MenuPages

The legal status of absinthe in this country is still kind of up in the air, but we now have two producers of the spirit: St. George's Distillery in Alameda, Calif., which began selling it last December, and now the newcomer Sirene Absinthe Verte from North Shore Distillery just north of Chicago. The latter hit the market just this month after debuting at WhiskyFest. Chicagoist has some tasting notes from the event:

The 110 proof white absinthe has a sharp, herbal bite to it. the 124 proof green absinthe is, oddly, smoother than the white. It also has an amazing mouthfeel. With absinthe shaping up as the year's new hot spirit, this should sell well.

Until just last year, the importation of absinthe was prohibited, and the only way to get it was to very carefully hide it away in your luggage and hope that no one in customs felt the need to verify your declaration. In 2007, a few brands were approved for sale, but they had to meet the FDA's ban of thujone in consumable products.

Thujone's the bad guy here, the one that's been blamed for all of the evils supposedly brought about by absinthe consumption. It can wreak havoc on your brain and nervous system if consumed in large quantities. But by the time you've drunk enough absinthe, which can be up to 75 percent alcohol, to experience any effects from the thujone, you're dead from alcohol poisoning.

We're not exactly running out immediately to try absinthe — we've never been particularly fond of anise-flavored foods — but we love the ceremony involved with drinking absinthe. The special spoons, the cube of sugar, and the precise way of pouring the ice cold water over it.

Introducing Sirene Absinthe Verte [North Shore Distillery]
St. George Spirits [Official Site]
Absinthe [Wikipedia]
Sorry, Absinthe Trippers: Scientists Say You're Just Really Drunk [Wired]
Chicagoist at WhiskeyFest [Chicagoist]

It didn't take long, once the new Grand Theft Auto IV was released yesterday, for foodie/gamer/blogger Adam Kuban to take a virtual tour of the game's eateries. He found that many of the spots bear a striking resemblance to actual New York establishments. That's not surprising, as Liberty City is basically supposed to be a virtual New York.

What is surprising is the level of detail with which the game portrays its fictional Big Apple. Unlike previous versions, which included major landmarks, such as the Golden Gate Bridge and Capitol building in GTA: San Andreas, GTA IV gets right into the neighborhoods to portray actual local foodie faves. They've also got hilarious take-offs of other local institutions such as the musical Banging On Trashcan Lids For An Hour (Stomp) Check out the screenshots over on New York Eats.

It's just too bad the virtual world doesn't (yet) include smell and taste. Of course, that would make games such as Cooking Mama a lot more fun, too.

The Real-Life Restaurants in New York City from 'Grand Theft Auto 4' [New York Eats]
GTA: IV [Official Site]
Cooking Mama [Official Site]
Adam Kuban [Wikipedia]

It's time for a little break. We're turning some age and going some place for the next few days. A clue to our whereabouts:

Yes, that cheeseburger is sticking its spicy tongue out at you. Ha!

There will be national content for the remainder of the week, and we'll be back atcha on Monday, aka Cinco de Mayo. Enjoy your break from us, and we will do the same.

[Photo: green chili cheeseburger, peabirdwoman/flickr]

You know what marginal group of tens of millions of people are being put at risk for poor nutrition by the global surge in food prices? American's school children! Back in the salad days of 2006 when money grew on houses, glowing accounts abounded on plans to revamp the way kids eat at school, trading the fattening and soulless frozen pizzas and burgers that fueled the childhood obesity crisis (remember that?) for the new religion of local/seasonal/organic.

Now that reality has set in, schools are swapping fresh for canned, seeing higher demand for subsidized lunches, and wondering how they'll cope with 30% to 50% cost increases while the federal per-meal subsidy remains static at an unrealistic 23 cents. Probably not all that well! Our youngest citizens have been historically poor budgetary advocates for themselves, so when their slice of the pie shrinks, that's generally the end of the story. Federal law will see to it that students are provided with a minimum number of calories each day, but that's also true for prisoners.

In this rapidly shifting environment for school meals, you have to wonder, just what are the children eating? Thanks to the wonders of the internet, hundreds of cafeteria menus are available for our inspection. Here's a sampling from around the country of what's being served for lunch today:

• Wicomico County, Maryland — Pork dippers with dipping sauce and dinner roll or hot dog on bun and potato rounds, cole slaw, pears

• Fulton County, Illinois — tortellini, pork tenderloin/bun, baked potato, salad bar, uncrustable PBJ, garlic bread, tossed salad, pineapple chunks, shape up in cup

• Fond du Lac County, WIsconsin — Grilled cheese, chicken noodle soup, raw vegetables and dip, mandarin oranges

• Pinellas County, Florida — Cheeseburger, Cuban pork with yellow rice, cheese stick munch and dip, potato wedges, beans, broccoli, Cuban toast

• Tate County, Mississippi — Salisbury Steak w/Gravy, Baked Chicken Nuggets, Fruit and Yogurt Salad, Ham & Cheese on Bun, Black-Eyed Peas, Straight Cut French Fries, Seasoned Cabbage, Chilled Peach Slices, Mixed Fruit, Fruit Juice, Central MS Cornbread, Rice, Saltine Crackers.

Illuminating! Almost everyone is eating pig products for lunch, and there also seems to be a preponderance of dippable items. Regional themes are clearly in play, like the Cuban toast in Florida and the intriguing "Central MS Cornbread" in Mississippi. It's heartening to see that, however unhealthy the dishes and low quality the ingredients, there's still a nod to culinary heterogeneity. Every school seems to be offering fruit and vegetables in some (unexciting) form, but that's a legal mandate; and besides, one of the articles mentioned that broccoli is now cost-competitive with flour!

But even as our school lunch program is stymied by high costs and crappy product, at least we don't have massive food poisoning outbreaks at our nation's cafeterias! For now, anyway.

Economic crunch seen in school lunch rooms [Bradenton Herald]
Food Crisis Forcing Cafeteria Managers To Try New Menus [AHN]
Food prices take bite out of school lunch menus [Star-Ledger]

[Photo: pingnews/flickr]

With grain prices skyrocketing, corn doing double duty between the gas tank and the table, and beef still reeling from that gigantic recall back in February, the American food industry seems strained, to put it lightly. This might be a good time for a new, more streamlined meat product to start making inroads in the market.

And, according to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article re-printed in Restaurants and Institutions, that's just what's happening with goat meat. Would you call it the soccer of meats? Maybe:

"It's the No. 1 consumed meat in the world," said Scott Hollis, a goat specialist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "It's very popular - except here."

Goat is especially popular with Muslim, Hispanic and some Asian communities, particularly around certain holidays, such as Greek Easter (which was Sunday), Cinco de Mayo, and the end of Ramadan, which comes in the fall.

Until recently, though, it was difficult to find American goat meat. If shoppers found goat in stores, it was likely to be imported frozen from New Zealand or Australia, the world's largest exporter of goat meat.

That is starting to change as American farmers get into the meat goat biz - which, as it turns out, doesn't require all that much.

Goats aren't expensive to buy and don't need nearly the land that larger livestock does. That means more small-scale "hobby farmers" have gotten into the business as word of new demand has spread.

While goat meat-burgers may not appear on the menu at McDonalds any time soon, we're glad to see a more worldly, eco-friendly meat treat gaining popularity. A brief internal poll revealed MP staffers overall like the stuff in curries, Jamaican jerk-style, in burritos and whole on the bone. MP Chicago editor Adam Peltz remembered a particularly transcendent cut he ate in Lima: "...i got this amazing leg of kid — so succulent and flavorful for juvenile meat."

As for us, eight years of vegetarianism stunted our meat discovery growth, but just as it is gaining fans in the American marketplace, goat is on its way to the top of our meats-to-try list. Now, if we could just find a local restaurant that serves the stuff...

THE OTHER RED MEAT? Goats find way to U.S. plates [St. Louis Post-Dispatch]
The American Meat Goat Association [Official Site]
Largest Recall of Ground Beef is Ordered [NY Times]
Photo: Mark Verner [Flickr]

Park 52, Jerry Kleiner's recently opened upscale comfort food restaurant in Hyde Park, has been getting decent play in the neighborhood, all things considered. The Dish reports finding the place "packed" at 9pm on a weekday night, despite prices well outside the normal range for the area, and food alternately described as "limp," "dineresque," and "copycat." The Chicagoist went by over the weekend and found people "disappointed" that the restaurant's not open for brunch. We're sure a serious review will hit the internet sooner or later, but in the meantime, we have the restaurant's very first shill on MenuPages to share with you.

User: Patricia (correctly capitalized first names are so infrequently used for legitimate reviews that their presence raises eyebrows — you know, because real people are lazy and illiterate)

Title: Wow! Just what Hyde Park needed!! (use of sentence case makes us nervous. It's true that Hyde Park needed a sophisticated, modern restaurant of some sort, but the title plays into that notion too heavily. Also, non-ironic double-exclamations are frowned upon)

Rating: 5/5/5/5 (an amateur shilling tactical error. Clever shillers realize that 5/5/5/5 is a big red flag, and often go with 4.5/4.5/4.5/4.5 instead)

Review:

What a great place! Absolutely wonderfully decorated (if you like that sort of thing). Great eclectic menu (not really). Food cooked to perfection (cliche). Chef ad libbed on a mustard sauce because I'm allergic to tomatoes and mushroomsit was superb and complimented the meal extremely well (lovely detail, well-intertwined with the narrative)! I felt like I was downtown but didn't have to travel a long way to get home (talking point). Great job!!! Please don't get stalechange the menu every so often and stay upscale (the neg). Valet parking is great idea, but please advertise (this is, in fact, the advertisement). I called and was told to park in the lot around back, but would have gladly paid the $8 to have the car parked and returned for me (wow, what a lazy person. Also, if they're from the neighborhood, why are they driving here?). My friend and I had a lovely time and I am definitely going to make it a "spot" to meet friends for a beautifully comfortable but upscale time in the neighborhood (scare quotes around "spot" and multiple modifiers on "time" are suspicious). Fantastic!!!!! (tell us what you really think)

All this said, we're sure the food is fine, and Park 52 will likely do very well. But we'll only participate when it's fair and square!

Park 52 [MenuPages]

[Photo: glazed salmon at Park 52, Kids' Writer/flickr]

• Rice: food crisis caused by 1) demand 2) distribution difficulties/costs 3) biofuels [IndiaTImes]
• UN: don't forget about commodities speculators! (and the craptastic dollar) [CanadianPress]
• Senate wants to add $200m to the $350m already requisitioned for food aid [NYTimes]
• Following Mars-Wrigley's megadeal, small candy members disheartened [Tribune]
• PM of Thailand, a former cooking show host, to personally make dinner for PM of Myanmar [AP]

• If you've been meaning to try Sally Lunn bread (all but pound cake; and who hasn't), good news! The new Andersonville new-Southern restaurant Big Jones is making sandwiches and French toast out of it [The Stew]

• Hyde Park's branch of the Dixie Kitchen & Bait Shop chain serves a credible catfish po'boy despite its hokey atmosphere [Chicagoist]

• Would you ever get so flustered by a 90 minute wait for Kuma's Corner to resort to Burger King? We're not even going to say anything. But apparently there's a rumor they're opening a store in Las Vegas?! [Drive-Thru]

• Solid, classic Italian at Lincoln Square's La Bocca della Verita'; the carbonara comes highly recommended [Chicagoist]

• What's better about Colombian bakery Mekato's — the pastries, the coffee or the prices? For us, it's the repeated use of "Columbian" instead of "Colombian" in the post, because we're horribly petty [Drive-Thru]

• Two nots about the South Side: Park 52 is not yet open for brunch to everyone's chagrin, and the service and food quality at Rosscoe's Chicago Home of Chicken and Waffles have not been helped by the name change [Chicagoist]

• The cookies are small and unassuming at Twisted Sister Bakery, but no less tasty for it [TOC]

[Photo: cemi-photographic 101/flickr]

It's time, folks: Take a long lunch, get your car/bus/train fare together, buy a magazine or two for the wait. Ben and Jerry's Free Cone Day is tomorrow, and the lines will be phenomenal!

Nah, we're just being dramatic. It's great. Ben and Jerry's feel-good ice cream company has been giving out free cones since it's one-year anniversary in 1979. Now, on it's dirty 30th birthday, the secret has somehow gotten out. Expect a bit of a wait, but it just may be worth it. You can find participating stores here, and a fun little B&J history lesson here.

No, they're not bribing us with any more free ice cream than you get.

Ben and Jerry's [Official Site]
Photo: Cresny [Flickr] Free Cone Day 2007

n.b. try your luck at the B&J's on Navy Pier

A politically active reader wrote in, wondering where he should fuel up next Saturday after he Gets Out The Vote for important presidential nominee [REDACTED] in hotly contested Gary, Indiana. Gary is known for many things — its rapidly shuttering steel mills, poverty, malaise and generalized decay — but much less so for its culinary offerings.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that you're really dead-set on eating in Gary, as opposed to Hammond or East Chicago or Hobart or Portage or, heavens forfend, Valparaiso. Because that would make this too easy! And obviously, you don't need our help finding the local Bennigan's (apparently one of the most popular restaurants in town), although it's worth pointing out that the Pepe's in Gary was the company's first NWI location when it opened thirty-two years ago.

Chains aside, there are credible indigenous dining options if you look hard enough. Our first suggestion comes from an encyclopedic post on LTHForum on Coney Island hot dog stands around Gary. Coney dogs are covered in beanless chili and have very little to do with Coney Island, Brooklyn; they first started to appear in Michigan around World War I, when place names were more appropriable, and continue to be popular throughout the Rust Belt (recently opened Cincinnati-themed bar Cinners offers Coneys for $2). In Gary's heyday, there were Coney stands on every other street corner (okay, not really), but in modern times, your best bet is probably Koney King, spelling it wrong since 1920. A Koney Dog runs $1.99 here, and you can eat it at the countertop atop totally mod red and blue diner stools. Be sure to arrive before 6pm, because this is not a late-night destination.

While you can't get anything pret a manger at Southern-style butcher Tennessee Country Meats, you can get a variety of exotica like salted spare ribs and the coarse, rustic, Hammond, IN-made sausage delightfully called "Bolshevik." You can serve it at your next USSR-themed soiree!

Finally, the somewhat out-of-place Miller Bakery Cafe has been serving fine food to Garyites (precious few letters away from Gary-itis, a common affliction) since the 1980s, when it took over a space formerly occupied by the Miller Bakery. If you thought you couldn't get wood-grilled organic quail stuffed with apple and prosciutto and served on lentils with a cherry liqueur-green peppercorn demiglace in Gary, you were dead wrong. But the fact that you can get it as an appetizers for $6.50 is truly astounding. Mains include a 7 Hour Lamb Shank, roasted with a savory spice rub, raisins and Zinfandel served on top a root vegetable hash for $22, and there's even an attached wine bar if your campaigning runs late.

Have a counterintuitive, hyper-specific query concerning Chicagoland dining? You've come to the right place.

Hillary Clinton arrives in Gary [NWI Times]
Pepe's Gary [Official Site]
Gary IN - Coney Dogs and Urban Decay [LTHForum]
Coney Island Hot Dogs [Wikipedia]
Cinners [MenuPages]
Cinners [Official Site]
Koney King [Google]
Tennessee Country Meats [Google]
Anyone heard of the lunchmeat "bolshevik?" [LTHForum]
Miller Bakery Cafe [Official Site]

[Photo: there are definitely more restaurants signs in Gary than actual restaurants (Vannah Von Terror/flickr)]

Add this shocker to the list of things we have in common with Drew Carey: A love of bacon-wrapped hot dogs. During our long tenure in San Francisco, we developed a late-night affection for the singular street-treats while stumbling home from bars in the Mission district.

The pork masterpieces are available from carts in many U.S. cities, as well as all over Mexico, so we know it's not just a local cuisine. Who wouldn't want a grilled, bacon-wrapped hot dog smothered in grilled peppers, onions, salsa, crema and sometimes even guacamole?

For starters, the Los Angeles Health Department, according to this fine piece of reporting by Drew Carey for Reason.tv. Take a look at the saga of an intrepid street vendor and her struggle to give the people what they want. And then try to walk away from this and not stop for a package of hot-dogs and one of bacon on the way home. Bet you can't eat just one!

