Remember how we said we'd felt some creative sparks from that statement that the average American eats $500 worth of fast food a year? Well, now we've done our homework.

Per our unofficial field work, a McDonald's chicken nugget is approximately 1.5 inches long, by 1 inch wide, by about .5 inches deep. Let's ignore its varied shapes, and just call it a rectangular prism. This gives us a volume, per McNugget, of 0.75 inches.

At most McDonalds restaurants, you can buy four McNuggets for a dollar -- meaning your $500 gets you 2000 nuggets, or 1500 cubic inches of deep-fried all-white-meat chicken bites. For those of you keeping score at home, that is also just under one cubic foot, or about one third of a human body (this per the no doubt entirely accurate lyrics of One Man Guy, by Loudon Wainwright III, where a person is "three cubic feet").

It is worth noting at this juncture that the goal of our investigation here was to see if $500 would buy you enough chicken nuggets to fill a jacuzzi. The answer is, sadly, no: even the smallest jacuzzi we found holds a whopping 200 gallons, which is 26.73 cubic feet, or the equivalent of $15,400 worth of chicken nuggets. Or $10,266 if it's a 6-piece-for-a-dollar sale.

Consider yourself informed.

[Photo: Ms. McNugget via Kate Shepard's Flickr]

What we would do with $500: lots of things.
What we would not do: drop it all on fast food.

But apparently, if we are an "average American," we do. Chicago-based Research International USA posed an online survey to 1,000 people, and found that the average annual expenditure on fast food was a cool half a grand.

This is ridiculous, yet also fills us with a sense of creative potential. We are going to have to go do some calculations, so in the meantime you can feast your eyes (and ears) on this visually SFW, aurally NSFW exploration of the breakfast/lunch divide at McD's:

Daily Bite: Do you spend $500 a year on fast food? [The Stew]

Given a sufficient amount of time, any gathering of enlightened carnivores will inevitably devolve into an argument about where the best burger can be eaten.

Some smug jerk will always, always say "my backyard," punctuated with one of those eyebrow-smirks, and for him the cause is hopeless. But for the rest of us, there's the Hamburger Hotlist at men.style.com.

Right now the only Chicago contender, Rosebud Steakhouse, is clocking in third among the editors' picks (after perennial national favorites Corner Bistro [New York, and in our opinion horrifically overrated], and Louis Lunch [New Haven, CT, and pretty decent]. But Rosebud's patty is ranked only 10th place overall, thus proving that internet democracy is wildly overrated.

Hotlist:Hamburgers [Men.Style.Com]
Rosebud Steakhouse [MenuPages]
Rosebud Steakhouse [Official Site]

[Graphic courtesy of Style.com]

For our fifteenth birthday, lo these many years ago, we asked our parents for two things: a KitchenAid upright mixer, and dinner at Bistro 110, where a friend of ours claimed to have once eaten two tables away from Tom Hanks et famille.

Our parents (questionably) decided to overlook the request for kitchen appliances, and instead sprung for dinner for us and five of our high school-era BFFs at the restaurant we'd so sagely chosen. That night we were introduced to three critical concepts that have informed our restaurant-going existence ever since: (1) If a celebrity is seen somewhere once, that does not mean that he will be seen there every night; (2) poulet rôti; (3) oven-roasted garlic.

So it is with no small amount of excitement that we read the Tribune heralding the return of French cuisine to the shores of Lake Michigan. It's back the way Madonna is back: never actually having gone away, as such, but suddenly cooler, hotter, hipper, and better than ever before. As Christophe David, exec chef at NoMI says, "It's growing. And it is not finished."

Chef David also points out that Chicago's four-defined-seasons weather makes the city much more amenable to true Parisian cooking than rival urbs Miami or LA:

"In Chicago sometimes the winter is long, but at least you have the winter. When I talk to my friends in France I say, 'Imagine Paris with a big lake, and it looks like Nice.' Nobody believes me until they come visit."

Just call us la deuxième ville. La ville du vent?

French (re)connection [Tribune]
Bistro 110 [MenuPages]
Bistro 110 [Official Site]
NoMI [MenuPages]
NoMI [Official Site]

[Photo: Bistro 110's French onion soup, via yummyinthetummyblog's Flickr]

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]

When a restaurant first shows up on MenuPages, its popularity will often spike past the regular strong performers as people search for what they're reading about in the papers and on the blogs and what have you. But, say, two to six months in, if a place is still showing up in the top ten, it means it's got some legs.

And so, we salute:

• Brasserie Ruhlmann, in 1st place Downtown! It's a definitely a big-name restaurant, but such a distinction was not preordained; they earned it with their consistently delicious and innovative French fare

• Crisp, in 3rd place on the North Side. Impressive for a little, insider-y Korean fried chicken place, no?

• The Balanced Kitchen, tied for 3rd on the Northwest Side. It's way the hell out there in North Park, and it's vegan, but never discount those niche clickers!

[Photo: Raw Plate (organic raw cashews made into cheese; served with flax seed crackers; and an assortment of dehydrated fruits & vegetables) at The Balanced Kitchen]

[Above: wild local salmon at Farallon in San Francisco]

Another depressing bit of seafood news: Following on the heels of our general freakout over the likely shut-down of the West Coast salmon season, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a follow-up article today insinuating that the entire California and Oregon salmon fishing industry is on the verge of collapse. From the Chronicle:

Barbara Emley, 64, who has run a commercial fishing boat with her husband out of Fisherman's Wharf since 1985, said salmon makes up about 70 percent of her annual income.

"We'll probably try crabbing longer, but if everyone shifts from salmon to crab, there will be more competition," she said. "I think we can survive the year, but I'm afraid it will go on."

If the crisis continues, she said, it could spell the end of a unique, nomadic culture of people who love the sea.

