Rachael Ray

I’m Josh Ozersky, the national restaurant editor for Citysearch, and newly-converted zealot for Team Rachael. I write our New York food blog, The Feedbag, but I’ll be writing every week here on topics that aren’t all tied up with the comings and goings of the New York restaurant world, my usual sphere of authority. Along with meat, that is — I’m also the author of The Hamburger: A History, coming to you soon in paperback.

I went to Las Vegas this past weekend for what amounted to a titanic surf ‘n turf trip: a dinner at world seafood mecca Paul Bartolotta, and a trip to Carnevino, where Adam Perry Lang’s genetically-designed steak and I had a long-standing date. The trip was a succession of ecstasies (well, except for the bad beats at the poker table). So why do I keep thinking about those hash browns room service sent up at Encore? Why is that my lingering memory?

It’s all left over from last week’s blog entry, which is still haunting me. I’ve spent so many man-hours fretting over potato shreds that don’t even care about me, or even know I’m there. Why? Then I have great hash browns, like the ones from the Encore, and they catch me at that exact moment when I’m least freaky and anxious and preoccupied with fetishizing breakfast treats. I didn’t expect them to be good; and thus, when they showed up, buttery and crusty, and with each shred discrete and starchy and light as air, I felt a rare, untroubled glee. My god, were they good. They were formed in that unnatural little circle that comes from the use of little metal slave collars; when at the Waffle House, I ask for them set free (i.e. “scattered.”)

Article continues below...

Eating those hash browns brought to mind another, equally happy, hash brown memory. I once went to Seattle to visit my friend Don Rauf, the genius who wrote and performed the Mr. Cutlets theme song, with his brilliant band, Life in a Blender. One weary night, sick of hearing myself talk and dismayed at my own jealousy of Don’s domestic bliss, I went with him to Beth’s Café, an all-night diner frequented by truck drivers and punk rockers. The place is something of a Seattle institution, one of those handful of places that constitute the secret heart of a city. But all I cared about at that minute was having something to make me full and tired. And then, lo and behold, I saw a man covering an entire flattop griddle with hash browns, and laying margarine on them with what looked like a stew ladle. “What the hell is he doing, Don?” I asked, not quite believing my eyes.

“Don’t you remember? They serve all-you-can-eat hash browns here.”

“WHAT?”

It was true. Don had told me that Beth’s, a bastion of west-coast gluttony, served a bottomless hash brown plate, along with a 12-egg omelet. I just hadn’t been listening to him. Or maybe it didn’t register. Was this too good to be true? Was they why I didn’t hear it? I went from being sad and distracted to gleeful and almost giddy, and assaulted the hash browns like the Marines at Wake Island, and didn’t quit until the fourth or fifth plate. I actually think I wasn’t even conscious for most of this. It was like a kind of hash brown fugue state. And a similar starchy reverie struck me in Vegas Saturday morning, and I remember it very, very fondly. It isn’t every day you get the hash browns you didn’t know you were desperately hoping for.