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viernes, 14 de enero de 2011

Meals for a Mensch and the Discerning Sports Fan

HEY, MR. CRITIC

Meals for a Mensch and the Discerning Sports Fan

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

The rich pork and shellfish dishes at Marc Forgione are forbidden by Jewish dietary laws.

By SAM SIFTON

Published: January 13, 2011

REPRINTS

The mail brought, among other things, questions of religious difference and requests for reservation advice and for a place to watch television while eating well. I tried my best to answer. As ever, you can send your own questions to dinejournal@nytimes.com.

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Michael Falco for The New York Times

Ouest bans sports from the dining room, but not the bar.

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Il Mulino’s veal chop with sage and garlic is for the few who get in.

Q. After two years of endless nagging, my kosher boyfriend has finally decided to come over to the dark side and, at least for one night, temporarily abandon his dietary restraint. Can you recommend a moderately priced place that serves such good pork and shellfish dishes that he’ll convert permanently?

A. Great food can change minds and alter people’s lives for the better, it’s true. But so can faith, for those who have it. Helping you use food to persuade someone to abandon his religious principles cannot end well for me. (Nor for him, if his mother finds out.) The laws of kashrut are clear: No pork. No shellfish.

And so I cannot possibly recommend a visit to Momofuku Ssam Bar, where those two banned proteins often combine into Korean-inflected Continental deliciousness, and where a fellow might be introduced to the pleasures of cured hog’s jowl, served with Honeycrisp apple kimchi and a Lebanese yogurt cut with maple syrup.

Nor could I nod to the Spanish-style Casa Mono, where you can find a delicious chilled lobster with ham (a combination the great Calvin Trillin would call a double-trayf special). For you there can be no suckling pig at the Italian gem Maialino or pig’s trotter at the British pub the Breslin or barbecued oysters at the American bistro Marc Forgione in TriBeCa or clams in black bean sauce at the terrific Oriental Garden in Chinatown.

That said, if you want to skate close to the edge, where the ice is thin and crackly, Chinese is probably your best bet. As my hero Arthur Schwartz, formerly the restaurant critic for The Daily News and author of “Jewish Home Cooking,” put it: “The Chinese cut their food into small pieces before it is cooked, disguising the nonkosher foods. This last aspect seems silly, but it is a serious point. My late cousin Daniel, who kept kosher, along with many other otherwise observant people I have known, happily ate roast pork fried rice and egg foo yung. ‘What I can’t see won’t hurt me,’ was Danny’s attitude.”

But proceed with caution. The Torah calls Jews a holy people and prescribes for them a holy diet. If they choose to abandon it, so be it. But you ever argue with a rabbi? I’m not meshuga. Take this boy to the Prime Grill for a kosher steak and tell him you love him.

Q. Il Mulino. How, oh how, can I get a reservation at this restaurant? I used to go there many years ago when I lived in New York City, but now only visit and would love to take a friend there. Thanks for any suggestions or help.

A. Il Mulino is marvelous in its way, a West Village Italian of the very, very, very oldest school, with food to match. The staff is notoriously bad about picking up the telephone to accept reservations, and not so slick about honoring them, either. Expect to wait for a while before being seated. But make the call all the same. If nothing is available for dinner on the night you want to go, try lunch, when it is less crowded, and you can linger awhile. Or you may try walking in and placing yourself at the mercy of the maître d’hôtel. You are an old customer of the restaurant who has enjoyed many meals there. You tried to make a reservation and failed. And you would very, very much like to take your friend to dinner right now or as soon as they are able to seat you. Either this method will work (you’ll have a great meal), or it won’t (you won’t feel so great about Il Mulino any longer).

