http://thepour.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/2...t-was-the-chef/
March 24, 2008, 6:23 pm
Salty and Unpleasant,
And That Was the Chef
Tags: california, pairings, White Wine


How can you pair a wine with a funky ham? (Tony Cenicola/The New York Times)Had lunch the other day at Momofuku Ssam Bar with Andy Peay of Peay Vineyards on the Sonoma Coast. Andy, who travels the country preaching the gospel of Peay, was in town for industry tastings and wine dinners, so lunch was a good time to catch up.
He had never been to any of the Momofuku restaurants, and I felt Ssam Bar gave us the best chance of leisurely eating in reasonable comfort. The lunch menu is just a shadow of the more complete dinner menu, but it has enough to keep it interesting.
Country ham, for one thing. They serve four different hams, sliced thin, generously arrayed unadorned over a plate. We ordered, among other things, two different plates, an unsmoked ham from Finchville Farms in Kentucky and a smoked Smoky Mountain ham from Benton’s in Tennessee.
I tried the Finchville ham first, and — yikes! — it had a most unpleasant funk to it, kind of a fetid wet newspaper flavor. I mentioned it to Andy and he looked at it carefully. “It’s still got mold on it,’’ he said.
Sure enough, even though the ham was sliced thin, a layer of whitish mold clung to the edges. Anybody who’s dealt with country hams knows that they often get moldy on the outside as they age. The first thing you do when you take a ham home is scrub off any mold.
We got a knife from the waitress and cut it off but the ham slices were so imbued with the flavor of the mold that it did no good. We hailed the waitress and asked her to show it to the chef and to express our feeling that it was no good.
This may not have been the best strategy since the chef — it was not David Chang — was not having a good afternoon. Through the open kitchen we could see him doing his best impersonation of a French tyrant, yelling at the staff and dropping f-bombs right and left. (Note to chefs: if you’re working in an open kitchen, play nice.) Not surprisingly, the waitress returned to tell us that the chef insisted the ham was fine. The restaurant charged me for it, too.
Chalk it up to experience. The Peay 2004 chardonnay, which I last had a year or so ago, was still a baby, tight yet minerally with a nice, leesy texture. It went well with our remaining ham, as it did with the terrific brussels’ sprouts, flavored with mint and fish sauce, and our other dishes.
Then, it hit me: I’ve had plenty of corked wines before, but this was my first corked ham.
We should’ve insisted that the chef eat it.


I LOVE THIS TOWN!!!

To Comment#22:

Y'know (much to Eater's blatant chagrin), I happen to know a LOT of people in the NYC restaurant industry-- but that's just cuz serving 20+ years time in all manner of places will do that to a person, evidently.

Now, do I think the Momo's are AWESOME? No. Do I think David Chang is the second coming of Christ? No. Do I think Ssam deserved two stars? Hell fucking no.

I have heard many things about David Chang, and to be fair (and to his credit), it seems to me the industry-wide general consensus is: he is indeed a genuinely very nice guy who DOES in fact love his staff and treats them quite well. (I highly doubt he hates his patrons, either.)

In this case, I must concur: if you're sick of all his nauseatingly overwrought hype, blame the game, not the player. (They're stupid and have nothing better to write about, don't you get it?)

I'm just sayin.

abbe diaz
PX This.
Comment #26, left at 03/26/08 03:42 PM.
http://eater.com/archives/2008/03/when_the...p#comment-73744

dave is a total sweetheart!