We are all guilty of doing these things that completely annoy bartenders, so here's a list of major bar faux pas to avoid when visiting your favorite watering holes.
10. Waving, yelling and leaning over the bar to get the bartender's attention is unacceptable. Don't assume you are the only patron waiting and be too aggressive. Instead be polite and wait your turn.
9. Being a bad tipper. There is just no excuse for this behavior.
8. Saying "Can I have a beer?" Um hello, most bars have more than several on tap. Figure out what you want or at least give some guidelines.
7. Spilling your drink and asking for another one. They are not responsible for you being a klutz.
6. "Can I have some water?" Asking this question when the bartender has 15 paying customers waiting for drinks is a definite no no.
5. Sending your drink back because "you can't taste the alcohol." While you may occasionally encounter a weak drink, be judicious with your complaints. If you had a few cocktails already, you're too drunk to judge.
4. Don't be quick to order, but slow to pay. Have your money/credit card ready to go to avoid delaying other customers.
3. "Where's the bathroom?" Go ask a waitress, please.
2. "Is that a full pour or are you going to get another bottle?" The average beer bottle holds 12 ounces, a pint is 16 ounces. If you want a bigger pour, then order a draft brew and stop whining.
1. "Do you have any pink umbrellas?" There are no words to justify this comment!
When my husband and I mention that we are both chefs, the reaction of others is always the same, "Wow! You must have great meals in your house!" On the contrary, after cooking all day the last thing that we really tend to think about is what to cook for dinner.
Though we both believe that we should prepare for our family a meal with as much love as we cook for others, there is often one hindrance that gets in the way, time. Plus with the rule in our home being, one cooks while the other cleans, I often find myself getting a jump start on preparing dinner. Luckily we have one "go-to," on hand in our freezer. Yes, I said freezer.
The neighborhood grocer, Trader Joe's sells a product simply called, Mandarin Orange Chicken and this has been a lifesaver for our busy, kids-included household. The contents in the bag are just that, basic chicken and a Mandarin orange sauce. Not only is this a quick alternative to take-out Chinese food, but it's inexpensive, versatile and a little healthier.
During the school year, this can be found on our dinner table at least two nights out of the week. The directions are effortless and the outcome is satisfying. For a family of four very hungry people, one bag is simply not enough. Two bags fills each of us satisfactorily, as well as the brown rice and mixed vegetables that are the usual accompaniments in our house.
I am fully aware that at the end of a long work day, it's easy to say, "let's just order take-out," but with the Mandarin Orange Chicken on hand a "home cooked" meal is mere minutes away, and you can forgo the need to scrounge for tip money.
I definitely subscribe to that whole "French women don't get fat" lifestyle mumbo jumbo and have ever since I became old enough to choose a self-help book by which to live. I like to imagine myself riding a bike down a Parisian street in red lipstick and cropped pants, enviably slim even though the basket of my bike is filled with butter-laced pastries and slabs of duck fat. I have no bike at the moment and croissants go straight to my hips, but I try to practice the spirit of the "French woman" hypothesis by eating good food with friends and drinking a glass of wine every night.
While this lifestyle has yet to present many problems, one arises every so often—I cannot finish a bottle of wine if I drink moderately, leaving me with piles questionable half-bottles. Sometimes, I weigh my options. If it's been one of those days, I drink it (which I probably shouldn't admit on a website dedicated to eating well). But, for the evenings when I'm not gripped by the need to drown my problems, I've started to collect recipes that call for wine.
If you cook, you'll already know some prime places to add a splash of wine
—deglazing a pan after searing meat, finishing off a ragu, macerating fruit. But for every conventional use, there is an equally unusual one. Below are some of my favorite recipes that call for wine. Leave a comment below and let us know how you use the dregs.
Escabeche is one of those dishes that appear in most continental European cuisines and the cuisines of all the places they colonized. In Jamaica they call it Escovitch, in Italy it is Savoro and the North Africans know it as Scabetche. Whatever the name, the dish consists of some meat (normally chicken or fish) that is fried or lightly poached then soaked in an acidic marinade overnight before it is served. While there are as many variations as there are stars in the sky, the marinade typically includes white wine. My current favorite riff on this dish is the quail escabeche from this month's Gourmet Magazine.
This recipe from Serious Eats came from a woman with a similar conundrum to my own. Her solution? Throw a handful of dried figs in wine and water, add a cinnamon stick and sugar and let the wine reduce into a syrup. I especially like this recipe over vanilla ice cream.