Food Fight: Battle of the Bacon Dogs [Reason.tv]
In Videos: Drew Carey in 'Food Fight: Battle of the Bacon Dogs' [Required Eating]

• UN calls meeting with 20 organizations to strategize about food crisis [BBCNews]
• Rice rationing in Vietnam much more serious than Costco's fake rationing [Reuters]
• Sweetened up by Warren Buffett, Mars buys Wrigley's for $23 billion [NYTimes]
• Fat activists working to pass size non-discrimination laws [Tribune]
• 400 lb man slims to 300 lbs in jail; files lawsuit claiming malnutrition [AP]

It certainly sells more newspapers (or attracts more clicks, really) to review the newest hot restaurants each week, but the dining community has just as much need to know about the workhorses of the world. Actually, much more need! And so, Bruno went to the Berghoff, which still exists in some form for some reason. Zombie restaurants! Anyway, while Pat gets all huffy at menu misspellings ("'Orchetta [sic] pasta with rock shrimp'"? Woe is me. If you can't spell it, can you cook it?"), he finds some of the classic dishes to be at least palatable if you absolutely have to go down memory lane.

Actually, can we point out that Thomas Witom's review for a suburban John Barleycorn also critiques menu spelling? "[A]nd the menu cries out for a proof-reader to clean up such gaffs as filet 'mingon.'" Haha, the Sun-Times is totally copping our steez! Well, the more, the merrier.

This week's Omnivorous uses the conceit of "restaurants near Wrigley Field" to talk about some of the staff's favored ethnic spots. Mike Sula leads with Cafe Orchid, a family-run Turkish restaurant that opened around the same time as Nazarlik, but to less fanfare; try the seafood and handmade doner. Mike also recommends TAC Quick, disclosing once and for all that the popular Thai restaurant's name stands for Thai Authentic Cuisine. Chip Dudley (not a nom de porn) thinks you'd be hard-pressed to find a better value for meat than at Tango Sur (then again, maybe it is a nom de porn). Finally, Ann Sterzinger has a review on the somewhat strange pan-European restaurant Rick's Cafe, which has the serious virtue of being BYO.

Okay, go out and try some B-listers this weekend!

[Photo: khâo khlûk kà-pì at TAC Quick, sazerac2k/flickr]

•The new Clover machines make sure that Starbucks coffee doesn't taste like soil. [MP: Boston]
•The last paragraph of this post contains probably the raunchiest joke ever made on MenuPages. [MP: Chicago]
•No matter how much you love Obama, it's probably unsanitary to purchase his half-eaten breakfast. [MP: Philadelphia]
•OMG, San Francisco has a chain called Pizza Orgasmica! [MP: San Francisco]
•Eating on the sand seems precarious. What if the wind blew it into your food? [MP: South Florida]

Sometimes, we just don't understand. We got an impressionistic (at best) non-review for an Logan Square Chinese restaurant from a user named "Vegetarian" entitled "Missing Meows":

I live down the street and I am missing all three of my f*cking cats. If I find fur in anyones' garbage can I am going to be pissed. For Gods' sake work on the rats. Thats why I HAD the cats.

It's not necessarily fair to assume that this is a young, literate crazy cat lady, but too late now! We feel bad about her cats, though. To lose three at once does make one suspect foul play, although probably not on the part of the restaurant; the Chinese don't eat cats, and especially not outside of rural China. Seriously, it's extremely uncommon!

Anyway, do you think that Vegetarian is really going through her neighbors' trash looking for cat remains? One can only hope.

[Photo: "go ahead, try it" (Yaron/flickr)]

America's most exclusive restaurant? It's not what you think. Not Le Cirque or Momofuku Ko or the French Laundry. Nope, the single-table Talula's Table, in tiny, historic Kennett Square, PA, about an hour outside Philadelphia, only accepts reservations one year in advance, and you have to be damned lucky to get one at all.

An upscale market by day, they convert to a restaurant after hours and do one seating a night for their renowned tasting menu. NPR reporter Alex Chadwick visited recently and reports:

A single farm table becomes center stage for one of the country's most exclusive dining experiences. A dozen lucky people gather around it to share an eight-course meal that runs from egg custard with Jonah crab to osso bucco made from pork, all prepared with local ingredients by husband-and-wife proprietors Bryan Sikora and Aimee Olexy.

Because of the restaurant's popularity and its single nightly seating, [proprietor Aimee] Olexy has devised a special system for selecting diners. Though the phone often begins ringing with requests at sunrise, she does not pick it up until 7 a.m. on the dot. The caller is then offered a reservation exactly one year later. Requests for earlier or later are denied, as are attempts to play the VIP card to skirt the procedure entirely.

Talula's: The Toughest Reservation in the U.S.? [NPR: Day to Day]
One restaurant, one table, and a year-long waiting list [Slashfood]
Talula's Table [Official Site]
Photo lifted from Hypsography

• Ban Ki-moon laments global food crisis for the bazillionth time [AP]
• The stalled farm bill contains much-needed relief for poor families [Tribune]
• Reuters has two detailed writeups on the food crisis that review the causes and recount the latest woes, of which there are many [Reuters, Reuters]
• Our pretend cousin Nelson Peltz just bought Wendy's for $2.3b [NYTimes]

We're looking at the Tribune, Time Out Chicago and Sun-Times dining sections this week, and they sure are a hodgepodge. We'll get to the reviews momentarily, but first, the substantive pieces:

• Phil Vettel does some cultural analysis concerning Houlihan's makeover from cheesy mid-scale casual restaurant to soulless mid-scale casual restaurant [Tribune]

• Chris Borrelli colorfully compares breakfast sandwiches, and is surprised to find himself enjoying McD's new chicken and biscuit entry [Tribune]

• A new breed of recipe websites let you search by ingredient and do other web2.0-type things, but the article is somewhat muddled by the overused comparison to music websites [TOC]

• Did you know that beer makes for as good, or maybe even better, a match to cheese as wine? Of course you did, because you haven't been living under a rock for the past three years [Sun-Times]

• Although this is similarly old news, we always find articles about Dippin' Dots charming, if suspicious [Sun-Times]

• You can never have too many upscale bakeries in Auburn Gresham...but one's a pretty good start [Sun-Times]

As for the reviews...

• Phil Vettel chimes in on Prosecco, the swanky River North wine bar. He seems highly impressed by the lounge's sophisticated aesthetic and by the competent regional Italian cooking, but gives little indication why it got two, as opposed to one or three, stars [Tribune]

• Joe Gray's review of Chant, the upscale pan-Asian restaurant in Hyde Park, refers to the broccoli in the pad se-eu as "toothsome." Puh-leeze! [

• David Tamarkin is duly impressed by Habibi, the Devon Ave Middle Eastern restaurant that has the presence of mind to put onions (i.e. thought) into their labna (and cooking, generally) [TOC]

• Heather Shouse approves of Kan Pou, a little Thai restaurant that makes up in quality what it lacks in exoticism [TOC]

[Photo: McDonald's Southern Style Chicken Biscuit, looking kind of sad (chickensandwichblog/flickr)]

Psst. Ever wanted to have you own hot dog cart? Maybe you've entertained dreams of making your own dirty water dogs. Maybe you've read A Confederacy of Dunces one time too many. Or maybe you're just a rich person with too much free time on your hands.

Either way, Hammacher Schlemmer is here to help. We just got word that their catalog now features an "Authentic New York Hot Dog Vendor Cart. Here's the word from HM:

"Made of durable food-grade 18-gauge stainless steel, the cart rolls on two 20" pneumatic wheels and a locking caster with two handles that provide easy maneuvering. It has three removable 360" cu. stainless steel steamer trays that can each hold up to 20 hot dogs or sausages. The front of the cart has a storage ring and hook-up for a propane tank (not included); propane provides fuel for the dual burner assembly housed in the rear interior of the cart directly under the three steamers; burners may be individually controlled by knobs in the cart's rear. A top-loading 3,000" cu. ice cooler keeps your beverages and meats cold; a drain plug on the bottom of the chassis allows you to drain meltwater. The front of the cart houses a two shelf storage or display area for drinks, buns, or condiments; additional storage area is located underneath."

The best part? The cart can be used to make Chicago-style dogs as well.

The Authentic New York Hot Dog Vendor Cart [Hammacher Schlemmer]

There's a very enticingly titled post from Tuesday on Bon Appetit's editor's blog. It's called How To Start A Cooking Club. That sounds like a great idea. We (densely) never even thought of it before, but it's a club where a bunch of friends get together and cook interesting stuff. Fun, right?

While the body of this particular blog entry doesn't specifically outline instructions on cooking club formation &mdash rather a series of jealousy-inducing photos of the author's own cooking club's latest accomplishments &mdash the author sends readers to the extremely handy Bon Appetite Cooking Club page, which does feature pdf downloads on the basics of starting and organizing a cooking club, as well as monthly menus, including recipes and a game plan.

This is definitely the season for getting out of the house, sipping wine on the fire escape, lollygagging with your friends in the park and destroying the kitchen with way-too-ambitious recipes. Get out there and do it, folks!

How To Start A Cooking Club [Epicurious/BA Blog]
The Bon Appetit Cooking Club [Epicurious/BA]
Photo: Aftermath, by Dishevld [Flickr]

Pastries. It was going to happen eventually; Padma reminded us that pastries have historically been an Achilles' heel for cheftestants, and it presents a good opportunity to see who's been paying attention to that fact. Lisa claimed she had sworn to herself she wouldn't do a pastry on the show, but how stupid is that? We don't even believe her. Spike, on the other hand, memorized a particular dessert recipe because he knew this moment was coming.

What none of them knew was that the pastry Quickfire would have the disproportionally prestigious prize of a spot in the Top Chef cookbook. Now obviously there will be other Top Chef cookbooks that include a larger chunk of this season's chefs, but still, it's pretty hot to slip in there at the end. All of the desserts, despite the chefs' crows of ignorance and fear, looked professional and appetizing, but Richard's pseudoscallop bananas and avocado was certainly the most interesting and original of the bunch and the only one whose recipe we'd actually like to see. Kudos also to Dale for making halo-halo, an underpraised dessert if there ever was one.

It was really funny (but not funny haha) when Mark disinterestedly rattled off the notable Second City alums by way of introducing the improv troop. Either New Zealanders are not impressed by the likes of Belushi and Colbert, or the man was completely exhausted and depressed by his crappy showing in the Quickfire. Both explanations are plausible; the life of a cheftestant is not a leisurely one!

The conceit of the challenge — dishes that connote the colors, emotions and foods yelled out by the audience during the improv show — is a clever one. Like in the movie challenge, here is a case of the chefs having to abstract a narrative to sell their dishes. Will they have learned the lesson of how critical it is to get the theme right? No, apparently not!

So let's see, there's...tofu+green+perplexed, yellow+love+vanilla, drunk+magenta+polish sausage, orange+turn-on+asparagus, and purple+depressed+bacon. And now that there's only ten people left and they all know each other pretty well, they were allowed to pair off on their own. This is the first of several elements of meta-improv that go on in the main challenge. While it isn't stated explicitly, the lack of electrical equipment (BTW, what the honk are robocoups and vita-preps, anyway? Too insidery! There should have been a pop-up explainer) and the chefs' forced relocation to the TC house for cooking are both improv devices, even if they didn't seem to have a negative impact on any of the teams.

It was certainly telling when we're treated to lengthy exegeses on the Spike & Andrew (goofy egotists) team, the Jen & Steph (competent professionals) team and the Richard & Dale (high-end superstars) team, but nothing much at all about Mark, Nikki, Antonia and Lisa. Because these people are all going to go away soon! But not just yet; as Nikki (and many others throughout the episode) pointed out, the show is now at a stage where chefs are eliminated for error, not for general incompetence.

First, the good. Richard and Dale's tofu-with-an-identity-crisis impressed the judges, who like pretty much everything Richard does (except for scaly sous-vide salmon). Dale seems to ground Richard, making sure the high-concept doesn't interfere with taste and quality assurance. But since it was Richard's "brainchild," as Dale called it, he was the winner. Now, winning the Quickfire and the challenge is pretty impressive, right?

Spike and Andy make a butternut squash soup (yellow) with vanilla creme fraiche to avenge episode 5's debacle, and pull it off very successfully. Because sometimes, it's better to be good than avant-garde! By the way, when Antonia said "if he wins with a soup I'm going to vomit in my mouth," we LOL'd a little.

Mark and Nikki pass through with a bacon dish because no one ever loses on bacon. We sort of took offense at Mark's contention that the bacon was "depressed" because it had to share a plate with brussel sprouts; brussel sprouts are like our Zoloft! Anyway, both of these people are on thin ice, and we bet one of the two will go next episode.

It was unusual this week that the top four chefs were men and the bottom four were women, especially given how much Bravo is touting the ladies this season. Lisa and Antonia were reamed for completely rejecting the Polish sausage aspect of their dish. Lisa's like, "I'm too good for Polish sausage peasant food." Well you know what, little Lisa? Polish sausage is damn good, and comes in more varieties than you can shake a stick at. Stop being an idiot and make what you're told; your ego has one foot out the door! Also, always serve the guests tequila.

But the real sadness is Jen and Stephanie, two people we would not have expected to see at the bottom already. Their vaguely uncomfortable ménage à trois with orange, goat cheese and asparagus was a total failure for the judges. First of all, Jen going on and on about the phallic imagery of the asparagus was kind of a lost cause. Second, how lucky are they that "orange" happens to be both a color and a food? You'd think they'd have been a little more grateful. Thirdly, they should have ditched innuendo for total obscenity and had the asparagus actually penetrating the orange slices...and along those lines, we can also think of a more clever way to deploy the goat cheese. Haha ew! It is somewhat tragic to have soggy croutons be your downfall on Top Chef, but that's the way the stale bread crumbles. Jen's departure, in which she calls Richard her [hair] brother, is classy. We will miss her!

Next week, important Oprah chef Art Smith (now of TABLE fifty-two) and his various charities.

[Photo: lost in thought (BravoTV]

• Our little Sam's Club rice sales limit tagged as "food rationing" [Guardian]
• Japan's butter shortage initiated by dairy cow cull two years ago [Salon]
• More countries (Uganda this time) telling their citizens to garden [AllAfrica]
• FDA to animal feed manufacturers: no more mad cow prions in the mix [Reuters]
• Farm bill, still unresolved, is increasingly out of step with reality [NYTimes]

Just as the country has finally re-embraced carbs after the whole Atkins nightmare, now we're all going to be forced onto low-carb diets by rising food prices. First, wheat. There's the worldwide rice shortage that will soon be seriously affecting us. Now beer prices are increasing because of the scarcity of hops and barley.

Two ingredients — hops and malted barley — are behind much of the price increases.

Hops produce the chemicals that give beer its distinct flavor. Some varieties are used to bitter the drink. Others impart its floral aromas. Most commercially grown domestic hops come from Washington, Oregon and Idaho.

After water, malted barely is the next-biggest ingredient in beer. It provides the sugars that turns into alcohol when the beer is fermented.

Barley prices have risen because of worldwide demand for grains, including wheat, corn and rice. Philip Sutton, owner of Skyscraper Brewing Co., a small brewery in El Monte, said the price of a 50-pound bag of malted barley had jumped to $22, or 57% higher than a year ago.

Hops prices are soaring even more. Sutton paid $3.40 to $4.70 a pound for hops a year ago. The least expensive hops he has found this year were $12.63 a pound, and he's paid all the way up to $22.45. But that's only if he can find them.

"The hops that we like to use just aren't available," Sutton said. That has forced him to substitute other hops in some of his beer recipes "and that makes a different beer. It's still good but isn't what we would ideally have," said Sutton, who has raised his prices 20% to 30%.

Rising beer prices hard to swallow [Los Angeles Times]
Asia limits rice exports as prices and uncertainty rise [Christian Science Monitor]

Photo, of barley: Shandchem [Flickr]

Bunch of one-namers, these are. Okay, sort of a lie; Stages is actually Stages Family Restaurant. Chuck Sudo attested to the charm of the Bridgeport diner's open face hot turkey sandwich, which we can confidently report to cost $6.75 and include mashed potatoes and a bowl of soup.

