He had reviewed some of the restaurants that I previously opened/ran. He was generally a nice enough, but standoffish guy. I’ll never forget the feeling of realizing he was seated. One of those moments that you train for, and now it was game time . There are all sorts of tricks that people employ, cheat sheets with reviewers photos (there is one unfortunate photo of him that everyone has, it must be on every restaurant office wall in NYC), serving extra dishes to the tables around him (so that he got a look at things he didn’t order but should have), and calling friends to fill an empty dining room when he sat down for example. It was always an awkward interaction, he knew I knew, I knew he knew I knew. I generally think Sifton was a better writer, I appreciate that he reviewed restaurants that weren’t your typical white male chef joints, and I’m happy to see Tejal still doing well out west. I’m particularly excited to read some Mellissa Clark reviews in the meantime.
It was an amazing experience, it made me who I am. I cooked through university, and then studied wine to become a sommelier after graduation. After a few years in a Relais and Chateau hotel in Colorado I moved to NYC for 10 years. I’ve since moved on to marketing in SaaS. I firmly believe that it gave me a big leg up in understanding consumer behavior and a unique ability to empathize with the end user. It was definitely stressful, but I wouldn’t trade that experience for the world. That being said, my quality of life has improved beyond measure since changing careers.
Absolutely! Recommending restaurants may be the unofficial New Yorker pastime. As a best practice, I recommend checking some of the Eater.com lists before visiting any town. They don't always hit the mark, however you can get a pretty good feel for the restaurant scene by what they are reviewing. I'll put a mix of genres below. But I'm more than happy to answer any others.
Ugly Baby (Carrol Gardens) is my favorite Thai restaurant outside of Thailand. The Chef/Owner also has a restaurant in Sylva, NC for those in WNC.
Popina (Columbia Street Waterfront) is a cozy Italian spot, with a stellar wine list.
Claud (EV) is casual fine dining that serves all the good stuff. They're two old Momofuku vets that serve a lot of the stuff chefs like to eat.
Lilia and Misi (Williamsburg) are always excellent for pasta.
Lucali (Carrol Gardens) is the best pizza in the city. Razza (Jersey City) is the best pizza outside of a borough. Frank Pepe (New Haven) is the best outside the city.
Rossi Rosticceria Deli (Poughkeepsie) is an amazing deli, up by the CIA.
Glacken's Bar and Grill (Bronx) is absolutely the best bar to stop in before a Yankee game.
Minca (EV) for Tsukemen Ramen
Paisanos (Carrol Gardens) is my favorite Italian Butcher.
My favorite restaurant in NYC at the moment is Frenchette (Tribeca).
Bars in no particular order Dante (everything campari, get a Garibaldi), Attaboy (anything is great), Dead Rabbit(Irish Coffee is spectacular), Four Horsemen (natural wine).
Amazing! Thank you for the deatiled answer, I've added all these to my Google Maps list for when I'm back in the city. I've walked by Minca a bunch of times, next time I'm going in for sure.
There are plenty, but my favorite celebrity encounter had to be this one. Dan and Eugene Levy dining with Paul Shaffer, they were the last ones in the restaurant, and paid with a gift card signed “Love Dave.” It was mid winter, in Gramercy and they thoroughly enjoyed their evening, including wine. While I was fetching their coats, they were singing show tunes outside of the coat check (restaurant management isn’t always glamorous). Apparently when I got Paul’s jacket his yellow beanie fell out. I remember this because while I was getting Eugene’s jacket, Paul stormed through the curtain yelling “Where is my hat?! It was a yellow hat! It was a very good hat! Find my hat you son of a bitch!” There were a couple of times in my career when in the moment I thought “Given all the possible outcomes for my life, how did I end up in this one?” This was one of them. In the end, I found his hat and they were off into a cold and rainy winter night. They were all absolutely lovely guests. Funny, charming, and they tipped the staff well.
Thank you! I've never fancied myself a good writer; I feel like, on a personal level, I can identify the beauty in things. However, I tend to have a hard time putting it to paper in a way that I feel conveys how I feel. But I'm working on it!
It's nice to be able to convey your feelings to your audience through writing, but great writers go further.
The world needs great writers, because they are travel guides. They guide us to visit places we couldn't reach alone. Worthwhile places that would go unvisited and unknown without our guides.
That's why "Kitchen Confidential" is such an amazing book. It's a travelogue.
When Gay Talese wrote "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold", he didn't write a profile of Frank. He was inviting us to go see Frank with him, to sign up to the great adventure of finding out who Frank really was.
If you would like to be one of our guides, I thank you.
Study the book "On Writing", by Stephen King, and begin inviting us to your travels!
Right when FiveThirtyEight launched, they did a brilliant piece of content strategy in that one of their very first pieces was a quest to find the best burrito in America [1]. Anna Maria Barry-Jester self reportedly "traveled more than 20,000 miles around the United States and eaten 84 burritos in two rounds (to say nothing of the dozens of extracurricular burritos I polished off)."
I was glued to the series as it plodded on week by week and it still sticks in my mind today as simultaneously the best and worst job in the world I could imagine. Part of what made it so enthralling to read was this grand act of human perversity that a single woman would endure such a gruelling quest for such a trivial question and she made you feel that perversity along every step of the journey.