World-renowned cookbook author, culinary expert and founder of the La Varenne Cooking School in France, Anne Willan, published a book devoted exclusively to using vino in your meals. This is among my favorite recipes from her classic guide Cooking With Wine.
Behind the Burner CEO, Divya Gugnani developed a finishing sauce for meat that is as tasty as it is simple. Just combine one part soy sauce with one part red wine vinegar and whatever leftover wine you have around the house—red or white. After you've combined the ingredients, splash it on whatever meat you're cooking right before removing it from the heat.
Chef Joey Campanaro has come up with one of the most decadent uses I can imagine for an old bottle of white wine. His recipe for creamy white risotto studded with black truffles on Behind the Burner epitomizes luxury. But if eaten in large quantities, it might even make a French woman fat.
Although living alone brings me solace in knowing that never again will I have to clean somebody else's hair out of the shower drain, being cooped up in the house, sick as could be, with no human contact for several days can be quite lonely. It can also cause a fresh loaf of bread to go stale. My cold killed my appetite and without roommates to dig in, after a few days, the Ciabatta turned into a rock. Not one to waste food, I searched for something to do with the hardened half loaf, as a sandwich was no longer a possibility.
Typing "stale bread" into the Food Network's database gave me more options than I was anticipating, as recipes for everything from stuffing to fish cakes to bread pudding popped up on my screen. Already overwhelmed by my sniffles, I was in no mood to sift through tons of recipes for things that I did not have the energy to read, let alone walk to the market and purchase. Relief came in the form of Molto Mario, one of my favorite TV chefs, and his tomato bread soup.
Mario's "Pappa al Pomodoro" is a simple dish cooked with ripe tomatoes and stale bread, which seemed like a perfect remedy for whatever bug had bitten me. In fact, since the only chicken soup I will eat is my ma's, the tomato bread soup was the only remedy at my disposal. With that, I made a grocery list, took some more cough medicine and ventured out of my apartment for the first time in three days.
Mmmm, fresh air. Well, City air, which is almost the same thing. The trip outside did me some good, but I was so exhausted when I returned home that my soup had to be pushed off for another day.
Feeling a little better the next day, I decided that it was time to get out of bed and rejoin the rest of the healthy world. It took most of the day to convince myself of this, so around dinner time I officially plied myself out of bed and threw my sheets in the laundry to prevent me from crawling back in. Once the spin cycle was started, I began prepping my kitchen for soup.
I sawed the Ciabatta bread into bite-sized pieces and set chunks aside until I was ready for them. I sliced the bread first because it was incredibly messy and I did not want the crumbs to stick to my counters once the juices from the tomatoes had been released. Next, I diced a small onion and added it to a hot frying pan with olive oil and garlic to cook until it was translucent. I dusted the pan with some hot red pepper flakes to give the soup a little punch and to heat up my insides to maybe kill off the remaining germs. Once the onion was cooked, I added about two pounds of diced plum tomatoes to the sautè pan and set them to simmer. The recipe said to remove the skins and seeds, but I did not feel like being bothered, so I just left them as is and hoped for the best. The tomatoes cooked for a few minutes and then I added the bread, allowing the mixture to fuse together over a moderate flame. Just before the soup was good to go, I mixed in a few fresh basil leaves and a mound of Pecorino Romano. Mario's recipe called for only a drizzle of cheese as a garnish, but that is nowhere near enough for me, so I switched it up a bit. After all, if cheese could not make me feel better, chances are nothing could.
I must say, it was not the most visually appealing dish I've ever eaten, but it certainly did perk me up a bit. The heat from the red pepper flakes was the first taste to hit my tongue. The fiery flakes sent a wave of warmth throughout my body which was absorbed by the juicy chunks of bread. In fact, the bread was so tender that had I not known it to have been hard and stale, I would never have guessed. The skin and seeds that I was too lazy to remove from the tomatoes were thankfully unnoticeable. The cheese melted beautifully, coating each spoonful of tomatoes with its deliciously pungent flavor, making me instantly feel a little better. The freshness that came from the basil leaves complimented the abundance of tomatoes, giving the soup an overall lightness despite the half loaf of Ciabatta bread that was in the mix.
I considered this illness and this meal a lesson learned—keep leftover homemade soup in the freezer for a sick day, as your ma's chicken soup may not always be within reach.