The basic point of this article and various other general hand-wringing in the blogosphere, is that we're going to have to get used to farm-raised salmon this year, and possibly for many years to come. Depressing.

But the Chronicle also quoted a chef who simply wouldn't use farm-raised.

"We'll stay away from salmon for a while," said Ryan Simas, the head chef atFarallon restaurant on Union Square. "I will definitely not use farmed salmon."

Paul Johnson, the president of Monterey Fish Market, a high-end seafood wholesaler at Pier 33 in San Francisco, with a retail market in Berkeley, said things won't be the same without local salmon.

"Oh man, I'm telling you the king (chinook) salmon is the icon in the Bay Area; this is going to be devastating to the economy," he said. "It's put everyone on edge. A lot of small-boat fishermen are going to go out of business."

Okay, we promise to lay off this topic for a while, but it seems like a very big deal, even if you don't live on the West Coast. Farm-raised salmon made headlines last year when the Washington Post reported that some fish food may have been tainted with the same chemical that caused that massive pet-food recall. And since the farmed stuff may be all you get soon enough, well, maybe you should develop a taste for tuna. Oh, wait.

Threat of closing jolts fishing industry [SF Chronicle]
So Long and Thanks for all the Fishing [The Grinder]
The King Of Sushi [CBS]
Farm-Raised Fish Given Tainted Food [Washington Post]
Farallon [MenuPages]
Farallon [Official Site]

Photo credit: Passionate Eater

Above: On the way out? A meaty meal at the Slanted Door

It's no secret that restaurants are tightening their belts economically. Rising food and fuel costs have led to smaller portions, less rich food and generally weaker value across the board for customers.

But we're wondering if that same economic frugality could lead to a literal belt-tightening among increasingly girthy consumers. From the Florida Times Union:

Beef, flour and cheese are among the commodities with rapidly inflating prices that are integral to running a restaurant. Flour prices alone shot up 67 percent between January 2007 and this January, according to Ephraim Leibtag, an economist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service. Cheese prices climbed 29 percent during that period, while beef costs increased a more modest 3.1 percent.

What gets you fatter than beef, cheese and flour? Not much. And there are hints that increasingly pinched restaurateurs are moving away from giant slabs of meat and towards more mixed dishes that lean on vegetables. From the Wall Street Journal:

But rising prices have prompted a furious new round of behind-the-scenes shuffling. San Francisco's The Slanted Door is known for its rack of lamb. On many days, chef and owner Charles Phan offers a more-profitable lamb sirloin stir-fry instead, shaving his food costs by a third. It is a temporary fix that draws some complaints. "Everyone wants that rack," he says.

Of course they do. Where's the fun in going out to a nice restaurant for a bunch of vegetables you could make at home? But maybe, as necessity dictates, chefs will begin to adapt to the new world order and create things out of plants that you could never mimic.

Localvorism already calls for more vegetables transported shorter distances, and the economic necessity might help integrate that into all our diets. As chefs play with spices and vegetable cooking techniques, we may not miss that big slab of meat as much, which will be good, because we may not be able to get it.

Restaurants on a diet in tight economy [Florida Times Union]
Cutback Cuisine [Wall Street Journal]
The Slanted Door [MenuPages]
The Slanted Door [Official Site]

We've been tracking some back and forth about the way Bandera's hostesses keep track of the queue of people waiting to be seated.

In May of 2007, a user left an otherwise glowing review of the restaurant:

being on Michigan Ave. you'd think it's too posh to enjoy but not really. it's pretty cozy, dark, and private.

one thing though that threw me was the hostess... when we walked in she wrote down visual descriptions of us all the way down to the piercings in some sort of short hand. the only reason i saw it was because the waitress accidentally set the card down on our table when she was talking to us. i understood most of what was written about me, some of it made me go hmm but that was just weird and made me uncomfortable to know that detailed descriptions were being written down about us.

anyway, the waitress was very nice and the food was very very good. as per usual with Bandera. and pricing isn't too high but it certainly could be lower... but that's just my opinion and i really doesn't cross my mind when eating there.

We can certainly understand being unsettled by the perception that one's hostess has gone all Homeland on you! But this was not the end of the story. Some months later, a user by the name of "Ex-Hostess" left a review that sought to clarify the nature of the hostesses' practices:

I worked at Bandera for a little over two years and just wanted to clarify the previous reviewers unsettling experience with the extremely detailed description that the hostess took. Bandera refuses to use the pager/ beeper system feeling that it makes the dining experience much less personal. Thus, as a host, we have about a minute to take a quick description of the guest as we write down the name, time they came in, party size, and amount of time quoted. When you are on a twenty minute wait, it is extremely easy to find your guests. When you are on an hour and a half wait and have taken over 50 names, it becomes much more difficult - thus, the crazy descriptions. So- if you want to guarantee that the hostess will find you an hour and a half after you have put your name in - be a little more creative with your dress! You would be shocked on how many men / women wear jeans, black sweater and black shoes.

This raises as many questions as it answers. Why does Bandera deserve the devotion necessary to create 90 minute wait times? Actually, that's the only question. The boringly dressed clientele really tells a story, though.

A third comment was registered just yesterday:

Just a quick follow up regarding the hostess description issue. Just to clarify, the hostess did not accidentally leave the card on the table. One is placed on every table, with the description in plain view (no one's trying to be sneaky here) so that the servers know if or if not the table has been greeted. Once the table has in fact had an initial greeting from a server, the card is either written on and or taken off the table by their server. Point being, there is no discriminatory system going on here.

The way we could see this turning nefarious is if the hostesses use non-PC terminology to describe their patrons; where is the line between objectively informative and subjectively nasty? Is it simply a function of the adjectives used? The kind of profiling in question goes on silently everywhere all the time, but the act of writing it down is a little creepy and invasive, no matter how well-intentioned.