Q. A friend and I want the best food we can possibly get while watching a football game. We are not looking for a sports-bar atmosphere and prefer something more interesting than a steakhouse. We want a great restaurant that happens to have a TV in the lounge/bar area. Ideally it would be somewhere we can eat very good food, have a martini, talk and keep an eye on the game. What are the top meals you can eat in New York while watching a game? None of my likely suspects have a TV: L’Express, Artisanal, the Spotted Pig, Compass, Pastis, Bar Jamón, Union Square Café, Grape and Grain, SD26, the David Chang empire, Tía Pol, Picholine (perfect bar menu but no TV), the Breslin.

A. You know why your favorite restaurants don’t have a television on where you can watch the game?

Because restaurants that make it onto lists like yours don’t generally have televisions on where you can watch the game. That’s not a Zen koan, either. It’s part of the Manhattan social contract, the same sort of understanding that keeps polka off the speakers at sushi bars and fluorescent lights out of bistros. Televisions don’t belong in good restaurants.

That said, you don’t want a steakhouse, which is too bad. There are few pleasures to rival eating a steak in the bar room at Keens Steakhouse while a game spools out on the television above the bar. You don’t want an actual sports bar, either, which is also too bad, since they’re designed for the service you have in mind, though with beer in place of the martini, and chicken wings in place of the haute cuisine you desire. You want a proper restaurant. See above.

Of course there are exceptions. There’s the bar at Ouest on the Upper West Side, with a honking big tube up over it, generally playing a game. That’s a nice place for just the meal you describe.

For Double Trayf and Double O.T.

THE BRESLIN 16 West 29th Street, Manhattan; (212) 679-1939, thebreslin.com.

CASA MONO 52 Irving Place, at 17th Street, Manhattan; (212) 253-2773,casamononyc.com.

IL MULINO 86 West Third Street, Greenwich Village; (212) 673-3783, ilmulino.com.

KEENS STEAKHOUSE 72 West 36th Street, Manhattan; (212) 947-3636, keens.com.

MOMOFUKU SSAM BAR 207 Second Avenue, at 13th Street, East Village; (212) 254-3500, momofuku.com/ssam-bar.

MAIALINO Gramercy Park Hotel, 2 Lexington Avenue, at 21st Street; (212) 777-2410,maialinonyc.com.

MARC FORGIONE 134 Reade Street, near Hudson Street, TriBeCa; (212) 941-9401,marcforgione.com.

ORIENTAL GARDEN 14 Elizabeth Street, Chinatown; (212) 619-0085.

OUEST 2315 Broadway, at 84th Street; (212) 580-8700, ouestny.com.

PRIME GRILL 60 East 49th Street, Manhattan; (212) 692-9292,theprimegrill.primehospitalityny.com.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 14, 2011, on page C33 of the New York edition.

En este día...

	Friday, January 14th The 014th day of 2011. There are 351 days left in the year. Go to a previous date.

Today's Highlights in History
See a larger version of this front page.		On Jan. 14, 1943, President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill opened a wartime conference in Casablanca. (Go to article.)On Jan. 14 , 1875, Albert Schweitzer, the Alsatian-German doctor who received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize, was born. Following his death onSept. 4 , 1965, his obituary appeared in The Times. (Go to obit. \|Other Birthdays)
		On January 14, 1882, Harper's Weekly featured a cartoon about the Apocalypse. (See the cartoon and read an explanation.)

