No Glamour, but Sandwich Is a Star

IS there any pain quite as sweet as the one caused by a steaming drip of cheese oozing from between slices of just-grilled bread and onto your lower lip?


Buttery, salty and enduringly simple, the grilled cheese sandwich stands unrivaled in the universe of simple gastro-pleasures. It is the gateway sandwich to the land of hot sustenance, the first stovetop food many children learn to prepare by themselves.

But in Los Angeles, the grilled cheese is less a starting place than a destination, an object of outright mania, not just at workaday coffee shops but also at any number of well-regarded restaurants, where it’s slathered with short ribs, decorated with piquillo peppers or topped gently with a quail egg.

Thursday is grilled cheese night at Campanile, a standard-bearer of Italian dining in Los Angeles, and the restaurant’s busiest night, when the tables bustle with families, hot daters, girls-night-out revelers downing prosecco, and divorced dads hoping to buy good will from their estranged children.

The Melt Down, a restaurant in Culver City devoted to the gooey sandwich, has lines out the door at lunch. Every April is grilled cheese month at Clementine, a lunch spot near Century City, with an elaborate new theme each time.

For the past four years, this city has also been home to the Grilled Cheese Invitational. Roughly 600 people show up at an unpublicized address, armed with frying pans and camping stoves, and are given 20 minutes to demonstrate their grilled cheese prowess. (One year, a contestant constructed an eight-foot grilled sandwich rendition of “The Gates” by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.)

Whether created with fresh-baked sourdough and enhanced with tangy green garlic, or slapped together with Wonder Bread and Kraft Singles, the grilled cheese sandwich is nothing less than consolatory after you’ve spent a long day sitting in traffic on the 405 freeway.

Buck Down, one of the organizers of the Grilled Cheese Invitational, sees its appeal this way: “It may very well be the ultimate comfort food, and one thing Los Angeles is about is insecurity. If you have to live here for your job, your entire career is predicated on insecurity, because you’re either going to be replaced, fired or exposed as a fraud. What better way to get comfort than grilled cheese?”

Of course, Los Angeles is more than the entertainment industry, and the grilled cheese sandwich appeals well beyond its corridors, as three months of happy trekking through diners from Hollywood to Culver City showed.

The classic Los Angeles grilled cheese, like the $5.95 version served at the 101 Coffee Shop in Hollywood, begins with perfectly buttered sourdough bread, topped with cheddar and perhaps a nice tomato, grilled to tawny perfection, its contents stretching appropriately with each bite. It is perfectly paired with a Coke (not diet, thanks).

But high-end grilled cheese owes a debt to Nancy Silverton, who began grilled cheese night a decade ago when she was working behind the bar at Campanile, which she formerly owned. She wanted something to increase business on a slow night. “But more importantly, I love grilled cheese sandwiches,” said Ms. Silverton, who now runs Pizzeria Mozza and Osteria Mozza here.

“That goes back to the junior high school cafeteria in Tarzana, where I was addicted to the super-greasy ones. I have upgraded my cheese preference, but that is where my love of grilled cheese went back to.”

It wasn’t long before grilled cheese night became the hottest day of the week at Campanile, and it remains so, says its current chef and owner, Mark Peel, Ms. Silverton’s ex-husband.

On a recent Thursday night, my 4-year-old and her friend worked through a classic, a Gruyère (no mustard) perfectly pressed, while the two adults shared a version with chickpeas and tomatoes, more salad than grilled cheese, really, and a Gorgonzola number with spiced walnuts and honey (not for beginners).

Many other chefs have their own exalted version of the sandwich. At the Foundry on Melrose, Eric Greenspan has a grilled cheese that weds taleggio cheese with short ribs, arugula and apricot caper purée on raisin bread.

Mr. Greenspan served raisin bread with his cheese courses and thought it would translate well in grilled cheese sandwiches. He added the meat because, he explained, a chef with ribs on the menu tends to have short rib scraps lying around anyway. (I have provided a recipe that does not call for ribs, presuming that like me, you have a lack of short rib scraps in your kitchen.)


I ate one in near silence in his kitchen over a white linen napkin, unable to turn my attention from this slightly spicy (arugula), decidedly messy (cheese and short ribs) and pleasantly salty amalgam.

“Grilled cheese is basically fat on fat on fat,” Mr. Greenspan said cheerfully.

Just because a 9-year-old with mildly permissive parents can find grilled cheese nirvana on her first time at the stove, that does not mean there are no secrets to the perfect sandwich.

Chefs agree: butter, room temperature and lots of it, must be spread all the way to the crust, to prevent the bread from taking on a soggy center with dried edges. This is not toast!

Further, the sandwich must be minded so that it does not scorch, a common transgression. “Bread quality matters,” Mr. Greenspan said, “but butter quality matters more.”

Quinn Hatfield, the chef at Hatfield’s, prepares most of his restaurant’s signature croque-madame, made with raw hamachi and prosciutto on toasted brioche with beurre blanc and topped with a quail egg.