We'll buy that a beeper system is too Outback-y (although Bandera is a chain with five locations nationwide), but you know what would be kind of cool? If digital photography could be utilized. A picture of your party is taken upon arrival, and when it's your turn, the picture shows up on a screen mounted in the waiting area. Kind of arty, right? Or we'd be perfectly happy to simply receive a text message when it's our turn to dine. Yes, we think that's a lot less...subject to lawsuits.

Bandera [MenuPages]
Bandera [Official Site]

[Photo: from their website]

Time Out redesigned their site since last week - it's much more web 2.0, but slightly harder to tell if we've seen the totality of what's new each week. Then again, our needs are somewhat out of step with the dining public's...

• David Tamarkin goes in search of a bottle of 1972 Chateau Haut-Brion from four new South Loop wine stores. He gets closest to finding his quarry at Binny's, but they only have recent vintages. If you're interested, you can purchase the bottle online at Evinité for 319.00€ ex-VAT, or just about half a grand. Bottoms up! [TOC]

• Tamarkin reports on a much more accessible wine product: a sample pack of seven wines with which to create your own blends. For $120, it'd make an excellent Easter/Passover present for your favorite wino [TOC]

• Harissa is hot right now, especially at sophisticated New American restaurants [TOC]

On the Tribune side...

• Fauzia Arain has an article on how to navigate Indian buffets, subtitled "Curry 101," but its contents read more like a remedial high school course. The intended audience is laid bare when the article concludes with a selection of Indian buffets that's largely suburban. Then again, if it gets one fat guy out of Old Country Buffet and into Sher-A-Punjab, it will have done a good thing. [Tribune]

• Trine Tsouderos rounds up some St Pat's Day traditional food options. Apologies for our ignorance; we hadn't even heard of boxty or colcannon! [Tribune]

As for reviews...

• Phil Vettel goes to Lockwood at the Palmer House Hilton and really loves it. This is a departure from the tepid reviews of months past; maybe there's been a legitimate improvement in food and service? [Tribune]

• David Tamarkin samples the Persian food at Masouleh, and finds it to be a cut above. Could it be a competitor for crowd favorite Noon O Kabab? Only time will tell [TOC]

Lockwood [MenuPages]
Lockwood [Official Site]
Masouleh [MenuPages]

[Photo: ah, boxty, of course. Irish potato bread, if the imagery wasn't obvious enough. HyperBob]

We were as surprised as you to discover that, if you twist the meaning of two profoundly out-of-date Illinois agriculture websites, you can come to this horrifying, yet inevitable, conclusion. Observe:

1) From the Illinois corn Fact Sheet:

"While exposure to ethanol via inhalation and ingestion is not recommended, it has not been determined to cause adverse health effects."

2) From IL Dep't of Agriculture Kid's Page:

That's right! Illinois is the nation's number-one producer of ethanol. Corn grown in Illinois is used to make about 690 million gallons each year -- enough to fill about 7 billion soda cans!

The ILDA's Kid's Page is from 1996, by the way, and current figure is 1.2 billion gallons a year, or almost 12 billion soda cans (and Illinois is no longer number one; it's third after Iowa and Nebraska).

Why is the state doing this? Don't the children already drink enough corn?

Ethanol Fact Sheet [Illinois Corn]
Gas Pump Answer [ILDA Kid's Page]
Ethanol Production by State [Nebraska Energy Office]

[Photo: SA_Steve/flickr]

Last time we checked in on our hot menus in mid December, the top spots were Butterfly, Medici, Sepia and TABLE fifty-two. Well, today (yesterday, actually), none of those are in the top four! How about that.

In fact, the grand prize winner is none other than Nookies in Lincoln Park. If that's not a cold-driven choice, we don't know what's wrong with the world. After that, the North Side runners up are Sapori Trattoria in second and Panes and Anteprima tied for third. Those are kind of classy, actually.

But back to the main event. If Nookies was number one, would you believe that Wok n' Roll in Hyde Park is number 2? Sure is. After WnR are Dixie Kitchen & Bait Shop and Lumes Pancake House, which is only marginally on the South Side. As per usual, 70% of the South Side's Hot Menus yesterday came from Hyde Park. Oh well!

The bronze goes to Brazzaz, the River North churrascaria, followed in rapid succession by Dao in Streeterville and David Burke's Primehouse. We should note that TABLE fifty-two, which follows Primehouse, never scores poorly in this competition.

In other neighborhoods...Semiramis, Nonno Pino, and Coast Sushi Bar all did well on the Northwest side, despite have less than nothing to do with each other geographically, culturally or culinarily. On the West Side, Thai Bowl, Baba Pita and Yummy Thai were popular; guess every single UIC student wanted their Pad Woon Sen all at once? And saving the best for last, the Southwest Side supported Brown's Chicken & Pasta yesterday, and to a lesser extent, the Skylark.

So there you have it. The people's tastes are fickle but palpable, and oriented at least in part by the weather.

This past Friday's Stew has a piece by Chris Borrelli on the Congressional-hearing-quote-cum-"There-Will-Be-Blood"-coda-cum-instant-amorphous-catchphrase "I drink your milkshake." So while Chris discusses various possible uses before it gets tired in a few weeks, can we point out that when we were watching the movie and Daniel Day Louis used straws and milkshakes to fashion an analogy for oil extraction with the now-famous line, we had an instant flashback to an irritating oil company commercial that employed the exact same imagery to the exact same end?