On this date in:
1639	Connecticut's first constitution, the Fundamental Orders, was adopted.
1784	The United States ratified a peace treaty with England ending the Revolutionary War.
1898	Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who wrote "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" under the pen name Lewis Carroll, died in Guildford, England, at age 65.
1952	NBC's "Today" show premiered.
1953	Josip Broz Tito was elected president of Yugoslavia by the country's Parliament.
1954	Baseball player Joe Dimaggio and actress Marilyn Monroe were married at San Francisco City Hall.
1963	George C. Wallace was sworn in as governor of Alabama with a pledge of "segregation forever."
1970	Diana Ross and the Supremes performed their last concert together, at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas.
1993	Late-night TV talk show host David Letterman announced he was moving from NBC to CBS.
1994	President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed accords in Moscow to stop aiming missiles at any nation and to dismantle the nuclear arsenal of Ukraine.
2004	Former Enron finance chief Andrew Fastow pleaded guilty to conspiracy as he accepted a 10-year prison sentence.
2004	J.P. Morgan Chase and Co. struck a deal to buy Bank One Corp. for $58 billion.
2004	President George W. Bush unveiled a plan to send astronauts to the moon, Mars and beyond.
2005	Army Specialist Charles Graner Jr., the reputed ringleader of a band of rogue guards at the Abu Ghraib prison, was convicted at Fort Hood, Texas, of abusing Iraqi detainees. (He was later sentenced to 10 years in prison.)
2005	A European space probe sent back the first detailed pictures of the frozen surface of Saturn's moon, Titan.
2008	Republican Bobby Jindal, the first elected Indian-American governor in the United States, took office in Louisiana.

Current Birthdays

Holland Taylor turns 68 years old today.

AP Photo/Chris Pizzello Actress Holland Taylor turns 68 years old today.

92	Andy Rooney Commentator ("60 Minutes")
73	Jack Jones Singer
73	Allen Toussaint R&B singer, songwriter
71	Julian Bond Civil rights activist
70	Faye Dunaway Actress
64	Bev Perdue Governor of North Carolina
63	T-Bone Burnett Rock singer, producer
63	Carl Weathers Actor
62	Lawrence Kasdan Screenwriter, director
59	Maureen Dowd Columnist
48	Steven Soderbergh Director
47	Shepard Smith Broadcast journalist ("The Fox Report")
44	Emily Watson Actress
43	LL Cool J Rapper, actor
42	Jason Bateman Actor ("Arrested Development")
42	Dave Grohl Rock singer, musician (Foo Fighters)
29	Caleb Followill Rock musician (Kings of Leon)

Historic Birthdays
Albert Schweitzer
1/14/1875 - 9/4/1965 Alsatian/German physician (Go to obit.)

60	Benedict Arnold 1/14/1741 - 6/14/1801 American patriot/traitor
64	Henry Baldwin 1/14/1780 - 4/21/1844 American Supreme Court justice
54	Berthe Morisot 1/14/1841 - 3/2/1895 French painter/printmaker
77	Art Young 1/14/1866 - 12/29/1943 American cartoonist
61	Hugh Lofting 1/14/1886 - 9/26/1947 English/American author
100	Hal Roach 1/14/1892 - 11/2/1992 American producer/director
74	John Dos Passos 1/14/1896 - 9/28/1970 American writer/journalist
86	Carlos Romulo 1/14/1899 - 12/15/1985 Philippine diplomat
76	Sir Cecil Beaton 1/14/1904 - 1/18/1980 American photographer

Go to a previous date.
SOURCE: The Associated Press
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A Clamor for Gun Limits, but Few Expect Real Changes

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JENNIFER STEINHAUER

Published: January 13, 2011

REPRINTS

TUCSON — The National Rifle Association has gone uncommonly dark since the weekend shootings here. A posting on its Web site expresses sympathies for the victims of the violence, and N.R.A. officials said they would have nothing to say until the funerals and memorial services were over.

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Shaun Tandon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A billboard in Tucson promotes an gun show this weekend, 13 miles from the site of the shootings that killed 6 and wounded 14.

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In Washington, bills were being drafted to step up background checks, create no-gun zones around members of Congress and ban the big-volume magazines that allowed the Tucson gunman to shoot so many bullets so fast. Gun control advocates say they believe the shock of the attack has altered the political atmosphere, in no small part because one of the victims is a member of Congress.

“I really do believe that this time it could be different,” said Paul Helmke, executive director of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Yet gun rights advocates and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle said Thursday that there was little chance the attack would produce significant new legislation or a change in a national culture that has long been accepting of guns. If anything, they said, lawmakers are less receptive than ever to new gun restrictions.

