Eatin' Ain't Cheatin'

Or so says the lame t-shirt found at tourist traps like Bourbon Street and Times Square.

I fully embraced that philosophy, going sans-Alannah to the United States for a week-long business trip and subsequent (mandatory) few days of R&R in Atlanta and New York, respectively.

Although I love my wife and share in all culinary splendor (and disaster) with her, I wasn't going to go off to a couple of America's great cities without indulging in local specialties. Sorry, babe, but although we share everything, this one's all mine. Gimme gimme gimme!

Things started off with what I thought would be a bang. Around the corner from my Atlanta digs was the celebrated South City Kitchen. "Contemporary southern food," they call themselves. I referred to it as fancified southern standards. And they delivered. Beyond the well-made fried okra (how can you screw that up, really?) and cornbread biscuits, I went for the first thing on my Georgia checklist - Shrimp and Grits, the local specialty. Although at South City, it's shrimp and scallops and grits. It was good. Really good. But tempered by the fact that it's basically the same thing as frutti di mare e polenta. All this time, I'd had shrimp & grits many times before. Just under a different name, with a different accent.

My colleagues who joined me didn't fare as well. The fried catfish was insipid and the accompanying hush puppies should've been called mush puppies. And everything was way over-salted. And as the wife would tell you, I like salt. Yet I was still taken aback by how many gigantic glasses of ice water I had to put down. On a more positive note, another colleague went separately and raved about the buttermilk fried chicken. I told him to go to Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc in Yountville, California to try TKFC (Thomas Keller Fried Chicken) before delivering a verdict.

Overall, South City was nice for what it is. I'd recommend it for people seeking upscale southern food, but to me, the food from below the Mason-Dixon line should be down and dirrrty. Cheap and satisfying.

Before hunkering down for work, I took some French colleagues on a shopping safari on Sunday. We ended up at a fancy mall in Buckhead, but in true southern style, the food court was anything but fancy. I sidled up to the first joint handing out free samples of southern vittles. "Woah! That's all salt!" Disappointed, I went to my old food court fallback from the States, chicken teriyaki from Sarku.


Even the normally acceptable teriyaki here was loaded with enough salt to put a normal human (i.e. a West Coaster) in a hospital. And to top it all off, they didn't use Japanese rice but cheap, dry jasmine rice. Fortuanately, the "medium" beverage was about the size of my gigantic head, so I was able to wash it down.

Back at my hotel, I wasn't prepared to pay $23 for banquet-quality biscuits and gravy for breakfast. Even when on an expense account, I simply couldn't go for the hotel breakfasts on principle.

Lo and behold, just behind the hotel there was yet another food court. And there, I found (at breakfast time) the $1.50 chicken biscuit.


And it was good. Damn good. It was salty as all hell, and eating fried chicken for breakfast probably shortened my life more than most other risky behavior I engage in. But it was worth it. With each bite of the chicken biscuit, I fully accepted that for the coming week, I would be eating food with a 50% sodium content, and that I should just roll with it.

Then I had the home fries.


No. Seasoning. Whatsoever.

WTF? Seriously? I get my tastebuds blasted with salt, Accent, and god knows what else for a couple of days, and I'm served a salty southern standard like home fries with no taste at all?

Granted, I got this at a place called Goldberg's Deli, but c'mon. If they can do a moist, delicious chicken biscuit, how could they not get home fries right? Its saving grace was the inclusion of fresh red and green bell peppers: The only non-deep-fried vegetables I'd seen since whatever it was I'd been served on the plane a few days before.

After a couple of days of pretty-but-bland banquet food, an old colleague and a customer and I got to talking about our predilection for eating. We decided we had to go "off-campus" for a real southern breakfast, and said place would be the famous Flying Biscuit. (Waffle House was too far...)


Despite being a chain, the Flying Biscuit is good. Friendly service full of genteel southern charm, good coffee and fresh orange juice (the hotel only had that horrible carton stuff), excellently executed scrambles, creamy grits, and - of course - huge biscuits.

I have to admit, though, that I prefer Alannah's biscuits. They're rounder, more tender, and feel better in the mouth. But after the rollercoaster of food over the preceding days, it was nice to get a meal that was consistent through and through.