We can point this out because we have the video to prove it. The clip is part of Shell's "Eureka" campaign about how one of the company's engineers serendipitously figured out a method of efficiently tapping hard-to-reach oil patches. The entire commercial, all nine minutes of it, is available on Shell's website, but the stripped-down YouTube version has everything you need (especially starting around 50 seconds in):

So Paul Thomas Anderson got the line from a 1924 Congressional hearing, according to that USAToday article, and Shell's Jaap Van Ballegooijen got the concept from his deadbeat son's sweet tooth. Even though this is coincidental and not causal, maybe the phrase is registering with people so strongly now because the seed was planted via that commercial. We await the squid-ink-ice-cream-as-light-sweet-crude shake, coming soon to a petrodiner near you.

I drink your milkshake meets where's the beef in catchphrase territory [The Stew]
'Blood' fans drink up milkshake catchphrase [USAToday]
Eureka - Shell Propaganda [YouTube]
Eureka [Shell]

Late last night, the thought occurred to us, "whatever happened to the Farm Bill, that critical and enormous piece of legislation ($286 billion enormous) that determines how America produces and eats food (and energy commodities) for the next five years?" Yes, that's exactly the thought we had, verbatim, parentheticals included.

In fact, it was auspicious timing, because just yesterday, President Bush warned "I'm confident we can come together to get a good farm bill, but if Congress sends me legislation that raises taxes or does not make needed reforms, I'm going to veto it." How sporting of him! The fact is, there really aren't too many glaring differences between the Farm Bills as envisaged by the House, the Senate, and the Administration, but that hasn't done much to quell the bickering. Most of the struggle, at this point, seems to be over esoteric (for non-farmers) rules about subsidy disbursement limits, small farm corporate structures, and crop definitions. What Democrats call "ending tax loopholes," Republicans call "raising taxes" - you know, the old story. And don't even get us started on the three-entity rule!

As an example of the relevant arcana, one of the Administration's goals is to "include dairy, peanut, honey, wool and mohair payments into the de facto $360,000 a year limit rather than allowing separate counting of them." Mohair, of all things! Wikipedia tells us that "the word 'mohair' was adopted into English before 1570 from the Arabic mukhayyar, a type of haircloth, literally 'choice', from khayyara, 'he chose'." See, researching the Farm Bill invites deep plunges down the rabbit hole, and we apologize.

Lest we forget the important stuff! The Farm Bill, as it stands, has clauses about increasing fruit and vegetable subsidies and food stamp allowances, and maybe some more ethanol subsidies, why not. Why not? Perhaps because of the biofuels creating more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels when all processing and transport is taken into account thing. Eep! We haven't heard anything good about ethanol from credible sources for over a year now. Meanwhile, this helpful article in the Daily Astorian (Oregon) points out that both Obama and Clinton support ethanol subsidies, while McCain does not. Food for thought.

But wait, there's so much more. The Farm Bill also addresses the issue of competitive livestock markets; Mabel Dobbs writes that "in the early 20th Century when five packers controlled over 75 percent of beef slaughter [while] today, four companies control 83 percent of the cattle slaughtered in this country." The "Livestock Title," as it's called, would open up the meatpacking market by permitting interstate shipping for smaller producers, and it would also call for country-of-origin labels on meat. The Livestock Title is in the House version of the bill, but not the Senate.

Here's something we didn't know about: the USDA was sued for discriminating against black farmers in the 1980s and 1990s, and both versions of the Farm Bill contain provisions for a $100 million fund to pay the farmers that didn't participate in the evocatively-named Pigford lawsuit of 1999. That must have been one hell of a lawsuit!

And on an even more niche front, the American Horse Council is lobbying the House to include provisions that "make horse breeders eligible for emergency federal loans following a disaster by including 'equine farmers and ranchers' within the class of eligible producers." The Senate already has such a provision, probably by way of whiny horse-riding Senator daughters. Are we allowed to say that?

So you see why Congress is having trouble nailing this thing down. Everyone wants a piece of the action, and everyone wants everything to change, and everyone wants everything to stay the same. It seems like Congress and the Administration are coming close to a deal (if the writers' strike can be resolved, anything can be resolved), but if they don't finalize it by March 15th, the permanent statutes from 1949 would take effect, with all hell breaking loose as a result (having a lot to do with soybeans and the environment). Five weeks, or we're bacon!

Bush Says He Might Veto Farm Bill [AP]
Farm subsidy reform is farm bill issue [Reuters]
Biofuels Deemed a Greenhouse Threat [NYTimes]
Journalist warns of implications of farm bill for rural America [The Daily Astorian]
Farm Bill Seeks Fairer Markets [KCCommunityNews]
Farm bill could aid black farmers [inRich]
American Horse Council Seeking Support for the Senate Farm Bill [USEF]

[Photo: Ludwig Von Mises Institute (sweet)]

Ahhh! The Tribune voters, bless their suburban asses, have voted for Forest Park as the best dining neighborhood in Chicagoland, over Lincoln and Logan Squares. There were nearly 10,000 votes (no one's saying there were 10,000 voters, mind you), of which 55% went to the western suburb. Lincoln Square got 35%, while Logan only picked up 8% of the vote. Oh man, 'cause Hillary got just about 35% of the vote in Illinois, too! No connection, just wanted to point it out.

The neighborhood voting result is patently absurd. We're not saying the food in Forest Park isn't good or bad, but it's based on the fact that there are "30 or so restaurants and bars in less than one mile." We are supposed to be impressed by this density? Fie upon that! It seems like the main attraction to these restaurants is that they're approachable and unpretentious, which ranks near the bottom for us in importance when it comes to the quality of a neighborhood's dining options. Of course, we all must come to terms with the fact that other voters, often a majority of them, hold completely different values than we do. One of the great terrors of democracy! Another is its tendency to be used as a chimera to disguise corruption and autocratism, which seemed to be the case in this contest as well ("perhaps there was a smidge of ballot-stuffing.") Nevertheless, CONGRATULATIONS FOREST PARK ON YOUR BIG WIN!

