It should surprise no one that, committed as I am to the consumption of smoked animal fat, I found little time to actually write about the tour while I was on it. Those intersticial periods between barbecues were spent either in productive slumber, or recumbent on an air-conditioned easy chair in my Hill Country headquarters. But having now returned, I feel the need to get the first of these four essays done. Today's post is hymn to the greatness of Kreuz Market; tomorrow a summary of the also-rans; then, an open-pit barbecue done collaboratively by myself, meat-master Zak Palaccio, and Robbie Richter, New York City's most decorated competition barbecuer; and lastly, I'll do my best to answer the questions with which I began this adventure (not that anybody cares.)

KREUZ MARKET

There is a special poignant paradox about starting at the top. Orson Welles spent a lifetime constructing the postscript to Citizen Kane; David knocked out Goliath with a single shot, and the next thing he knew, he was setting up Uriah the Hittite. My trip followed a similar path. The very first stop on our tour was Kreuz Market, the Bayreuth of Beef. Kreuz's isn't much to look at; it's a new building, unpleasing to the eye, offering no hint of the magic within. A story comes with it.

Continue reading Mr. Cutlets' Texas Tour -- Part One of Four

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"The influence of meat on the brain-stem" might be a paper, submitted by myself, to the Royal College of Physicians -- if I wasn't too fried to write it. There has been a lot of meat going into the Ozersky system in recent weeks. Half a dozen episodes were worthy of Slashfood chronicles, and would have been, had they not been succeeded within days by other, equally meat-tastic adventures. I had meant to tell you about my Steak Symposium In a Strip Club; A Visit By the Baron of Bacon, a tale of pigs and madness; What The Pit-Man Told Me, a romance; and other meat-related narratives. I still might. But now something is around the corner that's so big that I will have to blog it over several days.

I'm going to Texas tomorrow. To eat barbecue in the Hill Country.

Continue reading The Summit of Smoke

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The Steakhouse of My Dreams is a special place -- but you can't go get a reservation.   It is my secret sanctuary. I repair there when the world is too much. Let the buxom belles of Avenue B ignore me; let editors repulse my pitches, and copy crones mangle my best phrases. I see what my life is like. I know that my Cadillac has a broken grill, and a big crack in the windshield. Indian boys pelt my windows with durian. I don't care. I just close my eyes, and I see that place of my most fevered meat-dreams.

Here is what it is like.

Continue reading The steakhouse of my dreams

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Steakhouses, as a rule, all used to market themselves the same way. The place was presented as a sanctum sanctorum, an all-male preserve where men could drink whiskey, eat charred beef, and revel in their temporary liberation from the tyranny of women.

But times have changed; and the New York steakhouse has changed with them, giving yesteryear's cultural baggage the heave-ho. A few classic exemplars of the old school persist, and are rightly celebrated as temples of meat-worship; but now they compete with a new generation of steakhouses, all of whom bring a new, metrosexual take to the most primal of all restaurant concepts.

Typical of this breed is Quality Meats, a tarted-up meatery from the corporate group that brought you 78 different Smith and Wollensky restaurants, not to mention Cite, Maloney and Porcelli, and the Post House.

Continue reading You call these Quality Meats?

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 My adopted religion, or at least the ultra-liberal version to which I adhere, requires certain sacrifices. But I just don't like to make them. In a way, that makes the rare fasting days, like Good Friday, a good test case for Catholic Spirituality. A more pious person would welcome the chance to deny himself something. A less credulous one would dispense with hardship entirely. My own solution, perfected after many years of not trying, is to embrace the letter of the observance, while violating its spirit in every way. This works pretty well for me.

Continue reading Thank God It's Good Friday

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Your old pal Mr. Cutlets, New York's most corpulent carnivore, has been on quite a tear lately, writing at a white-hot frenzy. Thanks to a daily cocktail of bacon, pork roll, and methamphetimines, I've been able to write restaurant reviews, book reviews, travel guides, blog posts, a visit to a pudding factory, media criticism, a love letter to my cast iron pan, a huge feature on specialty meats for the NY Law Journal, and a book on the history of hamburgers, in addition to a big mutlimedia project that is still "in development."  But even Mr. Cutlets can't be on the job all the time. So here's a quick roundup of recent adventures.

Continue reading My week in meat

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How I ended up with James Frey's elk meat bleeding on my back seat is a long story. But it is also an instructive one. As a minor figure at best on the literary scene, I got a rare chance to see how my betters live when, on a cold Tribeca evening some weeks ago, I found myself talking meat with the disgraced A Million Little Pieces author in the latter's posh kitchen.

