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'Nightline' Reveals Supposed Secrets of 'Iron Chef America'
As the most frequent judge on Iron Chef, permit me to clear up a few things:
Who gives a f--k whether the Iron Chef is chosen on the spot; whether somebody with Mario's shape is standing in while Mario himself is somewhere in Spain or Del Posto; or whether Mark (a fine martial artist who does backflips on the stage to amuse the rest of us) really is the Japanese chairman's grandson or newphew?
When you watch the Japanese ancestor of ICA, do you believe the polymorphously perverse chairman is truly a Japanese nobleman who lives in a castle with three Iron Chefs. (You shouldn't: he's a Japanese actor who played Jesus in the first Japanese production of "Jesus Christ Superstar." ) As I may have mentioned before, who gives a f--k?
The important thing is the cooking! And the cooking happens right in front of the audience and the judges in the span of exactly one hour. I've never seen that one hour extended or interrupted (as is all the TV frippery at the start and finish). Kindageeky (just above) has it pretty much as I've guessed it; the producers would do better to explain the secret ingredient and knowledge of it more frankly--to stifle the more extreme forms of skepticism. Listen to Kindageeky.
The food is nearly always good, even if it doesn't meet my two overall tests--would I actually pay for this dish, and would I ever want to eat it again? To my surprize, at least one-fourth of the dishes we're expected to eat are good enough to find a place at any modern American restaurant in this country. And there's nothing fake about it. Winning on Iron Chef is a very special and particular skill, and not necessarily the sign of a fine chef. Tracy Des Jardin, for example, is a wonderful cook who has done poorly on both Iron Chef and Next Iron Chef. And there have been others like Tracy.
One of my favorite American chefs (from the Berkeley-Oakland megalopolis) once asked me, gently, how I can believe in the value of fast cooking. All of us these days prize slow food, not as an ideology or formal organization, but as a belief that so many wonderful things (including, for example, real barbecue and peaches ripening on their trees and aged Scotch and wine and cheese) require lots of time and attention. In exchange, they yield incomparable sensual experiences; all of them make us all extremely happy when they're done right--and slow.
Yes, but contests like Iron Chef are something else--an entertainment that just happens (unlike, say, Top Chef) to show us some of the special skills of some of the finest American chefs. As Vogue's food critic, I get to eat at pretty much any restaurant in the world I wish. But the standard is sometimes set by Iron Chef. I've never eaten a Foie Gras Chawan Mushi that actually transported and transfixed me as the one Morimoto made on Battle Someting or other--maybe duck. (Even the version at his own restaurant and a version I enjoyed at a modern Chinese restaurant in Beijing didn't compare. And I don't think Morimoto remembers how to make the ICA version.) Not only would I pay to eat that dish again, I would pay double or quadruple, if I could charge it to Vogue.
I know that the Food Network has narrowed it focus and its audience over the past ten years, and the result is too often disappointing. But with ICA, they've figured out how to lure a general TV audience into a fascination with great, modern American food. There's nothing else like that on television.
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This post will not make me popular. Is DiFara's transcendent or merely epiphanic? As a professional food critic, I can report only on food I have eaten. I have visited DiFara's just twice, once two years ago and again about ten months ago--both times mid-week and mid-afternoon. And both pizzas I ordered were banal or worse.
I consider pizza among the most important foods on Earth, for reasons I have written and would be happy to write again and again, but not right now. And so when I stumbled upon another series of disappointing peans to diFara, I finally could not longer stiffle my continual instinct to increase the volume of truth in the Cosmos rather than decrease it. No, that sounds grandiose. It is just that we all have the duty not to increase ignorance--in either the Dewey-decimal-sense of the word or the Buddhist sense, which may not be applicable here.
Adam, a long line means less in New York City than it means elsewhere. Can you imagine the people of a small town in the Sierras forming a long line to buy a banal (or worse) pizza? In New York City, Manhattan in particular, long lines form because they were long yesterday or because this morning they began long and consequently will not shrink for the rest of the day. A mathematician should study this. Or a statistician. But for now we can benefit from an analogy to the word "factoid," which became current, as I remember it, about four years ago, especially on cable news network stations. But it was used to mean, "a tiny fact" or "a fact of so little significance that if I called it a fact, you would consider me trivial, which of course I am."
The definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, the O.E.D., is far more useful:
factoid, n. and a.
n. Something that becomes accepted as a fact, although it is not (or may not be) true; spec. an assumption or speculation reported and repeated so often that it is popularly considered true; a simulated or imagined fact.
1973 N. Mailer Marilyn i. 18/2 Factoids+that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.
Naive and trustful as I am, I did not understand the application of the factoid principle to food until I stood in line for two hours to get into Tomoe Sushi on Thompson Street, which for several years had received a 27 rating in Zagat. The slices of fish were awkward, clumsy, warm, outsized, and while not "fishy" tasting, not remarkably fresh. It was time to return to Freud's analysis of the madness of crowds. Maybe someday.
For now, I'll summarize and abbreviate my view of what an ideal pizza should be: A pizza is a flatbread with a sparse but often intensely-flavorful topping, usually of Italian origin, especially in its olive oil. It is not an edible platter for Italian cold cuts, cheeses, and marinated, roasted vegetables. It is a flatbread, a wonderfully delicious, yeasty flatbread baked on a hearth; the hearth can be the stone or metal floor of an electric or gas deck oven, but small logs of wood burning on a stone surface are preferable for both flavor and temperature, which ideally should vary between about 600 dg. F. at the hearth and 800 or 900 dg. in the air above it, just right for finishing the flatbread in 90 to 120 seconds so that the dough underneath the pizza is crisp and charred; the top and topping are burnished and bubbling; and the dough in between is more chewy than crunchy or bready; and the rim of dough around the circumference is puffy and crisp and shot through with bubbles of air. (The Italians call it the cornichone, which sounds like the French corniches, the three highways that curve above the Riviera. The crust should have the assertive taste of roasted, yeasted, refined wheat.
This pizza, this flatbread, is little different from the first yeasted bread ever baked, on a stone--perhaps three thousand years ago in Egypt, which is why I become sentimental and even teary whenever I consider pizza in its very heart and essence.
I don't become teary or sentimental at DiFara's. Di Fara's is the Tomoe Sushi of wood-baked yeasted flatbread.
A good pizza is a flatbread with