With minimal fanfare, Draeger's San Mateo is closing for good.

 

Now I don't live in San Mateo any longer, but I'm not at all surprised to see this happening: SFGate: Gourmet Bay Area grocery store closing after nearly three decades
 There were rumors during the plague that the plot of land had been sold -the buyer varied depending on who you talked to-, but the flux of the pandemic let a lot of useful intel slip by unnoticed.

Let me add that I no longer have skin in the game as far as Draeger's goes. I was one of their cooking school's lead instructors for most of the 2010s, and enjoyed myself thoroughly there. An almost-independent department, we were a solid moneymaker, and what we brought in from private events and classes subsidized the in-house restaurant 'Viognier' quite well. The pandemic closed the cooking school for what we all thought was for good, (Worth mentioning that the restaurant permanently closed at the same time. The story in SFGate talks about a decline in fine dining... but that dining room was empty more often than not.) and so the Scions of the Draeger's Cooking School scattered. 

I'll miss that place. We had a lot of good times there, as a department. Abby ran a delightfully tight ship, and had the most incredible Customer Service mien I've ever seen in action. Oliver and the wine crew were extraordinary, and the housewares department was something out of legend. Jorge was a wizard with that stuff- truly incredible sense of style and a knack for placement that managed to make egregious expense avoid looking tacky. No small feat.

Heading back to downtown San Mateo is going to be a very different thing as the next few years go on. I wonder how this supposed mixed-use space is going to look... "Developer Lane Partners is planning to erect around 100,000 square feet of office space and 10 below-market-rate units, with around 17,000 square feet dedicated to an unnamed grocery store, according to the San Mateo Daily Journal"

That's corporate construction speak for "We want to pretend we're making this a more livable space while gouging the city and the locals". It's also interesting that the grocery store is unnamed, because one of the rumored buyers of this location was Target. Their grocery would do some most unpleasantly tacky things to the look of downtown, and I do hope that's not what ends up in the location. Blech.

I have contacts down there still, so hopefully there will be more information as things develop. Assuming they do, of course. We'll see.

Book Review: "The Man Who Ate Too Much" by John Birdsall

 

A James Beard Biography is a very tricky thing to look at. The man showed a refreshingly simple face to the world, full of bonhomie and circumstantially cogent expertise- enough to get interest, but not enough to get in trouble…mostly. A fine showman, exemplifying ‘larger than life’. But as with so many others, underneath the surface was the relentless tide of insecurity that comes from being so much more than he ever thought was safe to reveal. And so we have “The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard”, by one John Birdsall. A fellow culinarian and author (ironically, a two-time James Beard Award winner) who, as I read between the lines, seems to harbor many sentiments not unlike my own about the man. But this is Beard’s bio rather than Birdsall’s, so let us be about it.

First and foremost, the man known as James Beard came from luxury, and with connections. The reassembled minutiae of his early years is awash in expansive excess. Months spent in far-off locales, not even working for ages at a time- something utterly unthinkable for almost anyone who might pick this book up today. It boggles the mind to see how carefree people once had the privilege to be. Given such ease, how much more could have been done is a hard thing to consider. Nonetheless, his ability to flimflam fickle fortune began early and never ceased, blind luck leading him over and over to the absolute perfect persons to kickstart every facet of what would become his career, and with a mix of relentless clever schmoozing and discreet deference, such ways were kept open as long as might have been managed.

Made abundantly clear over and over again is Beard's knack for keeping things quiet till the time was right. His first cookbook? Largely pilfered recipes from early business partners and sometime socialites, mingled with mostly made-up attributions, all hidden behind an ironclad façade of rambunctious reputability- in what would seem to eventually become a tradition. A giant who stands on the shoulders of others, their faces carefully, even artfully obscured. People, ideas, opinions, all devoid of definition- for the protection of the man behind their use.

This biography also makes no small point of viewing the man through the lens of his queerness, but it's an approach far more robust than Beard’s own. Known in abstract, if not in common, James Beard lived the life of a man who wished to hear the music of love but knew not from whence the tune might come, nor how to carry it. Deeply repressed by the culture around him and the needs of the moment, sharp and acerbic beneath the bombast of his public face, Beard’s well-concealed intimates come across as ephemeral as his expertise often was. Small wonder so much of his life seemed so lonely.

More bothersome still, work ethic and disciplined consistency were the man’s lifelong bugbears. He never once managed a repute for reliability, something truly miraculous for one who managed to find his sort of success in the world of food- where showing up five minutes early, ready to go full speed for the next however long has ever been the standard.