Frey, fresh off his show trial on Oprah, was in no mood to talk about his troubles.  Nor would I have been in any hurry to do so. A man's sorrows are his own. God Forbid I should have to answer for all the baldfaced lies I've come up with over the years -- and with far less motivation than Frey had. But meat is a subject anyone can talk about, and Frey asked me point blank if I had ever eaten elk. I lied and said that I eat it all the time.

Continue reading A Million Little Meatses

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The emotional backlash against Valentine's Day is potent and ubiquitous. Millions of people despise the holiday -- far more than hate Christmas. Every spinster is a grinch on February 14, and  "lonely men in shirt sleeves, leaning out of windows" --  they have little love for public humiliation, either. Not since Ralph Wiggum got his pity card from Lisa Simpson has anyone had a good thing to say about Valentine's Day.

It's even worse when food and love are shoehorned together for the occasion. I understand the rationale of restaurants, who seek to fill tables with big spenders, who will buy better wine than they can afford. And I can see why editors, seeking a peg to hang banal features on, will assign stories about "the most romantic restaurants." But I have to here state my opinion, in which I feel backed by the consensus of all humankind:

Food and romance don't go together.

Continue reading Table for one

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Every time I find myself standing around at Di Fara -- and it happens more and more -- I start to think about a slice limit. In any other pizzeria, of course, there would be one. But then, in any other pizzeria, there would be a dozen cold, pre-cooked pizzas, ready to be reheated. That's not the way it works at Di Fara. Here, a dozen people will stand elbow to elbow, waching a septuagenarian make pizzas in slow motion, in the patient hope that they might get a slice. They don't complain; they don't ask impertinent questions; they don't look at their watches and then exchange exasperated glances. No. They're down with Dom, and off New York time. The place is strangely hypnotic: watching the old man go through his unrushed, painstaking routine is one of the city's most pacific experiences. At least I think it is; but I also like to sit around in strip clubs, listening to the Scorpions and pretending to be invisible.

Continue reading The Di Fara Diaries, 2

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Continue reading Come Fry With Me

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Of all of Nature's gifts, nothing is dearer to the hearts of drunks and gluttons than the slider. The slider! So named because of the ease with which it enters, and exits, the gastrointestinal system. Glorified in film and in literature. The end of a thousand loveless nights, and the start of a million melancholy days. I love the slider, and can't get enough of the little fellows.

The hamburger, you see, is a paradoxical creature. It is most itself when small, so that the basic proportion of surface to interior is 1:1,  ideally with a browned coarse surface that yields to oozing interiorities within. But people like to eat hamburgers with more meat; and most restaurants are only too happen to appease them. So the hamburger, as it becomes more popular, loses its soul, like a rapper who spends so much time quaffing Cristal in nightclubs that he forgets the mean streets.

Continue reading The Slider Reinvented

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It's rare that I'm stymied when I call upon my meaty muse, but it has happened two weeks running. No cause for alarm there, I'm sure. But first I was unable to come up with anything good to do about turkey, despite knowing a guy who was cooking one in a specially-made Caja China box. And this past week, after days and days of lying around my Castle of Carnivorous Consumption, making different kinds of Siberian dumplings, I couldn't even get together to produce an emotional essay about same. So I apologize to you, Slashfood reader. You expect better free content from your browsing.

Continue reading Communing With Kroc

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Thanksgiving is synonymous with turkey, of course -- a depressing fact no amount of boiling oil, salt water, or heritage breeding can disguise. Turkey is bad. Even as the self-appointed "majarajah of meat," I find it impossible to work up any enthusiasm for this bland bird -- and I make a living from feigning fascination, especially during the holiday article-assigning season.

Continue reading A Bad Bird

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The romance of discovering something you've always known is a persistent dream. G.K. Chesterton used the image of an explorer stumbling across his own country to begin his enduring Orthodoxy; the hero of "The Pina Colada Song" found the respondant to his sybaritic personal ad to be none other than "my own loving lady." And here I am, having crowned myself "New York's Most Conspicuous Carnivore," and I had never eaten a hot dog with mustard and relish.