> Part of what made it so enthralling to read was this grand act of human perversity that a single woman would endure
This is part of why I enjoy watching a couple of RuneScape YouTubers. The sheer time commitments they put in for seemingly minor gains is like gore but for amputating off their own time effort & energy and throwing it into a bottomless maw.
Man runescape was my life for a long while. Its still the only MMO I know which actually has unique and rewarding quests, activities, and mini games. There's something like 150 quests, most with completely new NPCs, new map environments/interactions, item, skill and map unlocks. For example to gain access to the best sword in the game (at the time) you had to do a quest where you were travelled to a monkey island where you had to sneak around, be creative, defeat a bunch of apes and the boss. And it was actually fairly difficult, you had to prepare for the quest and dying meant losing almost all your items. Nothing like go here kill 20 foxes, come back.
I used to joke that if you go to the movies or restaurants etc. you could open pass-through tax LLCs (which are “disregarded entities” at the IRS) and write those off as a business expense, as long as you had a website as a food or movie critic / reviewer, and even had a way to subscribe for some paid memberships (eg Patreon) and also advertising with affiliate sales (eg Amazon) for recipes, movie rentals etc.
You know, running a business kind of like that guy who writes about inside Apple news very rarely but effectively (what’s his name, Gruber? Daring Fireball?)
The business doesn’t actually have to make money in the first few years, as long as you are making bona-fide attempts to grow it. No one requires you to watch every movie or eat every burrito. But who is the government to say you’re not trying to run a business as a food or movie critic?
Much of your personal lifestyle could then be deducted as a business expense on your schedule C, being “necessary and ordinary” for your various LLCs. Perhaps even your travel expenses if you are a travel blogger staying at hotels etc.
But maybe it’s not a joke. Any lawyers or accountants on HN see any problems with this? Again, I’m talking about doing the minimum to make this an actual business — it may become profitable through the monetization but even if it isn’t, that’s 30% additional you’re saving on what would otherwise be your personal entertainment expenses!
The main issue I see is that if your LLC has debts that it defaults on, a court might see you as “commingling” personal funds with the business, even if you keep the accounts separate, and pierce the corporate veil. But, this is a separate issue of limiting liability for debts, which your LLC doesn’t have to even take on. Even if that were the case, from a tax point of view the question is only whether the expenses are necessary for the business, and ordinary, both of which they are.
As I understand it, you can only write off a business's expenses against that business's income, not income from other sources. For example, if you have a W2 income source and you have this business generating losses, you can't take your business losses or write offs and apply them to your W2 income, so you wouldn't really be saving any money as there would be no revenue to write off expenses against. You would need to get the business to generate revenue for this to be a viable idea.
The only case that I am aware of where you can take business losses / write offs and apply them to other income sources is in real estate, and only under very specific circumstances. This is one reason why high income individuals love things like short term rentals which is one circumstance in which this is possible.
I am not a lawyer or accountant, but you can fund your business with a loan from your person, and then if the business fails, you can write off the loan against your personal capital gains, and up to $3000 of regular income per year. This is not financial or legal advice.
I do not believe this is correct. If your business is a "pass through" style of entity, you can indeed deduct losses from other income (up to a point and with various limitations.) Doing too much of this can definitely trigger an audit.
Thanks for this! I didn’t know the guidelines were published. This is like FINCEN’s 2013 and 2019 guidances for cryptocurrencies.
“The limit on not-for-profit losses… does not apply to corporations except S Corporations”.
It doesn’t seem to mention LLCs. These are “disregarded entities” at the IRS level, so what does that mean? For tax purposes they are treated as sole proprietorships?
It seems to me there is some “minimum” level of bona-fide for-profit business that might be helpful to reach if you are a prolific traveler or movie goer or eat out in restaurants a lot. That’s my main point. A little bit of effort and you can write off thousands of dollars a year in business expenses while you also stand a chance of making money on top of it.
Business expenses must be ordinary and necessary to be deductible. A roofer would have a hard time justifying deducting a boat under the rule but a commercial fisherman wouldn’t have trouble.
Entertainment expenses are no longer deductible with recent tax law changes with few exceptions. It would be difficult today to get a CPA to sign-off off on a lot of what may have passed previously. A decent write-up can be found here - https://www.thetaxadviser.com/issues/2023/nov/navigating-aro...
* However, a taxpayer’s trade or business must be considered. For example, a theatrical performance, which would normally be considered an entertainment expense, would not be an entertainment expense for a professional theater critic attending the performance in a professional capacity (Regs. Secs. 1.274-11(b)(1)(iii), 1.274-12(a)(1), and 1.274-12(b)(3)).*
I had a small "hobbyist" software business once upon a time. I made a point of only deducting expenses that seemed reasonable and not red flags for a software business, and only deducted up to just below my revenue (about $7K/year in the 90s). That seemed safe if maybe somewhat conservative.
Doesn't work for a lot of things (including reputable restaurant reviews) but bloggers also have the opportunity to get free stuff if they get noteworthy enough. Yes, it's a source of bias but so long as everything isn't how this thing they were given for free is fantastic, I don't have a problem with it. I've reviewed books (and a few other things) sent to me and I've given some pretty negative reviews as well as positive ones.
