• Adam Erace visits Parc; finds that the food doesn't quite match up to the scene. That said, chef Dominique Filoni is talented, and you will feel at least a little bit transported to Paris.
• In beer adventures, Beer Lass dishes on Bella Vista Beer & Soda's move and what to expect at the new location. For starters, it will be "more like a supermarket" and will feature over 125 beers, plus equipment for homebrewing.
• More of an oenophile and into DIY? Then this write-up of the Wine Room in Cherry Hill is probably just the ticket.
We've had pirates on the brain all morning (seriously! This story is the most compelling thing we've seen all week!), so this flub/hijacking/pirate attack on Philly.com seems remarkably apropos. Caught by our Google Reader, we're just dying to know what happened to the feed from the Philly.com dining section.
Screen cap after the jump!
Wow. Someone over there is REALLY into Jules Thin Crust Pizza, huh? Not as into Jules Thin Crust Pizza as we are into having witnessed this meltdown!
Tom Colicchio has a lot going for him. A pile of wildly successful Craft-brandedrestaurants far flung throughout the country, national celebrity as host of Top Chef, an oh-so-shiny bald pate. But one thing his fame and fortune haven't delivered is the one thing he started with in the first place: A kitchen of his own, where he could man the stoves himself and directly oversee the plating and service of a handful of happy diners.
So now that he's rich and famous enough to build a small, humble restaurant, he's building himself a small, humble restaurant: the tentatively-named Tom: Tuesday Dinner, which will be located in the private dining room of his New York Craft flagship, and will run dinner service every other Tuesday, to the tune of a few benjamins a head. The first seating is October 14.
While we can see this raising eyebrows in some circles, and we certainly see the ironic circularity of the situation, we are ultimately of the opinion that this kind of return-to-the-kitchen situation is precisely what's needed to counteract the current national scourge of celeb chef empires. For every Mario Batali, who can effortlessly pull off helming Babbo in New York and Osteria Mozza in LA with equal aplomb, there are a dozen wannabe-national chefs like Marcus Samuelsson, whose C-House flounders helplessly in Chicago while in New York, his Merkato 55 circles the drain. Not to mention Wolfgang Puck, who has become little more than a glorified Chef Boyardee: a well-known name and a smiling face, readily available on soup cans and in your grocer's freezer.
What Colicchio's doing is a smart antidote to Puck-style market oversaturation (or Samuelsson-style too-much-too-soon). While anyone with basic cable knows Tom's name and face, and anyone in New York, Atlanta, LA, or Las Vegas is within 30 minutes of a menu he's personally signed off on, he's taking it one step further. He's simultaneously appeasing his original fans, the ones who knew him by taste instead of by DVR, and also shoring up the core value of his celebrity. Both of these, fortuitously, are achieved merely by offering the real thing: Himself, in a kitchen, making a plate of food just for you.
So, Robert Parker wants us to boycott restaurants that over-charge for wine. The publisher of Wine Advocatereportedly writes in an upcoming article that restaurants jacking up the price of wine is, "nothing more or less than a legitimized mugging."
Strong words, no doubt. But for as much as we'd like to see his campaign work, it might be a non-starter. Parker decries the idea of wine as "a luxury item," but the fact is, for many people, it really is a luxury item. Take, for example, the recent study that found more expensive wine tastes better. And, as long as there is disposable income left in this country, somebody's probably going to dispose of theirs on fancy wines.
But he's right that it's infuriating to know you're overpaying by as much as 500 percent simply because other suckers out there are willing to do so. So yeah, go ahead and boycott those places that gouge you into the poorhouse, but you may just have to write them off for good. We don't think they're going to see the light any time soon.
if you do still want enjoy a glass of wine the next time you're out to dinner, get a look at Lettie Teague's Food and Wine tips for getting the best deals in a restaurant. Also, check out this 2003 New York Times article on how wines are priced.
