Fatty

Meaghan just sent me a NYTimes article on fat - my favorite cross meat feature, and definitely the source of my grandfather's adage:

"anything that tastes good couldn't possibly be bad for you"


June 13, 2007
Critic’s Notebook

Fat, Glorious Fat, Moves to the Center of the Plate
By FRANK BRUNI

I’m not sure it’s possible to behave with much dignity around seven glistening pounds of pork butt, but on a recent night at Momofuku Ssam Bar, five friends and I weren’t even encouraged to try.

Servers didn’t bother to carve the mountain of meat. They didn’t give us any delicate way to do it, either. They just plopped it in the center of the table, handed out sets of tongs, left us to our own devices and let the pig scatter where it may.

It was an ugly scene, and it was a beautiful one. We lunged at the flesh. Tore at it. Yanked it toward ourselves in dripping, jagged hunks, sometimes ignoring the lettuce wraps on the side so we could stuff it straight into our mouths. We looked, I realized, like hyenas at an all-you-can-eat buffet on the veldt, and I wasn’t surprised to notice other diners staring at us.

But what I saw on their faces wasn’t disgust. It was envy. I’d venture that more than a few of them returned to Momofuku for their own pig-outs. The restaurant, after all, sells about two whole pork butts — a term that refers to part of the pig’s shoulder, not to its rump — every night.

These are times of bold temptation, as well as prompt surrender, for a carnivorous glutton in New York.

They’re porky times, fatty times, which is to say very good times indeed. Any new logo for the city could justifiably place the Big Apple in the mouth of a spit-roasted pig, and if the health commissioner were really on his toes, he’d draw up a sizable list of restaurants required to hand out pills of Lipitor instead of after-dinner mints.

The list would encompass more than steakhouses, which have multiplied exponentially over the last five years, because what’s lumbered into particular favor with culinary tastemakers and the food-savvy set isn’t just beef and isn’t just any old piece of meat.

It’s a piece of meat that’s extra-messy, like one of the fat-ringed slabs of lamb at Trestle on Tenth, which opened last year. Sometimes it’s a mammoth cut, sometimes just gooey nuggets of animal parts less conventionally appreciated or lyrically named than the tenderloin.

The menu at Momofuku, which also opened last year and seems to capture the culinary zeitgeist as well as any restaurant, has not only sweetbreads — the gateway offal — but also a veal head terrine that resembles a gelatinous amalgam of everything your mother ever told you to trim from a chop and shove to the side of your plate. That same description applies to a terrine of oxtail and pig’s foot at Trestle on Tenth.

Trestle and Momofuku would be high on the health commissioner’s list, but probably no higher than the new restaurant Resto, where some genius — and I am most certainly not being facetious — decided that deviled eggs aren’t sufficiently rich on their own. No, they need amplification, and of course they need meat, so they’re placed on rectangles of pork jowl. One more thing: these rectangles are deep-fried. At a certain point, I suppose, there’s no turning back.

It’s as if decades of proliferating sushi and shrinking plates, of clean California cuisine and exhortations to graze, have fostered a robust (or is that rotund?) counterculture of chefs and diners eager to cut against the nutritional grain and straight into the bellies of beasts. In fact, bellies (most often pork, more recently lamb) are this counterculture’s LSD.

Its Timothy Leary might well be David Chang, the chef at Momofuku, where steamed buns are filled with strips of pork belly. Or maybe it’s Zak Pelaccio, the chef at the tellingly named restaurant Fatty Crab. One of its best-selling dishes, called the fatty duck, takes strips of a bird not exactly known for its leanness, dusts them with cornstarch and deep-fries them.

The “crispy pork” with pickled watermelon in a dish that Fatty Crab mockingly labels a salad amounts to cubes of fried pork belly, and the rest of the menu (pork ribs, small burgers doused with mayonnaise and aptly named fatty sliders) works a similarly clogged vein. During a recent lunch there with a dauntless friend, I was touched by the way our server — let’s call him Sisyphus — replenished the moist towelettes at our table over and over again. What we really needed him to do was put a dropcloth under us and, at meal’s end, hose us down.

