Two weeks ago, we wrote a post on some findings from a day of processing menus, including Mothers-In-Law (tamales in buns with chili) on the North Side and Mexico City-style tortas at La Baguette on the South Side.

All this piqued the interest of Peter Engler a.k.a. Rene G, one of the superstars of LTHForum, and the MIL expert we quoted about the no-MIL-on-the-North-Side thing. Turns out what he meant was, no one on the North Side calls it as such, but the component ingredients of the Mother-In-Law are on plenty of North Side menus. We stand corrected!

Engler also had insight into the torta chilanga (milanesa, chorizo, ham and queso fresco), one of the Mexico City-style tortas we mentioned in the post. He wrote:

Tortas chilangas are not too uncommon in Chicago. Doña Torta Chilanga (2152 W Cermak) sounds like a good place to begin. A large window sign also advertises tortas guapachosas (I had no idea what those were until today). BomBon Café (38 S Ashland) makes an upscale version with ham, salami, Serrano ham and queso Chihuahua. On the north side you can get them at Cardona's (3537 W Lawrence), filled with milanesa, queso Oaxaca and chiles poblanos. Although there are some common features, the ingredients tend to vary.

The conspiracy theorist in us didn't get very far along in its investigation because neither restaurant has English-speaking staff, but that could be a ruse! Incidentally, Dona Torta Chilanga's menu doesn't resemble Dona Torta's menu in the slightest. Go figure.

Anyway, there's still a mystery surrounding the tortas guapachosasa, which appear on both menus. La Baguette's has milanesa, queso y pierna (i.e. breaded steak, brick cheese & sliced pork shoulder), while Dona Torta Chilanga's contains milanesa, pierna, queso amarillo, jamon y salchicha (i.e. breaded steak, flank steak, cheddar cheese and a hot dog). What makes this all the more strange is that "torta guapachosa" receives virtually no hits on Google, while "torta chilanga" has several thousand (although the top two are Yelp's page for DTC and our previous blog entry on the subject, so take it with a grain of salt).

The way we want to imagine it is, two brothers from Mexico City were up late one night with the munchies and they each constructed a torta that, under the circumstances, they named "groovy." And then they came to Chicago and opened competing torta shops, and one did quite well (La Baguette has a dozen locations, it seems), while the other has had to languish in his brother's shadow. Isn't this narrative more entertaining than the truth?

Because the truth would have to encompass an explanation for why there's a hot dog in DTC's guapachosa, an addition truly beyond the bounds of rational behavior and certainly good taste. We would, nevertheless, eat this sandwich in its entirety.

Dona Torta Chilanga [MenuPages]
La Baguette [MenuPages]
La Baguette [Official Site]

[Photo: Dona Torta Chilanga's guapachosa torta, via Peter Engler]

In Jay Rayner's recently published The Man Who Ate The World, the Observer food critic's diary of a tour through the world's most notable (and particularly, most expensive) restaurants, the author recounts an incident where a Japan-based chef was charged with stealing the dishes of a Washington D.C. restaurant. The accusation surfaced on eGullet, which has subsequently chronicled other instances of culinary plagiarism, usually involving molecular gastronomy.

This issue of menu copying came to the fore in late 2006 into mid 2007 (when Marcel of Top Chef may or may not have appropriated a dish from wd-50), inspiring a whole spate of articles exploring the subject. The basic format went like this:

1) Wow, look at these unprecedented accusations of stealing recipes!
2) Used to be, there was a canon of dishes with the air of historical permanence
3) Now, with advent of molecular gastronomy, there's a new emphasis on innovation
4) And originality is now where the money is, for these chefs at least
5) But, uh, how are you going to copyright food, exactly?

The last point is true enough; copyrighting recipes is relatively uncharted territory, especially when one is dealing with dishes that have been adapted and are not direct copies.

None of this ambiguity is stopping chefs from taking action. Homaro Cantu of Moto in Chicago has filed a patent for his edible menus (specifically, the ability to print text and images on an edible structure), and Missy Chase Lapine of sneaky-vegetable-cookbook-for-kids fame is suing Jessica Seinfeld for publishing a cookbook based on the same concept.

Let's consider a case that's much older than molecular gastronomy or even Jessica Seinfeld: Coca-Cola's secret formula. This well-written examination of intellectual property law through the lens of Coca-Cola gives us some insight into how the rest of this food plagiarism stuff will turn out. Coca-Cola has a copyright on the product's aesthetics, a trademark on the name, a patent on the method it uses to make the bottles and whatnot, but the formula itself, the key to the company's success, has no legal protection whatsoever. It's merely a trade secret — this is not a legal term — and the only protection Coca-Cola has against copiers is its ability to...keep the secret. If the company filed a patent on it, they've have to publish the formula and the game would be over.

For most chefs, the money isn't in keeping their recipes secret and their dishes unique: it's in providing high-quality food and service at a good value and maintaining it over time. The molecular gastronomists who invest considerable resources in innovation may be out of luck: anyone can take a picture of a heretofore unique dish at dinner and post it online along with the menu description, and chefs with enough patience and skill can reverse engineer it and serve it for breakfast, or change an ingredient or two and serve it for lunch. Molecular gastronomy dishes may simply be too fluid, malleable and impermanent for the law to touch, but it will probably take a whole bunch of lawsuits to find out for sure.