If the politically sophisticated N.R.A. has struck a quiet pose, the Crossroads of the West gun show will go on as planned this weekend at the Pima County Fairgrounds, 13 miles from the shooting site; another gun show is scheduled for the next weekend. “We had no hesitation about going ahead with the show so soon after the incident,” said Lois Chedsey, secretary to the Arizona Arms Association, a show sponsor. “Gun sales have been up since last Saturday”

An even bigger event in Las Vegas, the Shot Show — which bills itself as the country’s largest exhibition of guns and ammunition — is proceeding next week with a four-day run that fills two floors of convention space.

As an institution, Congress seems to celebrate gun ownership as much as many communities in Arizona, which may explain why efforts to enact gun control legislation have foundered. Many members of Congress own firearms, which they carry while riding around in farm trucks in their district or concealed behind a jacket in the streets, among constituents.

“I carry a gun because it is a personal preference and for my own personal safety,” said Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, one of several lawmakers who carry a concealed weapon in their districts. (His is a Glock 23.) “It’s not for everybody. Not everyone should rush out because of what happened last week and start carrying, but I like it, and I do it.” Representative Gabrielle Giffords once said that she herself owned a Glock — the same firearm the man accused of shooting her is said to have used.

Democrats who favor more restrictive gun laws say they do not expect new legislation to be passed, especially now that Republicans control of the House and Democrats have lost seats in the Senate. “The Pledge to America is our plan,” said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for the House speaker, John A. Boehner, “and our immediate focus is on addressing the top priorities of the American people, creating jobs, cutting spending and reforming the way Congress works.”

And Democrats are hardly uniform in supporting tough gun laws as a matter of policy; as a matter of politics, Democrats in Congress have increasingly shied away from the issue.

Gun control advocates said that they hoped the circumstances of this attack — including the facts that the suspect obtained his weapon legally and that one of the victims was a member of Congress — would help their cause.

Josh Horowitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, said, “People have really had it, and this whole magazine clip issue, and the mental health issue, is something that people can get their heads around.”

But lawmakers seeking even modest limits on gun rights seem almost resigned to failure. Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, said in a telephone interview that since he proposed a bill this week that would outlaw having a firearm within 1,000 feet of a member of Congress, his office had received “100 calls an hour from people who think I am trying to take away their Second Amendment rights.”

“This kind of legislation is very difficult,” Mr. King said, noting there had been “no enthusiasm,” even among Democrats, for the renewal of the assault weapon ban of 1994 in 2004. “The fact is Congress has not done any gun legislation in years,” he said, adding, “Once you get out of the Northeast, guns are a part of daily life.”

Representative Carolyn McCarthy, Democrat of New York, who was elected in 1996 largely on a gun control platform after her husband was killed and son injured by a gunman on the Long Island Rail Road in 1993, is careful with her language in describing her new bill, which would ban large-capacity ammunition magazines.

“This is not a gun control bill,” she said. “I like to use the word ‘gun safety bills.’ And this one just addresses the narrow issue of these clips.” Ms. McCarthy said she would try to appeal to members of the Senate and President Obama to push her legislation forward. “Listen, any kind of bill the N.R.A. is against is always a problem.”

Asked about prospects for new gun restrictions, Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, asserted, “I maintain that firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens makes communities safer, not less safe.”

The N.R.A. has kept such a low profile that its normally accessible executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, declined to comment. “At this time, anything other than prayers for the victims and their families would be inappropriate,” said Andrew Arulanandam, the director of public affairs. But gun advocates said the fact that the group was holding back reflected a calculation that the prospects of gun control legislation passing in Congress have not changed much.

But if the N.R.A. has kept a strategically low profile, other gun advocates have not. They said they were confident that as always happens, passions would subside and their argument — that Americans have a constitutional right to own guns — would carry the day.

