Really, though, this business concept will work in other, more permanent, spaces as well.  I have designed the logo and graphic language for the concept.  I have also designed the menu and developed all the recipes.  This could be a very fun Summer start-up project.  I am currently looking for space and investing partners.  Please contact me if you would like more details.

Quoted from the Apple post-purchase Customer Survey that I filled out after buying an iPad 2 at their Manhattan Upper West Side store:

“That day was the fourth day that I arrived at the Apple Store at 6AM to stand in line to buy an iPad (Thurs 21st, Fri 22nd, Sat 23rd & Mon 25th). On Thursday, Friday and Saturday, after waiting for between 20 minutes – 1 hour, we were told there were no iPads that day.  This evident disconnect between the channels of distribution and Apple’s own branded retail store seems ridiculous to me.  Especially from a tech company such as Apple.  A company that tracks and reviews every song download and iPhone/iPad application proposal.  For the retail store to tell me and every other customer that they “have no idea” what they will be receiving that day is crazy.  Someone does.  Even possibly as little as two people up the supply chain.  If Apple wanted to have that information available, they (you) would.  What if a potential customer could log onto iTunes or a special Apple website at midnight the night before and find out what each store would be offering in the morning: 10 iPad 64G, 15 iPad 32G AT&T, etc.  Or none for that matter.  That way the customer wouldn’t have to waste their time getting up ridiculously early and go to the store only to find that, oops!, there are no iPads that day.  Come back tomorrow and try again!  Apple would still sell the same amount of iPads.

And please do not use the excuse that giving out this retail availability information would allow people to game the system.  The system is already being gamed.  12 of the 13 people ahead of me in line yesterday morning were Chinese.  I tweeted a photo of it if you would like to see evidence.  They all bought two iPads.  And the ones that I saw while I was waiting to purchase mine all paid in cash.  I am not sure what is going on here but I bet someone at Apple does.  Is a blind eye being turned?  The New York Times even wrote an article about it happening at the Soho store a few months ago in regards to the iPhone 4.

I am a designer and brand consultant so I understand the concept of leveraging distribution to build demand.  But if the system that is put in place to manage demand is not designed correctly, it has the potential of doing harm to the brand image.  Maybe I am alone in thinking this, but to me it does not take much thought to realize that Apple’s system of distribution and customer information is flawed.  And we the customers suffer.  If I didn’t need this iPad for a trip this week I would have never stood in line four times and be turned away three times to buy one.  I definitely won’t do it again.  I like Apple.  But I like Apple a lot less than I did before standing in line a week ago.”

Jimmy’s No. 43 Restaurant in New York’s East Village recently held a friendly competition to benefit Food Systems Network NYC.  The competition, winkingly titled a ‘Duck-Off’ asked participants to serve a duck dish of their choosing to 150 people.  The judging panel, made up of Serena Di LIberto of Heritage Foods USA, Amy Zavatto of Edible Magazine, Food Network’s Jake Schiffman, Ariane Daguin of D’Artagnan, and writer Adam Robb, would be judging the dishes not only on taste but also on creativity, regional sourcing and seasonality of the ingredients used.  More info about the event can be found here.  After noticing an Edible tweet about it, I stumbled into being a contestant.

I have recently been developing a few meatball recipes so I decided to try to push my duck dish in that direction. Letting my creativity get the better of me… I served duck confit meatballs in a red wine ‘re-Duck-tion’ sauce along with duck liver pate, pickled oyster mushroom, fresh ricotta, asparagus pesto, pickled Spring onion and fiddlehead fern puree.  Oh and a little micro sprout to top it off.  A ridiculous amount of components.  But it was fun and we managed to plate all 150 dishes without too much trouble.  Also, I am honored to say, I ended up winning the competition!  My duck meatballs were awarded 3rd place in the ‘People’s Choice’ category, and 1st place as well as ‘Grand Prize’ in the judges category.  I was thrilled to accept the ‘Golden Ducky’ award.

