Been a long time since we went to Muffeletta, 2+years. They are not available this week, but can accomodate us next week. Suggestions for this week??? Erte is very close to Surdyks for anyone working the sale. Barley John's is also on the right side of the river. Anywhere else? Cheers, Jim From: "Jim L. Ellingson" <jellings(a)me.umn.edu> To: wine(a)thebarn.com Also a bit on Petite Syrah. Not sure if they grow any of that in Australia. Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2006 15:12:28 -0600 From: "Jim L. Ellingson" <jellings(a)me.umn.edu> To: wine(a)thebarn.com Greetings, Happy New Year, Bah-Mitzvah! Had some truly fantastic food at Alma. The three course, $39, prix fixe was the order of the day for most of us. Alma tasting option is unusually flexible. Diner's are able to pick "one form each column". That is any starter, any primi/pasta and any entree. Local pheasant and the risoto were very good. This week, we've been invited to Muffuletta. Muffuletta Cafe 2260 Como St. Paul, 55108 St. Anthony Park 651-644-9116 Style du jour is "Medteranian". Yes Warren/Ruth Betsy Bob Russ Lori Jim Louise is a maybe... Guess: Nicolai Karin Directions: Take Hwy 280 to Como, go east up the hill and then to the second light (Carter). Alt: Take Snelling to Como, West to Carter. Cheers, Jim January 11, 2006 Critic's Notebook Creeping Up on Diners: Stealth Charges By FRANK BRUNI IF you want some red wine with dinner at the opulent new restaurant Gilt in Midtown Manhattan, your options typically rise from a minimum of $20 to a maximum of $1,000, with a median of $55 and an average of $246. That range is about what you would expect, but for this: It's not for red wine by the bottle. It's for red wine by the glass. And while Gilt's pour may exceed the usual, this munificence is a matter of only a few droplets, judging from a $24 glass of 2004 Cakebread sauvignon blanc I had recently. I could have chosen a lesser sauvignon blanc for the veritable pittance of $18, the cheapest alternative among nine whites and the only alternative under $20. But I also could have spent up to $225. Is Gilt an aberration? Yes and no. You'll find few New York restaurants at which Bacchus is such a bully and a snob. But you'll find more and more with tactics, which sometimes seem like tricks, for making a meal costlier than it first appears to be. With add-ons that stealthily add up. With menus like minefields, financially perilous to anyone who strays broadly and heedlessly across them. At Gilt, an extreme case in point, an advertised fixed price of $92 for two savory courses and dessert turns out to be fiction, even apart from the wine. When I dined there, three of eight appetizer options entailed supplemental charges, and those supplements weren't paltry, ranging from $18 to $28. One of seven entrees had a supplement of $16, while another had a surcharge of $18. When I dined at the new restaurant Telepan on the Upper West Side, I spent $15.50 on roasted cauliflower with a special herb oil and crushed heirloom shell beans. Granted, the cauliflower came in three kinds and colors, and it was exceptional cauliflower, undoubtedly artisanal cauliflower, for all I knew the Kobe of cauliflower, hand-massaged and moistened hourly with atomized Evian. But still, it was cauliflower. And as noteworthy as its price was its placement on the menu in a category of "Mid Course" dishes, which was printed after the appetizers and before the entrees and planted the suggestion that a diner who wanted to experience the restaurant fully needed three savory chapters, with respective average costs of about $13, $17 and $27. The structure of the menu at Telepan, which opened in December, recalls the structure of the menu at Thor, which opened in September. Like Telepan, Thor points diners toward two courses prior to the entree, dividing what other restaurants might label appetizers into distinct categories called "Cold Plates to Start" and "Warm Plates in the Middle." Thor has yet another category called "From the Market on the Side," which is where items like roasted or pur�ed potatoes lurk, entailing surcharges of $6 each. Thor's chef, Kurt Gutenbrunner, said in a telephone interview that despite the semantic cues "to start" and "in the middle," the menu is not some culinary bait-and-bait designed to fatten checks by persuading diners to order a little from here, a little from there and, while they're at it, some quark spaetzle or fennel and figs from way over there. Like other architects of today's increasingly segmented menus, Mr. Gutenbrunner said his goal was to give diners more options and control. "When people are going out, they know exactly how much they're going to spend the minute they walk out the door, and they're not going to spend more," he said. "And if you somehow make them, you've lost a long-term customer." But what if it's only a little more? Vicki Freeman, one of the owners of Cookshop, which opened in Chelsea in September, said the existence on its menu of an appetizerlike category for "snacks" has not prompted the diners who order snacks to forgo conventional appetizers, which still have their own category. It has prompted them to explore both categories, and a check for a table of two is $5 to $6 higher as a result. The broadening presence of snacks on menus - Taku, which opened in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn in June, also has them - provides just one example of rampant category inflation. A few blocks north of Cookshop, at D'or Ahn, which also opened in September, there are four savory categories ("raw," "cold," "hot," and "side") for modestly portioned dishes, in addition to a category for entrees. Italian restaurants all over the city separate the crudi from the appetizers and the verdure, or vegetables, from the salumi, and before you know it, your $15 pappardelle has become a $50 production. Restaurant consultants and industry observers say that actual prices of appetizers, entrees and fixed-price multicourse meals at upscale restaurants haven't been rising as fast as inflation. But perhaps because of that, they say, some surprising surcharges have popped up. When I ate lunch a few months ago at Bann, a new Korean restaurant in Midtown, the lettuce and miso paste that other Korean restaurants consider a complimentary accouterment to barbecued meat entailed an extra $3. Over the last year, I've been struck by how cunningly many servers push bottled water, asking diners if they want "still" or "sparkling" without ever mentioning a less taxing possibility. In restaurants, apparently, "tap" is a four-letter word. I've had servers wordlessly replace finished bottles of water with new ones, so that my companions and I realized only when the bill arrived that we'd had five bottles at a cost of $60. That's insidious, and that's insane. But it's indicative of the sneakiness at loose upon the restaurant landscape. Sneaky is a fair word for Gilt (where, it should be noted, wines by the bottle aren't as shockingly expensive as by the glass). Gilt opened in December in a series of sumptuous rooms inside the New York Palace Hotel, replacing Le Cirque 2000. While other fixed-price menus have dishes with supplemental charges, I have not seen another New York menu on which the percentage of those dishes is so high. Or on which the charges seem so odd. There's no supplement for lobster, but there's $16 for lamb and $18 for a portion of Dover sole that, when I sampled it, could be consumed in fewer than 10 bites. Gilt may present itself as comparable in price to Jean Georges and Le Bernardin, both of which charge $95 for three savory courses and dessert. But tack on the surcharges and a glass or two of white - at Jean Georges you can get one for $9, at Le Bernardin for $13 - and Gilt has lofted you to unexpected stratospheres of spending. It's hardly the only New York restaurant these days that takes you there.