Food for thought: Eye on The Record

I launched a new blog today, Eye on The Record, a critical look at the daily newspaper in northern New Jersey where I worked for 29 years as a reporter, copy editor and food writer. I welcome all comments, anonymous or otherwise. Here is the link:

http://eyeontherecord.blogspot.com/

Wrong choice for Thai food in Hackensack

Bangkok Garden Thai Restaurant in Hackensack was awarded two and a half stars today by restaurant reviewer Elisa Ung of The Record, but lovers of Thai food know the only place to go in River City is Wondee's Fine Thai Food & Noodles.


Wondee's is only a couple of blocks from its white-tablecloth competitor on Main Street. Chef Wandee Suwangbutra turns out dish after dish with sparkling flavors, and her food is a better value. You'll save even more by bringing your own wine or beer; Bangkok Garden has a liquor license.

Wandee told me in an interview in 2005 that she especially got a kick out of how her homemade curries and other dishes have made loyal customers of of workers from competing Thai restaurants. I ate at Bangkok Garden only one time several years ago, but never went back.

The rating of Bangkok Garden -- between good and excellent -- also calls into question the reviewer's judgment. She gives it only a half star more than Bahama Breeze, the faux Caribbean chain restaurant in Wayne she reviewed in September. In the Thai review, Ung lists one of her recommended dishes incorrectly. It's green papaya salad, not papaya salad.

Each time I taste Wondee's green papaya salad, it reminds me of  "The Scent of Green Papaya" (1993), a beautiful but heart-breaking movie set in Vietnam.

Tell me more about food, less about decor

Few restaurants in North Jersey tell you where the food they serve comes from, perhaps fearing that if you knew, you'd run for the exit. Exceptions include Tasteatery in Fort Lee and Green Door Cafe in Tenafly.

That's one of the reason I almost always choose seafood, preferably wild-caught seafood, when I dine out with my wife and son. Where seafood is not available, I take a leap of faith, figuring one meal of mystery meat or poultry won't kill me and trusting that most restaurateurs put their customers first and profits second.

Now, The Record of Hackensack reports in its Starters feature, Bistro 55 has opened in Rochelle Park, in the space once occupied by South City Grill. Yes, this is part of the South City [Restaurant] Group, which has been the subject of nearly overwhelmingly positive stories in the newspaper since restaurant reviewer Elisa Ung slammed South City Prime in March 2008 for "too-rare steaks and rotten sushi."

In today's Better Living article about Bistro 55, writer Amy Kuperinsky tells us a great deal about the origin, or provenance, of some of the food served, quoting the chef: drug-free chicken from the Goffle Road Poultry Farm in Wyckoff; sea scallops from Viking Village, the fishing cooperative in Barnegat Light; and antibiotic-free veal from Vineland. Still, the restaurant serves burgers made from grain-fed -- not grass-fed -- beef.

On the very next page of the Better Living tabloid today, Ung reviews Bazzini in Ridgewood, and in typical fashion, tells us virtually nothing about the origin of the food, except to note one entree she tried was "organic or free-range chicken." The veal in the meatballs? The New York strip steak? Your guess is as good as mine.

The Record turns its back on frugal dining

Eating Out on $50 once was a popular monthly restaurant feature in The Record of Hackensack, because it focused on places where four people could eat well for that amount, including tax and tip. I wrote more than a dozen of those reviews in 2005-06, when I was employed there, and the newspaper paid for the meals.

But this year, in a bid to save money, the reviewer only writes about restaurants where two people can eat for $50. How did the change save money? The reviewer, a former reporter by the name of Jeff Page, was having an increasingly difficult time finding restaurants that could feed four for $50. So the editors, rather than boosting the amount Jeff is reimbursed for a meal to $60 or $70, kept it at $50, but knocked off two diners.

Do we really need The Record's help in finding restaurants that can feed two people for $50? They are a dime a dozen. Today's Eating Out on $50 review is of La Batalla in Bergenfield, a Mexican restaurant where the food sounds pretty unexciting, the usual Americanized mix of loads of melted cheese and tame spicing.

When The Record started the $50 restaurant reviews, it appeared the main goal was service to readers. But the food editor at the time dissuaded me of that notion, explaining the newspaper's prime motive was to cut the cost of buying restaurant meals for its reviewers. Nothing seems to have changed much.

Healthy cooking with tuna?

The list of cooking classes in today's Better Living section of The Record of Hackensack ends with one you may want to avoid if you are concerned about mercury in fish.

"FISH COOKERY: Healthy cooking with tuna and other fish ... at the Viking Cooking School in Fairfield."

Fresh tuna is among the fish with the highest levels of mercury, according to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration.

News flash: Peruvian opens restaurant

The Record of Hackensack ran a news article on Wednesday about the tens of thousands of Peruvians in North Jersey who began migrating here in the 1950s, drawn by textile mill jobs in Paterson.

The newspaper said the Peruvian-American community in the state is the largest in the U.S. and that Peruvians own 45 restaurants in Paterson alone.

Then, on Friday, The Record's restaurant reviewer, Elisa Ung, declared that a Peruvian-Cuban couple who opened a Peruvian restaurant in Clifton "aim to introduce Peruvian culture to the North Jersey dining scene."

Peruvian food may be new to Ung, but not to me and thousands of other non-Peruvians who have enjoyed dining at Peruvian restaurants in the city of Passaic and Clifton for many years. Jaimito's in Clifton and the El Chevere restaurant group in Passaic are my personal favorites.

For example, Pollos El Chevere on Washington Place in Passaic, just steps from Main Avenue, is a busy, clean, well-run restaurant with a liquor license and a full menu of Peruvian specialties, including the signature marinated rotisserie chicken. The restaurant's Japanese-Peruvian business partners have another place nearby that offers anticuchos, the beef heart loved by Peruvians.