A nice video of the event is here:

Jimmy’s No. 43 Duck-Off to Benefit Food Systems NYC from Letitia Productions on Vimeo

The ‘Duck-Off’ competition at Jimmy’s No. 43 was great fun.  The other contestants served some amazing duck dishes.  Over 150 people packed into the meandering restaurant, ate lots of duck and, best of all, supported Food Systems Network NYC.  Thanks to Jimmy and to Danielle for making it happen!  Thanks also to Hudson Valley Duck Farm for supplying me with some super tasty duck and duck livers!  Good stuff!

This negative incentive for chefs to shovel uninspired food to the deal-seeking eaters I find to be a real bummer of a product of the Restaurant Week formula.  I am not sure if these offending chefs of which I speak realize – maybe they do but just don’t care – is that some of us Restaurant Week diners are avid food enthusiasts and are taking the opportunity to try two or three different restaurants instead of just one (hey, not all of us have unlimited budgets) with the thought of returning at a later date for the full-ticket meal if we are wow-ed by what we ate.  But more often than not I leave a Restaurant Week meal disappointed and with more questions than answers.  ”Do they serve that to normal diners?”  ”Does that (insert menu item here) typically taste under salted and gummy?”  I end up wondering if it would be better that I just stay away from Restaurant Week dinners in hopes of staving off negative reviews of restaurants that I have not tried before and, after that lack-luster meal, will probably not ever try again.

So these are the thoughts that were running through my head when the boss said, “hey, Restaurant Week is starting.  Why don’t you look through the list and pick one or two.”  I started to sweat.  Not to mention that the start of the promotion coincided with my birthday.  I love birthdays in that they (mine or hers) are a great excuse to splash out on an amazing dinner at a seriously good restaurant.  No no, she assured me.  We have plans to go to Blue Hill Stone Barns next week so that will count for birthday splurge.  She just wanted something nice on the actual day.  Bless her.  Not to mention that she quickly pointed out that Dovetail was on the Restaurant Week list.  I started to sweat more.  We had been to Dovetail when it first opened a couple years ago and really enjoyed it.  I was worried that a Restaurant Week visit might ruin my estimation of it.  But… what if…  I couldn’t resist. We made a reservation and went.

And I am happy to say that I am glad that we did.  In one fell swoop Dovetail and chef John Fraser’s food have restored in me the hope that good food can be found in the jungle that is Restaurant Week.  Our meal at Dovetail was very very good.  The squid and melon salad was a sea-tinged mix of sweet and savory.  The gnocchi were comforting yet light, bathed in a delicious corn veloute. The braised veal had been coaxed to a superbly tender finish.  Evidence that traditional cooking methods, when done correctly, can yield food just as good as anything to come out of a sous vide bath.  And the hake dish was a deftly handled play on subtlety, the fish light and well cooked, the tomato ’stew’ adding a touch of acidity and the delicious shrimp giving a briny highlight to the ensemble.  Very nice.

A quick side note…  The dining room at Dovetail, designed by architect Richard Bloch, is nice.  Though a little stiff and hard edged.  Not quite as ‘luxurious’, maybe, as the food that it is meant to showcase.  Details such as the stainless cables the curtains are hung on feel more ‘architecty’ than fully thought out in terms of the bigger picture.  And the Dovetail logo, as nice as it is,  has always given me pause.  The ‘V’ looking a little more mutated and ‘grabby’ than visually expressing the concepts of craftsmanship, precision and expert pairing that I feel the name ‘Dovetail’ might be trying to express.  But, overall, Dovetail is a warm and handsome restaurant and a nice backdrop for its food.  To which we shall now return…

Sure the Restaurant Week menu was less extravagant than Dovetail’s typical tasting menus.  No duck or dungeness crab.  But the food that chef Fraser conceived for the promotion I think was a fitting representation of what Dovetail can do.  Our dinner showed a thoughtfulness of conception and an expert execution that I remember from our last full tasting meal there.  This, I think, was a great example of how the Restaurant Week promotion should be handled by the chefs involved in it.  Taking a long view, being creative with the dishes that are served to the price incentivized diners now, with the hope that they will enjoy their meal enough to tell others about it and to come back for all the fireworks the kitchen is capable of in the future.  If the chefs succumb to their incentive to not put any effort into what they serve for Restaurant Week, they risk loosing possible customers forever.  I know there are a couple such places that I do not feel the need to return to…

Chef John Fraser is to be commended for taking the time and the care to conceive of a great Restaurant Week menu.  We had a lovely time and really enjoyed the food.  Not to mention the added bonus of being able to chat with the chef himself as he walked through the dining room.  Imagine that – a chef that cooks in his own kitchen.  And during Restaurant Week no less.  We will definitely be back to Dovetail in the near future.