• Today the new FDA country-of-origin labeling requirements go into effect for produce and meat! [Seattle Times]
• ... for most produce and meat, that is. Mixed vegetables and Spam are exempt. [Bloomberg]
• Part of yesterday's failed bailout included a bill that would prevent non-ambulatory cattle from entering the food supply. [Pork Magazine {a real publication!)]
• Cadbury, Heinz, and Mars are all pulling their Chinese-made products, as they may contain melamine. Sigh. [Telegraph]
• Voters in California are debating Proposition 2, which would mandate that farm animals — including swine, veal, and chickens — be uncaged. In related news, why don't we live in California? [SF Chron]
• NoLibs brunch spot Cafe Estelle gets two bells from Craig LaBan. With only a couple exceptions, he finds everything to be pretty great. He even posits that the pancakes "may actually be among the best [he's] tasted in the city." Two bells, indeed!
• On the flip side, Rick Nichols visits Cooper's Brick Oven Wine Bar and runs into several "start-up glitches" that he thinks "ought to be history soon," based on Bruce Cooper's history. Worry not though: the faults like elsewhere than the pizzas, which are good.
Let no one tell you that you can't live forever: immortality has been discovered -- well, for a burger, anyway. Death eludes the indomitable McDonald's hamburger. Consider the following evidence, via Serious Eats and courtesy of Karen Hanrahan's website, bestwellnessconsultant.com:
The burger on the left, purchased 12 years ago looks exactly the same as the burger on the right, circa 2008. No wrinkling, no discoloration... the cosmetic industry ought to take a hint.
The Big Mac's source of fountain of youth is not, as popular conspiracy theories would have us believe, children who had been sucked into the ball pits, but rather an elixir blend of powerful anti-aging ingredients: distilled monoglycerides, DATEM, ascorbic acid, azodicarbonamide, enzymes, ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides, sodium stearoyl lactylate, guar gum, mono-and diglycerides, calcium peroxide, calcium propionate and sodium propionate. And that's just the bun.
Now the patty is a real puzzle. According to the McDonald's website, the patty is composed of
"100% pure USDA inspected beef; no fillers, no extenders. Prepared with grill seasoning (salt, black pepper)." But this doesn't quite explain why meat that ought to have rotted beyond recognition still looks like a recent order. Got theories on this subject? Send us a line.
I leave you with one thought, however: wouldn't it be embarrassing (or poignant, depending on your point of view) if a millennium from now, an advanced future race discovered the only remaining fragment of our civilization -- the soul-less, youthful carcass of a cheeseburger? And, in any case, aren't there better alternatives?
Chicago put itself on the front burner this past weekend with the inaugural Chicago Gourmet, a weekend-long festival of food and wine attended by chefs and sommeliers near and far. Special MenuPages correspondents Bridget Houlihan and Tammy Green, of the dining podcast Chicago Bites, were on the scene. From Sunday: Big names, big fun.
Art Smith's shrimp and grits.
I think Gale Gand (of tru) and Art Smith (of Table 52) should start a TV show of their own so that they can cook together more often.
When they took the stage at Chicago Gourmet Sunday for a cooking demonstration, it was like getting a sneak peak into what that show would be like.
Both Gand and Smith are obviously at home in front of an audience because of the time they have spent in front of the camera, and they know how to put on a good show. They even had cookware prizes to give away! But there was also something more personal about their presentation.
The two friends cook together behind-the-scenes at events but rarely in public. Still, they know each other well. So Gand and Smith kicked things off by cracking open a bottle of wine. They raised a glass to Chicago Gourmet. Then they got busy helping each other cook.
Gand made apple fritters. And Smith whipped the egg whites for her. Smith made his famous shrimp and grits. And Gand helped with the sauce. Then they opened some champagne.
It was fun watching these two play in the kitchen! They share a love for food and cooking that's positively contagious.