The Man Who Ate The World [Amazon]
Sincerest Form, Interludes after midnight [eGullet]
Can you copyright a dish? [Guardian]
New Era of the Recipe Burglar [Food&Wine]
Can You Have Your Intellectual Property and Eat It Too? [Wired]
Marcel Vigneron Is Not A Plagiarist [Gurgling Cod]
System and methods for preparing substitute food items [USPTO]
Jerry Seinfeld Lawyer Hits Out At Cook's 'Bogus' Lawsuit [Post-Chronicle]
Understanding Intellectual Property Rights through Coca Cola [Zvulony & Co.]

wd-50 [MenuPages]
wd-50 [Official Site]
Moto [MenuPages]
Moto [Official Site]

[Photo: Moto's edible menu and copyright notice with ramps on the side, via steve renaker/flickr]

It's late Monday afternoon and the Taste Of Chicago is in its fourth day already! We thought we'd take a look at what's been written about it so far, and it seems like the lion's share of ink has been spilled by the Tribune, via the Stew. This is really their area.

• The Chicagoist had a preview piece this past Friday, but the content ended up getting overshadowed by commenters being mean to Chuck Sudo over a spelling error. Jeez!

• The Reader's Food Chain forgot to mention the Taste until this special Heads Up extra post from last Thursday (still in plenty enough time, though). The post reminds us about the 800 people who were sickened by Pars Cove's hummus at last year's Taste. Come to think of it, watch those tomatoes!

• Kelly the Culinarian is an enthusiastic proponent of the Taste, dispensing good advice about bringing cash (credit card lines are long), not stopping at the first ticket booth you see (the interior ones are less crowded), bringing your own water (bottles are expensive), and not buying alcoholic beverages (they're a poor value). We think you should bring two bottles of water, but the second one should actually contain vodka. No one will be the wiser!

• MrsJ2004 had a few other observations that we haven't seen elsewhere: the Budweiser Clydesdales were on display (better catch them now before the Belgians turn them into tartare), and the line for free slices of Eli's one ton cheesecake was two blocks — perhaps a quarter of a mile! — long. People are really bad at making time/money calculations when something free is involved...but on the other hand, this particular cheesecake is a Tradition, which often perverts rational behavior.

But the Tribune's At Play team is really the star of the Taste's media show, with eight blog posts on the festival in the past few days, not to mention last week's entire At Play section. Reactions and retractions abound: the team has running, booth-by-booth commentary about each dish*; Monica Eng apologized for some recommendations she made once she actually tasted the stuff, and then provides some helpful hints on how to conduct oneself (by way of having made these mistakes herself); Chris Borrelli summed up all the reasons why people generally avoid the Taste; intern Michael Pasternak has a nice human interest story about the antacid booths like Tums and Ultra Xcid lining the upset stomach of the Taste (fun fact: we have never once experienced heartburn!).

But nobody tops Phil Vettel, right? For two minutes and thirty-eight glorious seconds, Vettel tours around the Taste wearing a hat cam that gives us a "Phil's-eye view" of his lunch, a perspective we only wish was permanently accessible to us. The truly sparkling moment comes when Phil takes a bite of his mixed berry sorbet at Canady le Chocolatier, the squeals of delight betraying an afternoon of scarfing greasy, heavy, crappy food in the heat and humidity. Enjoyable throughout.

And finally, while it's impossible to say what brilliant, unfettered mind concocted this, we're nevertheless thrilled with the unholy mashup of the Talking Heads' "Once In A Lifetime," a poetic response to the rigors of the Taste, and the specter of Phil Vettel, choir person. It is, by far, the most successful piece of media inspired by Taste '08.

[Photo: crayfish boil from Lagniappe, via corsi photo, who took dozens of great photos of the Taste]

* Like with the Chicagoist post, the real story here is in the comments. Three different people asked what "meh" means, as it's used repeatedly in the reviews. Phil Vettel keeps his head and responded with "Meh? 'It’s a verbal shoulder shrug. It’s not great, it’s not awful, it’s…meh.'" We would have gone on a tirade about three-letter Scrabble-valid words and then executed all the offending commenters. Feh!

A little cheap receipt humor for your Friday afternoon? Sure, why not! Most of these are pretty base, but oh well. Enjoy!

• Sticky Rice w/ Mango, via Aysha Photography:

It gets much worse after the jump...

Continue reading "Receipt Follies: Abbreviated Entertainment" »

Two interesting tidbits we came across while putting some new menus online for you:

1) The mother-in-law is an ostensibly South Side (also, Mississippian) concoction involving tamales, chili and hot dog buns, and often all three. The gut-buster got some coverage recently because of the Southern Foodways Alliance's tour of Chicago in May, which was written about in the Sun-Times and Reader. One of the points made in the Sun-Times article is that mothers-in-law are all but impossible to find on the North Side:

[Chicago food historian Peter] Engler is convinced the mother-in-law is a South Side phenomenon, just like bad bad Leroy Brown.

"I made a concerted effort spending a couple of days going all over the North Side asking about mother-in-laws," said Engler, who worked in mouse genetics at the University of Chicago between 1988 and 2007. "Nobody knew. It's not on any menu."

2) The menu for La Baguette, a Mexican restaurant on 43rd and Ashland, contains several heretofore mysterious epitaphs in the tortas section. Tortas are delicious Mexican sandwiches, of course, but the category is inscruitably subtitled with "Las Guapachosas," and sub-subtitled with "Estilo D.F."