Erich Pratt, the director of communications for Gun Owners of America, said his organization and others were girding for at least a skirmish in Congress. “But I think after the November election it’s going to be very tough for Carolyn McCarthy and even the Peter Kings,” he said “Why should the government be in the business of telling us how we can defend ourselves?”

Mr. Pratt added: “These politicians need to remember that these rights aren’t given to us by them. They come from God. They are God-given rights. They can’t be infringed or limited in any way. What are they going to do: limit it two or three rounds. Having lots of ammunition is critical, especially if the police are not around and you need to be able to defend yourself against mobs.”

Dave Workman, senior editor of Gun Week, a publication of the Second Amendment Foundation, said the gun control lobby was trying to exploit the shootings. “The average gun owner,” he said, “is saying: ‘I didn’t fire any shots in Tucson. I just want to go hunting, or protect my family, and this is just going to create more paperwork and more headaches for me.’ ”

Last weekend’s attack is unlikely to change the habits of members of Congress who carry guns. In fact, some said that an armed civilian might have stopped the carnage in Tucson.

Representative Tom Graves, a Republican, “is a firm believer in Second Amendment rights, owns firearms and has a concealed weapon permit in Georgia,” said his spokesman, John Donnelly, “and he has no plans to change his normal routine other than to focus his prayers on the victims of the tragic attack in Tucson.”

Adam Nagourney reported from Tucson, and Jennifer Steinhauer from Washington. Ian Lovett contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 14, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition.

A Tale of Two Moralities

OP-ED COLUMNIST

A Tale of Two Moralities

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: January 13, 2011

REPRINTS

On Wednesday, President Obama called on Americans to “expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.” Those were beautiful words; they spoke to our desire for reconciliation.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Paul Krugman

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Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal

Times Topic: Tucson, Arizona Shooting (2011)

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But the truth is that we are a deeply divided nation and are likely to remain one for a long time. By all means, let’s listen to each other more carefully; but what we’ll discover, I fear, is how far apart we are. For the great divide in our politics isn’t really about pragmatic issues, about which policies work best; it’s about differences in those very moral imaginations Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs over what constitutes justice.

And the real challenge we face is not how to resolve our differences — something that won’t happen any time soon — but how to keep the expression of those differences within bounds.

What are the differences I’m talking about?

One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.

The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.

There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.

This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development. Commentators who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not, pining for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it. As many analysts have noted, the Obama health reform — whose passage was met with vandalism and death threats against members of Congress — was modeled on Republican plans from the 1990s.

But that was then. Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party does not. When people talk about partisan differences, they often seem to be implying that these differences are petty, matters that could be resolved with a bit of good will. But what we’re talking about here is a fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government.

Regular readers know which side of that divide I’m on. In future columns I will no doubt spend a lot of time pointing out the hypocrisy and logical fallacies of the “I earned it and I have the right to keep it” crowd. And I’ll also have a lot to say about how far we really are from being a society of equal opportunity, in which success depends solely on one’s own efforts.

But the question for now is what we can agree on given this deep national divide.

In a way, politics as a whole now resembles the longstanding politics of abortion — a subject that puts fundamental values at odds, in which each side believes that the other side is morally in the wrong. Almost 38 years have passed since Roe v. Wade, and this dispute is no closer to resolution.

Yet we have, for the most part, managed to agree on certain ground rules in the abortion controversy: it’s acceptable to express your opinion and to criticize the other side, but it’s not acceptable either to engage in violence or to encourage others to do so.

What we need now is an extension of those ground rules to the wider national debate.

Right now, each side in that debate passionately believes that the other side is wrong. And it’s all right for them to say that. What’s not acceptable is the kind of violence and eliminationist rhetoric encouraging violence that has become all too common these past two years.

It’s not enough to appeal to the better angels of our nature. We need to have leaders of both parties — or Mr. Obama alone if necessary — declare that both violence and any language hinting at the acceptability of violence are out of bounds. We all want reconciliation, but the road to that goal begins with an agreement that our differences will be settled by the rule of law.