• House passes lumbering Farm Bill with 75%, for better or worse [NYTimes]
• Foie gras prohibition ends in Chicago; it was sort of fun [Tribune]
• BS: Bush admin's claim of biofuel's small role in global food crisis [AP]
• High prices force non-poor people to eat cheap fatty foods [ABCNews]
• Cookie-pushing girl scout unloads record 17k boxes on lardy MI [USAToday]
Here's how this went: We were going to tell you about this weird plan in Britain to secretly videotape everybody who buys cigarettes and alcohol. Creepy! But then we got distracted looking at these adorable pictures of penguin-shaped dumplings, and almost immediately started wondering what penguin meat actually tastes like. Ever seen it on a menu? Yeah, us neither.
There are a lot of joke sites out there regarding penguin meat. Apparently people think it is funny to eat the little creatures, and granted, it sort of is. After sorting through "press releases" from the Goliath Corp and the embarrassingly named Bud Ice Freedom Fighters, we discovered that penguins are actually protected and United States citizens are specifically prohibited from eating them.
But that doesn't mean people haven't. This account of an early Antarctic expedition cites Dr. Fredrick A. Cook, ship's surgeon of the Belgica, a Belgian ship captained by Adrien de Gerlache, which sailed from Antwerp in 1897: "If it's possible to imagine a piece of beef, odiferous cod fish and a canvas-backed duck roasted together in a pot, with blood and cod-liver oil for sauce, the illustration would be complete."
Another account, of the 1902-1904 Scottish Naval Antarctic Expedition aboard the Scotia, gave a more optimistic mention of penguin meat: "Once the unusual taste of penguin meat had become familiar, it proved to be a great favourite: fried and stewed, or as a basis for soup and curry."
Overall, though, penguin doesn't seem to have caught on in the least with those not on Antarctic expeditions. That's fine by us. They sound gross and impractical. We'll take a balut any day.
London Supermarket Secretly Videotapes Alcohol/Cigarette Buyers [Boing Boing]
Photo Of The Day: Penguin Dumplings [Required Eating]
Penguin latest food - available in abundance soon [Goliathcorp]
Antarctic Explorers: Adrien de Gerlache [South-Pole.com]
Voyage of the Scotia 1902-04 [Glasgow Digital Library]
Photo: Men with dogs and a cage of penguins at the bow of an ice-bound ship, 1902-1904 [Glasgow Digital Library]
• Farm bill vote expected today, veto expected tomorrow, neither good [Reuters]
• Food aid bill: by the way, poor countries, you have to use GMO seeds! [Tribune]
• UK's Minister of Climate Change undermines Ramsay's food mile claims [Mirror]
• Undocumented immigrant worker bust at big Kosher meat plant in Iowa [NYTimes]
• Your sugar preferences, consumption may be a genetic predisposition [ScienceDaily]
• North Korea has a predictably interesting take on global food crisis [RedOrbit]
• ADB to African countries: please cool it with the food export bans! [Reuters]
• Should pet foods have calorie listings? What's Spot's RDA, exactly? [DMN]
Time for Americanized bento boxes: Center City's Solefood is offering "lunch boxes" that sure sound like bento to us.
Here's the official word from the restaurant:
The “Lunch Box” at SoleFood will satisfy the soul and mid-day cravings without leaving the diner stuffed. Offering four individual-sized items that lunch-goers usually eat during the mid-day meal - soup, salad, sandwich and chips, the “Lunch Box” draws upon Chef Thomas Harkins’ food inspirations of the day. The “Lunch Box” theme changes daily, depending upon the season and ingredients available at the market. Sample offering would include: grilled cheese with truffle, tomato, fontina, an arugula salad, roasted tomato soup and fingerling chips; tuna slider with wasabi honey aioli, tofu Caesar salad, black bean soup and yuca chips; shrimp po-boy with Creole mustard, tomato salad with maytag blue, fish chowder and vegetable chips. The “Lunch Box” is presented on four, four-inch square plates atop a larger 10-inch square plate.
Sale price is $16.
It's hard to know what to make of this Nation's Restaurant News graphic, which shows that Asian food, and therefore Asian restaurants, significantly outpaces all other restaurants in consumer satisfaction by six different metrics; even "accuracy of order" in a sector of the industry notorious for its employment of non-native English speakers! In case anyone thinks this is a statistical anomaly, NPR points out that "[t]here are about 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States — more than the number of McDonald's and Taco Bells combined." Add to this the smaller but burgeoning population of Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Korean restaurants, and you've got yourself a story. (By the way, we can only assume they just mean East Asian and not also South Asian and Middle Eastern restaurants. Because that would be ridiculous.)
So what accounts for the apparent superiority of Asian restaurants? It's hard to approach this question without making the types of sweeping generalizations that NPD did in constructing this poll. But if we had to paint with broad strokes, we'd say:
1) Immigrant work ethic: many Asian restaurants in the United States are owned and operated by recent immigrants. The common narrative about new immigrants to the United States is that they work really hard to attain their slice of the American pie (literally, in this case). Hard workers run better restaurants, provide better service, and perform better on surveys.