So we consulted with Carolina of MP:South Florida, who translated the latter as "in the style of Mexico City," where D.F. = Distrito Federal. While tortas are served all over Mexico, they're especially popular in Mexico City as street food. The menu lists a specific Mexico City torta called the Chilanga. It has milanesa (breaded steak), chorizo, ham and queso fresco, plus the standard beans, lettuce, tomatoes, avocado, onions and mayo; a classic torta.

The explanation for "Las Guapachosas" comes from another torta on the list, "La Guapachoza," or the Groovy Torta. This differs from the Chilanga in that it has pork shoulder instead of ham or chorizo...clearly a groovier ingredient, right? Lest we have to explain why the Russian Torta includes hot dog and pineapple!

These tortas are all $4.25, so you can't really go wrong in any case.

Clark Street Dog [MenuPages]
La Baguette [MenuPages]

[Photos: a mother-in-law from Fat Johnnie's on the South Side, via Southern Foodways Alliance; torta de chilanga from Seattle, via ascheele100/flickr]

This week, we got three comments worth sharing with you (or so we think).

• On our post about cult-run restaurants, Tyler pointed us to the fishy Unification Church:

Remember the Moonie Sushi joints featured in the Trib 2 years ago?

• Re: an old post about Old Fashioned Donuts's apple fritters, in which we mentioned that Michigan goes down to 150th street, Chicago Guy tries to set us straight:

Did you know Michigan Avenue continues well past 150th street and goes all the way to Detroit?

It's how people got between Chicago & Detroit before I-94 existed.

• Finally, we were party to a dialogue about Chicago's Polish food back in April, covering topics such as 1) are people prepared to pay a lot of money for high-end Polish food 2) does the Polish food in Chicago compare to the Polish food in Poland 3) is Chicago's Polish food even any good? Commenter "Bart," a native Pole, declared that Chicago's Polish food &mdash nay, all Polish food in America — is subpar. Just yesterday, Todd S. Jenkins joined the fray with an ultimately somewhat inappropriate quote from his pastor:

My Chicago-born, Polish-heritaged, former-missionary-to-Krakow pastor thinks Bart is full of beans. He comments, "I imagine the statement “there are no good Polish Restaurants in the Chicago area” ironically came from a Pole. There is a saying in Poland: “If two Polish men meet, there will be three opinions.” I have had the privilege of eating at no less than 10 Polish restaurants in Chicago that are run completely by Polish natives. I also spent many years in Poland and have eaten at their best. This poor guy must have the taste buds of a 13-year-old anorexic girl if he can’t find a good Polish restaurant in the second largest Polish populated city in the world!"

Okay, have a good weekend.

The tone and energy level of the finale was, for us, really encapsulated early on in the episode: when Padma announced that first pick of sous chef and proteins would go to the cheftestant with the most Elimination challenge wins, we figured, given that Richard and Steph were tied at four, there'd be a final, brutal, clarifying Quickfire. Instead, Stephanie drew a knife with the number "1" on it, and even she seemed surprised that that was all it took to get the go.

And, star-struck, she was all over Eric Ripert like...orange on Ripert (hey, that's not very nice!), but Eric seemed more interested in Richard's liquid-nitrogenated hot chili balls than anything else. All the attention gave Richard a freeze-on, and unfortunately, it was the highlight of day for him.

Meanwhile, Lisa adopted a catty zen as she chatted up poor April Bloomfield of The Spotted Pig (which we've been to and recommend), annoying the world with sympathetic details of her child labor line cooking. At first we thought, when she was saying things like "you know what, I'm about to beat you, so...", Lisa was having a Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf moment, but honest to blog, we got scared right before the last commercial that she might get the win.

Because each of the judges was careful to articulate that based on this dinner, with much regret belied in their intonation and facial expressions, a winner was clear. And since we laminated the public's collective hatred of Lisa (although she did go up from 3% to 4% of the audience pick during the final ten minutes of the finale) onto the judges, we could only assume they meant the worst.

Honestly, given the judges' reactions to the various courses, it was plausible. Poor Richard, who deployed his puppy face to much success this episode, failed to execute his dishes to the satisfaction of the judges, and moreso, to his own. His admittance of such during the final cross-examination didn't hurt him as much as it's hurt other reality contestants over the years, but that's because he was already at the bottom. It wasn't just one flimsy piece of flabby pork belly skin that stood between him and victory, but, close enough (also, it might have been his gender).

Lisa and Steph traded top honors on most of the courses. Dare we say it's easier to please the American palate with decent South East Asian food than it is with great New American? Yes we will say it! Because high-end Thai and Vietnamese is still relatively novel enough to garner wows simply for being, while New American has been the focus of many (most?) serious chefs for decades now.

Which means that when Lisa's flavors are too "big bold spicy sweet salty sour" (the adjectives she used to describe her personality), there's less context to judge them against and she gets a pass. And on top of that, girl knows how to make tom kha soup.

Still, none of the twelve dishes garnered praise quite like Stephanie's medallions of lamb with maitake mushrooms, pistachios and olives. Ted Allen almost shat himself over the creativity of the combinations, and it's what put her over the edge. Tom pointed out, during judging, that she almost always cooks delicious food, but what really makes her a Top Chef is the ability to pull out a revolutionary, never-before-seen surprise like the pistachios. Except, well, it's not exactly sui generis. But nevertheless!

