The Reuben Review

Peewee Gets Reuben at Katz's Deli, NYC

2010-10-07T19:48:00.000-07:00

This very afternoon!

Which reminds me that I went to Katz's and have some photographs and an old review rotting somewhere in my external harddrive.

COMING SOON!!

Zingerman's Deli, Ann Arbor MI

2010-05-17T08:09:00.000-07:00

I was up in Michigan recently for my little brother's college graduation. Everyone there knew I was coming and that I'm this big deal food critic so they were all falling over themselves telling me to check out this joint. Curious by nature, I obliged these people and went with my mom to Zingerman's Deli.

At first I was a little put off by the bourgie college town vibe + ominously familiar clientele. These cobblestones look brand fucking new, I thought to myself. My mom liked it though, and spent 20 minutes in the olive oil aisle (olive/oil/aisle).

It was impressive. They seem to have a very keen & coherent, if relentless, branding initiative, complete w. events and calendar of said events. My favorite was called "How to Make a Cheese Plate," because it gives me hope that one day it could be possible for me to attend a class like that, and that after years of rigorous study, maybe even possible to teach a class like that.

My biggest "problem," I guess, was this irritating omnipresent font they spat out with dogged ubiquidevotion, festooning jam labels & bathroom signage without distinction, a mix between Comic Sans and the Toys 'R' Us logo. See?!

Gross!

But anyway, enough fussing about the ambience, you know, so we can get down to the task at hand.

I.

II.

The pastrami's made in-house, which is neat, and was also sofa king good, while the swiss was translucent but not entirely melted. You may remember me mentioning this in previous reviews because it doesn't fly with me.

See, unmelted cheese isn't a complicated problem to rectify, and so there's really no excuse for it. It just makes everything around it slightly worse, the kind of malady or shitty person you see around and while not actively despising still sort of secretly resent because you recognize, with your latent but still lucid animal precognizance that their presence lowers the stakes of everything, everything else, but they're too banal to really be justified in eliminating, raging against.

And another thing- there was a terrible meat-to-kraut ratio. Ideally they should be about equal, or close enough to equal. This nonsense was disproportionate to the extreme. Mom was forgiving, citing regional differences, Midwestern values. W/E Mom. Some redemption, though, in amazing pickles.

IN CONCLUSION:

Good, if a touch meh. Overblown fuss, I would say, and also I got in trouble for smoking, at the end there, by an aproned man who had clearly been sent out from the kitchen by a tattling member of the shifty, shaggy-haired waitstaff. Fine, I surrender. Obviously they didn't recognize me.

Addendum:

He did it! Triumph in the maelstrom!

We thought so.

2009-07-24T11:29:00.000-07:00

Sandwich Choices Reveal Personality
I was really hoping for a personality quiz at the end.

Thanks to Janelle for bringing this to my attention.

Bayside Betsy's; Provincetown, MA

2009-07-24T10:57:00.000-07:00

The fish reuben was fine, fine, no bones thank god.

It's hard to remember, actually. In truth, I ate this reuben more than a month ago. My side career as food critic has been the first thing relegated to a back burner in this summer of moving, joblessness, egg-and-toast dining.

Still, I have one complaint. It seems to me that geo/ local variants aren't trying nearly hard enough. Haddock? Please. Some ideas: lobster reuben, scallop roll reuben, clam reuben.

A Tour of Scotland's Culinary Delicacies: Shepherd's Pie Review

2009-03-15T18:39:00.000-07:00

It's Spring Break here at the Reuben Review, so we're headed to Scotland, to taste their national correlative w. foreign correspondent & blog celebrity Sean Higgins

First impressions:
Tiny, hand-held pie looks a bit like a maple-filled donut. Or at least, the topping part does--they seem to have filled an icing squeeze-bag with mashed potatoes and squeezed them over the top of an otherwise ordinary meat pie. The pie is not particularly round (the radius varies between 8 and 9 cm, so it was really more of an oval). It is pretty greasy, too, leaving a neat oval stain on the bottom of the paper it was wrapped in. Furthermore, the lady at the Auld Toon Cafe tried to charge me an extra £.30 for it, which is something like $5 American. I'm fed up with people acting like I'm crazy when I ask them to repeat themselves because the Doric accent is unbelievably impossible to understand. Even Scots can't figure it out half the time. Unless I actually need something, I just nod and pretend I've understood them. The key is to wait until they say "Ken?" and then say "Yeah, totally, totally. I know what you mean."

The pie:
The crust is warm, pretty crusty. Pie is very hot, but breaks, doesn't flake. I was unreasonably disappointed by that. The topping is mashed potatoes from some sort of potato-shooting device. Tastes like it sounds it would, though they were surprisingly smooth. Perhaps as a result of being shot out of a gun. Disproportionate to the filling, way too much potato. More of a potato pie with a bit of meat in it.