One of the great dishes at Jaimito's is tallerin verde, linguine in pesto sauce topped with a large, fried fillet of fish. The chef-owner is Chinese-Peruvian.

Uncle Paulie's Puro Sabor is a new Peruvian restaurant in Maywood that serves large portions of tasty food at reasonable prices.

Greek restaurant executes fish

A Greek restaurant in Ramsey appears to be lopping off the heads of fresh fish with a guillotine or maybe lining them up in front of a firing squad.

That's what I understood from The Record's report today on Varka Estiatorio, where, the reviewer writes in the data box, the food is "exceptionally executed." I think she meant to say "well-executed," but her copy editor was probably out to lunch.

It's unclear why The Record's Elisa Ung reviewed this restaurant, which has undergone no major changes since the initial, three-star review in 2005, or why it got a three-and-a-half-star rating, despite some poorly prepared dishes, farmed fish for up to $29 a pound, and one of the waiter's dropping a fresh pompano on the floor and then returning it to the display.

Could it be that the restaurant is a regular advertiser and asked for another review after Ung gave three-and-a-half stars in April to a new, competing, Greek fish house in Englewood, Nisi Estiatorio?

The Englewood restaurant charges up to $38 a pound for whole fish (which I thought was outrageous), but the Ramsey fish house has the chutzpah to ask for up to $50 a pound. You should know fish is a cheap commodity -- routinely flown halfway around the world and retailed for well under $10 a pound at Korean fish markets.

But Ung doesn't question the prices, just says they are "high, though justified given the quality of the food." Farmed seafood isn't quality; wild is. Even the sea scallops are farmed, according to her report. There's no explanation why the Ramsey restaurant doesn't serve wild scallops from the fleet at Barnegat Light, which is famous for that shellfish.

Wine-tastings at Jerry's Gourmet

In a previous post about free food samples at Jerry's Gourmet & More in Englewood, I forgot to mention that the store often has wine-tastings from the extensive selection it has added in recent years (see post, "Slap in the face for Jerry's Gourmet & More").

So you can wash down your samples of cheese, bread, cold cuts and olive oil with a nice red or white wine from Italy or elsewhere. All the more reason Jerry's should have been included by The Record of Hackensack in an article Saturday about free food samples.


Jerry's Gourmet and More, 410 S. Dean St., Englewood; 201-871-7108.

Slap in the face for Jerry's Gourmet & More

The Record's report today on free samples at food stores omitted any mention of Jerry's Gourmet & More, but included several stores that are far less generous than the Italian specialty store in Englewood, where you can eat free cheese, bread, olive oil and even imported prosciutto to your heart's content.

The newspaper also ran a photo of the olive selection at Fairway Market in Paramus, under a bold headline: "HERE, TRY SOME!" Unfortunately, the olives are the one item in Fairway you can't sample; at least that has been my experience at the Harlem store, which posts stern warnings to that effect. I called the Parmaus store and left my number to find out if the policy is the same in New Jersey. (In any case, I buy my olives at Fattal's in Paterson, where most of them cost $2.99 a pound v. Fairway's $6.99 a pound.)

The Record listed several stores that give out far fewer samples than Jerry's, including Trader Joe's, Whole Foods Markets, Williams-Sonoma and Chef Central, an expensive cookware store. The article also didn't mention Balthazar Bakery in Englewood, where I sampled three items on a visit last Saturday.

Jerry's give-aways are out every day and usually include salami, sweets, bread, toast, olive oil and a dozen cheeses or cheese spreads. One Friday, I was surprised and pleased to see a tangle of expensive prosciutto di Parma near two of the cheese samples. Delizioso!

I don't think The Record spurned Jerry's because it may not advertise much in the newspaper (the market is well-known among food lovers). No. This is just another example of how little The Record's staff knows about the food scene in North Jersey. (See earlier post, "A poor job of food journalism.") 

Jerry's Gourmet and More, 410 S. Dean St., Englewood; 201-871-7108.

A poor job of food journalism

The Record of Hackensack carried a column today by its restaurant reviewer, Elisa Ung, who criticizes "silly cliches" on menus. In a previous column, Ung highlighted typos, misspellings and other language problems on the menus of the places she has reviewed.

Unfortunately, her supervising editor and copy editors do a poor job of catching and fixing the typos, errors and wordy prose in her own columns and stories. In a restaurant review data box this past Friday, she listed $21.95 as the top price for entrees, but panned a paella for two at $41.95. On June 5, she noted "a casual relaxation from an easy dinner out." Once, she said a room in a restaurant was "chandelier-clad." In a story about Bobby Flay's hamburger restaurant in Paramus, she was just plain wrong on the type of ground beef used.

Ung is a woman in her 30s who demonstrates her limited knowledge of food and language with every column she writes. Rarely does she discuss how menus omit the origin of food and whether poultry and meat were raised with antibiotics and growth hormones. It is no longer enough to say a steak tastes good and was cooked to a customer's order. What I and many others want to know is whether the animal was 100% grass fed or confined in a feed lot and given grain, animal by-products and hormones to speed up its growth. And we also want to know whether the seafood we are ordering is wild-caught.

The $24.07 lunch menu Friday at Del Posto in Manhattan said the tomatoes were heirloom and the pork loin came from a breed of black pigs that are vegetarian-fed and raised without antibiotics and growth hormones. Other items were described similarly, as in the free-range chicken listed. Ung should start writing about whether the menus she sees in New Jersey show the same sensibility. (Revised Monday, Aug. 3, and Tuesday, Aug. 4.)