I am aware that by posting this, I am entering into a New York City obsession that has been blogged into the ground. The beloved Red Hook Vendors are so saturated by foodie web-scene coverage that my writing about them will undoubtedly cause even marginal followers of the NYC food world to roll their eyes. Thankfully, Behind the Burner is not a New York food blog and I'm hoping that some of you in other (less relentlessly competitive and easily bored) parts of the country will be interested to hear about one of the most satisfying eating experiences that I have enjoyed in awhile.
First, some background information: the Red Hook Vendors scene began over three decades ago when Latin American immigrants started preparing and selling the cuisine of their home countries for people watching soccer games at the Red Hook ball fields. Since then, the vendors have won the hearts and stomachs of New Yorkers (David Byrne and Chuck Schumer among them) with a pupusa, ceviche, elotes and, of course, tacos.
Over the years, they morphed from one of NY's best kept secrets to one of its worst. The vendors garnered so many enthusiasts, that they started attracting some negative attention as well; last year the New York City Parks Department stopped issuing permits and forced them into a process of open bidding despite their decades-long presence in Red Hook.
The Parks Department's decision incited the interest of the Health Department who stepped up their inspection process. The city was on the verge of shutting the entire operation down (the people who staff the health department clearly started their careers as middle school hall monitors), when public enragement (led by Chuck) caused them to backpedal.
To everyone's relief, they're back, although in compromised form. In order to return for the season, they had to comply with the city's tight regulations, racking up thousands of dollars in debt for refitting their trucks. The financial burden was so heavy that some vendors couldn't return at all. Others claim that it will take years to remake the money they've lost. The situation has bloomed into (one of the many) conversations about the unintended evils of gentrification and the city's nanny-state politics. But, I just want to talk about tacos.
I never tried the vendors at their peak, a decision I regret now. But even after surviving a run-in with the city, their food is phenomenal. On Saturday, two friends and I piled into my mother's car and drove to the Red Hook ball fields. Considering my skills behind the wheel, I could probably up the drama factor a little and say that I risked all of our lives for food without an unreasonable amount of exaggeration.
After the stress of feeling like I was going to kill myself and two good friends in a fiery car wreck, I was really hungry. Sheila, a friend from Slow Food USA and a gastronomista extraordinaire, had tried the pupusas the previous weekend at Brooklyn Flea and highly recommended them. So while she waited in line for the Salvadoran a pupusa plate, my friend Annie sourced out vegetarian tacos slathered in beans, cheese and salsa. On a leap of faith, I found a cart peddling ceviche and parked myself behind two soccer players.
Having only eaten the bastardized ceviche they sell at uppity fusion restaurants, I was surprised by the simplicity of the street food version. After ordering, the teenage girl working the cart served each soccer player a plastic Tupperware filled with milky, cilantro flecked liquid and chunks of mixed seafood. Both of them squirted the contents of their containers with lemon juice and hot sauce. Not knowing protocol, I followed suit and brought my ceviche to our picnic table unsure of what to expect.
If you have never had the stuffed corn tortilla called a pupusa, do so at the next opportunity. They're really, really good. I chose one filled with little spicy flowers called loroco and another with chicken and hot peppers. The flowers were delicate and tasted faintly of arugula, while the braised chicken practically melted into the gooey sheets of white cheese and chunks of pepper that accompanied it. Both a pupusas were served with a shockingly pink condiment of tart pickled cabbage and smoky tomato salsa.
We devoured everything on our plates then timidly dug our forks into the ceviche. Wholly unlike the tangy sushi surrogates they serve at restaurants like Sushi Samba, the seafood in our ceviche was cooked to a pleasantly toothsome texture by the acidity of the lime. Remarkably, nothing had the faintest fishy flavor and not even the squid was rubbery.
After polishing off a container of fried plantains with sour cream, I regretted not being able to try the fried pork skin or the famous elotes, ears of grilled corn drenched in mayo, cheese and chili pepper. But, I guess this means I'll have to go back again (preferably with beer in brown paper bags and no pressure to drive).
For those of you who have not read (or blogged) extensively about the Red Hook Vendors, Serious Eats has a comprehensive list of things that first timers should expect when visiting the carts. Despite the hardship that the vendors have had to overcome this year, things are starting to look up. Gothamist reports that some of the vendors will be part of a "foodie tent" at Coney Island's Dreamland this summer. So forgive me if I've brought the redundancy of blogging about Red Hook to a new level, but it was my first time. Okay? And, I was excited about it, damn it. On a final note, keep your eyes peeled for our managing editor and Californian taco enthusiast Mona Buehler's take on the Red Hook phenomenon sometime in the upcoming weeks...
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