On an entirely different matter, Phil Vettel leads the Tribune's At Play section with a trio of article on fish and chips. In the first, he introduces the dish and provides a news peg (Lent) as well as a video of some of his favorites fish and chip vendors. They include pubs like Elephant & Castle and The Gage, and why not, Keefer's. He concludes the series by breaking down the components of the dish, explaining why the smart set use Icelandic cod (it's greener) and why the smarter set use halibut (it's better and more expensive).

Our favorite piece in this week's TOC has to be the Three-way on potatoes. Tracy Evans found three brilliant permutations of the tuber at Sweets & Savories, Moto and Powerhouse , with each dish more fabulous than the last. Let's see, do we want twice-baked, duck fat-fried potato with lobster claw meat from S&S, the mind-blowing "M.C. Escher Ball in a Box" (you must click and look at this Moto photo), or Powerhouse's ever-famous sweet potato beignets? Yes, and in that order please. Love it! Also note that David Tamarkin's article on Valentine's Day itineraries is the best V-Day piece we've seen so far this cycle.

You know, we got so excited by voting that we almost forgot about the reviews! Quel horreur. So here they are:

• Heather Shouse agrees with everyone else that the Korean fried Chicken at Crisp is mighty good, even if they had to replace an overly salty first batch [TOC]

• David Tamarkin is impressed by the warmth and effort of the family that runs La Cocina de Frida, and while some of the dishes are uneven, he looks forward to their pending expanded menu (the moles are good right now, fortunately) [TOC]

• Joe Gray visits CJ's Eatery in Humboldt Park, which serves Southern and Southwestern-influenced diner food cheaply and competently. Gray uses "15 two-tops" to describe the restaurant's seating arrangement, a phrase which only recently entered into common knowledge with the advent of myriad restaurant-oriented reality television programs. So we can all say two-tops and four-tops and be understood by the public now, okay? [Tribune]

Finally, a strange piece in the Tribune on how to entertain out-of-town foodies; and TOC advises we buy a jar of carica, a fruit that "has the aroma of a pineapple, the color of a mango and the flavor of a particularly tropical peach." Whoa.

[Photo: carica, which is basically a type of papaya. Or simply is another word for papaya; we're not quite sure (Daniel*1977/flickr)]

The requisite articles this week on V-Day and Chinese New Year are what they are, but the sections also contain some hidden gems (a term we never again want to see in a restaurant review, BTW).

Bill Daley starts things off with an exegesis on Asian noodles in their various forms, and how to cook them. And then, a story about the 80-year-old Hong Kong Noodle Co., based in Chinatown. And then, he provides a glossary of Asian noodle species. And THEN, a piece on paring salami with barbera, an Italian red wine varietal. Bill mentions that he prefers his salami sliced super-thin but isn't sure why it tastes better that way; we think it's probably the higher surface-to-volume ratio. Razor-thin salumi melts on your tongue like Listerine strips, only stinkier! But seriously, Mr. Daley is earning his keep this week.

Speaking of salumi (n.b. salami is a subset of salumi), big plates of cured meat are hot right now, according to Jennifer Olvera. It is basically just a fancy version of the classic appetizer platter, but instead of everything being fried and yellow, it's all cured and purplish. This is an improvement. And now you know what kind of wine to order with it!

Remember how Lisa Donovan was spending the month of January eating a new food item every day and reporting on it? Well, here's her preliminary report, in which she names Peruvian corn as her favorite new thing (we also like Peruvian corn!) Props, too, to runsa (beef and cabbage-stuffed pastry) and bureks (a meat-stuffed savory pastry), and not to be left out, hot Calabrese salami. Dislikes include Sichuan pig ear, goat milk, and Swedish egg coffee. This last beverage is "a mix of coffee grounds, cold water and an egg poured into a pot of boiling water," to which one adds eggshells and "after it has boiled a bit, let it cool down and ladle the coffee off the top." Good for the Swedes!

We like that Denise O'Neal steps...outside the box?...in this week's "Outta the box" section by choosing an Indonesian rice dish, nasi goreng. Although we're more partial to nasi lemak, which is Malaysian a set plate of stewed chicken, hard-boiled egg, peanuts, sambal, and white rice. Such a thing is not conducive to coming in a box, unfortunately.

Robin Mather Jenkins has uncovered the food web application of the day: DIET.com's text message nutritional information service. It seems to be mostly chain restaurants (Dear Diet, how many calories are in my Transparency of raspberry, rose petal and yogurt? Love, Alinea Tourer), but is still kind of sweet. Eventually, all this stuff will be supplanted by full internet on our cell phones though.

As for the rest...

• Good ideas for V-Day, including Spiaggia's $25k dinner (!) [Sun-Times]
• And a few more [Tribune]
• "Oxford Companion to Italian Food" as good as its predecessors [Tribune]
• Ditto Michael Ruhlman's new book, "The Elements of Style" [Tribune]
• Paul Virant of Vie wins dubious Chicago's Top Celebrity Chef award [Sun-Times]
• Horseradish burgers with sauteed mushrooms on pumpernickel! [Tribune]

[Photo: is this thin enough? (Sarah .K/flickr)]

Our stars, is there a lot of talk about small woodland creatures today! First, Monica Eng is all over raccoons, supplementing the Trib's article on their popularity - she takes a trip, skinned 'coon in hand, to Moto, where Homaru Cantu does something weird, brilliant and delicious with it.

And if that wasn't enough, Mike Huckabee is all over the airwaves talking about eating grits (fine) and how he used to fry squirrels in popcorn machines during college:



Squirrels! Popcorn machines! For that matter, college! (He went to college?) Oh my. Have a politically active weekend.