Stephanie won because the quality and consistency of her cooking was more and better than any of her competitors. She may not have the attitude of Lisa (which didn't bother the judges much at all, by the way) and the so-called "artistry" of Richard (we don't mind calling it that, actually), but the key to being a great commercial chef (and Bravo reality has a penchant for the commercial, obviously) is the ability to churn out top-notch, accessible product with reliability. Being incredibly nice is merely a bonus.

Meanwhile, we're secretly excited for Top Haircut in two weeks.

[Photo: and that's why she's Top Chef, via Bravo]

p.s. we've seen Stephanie's last name, Izard, spelled a bajillion different ways, i.e., with two z's instead of one. The consensus on Google is Izzard (133k to 45k), but that's W-R-O-N-G. Disagree? Take it up with Bravo.

Disclosure: we spent much of last night in an ill-conceived attempt to fly from New York to Chicago during a summer afternoon; and instead of La Guardia to Midway like reasonable people, we picked Kennedy to O'Hare. Even bracketing the weather-related delays and hour-long wait in the take-off queue, we spent more time on blue-colored subway lines (the A train in New York, the Blue line in Chicago) than airborne. Since we were on JetBlue, we had the distinct displeasure of being subjected to a Top Chef marathon while knowing full well we'd miss a good fraction of even the second airing of last night's episode.

Nevertheless, we still have opinions and observations worth sharing! They mostly revolve around message T's. What would possess both Lisa and Stephanie to don that fashion faux pas of 2003-2006? Stephanie's lack of style (remember the teddy bear backpack from her audition tape?) comes off as charming, because she's a fabulous person and an even better chef. As for Lisa, all her affectations are indelibly coded as sinister.

Steph's "I ♥ Tahoe Boys" is quirky — and perhaps there's a deep camp interpretation that escapes us — but Lisa's "Kosher" is a direct assault on everything we hold near and dear. Because, okay, fine, so Lisa is Jewish and there's no turning back from that, but...how could the Kosher tee not have been a plant? The entire episode revolved around slaughtering and eating pig! Talk about a pat ironic "coincidence." And girl is not kosher on any level, sorry.

You know what we admire about Lisa, though? Obviously not her cooking; she's been second-to-last in every contest far back as we'd care to recall. It's the stone-faced death stare she's able to conjure in the moments before the judges decide her fate. The physiognomological structure is different from the one she deploys to receive/not receive criticism, which is more of a sour, twisting grimace of disgust; what we're talking about is the final few seconds, right before her co-loser is dismissed, where she goes slack and inscrutable like an Easter Island moai. That's how we want to play poker! We bet she's really good at poker.

Otherwise, the episode played out like these episodes play out. Everyone is in it to win it, and the two best remaining cheftestants both scored a victory: Stephanie's one-biteable tostones pucks with seared tuna clinched her first Quickfire victory, and Richard once again slightly outclassed his competition for a win in the elimination challenge. That Price-is-Right-style car he won (or least its mainland cousin) will doubtless be drafted into baby hauling duty.

Antonia got kicked off for...what, her al dente pigeon peas? Kind of ridiculous. Lisa may be a bigger ratings draw, but Antonia is a really clever lady; the funniest Top Chef contestant yet? Discuss.

Anyway, tragedies of injustice and all that. Next week, barring an utter catastrophe, Lisa will be at the bottom of the pile; her best can barely compete with her competitors' worst! And she's never at her best anyway, even though she keeps promising to "bring it this time" at the beginning of every episode.

Between Richard and Stephanie...they are both very good at making very good food, even if Richard's technical abilities surpass Stephanie's. There's the whole lady-must-win conspiracy, but we'll have to just wait and see, won't we.

[Photo: pigs are smarter than dogs, via Bravo]

And so, the final episode of Top Chef in Chicago starts out where Chicago itself starts out: no, not in a muddy onion field, but at the Allen Brothers steak warehouse. But first, Stephanie has to deliver the requisite line about there never being "this many girls" at this stage of the competition. Okay, Bravo, we get it! Lady power!

Back to the steak. The first part of the Quickfire involves Frenching a long-bone dry-aged rib rack, an activity to which Spike is unexpectedly well suited. Both of his grandfathers were butchers, and he adds, "there seems to be a little strain of butchery in me." You, and Pol Pot!

Spike did, in fact, do a great job cutting up and cleaning the ribs, while the girls suffer mightily against the ribs' tough outer layer of agedness. So much for lady power.

The cheftestants took their meat back to the Top Chef kitchen, where Rick Tramonto of TRU and Tramonto's Seafood & Steakhouse asks for the steaks to be cooked medium rare, please. (Tramonto must be pretty please about ultimately getting his way in the foie gras wars. Did you know he's the national spokesperson for the U.S. Duck Council? The ducks can not be happy about this.)

So the Quickfire is all — and only — about appearance: who butchered their meat the best, and then who cooks their steak to LOOK medium rare the best. No one's judging the taste of the steaks, or apparently even eating them at all. Hopefully they gave them to the homeless or something!

Each chef approaches cooking the steak in a different way; some grill, some pan-fry, some pop it in the oven, some do a combination of the three. But all must converge on the correct layering of red, pink, grey and black in order to please Tramonto. Richard and Stephanie fail to do so (they are not "tomahawky" or "lollipoppy" enough), and while Lisa and Antonia's impress, Spike edged out the competition with his superior butchering abilities.