Several more days of hotel banquet and room service followed, with nothing to really keep me salivating. This is probably a good thing, because I had tons of work to do. I didn't need to spend my days and nights in a constant state of food coma. Or salt-induced hypertension.

As the last day of the conference rolled around on Friday, I said goodbye to my European colleagues. I'd be staying on for a few days of vacation time, with one last night in Atlanta to spend with my US chums.

I was looking forward to that. I love our life in Paris, but what I miss most about the US (besides all the great places I know I can pig out) are my friends, and I was excited to spend an additional night with them, free of the burdens of work.

I was doubly excited that we were to dine at Abbatoir. When looking up what to eat in Atlanta, this came in as the only trendy restaurant outside of the spectrum of traditional southern food that I felt I had to try. Their name meaning "slaughterhouse," they specialize not only in meats but also in the off-cuts, so as not to waste the animal. I was really looking forward to eating at what may be the southeast's version of Incanto. The buzz was great.

Unfortunately, there was no offal on the menu that night. The closest it came was a plate of charcuterie, which was comparable to what you could get at a downmarket tourist dive in France.


One dish I did find peculiar and interesting and ultimately tasty was the pickled shrimp. I'd eaten pickled just-about-everything on my trip to Japan, but not shrimp. This dish was certainly the "oddball" highlight of this trip.

The rest of the food at Abbatoir is excellent, by the way, if not very inventive or adventurous.

Sorry, Atlanta, but I just couldn't find foodie adventure in your neck of the woods.

Fortunately, it was off to New York City the next morning.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find my excitement.

After a grueling week of work and eating crap in the South, the lack of sleep and blood-salt content were getting to me. I got to my friend's East Village apartment and cuh-rashed!

It was a beautifully sunny Saturday, though, so we eventually motivated and made our way to the new Highline park on the west side. Before we climbed up to the park itself (it's elevated, on an old stretch of railroad track, not unlike the Promenade Plantée at the Viaduc des Arts in Paris) I spotted a sight familiar to street food junkies: The Van Leeuwen ice cream truck.


Being a total foodiot, I jumped at the chance to buy $4-a-scoop ice cream out of a dodgy truck. I even convinced my skeptical buddy I should buy him a scoop. I got the Giandujia (chocolate & Piemonte hazelnuts). He got the espresso, and also got over his skepticism.

Truth be told, Van Leeuwen is very good, but nowhere near the best. I'm a spoiled bastard nowadays, living so close to Paris' amazing Deliziefollie, where Alannah and I satisfy many a nocturnal craving. And they've actually won "best in Europe" awards. Trend vs. experience: Experience wins.

Dinnertime meant a trip on the L to Brooklyn. Specifically, the hipster hell known as Williamsburg. But I was willing to put up with so-not-even-ironic-anymore trucker hats and mustaches and morons who don't know how to ride their fixies for some good barbecue at Fette Sau.


Fette Sau is German for "fat pig," but the menu is less German (save for the warm potato salad and sauerkraut) and more pig. Or more accurately, you're guaranteed to walk out feeling like a fat pig.


You order food by the pound, and it's served on big metal platters, alongside jelly jars of beer or whiskey from their extensive bar menu. Seating is Biergarten style on communal picnic benches (another German aspect, I guess). We ordered a half pound of brisket, a quarter pound of barbecued ham, another quarter of pork belly, a tub of beans, a basket of potato salad, and another basket of kraut. Between the two of us, we were destroyed. And I'd forgotten to order the slab of ribs we initially wanted. Which would have killed us.

But apparently I have a death wish, as we rolled ourselves over to Hotel Delmano for a round of St. George absinthe.


Absinthe is legal in the US now, but the market is flooded with many pretenders that don't even contain wormwood. St. George, made in Alameda, CA of all places (right next to Oaktown in the 510) is considered among the best out there, often ranked above some of the finest absinthes from Switzerland.

Any more than one glass - beautifully rendered with water and sugar dripped through the traditional slotted spoon - and I would've been a goner for sure.

Sadly, I did come across one casualty during the trek across Williamsburg:


Good barbecue, good absinthe, and respect paid to the passing of Gourmet magazine? Perhaps Williamsburg isn't the hipster hell I thought it to be. In fact, I found it less pretentious and annoying than the gentrified-by-trustafarians neighborhoods in both San Francisco and Paris. I wouldn't hesitate to go back.

