La Cense = No Sense: La Cense Beef Truck Review

Recently, everyone got all a twitter about this truck and the burgers it peddles. I cynically looked at their website, and beheld the magic words "grass fed beef burger". Through tears of joy I read that the truck was within a reasonable walking distance from my office today. Sweet. Now I really, really, reeeeeally wanted to like this burger. I love the grass fed beef industry, and want to support anyone who has enough care and vision to raise their cows the way La Cense does. With absolutely no line at 12 noon, I ordered the standard burger (with cheese) and onions, no pickle, and a bottle of water.

Taste? No, sorry, fresh out.

The bun is good, light and fluffy; sturdy enough for a burger, without getting overly dense and compact. The sesame seeds are a nice touch. The onions are both great and terrible: They taste good, but they are the only thing you can taste on this battleship of bland that's about to set sail for a three hour tour of disappointment.

You want a pickle with that?

The cheese might be cheese, or could just be an edible napkin with a chewy texture. Seriously, if you're gonna go for the 95% oil processed "cheese", give me cheezewhiz, and let me enjoy the heady buzz of an MSG overdose and its salt lick satiety. Now, I love American processed cheese, so long as its real. Land o' Lakes makes a great one, as does Boar's Head. Both are available at you local deli counter, but not on this truck.

The biggest offense here is the meat. Now many reviewers are pointing to "overcooking" of the meat as the reason for its dryness and lack of beefy zip, but that's just wrong. I can understand the error coming from someone stuck in the flavor vacuum that is midtown; it's enough to force anyone's taste buds make a run for the hills.

Also, the "well it is made on a truck" excuse holds no water with me. If you cannot make a good burger on a truck, maybe you shouldn't be making burgers on a truck. Wow, that's so simple it's scary.

Looks tasty, huh? Well so does that plastic sushi in the window.

Made correctly, even a medium well burger should be juicy and delicious. Period. No excuses. Mine was actually nice and pink in the center, medium rare, and it still sucked; no flavor, dry, with a gross lack of texture and an annoying chewiness. Why? Over processing which inevitably leads to over packing, the busch league bane of the burger.

When beef is exposed to heat, its collagen proteins shrink and tighten. This can make your burger rubbery, dry, and well, tight. The easiest way to keep a burger from basically wringing itself out as it cooks is to start with a mildly coarse, loose grind. In order to really let the beef do the talking, it must be a nice blend of fat (this is the juicy) and good lean (this is the flavor) cuts, and it cannot be overground. Ever had a bowl of Pho? With beefballs? You could give those to a 5 year old and tell him they're superballs they bounce so well. It's because they're ground so fine (pulverized, actually) that when they are formed the proteins feel like they're riding the #4 train at rush-hour.

You see over processing leads to over packing; squished too tightly together before the heat makes it even tighter, the burger is doomed before it meets the griddle. No amount of searing, salt, fat or praying is gonna make that India rubber puck taste good. So really, in the end, the truck wasn't even the problem. Funny that. Now what to do, what to do...

My savior...

Yes, it was so bad I could not stoop to waste the caloric intake on it. I actually threw it in the trash.


Now normally La Cense would just get 0 Gastroliaison Bacon Strips for this offense to my belly, but they are a super high end, responsible and caring beef producer. I just don't get it. This burger is the culinary equivalent of spending six careful years on a painting, only to drag it behind a pickup truck on the way to the gallery. I had to make up a new award for this sad, sad excuse for a burger.

Gastroliaison's How Dare You Serve That Award

The Verdict: Avoid avoid avoid, don't even try it out of curiosity. I mean it, you'll be cranky.

This concludes Gastroliaison's review of the La Cense Beef Truck.

Ice Cream by Van Leeuwen: Vive la pretense!

I have, for quite some time now, seen these nifty little ice cream vans toodling around Brooklyn and Manhattan. Looking like what might happen if Martha Stewart got her hands on a Mr. Softee, they smack of farmhouse/organic/free-trade/small-batch pretense, in all its glory.

Bad Mr. Softee... bad!

