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What Americans eat: A BSE followup
NEW YORK (DTN)--For adventurous eaters in Manhattan, it's getting harder to find meat innards and offal at several of the city's better known restaurants these days, due to concern over bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
At the same time, there seems to be tremendous confusion over what's safe/unsafe for diners to consume. Some restaurants have pulled beef cheeks from their menus but still serve sweetbreads, while others have taken the opposite approach. Many scientists consider brains, beef cheeks and neck bones risky. Sweetbreads are derived from a cow's thymus gland.
"Tell me, is there a problem with beef cheeks?" said Thomas Ferlesch, the chef at Brooklyn's Hungarian restaurant, Thomas Beisl, who has received rave reviews for his goulash made with beef cheeks. "Aren't beef cheeks muscle? I'm still serving it. I'm just a chef. Who am I to tell people what to eat?"
At Babbo, a Greenwich Village restaurant reknowned for serving unusual cuts of meat, co-owner Joseph Bastianich said, "We've taken calves brain ravioli off the menu. Better safe than sorry." But Bastianich, who co-owns a half-dozen upscale Italian restaurants in the city, added, "We're still serving beef cheeks and sweetbreads and steak. It's not much of an issue for us or our customers."
In the just-opened Asian fusion restaurant Asiate, located in the Mandarin Hotel, beef cheeks have disappeared from the menu. Stefanie Kelly, the assistant food and beverage manager, said, "We served beef cheeks smoked with a potato puree, it was an item on the tasting menu. The first day that we heard about mad cow, we took it off."
Meanwhile, the socialites who dine at the exclusive Upper-East side haunt Swifty's, are still happily chowing down on sweetbreads, liver and hanger steak, according to chef Stephen Attoe. "We're not going to take anything off the menu," said Attoe. "No one's even mentioned it."
Across town, at 520 Columbus, a neighborhood restaurant on the West Side which is a hang-out for families and the 20-something set, chef Christina Kelly has seen a similarly laid-back attitude. "I think a lot of people feel pretty complacent about it," says Kelly. "This neighborhood tends to be over-protective, so it's surprising. After 9-11, I had a customer demand to know where I got the skate from--he was worried it came from the water near the Twin Towers." (Skate is a fish with a flattened body and pectoral fins that look like wings.)
She's still serving sweetbreads, and her biggest problem is unsophisticated customers who don't know what they're ordering. "There was a 22-year-old girl at the bar, and she thought it was sweet bread. When the order came, she was horrified, saying, 'What is it? I don't want it."
Date: 1/22/04
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