“I end up throwing away 30 percent of the sandwiches that other people make,” he said. “It’s really a tricky maneuver because you’ve got to fry the bread in a lot of butter but not let it get too hard.”

Plenty of home cooks have taken grilled cheese to a superlative form, as well. The grilled cheese invitational here started as something of a joke among friends, said Mr. Down, an organizer. By year three, he said, the event had become so competitive, the organizers had to stop publicizing it. And yet, it grew.

Grilled cheese artisans compete in three categories: missionary (bread, butter and cheese), kama sutra (sandwiches with meats or other ingredients and fancier bread) and honey pot (dessert sandwiches). On 50 feet of tables, contestants fry the sandwiches and then divide them into quarters. They are placed on paper plates with ballots stapled to them, which runners bring to the judging table.

Sandwiches are graded on presentation, taste, Wessonality (“What makes this sandwich special,” Mr. Down explained) and style. One recent winner featured polenta fried two times with Brie, prosciutto and pesto.

But really, let’s not get too carried away. I prefer to belly up to the counter at the 101 for a basic grilled cheese, pondering as I eat the whereabouts of my high school friend Joe Puleo, who whipped me up government-issue cheddar versions after my cocktail waitress shift at Cheek to Cheek in Kalamazoo, Mich. Because really, for any native-born American, the first thing grilled cheese tastes of is home. In that lies its true appeal.

Tags:Glamour,Sandwich,cheese ,Gorgonzola

Nokia Does a Map Deal, Signaling Strategic Bet

Nokia’s plans to acquire the map and navigational software maker Navteq for $8.1 billion raise the stakes in the competition among wireless carriers, handset makers and new entrants like Google and Microsoft to deliver information and advertising directly to cellphone users.

The acquisition, Nokia’s largest, is an indication of where Nokia and other handset makers are headed. Navteq specializes in location-based services, which uses the Global Positioning System to track movement and delivers information to a consumer about routes and destinations. Because the services could include advertisements and promotions related to the locations, wireless carriers and mobile phone makers see potential for new sources of revenue.

“It’s a step that moves us toward the Swiss Army phone,” said Roger Entner, a senior vice president for communications at IAG Research. “It tells you where to go, where to pick up your children, how to find your spouse. It does everything for you.”

Nokia, the world’s largest cellphone maker, said yesterday that it would pay $78 in cash for each share of the digital mapmaker, including outstanding options.

The acquisition is part of a broader strategic shift by Nokia, based in Finland, to transform itself from a maker of handsets, a notoriously low-margin business, to a provider of mobile services like photos, video, music and games.

Nokia recently revamped Nokia Maps to make it easier for consumers to use. It also bought Gate5, a small company based in Berlin that makes navigational software applications for cellphones. And two weeks ago, Nokia acquired Enpocket, a mobile advertising company based in Boston.

However, mobile service is already proving to be every bit as competitive as the handset business. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all have ambitions to offer directions or maps to users via cellphone and to ply them with advertising along the way. Other electronics makers are also studying the market. TomTom, the world’s largest maker of car navigation devices, announced in August that it planned to buy Tele Atlas, Navteq’s main mapmaking competitor, for $2.7 billion.

“This is not just about ‘the Internet goes mobile,’” Richard A. Simonson, Nokia’s chief financial officer, said in an interview yesterday. “We’re not just trying to replicate the Google or Microsoft experience online. The consumer won’t come unless we give them something that is rich.” That includes using the Global Positioning System to help users find restaurants, theaters and shops. “That’s where we are headed,” Mr. Simonson said.

Information on traffic, updated in real time, would also help consumers reach their destinations more easily.

Unlike phones that access maps online — like the Apple iPhone, which accesses Google Maps via the Internet — Nokia cellphones could be integrated with Navteq’s navigational software and technology. That could give Nokia an edge over competitors like Motorola and Samsung, analysts said.

Today, most people who use G.P.S. do so through separate devices, though some can be linked to a cellphone. But with the growing popularity of smartphones, which are essentially hand-held computers, and the falling price and shrinking size of G.P.S. processors, it is becoming easier to access maps and other data that were once limited to personal computers.

“If you have never used one, it sounds high tech and kind of fancy,” said Charles S. Golvin, a wireless analyst with Forrester Research. “But it’s kind of like TiVo. Once you have it, it changes you. You have to pry it from people’s fingers.”

If Nokia wants to sell high-end phones, “they have to give consumers something different,” said Jack E. Gold, founder of J. Gold Associates, a technology research firm.

“Still they have to get beyond the coolness factor. After three months, is it still cool or are you moving on to something else?” he said. “They have to move beyond the next step; like, if I am driving, does it let me know about traffic accidents or where that bar or coffee shop is? Those are the concierge services that make it worth $10 a month or whatever they will charge. But if it saves you 45 minutes in traffic, then it’s worth a lot.”