The Challenge is revealed to be a takeover of Tramonto's Seafood & Steakhouse for an evening. Spike's reward for winning this Quickfire, much like when he won the healthy lunch Quickfire, was to have his first choice of proteins for his appetizer and entree. And much like the last time, he completely squandered it! He heard all the chefs talking about scallops, so when he spied some scallops in the kitchen, he nabbed them. But when they turned out to be frozen, instead of dropping them like a sack of frigid bivalves, he stubbornly decided to cut off his nose to spite his face and use them anyway. Right at that second, he was off the show.

Instead, we had to watch him unravel for 35 more minutes anyway. Each of the other chefs picked their proteins, which mostly involved seafood and organs for appetizers (sweetbreads, which both Richard and Stephanie used for their appetizers, are so hot right now we can hardly stand it), and various cuts of steak as the main. It's been a while since the elimination challenge was a solo event; when it's impossible to slough off the blame, you really have to bring it.

To make matters worse, Padma trotted out three VIP guest judges in the form of the winners from seasons past: Harold, Ilan and Hung. Everyone knows Ilan is a hipster douchebag, which is fine, but why did he wear an ill-fitting t-shirt to this relatively fancy restaurant? A fashion faux pas much worse, in our estimation, than Rachael Ray's keffiyeh kerfuffle. But we digress.

Onto the tasting and judgment. Richard's hamachi and sweetbread appetizer overwhelmed the judges with pleasure, to the point of it being their favorite appetizer. Similarly, Antonia's perfectly cooked, very "steakhouse" steak was their favorite entree, and they love how "from the heart" she is. Stephanie was determined (by the judges) to be the most "well-rounded" chef of the evening, and Tom Colicchio is amazed by her unflappable demeanor. All three are off to Puerto Rico (just in time for the primaries!), and Stephanie took the prize this week, which is a Tramonto cookbook (obviously) and a suite of kitchen appliances (kind of awesome, if a little Price is Right).

The bottom is always more interesting than the top. It came down, as everyone expected, to Lisa and Spike: Lisa's shrimp dish was served cold and her steak was cooked unevenly, while Spike's frozen scallop dish was a complete disaster. Lisa's face, while the judges were faulting her for various things, was a thousand different shades of hideous. But the best part of the episode was Spike's exchange with Rick over the scallops, which took around three seconds to devolve into a frat house shouting match.

Tom started it off by rightly criticizing Spike for using frozen scallops, which are mad declassé (and not very tasty). Spike suddenly blurts out, to Rick, something along the lines of "why do you have frozen scallops in your pantry?" And Rick reddens and says "yo, I'll take the shot, bro, that I had frozen scallops, but you gotta take the shot that you used them." (By the way, scallops are not currently on the menu at Tramonto's.)

After the interrogation round, Spike cracked up backstage because he knew that interchange was the death of him, and he was right. So the final four are Richard, Antonia, Stephanie and Lisa, and three out of four ain't bad. Lisa's going to get a hilarious sunburn in Puerto Rico next week, and then go home. Unless she kneecaps Antonia and no one finds out until it's too late, or something.

[Photo: "you're next," via Bravo]

We'd like to start this week out with a sighting: a friend of ours just saw last week's eliminee Andrew air-drumming really hard to music on his headphones (or maybe just in his head?) on the subway in New York. Of course he was. You thought that spazziness was just an act?

To the show. It's pretty easy to imagine that Tom Colicchio, in another life, was an experienced thief; who's ever looked more natural breaking and entering in the pre-dawn hours? Anyway, the cheftestants were woken up early to short-order cook at Lou Mitchell's. Owner Helene watched the six remainders fumble through orders of eggs over hard (who orders that? The same horrible people that like their steak well-done) and split sausage and so forth, eventually naming Antonia the winner for being generally competent and not screwing up anything royally. Also, Helene clearly saw a younger version of herself in Antonia &mdash tough, diligent white-ethnic family girl — and it is impossible to discount the role this emotional resonance played in her decision. Not that she didn't deserve to win, but still.

Toni's egg-flipping skills in the Quickfire allowed her to choose her team for the resurrected Restaurant Wars Elimination challenge, and she adroitly tapped Richard and Stephanie. Not only did she get two of the three best chefs left on the show, but she forced Dale and Lisa back onto a team together, a reliably explosive combination. Antonia's one canny lady!

So, Antonia, Richard and Stephanie decide to do a gastropub called "Warehouse Restaurant" (the challenge was to take place at a giant loft space on Goose Island); Stephanie took the front of the house, easy enough for the former proprietress of Scylla. Meanwhile, Dale, Lisa and Spike concocted an Asian restaurant called "Mai Buddha," since they all specialize in Asian cuisines and many of them have worked at Mai House in New York.

An aside: Antonia, for the second time, rails on Dale for only cooking Asian food. Excuse me, Ms. Italiana? Like "Asian" is such a tiny niche while ITALIAN is a universe unto itself and for all time? The first time she said it, it was a passing thought. The second time, racist! She may have been right about Dale getting kicked off, but for the wrong reason (by the way, what was the right reason? To be explored shortly)

Restaurant Wars was not the only relic making an unexpected return this week! Cue the devoutly adored Anthony Bourdain as guest head judge and several eliminees from episodes past — Antonia picks Nikki to cook her team's linguini and clams dish, while Mai House taps Jen because she's a good chef. Not that we hear from either of them at all for the rest of the show...