Shochu is a somewhat bigger story, as the New American/Asian small plate lounge in Lakeview opens TO-NITE. It's run by the Deleece people and is the first Chicago establishment to get on the shochu bandwagon. Shochu is a recently popularized 50-proof Japanese alcoholic beverage that's "cool" right now in America. Small plate lounges are also a recently popularized 50-proof Japanese alcoholic beverage that's "cool" right now in America. Um, anyway, here you'll find a handful of Thai curries, some upscale izakaya-style tapas, raw fish in various preparations, and skewers of meat (yakitori) served with any number of fusion-y sauces (blueberry teriyaki! Miso lychee aoili! White soy Dijon vinaigrette! And so forth)

Speaking of skewers, Skewerz! The name doesn't indicate this, but it's a Hawaiian fast food restaurant, opening "hopefully next week" in Wicker Park. Proteins available on a stick include: chilied chicken (with a red & black pepper marinade; four for $7), lemongrass tuna (with a lemongrass emulsion, three for $9), and flank steak (grilled with five spices; four for $8). Each of the aformentioned come with a rice (e.g. jasmine or brown) and a condiment (red curry peanut sauce sounds exciting). They'll be open until 3am on weekend nights, which sounds like the right time for this kind of food.

Finally, everyone else in the world may have known that the Butcher's Dog on Clark and Harrison closed a year ago, but we only found out yesterday that it's been replaced by Villains Bar & Grill. The menu offers nothing you haven't seen before (buffalo calamari for $9, mushroom swiss portobello burger for $10), but vodka drinks are only $3 on Terrible Tuesdays, an appellation we wholeheartedly agree with.

[Photo: grilled lamb chop with mandarin mint salad and white soy dijon vinaigrette at Shochu]

After reading yesterday's item in trade mag Restaurants and Institutions about a drive-through dispute that resulted in a double stabbing in Texas (!?), we got just curious enough to Google the term "fast-food rage" (but without the quotes).

Turns out there are all kinds of examples of idiots wailing on one another while in line or in the parking lots of fast food restaurants. Usually, it seems to have to do with vehicular disputes, more like road rage that happens to be taking place in the parking lot of a McDonalds, though there is this one case in Georgia back in August where a woman got so mad at perceived line-jumping inside the store that she tried to run down a couple outside. Yikes!

But none of these fights seem to stem from the one behavior in fast food restaurants that makes us seriously consider throwing a punch: the jerk who takes too long at the self-serve coffee machine. Seriously, if you don't drop that cream in and mix it as you're walking away so the rest of us can get our fix, we think manhandling you out of there should be a viable option.

But a Google search for "coffee rage" (with and without quotes) turned up only this incident in Boston, to speak of, where a couple of customers got into it in the drive-through of a Dunkin Donuts. Again: road rage, not coffee rage.

People, here this now: You're spinning your wheels fighting each other over French fries and drive-through windows. If a state of terror existed around the self-serve coffee dispenser, the world would be a better place.

Fast food drive-through rage leads to double-stabbing [Restaurants and Institutions]
Fast food flare-up: Possible road-rage at McDonald's [KTVB Idaho]
Angry Woman Gets Revenge At McDonald's [Associated Press]
Food Fights Across Boston [Universal Hub]
Photo: Coffee Rage album cover, lifted from Mad Blasts of Chaos

• PETA offers paltry $1m for construction of artificial meat lab [AP]
• Bad press forces meat industry to support banning downer cows [PE]
• Another cause of the food crisis: structural adj. programs [AllAfrica]
• Congress mad at USDA for sucking, in wake of herapin scandal [VOA]
• In sign of times, McD int'l sales way up, US sales way down [Tribune]

So we called NoMI and got in touch with the pastry chef and was like, "WTF is this?"

And he was French and very nice but also like a lockbox. He confirmed that those gorgeous half-sun wedges are grapefruit (for a moment we thought they were tuna sashimi), and that they're sitting on top of a rectangular prism of basil crème brûlée, but the crumble in between is the greatest mystery since..."Why French Women Don't Get Fat." We know it's some kind of biscuit, i.e. cookie, but exactly what variety is unclear. We're thinking maybe lemon, because that would totally go. Meanwhile, the flutter of whimsy on top is coconut tuile. The dessert is a not-unreasonable $10, and a light and bright way to end a lovely meal.

Mostly, though, we're just suckers for high-quality photography involving fruit.

NoMI [MenuPages]
NoMI [Official Site]

[Photo: Pecan Sandies/flickr]

An intrepid reader, doubtful of our matzo shortage claims, took this damning photo at the Dominick's on Roosevelt and Canal. The barren shelves! What a powerful visual metaphor.

But there's a secondary scandal: the particular box of matzo you see pictured is Streit's Onion-Poppy Moonstrips, which, according to Serious Eats, aren't even Kosher for Passover! A shande, truly.

ZED451, the River North American-style churrascaria is opening tonight to much fanfare. We passed judgment on the restaurant a few weeks ago, contending that it would be a fun place to spend an evening, but the all-you-can-eat meat selection and chef-driven sides would probably never rise above "good enough" at this suburban-origin chain. Gastronomic Bypass was there the other night for their free preview dinner, and pretty much confirmed our suspicions.

So we were somewhat surprised when we got a review this morning entitled "Zed-understanding fine dining!" from Sandra Smith-Doghmi, co-owner of Red Carpet Concierge. She wrote:

From the front door to the rooftop garden the experience was fabulous. Douglas Wickard, GM and his staff welcomed, served and d the ultimate in Chicago Dining! It is compared to dinner at Oprah's home. Buffet style for the first few courses with butlers constantly wandering with rump roast, garlic steak, sirloin, filet, short ribs, orange bbq pork ribs, parmesan crusted pork medallions, grilled chicken breast & legs, citrus salmon and lamb. Oh, and you have to start out with the fondue meats appitizer, the best. Zed definetly offers something unique-beyond compare. A Chicago Concierge

If any actually unaffiliated people make it to ZED451 tonight and love it, please let us know.

ZED451 [MenuPages]
ZED451 [Official Site]
Red Carpet Concierge [Official Site]

[Photo: shiller Sandra Smith-Doghmi, Red Carpet Concierge]

A torrent of articles from around the country have made certain what we noticed anecdotally the other day at the supermarket: America is in the grips of a severe matzo shortage. While there was just enough to go around for seders on Saturday and Sunday nights, observant Jews are scrambling to find supplies of the unleavened bread to sustain them for the rest of Passover, another five or six days of dietary restriction.

Theories for why this is happening this year abound, but are ultimately limited in scope. The aforementioned articles have pointed to recalcitrant retailers like Trader Joe's who have declined to carry matzo this year, stymied suppliers like Manischewitz that couldn't make Tam Tam mini-matzos because of equipment failures, and cantankerous consumers who didn't plan ahead and rushed to buy the limited cache of matzo all at once.

But these explanations ignore the reality that, while matzo is certainly a niche product, what this amounts to, more or less, is a bread shortage. As people around the globe are increasingly — and for many, painfully — aware, the price of wheat has DOUBLED in the past year. Matzo, as you may or may not know, is made of NOTHING BUT wheat! So it costs more to make, and less was made. We're merely implying causality here, but let's put aside our lack of hard evidence and consider the following:

All of a sudden, the people of the developing world are rapidly increasing their average daily calorie intake while the land, water, and energy resources used to grow food products are rapidly diminishing in quantity and quality. The wealthiest ten percent of the world has been materially unaffected by this imbalance, but billions are forced to sacrifice and hundreds of millions are on the brink of starvation. It is unfortunate that the richest decile of the world's population — the people who are in the best positions, politically and economically, to address the food crisis — have little in the way of structural incentives to make the sort of wholesale systemic changes to the global food/energy system that is necessary to ensure sufficient, reliable and equitable supplies of foodstuffs.

Earth Day and Passover are just the kinds of navel-gazing opportunities we need to encourage us to consider how to go about feeding ourselves in this new era of unprecedented high demand and low supply. While many await a technological panacea to rescue us from our present conundrum, no real solution is possible without a shift in attitude by the world's producing class (that, or we could start eating a hell of a lot less meat). The matzo shortage story may not exactly be a warning shot across the bow, but it's certainly a sign that no one's entirely immune to global commodities turmoil.

It’s Passover. Who’s Hiding the Matzo? [NYTimes]
Matzo in short supply for Bay Area Passover [SFGate]
Hit or miss with finding matzo as Passover looms closer [MercuryNews]
As Passover nears, matzo in short supply [Contra Costa Times]
Matzo shortage at many Reno stores looms for Passover [Reno Gazette-Journal]
Price Volatility Adds to Worry on U.S. Farms [NYTimes]
In Lean Times, Biotech Grains Are Less Taboo [NYTimes]
Rising Demand for Meat Takes Toll on Environment [NPR]

[Photo: no more matzo, in any language (missapril1956)]

N.B. Special bonus! There's also a shortage on Kosher-for-Passover margarine because farmers planted ethanol corn in lieu of cotton last year. Hope you like your flourless chocolate cakes dry!

As America gets ahold of itself in the wake of Pope Benedict XVI's recent visit, the time has come for parsing and analyzing every little thing His Holiness did while abroad in our native land. Not the least of these is what he ate.

Last week, former Cardinal John Ratzinger visited the United States for the first time since becoming the Catholic church's 265th pope in 2005. While in New York City, celebrity chef, local restaurateur and cookbook author Lidia Bastianich, along with a team of high-profile chefs cooked for His Holiness. Bastianich emigrated from Italy in 1958, when she was 12, with the help of Catholic Charities. From the New York Daily News:

Bastianich was asked two months ago if she would like to cook for the Pope, and didn't even believe it at first. "I looked around behind me, to see if they were talking to someone else," she says. "The Pope even looks like my father, and I kind of feel as if it's my father coming to dinner. For me, it is an opportunity to welcome someone as family and make the Pope feel comfortable."

You can take a look at the full menu on Serious Eats, as well as some recipes on ABC's website. There's also a website dedicated to the visit with a full roundup. We simply can't imagine the pressure Bastianich must have felt, but she seems to have pulled it off. Congratulazioni, Lidia!

Bastianich plans a meal fit for the Pope [NY Daily News]
Cooking for the Pope: Lidia Bastianich Comes Full Circle [Serious Eats]
Recipes: Cooking For The Pope [ABC]
United States Papal Visit 2008 [Official Site]
Lidia Bastianich [Official Site]
Photo: Nuncatrezeamesa [Flickr]

• Fast food calorie listing rolls out in New York to yawns [NYTimes]
• Food safety art project terror professor's case dismissed [TimesUnion]
• Federal crackdown on raw milk not sitting well with farmers [Tribune]
• WFP: 100m more people on food assistance than six months ago [BBC]
• Slow Food movement looks for a hook in Asia's fast lane [Reuters]
• Matzo shortage raises more questions than it answers [NYTimes]

Chicago's intrepid food bloggers were all over the damn place last week, in alphabetical order by restaurant

• According to Bridget & Tammy, Cafe Bernard is starting to lose some of its French mojo. Only a 10/20 for the old man [Chicago Bites]

• Guess what's still the same, basically, after its makeover: the Cape Cod Room, so you can all exhale and eat your thermidor [The Stew]

• Everyone likes Glenn's Diner, really a quality seafood restaurant with all the diner accoutrements thrown on for variety [Drive-Thru]

• Every time we read a review for Magnolia Cafe, it's favorable. Glowing, actually [Chicago Metblogs]

• Classic to the point of kitschy, RL does a decent job at fancy mid-century American food, albeit at inflated prices [Chicagoist]

• Tourist spot Rockit Bar & Grill does not quite do it for Bridget & Tammy, who give it a low 11/20 [Chicago Bites]

• Explore the functional boundaries of sandwichdom with the Stages' open face hot turkey mess, a cheap lunch in Bridgeport [Chicagoist]

• Sharing a name with the important Japanese film, Tampopo dishes up a merely adequate bowl of ramen [Drive-Thru]

• Early word on American churrascaria ZED451: all the food is good but never great, and where they really shine is the drinks (not a good sign for foodies, but surely profitable) [Gastronomic Bypass]

[Photo: Chicago in peril, via Fire Prevention Week]

see more crazy cat pics

OMG, lolcatz are soooo cute. You know who agrees? Jones Soda. They luv the little guys so much they haz contest for label! And you can vote!

For the uninitiated (anyone, anyone?) lolcatz are the hilariously cute photoshop jobs where people make "capshuns" of pictures of animals &mdash usually cats &mdash in lolspeak, "teh furst language born of teh intertubes." They come from the site icanhascheezburger.com.

Now the way hip marketing staff over at way hip Jones Soda (known for using customer-submitted snapshots on its labels) has this very fun idea to make lolcatz labels for its bottles. They did a call for submissions, and now there's a post up where you can vote on the favorite. It is, no surprise, getting a lot of hits, but the funniest part is the ire raised in hardcore lolspeakers posting comments about how their submissions didn't get picked:

i uhgri meh copeez have ben owevrluked. maybeh dis kitteh site needz mawr hutzspa awl mai cheezez neber make it wen i iz lauffin 2 much at mai own. theez wunz nawt sew hyoomoruss

We got a review early Saturday morning entitled "nice place - never going back" for Blue Agave that, whether the story is true or not, struck a chord:

They put soemone else's food into my doggie bag.
I don't want to see a half-eaten chicken wing that someone was gnawing on when I open the box.

I will never return to that place.
I will tell everyone I know to never go to that place.

Meanwhile, did you know that the doggie bag was invented right here in Chicago? The Wall Street Journal reported:

In 1949, Al Meister, the head of a Chicago-based packaging company called Bagcraft Papercon, came up with an iconic American invention. He developed a special coating to make a paper bag grease-resistant. Onto the bag went the drawing of a dog and a poem by his wife beginning, "Oh where have your leftovers gone?" With that, the company laid claim to the world's first dedicated doggie bag.

Blue Agave [MenuPages]
'A Doggie Bag, S'il Vous Plaît' [WSJ]

[Photo: lickyoats/flickr]

Have you ever heard of meat, actual meat, that does not come from an animal? Well, it exists, and according to the New York Times, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants it to take over the food world.

The animal rights group has offered a $1 million reward for the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.”

In vitro meat is the laboratory-grown meat substance based on stem cells taken from live animals. it's been around for a few years, but so far scientists haven't found a way to make its mass-production economically viable.

The attraction to PETA is obvious: Get lab-grown meat main-streamed and you reduce the amount of animals getting slaughtered for actual meat. But according to the Times, the move caused something of a schism in the PETA office.

Lisa Lange, a vice president of the organization, said she was part of the heated exchange. “My main concern is, as the largest animal rights organization in the world, it’s our job to introduce the philosophy and hammer it home that animals are not ours to eat.” Ms. Lange added, “I remember saying I would be much more comfortable promoting eating roadkill.”

PETA’s Latest Tactic: $1 Million for Fake Meat [NY Times]
In Vitro Meat [NYTimes]
Evil Monkey’s Guide to Kosher Imaginary Animals [Ecstatic Days]
Photo: Andreyphoto.com [Flickr]

• Ban Ki-moon issues his daily reminder on the direness of the food crisis [TPA]
• If the food crisis is bad now, what happens when there are 9 billion of us? [CSM]
• For starters, we'll have to give up our opposition to GM crops. Oh well! [NYTimes]
• Meanwhile, crop prices are wreaking counterintuitive havoc on farmers [AP]
• China's new food safety laws carry a maximum punishment of life in prison [Guardian]
• Gullible Australians believe the stupidest food safety myths [SMH]

We mostly like the framing of this, but also — sweater aside — it's hot out! Margarita time! Woo!!!

This particular specimen comes from Tecalitlan in Ukie Village for $6.20. A regular with lime is $5.50, but the very nice young woman who answered the phone when we called recommends the raspberry, her favorite. For our part, we always get plain because the fruit flavors are just sugar, and then we get a headache. When it comes to margaritas, though, you can do whatever your heart desires.

Have an uproariously enjoyable weekend!

Tecalitlan [MenuPages]

[Photo: allwood/flickr]

Actually, it's called the Pizza Expo, but our name is better. Pat Bruno went out that way and reported on...well, not all that much. Apparently, Pat "conduct[s] seminars on various aspects of the pizza business," but instead of telling us what the hell he means by that, we get a perfunctory word on the winners of the Gourmet and Traditional pizza competitions — neither of whom are Americans, naturally — and a sort of tepid round-up of our man's favorite pizzas around the country. Witness the profundity in statements like "California pizza is, well, California pizza." The article is unfocused; we just did a Google News search, and it doesn't seem like the piece has been syndicated anywhere else. Why so little connection to the Chicago market, then? Very strange.