I wish they'd come cook in my kitchen. As it is, I'm about to go heat up leftovers in the microwave.
Chicago put itself on the front burner this past weekend with the inaugural Chicago Gourmet, a weekend-long festival of food and wine attended by chefs and sommeliers near and far. Special MenuPages correspondents Bridget Houlihan and Tammy Green, of the dining podcast Chicago Bites, were on the scene. From Sunday: Hitting The Bottle
Jackie Shen telling her story at Chicago Gourmet.
They say the secret is in the sauce, and folks rave about the sauce Jackie Shen serves on chicken at Chicago's Red Light restaurant.
"Honey, it comes from a bottle!" Shen admitted, with a rather devious smile during her "East Meets West: Wok and Wisk" seminar Sunday at Chicago Gourmet.
Of course Shen does a ton of stuff to that bottled sauce before she serves it.
You need to have a good foundation in cooking to know what to do, she says. Inspiration doesn't just strike. Finding the right balance of flavors is all about knowing what you're working with — and trial and error.
Shen went on to talk about how her entire cooking career has been about finding that balance. Originally trained as a French chef, she got bored with the cuisine (especially the sauces) about seven years ago and decided she needed a change.
"My dad said, you're not a chef anyway; you know nothing about Asian food," she said. "I wanted to prove him wrong!"
So Shen asked her mom to visit and teach her how to make wontons. She started to focus on the food she ate as a child in Hong Kong but didn't know how to make. And once she had a solid foundation in Asian cooking, she started to think of ways to fuse it with western-style food.
"I've had a good time going from fire to wok," said Shen. "People are traveling more, and trying new flavors. There can be balance between them."
Shen is currently exploring this further in a cookbook she is collaborating on in addition to teaching at Kendall College and working at Red Light.
One thing is for sure: I need to try that sauce from a bottle as soon as possible. Red Light here I come!
A story on the Barf Blog today raises a question so disturbing that much of our restaurant-o-phile readership will probably shudder at the very thought. But the evidence is there: Some restaurant and institutional kitchen food poisoning may be deliberate.
It's not pretty, but when you think we've all probably harbored some kind of sick revenge fantasy against a boss from hell or a job from hell or some such thing, you have to admit it's totally possible that some of the food poisoning cases in the world are no accident.
Barf Blog refers to a story of an International House of Pancakes in Texas that has been linked to more than 100 salmonella cases over the last five months. Police are investigating, and while they stopped short of calling the contamination intentional, they said they were, "investigating every option."
But don't let it scare you too bad. Really, when was the last time you heard a substantiated case of this kind of attack? Plus, it's one of those things you absolutely can't predict. So just try not to think about it, okay?
But do avoid the IHOP at I-40 and Western Street in Amarillo. Intentional or no, that's a shameful track record.
When we wrote about the Bocuse d'Or last month, Kevin Sbraga, Culinary Director at the Garces Restaurant Group, was in the running for a spot on the American team.
Well, the Bocuse d'Or semi-finals took place this weekend, and Timothy Hollingsworth of The French Laundry in Yountville, California beat out the rest of the competition.
First, the bad: this means that Sbraga is out and will not be going to the Bocuse d'Or in Lyon in January. The good: he'll be back at Amada and Tinto even sooner, and without the competition to think about, will be able to devote all of his culinary efforts and brilliance to Garces restaurants. The super good: Sbraga won the Best Meat Award! We're sure he made an awesome showing, and this definitely lends weight to that theory.
Chicago put itself on the front burner this past weekend with the inaugural Chicago Gourmet, a weekend-long festival of food and wine attended by chefs and sommeliers near and far. Special MenuPages correspondents Bridget Houlihan and Tammy Green, of the dining podcast Chicago Bites, were on the scene. From Sunday: Tasting California.
In the tasting tent.
I tasted my way through the Alexander Valley in Sonoma County Sunday without even leaving Chicago.