> Much of your personal lifestyle could then be deducted as a business expense on your schedule C, being “necessary and ordinary” for your various LLCs
That's not how it works. You can maybe deduct the price of your movie ticket and mileage to drive to the theater. Anything beyond that and the IRS will be up your ass in an instant.
Well that’s what I’m talking about. The price of all your movie tickets and mileage to drive to the theater, perhaps even your netflix subscription etc.
Or if you’re a travel blogger, the plane rides and hotel stays become a business expense if you’re doing it for profit as part of an LLC. You have to have an actual business plan with memberships, advertisements, etc.
You could be making money with it. But even if you aren’t yet, as long as you’re trying, the business expenses made by an LLC that you are investing into, are deductible on your personal Schedule C! Are they not?
Well, as many on HN know, lots of startups fail. Investors write that off as a capital loss.
Maybe one day, long term capital gains tax will be on the same level as income tax, and then people will stop trying to use things like 83b elections.
But regardless of that, if you invest into your own startup by buying equity or lending it money, that is NOT currently a taxable event. And then that LLC’s losses are passed through to your Schedule C.
It may be strange to have you buying shares in your company if you already have 100% of shares. But if you do a Limited Partnership with a few people, then all of you could be competing to buy shares in it and dilute the others. Those are non-taxable events. And the members of the LLC are also its staff, who go watch movies and review them. Then the tax deductions are claimed on Schedule K instead, by each partner.
I am only talking about a bona fide business. You don’t have to go all-out for each business you start, working 40 hours a week for each one. You could even go to the movies and restaurants once a week and save 30% by turning it into an actual business. Can’t you?
Do travel bloggers deduct their travel expenses as necessary and ordinary?
Barry-Jester kept her cool on her burrito quest, where Jim Haggerty drove his RV into the depths of madness searching for our greatest barbecue, in Porkin' Across America.
You'd love the brilliant parody from The Onion "Porkin' Across America" on his journey to taste pork across the country and destroy his life on camera.
If a local or federal government attempted to do this type of survey, they would end up having to pay McKinsey seven figures just to plan the whole operation..
Hmm. If one spends just 60 seconds on each, it would be a 6 month full time gig. Barely enough time to look at info/photos on Google maps and make a few quick judgement calls. Of course one could maybe reduce this of them by setting a threshold on their rating, maybe also number of reviews added last 12 months, etc.
But yeah - lots of labor to actually evaluate thousands of anything. Months possibly.
The following year The New Yorker wrote a profile of him which features some of the backstory. "Is it possible to say with a straight face that Señor Frog’s is a better restaurant than Per Se? Can you get those words out without collapsing under your own idiocy?"
This is also why I don't like eating out much anymore. Every restaurant just leans so hard on heavily salting fats to make their food taste good.
I'd rather cook myself now where I can actually taste flavors and feel good, rather than just having the primal "mmm good food" button bashed in my lizard brain and feeling like garbage afterwards.
When I was in college in Massachusetts in the mid 1990s, there was a buffet-style Greek restaurant named "Brothers". (Somewhere near Peabody I think.)
The Greek woman behind the counter made me (well, guilted me into) getting some vegetables with my order. They weren't too salty or fatty; they were just good for me (and tasty).
It was like being fed by one's own mom. It was awesome.
This comments and many of the others on this thread strike me as written by people who have either never worked at a real restaurant and/or tend to order bland and fatty food (eat like a toddler) by default when they patronize restaurants.
This is fine but really not reflective of good restaurants and the majority of the food they serve.
What do you mean? Even in the linked article, the food critics consistently pointed out that restaurants make food very rich so that it's more appealing. And how they suffered from eating so much rich food.
Risotto in Italian cooking definitely uses buttoer. But, I already know what your reply will be: "Oh, that's Northern Italian cooking -- it doesn't count." Most normie readers don't care about that distinction.
Japanese izakayas frequently sell grilled items wrapped in foil that is swimming in butter. Again, I assume you will reply: "Oh, but that's not traditional Japanese cooking -- it doesn't count." Again, most normie readers don't care about that distinction.
Eating in restaurants is terrible for your health. Here's a study that finds a 49% increase in all-cause mortality risk for those who frequently eat meals prepared away from home. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33775622/
I have stopped eating out completely as I always feel gross and tired after a restaurant meal vs energized after home-cooked food. I think it's mostly due to cheap oils in quantities you would never dream of using at home.
Does that control at all for type of restaurant, both by market segment (e.g., fast food vs. sit-down fine dining), and by cuisine (e.g., "American" or "steakhouse" vs. various ethnic or vegetarian menus)?
Because I could see a lot of variability amongst those. And without controls, the study will default strongly toward fast-food, doughnut shops, pizza, burger / franks stands, and the like. Several of which have pronounced associated negatives (see, e.g., Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me (2004).
I find some restaurant meals strike me as far better than others. Taquerias, Thai and Vietnamese food, better vegetarian restaurants (say, Greens in SF), for example. Specific choices such as sides, beverages, alcohol, and whether or not the restaurant permits smoking (some parts of the US still allow this barbaric practice) would likely be huge confounding factors.
I'm not discounting home-cooked meals, and generally far prefer them myself. But overly-broad, undifferentiated analysis is ... not especially illuminating.