On the other end of the local interest spectrum, Mike Sula gets the DL on Cinners, the Cincinnati-themed bar recently opened in Lincoln Square. The big story here, if we might be so bold, is about the provenance of the Cincinnati-style chili that is the bar's raison d'etre. Owner and former nightclub promoter Tony Plum says his great-grandfather got the recipe from the famous Empress Chili in the Nasty Natty, which may or may not have actually happened. We certainly wouldn't put it past Plum to completely fabricate the story, given the classiness of his other promotional materials. What remains to be seen is whether the chili's actually tasty; so far we've heard decent things.

Cinners [MenuPages]
Cinners [Official Site]

[Photo: see, we'd wanted Bruno to write about crazy pizzas like this one from last year's Expo, with smoked salmon, creme fraiche, tobiko, basil and capers (Captain Scooter/flickr)]

•"When in France (even though this loaf is not a French native), one must have a nice and crusty bread to have on the counter, in case of emergency (or spontaneous company)." [MP: Boston]
•"Pastries are funny." [MP: Chicago]
•"Philadelphia is every bit as much a hamburger town as New York." [MP: Philadelphia]
•"Discounted drinks and cheap eats; there’s nothing better to get the reluctant tax payer spending again." [MP: San Francisco]
•"Sure, we want restaurants to have sufficient toilet paper in their restrooms, and we like it when they offer up the daily specials' prices. But it's not really something that needs to be legislated." [MP: South Florida]

• The global food crisis and riots aren't going away [NYTimes]
• Guyana's idea: give everyone seeds for gardening [AP]
• USDA brazenly says slaughterhouse oversight sufficient [Baltimore Sun]
• Will the country-of-origin labeling bill go far enough? [LATimes]
• Walmart to pull the plastic baby bottles w/ leaky chemicals [Tribune]

Chris Borrelli owned the Tribune today, with pieces on the subtle/non-existent qualitative differences between fries and frites and the pernicious disappearance of toast from brunch spots around Chicagoland. Why the double whammy on flash-heated starches, right as we're heading into ramp-and-morel season? Timing aside, the articles are great, especially the one on fries vs frites.

Borrelli touches on how the supposed sophistication of frites allows restaurants to charge more for them, but basically, fries and frites are both subsets of the larger world of blanched-and-fried potato sticks, which vary widely from country to country, region to region, kitchen to kitchen. No one way is best, and Borrelli provides a number of options for you to run the gamut.

French fries are kosher for Passover, which sort of surprises even though it shouldn't. Judy Hevrdejs rounds up some last-minute seder caterers for the Jew on the run.

On the TOC side, David Tamarkin tries to explain to us why you'd bother to get a Master Sommelier certification, and the answer is...mostly because it's there. Next up: a similar certification for beer.

As for reviews, Tamarkin's at Mercat a la Planxa, the Catalan tapas megaplex in the South Loop. The tapas are delicious, but the restaurant comes off as soulless. On the other hand, if Miss Asia is guilty of anything, it's having too many souls. You don't want to order from the Thai menu? How about Malaysian, Singaporean, Cambodian, Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Japanese, Laotian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Nepalese or Mongolian instead? But surprisingly, it's all pretty good.

Mercat a la Planxa [MenuPages]
Mercat a la Planxa [Official Site]
Miss Asia [MenuPages]
Miss Asia [Official Site]

[Photo: Pommes frites en gras de canard à Hot Doug's, by Chuck T./flickr]

We can't help but think that Runway's challenges are more interesting than Top Chef's have been this season, which is to say, not very much at all. High-end catering, low-end catering, high-end catering, low-end catering...has it been this way every season? We have a very short memory for this kind of thing.

But before we move on to the tailgate challenge at Soldier Field, there's the little matter of Koren Grieveson's AWESOMENESS to attend to. The head chef of Avec looked fierce on that particular morning; our notes say "koren is a f[*]cking monster. love her tshirt," and we stand by that. The consummate working chef, she presided wearily over a beer pairing competition; who can best bring out the subtle flavors of Michelob Ultra! That would be Richard, who makes a tuna sandwich to go with it. Stephanie does a mussels and Hoegaarden thing, and we agree with Mike Nagrant that she totally cribbed from Hopleaf. But in a much less execrable way than Cindy McCain cribbing from the Food Network, right? And Jen won for her shrimp beignets in honor of Zoi's departure last week/last night.

Our main criticism with the beer pairing thing was not that they used crappy, commercial beers (although this bothered other bloggers), but that the judging didn't at all touch on whether the dishes were properly paired with the given beers! Maybe this was an editing choice, or maybe because, as Spike said, all the beers did taste the same, but it seemed like they just completely elided over the intellectual justification for the Quickfire. Maybe we're asking too much...

The challenge to make tailgating grub for a Bears game is so close to the block party thing from a few weeks ago that we're mildly offended. But, you know, it's good for branding. Highlights from preparation phase include:

• Ryan's claim that he does not look like a sports fan, and instead is a "metrosexual"

• Jen's dedication of her Greek quinoa tabouleh dish to Zoi; the only way that could have been more Sapphic is if she'd served it in squash blossoms

• Mark's faux-upsetness at not being able to throw some "shrimp on the barbie"

• Lisa, when talking about her skirt steak and corn cakes, saying, "I'm just there with a rolling pin, beating my meat." COME ON!

• Tom's charming-to-the-point-of-boring patness with the chefs during the mid-episode interviews. Also, he's looking a little chub these days (this is not a problem for Top Chef viewers, half of whom would rather touch him during a football game than Padma or themselves. Padma is the most likely of the three to sue.)

After the prepping, they went back home. The best part of the episode was probably the hot tub scene, where Spike decides that because Mark has curly hair, he's friend-for-life material. To each fetish, his own.

Finally, game day. They seemed pumped, and early on, everyone liked everything. We appreciate that each cheftestant is getting face time, except for Lisa and Jennifer who will obviously not play a role in the judging phase. Extra attention is lavished on bottom three: Nikki, who ran out of food, Ryan the showboater, and Mark the slob. Can we tell you how excited we were to see Paul Kahan of Blackbird, and then how disappointed we were that he was barely on camera? No justice.

We were convinced during the judging that Nikki was going to go; not because she ran out of peppers and onions for Tom and Padma and Paul, but because she bought sausage at a store and had non-integrated shrimp on the side and didn't see anything wrong with any of that. Maybe girl spent too much time on her interstitial updo to bother to make a homemade shrimp sausage sandwich or whatever. And her initial justification for why she appended shrimp onto her dish was "in case people don't eat [pork] sausage." Who is this subset of people, exactly?

But no, it was Ryan's turn for petulantly making a fey four-course supper instead of tailgate food, and doing a crappy job at it to boot. During his goodbye speech, he copped to learning that he's not "the sh*t," but also repeatedly said his full name in order to be properly remembered by the viewing public.

Stephanie was in the top three again, but Dale won the challenge with his fancy ribs and got a football jersey and the grill he cooked with as a parting gift. We wonder if he's still "bitter" about Lisa's prize last week; is he "clinging" to that trip to Italy? HA!

Next week might actually be funny, because Second City and pastries are involved. Pastries are funny.

[Photo: so right about Koren's t-shirt, BravoTV]

• The next chapter of the food crisis will be about Asia's lack of water [AlterNet]
• Half a decade into drought, Australia gives up on growing rice [NYTimes]
• Bangladesh, of all places, expects bumper rice crop this year [AFP]
• EU, eager to set an example, to avoid food export protectionism [BBC]
• World Bank/UN food plan puts blame on, opposed by rich countries [Guardian]
• A core inflation figure that excludes food and energy is unhelpful [Union-Tribune]
• Intern takes the heat for McCain recipe plagiarism mini-scandal [AP]

Even food can be divided along party lines! At least so say the pollsters quoted in today's New York Times story about it. Actually, they divide it even further: by candidate. We'll start with cereal. Can you match the cereal to the candidate? (No peeking at the article! Answers are after the jump.)

1. Bear Naked Granola
2. Kashi Go Lean
3. Fiber One

The first thing that comes to mind is the high fiber content of each of these cereals. Go America! Most of you are starting the day right.

As far as beverages are concerned, Republicans like Dr. Pepper, bourbon, scotch and red wine. Democrats like Pepsi, Sprite, gin, vodka and white wine. (Pepsi? Seriously? All the Democrats we know, most of whom are under 30, are Diet Coke drinkers.)

So political strategists actually use your food habits to target you with propaganda for their particular candidates. Which strikes us as amusing, really, because we imagine that food is not exactly the best indicator of the way someone will vote. Especially given the increasing popularity of natural/organic/hormone-free/local foods, which are apparently favorites of Obama supporters. As the article mentions, there are often a number of different reasons for eating natural foods: environmental (traditionally left-wing), health (bipartisan) or quality (also bipartisan — Republicans like local heirloom tomatoes too).

Still, we must admit, this kind of stuff is fun.

What's for Dinner? The Pollster Wants to Know [New York Times]

Photo, of some political cheese at Zabar's in Manhattan: msnyc111 [Flickr]

Answers: 1. Obama; 2. Clinton; 3. McCain

Seriously, everywhere: in today's Sun-Times, in Hungry Mag, the next day in The Stew, not to mention right here. You know why? It's because she puts photos online. And she just competed in a Food Network baking challenge. Plus, organic!

Anyway, Passover is right around the corner (first night's seder is Saturday), so the Tribune and the Sun-Times both have a bunch of articles on the holiday:

• Sandy Thorn Clark has a piece on how kosher is going upscale, both in terms of its appeal as a traditionalist and high-quality way of making food, and of the variety and sophistication of dishes that can be made under its strictures [Sun-Times]

• Everything you ever wanted to know about macaroons, including their relationship with the French macarons (there is one, despite the desserts having little to do with each other) and the Italian maccarone, meaning paste. Because macaroons resemble paste in some way [Tribune]

• Bill Daley has an article on the improving state of Israeli wines that made us vaguely uncomfortable. Importers of Israeli wine speaking about their popularity at seders are quoted as saying things like, "Jewish people want to help support Israel in any way they can," and "It's safe to say that people like to serve an Israeli wine during the holidays and at the seder table if possible." We'd gingerly assert that it's not safe to imply that all of American Jews are commercially-oriented Zionists in this way. You wouldn't think that controversial ethnic geopolitics would come up in an article about wine, but here we are... [Tribune]

Now that pesach is out of the way, the rest:

• 24" sandwiches are coming to both Wrigley and US Cellular Fields! Guess which one gets the Italian beef vs. the hot dog [Sun-Times]

• Lisa Donovan finally discovers the PickleSickle [Sun-Times]

• It is possible to make the dishes in the new Top Chef recipe book, but they're mostly for show (pun intended) [Sun-Times]

And finally, check out Mike Nagrant's 3300-word epic on mado in this week's Newcity; it's an exhaustive but fascinating and relevant story on how this little neighborhood restaurant came to be, and it'll will probably incite you to try it out (they open tonight). While owners Allison and Rob Levitt may have eschewed some of their big-name corporate restaurant training in favor of the indie/local/seasonal/homemade spirit gripping Chicago and other major cities at the moment, but that didn't stop them from referring us to a publicist when we called to ask for the menu. Where is Schwa's publicist, we ask ourselves?

[Photo: coconut macaroons, WordRidden/flickr]

We're not positive we'd actually like this cupcake, but we're sure glad we've seen it, and we bet it appeals to at least some of you. Texture combinations aside, this looks like something out of Wonka or the Nutcracker, or maybe Marie Antoinette. The aesthetic is whimsy, but the reality is much starker: there are only three of these left at Bleeding Heart Bakery, where Michelle Garcia dreams up all manner of limited-time cupcakes that rotate in and out of the line-up. All cupcakes at Bleeding Heart are $3.50, but for your money you get something 1) unique 2) attractive and 3) organic.

Anyway, if popcorn's your thing, you know what you have to do.

Bleeding Heart Bakery [MenuPages]
Bleeding Heart Bakery [Official Site]

[Photo: Bleeding Heart Bakery/flickr. They put their cupcakes photos online. Why doesn't every restaurant do this?!]

• Good news: we're 15 years maximum from non-food crop biofuels [Telegraph]
• France up and passes law banning prorexia propaganda, confusing public [WaPo]
• Should we be concerned that China's food prices are up 21% this year? [BBCNews]
• Psychographic pollsters say you vote what you eat. Mmm...granola [NYTimes]
• With Philly restaurant name, tradition trumps empathy and understanding [Tribune]

For some reason, we got a bunch of reviews this past week from once and future New Yorkers raving about their favorite Chicago restaurants. And it's a really odd assortment! Observe:

• User: "Kompare" | Title: "Gotta Try It!" | 4/10 | Chuck's Pizza:

I have been eating this pizza for 25 years! I now live 2 hours away and drive in multiple times a year an pick up as many as my freezer can handle. No it's not a family dining or a sports bar, but it IS the best pizza I have come accross. If bambinos in new york is a 5 chucks is a 10. Hands down! Fox's is a good pizza, Rossi's is a good pizza, but I still remain loyal! If you have not tried it, DO.

• User: "New York Girl" | Title: "Happy With Happy!" | 4/13 | Happy Cafe:

I have lived in NY for the last 4 years but whenever I come back to Chicago we hit Chinatown for my dose of Happy Cafe. If you are looking for ambiance you are looking in the wrong place, however, if you are looking great down home Chinese fare look no further! It is further down Wentworth than most people venture but it is definitely worth the few extra blocks. I highly recommend the dul mui (pea pod shoots) as your green veggie and the Peking style pork chops. You will thank me later. :)

• User: "I'm Hungry" | Title: "Rating the Burger" | 4/15 | Weber Grill:

Its is one of the best burgers I've ever had. I am from NYC just moved to Chicago. My friends all say the same thing, go to Weber's for the burger, its amazing. I agree, the burger was juicey, big, cooked perfectly, and the meat tasted really fresh. I am only rating this place on their burger. I will definately go back for this reason.

[Photo: brady frequent traveler and eater/flickr]

Yes!

Virtually all of you will be getting a $600 tax refund this spring in an ill-advised scheme to restart the U.S. economy. The myopic goal of the refund is for us to spend the money immediately on consumer products and services, so why not blow it all on one epic restaurant meal?

Let us cast aside the $1000 sundae (gold foil) at Serendipity 3 and the $1000 omelet (ten ounces of sevruga) at Norma's — both in New York — as pure silliness, and instead focus on tasting menus, but sans alcohol. If you added in wine pairings, you could go over $600 on the first sip.

It's remarkable, isn't it, that you can spend $10,000 easy on 750 milliliters of fermented grape juice, but it is extremely difficult to imagine a $10,000 meal that doesn't involve kilos of truffles and caviar and the like. Can a $100 meal provide as much palate pleasure as a $1000 bottle of wine? We'd posit so; the price to quality ratio for wine is logarithmic, but only geometric or maybe even just arithmetic for food. Suffice it to say, a $600 meal is going to be really, really, really good, and a lot less risky of a financial investment than a $600 bottle of wine. So where, on Tax Day 2008, are our $600 meals going to come from?

Well, not too many places in America — sorry, Uncle Sam! Even the most renowned and priciest restaurants in the United States are hard-pressed to get you up to the $600 mark on food alone. French Laundry, Thomas Keller's landmark fresh/seasonal restaurant in Yountville, CA, charges a mere $240. Alinea, Grant Achatz's cutting-edge molecular gastronomy spectacle in Chicago is all of $195 for twenty-odd courses; possibly one of the best deals in the country, and actually worth some fraction of your refund.

Superexpensive restaurants tend to cluster in money cities, which is why Joel Robuchon chose unseemly Las Vegas for his first venture in the United States; his eponymous restaurant in the MGM Grand has a $385, sixteen course tasting menu that's nothing to sneeze at. Right now, the menu includes a dish with abalone (which retails for over $100 a pound) and baby leeks in a ginger bouillon, for example.

America's ultimate money city is, of course, New York. Where else could those aforementioned $1000 dishes exist without shame, and even find customers! The second most expensive restaurant in the city is Per Se, Tom Keller's other restaurant. The prix fixe there is $275, not much of a premium over the rural California version.

