It's Skyline Time

Growing up in the suburbs of Cincinnati, Skyline Chili was more than just a rite of passage. In a town wedded to its local dining traditions, it was simply What You Ate. You ate there after Reds games and before Bengals games (mostly to soften the blow of the inevitable loss), after school and on a date. You ate there late at night to settle the alcohol in your stomach, or early in the morning before a flight out of town.

I probably ate at Skyline once a week for almost 20 years. Not only did I never eat at another chili parlor, despite the many throughout town (and a fact that I should be embarrassed to admit in my willingness to try everything else), it never even occurred to me that I should.

An important note: people expecting a "real" chili are unfailingly disappointed. Think of it as a soft ragu or meat sauce. The spicing is also radically different, with an aroma of clove, cinnamon and chocolate dominating. Authentic recipes call for the beef to be boiled rather than browned and tenderized in vinegar for a characteristically mushy texture. I know, it's difficult to imagine how this could taste good, but stick with me. The chili is but one component of the whole, which works far better than it has any right to taste.

To be sure, this is not just a hard chili recipe to get exactly correct, the other ingredients are almost as tough, with the cheese being nearly impossible to replicate. A fluffy tangle of Big Bird yellow cheese forms a mountain over the chili and thoroughly cooked spaghetti, never clumping and only barely melting on the lowest layer touching the chili.

Finally, the proper dish is needed. See my picture below. The proper dish collects the copious chili juice, which provides a secondary yet crucial lubrication to the spaghetti. But the dish is also shaped so as to spread the juices and not concentrate them, like at the bottom of a bowl. I had no such dish.

Crash course: a 3 Way is spaghetti, chili and cheese. A 4 Way adds onions or beans and a 5 Way contains both. Top with liberal amounts of hot sauce and oyster crackers to achieve synergy.

Cincinnati Brings the French: Jean Robert's Table

No chef in Cincinnati, Ohio has more cachet than Jean Robert de Cavell. His previous restaurant, Jean Robert at Pigall's carried the fine dining torch after the closing of the Maisonette, which was the longest running Mobil five-star restaurant in the country. For the New Yorkers: de Cavel was the chef at La Regence, which was awarded three stars by the New York Times and named one of the best French restaurants in the city (youngster that I am, I've never heard of this place, but three stars speaks for itself).

But now, as everybody knows, the times are trending downscale, and with it comes de Cavel's new restaurant in a former Lone Star Steakhouse: Jean Robert's Table.

Jean Robert's Table has been open less than a month, but with much fanfare and hype (de Cavel had a contractual dispute with his former business partners that delayed the opening for months). I'd been eagerly following the developments, since it was the one new restaurant I wanted to try while home for Labor Day weekend in Cincinnati. Luckily, so did my parents. Less fortuitous was our complete lack of advance planning-- a call that morning revealed them to be booked solid. We would have to take our chances at the bar.

One thing I've learned from living in New York is the secrets of obtaining seats-- from restaurants to subways-- with practiced passive aggressiveness. My skills were put to good use, and quicker than I thought possible the three of us were seated comfortably at the bar, drinks and menus in hand.

Looking around the restaurant, there are no traces of the former tenant. The bar was stripped clean and looked brand new, and exposed brick set off the main dining room from the bar area (which also has some seats). The crowd was surprisingly older than I anticipated, and on entering the restaurant some guy in front of us seemed to forget where he was and blocked the door for much longer than necessary. He was apologetic when he realized his lapse, but I jokingly told him he was a crappy doorman.

Behold, amateurish pictures from the camera on my new cellphone after the jump. This might be as close as you'll get to me taking legitimate pictures in a restaurant, so savor the framing, lighting, etc.

The Great Roadtrip of 2010

It came together very quickly, but I'm excited to say that I will be taking a serious roadtrip with my younger brother between March 3-15th. We will be starting in Cincinnati, driving south down I-75 through Kentucky, Tennessee and into Atlanta for a night or two. I'm very familiar with this drive, but I'm debating taking a detour south of Knoxville to Benton's Bacon. There are also many, many delicious eats in Atlanta that I'll be revisiting.