone, though, so hopefully I’ll be able to update this entry with a picture.)

So, clearly, I need a TV show, so I can return the favor.

We also saw Alton’s final stage show, where he did a sort of live-action espiode of “Good Eats” involving custards, eggnogs, ice cream, and other foam-based foods.  It was a lot of fun, with probably one or two thousand people in attendance.  I’ve heard that the other live shows were similarly popular, and with six shows a day over three days, that’s a lot of people.  Even if you figure some repeat customers, that’s still well over fifteen thousand.

What wasn’t fun was the show floor, which was far too cramped and therefore choked with crowds of attendees.  The only reason I can imagine things were so tight is that they didn’t want to pay for more floor space, because the show area was completely surrounded by empty space.  Rumor has it that next year they plan to make it even bigger, and I certainly hope that’s the case.  It was clearly a popular event, so I think they can afford to bump up the surface area.  That may mean a slight bump in ticket prices as well, but honestly, they weren’t terribly expensive so I think a small increase would be totally acceptable.  Especially if it yields more elbow room.

There were also vague promises of turning the live shows into a TV special.  I hope they make it two hours long, and call it the “Great Big ‘Great Big Food Show’ Show”.  The name actually rolls off the tongue more smoothly than you might expect.

In all, we really enjoyed ourselves.  Hopefully those of you in less-hip cities will have a chance to see the show next year.

• People who don’t like fried foods in general don’t count.  This has to be someone who genuinely dislikes French fries on their own merits (or, I suppose, a percieved lack thereof).
• A person who is allergic to potatoes, or to any ingredient common to fry preparation, also doesn’t count.  We’re looking for people who are perfectly capable of eating fries, but don’t want to do so.
• We’re completely ignoring people whose political ideology causes them to be upset with the French right now.

So how about it—are French fries really the universal food, or is there a counterexample?

(Addendum: if you do dislike French fries, please tell us what it is that causes you to dislike them.  Is it taste? Texture?  Smell?  Something else?  Inquiring palates want to know.)

I just noticed that Matt Haughey lists meyerweb as a blog he reads, which is really rather cool.  I should return the favor, as I do drop by there every now and again.  I also notice that he has never visited Ohio, and is apparently of a mind to undertake a major road trip to fill in the voids in his lifetime itinerary.  Maybe I can get him to drop by for some tea and crumpets… or maybe some really good sushi, tasty Ethiopian, possibly some great chicken ‘n’ waffles.  Note that I’m not in any way responsible for the sites to which I just pointed; I sometimes think that there’s an inverse correlation between the quality of a restaurant’s cuisine and that of its Web site.  We can only hope the same is true of WWW2004, because the both the current and previous conference sites have been… substandard.  Sub-standards, in fact.

<sigh type="weary" />

Speaking of food, which I was, we’ve recently discovered halloumi, a truly miraculous Cypriot cheese that is a touch expensive but oh, so worth it.  You can literally put the stuff on a skewer and grill it without it melting, and the taste is if anything better than just eating the cheese straight.  The texture is amazing; the taste, divine.  If halloumi had been the manna dropped for the Israelites after they left Egypt, they’d never have left the desert.

And that leads me to a question I’ve always had, but never had answered to my satisfaction.  We’re all more or less familiar with the concept of a miracle, even though one can stretch its meaning around a bit.  But let’s take as a basis the definition that a miracle is a divine action in the mortal realm, a supernatural act of God.  Good enough?  Okay, here’s the question: what is the antonym of the word “miracle?”  The results from an online thesaurus weren’t really satisfying; they expressed either an absence of miracles, or else simple bad luck.  Neither of those is quite what I’m after.  In other words, if God performs miracles, what does the devil perform?  (Sorry, “atonal symphonies” is two words.)

Kat and I have just returned from Morimoto, where we had one of the most amazing meals of our entire lives.  Although we’d been seated at a table to start, Kat decided (and rightly so) that we should move to the sushi bar.  So with a little help from the hostess, we moved to sit at the end of the bar, just a few feet from Morimoto himself, and after a bit of debate we decided to start out with the seared kobe beef and green tea soba noodles.  These were by themselves amazing, but they were just the beginning.  From there, we moved into the omakase, or chef’s tasting menu.  The best part of this was that we were seated right in front of the chef who was creating our meal, a sushi chef by the name of Alex, so we could ask questions and make requests while he prepared our courses.  And what did we have?

1. Toro tartare (one of the restaurant’s signature dishes)
2. Japanese oysters on the half-shell with four different sauces
3. Seared scallop
4. Sashimi salad of striped jack
5. Mango sorbet with tiny wasabi beigniets
6. Grilled half lobster in ginger sauce and rice noodles
7. Grilled kobe beef with pan-seared foie gras
8. Nigiri sushi including toro (fatty tuna), kanpachi (juvenile yellowtail), sawari (kingfish), Japanese tai (red snapper), needlefish, fluke, and fluke fin
9. Chocolate temple dessert

It’s difficult to even imagine being able to come up with the words to describe how good everything was. Take the scallop, for example.  Alex scraped the meat off of a shell, then sliced it in half and bent over to closely inspect the two halves.  We couldn’t figure out what he was doing as he switched his gaze from one to the other, then back.  After a few moments he beckoned us close and said, “Look at this one.  See around the edges?”

We looked.  In the light, the edge was puckering and moving slowly.

“It’s still alive,” he said happily.  And then he sliced the meat into chunks, seared it on the sushi grill, and served it up with spicy extra-virgin olive oil and cherry tomato halves.

Even though I hate scallop to the extent that it makes me feel ill, I somehow just had to try a piece.  It was actually rather tasty, although I did keep it to that single piece.

The whole time, Alex graciously answered our every question of “Ooo! What’s that?” and “How is that made?” and “How do you get a meal prepared by Morimoto himself?”  He didn’t even take that last question personally; I’m sure he gets it all the time.  From our perch we got to watch Morimoto make mini-sushi, which we’re told is all the rage now in Japan.  Each little piece was maybe a centimeter long.  Not only did we think they were too cute for words, so did most of the staff.  We saw one waitress run after the server calling, “Wait, let me see, let me see!”

It was, in every sense, an incredible experience.  If we ever do make it back to Morimoto, we’ll not only try the omakase again, but we’ll ask to sit at Alex’s station on the sushi bar.