2) Heavy competition among similarly structured restaurants: your average Chinese take out spot does not resemble a top-end Japanese fusion restaurant, but within the categories, there's substantial repetition. We go through a lot of Chinese take out menus and they hew very closely to a model — thirty different preparations available with four different proteins. Egg rolls, spare rib, wonton soup? Name a Chinese restaurant that doesn't offer those. Southeast Asian restaurants behave in a similar fashion, although their canons have not been normalized to nearly the same extent as Chinese restaurants. Now, Asian cuisines are as complex and diverse as any on Earth, but only a limited selection of dishes have become successful in America, and those are the ones you see on menu after menu. The point of all this is that, if any given Chinese restaurant's menu is the same as the other, it creates a highly competitive system that rewards quick, competent service. Restaurants that do not meet a certain ever-increasing standard disappear within short order. Overall quality is high in such an environment, and the consumer recognizes that.
3) Lack of frame of reference: statistically, most people who participated in this survey did not eat home-cooked Asian meals growing up. If all you know from Asian food is what you get in restaurants, that will tend to bias you toward what Asian restaurants make. Not having to compete against Mother is certainly a leg up.
4) Asian food is especially delicious: this is not exactly an objective opinion, but let's (optimistically) call it an expert one. Boy do we love Asian food! Perhaps more of a confirmation of the survey's results than an explanation of them.
We're not all that surprised by the results, even if the magnitude of difference is striking. The good news is, now that a discrete subgroup of restaurants has been identified as successfully meeting consumer expectations, it should be easy enough for the rest of the pack to emulate it.
Chinese Restaurant Workers in U.S. Face Hurdles [NPR]
[Graphic: Nation's Restaurant News]
While listening to NPR and slowly getting ready for work this morning, we got to thinking: Could one judge presidential candidates by the amount they tip? Answer: Hell yes.
Turns out there is plenty of information online, not only about the tipping practices of our presidential candidates, but about celebrities in general, and even average Joes. More on that in a minute.
To answer the initial query, here's how the candidates stack up, gratuity-wise:
-According to TMZ, Barak Obama recently tipped $18 on a $2 Pabst Blue Ribbon in North Carolina.
-There's some debate over whether Hillary Clinton did or did not tip a waitress who may or may not have given her and her staff a free meal in a Sioux City diner.
-Virtually no serious information exists about John McCain's tipping habits, but Johnmccainisyourjalopy insists he tips 9%. Whatevs.
On the non-political side, a couple sites dish the dirt about celebrities and, like we mentioned, normal people. According to Stained Apron, Willie Nelson is a good tipper, but we could have told you that. Derober, which has a celebrity tipping database, reports that Kirsten Dunst stiffed a server after receiving a free meal: "I guess she multiplied 20% into zero and screwed me."
And finally, in case you ever get tempted to pull a similar stunt, there exists www.lousytippers.com, which keeps a database of bad tippers' names and cities. Be careful you don't end up on there.
Holy Schlitz - Obama's a Big Tipper! [TMZ]
Tempest in a Tip Jar [Washington Post]
Johnmccainisyourjalopy [Official Site]
Celebrity Tippers: The Saints and the Scum [Stained Apron]
Kirsten Dunst should go to tipping rehab too [Derober]
Lousy Tipper Database [Lousytippers]
Photo: Consumatron [Flickr]
Thanks to Mac & Cheese, we learned that a firm called Sarah's Savories makes a vegetarian scrapple. It's called, yes, Vrapple:
Vrapple is a delicious non-meat breakfast treat that the vegan and carnivore can both agree on!It makes those early morning protein struggles obsolete. Though it tastes eerily like it’s ‘meaty’ cousin, it is one-hundred percent meat-free.
Primary ingredients are seitan, locally grown & milled cornmeal, locally grown & milled buckwheat, organic vegan stock, organic canola oil, organic cane sugar, sea salt, and spices - but don’t think it’it does have a little back pepper kick!
If you want to try it for yourself, Vrapple is on the breakfast menu at Milkboy Coffee in Ardmore.
Fakin' It Like A Loca [Mac & Cheese]
Sarah's Savories [Official Site]
Milkboy Coffee [MenuPages]
Milkboy Coffee [Official Site]
• Burma's junta, large and evil as it is, hoarding all the good food aid [AP]
• Did you know the junta forced everyone to plant semi-useless jatropha nut? [AFP]
• Food science's new artificial mouth to make tastier products for you [NYTimes]
• Liberia bans food exports in a move sure to go over well with its neighbors [RTT]
• McDonald's has decreed that you will eat more fried chicken for breakfast [Trib]
• In antipodal Australia, beer trumps children in battle for seat belts [BBC]
We just added several new restaurants to MenuPages. Here are today's new selections:
• Eric Ripert's brand-spankin' new 10 Arts.
• New Center City high-end takeout and market Union Gourmet.
• West Philly's Cavanaugh's is a Penn/Drexel institution — and we've got their menu.
