Vynl

Location: 754 9th Avenue, Manhattan (51st Street)
Obligitory Web Address: http://www.vynl-nyc.com/

Vynl is kind of a default diner for us, as it is close to home, has a good happy hour with frozen margaritas, and is generally full of gays. Their bathrooms are themed with the style and music of various divas, and the menus are set inside old LP albums, hence the name Vynl. I'm sure they thought they were very clever.

What they should have been doing instead of congratulating themselves on being all smartass with the concept and name (I mean, it's vinyl, like, seriously, you couldn't just add one letter and spell it correctly?) is going to cooking school to learn how to poach a damn egg.

Eggs Benedict at Vynl are hit-or-miss. Sometimes, the egg is perfectly poached and the yolk runs thickly when cut and the hollandaise hasn't curdled, and then other times it's last Saturday morning, the egg is completely cooked through, and the hollandaise has hardened because they let it sit there too long and the butter separated and cooled out of the emulsion.

The problem with the egg is common and preventable, but there is just no excuse for fucking up hollandaise. It's yolk, butter, lemon juice, and salt, and if you mess it up, which is nearly impossible with a food processor, it's easy to fix. The poor hollandaise on my plate was barely recognizable as such.

The trick with the egg, though, is to get it to stop cooking, which only takes about two or three minutes on a low simmer. Remove it with a slotted spoon and plop it in ice water. You can keep a whole bunch of them in there for a while and reheat them quickly when you are ready to serve. Then they don't cook on the plate, which is probably what mine did on Saturday.

The ham was good, not too salty, and the English muffin was acceptable though bland. Clearly store-bought.

But like I mentioned, Vynl is not very consistent with its dish, and once in a while it is pretty good: it really just depends on the day. Their hash browns, and I only call them that because they are listed as such on the menu, are terrible, and if they let you substitute them for toast, they have a whole grain bread that is very good with butter.

Price: $10.95
Score: 2/10
Yolk: Sometimes it's ok, but it was not their day.

Everything Tastes Better with Hollandaise

There is no definitive creation story for Eggs Benedict, Greatest Dish in the Land, though Wikipedia says it went something like this:

Lemuel Benedict, a retired Wall Street stock broker, claimed that he had wandered into the Waldorf Hotel in 1894 and, hoping to find a cure for his morning hangover, ordered "buttered toast, poached eggs, crisp bacon and a hooker* of hollandaise." Oscar Tschirky, the famed maître d'hôtel, was so impressed with the dish that he put it on the breakfast and luncheon menus but substituted ham and a toasted English muffin for the bacon and toast.

Probably this is pretty close to how it happened, as all of the reasonable creation stories I could find in ten minutes on Google mentioned either the Waldorf or Delmonico's**, a posh restaurant in New York that closed in 1923 but existed in various forms here and there since then, since the name passed into the public domain when the family closed the last place.  There is still one in New York, but it opened in 1998 and is owned by the Ocinomled partnership, whatever the hell that is.

Anyway, my point is that this Oscar Tschirky guy also worked at Delmonico's for a while, so most likely he had something to do with the creation of Eggs Benedict.  He also created the Waldorf Salad and Veal Oscar, and all this even though he was a maître d’ and not a chef.  He even had a cookbook, which was probably pretty ballsy back in the day. I mean, today anybody who has an accent and large forearms and maybe cooks with mayonnaise all the time gets at least a cooking show and book deal.  You know who I mean.

The goal of this blog will be to taste and review Eggs Benedict throughout the city of New York, and probably elsewhere also.  It is a rich meal, and I eat it as much as possible, so maybe we will also have a Waistline Watch.  I don't know.  We'll see how it goes.

At the bottom of each post, I'll put the price of the dish, a score (out of 10), and a summary.

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* HAH
** Delmonico's is also credited with creating Lobster Newberg and Delmonico Steak