Our winner today is Masa, the country's preeminent sushi restaurant (at least if you use cost as your primary metric!) It was opened by Chef Masa (there's a surcharge for the surname) in 2004, with the only menu option being a $350 omakase, exclusive of drinks, tax and a mandatory 20% tip. The prix fixe has only risen $50 in the past four years (only!), but don't fret: you can tack on a supplement of Wagyu beef from Masa's home prefecture of Tochigi to nudge it up to $600, thus fulfilling the mission of wasting your tax refund.

Meanwhile, Wagyu beef is the culprit at the most expensive restaurant in the world, Tokyo's Aragawa steakhouse. There, a twenty ounce cut of some of the best-quality meat in existence runs a shade over $600, depending on the exchange rate. For a single piece of steak! And the service and decor are shoddy! Still, wow.

French Laundry [Official Site]
Alinea [MenuPages]
Alinea [Official Site]
Joel Robuchon [Official Site]
Per Se [MenuPages]
Per Se [Official Site]
Masa [MenuPages]
Masa [Official Site]

[Photo: your tax refund, in meat form (at Aragawa, via dottyguy/flickr]

• American policymakers still in denial about ethanol's role in food crisis [NYTimes]
• The IMF estimates that 100m people are severely affected by food crisis [FWI]
• Bush releases $200m from food fund for immediate stability aid [CNN]
• The World Bank wants to raise $500m for food aid, especially in Africa [MG]
• Haitian food riots, having taken six lives, finally quiet down [VOA]

The latest yogurt craze-inspired entrant to the Chicago restaurant scene is Starfruit, opening tomorrow in Ukrainian Village. Unlike competitors Berry Chill and Wow Bao (you knew they were serving Asian-style frozen yogurt, right?), Starfruit makes its parfaits, smoothies and frozen concoctions from kefir, a variant of yogurt with a high concentration of bacteria. But good bacteria! Starfruit uses "probiotic" a lot on its trippy, hypnotic website (the best Flash-driven restaurant website we've ever seen, by the way, even though we normally don't like Flash), a totally hot trend in 2008. The yogurt...it will cure all your medical problems! It will do your taxes!

On that topic, as a special promotion for their opening day tomorrow, Starfruit is offering, for free, small parfaits, smoothies and frozens (let's just call them that) plus one topping. All of this would normally be $5, so it's not a bad deal. Flavors include flavors-of-the-week like Pomegranate and Acai, plus all the standard berries, a handful of fruits, and vanilla and capppuccino. Some of the flavors are available in organic, an extra 50 cents. The toppings are more fun, ranging from fresh fruit to milk and honey granola, yogurt chips (in case you can never get enough) and most exotically, mochi balls (a buck for the first topping, and then 50 cents per).

We say, the more, the merrier on yogurt. But the best part is, the menu they sent us came in three versions with three different fonts. They've since determined one for the website, but the tri-font menu gave us the unique opportunity to share with you the design decision as it came together. Here are the three options:

1)

2)

3)

The first one has a Harry Potter-type thing going on, the second one is like playful late 1950s, and the third one is a bit American Girl Place, yeah?

So which one makes us think the most about groovy yogurt? Also, why not just use the same sans serif font that the Starfruit logo is in? Because sans serif is modern and forward thinking, but Starfruit's hippy-wellness-holistic angle requires a few serifs to put us in a time and place, and the curlycues in the first font are as close as you're gonna get. And so, that's the font they ultimately chose for the website. Branding, we think, is like one of those good bacteria! Best eaten fresh and cold.

Starfruit [MenuPages]
Starfruit [Official Site]

Nevertheless, here, here and here.

• New Andersonville New Southern restaurant Big Jones is kind of a big deal (and the Hungry link has photos to prove it) [Drive-Thru, Hungry Mag]

• There's a whiff of controversy bubbling over the origin of Cinners' chili recipe, which is slightly spicier and less sweet than standard Cincinnati formulations [Food Chain]

• So far, Great Lake has been getting unremittingly great press for their superfancy pizzas. (Anyone want to source us their menu?) [The Stew]

• The smart Chicago diner will forget about North Pond in Lincoln Park at his or her peril! [Chicagoist]

• Solid 7/10 rating for Prosecco from Bridget & Tammy; the wine bar's weakness is in the value department [Chicago Bites]

• Contrary to the reports of some naysayers, Spacca Napoli is still churning out delicious pizza [Drive-Thru]

• Vegetarian fast food joint Veggie Bite opens second location in Wicker Park; the tofu textures are purportedly strange, but the milkshakes are good [Chicago Foodies]

• The solid, classic breakfasts at West Egg Cafe are served with practiced efficiency [Chicago Foodies]

[Photo: Big Jones' interior]

Some of us at MenuPages are taking a vacation in Mexico this week &mdash Mazatlan, to be exact &mdash and thought we'd share a few photos of what we'll be consuming. These are all from other people's Flickr photostreams, but they give you a good idea of what's going down the gullet in the Pearl of the Pacific.

There will definitely be plenty of these:

It's especially delicious with a couple of these:

More jealousy-inducing photos after the jump:

You have to be careful of the dangerous and apparently cannibalistic wildlife:

But seafood in Mexico isn't always cooked. Just throw some lime juice on there, marinate and you've got a wonderful ceviche:

You don't always have to eat seafood in Mazatlan. These people got to go to a party back in 1986 that included puerco, a whole roast pig (though they do still make this today). Check the classic apple in the mouth of the dinner and the extra-classic sta-prest pants on the diner.

If you need a bite on the run, you can stop by a taco stand for a snack that will likely cost less than a dollar and taste a million times better than almost any fast food in the U.S.

Finally, for dessert or maybe breakfast, there's got to be a stop at the Panederia. These pan dulces are super good and not too sweet:

There's just barely time to catch the last rays over the Pacific. Awesome:

Photo: Cassadota

• At global economic conference, food crisis trumps credit crisis [NYTimes]
• France says: the EU really needs to do something about the food crisis [BBC]
• One reason food prices are up: vastly increased farm input costs [WSJ]
• South St. Paul stockyard, once largest in the world, shutters [Post-Bulletin]
• Singles are eating black noodles for love on Black Day in S. Korea [Reuters]

•Is it really appropriate for a restaurant called Gandhi to offer an all-you-can-eat buffet? [MP: Boston]
•Should certain cuisines always be cheap? [MP: Chicago]
•Can restaurants withhold tips from its workers? [MP: Philadelphia]
•Will there ever be a disagreement-free "best-of" list? [MP: San Francisco]
•Is there anything wrong with a four-egg omelet? [MP: South Florida]

What's the best way to nab that unattainable table or bounce back from a missed reservation? It's not necessarily bribery. An article in Restaurants and Institutions this week indicates that the best solution may be a mix of common sense, basic manners and flexibility.

If you are so late that your table has been given away, apologize and ask, "Is there anything you can do for us?". Most restaurants get far more last-minute cancellations than they'd like to admit, so the chances are slim that there will be nothing available for you all night. Many restaurants also have at least one reserve table that they reluctantly bring out for unexpected situations.

If the restaurant truly cannot offer you a table, try eating at the bar, as you'll get a sense of the restaurant's items and the chef's style, and the food might even be cheaper. As a bonus, you can forge a relationship with the staff, increasing your likelihood of getting -- and keeping -- future reservations.

But other solutions are equally as practical and more employable. for example:

Problem: The waiter tells you all about the special but doesn't mention the price.

Solution: A good way to get at the question without seeming rude is to ask, "What price point are the specials?" This phrasing is a little less specific and better than saying, "How much is that?" If you are with people you don't know well or are treating someone and don't want to seem stingy, keep in mind that specials are generally the same price as the more expensive menu items.

Experienced diners know all this stuff, but it makes good reading anyway. And even you, savvy Menupages reader, may pick up a hint or two.

Restaurant Etiquette 101 [Restaurants and Institutions]
Momofuku Ko [Official Site]
Image: Timon [Flickr]

And one of those times is now. Please enjoy the forthcoming syndicated posts, and see you Monday!

What is it about formerly McDonald's-owned Mexican chain Chipotle that gives it such a ferocious cult following? Fast Company tried to find out. Apart from commiting the sin of calling Chipotle "the Bono of the fast-food business" (!), they think it comes down to a combination of quality food and a social responsible message:

"Good food wrapped in a socially responsible message has created legions of Chipotle fans -- and a superhot business. Acquired by McDonald's in 1998 when there were only 14 Chipotles, the company went public in 2006 with 500 stores and watched its stock rise from $22 to $110 in 18 months. The now-independent outfit is enjoying an 80% revenue run-up over three years, and by year's end, it will have 840 stores and top $1 billion in annual sales."

Chipotle is influencing America's food supply chain as well — both Burger King and Wendy's have started considering imitating their humane-pork options.

Chipotle [Official Site]
Ode to a Burrito [Fast Company]

[Photo: Carnitas burrito, Flickr: skeptict]

This is going to be very fast! Everything you ever wanted to know about:

• Hyde Park dining, by someone who should know [TOC]

• On a related topic, Park 52 is finally open [TOC]

• Tallulah, the Lincoln Square New American, is hit or miss [TOC]

• Natalino's, the West Town Italian-American, is pretty good, if a little kitschy and not at all relevatory [TOC]

• You know what's exciting about Spring that isn't ramps? Morels! [TOC]

• Mike Sula's story on Masouleh, the Persian home cooking restaurant in Rogers Park, has fascinating political angles [Reader]

• Phil Vettel loves Sixteen, a big fat duh [Tribune]

• Earth Day is coming up, and Monica Eng has a list of green restaurants for you [Tribune]

See? Fast.

[Photo: this morel mushrooms is moderately frightening. But delicious! (J-Fish/flickr)]

We all know how strongly food can affect mood. Ever been hangry? It's not a pretty sight. But in an environment where very little else has the power to elevate, the role of food moves from attitude adjuster to a hook on which to hang your sanity.

This NPR story from Daniel Zwerdling takes a pretty fascinating look at the roll of meals and cooks on possibly the most remote outpost on earth: McMurdo Station, Antarctica. There, according to one worker, the quality of meals can "make or break morale of the whole station."

We've heard of prisoners rioting over the loss of peanut butter or some such dish, but at least they get a few hours of sunlight a day. In Antarctica, when it's night, it's dark for months on end. During that time there is literally no other sustenance than what comes out of the kitchen. From NPR:

Occasionally, diners lose it. Despite all the menu options, the institutionalized feel at McMurdo can often push people's buttons. Ebel, the maintenance worker, says he went "berserk" once in 1994 because he thought the cooks were always flavoring dishes with curry.

"I cleared that galley once, I cleared the whole serving area," Ebel recalls. "They were peeking around the corners at me, 'Mike calm down!' And all the food and plates got in the way."

Think about that as you head to the farmer's market for spring vegetables. They're sold out of asparagus? It could be so much worse.

Food is Morale Booster or Breaker in Antarctica [NPR]
Photo: Antarctic Sunset #4, Peterkelly [Flickr]

No. But they are from Chicago.

Last night's episode was all about taste. As opposed to the rest of the season, where taste has no bearing! Much-ballyhooed chef Ming Tsai was on hand for the day's challenges, which involved a blind taste test (conceptually interesting) and catering the first course for the Meals on Wheels Chicago Celebrity Chef Ball (worthy, but less interesting).

Ming introduced the blind test by saying "if you can't tell what tastes good [...] you might as well pack up your knives and go home." Who wrote that line for him? Totally lame to plug one of the show's catchphrases. Nevertheless, the challenge itself was elegant in its formality and objectivity: each of the cheftestants tried cheap and expensive versions of fifteen food items (olive oil, bacon, chocolate, etc.), and the one who most often identifies the pricey item, won.

But it is not as easy as you'd think, apparently, since poor Stephanie only got six out of fifteen. Antonia, of all people, won with twelve correct IDs (note that underachiever Ryan got eleven). Which made us wonder, how much of taste is nature and how much is nurture? You can train ad infinitum, but not everyone has the same amount or distribution of taste buds. A discussion for another time, perhaps. What you should take away from the Quickfire is, this would be a great party game for foodies.

The main challenge was creating a first course for this Meals on Wheels chef ball, whose theme is the elements:

• Team Water, led by Richard, made scaly sous-vide salmon. So many scales! Andrew pointed out that not removing the scales is like "leaving a fish head on." Although that can work sometimes: witness the deliriously delicious cod cheek. But anyway, Tom Colicchio doesn't even like sous-vided salmon, and didn't understand Mark's parsnip puree.

• Team Earth, led by...well, no one, unfortunately, made bland-ass beef carpaccio with mushrooms (poor Zoi!) and sunchokes. Antonia had immunity from the Quickfire and shot down Spike's soup idea, which turned into a giant bone of contention later on when Earth ended up at the bottom of the heap, but oh well. Our favorite moment involving Team Earth was when two fancy ladies in their 60s were chatting and one of them said, "I would be telling someone on the Earth team they're going home tonight," and the other one said "Ouch!" Okay in our book: fancy ladies saying "Ouch!"

• Team Air, with Jen and Ryan and Nikki maybe (Nikki is a character we know almost nothing about. Soon, she'll do something stupid and get eliminated), made duck breast, an herb salad, and a prosecco cocktail. Air got in second place and there's really nothing to say about them.

• Team Fire, with Stephanie mediating between ever-squabbling Dale and Lisa, made spicy shimp with spicy chili and an innovative cross-cut bacon component that won Lisa a lil' trip to Italy. Dale was so pissed that he didn't get to go to Italy! Well, he should have done something with bacon then, right?

So Lisa won for her neato bacon, and Zoi lost because of her underseasoned mushrooms. We're disappointed because, there was some promise of Zoi and Jen's relationship becoming an *issue*, and now there's not. Human dignity one, us zero.

Now that we're down to a dozen chefs or less, the show's format is changing a tad. Tom got some extended interview time with the chefs as they were preparing their dishes, and then had a monologue at the camera where he discoursed on their relative strengths and weaknesses. He also forced the chefs to identify themselves with the components of their dishes for the purposes of easy elimination later on.

When does Top Chef start to get really compelling? Is it at nine chefs? Six? Possibly never? We will have to stay tuned for the next episode, which involves hot tubs.

[Photo: BravoTV]

• As Haitian food riot violence continue, PM urged to step down [AFP]
• US & EU complicit in global food crisis, and must act to mollify it [NYTimes]
• WHAT FOOD CRISIS? Meet the $100k kitchen that's sweeping the nation [NYTimes]
• Defying government regulation, raw milk sales continue to skyrocket [AP]
• Post smoking ban, UK pubs report an increase in food sales [Mirror]
• In display of vulgarity, Seoul to put on Guinness Records food fest [Chosun]
• UK closer to banning food additives linked to child hyperactivity [Telegraph]

Nothing gets a foodie excited like ramps in early April. The entire calendar of fresh produce is about to begin! That pungent little green leaf wakes us out of our winter hibernation and says: there will be a lightness to your step! And other enconia as well.

But really, it's been a long winter of meat and brown, and we're happy to hear word of the wild leek's appearance in northern Illinois, as per this lovely article from Jennifer Olvera about how all this is playing out. Included: what chefs are doing with them, where you can buy them, recipes.

Otherwise, the food sections are what they are:

• Biodynamic vs. organic wines — especially, which wines are worth getting organic [Sun-Times]

• Andrew Zimmern of "Bizarre Foods" likes Manny's corned beef [Sun-Times]

• Kendall College is launching a one week restaurant hospitality summer camp. Sounds...fun? [Sun-Times]

We're hard-pressed to get inspired by the Tribune's dining section today, but we'll try harder:

• Everything you ever wanted to know about local meat purveyor Allen Brothers [Tribune]

• The Greater Midwestern Foodways Alliance people are back, and this time, they're conferencing about the region's desserts [Tribune]

• Bill Daley dissertates enjoyably but esoterically on petite sirah [Tribune]

• Something we had never heard of: filé powder, a Creole spice [Tribune]

[Photo: leeks emerging in Michigan, from Kim in MI]

There's some weird stuff going on in restaurant kitchens these days. In the video (which should be edited down to, say, three minutes, but is still interesting — just ignore the annoying blond woman), chef Stuart Sage of Tang in Dubai demonstrates how he uses liquid nitrogen like a deep fryer to cook food — in this case, a tomato espuma — at ridiculously cold temperatures.