What that and so much else of this manuscript also none-too-quietly shouts is how exhaustingly easy it can be for someone of means to succeed whether they deserve the privilege or not. To dawdle about universities, flirting with professors and professionals. To have friends get you jobs teaching things you know little and less about, reading two weeks ahead of your students to maintain the charade. To breathe a false life and meaning into illusion via artifice and imagination. Miracles of days gone by, impossible now.

The years passed, the man aged, the world changed, and then he was gone from it. I suspect the notion of a true successor had vanished from Beard’s mind decades in the past, but that of a legacy was one he held tightly to, and so he maintained his disciplined discretion all the way to the end. A long, rich, full-seeming life, yet somehow as thoroughly hidden away as could possibly be.

In some ways, it's best he died when he did. Fragile as his mental health was, the AIDS crisis would surely have broken him, as it did so many it didn’t kill. Perhaps worse still is what later became of the world in which we now pretend to live. Life’s whimsy and joy has been ruthlessly stripped away by those born to wealth then raised to selfishness and greed. Men like James Beard are ground up and molded into nameless drudges in flavorless locales with no hopes, dreams, or futures. I know many of them. I worry I may well be one, no matter my mastery.

If you wish to read a fine story, The Man Who Ate Too Much will serve you well. The best way to remember a showman like Beard is, perhaps, through the telling of his tale in a manner he’d understand. One can hear his voice in the pages- both the one you’d hear in public… and the much quieter one at the back of his mind he tried so hard to forget.

Resolutions?

 

Resolutions have never been something I looked at seriously. Seeing other people make their own leaves many bereft of resolve, and dooms them to failure more often than not. 

I see things like "An apology to myself and others for having fallen apart, and a commitment to restoke my fire.", and... no, I don't believe that for a second. Most people fall apart because you let yourselves crumble. You do not sacrifice what is necessary, nor do you spend your resources in a way that would help. I should know- in times long past some have asked, and I told them. If they decided to do something else? My wisdom is no shackle- even though for many it certainly should be.

Given all that mess, plus the worldly horrors of the last decade or so- plagues, fascists, brain drain, climate change, overpopulation, and many other awful things... one resolution worth considering has come to mind.

I should stop being the one who reaches out first.

The lion's share of the work in many of my interpersonal relationships has always been done by me. I know one person my age aside from myself that has a christmas card list- while written correspondence itself is vanishingly rare in this day and age, some things remain worth doing for an intimate, personal touch. Even digitally though, if it's been a while since we've talked? I'll likely drop a line every month or three to try and see what's what. All too often though, those messages simply vanish into the aether, either unread and unnoticed, or simply dismissed. My message archives are awash in open-ended queries, salutations, and attempts to reconnect.

Between the literal and figurative plagues, the chaos of the world gives more reason to be fostering relationships than any time most people alive today can remember. And yet I only grow more weary of spending my time on those who can't bothered to remember just how valuable it is. It brings to mind something of an exhausting question quite firmly cemented in my mind and worldview a couple of years ago: "How many times do I have to save someone's life before they owe me the rest?". I know the answer to that. But none of those so indebted will ever so much as admit to it, much less pay up.

What will taking the passive role and waiting for outreach do? Hard to say. It's not like I have more than a handful of people who ever bother to talk to me in the first place, and it often feels as though I'm the last option even for them.

If all it does is turn those numbers from nonzero to zero, then... it was always zero to begin with.

Probably won't change much at all, really.

Someone once said this always made them think of me.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Better food media journalism at the macro level, please.

This is 'Hall'. An exceedingly intricate NYC establishment that seems formed around a concept reliably associated with the Japan bar scene- a half-hidden gem where a person in the know can stop in and hide out for a while, discreetly and unobtrusively relishing the environment and ambiance with a fantastic cocktail and something to eat. It's an experience I often create for my clients, and one I wish I could afford to experience myself.

It's run by Hiroki Odo, whose flagship restaurant has two Michelin Stars. I'd expect a deliberate, measured style, with appropriate subtlety. Though looking at the 'menu' of the restaurant 'odo' I admit to finding it uninspiring. For someone like me, whose expertise in the relevant niches is comparable to the chef's, it reads as exhaustingly vague, and much more a listing of how many courses there are than anything meant to pique the interest or tempt the appetite. A terrible habit of many modern Very Expensive Establishments, and one I'd like to see Michelin criticize more aggressively.