Mr. Pelaccio’s appreciation of a fatty rib extends from pork to lamb, and at the restaurant 5 Ninth, from which he recently severed his ties, he occasionally served lamb ribs, the far reaches of which incorporated bits of lamb belly, he said.

He recalled in a recent telephone conversation that when 5 Ninth opened in the meatpacking district three years ago and he asked one of his suppliers about getting him this meat, he learned that the supplier “was selling his lamb ribs to a woman down the street to grind into dog food.”

Back then, Mr. Pelaccio said, no one much wanted them. “I could buy lamb ribs for a dollar a pound,” he said. “Now it’s $2.50.” Lamb ribs are definitely on the rise.
They’re a fixture at Resto, and that’s no accident: Resto’s executive chef, Ryan Skeen, worked for Mr. Pelaccio at 5 Ninth. And he’s a fellow cholesterol enthusiast, that’s for sure. In addition to putting pork jowl below deviled eggs, he grinds fatback into the restaurant’s burgers and combines pigs’ head meat with mayonnaise in sandwiches served on toasted brioche.

He told me on the phone recently that when he outlined his prospective menu for investors, they asked him if he might want to consider “some lighter dishes, like tuna tartare.”
He nixed that idea. “It wouldn’t be true to my nature,” he said. Lamb ribs, on the other hand, are. “I think the fat of lamb is an amazing flavor.”

So does the chef Seamus Mullen, who just put together a new menu for the Spanish restaurant Suba on the Lower East Side. One of the dishes on it is a lamb triptych including a square of fat-swaddled lamb belly that’s seared on a plancha.

“Fat’s great,” said Mr. Mullen, whose Suba menu also has pork belly — in two dishes. He added that more chefs and diners were coming to that conclusion and realizing that “a well-marbled rib-eye has a lot more flavor than a lean filet mignon.”

Indeed they are, and the prevalence of rib-eyes on menus around town demonstrates that even beyond Momofuku, Resto and the city’s most committed champions of advanced gluttony, there’s an embrace of less prissy, more vigorous eating.

There are other signs of this spirit as well. These days a New York restaurant is more likely to present an entree of Kobe or wagyu beef, which is synonymous with fattiness, than of bison, once touted and promoted for its relative leanness. If a fillet of fish isn’t showered with pork, then it’s wrapped in it, like the monkfish at Cafe Cluny or the sea bass “saltimbocca” at Insieme, both of which wear cloaks of prosciutto.

Meatballs are everywhere, sweetbreads are close behind, and I even detect inklings of a marrow surge, what with the continuing expansion of the Blue Ribbon family and the recent opening, in the Time Warner Center, of a new branch of Landmarc. The Blue Ribbon and Landmarc restaurants are big on marrow bones but don’t go as far as Craftsteak, which serves an appetizer of fried cubes of marrow.

Some of the restaurants in the gluttony brigade have been around a while and helped point the way. Take Prune, which the chef Gabrielle Hamilton opened in 1999, charting a brave and beloved course of battered, deep-fried sweetbreads sauced with bacon and butter; of marrow bones with sea salt; and of house-made lamb sausages.

All of these dishes have been on Ms. Hamilton’s menu from the start, when it was much more surprising for diners to encounter them and, she recalls, people struggled to describe the little restaurant’s big fare.

“I think it got called a lot of things, like a macho-eating menu,” she said, adding that she hastened to warn diners that “it could be gross if you have the sweetbreads and the bones and the chocolate cake. You eat one of those things.”

