Food – Page 4 – Pickpocket Bob Arno

Duck in a can

Montreal—Read anything about this city’s vibrant dining scene and you’ll be pointed to Au Pied de Cochon. You’ll also be warned: dining here entails a serious lapse in a heart-healthy diet. Pigs, of course, are featured heavily on the menu. Foie gras is the restaurant’s other specialty.

I don’t eat pigs, or any four-legged animals. I’m not big on two-legged winged creatures, either. But foie gras makes me swoon. In Montreal, it comes from ducks, not geese, and I find it slightly inferior. Slightly.

At Au Pied de Cochon, chef Martin Picard puts foie gras in everything: pigs’ feet, pizza, and a weird QuÃ©bÃ©cois dish called poutine. Poutine is a pile of fries and cheese curds covered with sauce, and often meat. What are cheese curds? I can’t think of an American equivalent. Cottage cheese curds are smaller and softer, and creamed. Indian paneer is similar: firm, dryish, squeaky lumps of milk soured by an acid. They’re good.

Au Pied de Cochon’s version of poutine starts with potatoes fried in duck fat and topped with a large lobe of seared foie gras. And get this: the sauce is made of foie gras puree, egg yolks, and cream. The eyes and mouth say yeah! while the heart runs for cover.

It was fabulous. Bob and I shared a plate, and we could have walked away satisfied after just the foie gras poutine and glasses of chenin blanc.

Duck in a can

But no. We had to experiment. Bob had a fresh bluefin tuna dish, rare and complicated. I had duck in a can. My chef brother-out-law had told me about it. The waiter brought out a piece of toasted bread covered with celery root puree. He also brought a hot sealed can, which he opened with a can opener at the table.

Slowly and ceremoniously, the steaming contents were dumped atop the bread. A duck breast, a large lobe of foie gras, buttered cabbage, a head of garlic, fresh thyme, and mysterious juices were cooked to a fragrant, unidentifiable heap that looked sort of… well, pre-digested.

It was not a pretty sight, though it smelled divine. The structure stood tall on its bread foundation for a minute, until the bread soaked up enough fat and juices to lose its ability to support such a heavy burden. Neighboring diners’ eyes bugged out. Mouths gaped. Oohs and ahs for the spectacle of the duck.

Needless to say, it was delicious. The duck was chewy and gamey, the foie gras meltingly luscious, the garlic an occasional bright surprise, and the cabbage a vegetal counterbalance. The celery root and juicy-crusty bread could have been a meal on it’s own. As you can see, the dish was enough for six people.

No surprise that the combination, foie gras poutine followed by duck in a can, was not a wise choice; I knew that when I ordered. I just had to try both dishes. There were many others I managed to pass up.

So this is my recommendation. Go to Au Pied de Cochon. If duck in a can doesn’t intrigue you, try one of their spectacular seafood platters. Or probably anything on the menu.

Midnight sun in Stockholm

Actual, working pickpockets discuss their demonstrations in Bob Arno's National Geographic documentary "Pickpocket King"

$Bob Arno interviewed by Sweden\'s TV4$

A family visit to Stockholm turned into a media circus. How did they know we were in town? First was an interview for an article in the Sunday supplement of Aftonbladet, one of Sweden’s national newspapers. (See it here.) Then Bob (Arno, the criminologist) was asked to speak to Stockholm’s street cops and detectives. Halfway through his two-hour presentation on street crime, TV4 showed up for an interview and demo.

The tv news reporters had to wait an hour for us, while Bob and I analyzed some tricky footage of a bag theft in Stockholm’s main subway station. The subway surveillance cameras are excellent, with high resolution and enough frames-per-second. We recognized the finale of a version of the pigeon-poop ploy, but earlier footage of the set-up was no longer available. Video footage is only kept for a few days before it is destroyed. The department’s looseleaf “book of criminals” is thick with mugshots. Stockholm is not what it used to be, even just a few years ago. Sad.

We drove Bob’s 97-year-old father out to his country house on an island in the archipelago. The old man built the three houses on the property with his own hands, and has maintained them reasonably well until the last year or so.