What freaked us out was how he scooped the espuma out of the bowl full of liquid nitrogen and immediately presented it to the woman. We'd be terrified to eat it, for fear that our tongue would immediately freeze and break into 100 pieces, and then how would we taste food. (Shudder.) Of course, the nitrogen had likely evaporated at that point, and besides, we breathe it in and out every day, right? Still. Just a teensy bit scary.

Restaurants - Cooking with Liquid Nitrogen in the Real World [YouTube]

So! The news cycle is awful fast these days. Moments after we commented on the game of chicken being waged by Roscoe's and Rosscoe's, Rosscoe's (the one in Chicago) decided to go ahead and change its name to Chicago's Home of Chicken and Waffles. Smart move! However, this doesn't necessarily the personal score between Herb Hudson (of LA's Rosscoe's) and Darnell Johnson (of Chicago's Home of Chicken and Waffles as of this very moment); Hudson still plans on suing for "damages." Ehh...he won the name battle, he's the more successful businessperson, he should just get over it and move on. Besides, how would you calculate the damages thus far? Some arbitrary percentage of all chicken and waffles sold thus far? Shouldn't Johnson's public shaming be enough? It is plenty for us.

Chicago owner agrees to change restaurant's name [Tribune]

When Rosscoe's Chicken & Waffles opened last month, we cautioned that

trying to ride the coattails of the established LA institution doesn't sit all that well with us. We realize the owners are just trying to maximize their business, but given the dearth of decent dining options in the area, simply providing good food and decent service would have taken care of that. Using the name Rosscoe's (misspelled as it might be) just opens you up for increased scrutiny and ire.

Equally relevant is Roscoe's logo, which is also protected. The trademark has a disclaimer that states "NO CLAIM IS MADE TO THE EXCLUSIVE RIGHT TO USE "CHICKEN N WAFFLES" and the illustration of waffles APART FROM THE MARK AS SHOWN." Let's take a look at the mark!

The chicken on the left belongs to Chicago's Rosscoe's, while the chicken on the right is property of LA' Roscoe's. There are differences between them, to be sure; um...for example, they're looking in opposite directions. The owner of Chicago's Rosscoe's, Darnell Johnson, is quoted as saying:

In a court of law, in a civil case, we feel we can win 9 out of 12 jurors. If they get the whole story.

Nevertheless, this infringement suit seems to have legs, given that the "likelihood of confusion between the two is pretty high for unsuspecting Chicagoans. It's one thing to use the name "Rosscoe," which is a recognized variant of Roscoe (meaning "deer wood" in Old Norse) — after all, during the interwar period, one out of every two hundred male babies was named Roscoe!

But the similarity of the logos is pretty damning. At the end of the article, Johnson states he'd be fine changing the name except for the high cost of switching the signage. We're underwhelmed by this argument also, but doing so would be a lot cheaper — and arguably less insulting — than getting shut down by government injunction.

L.A. restaurant cries fowl over Chicago eatery's name [Tribune]
Roscoe's House Of Chicken N Waffles [USPTO]
Trademark infringement [Wikipedia]
Roscoe - Name Meaning and Origin [Think Baby Names]

[Photos: top, the appropriately titled "Our efforts thwarted" (Chicago White Meat/flickr); middle, our own construction using Google Maps Streetview and dcfud]

An upcoming vacation has us stocking up on pulp novels, and it was impossible to resist breaking into Ian Fleming's Moonraker a bit early. James Bond novels often include wonderful descriptions of classic meals and this is no exception, starting with dinner at M's mythical Blades card club in London:

"Well," said M. "Caviar for me. Devilled [sic] kidney and a slice of your excellent bacon. Peas and new potatoes. Strawberries in kirsch. What about you, James?"
"I've got a mania for really good smoked salmon," said bond. Then he pointed down the menu. "Lamb cutlets. The same vegetables as you, as it's May. Asparagus with Bernaise sauce sounds wonderful. And perhaps a slice of pineapple."

But that's just our own latest exposure to the vivid descriptions of Bond's culinary escapades. Throughout the series the meals keep coming, including crab legs and pink champagne at "Bills on the Beach" (rumored to be a thinly disguised description of Joe's Stone Crab) in Miami, langouste in France and an endless stream of scrambled eggs and bacon all over the world. He even manages to scare up eggs Benedict and a bottle of Old Granddad on a train in Japan in You Only Live Twice.

Fleming can cook a meal on the page that hits as close to the gut as anything that doesn't actually consist of food. In fact, we would submit that many of his descriptions come off more satisfying than the real thing. We'll take a dining chapter of Bond over a real-life Egg McMuffin any day.

It's unlikely, on our upcoming trip, that we'll enjoy a "delicious lunch served by an even more delicious stewardess" on Continental, as Bond does in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. As long as there is a Fleming novel or two in the beach bag, the real-life menu can't hope to compare. We'll let it try, though.

So What is James Bond's Favorite Drink? [Accidental Hedonist]
James Bond food and eating [The James Bond Dossier]
Joe's Stone Crab [MenuPages]
Joe's Stone Crab [Official Site]
Photo: Pink Champagne (a Bond favorite) by Gareth Lowe1 [Flickr]

• LA's Roscoe's Chicken & Waffles sues Chicago's Rosscoe's Chicken & Waffles [Tribune]
• EU Development Commissioner brashly calls African food crisis a "tsunami" [BBC]
• Minnesota Twins ballpark signature food item to involve walleyed pike? [Star Tribune]
• On farms, environment losing ground to little-known foe called CAPITALISM [NYTimes]
• Food riots in Haiti continue for a third day; UN peacekeepers worried [Guardian]
• Mich. closer to issuing food stamps bimonthly, encouraging produce purchases [MLive]

Uncle Wiggily is a friendly old rheumatic rabbit that walks with a peppermint-striped cane who's featured in a series of children's stories by Howard Roger Garis. It's also the alias (actually, a slight variant) of a certain friendly Michigan state government employee who recently visited Chicago with his family and recounted his restaurant experiences on MenuPages.

Uncle Wiggly (our interlocutor has dropped the second 'i') left four reviews in the past few days for some classic, family-friendly Chicago restaurants. He visited solid institutions that one may forget about in the endless hunt for the Next New Thing, but are generally worthy of whatever praise they may receive. We really like Wiggly's friendly, intelligent and totally unpretentious style, and think that the reviews function well as a set.

His first review, on April 7th, was for Hot Diggity Dog, matter-of-factly entitled "uncle wiggly loves hot diggity dog(s)":

I loved Hot Diggity Dogs. I had a great brat with peppers and I had a hot italian beef sandwich also. Fun atmosphere and great service. Big Joe broke his leg and was not there and it's my understanding that his sister is a CUTIE! but she's engaged and she was taking care of big Joe. I'm going back to Chi-town in August and I will be eating at Hot Diggity Dog. Just to show my objectivity, the hot italian beef sandwich at AL's Hot Italian Beef was a little better but Hot Diggity Dog's was very good. Lastly, check out the sign at the counter where a fire boat in Lake Michigan is shooting mustard onto a Chicago style dog!!!

As Wiggly foreshadowed in his Hot Diggity Dog review, next up is Al's No 1 Italian Beef, entitled "Al's is no. 1!!":

I was just in Chicago and ate at Al's no 1. Italian Beef for the second time it was just as good as it was 2 years ago. My wife and son and our friends were at that overrated, overpriced, Rainforest Cafe 2 blocks away I sprinted away to Al's and ate like a king the best hot italian beef in Chicago. When I jogged back to Rainforest my gang still did not have a table!! I'm coming back in August for the Tigers and White Sox and I'll definitely eat at Al's again. The french fries are delicious too in fact, I took some back in my pocket to give to my starving 11 year old son who happens to be a french fry mayven and he love them!! Thanks, Al.

Breakfast time! Uncle Wiggly and his gang make their way to West Egg Cafe, which turns out to be a "Great Breakfast Find":

Great place for breakfast I had a skillet, my wife had eggs and fruit, my son had pancakes. I would have given a 5 for service, but my wife had to wait and ask for her eggs. I had a side dish of corned beef hash and it was delicious. My wife's fruit was fresh, there was a ton of it and it was presented very well. Our waiter was excellent and the atmosphere was clean and light. There's a menu item named Myron and Phil's and it was named after the owners of a great family restaurant in Chicago which was featured on the food channelspecifically on the show "The Hungry Detective." Two years ago in Chicago we had breakfast at the Omni and it was way too expensive, way to glitzy for a kid and I walked away hungry. I will eat at West Egg again when I come back to Chicago in August.

Finally, this morning, Wiggly regales us with tales of Ed Debevic's, using the promising title of ""Live Long and Grumpy" at Ed Debevic's":

Went to Debevic's for a 2nd time over spring break. Had just as much fun as we did 2 years ago. Good burger, onion rings and chocolate/banana shake. Ed's was not crowded so we had "Biscuits" (our waiter) entertainment almost exclusively...He was very entertaining and we had a blast. 33 years ago I saw a great basketball game between the bulls and the kansas city kings...I couldn't remember what arena they played at but I knew it wasn't the United Center where the Bulls and Blackhawks now play. Anyway, I asked several people the name of the old arena and "Biscuits" was the only person who knew the answer, Chicago Stadium. The most important thing about Ed Debevic's is that you just plain have a lot of fun we had several great laughs, including when Biscuits called my son Poindexter. If you have time, carefully look around at the memorabillia it's funny and interesting and you don't find stuff like this in many restaurants.

Anyway, we're just happy to see reasonable, real people leaving reasonable, real reviews that will help other reasonable, real people make restaurant selections. It can't be all hate, all the time, now can it? Overall, we found reading these reviews to be a very calming experience, like tending to a Zen rock garden. Maybe you too!

[Photo: a classic moment at Ed Debevic's (Uncle Wiggly not pictured), from tansyjefferies/flickr]

Potatoes are a terribly versatile starch; you can mash them, smash them, fry them, scallop, dice, puree, bake, roast, gratinate, chowederize and latkefy them...they take well to almost any preparation. Now that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has decided that they are the food of the future by dint of their caloric yield per acre (a critical metric in an era of unmitigated cereal price spikes), there will be opportunity for even more permutations of potato dishes, like some of these exotic specimens:

"Tornado Potato" — as purchasable on the streets of Seoul (superlocal):

After the jump, spuds galore!

Potato and Bacon Galette — may look like a pastry, but in reality, so much better (Loua):

Scotch Quail Egg with Purple Potato Salad — presented as a way to use leftovers, but worthy of primacy (Biggie*):

Sweet Potato Green Tea Soft Serve a.k.a Asabu Sabo — because potatoes can do anything (tychenyt):

Tofu Wrapped in Potato — potatoes can act as a powerful exoskeleton (tofu666):

Roasted Sweet Potato Salad — is it chicken? is it croutons? Guess again! (su-lin):

Red Potato Pizza — of course it tastes good (QuintanaRoo):

Potato Candy — these are made with a queen's ransom of sugar (pixchica):

Shimiimo a.k.a. Dried Potatoes — a traditional wintertime preparation in Japan; apparently they taste like mochi when fully dried (mistubako):

What is the strangest thing you've ever done with a potato? Actually, on second thought, maybe we don't want to know.

Potatoes seen as 'food of the future' [Food Navigator]

Last Friday, we wrote about our sticker shock when we saw the price of a certain (tasty-looking) main course at Szalas on the Southwest Side. We argued that we've come to expect Polish food in Chicago to be cheap, and we're somewhat suspicious when it's not.

This generated the slightest pique of ire from Louisa of Movable Feast, who was concerned we were reopening the X-food-is-meant-to-be-cheap message board war (veterans of which are currently suing for more generous meal stipends).

But we never meant to imply that there's a reason inherent to the cuisine itself for it to be universally inexpensive, or that we would not be willing to pay a lot for imaginative, high quality Polish food served in a sophisticated restaurant. It's just that, since such a venue empirically does not exist in Chicago, and because the overwhelmingly vast majority of Polish restaurants in the city are conspicuously inexpensive, that we've come to view Polish as a "value" option. In fact, we think there should be a temple to fancy Polish food in Chicago, and that there's a market for it.

However, commenter "Bart" disagrees:

There are no good Polish restaurants in the Chicago area, and I doubt you would find one in the US at all. Simply this kind of cousine doesn't sell, and is not existent except withing old country. For real taste of Polish cuisine try some more upscale restaurants in Warsaw, Krakow. But don't expect the bill to be running under $40-$50 per dish.

But truth is, Szalas is still serving it right, even if their menu is bit on a countryside - but you are served a traditional stuff.

The set menu (like a prix fixe except you don't have any options) includes pierogi, sour soup with smoked bacon, beef roulade in mushroom sauce with buckwheat and warm beetroot salad, "cream cake on the mirror of strawberry sauce" (!) and a glass of cherry vodka, and is 175 zloty, or $80, a person. That's not insignificant in a country with a per capita GDP of $16,600, around half that of the United States.

But only tourist eat set menu, yes? Should we ever find ourselves in Krakow, we are ordering: foie gras in wild rose and apple preserves ($42), crayfish soup with sour cream and dill ($16), and the roe deer and quail duet served with wild rice
and many-colour pepper sauce for $50. Ooh! Or maybe the veal leg stewed in dark mushroom sauce, served with roasted potatoes and sweet pea, a hefty $57. And we can't say we're not intrigued by the apple strudel with linden tree ice cream for $15. All this comes to upwards of $130 or so before beverages (tax and tip are mostly included, in all likelihood), which is nothing to sneeze at.

While an opulent, 650 year old Polish restaurant that regularly plays host to visiting foreign dignitaries may not be in the cards for Chicago, surely there's still room for something special, eh? Something with foie gras...

Szalas [MenuPages]
Szalas [Official Site]
Wierzynek [Official Site]

[Photo: Daniel Matysiak/flickr. That "GRILL" awning is atrocious]

What is it with Germans re-enforcing their own stereotypes? The country known for efficiency and automation, birthplace of the automat, has now debuted a new kind of mechanical restaurant that uses a fantastic series of tracks, screens and conveyor belts to deliver fresh, often locally sourced food. From the BBC:

Supersonic sausages, high-pace pancakes and wine bottles whizzing down to the customers' tables with the help of good old gravity. One pot is spiralling down so fast, it looks like an Olympic bobsleigh (but it's only Bratwurst).

What's more, at the 's Baggers restaurant in Nuremberg, you don't need waiters to order food. Customers use touch-screen TVs to browse the menu and choose their meal....

Up in the kitchen, it is man, not machine, that makes the food. They haven't found a way of automating the chef, just yet...

Then it is put on the rails and despatched downhill to the correct table. Manna from heaven, German-style.

The restaurant is the brainchild of local businessman Michael Mack.

"I wanted to come up with a complete new restaurant system," Michael tells me, "one that would be more efficient and more comfortable".

We don't think the waiters of the world need to worry too much about their job security in the face of this latest development in automated foodservice. It is fascinating, though, and as the BBC reporter (who strangely doesn't get a by-line in this story) points out, there is no need for a tip in an automated restaurant.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., we're working on new ways to hilariously add steps to the food preparation process. What if Michael Mack and the Rube Goldberg competition guys got together on a project? The result could be the most entertaining mechanical comedy of a restaurant ever. We really hope they consider it.

Fast Food, German-Style [BBC News]
's Baggers restaurant [Official Site]
Automat [Wikipedia]
Burgers The Excruciating Way [Menupages Blog]
Bamn! [MenuPages]
Bamn! [Official Site]
Photo from 's Baggers' Website

• Cloning-for-food moratorium still USDA modus operandi [Reuters]
• Genetically modified taro moratorium in effect in Hawaii [AP]
• Food riots are the new energy, water riots in developing world [UKPress]
• British mildly upset that food additives lower kids' IQs [UPI]
• Also, they throw away $6b worth of fruits & veggies a year [RWM]
• China plans 24/7 monitoring of food factories during Olympics [Guardian]
• Calls for food sovereignty in Canada...sounds like energy independence [SunTimes]

ZED451 is an AYCE (all you can eat) New American steakhouse, opening in River North in two weeks. The restaurant is similar in concept to the various churrascarias around town like Brazzaz and Fogo de Chao, but with a New American rather than Brazilian orientation toward the meat and accompaniments. For a $50 prix-fixe ($25 for the kiddies), you get your pick of proteins like bacon-wrapped filet mignon, Parmesan crusted pork medallions, buttermilk marinated bottom sirloin, spicy fruit-glazed lamb chops, and so forth. And in lieu of a traditional salad bar, ZED451 employs a "Harvest Table" with sides like Maui pineapple salad, roasted asparagus with herbed aioli, and a "Hot Station" with options like sherry braised mushroom soup.