• The Hikari, a new upscale Japanese restaurant straight out of Northern Liberties.
• Bucks County/Bensalem Italian restaurant Casmirri's.
The logical follow-up to black metal sweets, which are hilariously evil in spite of the fact that they are cake, would be those sweet things that look like other things. We laughed right in the middle of our crowded office when confronted with this picture, from Serious Eats, of a reversed China Box scenario:
And we just kept laughing as we perused other non-sweet-looking sweets...
Barely a week ago, we ran a post that alluded to the curse of 1420 Locust Street. The space formerly held barbecue restaurant The Smoked Joint and Toni's Bistro... and was well-known for restaurants opening and closing within a year.
Well, the newest restaurant that opened in the space — Kaizan — just announced that they will be closing indefinitely. They were open for less than a year.
And so it goes...
The intersection of food and pop music provides some of the best cocktail party conversation / refreshment fodder. Be it the Janet Jackson breast cupcake that helped launch the Amateur Gourmet to national fame, the amazingly large collection of Beatles-themed candy or the web-TV phenomenon Cookin' with Coolio, food-themed pop and pop-themed food are always delicious.
But we felt transported to another, darker realm when we read about the website The Black Oven, a Nordic black metal-themed baking blog featured today on Boing Boing. With recipe titles like Where The Chocolate Beats Incessant, Le Petit Gateau du Les Legions Noire, and Frostbitten Molasses Cookies Entombed with Ginger, even your most devoted metal head can now enjoy a sweet treat without losing his or her edge.
Our mother likes to point out how nobody can really look all that scary while holding a pink bakery box. Well, Ma, that may no longer be true. If this evil baking trend catches on, we'll soon be feasting on "bloody elves hearts" and "shattered black souls" instead of plain old jelly donuts and chocolate chip cookies, and the pink bakery box will fall in line right behind the upside down cross as a symbol of the black metal underworld. Muahahaha!
The Black Oven [Official Site]
Black Metal Cupcakes [Boing Boing]
Janet Jackson Breast Cupcakes [Amateur Gourmet]
Beatles Incredible Edibles [Rarebeatles]
Cookin' with Coolio [My Damn Channel]
Photo: Courtesy of The Black Oven
Courtney and Kristen Kammerer own the Remedy Tea Bar on Sansom & 16th. They also have a problem: Their store's windows keep getting broken.
And while that might be bad enough, it gets worse. The city of Philadelphia won't let the sisters put a security grate over their door and windows. According to the Inquirer, the city zoning board told them they couldn't have shuttered security grates "because of police and fire department concerns."
On and on it goes:
"Now, even with an alarm system, they feel vulnerable. In the last six months, 15 commercial burglaries have been reported in the area bounded by Broad, 17th, Chestnut and Spruce Streets.In October, the store's front door was shattered. Two weeks later, it was shattered again, and this time $200 was gone from the store's cash register, which is still bent from the crowbar.
After the third break-in - about 2 a.m. a few weeks ago, the Kammerers sat in the store for hours, waiting for a repairman to board up the front window.
The sisters want to install the correct security grates, but say because of the shop's massive glass structure, they can't afford it now."
The "correct security grates" referenced in the quote above are aesthetically pleasing screen grates — which happen to be too expensive for most small Center City restaurants to install. Viva la bureaucracy.
A city tearoom fed up with the red tape [Inky]
Remedy Tea Bar [Official Site]
[Image via April Saul/Inquirer]
• Now that Congress finally finished farm bill, Bush to veto it [USAToday]
• Maybe a million Burmese storm victims going largely without aid [Bloomberg]
• In Canada, gov't support for ethanol subsidies waning rapidly [G&M]
• Rice production rising globally, but it won't stop rising prices [CNA]
• Crop dusting in California a lot more dangerous than it sounds [NYTimes]
Philly celeb chef Jose Garces of Tinto and Amada was the subject of a recent profile in the Chicago Sun-Times.
The reason for the profile is the recent opening of his Chicago restaurant Mercat a la Planxa. Garces was mentioned along with fellow chefs Marcus Samuelsson, Laurent Gras and Terrance Brennan — all of whom have opened new Chicago restaurants in 2008.
But what about our hometown chef? Here's what the Sun-Times had to say:
Garces graduated from Chicago's Kendall College with a degree in culinary arts, but built his hefty resume in New York and Philadelphia at award-winning restaurants."I've been wanting to get home for 13 years," Garces says. "Chicago's come to the forefront as a very modern culinary town. Along with Grant [Achatz of Alinea] and others who work here in town, that's transformed [this] from a meat-and-potatoes town to a culinary mecca."
At his two spots in Philadelphia, Tinto and Amada, Garces took bold approaches to Spanish cuisine. He's taking it farther at the 162-seat Mercat a la Planxa, with grilled-to-order meats and seafood at center stage.
For research, Garces and his team made a pilgrimage to Barcelona, Spain, to sample food inside the city's famed Mercat de la Boqueria and local tapas joints.
Sounds good to us.
Their kind of town [CST]