Like so many of my crippling, idiotic, and persistent life errors, this one isn't my fault. As an impressionable child, I received at my father's knee powerful opinions, ardent orthodoxies whose expression awed even as they instructed. Just the way he talked about certain foods was enough to make me feel guilty for liking them. Fudge was wasn't just a confection, but a vice; it wasn't even fudge -- it was invariably "disusting fudge." That was like "the disgusting Port Authority," a fixed epithets, as automatic as "wily oddysseus" in Homer. "How can you eat that disgusting fudge?" he asked me, rhetorically, when I was eight years old. "It's so sickeningly sweet."  The force of his convictions impressed my infant mind, and I took these strange proclamations at face value. Candy bars should always be frozen, pizza should never have more than two toppings, and hot dogs should only be eaten with mustard.

It's amazing to me that I didn't see through these precepts earlier, especially the ones that are so obviously wrong. He wasn't a prissy guy. He loved fried salami, Chinese spare ribs, and chocolate milk. But his tastes were weirdly austere and perverse. Grapefruit juice, dried fruit compotes -- everything bad, he liked.  I always knew this on some level.  His anathemas against American cheese, white bread, margarine, Funyons, and the like made no more impression on me than a public service announcement.

But his opinions on Jewish foods were not so easy to throw off.  These carried the weight of millennia behind them, not to mention the incomparable cultural aura of Old New York, so potent in motley, sterile South Florida.  Such was the power of tradition that, though I can't stand mustard, especially deli mustard,  I allowed myself to be imposed upon by my father's prejudices for all these years. How many thousands, nay tens of thousands of frankfurters have descended into my colon unlubricated by a trace of sweetness or savory!

Continue reading A Prisoner of (Hot) Dogma

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I'm still not ready to write about my trip this past weekend to the Jack Daniels World Championship of BBQ.  Tempers ran high, and my entry in the Chef's Choice category, which came in 40^th out of 47 entries, will require a full feature post of its own.  What I do feel ready to write about, though, is the torrid three-day affair I had with Waffle House.

Waffle House, as you may or may not know, is a ubiquitous chain of 24-hour coffee shops which dot the Southland.  They're more common on southern highways than roadkill.  Rare was the exit, as I travelled across Tennessee and northern Alabama, that didn't have a massive yellow-and-black sign hovering high nearby, beckoning me to yet another plate of hash browns.

Because, the name notwithstanding, hash browns are what to get at Waffle House.  They bill themselves as the biggest seller of T-Bone steaks in America, and have named themselves after the blandest of all breakfast foods, but the star attraction here are shredded, preserved white potatoes sauteed in margarine on a griddle.  Other things are good here, too - I had a grilled bacon and cheesesteak sandwich on white bread that still puts a hop in my step. 

 
But in the end, it's all about the hash browns.

Continue reading Last Tango in Tullahoma

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The roster of Slashfood bloggers, which appears prominently alongside these words, tells a sad tale about Mr. Josh Ozersky.  Dead last, and with a grand total of no comments, I seem to be a basement dweller here at Slashfood, where even the most unprovocative of pie recipes inspires more interest than one of my prolix and melancholy meditations.  I don't blame the Slashfood reader.  I myself am oppressed by this spherical prison of ego in which I live.  You only have to read this blog; I have to live it.  

The good part, though, is that I have a chance to write honestly about food, a rarity for a professional.  As a restaurant critic for one of the city's major papers, I write from the perspective of my ideal reader, a well-informed, hungry, open-minded gourmand, eager to find the next exotic Bosnian porridge, or Uzbek kebab.  But, like a haute couture designer who pads around the house in boxers and a wife-beater, my actual eating habits in private are stark and sad. 

Take my refrigerator.  I have just moved into a brand new apartment in an out-of-the-way part of Brooklyn.  There are still boxes in my closets; the ground-floor windows don't have blinds, because I'm too inept to put them up without adult supervision.  That's all right, but I have much to answer for when it comes to the contents of my refrigerator.  Here is what it contains.

·        A 16-ounce can of Busch, found serendipitously on a hallway window sill, and a 16-ounce can of Budweiser (origin unknown);

·        A freezer bag containing an obese wedge of chocolate cake, preserved from my August 22 birthday party;

·        A five-pound bag of Swedish meatballs from Ikea, defrosted, with a jagged, impatient hole torn in its front ;

·        A bent bottle of Sprite;

·        A 12 oz can of Coke;

·        A half-open plastic bag, containing a quarter-open paper bag, containing the neatly packaged remains of a dinner at Waterfront International Enterprises, a Northern Chinese restaurant in Flushing I am reviewing for next week;

·        A plate with two apples and a plum.