Then a lot of things happen very fast — as is often the case on the Restaurant Wars episode — but especially for Mai Buddha. Dale browns up the avocado mixture, Lisa continues her losing streak with some Teflon sticky rice, and Spike slicks himself into a suit at the front of the house and completely disowns his teammates.

Team Buddha's utter failure during dinner can be placed neatly in the realm of the spectacularly inevitable. Bourdain prophesied that the team, with their overconfidence and disproportionately upscale decor, had set themselves up to fail, and that's the one front on which they succeeded. Lisa's laksa shrimp was too smoky for the orthodox Bourdain (although Padma and Ted Allen like it), while her mango sticky rice was likened to "baby vomit and wood chips" (this is better than adult vomit, though). Dale, on the other hand, only had one dish disaster, in the form of some butterscotched scallops. He should have simply served Scotch; we understand Johnnie Walker Black is very popular in certain high-flying Asian circles.

Wearhouse Restaurant did so well it's barely even worth discussing. Stephanie won for her superior leadership, and got a food tour in Spain as a prize. Wow, that certainly beats the bottle of wine Dale got last week! The only other thing of note is that Richard used ras al hanout again, making it the "fierce" of this Top Chef 4.

During judging, Mai Buddha's staff got eviscerated, partially by Bourdain but just as much by each other. It was a high-speed bitchfest, and we weren't the only ones that found it entertaining — Spike didn't even bother to stifle his laughter. Bourdain at least called him out on being an aloof, selfish prettyboy who only avoided elimination by doing nothing. (It's worth nothing that unlike in past ResWars, there were no serious service snafus.)

And it came down to Dale and Lisa. They'd been at each other's throats for so long we can't even remember who's at fault (either is plausible), but the difference between them is, Dale has repeatedly shown himself to be a good cook, and Lisa has not. Dale's elimination at this point reeks of injustice, since Lisa and Spike are clearly lesser chefs than he, and it seemed like Lisa did more wrong, culinarily, than Dale did this week. But since Dale was the executive, the captain went down with his ship. One can only assume he'll do fine in his next life, at least. We unhappily await one of Lisa or Spike in the final four; they both have the potential to flame out spectacularly next episode, in which Rick Tramanto of TRU takes everyone down a notch.

[Photo: Painful to look at, via Bravo]

To the dismay of local MenuPages fans, Adam’s services are needed in other menuniverses this summer. Though his food rhetoric won’t die off completely, he’s enlisted a group of menu aficionados to fill in. I’m one of them.

Like you, I rely on the MenuPages blog to beef up my morning procrastination routine. Upon arrival at the office I check email, the weather and the MenuPages blog to catch up on all things edible in Chicago before doing any actual work. To ward off any unwarranted guilt I may have over this delay in corporate obligation, my morning routine will now include posting; a productive, “for fun” activity according to Adam. Indeed. A morning at the farmer’s market is way more fun than doing my real job. Take a look at the goods:

Asparagus, $2 a bunch from Stover’s Farm Market, Berrien Springs, MI.

Chicago PD and honey bears guard Stover’s Farm jams and nut butters, $4.95.

Make the jump for cherry-filled strudel, herbs and more.

Continue reading "Farmer's Market Is More Fun Than Morning At The Office" »

We just read through John McCain's speech to the National Restaurant Association to see what he had to say that's pertinent to the restaurant industry.

As you can imagine, most of the speech is about...nothing in particular — lower taxes, more trade, and so forth. We were instead looking for substantial pronouncements about food prices and labor availability, and got met halfway.

McCain opposes the Farm Bill in its current form, much like President Bush; all those nasty agribusiness subsidies and protectionist tariffs raising food prices and eviscerating the global poor, or so goes the argument. The theory is, a McCain-authorized farm bill would lower costs for restaurants, although he doesn't go so far as to say it.

The elephant in the room for restaurants, as far as we're concerned, is workers. Specifically, finding them, paying them and keeping them in an environment where much of the traditional labor pool is not authorized to work in the United States. Remember when illegal immigration was a big deal? Wait a minute, it still is!

Last year, the NRA was up in arms about the immigration bill that McCain co-sponsored, worrying that their industry would fall apart without cheap, unchecked illegal immigrant labor; they were hoping for some kind of comprehensive guest worker program instead. America went the third way — doing nothing.

Since that time, McCain has reversed his position on the subject, leaving us with very little to go on aside from a nostrum on border security. What will we do about the 13 million people living here without papers, then? Anybody's guess!

So, how will restaurant kitchens function under a McCain presidency? We don't know, and the NRA certainly didn't find out from this speech.

McCain's Remarks to the National Restaurant Association [Real Clear Politics]
Sen. John McCain to Address NRA Show [NRA]
McCain: I would honor NAFTA; veto farm bill [USAToday]
Bush signs one-week extension of federal farm bill [Reuters]
Issue Du Jour: Immigration And The Restaurant Industry [MP:Chicago]
Industry leaders express concerns about new immigration proposal [NRN]
CNN's Bash noted McCain said he'd oppose his own immigration bill -- but not his remark days earlier that as president, he'd sign it into law [Media Matters]
Border Security & Immigration Reform [McCain Official Site]

[Photo: McCain in a NH restaurant by Jim Cole, via Daylife]

À notre santé! This week's episode was all about health; Padma is dearly concerned about America's diabesity problem, and everyone's favorite chunk (chef-hunk, duh) Sam Talbot is, in fact, a diabetic, so it's important that the cheftestants be fluent in languages other than butterese.