The morning after required some caffeinated revival. Fortunately, my friend's place is around the corner from Ninth Street Espresso. As I waited in line, I drew parallels between NSE and San Francisco's Blue Bottle, which incidentally was around the corner from my place. Both take a ridiculous amount of pride in their coffee. Both take a ridiculous amount of time making it. Both have ridiculously simple menus. Bless them for that.


But in my opinion, NSE hands Blue Bottle its ass. And I love Blue Bottle. I'd take BB coffee over that of the finest Parisian cafés any day. Yet NSE puts them to shame. Rich, robust, expertly pulled. Yeah, so the guy behind the counter is wearing a trucker hat. Just because you look like a douche doesn't mean you can't make the best espresso or macchiato outside of Italy. (For fancypants, they have a location at the over-hyped and underwhelming Chelsea Market on the west side.)

But you know how it goes: Looks are always deceiving. That's the great thing about a food safari. You hit up the obvious places, and sure they're good, but sometimes it's the unpolished joints that are the true marvels. Like the Halal Guys food cart.


The "halal cart," as it's most often called, is no secret. They're a street food phenomenon, and street food itself is the hottest thing among foodies since Giada and Nigella rubbed their prosciutto-wrapped melons against one another. (Ok, that never happened, but that's how hot street food is right now.) Even in the wee hours of the night, people queue up to get a chicken and rice platter off of what's most often called a roach coach, and it's cool to do it. Even when sober.


And it's out of this world. It doesn't look like much, but the chicken is perfect. The almost biryani-like pile of basmati rice is beautifully seasoned. The hot sauce packs a serious punch. And the particular Halal Guy I dealt with is awesome. He spoke Spanish to the people in front of me. And when I told him how his cart blows away the hundreds of halal takeaways in Paris, he replied to me in French.

The craziest thing is that they set up shop at 53rd and 6th (or 7th during the day, when I went) - smack dab in Midtown Manhattan, home of gaudy chain restaurants, overpriced tourist traps, and that abomination people call Times Square. Right in what I consider the worst part of New York City is some of the best, cheapest food.

Cheap became thematic on this little jaunt. People say New York is expensive... because it is. But look around, and there are deals to be found.


Like $3 drinks at Lit Lounge. For that price, you can afford to while the hours away, boozing it up while you wait for your turn to eat at a Lower East Side hotspot like Ippudo.


The Akamaru Modern ramen (with a supplement of kakuni pork belly) at Ippudo is far and away the best ramen I've had outside of Japan. Places in the San Francisco Bay Area try pretty hard to make good ramen, and they do pack the house. And Paris is growing its own respectable ramen house scene around Rue Sainte-Anne. But none of the joints in those places come remotely close to what Japan's "Ramen King" Shigemi Kawahara has going in NYC. After a bowl of Akamaru and a side of Hirata buns, I didn't even want to bother with nearby Momofuku Noodle Bar for a comparison.

The next day was decidedly more downscale. I met up with a friend (and fellow San Francisco transplant) for lunch. His venue of choice: Wogie's. For cheesesteaks.

What? Cheesesteaks in New York? Why not just hop the train to Philly?

I looked them up and read repeatedly that Wogie's does cheesesteaks even better than the standard-bearers in the City of Brotherly Love. I confirmed with my friend. "See you at Wogie's."

I made my way to the West Village and we hooked up at the cheesesteak joint in question. One of the party recommended I have mine with Cheez Wiz in lieu of real cheese. There were two ways of handling this. Being the Parisian cheese snob that I have become and turning my nose up at the concept... Or being who I truly am and say, "Oh, what the hell? I can't get this crap at home!"

And so we had cheesesteaks with cheeselike-substance on them.


It was the most horrific thing I'd eaten in some time. Mind you, I was just in the south, and this thing still seemed horrific in comparison. But it scratched a certain itch that I didn't even know I had. Sometimes you just have to try disgusting, taboo things to find out that they're not that bad. And in fact, pleasurable. Especially with a gigantic beverage with free-refills to wash the ooze down your gullet.