Perusing the menu on the side of the truck, I was impressed by how "artisanal" the ice cream must be; not only was it grandiosely titled artisan ice cream, but the menu on the truck has these really nice, Pierre-Joseph Redouté style illustrations of the ingredients.


Now being "somewhat familiar" with communication specialists, designers, marketing and brand consultants, I know when I'm having sunshine pumped up my you know what by someone trying to get me to part with my hard earned dough. I do agree somewhat with the Arts & Craft movement, in that some hand made stuff can be much better than a mass produced counterpart. I do have a fine appreciation for things like Stickley Furniture, IWC watches and Aston Martins, but this is ice cream people. Oh wait, ice cream? Gotta try some.

So I grabbed a paper menu and looked for one of my favorite flavors, mint chocolate chip, but I couldn't find it anywhere; I could've sworn I saw it on the truck itself. Luckily, my super smart brother is fluent in ostentatious, so he pointed me in the direction of "Peppermint and Chip."

The description of this frozen delight waxes poetic about "Pure organic peppermint from the rich volcanic soils of Oregon" and "Ultra thin Michel Cluizel 72% chocolate chips." The chips are ultra thin, as was pontifically explained, so as to reach the right temp in your mouth to allow you to taste them before you swallow them.

wait... here comes... the taste!

At this point I was expecting a truly transcendental experience. Seriously, its gonna be so good they are worried I will swallow it before my brain can fully process the signals from my taste buds? That a Pavlovian response will somehow trigger a swallow so fast that the 50,000 or so taste cells on my tongue won't grasp a single molecule of theobromine before the icy bomb of goodness is lost forever to my stomach?

I raised the spoon to my trembling with anticipation lips, and was overcome by the outstanding mediocrity of the ice cream. Wait, I want my $3.95 back mother#@%&$*!


Really, it just left me flat. The mint was very nice, bright, upfront and fresh, so I was hopeful. The chips (yes I could taste them) were just what they should be, good, but I've had a lot of good chocolate, I wouldn't call them outstanding. The problem was the ice cream. It was thin and watery tasting. Seemed like the milk made the obligatory polite rounds at the party and discreetly snuck out the back. A far cry from ice cream, I'd call it milk sorbet.

In desperation I tried the Currant & Cream, same deal. Great currants, but I shrugged my shoulders at the "cream." Ginger? Lovely spicy candied niblets, interspersed in a sea of take-it-or-leave-it. Where was the "dense, creamy and rich" their propaganda promised?

At this point I realized that "Artisan" is ostentatious for "we're figuring this out as we go," and "small batch" means "we only have two employees." Once again, I'd been suckered by some great food marketing. I wondered if other reviewers of this ice cream had perhaps eaten it on a 90 degree night after skipping dinner.

Van Leeuwen's secret chocolate ingredient (don't worry, it's organic)

Later, I cyber moseyed over to their website where I learned that "Stockists" is ostentatious for "Whole Foods Supermarket." I also noted the fact that they tout their wonderchips as 72% chocolate. What? Now I'm really confused. Whats the other 28%? Filler?

All chocolate is made of three basic ingredients: cocoa butter, cocoa solids, and sugar. That's it. The USFDA states that in order to be called dark, chocolate must be at least 35 percent cocoa. As a general rule, the higher the cocoa percentage, the darker and more intense the chocolate. Obviously 72% chocolate was a typo on the website (see Artisan, above).

But I do know the quality of the cocoa makes a huuuuuuuge difference in the way that stuff tastes, think Hersey's vs MarieBelle. Nothing wrong with Hershey's, but its underwhelming chocolate flavor is borne out of its rather pedestrian cocoa. So my ears pricked up a little upon reading about the highly selective, innovative, French, family run source of the chocolate for the chips, and the chocolate ice cream. How did I miss that little gem?

Awesome "reverse depth of field" (ostentatious for out of focus) iphone photo

A fortnight later, I happened upon a fine fellow, my local stockist; being a true connoisseur and purveyor of wholesome and pleasurable victuals, he was well appointed with charming vessels of rimy milk, sourced from bovines browsing pasture from the foot hills of the Adirondacks (that's ostentatious for I went to whole foods and bought some ice cream). When I got it home, I nonchalantly tried a bite.