The Quickfire concerns "sexy" salads — Padma's line about "bringing sexy salads back" made us hackney up our lunch, and besides, when did salads ever go out of fashion, exactly? If anything, they're more popular than ever.

At any rate, successful "sexy" interpretations of salad included Antonia's poached egg and bacon salad. First of all, it's a Top Chef axiom that you can't lose on bacon, and second, Sam cooed about the indivisible sexiness of breaking into an oozing egg yolk. Woof!

Stephanie's missing artichoke chip didn't help matters and Richard's ceviched fruit had no bite, so it went to Spike's "sensual beef salad" with mint and pineapple. It was Spike's first win at anything, which he ultimately handled with a complete lack of grace.

The elimination challenge was to devise a healthy boxed lunch for the Chicago Police Department — not exactly known for its physical fitness — involving a whole grain, a lean protein, and fruit and a vegetable. So then it comes out that the "significant advantage" Spike earned with his Quickfire win is that, whatever ingredient he picks in each category is verboten for the rest of the crew. Since Spike is a little bitch — it's true, just like Lisa — he chose chicken, bread, lettuce and tomato. Which would have been fine if he intended to use the bread, lettuce or tomato! But he didn't!

Meanwhile, Andrew got a lot of camera time throughout the show, never a good sign. Andy studied nutrition for a few years, and was superconfident about his ability to make an unconventional healthy meal. But...not a healthy meal for cops, who are not known for their propensity toward raw food diets. He excitedly discussed his plans to make a carb-free sushi roll in the monologues, which were sped up and jump-cutted to make it look like he's a crazy person. It's less illegal than subliminal advertising!

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Stephanie is serious eater and knows the CPD is, too, so she made a thick soup. Richard threw together a log of a burrito, but tuna and bok choi? Yes please. Dale did some bison (if it's delicious enough, we'll rescue it from extinction) with lemongrass and herbs, prompting Antonia to predict that Dale's Asian-only limitation would eventually be his downfall. But that's not even factually correct, so we'll see. Tom offered his usual mid-episode non-insight, this time remarking "I don't think any of them want to go home for a boxed lunch." Really, producers, was that his best pull quote?

Oh, and someone set little Lisa's brown rice on fire! It could have been any of them at this point, but it was most likely Lisa herself. We all laughed on the inside a little.

The scene at the Police Academy was very nice and antiseptic. Padma said to Sam, "so, your family is cops?" And Sam responded, "yep, my family is cops." Very thrilling.

Finally, the judging happened. Dale and Stephanie landed on top with their bison and soup, but the bison was sexier. Dale won, get this, a $25 bottle of wine! Also, a trip to the vineyard in California, but come on, that's pretty sleazy overall.

The loser's circle was composed of Spike, Andrew and Lisa. Spike was a little bitch (yes, worth repeating) for blocking tomato, lettuce and bread and then NOT USING THEM, plus his apparently strange combination of grapes and olives that we do all the time because it's delicious. Andrew missed the point of making a healthy meal that people might actually want to eat, and as Lisa slimily pointed out, didn't use a grain. Lisa's rice was burnt and undercooked to be sure, but her much larger problems included undercooked shrimp and a poor flavor balance overall.

In the end, they sent Andrew home, but seemingly not for the whole grain lacuna (by the way, when Andrew said he "always goes against the grain" the first time, it was funny, but the second time, it was annoying). Instead, it seems like Andrew doesn't (yet?) have a sophisticated understanding of how to cook for an audience. He was proud of how far he got, meaning he had a sense of his experience gap with the remaining chefs. Lisa and Spike should be shaking in their toques, because their volatility is no longer serving them well.

Next week, short-order cooking and the triumphant and suspiciously rapid return of Restaurant Wars ought to make for good television.

[Photo: Ted Allen gets better every year, via Bravo]

p.s. The Times today has a piece on the emergence of contextual targeting of TV advertisements, a practice that Bravo excels at already. Did you see those ads for Soy Joy and the diabetes medication at the end? Yeah.

Weddings are all well and good, but we're just as disappointed as the cheftestants about the substitution of a Wedding Wars for the traditional Restaurant Wars of seasons past. Why? Because it's another catering job. How many have there been now, five? When Dale says he hasn't catered since he was 18, that's a goddamn lie; more like two days.

ANYWAY, the challenge turned out to be mildly interesting. But first, the Quickfire! It's a skills relay, and anyone who didn't know what a monkfish looked like certainly got schooled. Fortunately, we feel the same about eating ugly things and cute things — and smart things and dumb things — more please! Richard and Dale skin and slice the creature with equal aplomb (by the way, when Richard said "I'm up against the dragon," did he mean the fish, or Dale? If the latter, we call racism! Also, will Dale have to pay for that locker he dented? Or did the producers tell him to do that...) and it all comes down to Stephanie whipping up a quart of mayo a little faster than Nikki, who took a BREAK in the middle of it! Where's your drive, Nik? When it's down to an immunity-less eight people, neutral doesn't cut it. But she will learn soon enough.

So JP and Corey come out of the wings and are introduced as wedding caterers who need their wedding catered, and pronto. Moments later, the internet told us their entire life story, including how they completely scrapped their planned ceremony in Kansas, and instead, threw new plans together for a 'ding in Chicago in the space of 27 days. Why? Because TV!!!