After lunch I made my way downtown, walking off my who-knows-what-was-in-it lunch through Battery Park, Ground Zero, and southern Manhattan in general. I happened upon a bookstore and decided to pick up a little something. Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc at Home (see reference to Ad Hoc above) had come out ahead of schedule. Early in our relationship, Alannah told me the only way she'd forsake me is to eat at Ad Hoc. I got her the book, so I'm guessing now she'll never go astray.

I made my way back to the East Village, making a pitstop across from Tompkins Square Park to pick up a famous chocolate egg cream from Ray's Candy Shop.


Nasty.

I'd tweeted about how underwhelmed I was by this New York classic, first off being truthful but secondly hoping to get a rise out of my New-York-is-the-center-of-the-universe-and-how-dare-you-question-anything-from-here friends. But instead, I got a whole lot of agreement.

The going theory, as far as I'm concerned, is that the egg cream is something tourists order, and once we leave the place, the shopkeepers laugh mightily.

By the way, an egg cream contains neither egg nor cream. Discuss.



I rounded out my last daylight hours in New York with a true American classic: The Budweiser tall-boy.

After all, everyone should drink at least 32 oz. of water by the end of the day...


Before catching my red-eye flight back to Paris, we had a quick dinner at Cafe Orlin. Burgers, booze, and a bafflingly bubbly blonde server were my last taste of New York City.

I came back home exhausted. Bloated. A few pounds heavier. And in serious need of sleep. But I also came back with a mission: To get back to New York. And eat it. All of it.

KFC vs. Local & Organic: An Epic Tale

It's been a long, hot, sultry summer. Have you noticed our absence?

In true Parisian style, we've blown off just about everything for the summer: A couple of weeks in the States, entertaining (and sometimes getting busy in the kitchen with) friends from abroad, and generally doing anything to avoid being in our steampit of an apartment. Generally, this has meant hanging out on the various terrasses of Paris and getting slurry. And frankly, if there's anything we like better than cooking, taking photos, and writing about it, it's actually being out and about in Paris. Drinking.

But with the weather cooling down in time for la rentrée, we've ventured back into the kitchen more often, greasing the pans and flouring the crevices of passion. I've been compiling a sort of "Greatest Hits" of the summer for anyone interested, but in the meantime, something else has brought us out of our summer stupor: The KFC Double-Down.

Of course, I loathe KFC for their animal husbandry practices (or lack thereof) and the fact that their food, in general, sucks. But I have this morbid curiosity about various manufactured foods, and the last one to enchant me with its siren song was KFC's disgusting Famous Bowl. From first sight, I had to know what a sandwich using two pieces of fried chicken breast in lieu of bread was all about.

Fortunately for my stomach, intestines, and any other orifices affected by potential food poisoning, KFC in France has an extremely limited menu. No Famous/Toilet Bowl. And most certainly no Double Down. So after numerous comments back and forth on Facebook and Twitter – and some egging on from Alannah – I vowed I would make a "premium" version of the Double Down so we can try for ourselves.


Behold, the TKFC Double Down.

Two fried chicken breasts done in the style of Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc fried chicken (from scratch, cribbing the recipe from the spooge-worthy Inuyaki.com), and in between it some slices of cheese and bacon.

Of course, these aren't just any ingredients. In order to really one-up KFC, we went as from-scratch as possible.

The chicken is farm-raised, just slaughtered, and lovingly prepared by our local butcher. Yesterday morning, it still had a head, feet, and feathers.

The bacon is one of the same butcher's specialties: Poitrine fumée (smoked pork belly), sliced to order. The butcher's from the Auvergne region – famous for its hogs – so he does not mess around when it comes to his cured meats, most of which are the product of his mad in-house charcuterie skills.

The cheese is Gruyère from the fromagerie up the street: One of the many master cheesemongers who ages and then selects cheeses for you on-site based on when you'll consume it (an appreciated art in France); One of the few who is a woman.

We even went a little crazy sourcing the ingredients for the fried chicken coating.

Buttermilk is hard to come by in France, so Alannah has devised a trick where she mixes fromage blanc ("white cheese," but it's actually just a denser yogurt) with milk. Naturally, we go with the organic stuff that's micro-filtered as opposed to heat pasteurized, but sometimes we go raw if we know we're going to use a litre within a few days.