With raccoon carcass, Moto chefs unmask a tasty dish [Tribune]
Raccoon meat delights the down-home faithful, amuses the haute curious [Tribune]
Mike Huckabee: Fried Squirrel Out of a Popcorn Popper [YouTube]

As you all know by now (we mentioned it this morning, and so has everyone else on the Internet), the FDA has cleared cloned meat for consumption. By humans! American humans! So we made some lists:

Pros:

1) The meat from any given cloned animal probably is safe - more a non-con than a pro, though
2) We clone vegetables and that's okay, right?
3) High-quality and -yield animals can be selected and propagated - resulting in cheaper good meat for consumers

Cons:

1) Monoculture is bad - if you only have one type of thing, and a lot of it, it's susceptible to disease, environmental factors, etc.
2) Animal cloning is lossy - successive generations will decline in quality and possibly safety; sexual reproduction and genetic variation became evolutionarily dominant for a reason
3) Cloned animals are a lot more complex than cloned vegetables. They really aren't analogous
4) The economics of cloning prevent commercial rollout anytime soon, but the goal of the cloners is ultimately to take the risk and cost out of producing high-quality meat, not lower its selling price
5) There aren't really any plans to mandate labeling for cloned meat, and people really aren't going to like that. Europe allows cloned meat, but requires labeling

Basically, there is no compelling reason to allow (as opposed to not disallow) cloned meat except to increase the profits of agribusiness. It may not kill us, but it won't make us stronger, either. Even if there isn't a long-term direct impact on our health, there will definitely be long-term impacts on our food infrastructure and the environment. We don't think the FDA is being criminally remiss in its duties - but like its weakening of "organic," its laxity on hormone use and its distaste for labeling, it's hard not to feel like the FDA's science is oriented by politics, and the wrong politics at that.

F.D.A. Tries to Convince a Skeptical Public on Cloned Food [NYTimes]

[Photo: guyscoop/flickr]

This week, in addition to going to the suburbs, Pat Bruno finds himself at Cafe Spiaggia. He loves it, which is not too much of a shocker. The top-end Italian food comes from the same kitchen Spiaggia, but is cheaper and less formal. Not, like, a lot cheaper, but maybe enough to push it into your price range for a semi-special occasion? If you go, you should get their...everything. Actually, Bruno goes a little overboard in this review: "A special one evening -- burrata con pomodori -- was ethereal, not to mention exquisite." Who writes like that?

Lisa Donovan has a special Friday article on tea, since January is National Tea Month. Sure, why not! It's also National Careers in Cosmetology Month, National Eye Health Care Month, National Fiber Focus Month, National Hobby Month, National Soup Month, Oatmeal Month, and Prune Breakfast Month. All this makes sense, since these foci complement almost any conceivable New Year's resolution. But anyway, tea - the article contains a roundup of both tea and high tea establishments all around the city. It might even become a habit.

Over at the Reader, Mike Sula visits the Gary, IN, factory of one of the last independent potato chip makers in the region, Peerless Potato Chips. Peerless is slowly losing shelf space to the big guys, but maybe the article will give them a little sales boost. To do our part, you can call them at (219) 885-6843 and they'll ship the chips to you directly! Apparently, they're pretty good.

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.

Cafe Spiaggia [MenuPages]
Cafe Spiaggia [Official Site]
Szalas [MenuPages]
Szalas [Official Site]
Elite treat [Sun-Times]
A new leaf]
The Little Chipper [Reader]

While the ethics of restaurant reviewing is a massive issue to which reams have already been devoted, we just wanted to briefly respond to editorkid, who commented on our post earlier today about Lao Beijing. We noted that LBJ has been getting poor reviews in its first few days of existence, which editorkid found problematic:

Well, in fairness, people shouldn't try restaurants the moment they open for the sake of a review, either. It's reasonable to expect outages and glitches the first week or two. (I was going to say "bugs," but thought better of it.) If you're all but a household name posting reviews on an Internet forum read by tens of thousands, give the poor place a couple of weeks to shake things out, maybe.

Yes, editorkid, we agree with you. Newly opened restaurants should get a chance to get settled before they're reviewed, and the more influence a reviewer has, the more he or she should abide by this code of conduct. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to put the genie back into the bottle. LTHForum could establish a policy of not allowing reviews for restaurants less than a month old, say, but this is both unlikely to happen and almost beside the point, anyway. The rabid foodies of the Internet cannot be made to follow rules in the quest for information (and to be first).

This is not to say we should abandon our personal scruples! But we think it's fair to take it as given that restaurants, whether much-hyped new openings, tiny ethnic storefronts and anything in between, will be reviewed vanishingly close to their opening date.

In this reality, two things can be done. Restaurants can take it upon themselves to be as polished as possible on opening day. In Lao Beijing's case, that means making sure the menu's signature duck is available. If a restaurant opens prematurely in order to maximize revenue, it must now take into account potential lost revenue from a bad review related to a lack of readiness.

Consumers are also complicit in this process. It is up to us to evaluate the reviews we read for their value, based on criteria like how long the restaurant has been open and the trustworthiness of the reviewer. There will always be bad and unfair information out there, and even if we (MP:Chicago we, not restaurant-going Everyman we) are guilty of perpetuating it, potential patrons need not be blindly deterred.

Will Lao Beijing's fate be determined by these early reviews? Almost certainly not. For a restaurant of this scale, bad reviews can't hurt nearly as much as good reviews could help. So all is not lost! As long as we try to keep the consequences of our actions in mind...

Opening: Lao Beijing (Or Is It Lao Peking?) [MP:Chicago]

This week's chart, which actually is from 18 months ago but is sort of amazing so who cares, lists cities with exceptionally high and low percentages of respondents who say they want to see more "healthy" items on restaurant menus. We all have our stereotypes about cities - let's put them to work!