The structure of the challenge involved the Quickfire teams choosing a pre-spouse and making a buffet to their specifications. Team Functional (Richard, Steph, Andrew and Antonia) chose the bride, who wanted fancy meat and potatoes (remember: Kansas), while Team I Hate You (Dale, Lisa, Spike, Nikki) were assigned the Italophilic groom. Nikki and groom hit it off immediately, and so they chose to make an Italian feast! Which would be easy enough if 1) Nikki took a leadership role and actually planned the menu 2) Dale wasn't a selfish control freak. But neither of those things were the case!

In fact, much of the middle of the episode was spent chronicling the collapse of Team I Hate You. Lisa's worried that Dale is stretched too thin and his quality is dropping. Spike is pulling back and saying, if our quality is going down, I'm going to find me a raft. In the form of a Chilean sea bass. Nikki's like, weeeeeeel, I'm making a pasta. Even though I should be running the show and the judges will eventually kick me off for not being in charge! Instead, she's busy mumbling about her differences in ragout philosophy with Dale. If there's one thing you don't want at a wedding, it's philosophy.

Meanwhile, the highlight of Team Functional's prep phase is when Andrew starts waxing psychosexual, with his 18-hour "culinary boner" (if you're cooking with fat, does that mean you have a "lard-on"? Does making a salad give you a "Swiss chard-on"?) and the ways in which his spinach resembles "Popeye's wet dream." First of all, wouldn't that be Olive Oyl, actually? And second, it really brings a whole new meaning to "creamed spinach."

During the wedding, which was very nice, it became clear that Functional was besting I Hate You by some measure. Everyone from guests to judges to the newlyweds were oohing and ahhing over the brisket, while rock-hard bruschettas and awkward pastas were politely passed over. The profound visual disparity between the cakes — Stephanie's soaring and splendid lemon vs. Lisa's stolid, Brutalist German Chocolate — turned out to be mostly symbolic since the judges ultimately liked the chocolate better, but still. (By the way, when a lady on the buffet line responded to Dale's comment about his exhaustion by saying "you're like a med student," we call racism!)

Functional's win was no surprise, but the episode's (maybe even the series'?!) nicest moment was when Richard bestowed his win on Stephanie, and in return, she gave him half of her $2000 Crate and Barrel prize. Awww! You can't manufacture love like that, or ceremonialize it.

Finally, what we've been waiting seventy-five long minutes for: the kill. Lisa gets a pass for her tasty cake, and while Spike and Dale fall into a little exhaustion-induced hissy fit, you can't lose on decent Chilean Sea Bass. It practically sautées itself into extinction it's so good! No, it came down to Nikki the Lazy and Dale the Overeager. But trouble is, the judges have been wanting to kick Nikki off since she squeaked by in episode 5 when Zoi got booted instead. Also, it would be hard to make the case that Nikki's a better chef than Dale, even though she's clearly a better person.

Will next week's episode right the balance of boys vs. girls? Not if Season 2's Sam Talbot (who The Stew, MP:Boston and we all agree is the "tall, dark and handsome" guest chef in the previews) has anything to say about it!

[Photo: Hello Clarice (butsugiri/flickr)]

Things you know about Myanmar/Burma:

1) On May 3-4, the country's Irrawaddy delta region was hit by a powerful cyclone, killing 22,500 and leaving over 40,000 missing as of publication time (nationwide population: 55 million)

2) Last fall, the ruling military junta cracked down on widespread, monk-lead demonstrations, leading to the political imprisonment of hundreds and quashing hopes of a democratic revolution

3) Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel prize-winning democracy activist, has been under house arrest there for much of the past two decades

Things you may or may not know about Myanmar/Burma:

1) "Myanmar" is a pre-colonial name that the junta encourages you to use, and "Burma" is the somewhat racist colonial appellation that Aung San Suu Kyi prefers, because one really sticks it to the junta that way

2) Until a few days ago, Burma — let's just go with that...stupid junta — was a net exporter of rice, but the country's rice bowl (this is an official term) was storm-surged into oblivion. Maybe China will give them rice?

3) Burma is shunned by most of the world for its human rights violations and narcotics-based export economy. The junta is reasonably good friends with China

Things you don't know about Burma:

1) The junta is being pretty cagey about taking aid from the international community, but you can donate through the Anglican Relief & Development Fund

2) Burma has a unique and wonderful cuisine that's hard to find in the United States but always a joy to come across. It's a natural fusion of Indian, Chinese and South-East Asian traditions, meaning you can get chicken biryiani, durian ice cream and night market rice noodles in a single sitting if you so desire. They even have their own form of tofu, made from chana dal (split, skinless chickpeas) or yellow split pea flour, depending on the ethnic group. Better than soy-based tofu? In many ways. You like dumplings? The Burmese have half-a-dozen indigenous varieties to try. And so forth.

For us, though, the single biggest achievement of the Burmese kitchen is its myriad and exotic salads. Thai salads are more famous, but the Burmese do a job at least as sophisticated throwing raw and pickled vegetables and miscellany together into something greater than the sum of their parts. Observe:

• Pork Ear & Tongue Salad from the recently closed Burmese Cafe in Queens, NY (Jane! Jane! Jane!):

• "Burmese Feast" Tofu Salad from Golden Triangle in Whittier, CA (Tales of an LA Addict):

More salads than you could properly digest, after the jump...

Continue reading "The Salads Of Myanmar/Burma: A Timely Appreciation" »

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]

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)]

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]

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.

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!

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]

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.