When I look at this list, I am struck by several things - its unwholesomeness, its haphazardness, its unloved, undomesticated quality.  It isn't the larder of a home, but rather something you would find in a bear's cave, or - more charitably  -- a madman's sanctuary.  A fallout shelter maybe.  The abode of elderly twin hermits, found dead under piles of newspapers.  You get the picture.  

But I am also struck by the secret signs of love and friendship here.  The cake was made for me by my friend Rozanne Gold, the chef and cookbook author.  It was enormous, intensely moist and potent with dark chocolate cake, dense cool mousse, and a gorgeous bittersweet frosting that took the chocolate taste to a whole new level.  It had a second tier and aquamarine highlights, and weighed as much as a thanksgiving turkey when first delivered.  Rozanne wanted to make it with some kind of raspberry or other fruit flavor, but as it was my birthday, I thought I could get away with asserting my desire to have just chocolate and plenty of it.  Who the hell wants fruit on a cake?  So she had the chocolate cake to end all chocolate cakes made for me.

This cake, unwrapped and unboxed, sat afterward on the center shelf of the refrigerator in my previous apartment.  After slashing crudely at it for a few days, I somehow found the presence of mind to slice it in big pieces, wrap each one in Key Food brand plastic wrap, and drop it into a one-gallon freezer bag.  When it came time to move, at the last possible minute, I sat on my step, waiting for movers who were two hours late.  The panic rose, and it was my good luck that another undeserved friend, Henry Tenney, happened to be eating dinner with his family down the block.  I summoned that good ruddy Scotchman over, and entrusted him with the bags of frozen cake, along with two bags of Big Island Barbecue's Grand Championship pork from the Hudson Valley Rib Off, which I was saving as a kind of edible relic.  Both eventually made it into my new place, and though the barbecue went bad after a night left in my Cadillac, the cake, like the sole survivor of a shipwreck, accompanied me into my new life here.  I have eaten a little bit of it every day, and it raises my spirits.

 Then, too, there is the small plate of fruit.  There is almost no difference between my real self and my identity as Mr. Cutlets, New York's Majarajah of Meat, and you might wonder what I was doing with something this healthy.  That was something I bought for my sweet Patricia, so she wouldn't be forced to eat the leathery Ikea meatballs.  The apples and plum were bought from a vendor on Flatbush Avenue, and I carried them home and carefully put them on a plate.  They look very nice there, a Cezanne still life, and I will take them out when she comes by tomorrow, setting them on the counter to warm up.  When she is here I will also make her Lipton tea, with the second teabag from a grim box of 500  bought at an Indian bodega on the corner.  (The previous teabag was was immersed for her on Monday.)

I know that sometime soon, perhaps this very night, I will make a meal of Busch and Swedish meatballs, possibly warmed up in the toaster oven, or possibly taken chilled like bon bons.  But this is not the meal of the man I want to be.  In the apartment of my dreams, my refrigerator is filled with smuggled gifts and readied presents for other people.  It cheers me to think that it is already halfway there.

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First, a note to Slashfood readers:  I apologize for missing pizza day.  Not that anybody cares.  But I feel badly about it.  My long displacement kept me from regularly posting, but now, having landed at my new headquarters here in beautiful Midwood, I'm ready to resume my subliterary labors.  I'll start with my tardy post on the unpredictable genius of Domenic DeMarco.  And early next week I'll report on my experience this weekend as a judge at the Long Island Pizza Festival. Writing in Newsday some months ago, I penned the following paen to Dom:

"One man - bent, driven, possessed - towers over the world of pizza. His name is spoken of in hushed tones by the circle of believers; his work is subsumed in mystique; and no one who has made the trek to distant Midwood to eat his handiwork has ever walked away less than awed."

Continue reading Mysteries of the Master

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The love of a sandwich must, I suppose, be an unrequited one; and so grilled cheese and bacon has never stopped to think about how much it means to me. I must know more about it than any person alive.

That is saying something. A food scientist in Kraft's massive research facilities in Terrytown, NY or East Hanover, NJ probably knows more about the mechanics of melted cheese than I do, and Harold McGee more about butter. Dan Phillips, the founder of the Bacon of the Month Club, knows more about bacon. But put these things together in a glorious gestalt, and I am its master - and its slave. I have given the consideration of this sandwich everything, and am a crude and pitiful human being in all non-grilled-cheese-and-bacon-related ways. My knowledge has been purchased at great cost, and if now I can prescribe its construction with the exactitude of a Japanese tea ceremony, it is only because I have neglected whole vast tracts of human life to do so.

Continue reading Grilled Cheese and Bacon and Me

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