There may be associated negatives, but Super Size Me is a terrible piece of evidence of it. Spurlock not only intentionally ate far more than any normal person would, but also declined to mention in the movie his copious alcohol consumption. (Not that I expect someone to admit to their alcoholism in a movie, but when you're making a polemic about how what you consume is bad for you, not mentioning that you're drinking a lot of alcohol during the same period isn't great!)
TBH I was mentioning SSM more as an exemplar than as hard science, and there are plenty of other indicia (rigorous or anecdotal) which suggest a consistent fast-food diet is other than health-inducing. I'm not aware of Spurlock's alcohol consumption during the trial, and there is the fact that he reversed much of the damage at the time following his partner's dietary advice (she is a dietician AFAIR).
If you've any links or references to share I'd be interested.
I don't unless I'm traveling but eating a couple modestly portioned meals a week which, yes, you can do in the US, is healthy enough as part of a basket of options. And often better than whipping up a lot of things you can make with 15 minutes of effort from the grocery store.
I also suspect that a lot of the people who are eating out in restaurants all the time are on planes a lot and at late business dinners, many of which are determined by "safe" customer choices like steakhouses. (Though, without further info, I also suspect to it defaulting to fast food on an absolute basis.)
Also: truckers (largest single occupational category in many classifications), cabbies, trades workers, etc., etc. If you're in a captive market, whether that's airports, convention centres, motorway service areas, lunch wagon, lunchroom, etc., your choices are going to be limited.
On business travellers vs. truckers, I'm finding ~ 3.5 million truckers in the US, who all but certainly eat on the road at least one meal per day (local) and more likely 3+ (long-haul). <https://schneiderjobs.com/blog/truck-drivers-in-usa>.
For corporate travel: there are ~400 million long-distance business trips annually <https://www.trondent.com/business-travel-statistics/>. Trips-per-person is harder to find, though one source gives 6.8 trips/year, which gives 60 million travellers/year. So that's more than truckers ... but it's a lot fewer trips (and meals). I'd put money on there being more trucker meals-out than business travelers'.
Fleshing out further: we really want trips per year, for each classification. I'm going to assume truckers are on the road 250 days/year (roughly 5 days/week) ... we'll do variance after in case I'm wrong. That gives 3.5 million * 250 or 875 million trucker trips/year, more than double the business air travel number. We could cut trucker travel in half and still be somewhat above the business air travel trips figure.
Whatever the exact number, it's probably safe to say that directionally way more "meals out" are grabbing some variety of fast food than some variety of upscale/fine dining. Not all that fast-ish food is unhealthy/bad but a lot is as a steady diet. Which just reinforces the point that drawing a broad brush eating out will kill you doesn't have a lot of support. Eating at a nice restaurant once a month is almost certainly not a killer.
The truckers vs. business travellers comparison was mostly me just trying to suss out what the relative magnitudes of those were. Information's sketchy, but inferences can be drawn. That was independent of your points, which are valid and insightful.
And yeah, the idea that 1) most "restaurant" meals are fast-food franchises and 2) that's not especially healthy on a consistent basis, as well as that 3) specific choices about menu items can have a major impact are ... fairly self-evident. Pity the study doesn't seem to address those, at least based on the unembargoed bits at the shared link above.
There are certain foods that you can not reasonably make at home or are just extremely fussy and a huge waste of time to make at home.
You won't achieve wok hei on your stove, your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods, restaurants in your area will get priority from suppliers over what you find in the grocery store and even most farmers markets, and that's just talking about average restaurants. You start getting into fine dining or a Michelin experience with teams of people preparing the food and it's an entirely different level of impossibility to make at home.
Sure eating a fast food burger and fries everyday will be heavy, but even something that simple can be difficult to match compared to the restaurant. Grinding your own meat, double frying the fries, finding/making decent buns, etc.
Food is one of the few activities that can be very enjoyable daily. It's usually cost saving to cook yourself and there's a lot of good stuff you can make at home. But you're missing out on some enjoyable experiences by completely avoiding professionals using professional equipment with access to better ingredients.
Paradoxically, it's the fast food staples that are most difficult to do at home – because you need a fryer. Haute cuisine is no problem making at home, because fine dining is not based on using fryers. It can't be made with restaurant speed nor quantity, but you can get the same quality at home.
My air fryer makes decent fries, using only olive oil as a fat. It did take some practice to get it right.
Are they as good as deep-fat fried? No, but they're crisp on the outside and tender on the inside.
OK, you all want to hear this, you know you do:
===============
Start preheating the air fryer to 400F.
Slice the potatoes. Drop them in a bowl of water, swish them around and drain off the water, and fill the bowl again. By now, the water should be clear. If not, do it again.
Take the fries out and dry on paper towels, as dry as you can get them.
*These steps are important; you need to wash off the surface starch, and get them dry so you're not steaming them*
Dry the bowl, and put in some olive oil, with seasonings (salt, pepper, garlic salt, etc.)
Put the fries back in the bowl and get them all oily. Put them in the fryer. The basket should be hot enough that they make a sizzling sound.
Every 5 minutes, toss the fries. You can either get compulsive and turn each one individually, or just pour them in a bowl and shake it, or shake the fryer basket (if that doesn't cause it to separate, as it does mine). Put them back in the fryer.
Check periodically that they're as brown as you want them.