A year before Prune came Babbo, where the chef Mario Batali scattered organ meat across the menu and presaged the lardo pizza he would serve at Otto with lardo bruschetta, though he didn’t have the nerve to call it that. He told diners that the toasted bread was covered in prosciutto bianco, or white prosciutto, a nonsense term he coined to disguise the truth.
“I knew that they wouldn’t eat it if I just said, ‘This is the fat of a pig melted onto toast,’ ” Mr. Batali told me.

Now, however, “lardo is sought after, and it no longer raises people’s hackles,” he said in a recent phone conversation. “People finally realize that fat is truly delicious, particularly pork fat.”

The unabashed names of the restaurants that feed that creed support his assertion. In addition to Fatty Crab there are, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, Pies ’n’ Thighs and Fette Sau, German for fat pig.

There’s also the Spotted Pig, a Greenwich Village gastropub in which Mr. Batali is an investor. The British chef April Bloomfield guides its kitchen, which turns out roasted pork sandwiches, hamburgers dripping with melted Roquefort and toast slathered with chicken liver. Like Mr. Pelaccio and Mr. Chang, Ms. Bloomfield is among the city’s most celebrated young chefs.
Fette Sau belongs to a posse of new barbecue joints, the spread of which, along with the growth in gastropubs, is yet another sign of these fleshy, flabby times. Even slightly older joints have raised the level of their game of late.

Last year Daisy May’s BBQ U.S.A., which opened in 2003, began serving not only whole pork butts but also whole pigs. They weigh 30 to 35 pounds, are meant to feed a dozen or so people and cost $480. Adam Perry Lang, the chef and co-owner of Daisy May’s, says that he sells at least two of them a night.

It’s some ritual. Before the platter of pig appeared before the group I’d assembled, a server set up two perpendicular wood braces to support it. They formed a cross, a reminder — as if we would need one — that something died for the deadly sin dearest to us.

That something was pretty much intact: snout pointed straight toward me, two little ears, four little hooves and a profoundly bronzed hide. The server carved into that skin and peeled away flaps of it, exposing a lustrous layer of fat and a deep reservoir of meat. The rest was up to us, a few sets of plastic tongs and some dull plastic knives.

“This really puts you in touch with your barbaric self,” said a woman in our group as she tugged at individual ribs along the pig’s midsection. Her fingers were slick with grease.
A man in the group flashed back to his two previous dinners. “I had suckling pig in Boston on Saturday,” he said. “I had a pork chop at ’Inoteca last night.”

He paused for a beat, then added: “It’s a lifestyle choice.”

So it is, and there’s a wicked, wonderful cluster of restaurants to support it.

A Glutton's Guide to New York

Craftsteak 85 10th Avenue (15th Street); (212) 400-6699 . Fried marrow.

DAISY MAY’S BBQ U.S.A., 623 11th Avenue (46th Street), (212) 977-1500 . Whole pork butt, whole pig.

FATTY CRAB 643 Hudson Street (Horatio Street); (212) 352-3590 or 3592. Fatty duck, pork belly and watermelon “salad,” pork ribs, fatty sliders.

MOMOFUKU SSAM BAR 207 Second Avenue (13th Street); (212) 254-3500 . Whole pork butt, steamed pork belly buns, sweetbreads, veal head terrine.

OTTO 1 Fifth Avenue (Eighth Street); (212) 995-9559 . Lardo pizza.

PRUNE 54 East First Street (First Avenue); (212) 677-6221 . Sweetbreads, marrow bones, lamb sausage.

RESTO, 111 East 29th Street; (212) 685-5585 . Deviled eggs on pork jowl, burger with fatback, pig’s head sandwiches, lamb ribs.

The Spotted Pig 314 West 11th Street (Greenwich Street); (212) 620-0393 . Cubano pork sandwich, burger with Roquefort, chicken liver toast.

SUBA 109 Ludlow Street (Delancey Street); (212) 982-5714 . Lamb belly.

TRESTLE ON TENTH 242 10th Avenue (24th Street); (212) 645-5659 . Saddle of lamb, oxtail and pig’s foot terrine.