"Bite" must be ostentatious for "1/4 of the container" because that's what disappeared down my throat before the chocolate fog of deliciousness unleashed me from its sweet, sweet, death-grip. This stuff is good, you need to eat some.

The ice cream itself is just not that good without this chocolate, I'm sorry, gotta call it like I see, um, taste it. The chocolate they are using is amazing, and it makes the ice cream. It's not as appreciable in the chip, but when you get the full bore blast of its flavor standing center stage, with no distractions, its marvelous.

Ever had a really good chocolate brownie, so good the chocolate seems more like a stick of fresh butter and a cocoa bean hooked up and had some delicious bi-foodal kids? That's what this tastes like. That rich buttery chocolate gives the thin ice cream that hint of the amazing 5th taste, umami, (that's japanese for yummy) which there is NO excuse for a fat/protein bomb like ice cream not to have. If you make me ice cream and it doesn't have that elusive hint of mm-m-mmm that envelopes your tongue like a glove of satiation, you can talk to Johnny Cash.

Censored for your protection

Ok, ok. I'm not gonna fault the ice cream for being a vehicle for something far better than it. I love shrimp cocktail, same thing. Totally bland shrimp as a rickshaw of repast? Carting that delicious zestfulness of sweet tomato and horseradish to my mouth. Love it. So do you.

Benjamin Van Leeuwen cares about ingredients, cares about his ice cream, but still has some learning to do about making it. I look forward to monitoring his progress.

Verdict: Get the chocolate or the Giandujia (ANNOYINGLY ostentatious for chocolate-hazelnut). Don't bother with the rest. They get a half Strip for having 2 good pints (I'm feeling generous today).

Van Leeuwn Ice Cream
1/2 Gastroliaison Bacon Strip

This concludes Gastroliaison's review of Van Leeuwen Ice Cream.

How to buy a steak

Feel the love? I do.

When selecting a steak, make sure you go to a good butcher, one who gives half a crap about his job. Just get good ingredients, cook them simply, and let them do the work, its easier than you think.

You want potato salad with that?

If you're buying a piece of meat from this guy, you might as well put away your little Foreman Champ, call for take-out, and swear on something important that you will never invite me over for dinner.

Dry Aging Vs. Wet
Basically you must buy any expensive cut dry aged. Say it with me, dryyyyy aaaaaged. That's good.

Dry aging is what they used to do to all good steaks, before food was seen as a commodity to make money with. They hang the meat in a strictly climate controlled room, at just the right temp and humidity levels, with just the right air circulation. This dries the meat somewhat and allows for the natural enzymes, mostly Pediococcus cerevisiae and P.acidilacticiti to start to break down the connective tissue between the muscles. The majority of this lovely enzymatic action occurs in the first 12-16 days of sitting around, but the good places do it longer, around 25-28 days.

Really, what is going on is a specifically controlled rotting of your steak. Yup, you read that correctly. But before you get all huffy, start eating goji berries and run off to some ashram to become a vegan, lets reflect for a moment on rotten foods.

Don't let this happen to you

Some of my favorite foods, are, in fact, "rotten" in the exact same way. Cheddar cheese, on your ham and egg breakfast sandwich? Rotten. That innocent curl of shaved piave on your arugula with lemon and salt? Rotten. Pork sausages? Rotten (yes all of them, the breakfast ones, the Italian ones, the chorizo, the andoullie). Pickles? Rotten. Soy sauce? Rotten (and its such a good marinade). Beer? Rotten. Sauerkraut on your hot dog? Rotten (and your little dog too!).

Now that you are over that fun little food fact, you either-

a: have really become a vegan (no tofu now, its rotten as well)
b: grasp that "rotten" actually just means good bacteria doing fun things like fermentation
c: can't stop thinking about food

The controlled enzyme all-nighter actually concentrates the flavor of the meat, and makes it more tender. It's difficult and expensive to do correctly, as you actually lose some meat in this process. The outer layer must be trimmed away due to the exposure, and the reduced water levels mean reduced weight. This means it costs more, but tastes better. Peter Lugers cares so much about their steak, they have their own aging rooms.