One mildly interested twist is that the restaurant employs thirty front-end chefs, who do everything from carving your meat to delivering it to your table. Furthermore, they get to show off their skills by making amuse bouches for the audience...er, dining guests. This is sort of like an audition so maybe you can hire them to be your corporate chef or something! We wonder if they wear name tags...

If ZED451 sounds familiar (the restaurant's name refers to the last letter of the alphabet and the temperature at which paper spontaneously combusts. All this makes us nervous that it's a doomsday cult), that's because there are already two in the area: Downers Grove and Schaumburg each have a location. It definitely feels like sloppy seconds to get a restaurant concept that got its start in the suburbs; we've learned by now to not assume that food served in the suburbs will be less sophisticated than its city counterpart, but...we cannot shake the associations of the soulless marketing immanent to restaurant groups in general, and these suburbs in particular.

The next best thing to judging a dish by eating it is to judge by looking at it (this is the premise behind Top Chef, by the way). Above are some encrusted lamb chops (apparently not the spicy fruit-glazed variety they have on the menu). They look...fine. More than adequate. There are chives in the foreground, cilantro in the background. Definitely a stab at upmarket. We look at these lamb chops and know instantly that the food will be good enough for the people who decide to go to this restaurant. It will be tourists and conventioneers and families and all sorts of people who appreciate high quality AYCE in a large (15,000 sq ft!), safe space. It at least has the virtue of being slightly different from other plausible alternatives in Chicago. Given the spiraling costs of meat, $50 for all the filet mignon you can eat is not a terrible deal.

ZED451 [MenuPages]
ZED451 [Official Site]

[Photo: ZED451's media center]

The April, 2008 issue of Budget Travel includes a wonderful piece on pay-what-you-want restaurants worldwide. We had no idea this was even a trend, but this little roundup gives four examples, including two in the U.S., one in Europe and one in Australia.

The idea is that you go into one of these restaurants, eat like normal and then pay what you feel is appropriate by dropping some cash into a box or using a customer-operated credit card machine. This seems, weirdly, both intimidating and welcoming. It's nice to feel like you're trusted, but it might be intimidating to feel you're essentially rendering judgment on the place by the amount you leave. What if it wasn't that good? Should you stiff them?

While the pay-what-you-like trend reminds us of these underground kitchens that are taking hold in various urban centers, it seems there is much more at stake. The casual dinners thrown at someone's house are simply a nice thing to do and would stop if they weren't fun and/or financially viable.

These restaurants, on the other hand, pin the financial health of the owners and staff on the fair-mindedness and generosity of their customers. It seems to us an experiment that puts a huge amount of faith in humanity and would be very depressing if it failed.

Pay-what-you-like Restaurants [Budget Travel]
Pirates of the Kitchen [Menupages SF]
Photo courtesy of Terra Bite Lounge [Official Site]

Chicago's intrepid food bloggers were all over the damn place last week, in alphabetical order by restaurant

• Bucktown gastropub Bluebird gets the smackdown for alternatively bland and overspiced dishes [Drive-Thru]

• First word on the Cincinnati-themed bar Cinner's Cincinnati-style chili - "good" [Hungry Mag]

• "The Mess" at Costello Sandwiches is salami, ham and capicola topped with cole slaw and fries, but the real story is the review itself, in poetic form! [Chicagoist]

• Classic Wrigleyville bakery Dinkel's still doing its thing — and doing it well — all these years on [Drive-Thru]

• Mike Nagrant lists a few of his favorite things, including the Philly cheesesteaks at Granddaddy's Subs on Taylor Street and the crispy tacos at Mexican Inn on the Southeast Side [Hungry Mag]

• If you don't order a cocktail at Room 21, they'll screw up your order on purpose! Or...maybe not, but also, the food reminded the reviewer of a "hotel buffet line" [Gastronomic Bypass]

• At Chicago's only Laotian restaurant, Sabai-Dee, skip the buffet and order off the menu. For example, the shredded chicken curry noodle soup [Chicago Foodies]

• The Lincoln Park Sushi X is less trendy than it's Ukie Village sister, and BYO for the moment [Gastronomic Bypass]

[Photo: Schlitz's reformulation marketing campaign, which highlights the use of the beer's 1960s recipe. The ad campaign intones, "Gusto is being correct rather than politically correct" and "Gusto is still having a phone that rings, not sings," and "Gusto is believing a firm handshake is the best form of contract," and "Gusto is not even knowing the meaning of the term ‘metrosexual.'" Ah, yes, nostalgia for the time when middle-aged white men ran the country, the corporations and the culture. Long sigh.]

For anybody who has worked in a kitchen or watched a professional cooking show, you know efficiency is possibly the most important trait one can bring to the table, er, workstation. Just the opposite in the annual Rube Goldberg competition. This year, contestants built machines whose sole purpose seems to be to make the heads of people like Gordon Ramsay or our old restaurant boss Larry explode in a burst of professional fury. Ha.

The winning entrant and home team at the Purdue University-hosted event took 156 steps to construct a hamburger, using a patty that had already been cooked. Hilariously, the machines seem really bad at making their burgers while taking way too long to do it. But the competition isn't about making burgers, it's about making teamwork and ingenuity, which gets done in spades.

By the time they're done working on these contraptions, the teams in this competition could probably knock out breakfast for a couple hundred people without breaking a superfluous egg. Maybe they can come down to our local diner and give a lesson. Larry should come, too.

A hamburger in 156 easy steps [Slashfood]
Purdue's 156-Step Burger Maker Wins Rube Goldberg Contest [Gizmodo]
Rube Goldberg Contest At Purdue [Purdue News Service]

• Italian food undergoing an (ethnic) identity crisis in Italy [NYTimes]
• Humorous Absolut ad prompts boycott calls from silly Americans [Tribune]
• Embattled Atlantic City casinos cutting food and drink comps [USAToday]
• India's structural economic problems exacerbating food shortages [BBCNews]
• Might the World Bank implement a "New Deal" for African agriculture? [AllAfrica]
• Food riots in southern Haiti leave four dead [Reuters]

Last we checked in with Szalas, it was because an Omnivorous feature was designed specifically to accommodate the restaurant. To whit:

The restaurant round-up that follows Omnivorous this week is "Twenty-four restaurants south of 52nd Street," so themed because Gary is...south. But why 52nd street in particular, we wondered? A quick check of the addresses reveals the northernmost restaurant to be Szalas, a Goralean restaurant in Brighton Park. Come again? They're Polish highlanders, they eat veal goulash, and on the weekends, they dance. If the column was named to accommodate this particular restaurant, you know it must be good.

Right or wrong, Polish food is simply not a cuisine we expect to pay a lot of money for; Chinese and Mexican are also in this category. Thai and, say, Greek, are not anymore, because the gentrification of Thai and Greek food have inured us to $15 and up entrees. Which is not to say there aren't plenty of places to get delicious and cheap Thai and Greek food! But we're fine paying a little or a lot for either. Of course, Chinese and Mexican have been making inroads, too — witness Shanghai Terrace and Topolobampo.

As for Polish food, though, there's really only one "expensive" Polish restaurant in the area (Lutnia). This doesn't need to be the case! Any cuisine can be elevated to gourmet heights; all it takes is one enterprising and aesthetically gifted chef. But that hasn't happened yet in Chicago, which is why a $15.50 entree at Szalas is jarring. But hey, if they can get away with it — and again, this looks pretty tasty — more power to them.

Okay, have a good weekend then!

Szalas [MenuPages]
Szalas [Official Site]

[Photo: cohodas208c/flickr]

•Oxtail obsession: totally justified. [MP: Boston]
•Exemplary empanadas: cheap and tasty! [MP: Chicago]
•Obama's omission: how can you go to Philly and skip the cheesesteak? [MP: Philadelphia]
•Agricultural art: controversial in Mexico. [MP: San Francisco]
•Deceased delis: won't someone please think of the pastrami? [MP: South Florida]

This week's Reader and Sun-Times is just a whole slew of reviews. Kudos to Pat for scoring the first major review of Mercat a la Planxa. He loves it, but spends a chunk of the piece warning his audience that they might be confused and overwhelmed by the menu. But he basically thinks one cannot go wrong in ordering, and the only major faults he found were that he was told to order everything at once, and then the dishes came out willy-nilly. But others have talked about how great the service is, so the jury is still out.

Mr. B also sashayed over to Nia, the family-run pan-Mediteranean restaurant in the West Loop. Describing Nia's offerings, Pat says, "Tapas (called 'small Mediterranean plates') take up one entire column on the menu." We say, MEZZES! Or mezes. Or mazza or maza. Or mazze or maze. You know, depending on which Mediterranean country you're in at the time.

Meanwhile, on the Reader side of things, Mike Sula continues the upward trend of Sixteen evaluations, which critics are increasingly, albeit grudgingly, admitting that they enjoy. So the food is really delicious! The view is really good! It's extraordinarily expensive! Probably more than it's worth, but at least you know what you're getting into! Etc.

And Marthe Bayne confirms conventional wisdom that the food at no-longer-so-newly-launched Schwa is "better than ever." We also learned that the antelope on Michael Carlson's menu is shot from helicopters and slaughtered on site. Apparently, if you eat there, you will learn similar trivia about your meal. That alone is worth the price of admission! Which, considering it's still BYO, is not that much.

Mercat a la Planxa [MenuPages]
Mercat a la Planxa [Official Site]
Nia [MenuPages]
Sixteen [MenuPages]
Sixteen [Official Site]
Schwa [MenuPages]
Schwa [Official Site]

[Photo: the amuse bouche at Schwa, composed of "pink grapefruit segments, honey-yuzu sorbet and chamomile gelee topped with black truffles, shaved tableside," according to Metromix. Courtesy of cal222/flickr]

Like many foodies out there, we're always looking for little ways to stymie the onslaught of love handles that comes with our chosen pastime/profession. We'd rather not join the charmingly dubbed Fat Pack. So this headline in the Hot Sauce blog was eye-catching: "Eat hot sauce, lose weight?" Hey, could there really be some kind of slimming magic in that little bottle of capsaicin we love so much?

Yes, it turns out, but it is a terrifying and black magic. In addition to simple appetite suppression and encouraging water consumption, part of the "hot sauce diet" includes Pavlovian-style conditioning:

Hot sauce is toxic and can make your face flush and feel uncomfortable. This discomfort creates a situation of aversive conditioning.

However, part of the plan seems like a stroke of genius. We all get periods of near-uncontrollable hunger, where some outside help seems necessary to supplement the will-power. For us, it's late at night, for Dr. Spiro Antoniades, who developed this hot-sauce weight-loss method, it was right after work, when he would gorge before the family dinner.

Antoniades employed his “pushback” — one teaspoon of hot sauce in a glass of tomato juice — to calm his appetite, pique his thirst and cause him to drink water. He found that, by using his pushback, he was able to eat dinner normally.

Eat hot sauce, lose weight? [Hot Sauce Blog]
The Fat Pack Wonders if the Party's Over [NY Times]
Photo: Fat Kid Sauces [Official Site]

• When Polish artisanal family farms and EU regulations don't mix [NYTimes]
• Miller to craft-ify their Lite beer, destroying both in the process [AP]
• Corn hit six dollars a bushel yesterday. That's really scary! [Guardian]
• What do Texas, the NFL and award-winning wine have in common? [Tribune]
• World Bank: well, it's possible Asia will survive food price spikes [Reuters]
• Bomb defused near Istanbul McD's could be any number of angry parties [CNN]

We're so overwhelmed by Time Out Chicago's 2008 Eat Out Awards that we don't have anything intelligent to say about it. The critics' picks represent a nice range of high and low, new and old. Everything is consistent with what we've been reading in TOC over the past year. The little piece on the baker at Gibson's Steakhouse responsible for those enormous cakes is nice, and does it bother us that they named Sixteen the "Best Room with a View"? Not really. Overall, a good assortment. The Readers' Choice awards did not bring any major surprises, with the populace generally awarding the leader in each field. Although what makes you the leader if not for popular support! Confirmation of the zeitgeist is always useful. As for the editors' wish list for 2008, who wouldn't want a Grant Achatz taco stand or a $20k coffee machine. In our basement, please, kind of like Tommy Lee with his Starbucks bar and Jaegermeister tap. Except, wait a minute, we don't have a basement! Sigh.

But wait, there's so much more:

• Everyone knows that Juicy Wine Company serves brunch now. But were you aware that the dishes, each $5, are sourced from Establishment establishments like Charlie Trotter's, Hot Chocolate and Harold's? Amazing [TOC]

• Purgatory Pizza has a giant mural of Dante's Inferno on one of its walls. Hottttt. TOC]

• The ramps are back! Ramps!!! [TOC]

And let us not forget about the Tribune:

• A Mexican restaurant in the 'burbs that Phil Vettel seems to like [Tribune]

• April makes us think of German restaurants. Um. Really? [Tribune]

• And the highlight — should people feel free to sit at their table as long as they want, or should they clear out and make room for the next customers? You should have the right to the former, but the decency to do the latter. [Pro/Con]

[Photo: Ramps. They come from the ground! Courtesy of Donna-WV]

Burger King has just licensed out their name for a series of, err, "potato snacks." Not potato chips. Potato snacks.

We just got word from snack makers Intensely Different that they have officially unveiled a line of Burger King potato snacks. The chips/snacks/whatever come in two flavors: "Ketchup & fries" or "flame broiled." Yes — hamburger flavored chips. Are they the American version of British bacon flavored crisps? Who the hell knows. But, because we love you, here's the company's description of the "flame broiled" chips:

The BK™ spin on chips is nothing short of a revolution. Our hearty flavor now packs a crispy punch. A savory bag of crunchy, bite-sized flame-broiled taste whenever you want it.

Meanwhile, we admit this sounds like an April Fool's kind of post. I mean, hamburger flavored potato chips? But it's not. However, here's a fast food related prank for you.

Intensely Different [Official Site]

God bless animators with too much time on their hands. They come up with hilarious stuff like the below video. We've enjoyed the combination of hip hop style and food media in the past, but this takes the cake so far. Idolator blogger Anthony Miccio astutely points out that Snoop Dogg's "butternut reduction" line is kind of addictive. Well, you just watch. It's great:

I Cannot Get "Butternut Reduction" Out Of My Head [Idolator]
Akon Calls T-Pain [Superdelux]

This week's Top Chef revolved around being able to cut vegetables and watch movies. These are things we do in our spare time! We can be Top Chef!

Okay, so in addition to chopping vegetables, we also need to learn how to: blanch, grill, curl, chiffonade, tournée, brunois, and supreme them. These are not all verbs, but you get the drift. The classically trained chefs did well (especially the ones who worked under Boulud! More Richard than Ryan, who couldn't take the heat), and the self-taught ones mostly underperformed. Tellingly, Manuel's effort was called "Level 1," which is totally harsh (and probably true!)

Dale wins with a dish that Boloud decided "showed something amazing." But the most fascinating part of this challenge was that Jennifer and Zoi, the show's resident lesbian couple, both made vegetable plates that involved poached egg. That is so Freudian we don't even know what to do with it! Delightfully so. We were told that this episode would feature "a big editorial focus on the lesbian relationship and the competitive advantage of having your significant other on the show," which seemingly happened in one or two sentences at the very beginning of the episode. But the real commentary was in the eggs, most certainly.

Padma (whose blue dress nearly stopped time) reveals the main challenge to be...creating a dish inspired by a movie. Uninspired, to be sure, but maybe Richard Roeper really wanted to be on Top Chef? The people we were watching with think he's a horrible movie critic, while we have no opinion on that front. As a food critic, though, we do not approve of the little we heard. His gustatory populism has no place at the judges table! But we digress.

The real tragedy of this challenge is that half the battle — the easy half — was coming up with a narrative that links the movie to the dish. So many of the chefs failed to understand this! Maybe they didn't think it mattered, but the deciding factor in these early rounds often comes down to which chef more closely hews to the theme, rather than the tastiness of the dish itself. So when Spike and Manuel chose "Good Morning Vietnam" as an excuse to make a crappy summer roll, we totally wanted them to lose. And they did! How gratifying.