Stefen Soltysaik from Rodney Strong Vineyards was my guide; his wine seminar at Chicago Gourmet, called "Examination of Cool to Warm Climate Cabernet Sauvignon," was excellent. We were each given four glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon. The first three glasses were from different Rodney Strong wineries in the valley, and the fourth glass was the vineyard's current pride and joy, the 2005 Rockaway blend.
Then the geography lesson began, and Soltysaik explained how climate impacts wine. Each glass was incredibly different because of the location of the winery where it was produced.
As we tasted and learned more, Soltysaik also detailed how the wine we were drinking was made.
It was a fascinating and well-put-together presentation. I've taken a variety of wine tours and have gone to a number of tastings. This one was far-and- away the most educational and entertaining I've attended.
The wine was spectacular too… especially the Rockaway 2005! I sought out that wine and sipped some more at the Grand Cru Tasting later in the day. It just might inspire me to go to Sonoma one day. (As if I really needed an excuse!)
• Uh-oh, Jack-o-Lantern (and pumpkin baked good) enthusiasts! Too much rain this summer = poor pumpkin harvest this fall. [Boston Globe]
• The poisoned milk disaster spreads its melamine tainted tentacles even further, with news that White Rabbit candies, the inexplicably tasty vanilla-flavored chews, are NSFE (not safe for eating). [LA Times]
• The North Dakota Farmer's Union is opening a restaurant in Washington, D.C., and they're shooting for making it the "greenest" in the city. Ironically, since this demands an emphasis on local crops, most of the food will not come from North Dakota farms. [AP]
• Would you like Starbucks in exchange for your empty milk carton? RecycleBank awards per pounds recycled, and those points can be redeemed for Starbucks, groceries, Coca-Cola products and more. Filling your tummy by emptying your bottles and cans? Pretty sweet deal. [Newsweek]
• 103,000 pounds. Sound heavy? That is how much meat the Utah Food Bank got from 4-H members across the state, in an incredibly weighty donation. [The Salt Lake Tribune]
Fresh off of her spectacular interview with Katie Couric, the nation's #1 Tina Fey impersonator has been flitting about Philly these past few days.
Sarah Palin stumped around town for John McCain this weekend. Palin kicked off her hob-knobbing with the hoi polloi on Friday, when she popped in to the Irish Pub, pre-debate. She continued her excellent Philadelphia adventure yesterday by sampling our most famed regional food. Yup: Palin went to Tony Luke's with her 14-year old daughter, Willow, where she ordered a cheeesteak with Cheez Whiz and onions.
Curious about how she did? CNN taped her order.
Some commentary on the cheesesteak would've been nice, but oh well. And for the sake of giving credit where credit is due, we must admit to being impressed that she went to Tony Luke's instead of Pat''s or Geno's.
Chicago puts itself on the front burner this weekend with the inaugural Chicago Gourmet, a weekend-long festival of food and wine attended by chefs and sommeliers near and far. Special MenuPages correspondents Bridget Houlihan and Tammy Green, of the dining podcast Chicago Bites, are on the scene. Today: How to taste wine.
Lined up and ready to pour.
Pairing wine with food is what makes wine great. And Master Sommelier Fred Dame says there's a scientific reason for that.
"Food is full of fat, and wine is acidic," he explained Saturday during a wine seminar at Chicago Gourmet. "Think about eating steak. You're essentially coating your palate with fat. As you sip wine, it cleans your palate so you can taste the next bite."
The first bite is always the best, he continued, and when you pair food with wine you get 30 first bites.
That's a good reason to become a wine lover, and once you start tasting a variety of wine it's a whole new world.
In the seminar "Tasting the Masters' Way," Dame walked us through that world a bit with a blind tasting. He detailed techniques sommeliers use to identify and appreciate wine and discussed what it takes to become a sommelier. Some of his best tips:
Identify the scents in the wine you're about to taste. What fruits do you smell?