Wet aging involves wrapping the steak in plastic and letting it stew in its own juices. Gross. If a steak is wet aged it will be overly moist (not juicy), with a lack of flavor. It's close to what a steak should be, but just seems wrong; like plastic surgery, somethings off but its hard to pin down what it is.

Let's review.

Dry aged.

Wet aged

Grass Fed Beef
Grass is what a cow was designed to eat. The beef industry is going to tell you corn fed is fine, just like the tobacco industry tells you Joe Camel wasn't meant to market cigarettes for kids, or GM tells you/desperately tries to convince you that SUVs are a good idea. The little corn fiesta these poor cows are on is a far cry from a wholesome tortilla chip.

You wanna do what with that cob?

In order to bring a cow up to market weight in record time to make more cash (oh, mother nature is so behind the curve), its feed is supplemented daily with steroids, and protein; I'm not talking tofu here, it's from other animals. Now say what you will about the corn, but I have never seen a carnivorous cow, never. And seeing as how diseases typically infect humans after making the jump from one animal species to the next, this seems like a really, really bad idea.

The cows have to be pumped full of antibiotics so they don't keel over from eating this stuff all day, that's where 70-80% of ALL the antibiotics used in the U.S. go. And that's not increasing the likelihood of building any antibiotic resistant strains of some horrible disease or anything, right? Right? Want to know more? Read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollen.

Grass fed beef is higher in Omega 3 fatty acids. Simmer down, this isn't crisco. Omega-3 fatty acids are considered essential fatty acids (EFA), which means that they are essential to human health but cannot be manufactured by the body. For this reason, omega-3 fatty acids must be obtained from food.

Essential fatty acids are polyunsaturated and grouped into two families, the omega-6 EFAs and the omega-3 EFAs. Although there are just minor differences in their molecular structure the two EFA families act very differently in the body.

The metabolic products (this means after you eat them) of omega 6 acids promote inflammation, blood clots and tumors, sweet. Omega 3s do the exact opposite. Ideally, you want to be at at 1:1 ratio of Omega 6 to 3.

Here's a chart-
Free range eggs...................1.5 : 1
Cheap ones..........................20 : 1
Farmed salmon.....................6 : 1
Wild salmon..........................1 : 1
Corn fed beef.........................6 : 1
Grass fed beef........................1 : 1

Funny, farm raised fish is fed corn, and has the same ratio as corn fed beef, huh, imagine that.

The purpose of this caffeine fueled rant? Next time someone raises their eyebrows at your rib-eye and starts waxing poetic about cholesterol while they dip into their trout almandine, you can tell them to suck it.

All the beef in Argentina is grass fed.
All of it, without exception. Need I say more?

Next week, we cook one.

The best cut of beef ever

The pinnacle of bovine deliciousness, the succulent, lip-smacking king of food, I present to you, the Porterhouse. No other steak stands up to its double barrel blast of deliciousness, and the fact that it can please just about everyone (except vegetarians) makes this one serious contender for the best thing mankind ever thought of eating.

Before I school you on how to cook one at home, lets have a little history lesson, because I like history, especially when it involves places where I'm from. The porter house cut was invented at Porter's Hotel, operated by Zachariah B. Porter, in Porter Square, our fair city of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The biggest, baddest steak invented by Yankees? Suck it Texas.

The Porterhouse is vastly superior to its arch nemesis and wanna-be doppelganger, the T-Bone. Why? It has a bigger piece of tenderloin, look here.


Now, although this makes it easier to cook the whole thing evenly, as its increase in mass will help somewhat in compensating for tenderloins propensity to cook faster than strip, this alone does not make it the king of cattle cuts. You get more of the most tender meat of the cow, but it's cooked next to the bone, so it picks up a ton of flavor.