For the dry part of the coating, we went as "from scratch" as we could, as well. While we don't mill our own flour, I did mill our own garlic powder (half a dried clove in a pestel and mortar), and the seasonings were as locally sourced as possible. (Impossible for the cayenne pepper, but hell...) Even the herbs and lemon for the brine were purchased at the local green market.

Having gone so far as to skip KFC and the supermarket, we decided to go a bit upmarket with classic KFC sides, as well.


Mashed potatoes became Alannah's spectacularly creamy, thick mashed red potatoes, topped with bacon gravy. Corn on the cob became corn charred on the cob, then shucked and tossed with butter and parsley. And - making a pitstop at Shakey's - Mojo potatoes became our Belgian-style double fried Mojo potatoes with grated parmesean and olive oil.

And the end result of all this?

It tasted like upscale fast food. Really good, really upscale fast food. As in I'd do body shots of the gravy off of Alannah. And she's already told me the only thing she'd forsake me for is Ad Hoc – and by golly, that's Ad Hoc fried chicken in front of her.

But I didn't cream my jeans over the concept.

In fact, I'm not sure what the big deal with KFC's Double Down is. The marketing ploy is that it's a bacon-cheese sandwich using fried chicken breasts for a bun. In reality, the combo you're looking at is a rebranded chicken Cordon Bleu. Think about it: A Cordon Bleu is a fried chicken breast stuffed with ham and cheese, often served at banquets and school cafeterias. The Double Down just doubles the amount of chicken.

So really, we made chicken Cordon Bleu with excellent ingredients tonight. Ho freakin' hum.

--

But wait, there's more!

When we were assembling the ingredient list yesterday (we started a day before, because of the overnight brining process for the chicken), Alannah was a bit bummed by the bill of materials. She was under the impression that the Double Down was a burger. As in chicken-burger patty-chicken with some bacon and cheese in there.

So when we were at the butcher shop, we had our man in the bloody apron grind up some of his finest beef for us.

And like every good mad science project, we created a backup in case the first one failed... "Screw the Double Down," she said. "I wanna go All-In."

Mixed gambling metaphors aside, it was a perfect name.


Two TKFC chicken breasts, a 250 gram (over half pound) burger patty cooked medium, bacon, gruyère cheese, caramelized onions, deep fried hash browns, and bacon/burger-dripping gravy.

The heart-topped picks not only keep this monstrosity together, but remind you exactly what you risk damaging while you eat it.

I suggested topping it with a fried egg, but Alannah told me to stay realistic. There's only so much one can fit in his/her mouth in one go, after all.

And while I can't say I will ever make or eat such a thing again, it is now quite evident that I married the perfect woman. One who is still shapely, but can concoct a "sandwich" that puts the McGangBang to shame.

--

Unfortunately, we were too busy deep frying, frying, and roasting to concoct a KFC-style dessert. And to be frank, I don't care to make a fancy version of the Colonel's Parfait.

Instead, we rolled down to the gelato shop in our neighborhood, named in 2007 as Maître Glacier (Master Ice Cream Maker) of Europe, for some of their fabulous on-site creations. I was very happy with my cup of lemon-basil gelato, and Alannah with her green tea gelato, all made and sold on the very same street as the butcher, green market, and cheesemonger.

How's that for supporting independent, local merchants who source their goods from as near as possible?

--

Unfortunately, in bending the Colonel over and making his redneck ass our bitch like this, we spent a lot of time and money, and didn't exactly stroll to the gelateria all light as a feather.

The ingredient cost for one "Double Down," one "All-In," three sides, a bottle of wine, and dessert for two nearly came out to 30€ ($43). The time to prepare it from beginning to end: 17 hours. NOTE: There's a substantial amount of leftovers. Except the wine.

A Double Down combo meal at KFC costs around $7 (plus tax) and probably takes around six minutes.

Neither is particularly good for you.

But our version contained no hormones, came from animals raised in open-air farms (and we don't accept farms that are big dirt lots as open-air, there's a whole rating system for it), had as few industrial ingredients as we could get away with (no luck on the peppercorns, salt, and milk, I'm sure) and nothing genetically modified.

