PREMIUM SEARCH Search by job title, geography and build a list of executive contacts
Charlie Trotter advises ordering the sandwich hot and wet, so that's what I do. The Italian Beef the counterman hands me is soaked in juice and liberally dosed with chunks of spicy green peppers. I eat the sandwich standing at a narrow ledge that runs the length of the Mr. Beef sandwich shop, leaning forward to avoid dripping on my sweater. With a large Coke and a dozen paper napkins (gratis) it comes to just over $6. I've been dreaming about eating another one ever since.
It might seem odd for a hoity-toity restaurateur like Trotter to be hanging his toque in Mr. Beef while he grabs a quick bite. He's the chef-owner of Charlie Trotter's, an upscale restaurant that has been honored by the James Beard Foundation and has the kind of wine list that includes a bottle of 1870 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild at $9,500.
Mr. Beef, on the other hand, is a little eat-on-the-run dive on an industrial block in Chicago with functional (i.e., easy to hose down) white-tile-and-Formica decor and a notion of service that can charitably be termed gruff. If you ask for water, a counterman is liable to growl something like: "You want water, walk over to Lake Michigan."
I learned of Trotter's fondness for Mr. Beef from a new book called Chef's Night Out by the husband and wife food-writer team of Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page (John Wiley & Sons Inc., $29.95). The authors had the inspired idea of asking 100 top American chefs where and what they like to eat when they have a night off and don't want to cook. If you travel a lot on business and like good food, I recommend consulting the book before you head out on a trip to any major city, from Atlanta to Washington, D.C.
B.Y.O. BUCKET. From grim experience, I've found it inadvisable to eat out on a business trip without first doing some advance work. Otherwise, at the end of a tiring day you're liable to settle for the hotel restaurant, where -- unless you happen to be staying at the Crillon in Paris -- the food is likely to be mundane.
Alternatively, if you ask for a recommendation, you'll probably end up with the local "great restaurant," the kind of "universal Chamber of Commerce favorite" the writer Calvin Trillin has dubbed "La Maison de la Casa House, Continental Cuisine." In Houston, I once landed with a colleague in a supposedly decent eatery whose food left me so ill it might as well have been served in a bucket.
Chef's Night Out can help you avoid such debacles. It gives you a good selection of the better restaurants in major destinations -- Le Bernadin and Daniel in New York, The Rattlesnake Club in Detroit, Charlie Trotter's in Chicago, Bizou and Chez Panisse in San Francisco, Spago and Vincente Ristorante in Los Angeles, and so forth. Any halfway serious foodie would know about these places anyway. But how many of us would think of Mr. Beef? Or the Wondee Siam Thai restaurant on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan? Or Mike's Kitchen in the VFW Hall in Providence, R.I., LC's Bar-B-Que in Kansas City, or Mia's Tex-Mex in Dallas? All of the above come recommended by the nation's premier chefs.
DOUGHNUT DESSERT. These folks, it turns out, aren't as snooty as one might expect. Several of them avow a secret love for Krispy Kreme doughnuts, for instance. Laurent Tourondel, the French chef at Cello, one of New York's toniest seafood restaurants, likes the airy little doughnuts so much he offered a Krispy Kreme insider $1,000 for the recipe. Rebuffed, he went back to Cello and came up with his own doughnut-hole concoction, which he offers as a dessert at lunch and dinner.
Frank Brigtsen, of Brigtsen's in New Orleans, loves Popeye's spicy fried chicken. And on the road Patrick O'Connell, of the Inn at Little Washington outside Washington, D.C., buys baked potatoes at Wendy's and eats them "like ice cream cones."
I've eaten in a few of the fancier restaurants the book recommends (Le Bernadin, Spago, The Rattlesnake Club) and can attest that they're pretty good. In early March, I had lunch in Tra Vigne in Napa Valley, which the book also recommends. My food -- a Caesar salad, followed by fresh sea bass with homemade peach ice cream for desert -- was marvelous, as was the wine from a little local winery in St. Helena, Calif. Even more remarkable was the thoughtful, solicitous service, which was about the best I've ever had in an American restaurant.
FAT-CAT GRILL. Just for the heck of it, I checked in with an old friend in Washington, D.C. -- a big-time lawyer -- for his impression of the book's selections there. He dissed the choice of steak houses -- Morton's or Sam and Harry's -- contending that the Capitol Grill, a big hangout for Republican lobbyists, has better beef. When I politely suggested that this judgment might be, perhaps, more political than culinary, he became irritated: "Who are you going to trust on this, some Democrat who probably grows organic veggies in the backyard or a fat-cat Republican lobbyist like me? We Republicans know about steak."
On other cuisines -- which is to say places he goes with his wife and kids -- my friend pretty much concurs with book's recommendations: Sushi-Ko is one of the best Japanese restaurants, Jaleo has the best tapas, and Cantler's Riverside Inn in Annapolis, Md., is a wonderful, down-home crab house. (This ecumenical spirit might be partly due to the influence of his wife, who I suspect cancels out her husband's vote most of the time and undoubtedly sees nothing embarrassing about growing organic veggies in one's backyard.)
I have a few quibbles with the book. It's padded out a fair bit by repeating the same information in different contexts. And some useful info is left out. For instance, the French Laundry restaurant in Yountville in Napa Valley gets favorable notice, but the authors don't mention that you have to book a reservation at least two months in advance to get in and that the phones are perpetually busy.
NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND. The listing for Dave's Italian Kitchen makes it sound like the restaurant is in Chicago when it's actually in my hometown of suburban Evanston -- a "fur piece" for a business traveler to come. Most would be better off trying someplace closer in, like Bacchanalia on S. Oakley Ave. in a neighborhood that's full of good, home-style Italian places.
Nonetheless, the book's recommendations seem worth consulting. As another test, I tried Dave's Italian Kitchen, which I had avoided before because it's in a basement. My gorgonzola salad was zesty, the bread was fresh-baked, and there were indeed some surprising bargains on the wine list. My stuffed zucchini was a little heavy on what I took to be cheddar cheese. But I couldn't complain, considering the price -- $12.58, including tax and tip. I expect to see Charlie Trotter in there any day now checking out the ricotta cheese pie.
Peterson is a contributing editor at BusinessWeek Online. Follow his weekly Moveable Feast column, only on BW Online Edited by Beth Belton
Copyright 2001 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
Printer-Friendly Version
