Tuned In

Tuned In TV: Unpack Your Knives

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Top Chef New York airs its finale tonight, and in honor of that, I visited season 1 winner Harold Dieterle at his restaurant Perilla in Greenwich Village for a time.com video. Besides talking about his experience on the show, Harold showed us how to make a recession-gourmet meal: a duck burger with seasoned fries.

The burger, which Perilla serves for brunch, is bound together meatloaf style with panko crumbs, and the ground duck itself, Dieterle told me, is about 50% fat. But this is recession cooking, and if your retirement portfolio has lost half its value, shaving a few years off the end of your life is probably a wise economic move. 

One question I asked that time.com’s editors left out of the final video, and to my mind the most important: what do you drink with a duck burger? Dieterle said he’d go with a gin and tonic. Which is also not a bad choice for watching tonight’s final. Who do you pick to win?