Look at the color of the wine. Is it bright? Clear?
Keep in mind that white wines grow darker with age and red wines grow lighter.
Swish your wine around. Look at the legs. Wines with a lot of tannins are fuller-bodied wines.
Taste a variety of wine. It will surprise you.
Take notes whenever practical.
Enhance your skill with taste tests — especially blind ones.
Becoming a sommelier is not easy, and it takes additional years of study to become a master. But what I learned from Dame will surely enhance my wine experience — not to mention come in handy the next time I'm trying to select a bottle to go with dinner.
Chicago puts itself on the front burner this weekend with the inaugural Chicago Gourmet, a weekend-long festival of food and wine attended by chefs and sommeliers near and far. Special MenuPages correspondents Bridget Houlihan and Tammy Green, of the dining podcast Chicago Bites, are on the scene. Today: Food demos!
Jose Garces, head chef at Chicago's Mercat a la Planxa, prepares octopus.
Do you know how to "scare" an octopus? Dip it in boiling water three times before dropping it in to cook.
No joke. This simple technique, known as scaring, tenderizes the octopus, making it more succulent to eat.
Jose Garces, the head chef at Chicago's Mercat a la Planxa, explained this to a captive audience yesterday during a Best of Spain and Mexico cooking demonstration at Chicago Gourmet.
Sharing the stage with Rick Bayless, Garces got everyone's attention before he even started cooking, simply by holding up the octopus. Then he showed us how to cook it. I know I'm not ready to give this a shot myself, but it was utterly fascinating to watch. Until yesterday, I had absolutely no idea how to "scare" an octopus.
You know what else? Start saving the corks from the red wine you drink. When you throw them in the boiling water with the octopus it adds to the flavor. Cool, huh?
Watching a cooking demo at Chicago Gourmet is what I imagine it would be like to be on the set of a cooking show that airs on the Food Network. The stage at Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park is currently the home of a snazzy looking kitchen set, complete with professional appliances and cookware. Large mirrors hang over the prep tables so that you can watch the chefs work.
And it's really fun to watch a great chef cook. They make it look easy. Cooking and plating well is an art… and I like to see it as it happens.
Having said that, I must admit that I don't watch cooking demos often. That's because I find it very dissatisfying not to be able to taste the food I'm watching people prepare. I know for a fact that if I were to make the same dish myself it wouldn't taste as good. So I was really hoping to get to taste the food after watching live cooking demos.
No such luck. In some cases, I could find samples of the dish made in a demo at a tasting table later in the day, but not always.
Still, the demos were great to watch and they may even inspire me to cook! Garces certainly inspired me to eat: Tammy and I made our way Mercat a la Planxa for dinner last night and splurged on not one, but two orders of octopus.
—BRIDGET HOULIHAN
After the jump, photos of Rick Bayless's two demo dishes, plus salted cactus!
Rick Bayless' demo dish: Stewed ribeye.
A sample portion of the ribeye, served up at a tasting table later.
Salted cactus from another demo, "The Best of Latin Flavors."
Chicago puts itself on the front burner this weekend with the inaugural Chicago Gourmet, a weekend-long festival of food and wine attended by chefs and sommeliers near and far. Special MenuPages correspondents Bridget Houlihan and Tammy Green, of the dining podcast Chicago Bites, are on the scene. Today: Where's the food?
Dried fruit display at Pastoral Artisan Cheese
Chicago Gourmet is a food festival without food.
My tummy was rumbling when I arrived at the main entrance Saturday morning, primed to sample everything Chicago's best chefs had to throw at me. It turns out that wasn't much.
The majority of the booths at the main event, located on the lawn of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, offered wine, not food.
"Isn't there supposed to be a Grand Cru Wine Tasting later today?" I asked Tammy, my Chicago Bites co-host, as she photographed the scene.
"Yeah."
"So what's with all the wine?" I asked, baffled. "Where's the food?"