'Hall' on the other hand looks lovely. It's got style and poise. The menu is small. The food, wine, and liquor lists are short but nicely and precisely chosen. The cocktails aren't numerous, but as the focus they look beautifully balanced and well structured, with something that will catch the eye and interest of almost any cocktail afficionado irrespective of their personal taste in drinks. It might well work. 

Except then he went and did an interview with Eater and they tipped his hand like a bunch of chumps. 

Successful high-end operations tend to need subsidies. Investors no longer understand the concepts and goals of community or social capital- they just want cash. (This isn't news, even if it bears repeating: Everything about modern investment is both wrong and backwards.)

So every fancy restaurant benefits from having a reliable money maker to help hold it up. This one is well disguised in a lot of ways unless you know what to look for, but they went ahead and blurted it out so I'll give some more detail.

Behold the most lucrative con in modern restaurants: the Wagyu burger.

What makes Wagyu so expensive? Treatment of the beef that results in incredibly dense and flavorful marbling. The texture and flavor are everything, and that comes from the meat's natural state.

What does making beef into a burger do? It grinds the meat, mixing the protein and fat into an emulsified patty. What happens when you cook it? You get a pockmarked texture that's harder to sear, and fat leaks out- a lot faster than if you'd left the meat whole. 

Both of those do serious damage to expensive beef, and Wagyu is no exception. But... Wagyu has a certain cachet. People associate it with quality and a premium price. Here's the tricky bit though- as long as the fat percentage is the same, there's no appreciable difference between A5 and, say, USDA Select in texture once ground. Not in texture, not in flavor, not in anything noteworthy at all.

So how much of a burger needs to be Wagyu to be labeled as such? Well... there's no fixed required minimum to meet truth-in-advertising laws, so it could be a drop in the bucket. Easy as can be to make $25 burgers when you're paying for a dollar worth of Wagyu fat and trim mixed with a pile of more standard beef.

A little extrapolation later... this blundering interview by Eater might have accidentally torpedoed a couple promising restaurants and potentially a chef's career.

Greeeeat work, guys. Keep it up. Sigh.

The Rich People's Christmas Lists

Eater did the thing again, poking fun at gratuitous potential holiday spends while discreetly providing affiliate links. 

Clever, yes. Mildly to moderately underhanded? Also yes.

But I had to look, just to see for myself what they were talking about. Their tagline was:

"The Fanciest Food, Kitchen, and Cookware Gifts Imaginable

Is it even a kitchen without a $200 pepper grinder and a $400 pineapple? (I’ll sip from my $1,200 bedazzled travel mug while you answer.)"

As soon as I read that I went AHA, because there's only one $200 pepper grinder on the market that I know about and I already own it! 

They took what's essentially a legacy item on par with your grandmother's Kitchenaid (the one from the era of machined internal parts rather than plastic ones) and used that to frame the notion of other things on their list being halfway reasonable.

Utter rubbish.

A 400 dollar pineapple.

A 230 dollar, fifty gram chocolate bar. 

A 140 dollar 'Gucci' pannetone?!

And that's just some of the edible stuff.

There's a candle that smells of cucumber for ~250. Why? You can probably get that at Yankee Candle for a tenth of that. 

Or the thousand dollar ice press, for when you absolutely have to have those perfect 2" spheres of crystal clear ice for your drink. 

Who on earth is reading this and thinking "Huh. I could use one of those!"?

Eater's audience is not the people who buy stuff like this. Never was, never will be. I honestly don't know why they bothered beyond curiosity clicks. It's a SkyMall Christmas list. A pile of gratuitously expensive mostly-junk masquerading as haute couture journalism.

Bah, humbug.

Crumbl- where Less is Less

I’m a dessert person, but I’m poor and frugal. So when it comes to desserts, the notion of Value For Money gets a lot of attention. Pricy components and proper attention to detail can, with care, make what looks thoroughly mundane both justifiably expensive and extraordinary. That was the sort of thing I focused on when reviewing the local cookie shop Butter Pecan. Partially because I enjoy portable desserts like cookies, and partially because you can buy just one cookie without blowing your budget. …Most of the time.

A friend made a mention of getting cookies from a place called Crumbl “Just to see what all the fuss is about”. His resultant glowing review led me to look them up, discover their home storefront was in the next town over, tell myself ‘what the hell, it’s for science’ and get in the car.

Over the course of getting there, getting cookies, and getting home my “Sure, what the hell” had turned into “…wait, what the hell?”.