On first inspection, one might assume that cities in the "highest" column are full of health nuts, and cities in the "lowest" column are full of lazy, self-defeating fatasses. That assumption certainly explains Portland, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles and possibly Boston with its college crowd. Not to mention Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore and Houston!

But what are Atlanta and Columbus doing on the left side and Seattle and Denver on the right? The placements seem counterintuitive, but there are plausible explanations for all. Columbus and Atlanta, despite being fat cities, are fast-growing, dynamic, and full of aspiration. For example, Columbus wants to, one day, not require the apposition of comma Ohio. Atlanta wants to be the capital of South, which it sort of already is, but more formally. These places want to better themselves, and by extension, their citizens want to better their health.

To explain Seattle and Denver, one only need walk down their imaginary main streets - every other store sells granola, caribiners, pilates on tap, organic local celery, and water. These people are healthy by nature, but are so sick of being inundated with positive energy that maybe, once in a while, they could use a donut. So of course they don't want more healthy food on the menu - it would just be redundant.

Chicago mercifully escapes analysis through overgeneralization by not being on either list. Small favors!

(All of this obscures the real issue - that more "healthy" food on menus isn't going to do squat if people don't choose those menu items/can't afford them, or eat three times as much as they should, or don't exercise. But that's well outside the scope of this chart.)

[Chart: Nation's Restaurant News]

Today's chart from Nation's Restaurant News details changes in restaurant meal-period consumption since last year. Meal-period is something we just made up to describe any of breakfast, lunch, dinner or brunch. For example, if a restaurant is open for lunch and dinner, it serves two meal-periods a day. Because if you simply said, it serves two meals a day, that's ambiguous and misleading. And we don't think there's an already-recognized label for this phenomenon, but if we're missing something obviously, please don't hesitate to let us know.

Anyway, according to this chart, breakfast and late night meal-periods are surging while lunch is flat and "supper" is waning. Let us examine each meal-period in turn.

• The substantial increase in the morning meal is probably some combination of more people eating breakfast (after all, it is the most important meal of the day, they keep telling us), and more people eating breakfast on the go instead of at home. Given this, we bet that the majority of this uptick is in the fast breakfast subcategory, where food is designed to go instead of being served by waiters. Regardless, it's still a huge growth spurt for that meal-period.

• The shifts in lunch consumption seem statistically insignificant. Why would lunch change, anyway?

• "Supper," and for the life of us we can't figure out why they've used such an anachronistic term to describe the dinner meal-period (maybe to free up "dinner" for use in the title of the chart?), took a small hit. Dinner is definitely the most expensive meal-period, and perhaps it reflects the slowing economy. Or maybe people are spending more time with their families? Perish the thought!

• PM snacking...ugh, you just shouldn't be doing it. You'll get indigestion! Maybe it's dessert places, maybe it's more stupid drunk kids, maybe it's people working really late in order to keep jobs that are increasingly at risk due to the slowing economy. Idea: try eating only vegetables after 10pm. Could you imagine!

We can see an empire of restaurants open only from midnight to nine in the morning, leasing out unused space in lobbies and such. Meanwhile, how have consumption patterns changed in 24 hour diners? That would be interesting to know.

[Photo: Breakfast, snack on rise as dinner dips]

Originally posted 6/1/07. This is especially relevant following the Jessica Seinfeld scandal.

This past Wednesday's NYTimes Dining Section featured a light-hearted look at children's menus, specifically how they almost universally feature chicken fingers. The writer, David Kamp, used to love the fingers' ability to placate his children at restaurant after restaurant, until he realized what this represented: a subversive takeover of young American palates by a singular, homogenous and not entirely healthy foodstuff. Let's assume you, the voracious reader, already know why this is a problem (never too early to start building bad eating habits and entitlement issues!)

Kamp goes on to report about bringing children into the adult food/local/seasonal/organic fold with new and improved kids menus at institutions as diverse as Disneyland (where French fries are no longer automatic) and Latitude 41 (grilled organic chicken teriyaki, anyone?).

We will get to some smarter kids menu options in Chicago momentarily, but first we want to highlight an issue whose root cause is not fully addressed in the article: why kids and adults prefer to eat different foods. Yes, that preference was certainly exploited by the fast food industry over the past thirty years, but it was not invented by the fast food industry. Even little children who don't watch TV and have never set foot in a McDonald's prefer different foods than their parents, at least at the outset. The explanation? A smart cousin once told us that children's innate biological imperative to survive steers them toward food that's bland and familiar. It is easy to imagine how the flavors and textures that adults crave could send out warning signs of inedibility to a child: spice hurts, and things that hurt are bad, for example. Nothing in the world is as consistent and unthreatening as a chicken finger, and so, kids gravitate toward them.

But that doesn't mean you, the parent, shouldn't occasionally curb those defensive instincts, lest your child grow up to be a conservative eater (and fat!) Here are some restaurants with kid's menus that have more to offer than golden logs of conformity:

• Wishbone's children's menu includes a host of cutely named, Southern-influenced dishes like the Original M 'n' C, made with four cheeses and topped with baked ham or chicken sausage ($5.95)

• Big Bowl Cafe has a ton of kid-friendly pan-Asian noodle dishes and stir fries - even a kid's pad Thai!

• Chicago Diner has options specially designed for your budding vegan, like the Not Dog with homestyle potatoes, coleslaw, mac n cheeze, or brown rice ($6.95; note the spelling of "cheeze")

So you see, all is not lost for our nation's youth. Just don't give into them all the time! And don't overcook the vegetables you give them, either.

Don’t Point That Menu at My Child, Please [NYTimes]
Latitude 41 [Official Site]
Wishbone [MenuPages]
Wishbone [Official Site]
Big Bowl Cafe [MenuPages]
Big Bowl Cafe [Official Site]
Chicago Diner [MenuPages]
Chicago Diner [Official Site]

[Photo: Salomon]

(Why are you seeing this old post? Click here to find out!)