The grounds have always been a loosely-controlled wilderness, but now the meadows of wild orchid, lilly-of-the-valley, lupine, and Swedish soldiers are overgrown with tall grasses that hide the colorful flowers. As we arrived, a huge male deer munching leisurely on the trees looked accusingly at us, as if we were the trespassers. Within arm’s reach of the car, it didn’t bolt until we aimed a camera at it.

The weather was glorious and the old man was happy to be at his “summerhome.” I picked handfuls of smultron, tiny wild strawberries, until I was dragged away. I find it excruciating to walk on such delicacies, but they cover the ground and there’s no choice. I brought home a tick, but didn’t find it until the next day.

Bob Arno Food lecture police stockholm street crime sweden

Chinese torture contraption ?

Can anyone tell me what this contraption is? I took this picture through a window in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, after a dinner at Spring Deer, the famous and fabulous house of Peking duck. What are they doing to those poor women? Does it hurt? Click the picture for a larger view. I saw several shops in the neighborhood with this weird torture unit visible through the window.

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Feeding security-types

Ever the facilitators, Bob and I hosted dinner for a few security types the other night. Attending were Jo and Willy Allison, who put on the annual World Game Protection Conference in Las Vegas, at which Bob presented last month; Lieutenant Bob Sebby, who runs the quintessential fraud detail at LVMPD’s Financial/Property Crime Bureau; his wife, Cynde Beer, who is a mortgage fraud investigator; and LVMPD’s Detective Kim Thomas, an international authority on forgery. Kim’s also written a damn good book, Vegas: One Cop’s Journey. I reviewed it here.

Among us, we pretty much cover the gamut of theft. But on this night, the featured topic was how high-tech theft is moving into casinos. There’s nothing new about abusing credit cards, the magnetic data on them, shared-value cards, and washed or stolen checks. But bring those into the virtual money palace of a casino, and security-types begin to quake. With Eastern European organized crime gangs getting more sophisticated than ever, a cop’s gotta be well-fortified to stay on top. Or keep up. I’ve done my part:

Menu

Neon cocktails (Campari, Aperol, Midori, Absinthe, Ricard)
Aunt Diane’s special spinach salad
Grilled snapper filet on sweet potato mash, with
Orange-avocado-onion-cilantro-chili salsa
Watercress
Black rice
Garlic broccoli salad
Fresh melange of pomelo, pomegranate, jackfruit, mango,
and strawberries, with jackfruit-flavored coconut milk

Food police Security surveillance

Maui and Majuro

Pacific O

Chef McDonald had a farm, EIEIO. We had a gorgeous dinner in Lahaina last week, outdoors, on the beach, hibiscus blossoms in my hair (still attached to the shrub, which we were snug against, having begged the last outdoor table). A tacky tourist luau was taking place next door, but it was hard not to enjoy the music which visited us on the breeze. We’d only just arrived on Maui, and from the taxi, we watched whales spouting just offshore as the sun set. Lovely.

Our hotel receptionist, when asked for dinner recommendations, said “They’re all the same in town, and none are any good. The only place I eat here is Ruth’s Chris.” Then we found the quintessential local, a grown-up surfer on a bicycle, a food enthusiast. He pointed us to Pacific O, among other interesting options. Its chef, James McDonald, runs an organic farm for all the produce at Pacific O and his other restaurant, IO’s. We walked there and got a table right away, but it was under a roof next to the bar. Noisy, and not outdoors enough. I pushed hard and the manager created a spot for us on the patio out of nothing. We rewarded him with a hefty bill.

The following week we came ashore in Majuro in the Marshall Islands, by small boat. Only lightly touched by tourism, the jungle island was a delight in all its ineptness. The airport was mad with well-wishers, send-offers, and children running around as if it were the county fair. Almost every flying islander checked in an ice chest, and each ice chest (as each suitcase) was emptied, inspected, and repacked. The ice chests contained plastic baggies of frozen food, lobster, crabs, and frozen fish. Much of this was unwrapped. Just frozen and thrown in the chest.

Food islands Restaurant Travel