The shop itself is pastel pink, white, and sterile looking. It’s not remotely friendly aside from the smell of buttery fresh-baked sweets- which is cheating anyway. There are people behind the counters, but none of them are looking at you or even anywhere close. Everything from order to payment is done via kiosks, which led to a Big Problem for me. I got bait-and-switched.

The order kiosk has icons for both Large Desserts and Mini Desserts. The image on the Mini Desserts is of a hand holding what is apparently a Large one. I didn’t find that out till later because there was no actual product visible from the customer accessible area. What sort of bakery does *that*? One that’s not expecting professionals with standards, I suppose. I ordered my cookies- a mini cookie 6-pack because that gave me the maximum opportunity to test the flavors. Three bucks apiece, rounded up, before tax and… tip?. The ‘tip’ calculator was, of course, gibberish math. Plus, who tips big at a place that’s 100% takeout and has no counter service? It’s designed to get people to pay extra for nothing, and I don’t approve. Rather like most modern restaurant websites where you can’t even look at the menu until you start an online order- that’s poisonous as hell.

Anyway, they called my name a minute or so after the order went in, and I was handed a box that was approximately half the size I was expecting. I opened it and looked. Then I closed it and left to go home. 

Upon my return I got out my scale and set to work.

The subconscious value calculations a lot of us do come down to size and weight if we can’t precisely gauge quality. In this case I can do both, but I wanted to start with the easily quantifiable.

Six cookies, five different varieties, just under 250 grams. What the hell? That’s tiny!

The diversity of the cookie styles left me with a wide range of weights, which was even more of a surprise. The Confetti was smallest, weighing in at 29g. Most others were in the 30-35 range, but the Chocolate Mint Mallow swung up to 60g.

Disparity aside, we take the average, and we’re talking about something in the neighborhood of $35-40/lb for these. In the past I reviewed another cookie spot (review linked at the top) and did similar math. Those cookies were $3.75 each, and averaged out at 100g. Quick math, rounds up to $17.00/lb. Crumbl charges literally double what Butter Pecan does based on weight of ingredients.

So yeah- what the hell?! These had better be some absolutely incredible cookies!

They weren’t.

The universals are mostly good overall:

-Deliberately underbaked to extend the shelf life. Totally normal, and I like a soft cookie anyway.
-Doughs are salted for balance to the point where you can taste it. Just a whisper shy of too much.
-All the cookies are S W E E T. Tons of sugar, hence the aggressive saltiness. (Sugar’s cheap.)
-Lots of butter flavor. It comes through very strongly, adding richness to help balance the sweet.

The individual cookies, however, all had their own problems:
“Churro”: way too heavy on the cinnamon, and topped with a swirl of what could almost be buttercream- plenty of powdered sugar in it for that. Sans the cream it’d have been a fine snickerdoodle. I'd rather have had that.
“Milk Chocolate Chip”: The chips were large, bulking the cookie out some but not enough. They were more milk than chocolate, with a rapid-melting texture and a flavor reminiscent of astronaut ice cream. The cookie component was a fairly basic dough, probably also used in some of the others.
“Confetti”: Bog-standard. I’ve eaten many like it. It was a high-quality incarnation of what I expected.
“Peanut Butter”: Despite the massive fat content it still had that sandiness that peanut butter cookies are reliably known for. That said, there were no whole nuts or pieces (in a cookie that small, who’d dare?) so the texture was pleasant.
“Chocolate Mint Mallow”: A very odd sandwich of chocolate cookies with what they claim is a mint marshmallow filling between. The filling tasted more like buttercream, but the mint flavor was milder and more subtle than I expected. Since most mint products go waaay overboard, this left a good impression. The cookies were very dark chocolate and very soft, almost tacky to the touch, which had me considering other preparations. I’d happily have rolled portions of that dough in spiced sugar before baking and sold them accordingly. Perhaps a chipotle sugar? Beautiful with dark chocolate. Less worry for cross contamination too.

Speaking of that, it was the final worry I had. Mint and peanut are both somewhere in that facility and I didn’t see any way to avoid allergen or flavor contamination. The chocolate chip cookie had a faint whisper of peanut come through on my palate, and that’s Not Good.

Overall, I’m not sure how Crumbl got past its first store, much less expanded across the country. It has all the trappings of a vanity project sponsored by someone with deep pockets- niche product, high prices, minimalist décor, tech-heavy processes, minimal human interaction. I don’t like it one bit, but it’s on the main drag in a college town so it probably makes bank. 

I’ll leave Crumbl to the UCB kids who don't know any better and get better product for a better price at Butter Pecan.