And it's probably not reasonable that the average person who gets McDonalds fries (which are indeed good and better than most, if not all, of the "fast casual" joints) will do those things. Not that frozen supermarket fries in a deep fryer are an especially heavy lift and they're mostly good enough (with reasonably fresh oil) for hamburger and fries.
McDonalds fries can be somewhat achieved by adding beef flavor (authentic or vegetarian sub) to the fries. It’s like the easiest hack to better homemade fries, IMO.
This is simple untrue. There is many, many YouTube videos explaining how to achieve wok hei (鑊氣) at home with a non-commercial gas-fired stove and a cheap wok.
I know very little about Asian cooking of any kind, but I seem to remember being told that wok hei produces enough smoke to be extremely unpleasant to have inside a residential building - to the point that even when people do want to use wok hei at home they would choose to have a setup in the garden rather than the kitchen.
If my memory/understanding is not wrong, then that adds to the idea that people won't achieve wok hei on their stove even if the reason is not wanting its side effects rather than being technically impossible.
> wok hei produces enough smoke to be extremely unpleasant to have inside a residential building
Not true. Find some videos on YouTube about wok hei. Yes, you need to choose an oil with a high smoke point (not olive oil). With a bit of practice, you can do it in your sleep and enjoy delicious stir fry.
Re: oven temps, I seem to recall seeing a link here maybe a decade ago about a guy who figured out how to get his oven hot enough for certain pizza routines by basically breaking the handle on the cleaning cycle or something.
> your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods
Get a steel or aluminum plate for your oven. The conductivity can make up for a lot of the heat differential. Yeah, a true Neapolitan at 900F is out of reach, but almost everything else is just fine.
> restaurants in your area will get priority from suppliers over what you find in the grocery store
This might be true, but from what I have seen most of the restaurants are barely even reaching SysCo/USFoods level of quality ingredients. Your local grocery store is probably just fine until you are a very good cook. At that point, you might have to start looking at more niche grocery stores.
And, if you get better than that, well, you're likely sufficiently obsessive that you will find a way.
> You start getting into fine dining or a Michelin experience with teams of people preparing the food and it's an entirely different level of impossibility to make at home.
It's more sheer technique and attention to fussy detail than teams of people. A patissier is simply WAY better than you are at making desserts, for example. They know all the tricks; they will also have all the necessary equipment.
However, yeah, Michelin restaurants are definitely next level.
For most people, it's also not just the technique (and, to a lesser degree, gear), it's also the sheer number of fresh ingredients often required. Desserts may actually lean more towards technique/time and less towards ingredients. I took a croissant class and produced at least serviceable croissants (with a chef correcting things here and there). But much as I like a hard to source fresh croissant I'm not going to routinely spend half a day making a batch.
> Get a steel or aluminum plate for your oven. The conductivity can make up for a lot of the heat differential. Yeah, a true Neapolitan at 900F is out of reach, but almost everything else is just fine.
I have a steel plate. An hour at 500F only gets it to around 400F.
Which is fine for pizza, actually, so you're right about that.
If you ask big US pizzerias (I don't know about the famous Naples ones) what temp they use, it's usually 650-750. At 900F you have zero margin for error.
You can get a standalone pizza over for a couple hundred. I've got an Ooni and it gets up to 900 in about 15 minutes. Its obviously not for indoor use but its great nonetheless. It still takes a good bit of technique to get the dough and timing right but its great to be able to cook a pizza in little more than a minute.
Have you actually pointed an IR thermometer at it? On mine (which I sold), it was 900 at the back and 600 at the front.
It was just too much trouble. A pizza steel in a kitchen oven, preheated, works very well; maybe not as good as a 700F oven but WAY easier. And 5 minutes instead of 1 minute is not a big sacrifice.
Hey, this is a great post. I have read similar complaints about Ooni pizza ovens, where it is very difficult to achieve the 900F temp and impossible in the front. Great point about 5 mins vs 1 min.
Can you share: Do you think normie home cooks can taste the difference between a 5min and 1min pizza? I am unsure. For example, is the 5min pizza much drier? (I assume no.)
You cannot get the same leoparding on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside with a 5 minute pizza. If you are talking about normies than probably no, they cannot tell the difference but if you are detail oriented you can tell the difference.
My setup at home is a 20kg pizza steel and pre-heat it in the oven at max temp for at least 1 hour. Even with all that thermal mass I find the later pizzas take longer to cook due to the steel cooling off. You just cant put enough energy into a home oven to match the energy it looses during cooking.
Another tip is when the steel is maximally heated I find the rate of cooking on the bottom of the pizza is faster than on the top so I also turn the broiler onto max after I put in the pizza so the toppings get cooked at the same rate as the bottom of the crust. A delicate balance which requires continuous feedback.
Real question: I see a lot of YouTube videos bragging about "leoparding" (spots on the bottom). Does it really matter? My point: Can you cook a pizza that tastes just as good _without_ "leoparding"?
> My setup at home is a 20kg pizza steel and pre-heat it in the oven at max temp for at least 1 hour.
Sheesh. This is my second complaint about endless YouTube videos about the "perfect pizza at home": What is the carbon footprint per pizza? (Exception: I can forgive anyone who has a magical setup that is 100% electric and has solar panels / wind turbines to supply it! Also: Hat tip to any of the crazies that are producing their own green hydrogen at home via electrolysis for their hydrogen-gas-fired pizza oven!)
