Best of 2009
two slices of bread. That’s still the way
burgers are served at Louis’ Lunch: on
toasted white bread with tomato. You can
get onions and cheese if you want, but no
ketchup or mustard. Ever.
There are so many good burgers out
there today, I wouldn’t even know where
to begin to narrow them down for you.
Oh, all right. Have you tried Burgers,
Shakes & Fries in Greenwich, Conn.?
Baked Alaska
Whenever you start looking into food
history, the restaurant Delmonico’s
comes up a lot. It was New York’s
grandest restaurant during the 1800s,
and claims responsibility for inventing
many dishes: the Delmonico steak, eggs
Benedict and—you guessed it—baked
Alaska. The restaurant’s version of
history is that the dish was created to
commemorate the purchase of the Alaskan territory. ( You remember Seward’s
Folly, right?) I like that version. After
all, baked Alaska is spongecake covered
with ice cream, topped with meringue
and browned under a broiler. Sometimes
the meringue looks as if it’s swimming; it
always looks as if it’s cold.
And that brings us to another version
of history, which says that, in the 1850s,
the French learned from a visiting Chinese chef how to “cook” ice cream, and
then toyed with using meringue instead
of the pastry shell the chef had showed
them. They named the new creation
omelette norvegienne, or Norwegian
omelet, according to An A–Z of Food and
Drink by John Ayto, because of “its arctic
appearance and cold centre.”
Daniel Boulud’s new DBGB Kitchen
and Bar ( danielnyc.com)in Manhattan’s
East Village features omelette norvegienne on the menu, and though people
have been confused at first about how
to attack the darn thing, once they get
Best of 2009 their heads (and forks) around it, they
are finding much pleasure indeed.
Philly Cheese Steak
Philadelphia, sure. But where in Philadelphia? I’m going to get in trouble for
saying definitively (note my caveat again,
please), but one restaurant shouts its
version the loudest: Pat’s King of Steaks
( patskingofsteaks.com). (Its main competition, Geno’s, is a close second.) Legend
has it that one day in 1933, Pat Olivieri,
owner of a hot dog stand, didn’t feel like
having hot dogs for lunch. So, he got
some chopped meat, cooked it on his
griddle, then put it in one of his hot dog
buns. He added some onions. (Geno’s is
said to have added the cheese.) A regular
tried it and convinced Pat to sell his
steak sandwiches instead of hot dogs.
People still love Pat’s King of Steaks,
and they still love Geno’s ( genosteaks.com)
—and a gazillion other places in Philly
Best of 2009
Molten Chocolate Cake
If ever we’ve witnessed a modern classic in the
making, it’s Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Warm,
Soft Chocolate Cake. (That’s its official name,
given in his book with Mark Bittman, Cooking
at Home with a Four-Star Chef.) The individual
chocolate cake—usually served inverted from a
muffin tin—is baked until the outside is cooked
through and the center is oozing liquid. It has
been copied on menus everywhere from Chili’s
Grill & Bar to Chile, South America.
Turns out, one day in the 1980s, Vongerich-ten checked his cakes too early. He cut into
one and—voilà!—an American classic, the new
Boston cream pie. If you haven’t already, go to
the source at Jean-Georges ( jean-georges.com),
the chef’s flagship restaurant in New York. Who
knows when you’ll get another chance to say
you tasted a classic at its true birthplace?