We got the pleasure of talking to our local purveyors, who are always more friendly than anyone at a supermarket or fast food restaurant.

We enjoyed beer and wine while waiting for the brine to cool.

We enjoyed each other's company while the chicken was brining overnight.

In every way, despite the much higher amount of time and money required, our "Double Down" (and "All In") were infinitely more pleasurable than the experience you get from KFC.

And what point is it going after foods on the extreme ends of the spectrum – be they the biggest, the fattiest, the greasiest, or whatever – if there is no pleasure?

Drunken Paella

It wasn't quite a lost weekend, but definitely a hazy one. We wore ourselves out pretty nicely, but now we've almost recovered enough to get back to the business of exposing ourselves.

The mercury was pushing 30ºC in Paris and the air heavy and balmy, with plenty of sunshine. It's as though someone forgot to remind Mother Nature that the weather here is supposed to suck hard, then unexpectedly snowball you. Such weather calls for just one thing: Hot, sweaty sessions of day-drinking.

Before starting our Sunday session of boozin' in the sun, I prepped everything I could to make a proper paella mixta after coming home later. After lubing up with a beer and bloody Mary first, of course.


If you've done the necessary prep work (the bulk of which is just measuring out your ingredients and having them at hand), making paella is easy. Even hammered. Hell, even without a proper paellera (paella pan).

Take a wide, shallow pan, heat it up, and throw in a few tablespoons of olive oil. Throw in a bunch of whole prawns (or crayfish or langoustines... something with beady eyes, meaty tail, and tasty guts) and heat until nice and pink/red. Set aside.

Now throw chunks of Spanish chorizo into the pan (Mexican chorizo isn't quite the same, but you can do that if you like) and brown. Set aside.

With the pan still going, throw in a mixture of very finely chopped onion, a crushed garlic clove, and if you feel like it, a small tomato that's been beaten to a pulp. (Don't bother with the canned stuff.) Maybe a dash of sweet paprika. Once they're nicely sweaty and soft, throw in two cups of rice and sauté in the mixture until browned.

Pour in 3 cups of seafood broth. Or in my case, I had only made 2 cups of broth (basically by boiling and straining the carcasses of around 2 dozen previously cooked and eaten shrimp) and added an additional cup of water. The homemade shrimp broth is awesome and simple. If you can't swing it, use chicken or vegetable broth.

Get the heat up nice and high until the broth starts to boil, then turn it down to a medium low and let it sit for about 15 minutes. At that point, most of the water should be gone and your rice should be al dente.

Grab a healthy pinch of saffron (the real shit, not that turmeric-infused powdered orange trash) and mix it into the rice. I prefer to grind mine down with a pestel and mortar first for even distribution and to get as much scent and color out of it. Re-introduce the sausage to the pan and mix in as well. Press your filter-feeders into the rice and make it look pretty.

Crank up the heat under your pan to high, in order to form a light crust at the bottom. You'll know it's good to go when you smell a slight burning scent. It should take less than a minute.

That's it! Some people like to finish it in the oven, which I did to get a little extra "roast" on the prawns from the broiler. It gives them that just-barbecued-on-the-beach feel.

Trust me, you can easily do all of the above while completely tanked. In fact, it will come out even better when you're in a less inhibited state of mind.

Case in point: After drinking all day, I got to the step that requires a "healthy pinch" of saffron. Apparently, after numerous cocktails and beers, you don't think twice about dumping half a container of real Iranian saffron into your paella. Since it's not polite to discuss finances, let's just say that good saffron makes uncut Colombian cocaine look like a bargain.

While you may want to kick your own ass when you sober up and realize you just used up half a college tuition's worth of spice, the memory of saffron flavor exploding all over your tastebuds and olfactory senses makes it forgivable.

Hell, even if you don't follow our drunken lead, a good paella is still easy and surprisingly simple. And you can make it with just about anything - chicken, rabbit, mussels, clams... Even vegetarian if you swing that way.

Of course, there's never too much of a good thing. Keep your buzz going by enjoying your paella with a nice old-vine Garnacha from Spain. It's the hotness as wine goes right now, and dirt cheap to boot.