All of the electricity produced in my area is hydroelectric so the carbon footprint is minimal on a per unit basis.
There are much bigger fish to fry when it comes to carbon footprint such as how often you fly and what motor vehicles you drive which use orders of magnitude more energy than a pizza.
At some level baking becomes an art form — a way to channel your efforts into a form of mastery. Does the leoparding make a difference? Probably not. It is the aesthetic and demonstration of mastery which makes leoparding desirable, much like how people desire perfectly manicured lawns and gardens.
Thanks, you know, I think the brick oven pizza IS better. Yes, you probably could taste the difference. Whether the 5 min is dryer: maybe, could be.
My decision to sell my Ooni, after about 6 tries, was because my actual results were nowhere close to a pizzeria's, and way more trouble than my kitchen oven's.
Since you can't just open the door as you can with the kitchen oven, you have much less tolerance for error. In the kitchen, you just open after 5 minutes and decide, "OK, it's done" or "One more minute."
I guess I decided the brick oven pizzeria results are just not attainable at home. The kitchen results are damn good; way better than a frozen pizza.
Great follow-up. Thanks! I never saw anyone comment like this: "you have much less tolerance for error". That is the key to understanding Ooni vs kitchen oven. Brilliant.
Have you tried Adam Ragusea's NYC pizza recipe? He gives a lot of sensible advice about how to get a great pie from a shitty kitchen oven!
Which model did you own? I haven't bought one but had been considering buying an almost unitasker because the reviews from trusted sources seemed very good. Serious Eats in particular seems to love the brand.
Yeah the taste difference is there, but you can get quite close even with a regular 500°F (~250°C) household oven and a longer time (4 with fan/grill + 4 minutes without in my case, YMMV). The basic tricks are to use a pizza stone, prepare your pizza dough a few days before (let it rest in a fridge) and do not go crazy with the toppings (less is more, too much stuff on top of pizza usually means soggy pizza - the top grill element can sometimes fix this, but not always).
It's not perfect but those Naan flatbreads available in many US markets plus a pizza stone at 500 degrees F work fine for the occasional homemade pizza if I don't want to get takeout from one of a couple of local pizzarias. One of which is more convenient and the other is brick-over/better.
I lost a ton of weight during the initial Covid lockdowns of 2020 without even trying. The only difference?
I ate home cooked meals while WFH. They weren’t even made to be specifically healthy or with the objective of losing weight.
Then I jumped ship for a company that was 100% in office. I started eating the supposedly healthy meals catered by the company for lunch. Dinner also came later because commute time.
I gained back all the weight I lost WFH and then some. The significant amount of walking and/or biking from the commute did nothing to help.
Where are you people eating that you feel gross? And what are you ordering? I promise you, eating out does not and should not need to be anything like you are describing.
5-10 years ago I would have agreed with your comment, but once I hit my 30s I started to feel gross if I ate a bunch of donuts, super duper greasy food, etc.
As the years progress more and more food makes me feel a little yucky afterwards, not just the blatantly obvious incredibly unhealthy ones.
...but you could just get a suana and use it 4-7 days a week for 20 min > 174 F, which reduces risk of all-cause mortality 66% and come out 17% ahead! :)
I suspect portion size and number of dishes with homecooked food.
In a restaurant, adding appetizers, side dishes and desserts can be done with a nod. At home, it will take a lot of work to add each dish.
But yeah, if you do apples:apples I think restaurants are paid to make things tasty - with salt, cheese, cream, butter, oil. And then with more of those.
(also, I wonder how restaurant review eating compares to supersize me)
Your side comment about saunas got me searching. It's quite amazing (though based on small populations) - I'll be giving this a try, thanks for pointing it out!
I hear this "cheap oil" thing a lot in food pseudo-science Internet writing. What exactly is "cheap oil"? And, is there any peer reviewed evidence for your claims about how you feel after eating "cheap oil"? If this effect is so drastic, then, surely, it must affect others, and would be an interesting and worthy research topic.
I guess it's generic vegetable oil as opposed to Canola oil or Peanut oil? I'd actually suspect that a mindset of buy whatever oil is cheapest from Sysco would pursue cheapness in other areas as well including kitchen supervision/skills.
I doubt it makes any appreciable difference anyway most of the time although Canola oil and Peanut oil do have a slightly higher smoke point than vegetable oil.
Since my mom moved to town, we've been eating at her place frequently. She uses a lot of recipes from the NY Times. They are heavy. Lots of butter, cheese, coconut milk, etc. We've asked my mom to cut those things in half.
She's a very good cook, and the things she improvises or makes from memory are much lighter fare. I learned to cook from her, so my meals tend to be fairly light too.
Sure, the fat and salt (and don't forget sugar) are yummy, but they'll kill you. There needs to be a compromise.
An amusing aside, Julia Child said that it's perfectly honorable to be a home cook and not a chef. Making stuff that's good but healthy is an art unto itself, especially if you're feeding vegetarians.
> She uses a lot of recipes from the NY Times. They are heavy.
There’s a good chocolate chip cookie recipe from the NYT that I’ve used several times. Not only is it heavy, I’ve had to halve the ingredients and even then it still produces enough to satiate the Cookie Monster for probably at least a month.