Originally posted 5/23/07. Methane recycling is even more economically viable now than it was six months ago.

The big news in today's NYTimes dining section is that beef prices, especially the top grades like prime and choice, are skyrocketing as supplies plunge. According to the article by Florence Fabricant, the per pound price for steers ready to slaughter (lovely) increased from 83 cents in April '06 to 98 cents today, and the percentage of beef graded as prime has dropped from 2% to possibly as low as 0.5%. While some fluctuation in price and availability for high quality ingredients is normal, the factors which have led to this particular run seem to boil down to one thing: energy costs. The journey from skinny cow to juicy steak requires two inputs (for our purposes) - food, to make the cow grow, and gasoline, to transport the meat to your local supermarket or restaurant. Big cows with lots of fatty marbling consume a hell of a lot of corn to get that way, and their tremendous girth requires a lot of fuel to move around. Back in the day, farmers had cheap feed, and slaughterhouses had cheap oil. Now, with the ethanol market booming, everybody has expensive corn. Corn prices have increased so much that cows are now being slaughtered younger - before their beef becomes really tasty - to save the trouble of feeding them and transporting them at a higher weight. Next time you're at a steakhouse and your prime rib is scrawny and $70, you'll know why. (Actually, for the time being, steakhouses are mostly eating the costs and cutting back on reservations rather than quality, but that compromise is ultimately untenable).

Our solution? Methane! Yup, cows produce a vile amount of methane, currently warming the atmosphere at an even faster rate than carbon dioxide (by volume). Wily scientists are already busy coming up with ways to harness the tremendous output of natural gas on America's pastures. One day, we hope that cows are transported to meat packing plants and your plate in vehicles powered by fuel derived from the cows' own farts. Ah, the elegance of technological progress.

Demand and Costs Rise for Best Cuts [NYTimes]
Methane from cow manure makes new energy [Minnesota Daily]

[Photo: Audubon Magazine]

(Why are you seeing this old post? Click here to find out!)

We're saddened - but not in the least surprised - by the chart that popped into our inbox moments ago, courtesy of Nation's Restaurant News. The slow, inexorable takeover of the American dining landscape by large corporations continues apace, having expanded from 49% of restaurant traffic (paying customers, we guess?) in 2001 to 57% in 2007. These numbers are only for the summer, but we can't imagine that people abandon Applebees for their local chef-driven bistro en masse in September. The small chains are more or less (less) holding their own, but the independents have taken a huge hit.

Almost certainly, this loss is skewed outside of urban areas. Chicago has more independent restaurant than you could shake a stick at! Then again, how many of the recent new openings have been orchestrated by boutique, high-end restaurant groups? More than we're entirely comfortable with. But while there will always be demand in the city for independent qua independent restaurants, the suburbs and exurbs are not so oriented. In those realms, that which is inexpensive, efficient, non-challenging and familiar reigns supreme. The nationalization of the service industry is an economic inevitability, but not a cultural one.

Rise up, non-urbanites! Take risks, demand uniqueness, rail against gustatorial sterility! Life is richer when you live to eat.

Major chains increase share of summer traffic [NRN]

Via Political Animal via Rob Donoghue, and we're sure it bounced around a few other unaccountable times before it reached us, is a post about how to use "nerdfury" to find a good restaurant, inspired by a talk that non other than Anthony Bourdain gave:

The question at hand was how to find good restaurants, and his answer was to take the city you want to go to and just google up some restaurant names that serve the dish you're after. Then got to chowhound or another foodie site, and rather than asking about restaurants, you put up an enthusiastic post talking about how you just had the best whatever you're looking for at one of these restaurants.

And now the nerdfury part, whose definition is self-evident from the following:

Posters will show up from nowhere to shower you with disdain, tell you how that place used to be good but has now totally sold out and - most important to your quest - will tell you where you would have gone if you were not some sort of mouth breathing water buffalo.

We think it's mean to bait foodies like this. It raises the collective blood pressure, and heavens knows what the associated medical costs would total! Yes, this is intellectually dishonest and we cannot support it. Better to ask the question directly and face the ire of the crowd (or accept being utterly ignored) like a mensch.

Hunting Vegetarians with Ted Nugent [Robert Donoghue]

[Photo: as far as we can tell, all the references to water buffalo on Chowhound have been civil and relevant]

Over the weekend, the NYTimes ran an editorial by Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. She's a smart lady, and she travels a lot and thinks about global culture and other narrow topics. The piece was about food recycling in China - basically, that hundreds of millions of people there eat food that was grown, raised or caught nearby, consume it immediately, and then use the waste for animal feed and fertilizer and what have you. She doesn't come to any grand conclusions, but basically, her findings about this system are as follows:

1) It's much better for the environment, and the resulting food tastes better, too
2) It's incredibly labor-intensive, and rather difficult to implement in cold climates
3) As China urbanizes and becomes wealthier, it's falling by the wayside and beginning to look more like the system in the United States

So unless we depopulate our cities, give up on modern life as we know it, and establish a global gentleman-farmer culture in its stead, we're going to have a hard time pulling it off. After all, Ms. Slaughter herself employs a round-the-clock maid to purchase, cook and clean all the food she eats. A commenter points out that

the only way for this to happen is with the support of a vast underclass of servants, maids, ayis, etc. whose sole purpose is to feed the upper-class in pre-approved, "sustainable" ways. The poor and even most of the middle class will not be able to afford employing these servants… and creating a food movement rooted in the existence of a subservient food-preparation class to satisfy the guilt of the upper classes seems rather morally repugnant.

Okay, true!

China's system (similar systems exist all ove