But other things happened on the way. The dream team of Richard, Dale and Andrew won with their inspired salmon-faux caviar-wasabi-chocolate whimsy complete with fizzy lifting drink — sufficiently appropriate to "Willy Wonka," but couldn't they have made it in gum form? Stephanie continues to be able to do no wrong. Zoi and Antonia pick a good movie ("Talk to her"), but their narrative about two strong women being represented by two skinny lamb chops is pretty stupid. Nikki and Jennifer get away with choosing "Il Postino" because at least their Italian dish is "rustic." Mark and Ryan deftly steer clear of "Dumb and Dumber" and manage to pull some crazy-ass sh*t out of the bag with a scene from the "Christmas Story" involving Chinese food, and a well-prepared quail. See, because it's all about creating a narrative!

Anyway, it was time for Manuel to go. His "Level 1" skills simply were not paying the bills, as evidenced by his real-life dismissal from Dos Caminos a few weeks ago. Plus, he was way too beta for this crowd of preeners. Oh well! Next week promises to be a huge bitchfest, which we're excited about.

[Photo: the winning salmon/chocolate dish. Not much to look at, but evidently very impressive, via BravoTV]

• Stem rust scare threatens Asia's wheat crop; it could wipe half of it out! [ATimes]
• Seattle to ban foam containers and tax paper and plastic bags [SeattlePI]
• Food costs make up 1/3 to 1/2 of families' budgets in Asian countries [Bloomberg]
• Argentine farmers, 3 weeks into strike, back to the fields during talks [NYTimes]
• N Korea's food crisis now bad enough to force elites to ration food [RadioNeth]
• Nigella Lawson gains a few pounds and doesn't care. Keep it on, sister! [Telegraph]

Lito's Empanadas, operating out of a little storefront in Lincoln Park, has built a nice reputation for itself since it opened late last year. We're happy to see a family-run place that decides to offer only one thing, and does a really good job at it.

Look how positive MenuPages reviewers have been!

Make it a point to get to Lito's. Lito's is a very small, sparkling clean place which has a few window seats for dining in. Much of their business seems to be take out. The empanadas which are fabulous, travel well and stay warm. Try my favorites: beef,olives,rainsins, rice or the beef and rice. My ultimate favorite is the choco-banana. The empanadas are inexpensive -a wonderful deal for the money. The owner and his wife are very friendly. These would be great to take to a party. If you are in the neighborhood, stop by. If you are not in the neighborhood, make it a point to get there. I am convinced you will not be disappointed.

Lito's empanadas range from $2.09 to $2.29 (regular unleaded, premium unleaded circa 2005?), with the beef and rice smack in the middle at $2.19. Which is a bargain, compared to how empanadas are priced elsewhere around town. Que Rico! does two cheese and spinach empanadas for $6.80 (but we didn't want two!); Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba's are $5.25 a pop for your choice of chicken or beef; and it doesn't get much better from there. No, Lito's is pretty unique in what it's doing — if you've never had an empanada before, this is a good place to start.

Lito's Empanadas [MenuPages]

[Photo: R.A.M.O.N.E./flickr]

We are so happy that baseball is back. We managed to get tickets to Opening Day at Dolphin Stadium; the Marlins lost to the Mets (boo!), but it was still a great time.

To celebrate, we thought we'd present a photo essay of ballpark food from each of our cities. We've actually visited and eaten in each of the parks listed, except for the two in the Bay Area. We'll start with our favorite: Philadelphia.

Citizens Bank Park

We hate the Phillies. But we think their ballpark is great, and we love the fact that we can get a Tony Luke's roast pork Italian sandwich for about the same price as at the restaurant. Whenever we go to a game there, we arrive early to get our sandwich before the game starts, because by the third inning, the place is mobbed.

US Cellular Field

We had to get one of these at every White Sox game (and we went to quite a few throughout our college career), sans ketchup of course. The sauteed onions really were key, and you could smell them as soon as you walked into the stadium.

Wrigley Field

We heard that there were Chicago-style hot dogs at Wrigley Field, but we were never able to find any. Were they reserved for those sitting in the lower level? (We sat there once ... in the bottom of the ninth inning when the Cubs were being blown out.) Every hot dog we had at Wrigley was boring (frankfurter, bun, mustard, maybe raw onions), but the photographic evidence indicates that interesting hot dogs do exist there. So clearly we weren't looking hard enough.

Fenway Park

So there's the Fenway Frank. It's famous. We're not quite sure why. We remember having a hot dog at Fenway, but we don't remember much about it. Conclusion: it was forgettable.

AT&T Park

After a quick image search and a chat with San Francisco editor Adam M, we learned that garlic fries are the way to go in both stadiums. And boy do they look good. The ones above are paired with a Polish sausage that has been ruined with ketchup. We'll never understand that.

McAfee Coliseum

See? More garlic fries. And a Chicago-style hot dog. It doesn't look completely authentic (poppy seed bun?), but hey, they're trying.

Dolphin Stadium

We've been to about 20 times as many games here as at the other ballparks, yet we can't remember the last time we actually purchased food at the park. Two reasons: 1. When you go to so many games, that overpriced food can get expensive. 2. The concession stand money goes to Wayne Huizenga. Not a good thing.
There's a Caribbean food area where you can get Cuban sandwiches and jerk chicken, which aren't bad options. But really, the best option is to bring your grill and tailgate (see above). That's what the enormous parking lot is for.

Photos: tumblebunny, 81timesayear, Thinking Violet, andrewmalone, fancydee, mojo!, nicaorgullo [Flickr]

Neither the Sun-Times nor the Tribune have much of a theme this week, but so what. We enjoyed many of the articles anyway, which highlighted the wisdom of Chicago's various and sundry food writers.

• Bill Daley advances the theory that Chicago is a great oyster town because it's midway between the three coasts. And its position on the fourth coast enabled local oyster consumption as early as 1835! [Tribune]

• Leah Zeldes knows that you can get great food deals in the unlikeliest of places, most intriguingly in sporting goods stores like Cabela's and Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World [Sun-Times]

• Lisa Donovan is on top of the newest development in the cutlery world: the knork, a portmanteau of knife and fork (in the mode of spork). Everyone and his mother has envisaged such a product, but this one guy finally designed and marketed them. They claim it doesn't slice your mouth up, but that doesn't mean we won't try! [Sun-Times]

• Mike Nagrant chronicles the effects of raging euro on European wine imports to the area. This would be a good time to remember that California uses the dollar as its form of currency! [Sun-Times]

Fact: 99% of the olive oil used in this country is imported [Tribune]

Fact: "The NHL Alumni Association has rolled out a Signature Wine Series, a 12-bottle collection — six Chardonnays, six Cabernet Sauvignons — featuring the likeness of some of hockey's greatest players" [Sun-Times]

There is a huge, untapped market for made-in-America olive oil in bottles featuring the likenesses of the WWE's greatest wrestlers. Right?

[Photo: "knork knork." "Who's there?" "A fork that can cut." "A fork that can cut who?" "Anyone who tries to eat with it." HAHAHA!]

Aside from April Fools Day, the fourth month of the year carries a few holidays of note: Passover, Thomas Jefferson's birthday, ummmm... Okay, maybe those are the only ones, but what we celebrate around here is National Grilled Cheese Month, which lasts all of April.

Among the cheesy, gooey reverie taking place:
-Registration is now open for the First Sixth Annual Grilled Cheese Invitational, taking place April 19 in Los Angeles
-The Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board has a bunch of recipes and tips and even a video up on its site
-Surely, millions of Americans will cook millions of grilled cheese sandwiches all month long without even knowing it's a holiday
-The Grilled Cheese Blog, while so far quiet on the subject, will likely explode, just a little bit, in a fervor of enthusiasm over this unsung celebratory month.

After the jump: A recipe and a very creepy video

First Sixth Annual Grilled Cheese Invitational [Official Site]
Wisconsin Grilled Cheese Sandwiches [WMMB]
The Grilled Cheese Blog [Official Site]
Photo: Esther17 [Flickr]

For us, the best grilled cheese is cheddar on wheat, with a bowl of tomato soup, a pile of dill chips and some brown mustard on the side. In case you are from Mars and don't know how to make a grilled cheese sandwich, here is a recipe for the simplest one ever, from the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board:

8 slices firm-textured sandwich bread
Mayonnaise, optional
Mustard, optional
1/2 pound (8 ounces) Wisconsin Cheddar cheese, mild, medium or sharp, grated
3 to 4 tablespoons butter, softened

Cooking Directions:
Spread bread slices with a thin layer of mayonnaise and/or mustard. Evenly divide the grated Cheddar over four slices of the bread. Top with remaining four slices.

Heat half of the butter in a large (12-inch) skillet over medium heat. Place sandwiches in skillet. Spread remaining butter over top slices of bread. Cover skillet. Cook about 3 minutes, until underside is golden brown. Carefully flip sandwiches with spatula and continue cooking, uncovered, 2 to 3 minutes, until cheese is melted and underside is browned. Serve immediately.

Tip: Using 2 to 3 ounces of processed cheese to replace part of the Cheddar imparts a creamy, silky sandwich. Processed cheese was traditionally used in grilled cheese sandwiches.

And, just so you don't think we focus solely on good, wholesome tastes around here, witness one of the creepiest YouTube videos ever, courtesy of the Grilled Cheese Blog, on hideously mocking making the classic sandwich in the microwave. Gross:

• As conventional farming input prices rise, organic gets competitive [NYTimes]
• Japan, not satisfied by USDA assessment, to study cloned animal safety [Reuters]
• Feed a cold: study shows your immune system is sensitive to diet changes [ScienceDaily]
• Melamine pet food maker starting to settle lawsuits with aggrieved owners [USAToday]
• American Airlines to begin testing on-board a la carte meals [CNN]
• Pernod may have overpaid for Absolut; liquor industry in a tizzy [ Tribune]

When it rains, it pours. Most of these are just opening or about to open. Some are from a few months ago, and one has eluded us since 2006! But all are worthy of note, not least for the reasons given:

• Big Jones — offers New Southern (i.e. fancified New Orleans and Charleston) cuisine starting April 9th. Sipping the Zeitgeist, they have a tea menu!

• Cinners — is Chicago's only Cincinnati-themed restaurant? They serve the city's famed chili over spaghetti, starting April 4th.

• Edgewater Lounge — has a MySpace, which is not so unusual. Music tastes include: Hank III, Drive by Truckers, The Verve, David Bowie, The Stone Roses, Mastadon, Van Halen, OutLaw Family Band

• Habibi — this Edgewater Lebanese restaurant, which drew the ire of the Dish last week, makes a point of saying they're open 365 days a year, including New Year's, Christmas and Thanksgiving. It's right on the menu!

• Harry Caray's Tavern — a spawn of the River North original hard by Wrigley Field, indulges in the irritating habit of placing a little ® next to "Holy Cow!" all over their menu, refering to their burgers. COME ON.

• Miss Asia — has every major South-East Asian cuisine except for Burmese. But that's the one we really wanted!

• Nellie's — purportedly has Chicago's only Puerto Rican breakfast buffet! It's $11.95 for adults and includes coconut oatmeal...

• Risqué Cafe — is Betty-themed. What a powerful cultural meme! Makes their barbecue sound plausible, ain't it; the chain of association being Betty-Route 66-BBQ. Correct us if we're wrong.

• Spicy Pickle — a national sandwich chain planning 9 more locations in Chicagoland!

[Photo: five spices pork leg, $14.95 at Miss Asia]

Today is the only day besides Halloween when we purposefully make our food appear to be something that it's not. Ironically, unlike on Halloween, April Foods deceptions are actually intended to "trick" the targets rather than simply gross them out. Since the attempts usually aren't that convincing, we settle for mild amusement. To whit:

• "Grilled cheese sandwiches" by seachelle323:

• "Dessert sushi" by Dot D:

Many more appetizing simulacra await you after the jump...

• "Spaghetti & meatballs" by deb33:

• "Fish sticks" by Karrie20:

Karrie20's description of her creation:

"Fish sticks" (Twix bars rolled in toasted coconut), "Mashed potatoes with gravy" (Vanilla ice cream with caramel syrup), peas & carrots (Peanut butter cereal dipped in green candy melts and small caramel pieces dipped in orange candy melts.)

• "Meatloaf cupcakes" by whisperawish:

• "Poo cupcake" by traoki/flickr:

• "Spilled coffee" by Zeroth57:

• "Poissons d'Avril" by rubykhan:

Another kind of April Foods joke we've encountered takes the form of offering someone something spoiled; we think this is more April Cruel than April Fool, and do not condone it.

And remember, the best time to do an April Foods joke is some random day in August. They'll never see it coming!

[Photos: flickr]

Yes, we know what day it is. Just because it's April 1 doesn't mean every crazy idea you hear is a joke. For example, this video about human cheese (only moderately safe for work--there are two topless shots with the naughty bits blacked out) is obviously a spoof, but the whole concept might not be so crazy.

A friend forwarded a very convincing post on Why Travel To France about a dairy in Singly that apparently specializes in the stuff. We know from precedent here at Menupages that the sale of human milk is legal and that there is some kind of demand for it, so why not?

Also, after a trip through Alta Vista's Babelfish translator, the site for Le Petit Singly sounds very straight-lipped. So is it a joke? Find out after the jump!

Cheese Made of Breast Milk [Trendhunter]
Human Breast Milk Cheese Made In France [Why Travel To France]
Le Petit Singly [Official Site]
Question Of The Day: Human Breast Milk In Restaurants [MP Chicago]
Photo: Why Travel To France

This is what you get if you try to order human cheese (we ran the French text through Babelfish, hence the awkwardly translated English):

Then you, one proposes to you to eat cheese made starting from HUMAN mother's milk and that connects you? A small precision is essential at this stage: ALL the ELEMENTS, EVENTS, NAMES, MARKS, PLACES and LABELS purely fictitious and/or are used in a diverted way. On the other hand, we would be strongly interessés to have your "hot" reactions. Hesitate-therefore not with us to communicate them by e-mail. While waiting, the 5 last gogos to have been made here, have héhé:

Last Tuesday and Wednesday, two reviews were posted for Bubba's Fried Turkey on 87th Street near Stony Island, bringing the grand total of reviews for that restaurant to...two. On further inspection, our two reviews seem to be the only such commentary on the entire internet! You know something's obscure when LTHForum, Metromix and Yelp all come up empty. And yet, they have an amazing URL (www.bubbasfriedturkey.com) and a relatively well-designed site.

Now when they say "fried turkey," they mean, battered and deep fried. This is not that new-fangled method from the South where you deep-fry the turkey instead of roasting it and it cooks faster but doesn't absorb any of the oil for some reason. No, the turkey is covered in yellow batter, like everything else on the South Side. Alas.

Let's check out the reviews. The first one, by "local resident" (a warning flag), was entitled "Something Different":

This is the great place to satisfy your taste buds when you are tired of the same ole' meals. Service is friendly and welcomes you once you come through the door. No attitudes here! Food is filling and resonable. The salmon with the fish and chips is a huge portion with great flavor. The turkey sandwich, fried, was light and tasty. Not the boring rubber sandwich that I usually receive. Be patient, this is not a fast food set up. Fast is not always good! The dinning atmosphere is good but not large. Clean. This restuarant is great change from the normal and the cook really cares about the quality of your meal.

The next review was from "tracey," optimistically entitled "healthy and good":

if you want something healthy and good this is the spot! when you go, get the turkey breast sandwich fried!! This is the best sandwich I ever had in my life!!

All that said, we're intrigued by the fried salmon fish and chips, and we appreciate the menu's warning that "products may contain peanuts." And fried turkey is not something we see on too many menus in Chicagoland. Shills or not, Bubba's is definitely doing something different.

Bubba's Fried Turkey [MenuPages]
Bubba's Fried Turkey [Official Site]

[Photo: from their website]

• Global poor complacent, forgiving of their gov'ts as food prices rise [Reuters]
• American farmers planting just the right amount of corn and soya [NYTimes]
• Study: most Americans haven't noticed food or fuel cost changes [AP]
• Gov't & farmers unite to efficiently and effectively combat global hunger [Reuters]
• New "pro-biotic" yogurt contains plastic discs that aid digestion [FreshPlaza]