As a Brit, I also had to convert all of the measurements (patent absurdities like ‘cups of butter’, ‘tablespoons of chocolate’, etc.) to grams — taking account of the variation in density, of course.
Some of the measurements are aided by how the ingredients are packaged. For instance, butter is sold by the pound, in boxes of 4 "sticks" that are marked as being 1/4 cup each, which ignores the density variation but is familiar to every home cook. Chocolate comes in "squares" that are some predictable amount. In fact some recipes call for squares.
"A pint's a pound the world around" is a workable rule of thumb for a lot of things, but of course you need to know when greater precision is needed. Since I don't bake sweets very often, I measure most things by eyeball. For instance my bread recipe is based on filling a glass measuring cup nearly to the top, above where the volume markings end.
Maybe it's a reaction to spending my day designing precision measuring equipment.
But yeah, it's a hodgepodge of archaic units, and quite unnerving if you hail from the metric world.
If it was at least all in cups, it’d be somewhat more forgivable. I’ve even seen recipes using amounts of flour measured in a combination of cups and tablespoons! Actually, maybe that doesn’t sound as mad to everyone as it does to me…
Anyway, it makes more sense hearing that sticks of butter are labelled in cups. I didn’t know that! In the UK, butter comes in 250g blocks.
Sticks of butter are also labeled in tablespoons here. One stick is 1/2c, and the paper it is wrapped in also has markings for 1-8 tbsp. So it's pretty common to see that in US recipes as well.
As far as flour goes, it's incredibly common to have both cups and measuring spoons in a US kitchen. So if a recipe says "1 cup and 2 tablespoons" or something, it's really easy to measure that.
By contrast, I hate recipes which use weight measurements. It takes a ton of faffing about to get exactly 300g (or whatever weight) of flour weighed out. Add a bit... watch scale... add a bit more... watch scale ad nauseam. And then I often wind up overshooting anyways, so then I have to try to scoop some back out! Whereas with volume measurements I just dip a cup/spoon in, level it off, and I'm done in a couple of seconds.
For similar accuracy to what you have with cups and spoons, you don't need to bother making the measurement exactly 300g.
A relative was a professional cook. Butter wrappers are also marked with measurements here, at 25g intervals. That would be accepted for some recipes, but the butter would be measured more carefully when making certain pastries or cakes.
Yeah, especially since the density of flour varies. All the home bakers I know either weigh their flour, or eyeball it like I do and live with the imprecision.
I'd just let the flour mound over the top of the cup by a bit to make up for the tablespoons. ;-)
Agreed - eyeballing it (or volume measurement for that matter) is good enough for the vast majority of baking recipes. I have made some finicky recipes in my day, but generally you will not need the precision of measuring by weight. For some reason people online hype up how exact you "need" to be when baking, but it's just not true. Hilariously, people also act like you can just completely wing it with no precision at all when cooking on the stove, and that also isn't true. Both forms of cooking benefit from some measurements and consistency, but you don't have to go too crazy with it.
A scale's cheap and if it's in a situation where accuracy matters, I use it if the measurements are given or consult a standard conversion. And as someone in the US I tend to use grams for the purpose to avoid faffing with a combination of units. And I don't even mind at all using US Imperial for many things on a day-to-day basis,
To a first approximation, fat won't kill you. There's no reliable evidence that a diet relatively higher in fat causes worse health outcomes, as long as you maintain energy balance. Salt won't kill you either, unless you're genetically susceptible to hypertension and don't drink enough water. The sugar is more problematic.
Halving is a neat trick. In my experience you can usually safely halve the amount of sugar in most cake recipes and still get a great cake that is sweet enough.
It can't do it with everything but sugar is probably the thing I'm most inclined to go "Nah, that's too much" in recipes. (Often, online, I'll see what people say in the comments too.)
I disagree. If we're talking about restaurants and not fast food, it's portion size that's typically the issue in the US. Oddly enough, the higher end restaurants start to move in the other direction and shrink portion sizes.
>I disagree. If we're talking about restaurants and not fast food, it's portion size that's typically the issue in the US.
i think you are right.
i have always seen big portion sizes in restaurants when i have gone to the US.
also, very recently, i saw a youtube video in which a french person says the same thing. they said that even though the French eat a lot of fat, their overall portion sizes are smaller than those of the US. so overall, they end up eating less calories than US people.
also the French tend to walk a lot, while the US people tend to drive a lot.
My own impression from a week in Paris is that you're right: if you get the "menu" at most restaurants (appetizer, entree, dessert), you walk out full but not stuffed.
The weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, supposedly make you feel like that. I haven't taken them myself. It's like you don't really want any more.
Americans seem to feel entitled to two meals for the price of one, and they may or may not eat them both in the restaurant. (If they don't finish, they take the rest home with them)
>Americans seem to feel entitled to two meals for the price of one, and they may or may not eat them both in the restaurant. (If they don't finish, they take the rest home with them)
yes, when my parents used to go to the US, a few decades ago, they told us kids about this practice called using doggie bags. apparently people used to ask for the uneaten part of their restaurant orders to be packed in what was called a doggy bag, under the euphemism that they were taking the extra food home for their dog.
I don't know whether the practice is still followed.