Speaking of the filling, it was just an ordinary meat pie with gunned-potato on it. No corn! Maybe it is particular to American shepherd's pies, but it adds a fresh crunch. Also, I was not sure the filling was 100% beef, though the gravy was nice. I asked my officemate, Rachel McGregor, a local, what the cafe usually put into "mince" and "...who can say?" It was also pretty encouraging that the filling made my mouth tingle. It was definitely some sort of meat, though, I can say that much with confidence.

My mouth hurt a little bit when I was finished. Can't really say why. I felt like I had just done battle. Then I had a grumbly stomach. The pie sits like a rock, but somehow isn't satiating. A paradox pie. The shame factor was pretty high. I felt like a jerk eating this while everyone else in the room was eating salads, and even more like a jerk when I had to buy a candy bar because I wasn't full.

Conclusion:
Recommended if you like small food (which I do, even if the pie isn't very good or even round), but otherwise only if you harbor a grudge against your heart or digestive system. If you're headed home from getting sozzled at your local pub, then it's a bonnie scran. Wash down with lots of tea or coffee. Have a nap or a bosey afterwards.

You should probably just make a sandwich instead.

The Black Sheep, Amherst MA: a special dispatch by guest correspondent Abe Adams

2009-02-28T10:10:00.000-08:00

The Black Sheep does not offer a “reuben,” rather, a disguised variant. I noticed this before ordering, but to confirm that it was de facto appropriate material for the purposes of this review, I asked for a reuben, and indeed, they directed me to “Nick’s #1 Pick”. Now let me describe this unpleasant sandwich.

First I should say I can’t count against them that they ran out of corned beef halfway through constructing the thing (which took, all told, less than two minutes) and so substituted pastrami. And I cannot attest to its temperature, though it was cold when I ate it, which may have been because, just after asking the old man beside me to photograph me with it, I was taken for an eccentric by a video documentarian, who interviewed me for several minutes (I can only remember a few of the inane things I said to her: “yes, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is a fine breakfast; I don’t understand the prejudice, everyone is happy to eat the pieces independently and call it toast…”). During that time it may have cooled. We will give them that.

But nothing excuses its miserable architecture. A wad of thick ominous whiteness between two wetly curved pieces of inadequately toasted bread, the sandwich, if I am to call it that, began to hemorrhage the instant I unplugged its little wooden stanchion. The wet little thing resembled a circus tent in rain.

I began to eat it. I do not know which meat’s side, as the tastes of those small portions were lost in a sea of unbelievably creamy coleslaw. (Not sauerkraut. Is this a reuben? Is there any reason for me to be writing about it? I don’t know.) I opened the thing up to inspect it, and I guess the top stratum of cream was the Russian dressing promised by the menu. It may have been nothing more than auxiliary mayonnaise, as whatever tastes there were in that sandwich were not distinguishable, though my pallet may have briefly glimpsed swiss cheese on its way out to sea.

The bread: it did not look or smell like rye, but it had little flecks in it that may have been caraway seeds. It really seems like a trifle. That day I ate a big bowl of coleslaw. So much escaped material escaped that I had to finish it all off with a fork.

I threw away my several sodden napkins and paper plate smeared with pinkish cream, and left, forever, feeling a heaviness within. I did not write the other reviews on this blog, so I’ll forgo a relative grade for “Nick’s #1 Pick,” but, obviously, I don’t recommend it.

The Northampton Brewery, Northampton MA

2009-02-13T15:49:00.000-08:00

I'm wearing the same shirt on accident. Anyway.

Rye: marbled, thick, unsoiled by grease
Corned Beef: thin & moist but a touch rubbery
Thousand Island: white instead of the usual pale orange, with a much more subtle flavor. At one point I asked myself, is this in fact butter? But the lack of emphasis on the dressing was fine because the...
Sauerkraut: was v. flavorful, tasting of ferment
Swiss cheese: unremarkable, barely noticeable- a clear indicator of success

$7.25. Bravo, B+

The Route 9 Diner, Hadley MA

2009-02-09T06:49:00.000-08:00

I want to preface this first post by saying that I haven’t been to the Route 9 diner since my first year at school for famous and well-founded reasons.

It will surprise no one that tonight’s Reuben was mediocre.

Rye: thin, greasy
Corned Beef: suspiciously carmine, thick, crumbly and v. dry
Thousand Island: fine, but on the side, which to me indicates a lack of confidence
Swiss Cheese: too much, rubbery, and ballooning from the sides (ideally the swiss should be almost indistinguishable from the other wet elements, acting as a kind of light glue)
Sauerkraut: fine, even good, comparatively

$ 9. On a grading scale, I give this Reuben a generous C- because I was really hungry at the time. Moving quickly along…