For now the market for such services is tiny. But wireless carriers, mobile phone makers and others are salivating over the potential revenue if such phones catch on with consumers. In July, Sprint Nextel began a “friend finding” service from Loopt, based in Mountain View, Calif., that allows users to find their friends who are also using the service. “Carriers want to offer the same products, so there is likely to be some tension,” Mr. Golvin said.

Mr. Simonson, of Nokia, said the relationship with carriers is not tense now and that the two sides are realizing that they have to work together.

Nokia shares fell as much as 4 percent in New York trading after the announcement as some investors questioned whether the Finnish company had paid too much for a business that had $582 million in sales in 2006. Nokia shares rebounded, however, amid a broad rally in the market. The stock closed up 3 cents, at $37.96 a share on the New York Stock Exchange.

“This is a very high valuation for the U.S. company, so yes, this is a high price to pay,” said Mats Nystrom, an analyst at SEB Enskilda Bank in Stockholm. “But navigation is a hot area and fits well with Nokia’s strategy.”

Navteq shares fell $1.52, or 1.95 percent, to $76.45. The stock had been bid up since July on rumors that it was an acquisition target.

Judson C. Green, the chief executive of Navteq, said executives at the company, based in Chicago, talked to other potential bidders before agreeing to be acquired by Nokia, but he declined to say which ones. Analysts said Navteq would have been a good fit with Google because, although it dominates the search and online advertising businesses, it does not have the technology to make its own maps.

Google, like Yahoo, buys maps from Navteq.

Mr. Green said another reason he preferred an acquisition by Nokia was that Nokia had agreed to let the company remain an independent unit. The new parent company would bankroll improvements to service, including better block-to-block tracking of cellphone users as they walk down the street.

Both Mr. Green of Navteq and Mr. Simonson of Nokia said they were interested in expanding into emerging markets like China and India, where a growing middle class is widely using entry-level phones but could be eager for expanded services.

Tags:Nokia,Microsoft,Google,Cellphone

EBay Revises Its Ambitions for Skype

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 1 — EBay is finally acknowledging that it paid too much for the Internet phone company Skype two years ago.

On Monday, eBay, based in San Jose, Calif., said it was taking a $1.43 billion charge related to the acquisition of Skype. EBay paid $2.6 billion for the rapidly growing service in 2005.

Since the purchase, Skype’s membership rolls have swelled past 220 million. But the company has not had as much success making money as it has had growing. Skype does not charge its users for calls to other Skype users. There is only a small fee for calls to landline numbers and cellphones.

Skype earned $90 million during the second quarter of 2007, far below eBay’s projections. EBay said in a regulatory filing that the charge was “the result of the updated long-term financial outlook for Skype.”

The Skype deal helped to initiate a renewed acquisition frenzy in the online world, and a return to what some call a bubble mentality. After the spectacular dot-com flameout seven years ago, Internet executives pledged to begin judging technology companies by revenue rather than by something as ephemeral as “eyeballs,” or traffic on a Web site.

But somewhere along the line, the high-tech industry reverted to its old form.

“We are almost going back to year 2000 types of errors,” said Aaron Kessler, a senior Internet analyst at Piper Jaffray. Internet companies “are buying users instead of revenue and profitability. That’s what eBay did for Skype. They saw a great asset with tons of users but no clear monetization path.”

EBay has struggled to turn Skype’s popularity into profits. This year Skype added a “yellow pages” directory and ways for its users to rate businesses. Neither of those features has drawn much attention or activity.

EBay has also begun to integrate Skype calling into auctions on the eBay marketplace, in the hope that buyers and sellers would communicate better. But the success of that integration is almost impossible to measure.

“It has seemed relatively clear that Skype has underperformed even modest expectations for the last two years,” said Derek Brown, an analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald.

EBay also said Monday that as part of the $1.43 billion charge it was making a $530 million payout to Skype shareholders. When it bought Skype, eBay pledged to pay up to $1.7 billion if Skype met certain user growth and revenue goals.

The company also announced that Niklas Zennstrom, Skype’s chief executive and one of its founders, was stepping down to become nonexecutive chairman and would focus on his entrepreneurial efforts outside the company.

Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman, said the parting was mutually agreed upon. “He could have continued to run the company, but he wanted to focus on new opportunities. He’s an entrepreneur at heart,” Mr. Durzi said.

Michael van Swaaij, eBay’s chief strategy officer, will act as chief executive of Skype until eBay hires a replacement.

The high price eBay paid for Skype now brings to mind some of the most flagrant mistakes of the first dot-com boom, like Time Warner’s purchase of America Online — and how some of those mistakes could be repeated in a new investment frenzy.

“Right after the bust, people started focusing on business models and revenue,” said Greg Sterling, a Silicon Valley analyst and consultant. “There has been a little bit of departure on that, with a focus on building the biggest audience and figuring that revenues will follow. That is the attitude that has prevailed over the last couple years, and it may not be sound.”

Tags:Skype,Ebay,America Online,outlook