Tenderloin you say, cooked on the bone? Big whoop, can't you just wrap it in in bacon and call it a day? Busch League my friends, Busch League. Although I truly believe bacon to be mankind's most perfect food, nothing compares to meat cooked on the bone, nothing.

A strip steak, and a tenderloin? Cooked on the bone? Together, on the same plate? You mean there's a socially acceptable way to eat two steaks at the same time?

At this point you are either
a: fully understanding why the North won the war
b: thinking something that tastes this good should be illegal
c: imagining you could eat more of this than anyone else on the planet

Restaurant Review: Shinjuku Mon Cher Ton Ton.

Kobe beef may just be the Holy Grail of beef deliciousness, but you can't buy that here, no matter what the menu at your favorite steak house says. At best you're getting some American Wagyu. If it's not from Kobe, it ain't Kobe, period, and there is a reason it's the worldwide benchmark.


I have been to Quality Meats, Kobe Club, Smith and Wollensky's, the Strip House, Peter Lugers, Angelo Maxies, Ruth's Chris, Wolfgangs, BLT Steak, BLT Prime, Dylan Prime, Craft, Craftsteak, Pastis, and I have bought Lobel's $167 American Wagyu porterhouse. Am I missing anyone?

With my credentials firmly established (to myself at least) I can now declare myself the expert of all things beef. That little detail out of the way, my next declaration as the king of beef is that the best steak experience ever is at Mon Cher Ton Ton. This teppanyaki steak house is owned by the amazing chain Seryna and is located on the 52nd floor of the Sumitomo Building in Shinjuku.


Now when I hear teppanyaki, the first thing that pops in my head is Benihana in that scene from the 40 year old virgin. Evidently though, they do things a little differently in Japan. Entering the restaurant is awesome. You are snappily whisked up an elevator to arguably the highest view I have ever had from a restaurant. The place is nice, not stuffy, but with a whiff of hotel bar to it (my companion thought it was because it's in a high rise, but I feel like it was the upholstery).

Sitting down at the teppanyaki bar I carefully chose how I would rack up a huge bill on my amex. I figured surf and turf was the way to go, so I selected prawns, the priciest beef I could find on the menu, some veggies for good measure, and cold beer, lots of it.

My prawns were first up to bat, expertly sauteed on the searing hot table top with a little soybean oil. After the guy was done cooking them, with a flick of the wrist he sliced the shrimp out of their shells, and placed the meat on my plate. It was perfect, and definitely benefited from being cooked whole, imbuing it with a flavor often lacking in American restaurants (we seem so quick to distance ourselves from our food, or at least its eyeballs).

Next he cut the head from the shells, pressed them under under a flat steel weight, and let them cook until they became crispy, wafer thin, translucent slices of shrimp heaven; somewhat reminiscent of a soft shelled crab crossed with a pork rind. Yeah, it's that good.

Next, the steak. It was marbled so perfectly it would make your butcher blush.



My chef deftly seared, sliced and served it with the casual detachment of a true professional. It was delicious. Hot and crusty outside, enough temperature to seal the outer layer, melt the fat throughout, but keep the meat from losing its flavor.


It had a self basted quality to it, like piece of sable fish (sea bass, black cod, etc). This steak displayed that remarkable quintessence typically reserved for such things as a Mont Blanc pen, or a Ferrari.

He then proceeded to saute some white rice IN THE FAT left on the teppan. At this point I was almost weeping with joy and ready to sneak the little chef home in my suitcase. The steak tasted like steak flavored butter that married a slice of bacon without the smoke. The rice was cooked in that steak flavored butter, and the beer was cold. I think there were some veggies and fungus too, but honestly, who cares.

Capped off with a Suntory Yamazaki single malt overlooking the city, it was heaven.

Verdict: You need to go there. Sadly, Mon Cher misses out on the coveted 5 Bacon Strips only because it's too far for me to go whenever I want to.

Pros: Amazing food, amazing view, cultural experience, it's in Tokyo.

Cons: It's in Tokyo, it's not cheap.

Shinjuku Mon Cher Ton Ton
4 Gastroliaison Bacon Strips