Last month curator and writer Nicola Twilley, who writes the fascinating blog ‘edible geography’, put together an exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture entitled ‘Landscapes of Quarantine’.  As part of the exhibit Nicola commissioned Michael Cirino of ‘culinary experience’ A Razor A Shiny Knife to put on two nights of dinners based on the concept of ‘quarantine’.  Being a sometime collaborator with A Razor, Michael asked me to design the menu for the dinners.  The menus were a lot of fun to design, allowing me to play with imagery of virus and bacteria close-ups as well as the graphic language of pharmaceuticals and health care.  A detail of the menu is shown above but the full menu can be seen here:

The dinners were a great success.  We walked away happy from a well conceived and orchestrated event as well as relief that we hadn’t caught something in the process.  But today Nicola informed me and the rest of the A Razor A Shiny Knife crew that she had contacted the NYPL’s culinary archivist and submitted the menu for our event.  The archivist accepted it and I am happy to say that it is the first piece of my design work to be catalogued in the New York Public Library.  Now just to land a book deal…

All jokes aside, it was raining so we hurried into this renowned pizza shrine as we were downright reverent.  And hungry.  Inside there were easily twenty people standing in relative silence patiently waiting for their pizza.  It turns out that a stroller works pretty well as a people plough so we managed to ‘excuse me’ our way up to the counter without too much trouble.  My first welcome surprise was that the woman that took my order was pleasant and smiling.  Much  different than the ‘Pizza Nazi’ attitude I was fully prepared to endure.  I quickly placed our order for one regular pie.  That’s right… a regular pie.  No messing around with fussy toppings and risk upsetting the delicate ingredient proportion equilibrium.  I wanted to let the pizza master be the pizza master and just do a pizza the way he does it best. 

We then proceeded to wait

And wait.

But all this waiting is a typical experience.  Dom makes each pie by hand so the production output is a little on the slow side.  But you can tell by watching him that he cares about each pizza and about each ingredient that goes into it.  It was so refreshingly surprising to see how nice Dom and the two daughters that were working with him that day were to all of the customers.  They really didn’t have to be.  Us people will still line up for this superb pizza regardless of the staff’s mood.  But the women were kind and pleasant to everyone.  Even those that checked on their order’s status multiple times.  And Dom, as he snipped fresh basil and sprinkled a handful of shredded grana padano onto each finished pie, made a point of asking, “Is this yours?” to the customer standing at the counter.  Even that little gesture of the master looking the person in the eye, connecting his pizza to the person and then passing his creation on to them I thought was a very nice touch.  It is obvious that Dom cares about his pizza.  And he cares about his customers. 

The Di Fara customers, speaking of, are the wild card of the whole experience.  Waiting for a Di Fara pizza is serious business.  People travel long distances to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in this tattered little shop.  And the combination of aching feet, politeness fatigue, and ravenous hunger can put nerves on edge.  For the most part everyone on the afternoon we went was great.  Civil, polite and obedient in observing the social contract.  But there were a couple mumblers in the bunch.  “I can’t believe it is taking this long.”  “I was here before that guy, why is he getting a pizza?”  Etc.  Etc.  All to be expected for waits this long on an empty stomach.  It only becomes awkward when the mumblers turn to you and try to drag you into their low-decibel monologue.  Best to be prepared to smile and nod sympathetically to whoever looks at you.  And then pretend to be distracted by something else.

The wait for our pizza ended up being an hour and twenty minutes.  After an hour on the train.  And then an hour on the train to get home.  A total of three hours and twenty minutes of pilgrimage operational process.  All for a pizza eating experience that lasted maybe fifteen minutes.  Sound crazy?  Definitely.  Was it worth it?  Absolutely.

