cook central

For some odd reason people keep inviting me places...

Last night a friend invited me over for dinner. It turned out everyone at the dinner was in the restaurant business. John, who trained at the CIA in NYC and cooks at a well known japanese restaurant, made the dinner, and was kind enough to let me sit in the kitchen and watch what he did. He also answered all of my questions, even the ones unrelated to dinner (e.g. how to make bone marrow soup, what brains taste like).

John made this meat thing that's like filet mignon but a cheaper cut (can't remember what it was called, I should have written it down). He said that it's cheaper because people don't like the way it looks (it looked like a just born puppy still in the birth sack until he cut it up). He also made au gratin potatoes and broccoli rabe. Everything was excellent.

There was also in attendance M who's been John's best friend since he was 4, a guy who is opening a ramen place near my house, and another guy, K, who invests in restaurants among other things. Ramen guy invited me to the soft launch of his restaurant and was lamenting the fact that there are "so many fucking foodies" in my 'hood. John and K discussed what it would take for John to open his own restaurant. When the shop talk got too technical I talked to M who used to be a marine.

The conversation kept turning (and not because of me, I swear) to offal and eating things like squirrels and snakes. Apparently with offal you should cook it down and wash it a lot (John said for 10 lbs of raw offal you should end up with 2 lbs when it's done cooking and that it should be washed 5 times, else you are eating, as he eloquently put it, "some animal's poop"). Then K and ramen guy tried to convince me that they could cook a squirrel in such a way that I would think it was the best thing I'd ever eaten. John said he was sure he could get me to eat liver. I was like "why can't you guys make me a pizza instead?"

They also talked about some cooking contest thing that had just gone on. John and ramen guy were talking about the prize, the big green egg. Both John and ramen guy are obsessed with it and want a big green egg (ramen's wife won't let him buy one until he gets rid of other kitchen stuff, and John doesn't have room for one at the moment). Ramen said the contest is kind of bullshit because if the winner already has a big green egg (at this point in the evening there was a lot of drinking going on, I was told that's what people in the restaurant business do, so some of the stories were a little unclear) they don't get to take the big green egg as a prize, they just win the contest. John said "I think that's the same fucking big green egg from 10 years ago".

Around 8:45 I decided it was time to head home. My friend called me 10 minutes later to say I broke up the party and then asked if I had any extra dish soap.

No shock my contribution to the dinner party was a cleaning product...