I don't know that anyone has ever used "doggy bag" to mean/imply an actual bag for dogs in my lifetime (I'm 39), but yes it's still common to get the rest of your food in a container to take home. These days your waiter/waitress will usually ask "do you want a box" instead of referring to a doggy bag, but everyone knows what you mean if you ask for a doggy bag.
I don't think the term is all that common today in the US. But, counter my pervious comment (though I hadn't been active that day and it was quite hot), a few of us were having dinner and most of us took something home (for us, not a dog)--and I just had a starter! Considered quite normal. Good food but there was just a lot of it and I didn't have much of an appetite.
I do know a few places that are sort of known for having portion sizes that are oriented towards people taking leftovers home.
It is a generalization but maybe I know it's because there's often a lot of relative filler in entrees and I often gravitate towards one or two starters/apps. That said I mostly don't find portions in Europe (including France) to be especially small.
Appetizers. In my experience the term is fairly common in the US.
I think some of it is that many restaurants have a lot of fairly inexpensive filler (potatoes, rice, etc.) with entrees that I probably sort of tune out and don't really try to finish a lot of the time. This is probably less true of some countries/cuisines than others.
I feel like restaurants really have an unfair advantage there as far as flavor goes. Whenever I try to make something following a recipe, I balk at the amount of butter/sugar/oils/salt and cut way down or leave them out entirely, with predictable results. With a restaurant this is completely abstracted away so it's easier to get past.
Last spring, I was at my friends new at the time restaurant, when he let me know that Pete Wells was at the table behind us (and how important this night was for my friend) -- I noticed the sheer amount of food - pretty much the entire menu - that was coming and going from that table. I didn't even put it in to perspective how demanding that was on the body, since all I could think of was how I wish I had his job tasting amazing food all the time. The review came out a few weeks later, and it was a pretty nice review - took quite some time before reservations were obtainable again.
Wells has said he often dines with multiple people in order to be able to try multiple things on the menu. of course The Times is picking up the tab. I guess being a restaurant reviewer is like owning a boat - it’s tough on you but your friends love it.
I'd also comment that, in general, even though I've had jobs with tenures that many HN readers would consider ridiculously long, I mostly settled into the decade +/- space outside of a couple (of short) "events" outliers. Even with making some changes along the way sometimes, that ended up my been-there/done-that range.
Obviously people are different but that has been my experience.
Yeah, I think anyone who travels a lot for work very quickly realizes that restaurant food eaten everyday, if you're not careful, will very rapidly put pounds on you. Now with Wells' article we know how much worse it becomes if that's your job too.
As Anthony Bourdain wrote... "In a good restaurant, what this all adds up to is that you could be putting away almost a stick of butter with every meal." He's not exaggerating!
When eating out a lot is your job (including eating out at places you wouldn't naturally have gravitated towards), like many things it becomes work.
I eat out when on vacation and business trips and really don't want to cook even if the hotel has a kitchenette. I also rarely go out at home to eat unless it's to attend an event or to socialize.
When I was an analyst I definitely gained weight until I developed the discipline to not eat the three meals a day (plus also snack breaks) just because they were there and often good.
I am up to the challenge of trying to be a food critic, but without gaining weight. I would review food once every 3 days and do a lot of cardio and eat les on the off days.
That would be a rough ride for your health. I remember back when Adam Richman was doing the original run of Man vs Food and he was looking like death towards the end.
I mean, that wasn't a show about "food" or "restaurants" it was about gluttonous, over-the top food "challenges". Unless you were doing an equally extreme amount of work to counteract those meals, a season would absolutely destroy someone.
I see all the pearl clutching comments about how bad eating at restaurants is (former restaurant chef, I'm extremely biased and refused to be moved), but an over the top entree coming in at 1500 calories isn't even close to a 7 pound burrito IMO.
One big cheat meal per week can undo a lot of work. It's easy to blow through a entire day's worth of calories and macros at one sitting let alone four!
"You can't outrun your fork" - I think a good thing for people to do when trying to get healthy is eat a donut and then run on the treadmill for the equivalent amount of calories you just ingested. Hammers home it is a lot easier to just not eat the donut.
Just start on semaglutides, and eat in smaller portions like the women critics he describes in the article do. I think quitting a good critic job for your health is pretty silly when there are modern workarounds that mostly solve the issue.
The author literally described how women food writers keep their health while writing food columns - they taste the dishes but don't eat the whole plate. He doesn't say this makes women worse food writers at all.
He could just copy this strategy. If he doesn't have the will for it, semaglutides would make it really easy. You still enjoy and taste food the same on it, you just get full quicker.
Complete indifference to food and water that led to fainting and probable heat stroke. Extreme nausea. All mitigated now with medication and forced hydration. Not fun.
This is the guy that trashed Guy Fieri's restaurant, right? Guy Fieri (and his restaurants') style might not be for everyone, but he's such a sweetheart and does so much for small businesses, not to mention firefighters etc., that you have to be pretty cold to do that. Still makes me mad.
Eh, I think it's like media reviews. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and a lot of times what professional critics think has nothing in common with what the average person actually wants. The high end restaurant world is much like the professional art world in that it gets really pretentious and out of touch. It just is what it is.
I mostly don't go out of my way to eat at top restaurants (as opposed to good ones that are more midrange). Don't get me wrong; I've had some really good meals. But I think I'd find it all a bit exhausting as a regular routine.