The Di Fara pizza is most certainly deserving of its reputation for being one of the very best in New York City.  So simple yet so transcendent.  The multidimensional crust the perfect base to a compilation of top-notch ingredients.  The center dough thin and chewy with hints of crispiness while the outer crust billows into pillowy sections of crispy crunch giving way to a chewy bread-like interior.  With bits of char scattered about as flinty taste counter-point.  And the three-cheese combination is perfectly balanced in composition and proportion.  The pizza’s melted base of both fresh and aged mozzarella gives the pie a good depth of character to build upon.  And the addition of a handful of grated grana padano scattered when the pie comes out of the oven is pure genius.  As the pizza is eaten, the diner is able to experience the grana padano as it struggles through its transition between two states.  From its raw state of unadulterated sharp saltiness to the oozy comfort of the cheese in melted form, each bite has the potential to capture not three but four cheese taste characteristics.  For the price of three! 

All of the cheeses and the sublime dough are accompanied by taste accents from top-notch ingredients.  The tomato sauce is San Marzano.  The olive oil is good Italian stuff which Dom drizzles, nay… douses, the pie with both before and after the oven.  Again expanding on the potential of taste character from both fresh to cooked.  And the addition of fresh cut basil at the end caps the whole taste experience off with a lovely herbaceous high note and aroma that would be otherwise muted and largely lost if the herb was allowed to bake with the pie.  All of these high quality ingredients expertly composed and transformed to form a delicious pizza whose taste is greater than the sum of its parts.  That’s Di Fara pizza magic.  And totally worth the trip.

But, after personally witnessing Dom DeMarco’s sublime pizza operation for myself I think that I have figured out the secret to the whole Di Fara’s experience.  Wanna know the secret?  Here it is:

There is no secret.

There is no ancient coal oven imparting mystical smokey-charred taste.  There is no secret recipe.  Sure the dough is great but there are other pizza places in town that make great dough.  And, really, dough ingredients are so simple that there is not much room for adjustment.  There is no secret ingredient added behind the scenes.  Heck, you can stand there and watch the guy make every single pizza.  No, there is nothing that Dom DeMarco knows that you don’t have access to yourself. 

But that is just it.  The thing that makes Di Fara so good is that they use only great ingredients to make their pizzas.  Great tomatoes, great cheeses, good olive oil and fresh basil.  And they don’t skimp.  Anyone could use these same ingredients.  On the long train ride home I was thinking that any crummy pizza place in the city could change up their operation and make killer pizzas very similar to Di Fara’s.  But they don’t.  Why not?  That is what is so maddening about it.  If you have a good pizza oven and some basic business insight, great pizza that people will clamour for is within your reach.  But very few pizza makers understand this.  So people like me have to travel from all over the place out to sleepy Midwood, Brooklyn for some of the very best pizza in the city.  In the country possibly.

Dom DeMarco’s genius is a straight forward one.  Just use great ingredients to make great pizza and the rest of the business equation will fall into place.  That is what he does every day that Di Fara’s is open.  Pizza is Dom DeMarco’s soul focus.  His passion.  His meditation.  And maybe, now that I think about it, that is the actual secret behind Di Fara’s.  Hidden in plain sight for everyone to see.  The tiny details that make up the process.  How the dough is treated, the careful proportion of sauce and cheese, the length of time a pizza spends in the oven.  How often it is turned while baking.  The right sized handful of grana padano and just the right motion to scatter it.  These sorts of little motions and details that have a cumulative effect on the final product.  All of which can, of course, be learned and recreated.  But it is more than just learned behavior that Mr. DeMarco uses in making his pizzas.   He actually cares about each and every pie that moves across his counter is and shaped by his hands.  And he cares about the people eating his pizzas.  His taking the time to speak to each person that he hands a pizza over to is a subtle, yet very powerful part of the experience.  It is obvious to any attentive observer that he loves what he does.  And it is evident in his pizzas.  Maybe that is the real secret behind Di Fara’s Pizza.  A pilgrimage worth taking.