So we set out on a tireless quest to find something to eat, relentlessly foraging from booth to booth.
The booths themselves were lovely. Many looked professionally designed, and were decorated with phenomenal flower arrangements and tempting pictures of food or large reproductions of restaurant menus. But time after time, we walked away with brochures and nothing to eat.
Then we saw a line stretching out of the Chaise Lounge booth… they were serving crab cake and salad! Victory!
"Have another plate," the owner said, after I'd devoured my first. "I've never been to a food fest with so little food."
True. And here's the kicker: I'd venture a guess that all that wine drove up ticket prices. So folks paid $100 to get in and drink on empty stomachs because they thought they were paying to eat.
Tammy and I were able to ferret out a few more food tastings throughout the day. But they was sparse and meat-heavy. Tammy is a "fussitarian": She eats fish but no meat. So she sat by patiently while I tried things like chicken salad wraps and bacon-and-onion tartlets.
She did get to sample A Mano's olive oil gelato though, which was one of the food highlights of my day. We both enjoyed Kefir smoothies from Star Fruit café in the Whole Foods kids' area, and there were a couple of booths with dried fruits and excellent cheese. I loved Rick Bayless' rib eye steak dish. But of course Tammy couldn't eat that.
—BRIDGET HOULIHAN
The crab cake at the Chaise Lounge booth was a saving grace.
Chicago puts itself on the front burner this weekend with the inaugural Chicago Gourmet, a weekend-long festival of food and wine attended by chefs and sommeliers near and far. Special MenuPages correspondents Bridget Houlihan and Tammy Green, of the dining podcast Chicago Bites, are on the scene. First up: The opening night reception.
When you know the bartender, the headwaiter, or the bus boy, you're in for a better dining experience. These are the folks whose service can make or break an evening.
So, when I spotted Carol, an acquaintance I met years ago through work, behind the bar last night at Chicago Gourmet's kickoff in Millennium Park, I had an inkling it was going to be an amazing night.
"I didn't even know you were a bartender!" I said, wandering over to say hello, while the press photographers were busy snapping shots of Mayor Daley.
"One of my four jobs," she replied with a smile. "This is such a cool event, isn't it?" she said, pouring me a glass of wine. "You've got to try the Seven Daughters white, it a blend of seven grapes. You'll love it!"
Chicago Gourmet aims to solidify the city's place as an international food contender through a series of cooking demos, seminars, and tastings this weekend. And the food I sampled last night was great, but it wasn't the most striking part of the launch.
The most striking part was a prevailing sense of excitement. Every chef and attendee I chatted with shared Carol's enthusiasm for the event and seemed genuinely thrilled that Chicago is finally flexing some culinary muscle. Last night's reception was attended mostly by presenting chefs, the media, and corporate sponsors, but it was anything but stuffy. It was more like a jolly convention of foodies.
I still have to wonder though if Chicago Gourmet will resonate with the general public. In Chicago, we're used to having a street fair every 15 minutes during the summer, so a weekend of food is nothing new. And as a result, we're also pros at eating food on a stick in a tent.
Ticket prices, chocolate pepper macaroons, and worries for the future, after the jump!
John Penn's salad gives me hope that the British won't starve!
But we don't usually have dark chocolate with sea salt on a stick as an option. And until Chicago Gourmet, we've never had to pay upwards of $150 just to get in the tent in the first place. This is not the Taste of Chicago. It aspires to something more.
The local lineup showcases Chicago's best, but just as impressive is the event's international flavor. Chefs from Chicago's sister cities throughout the world have flown in to participate, and last night there was much buzz about the 2016 Olympic bid.
In between chats with fellow foodies, I did manage to taste everything. The standouts for me were the tuna tartar starters, and the desserts – especially the chocolate pepper macaroons. Many of the main dish tastings were game heavy – featuring veal and ostrich. I didn't really like them, but appreciated what they were going for.
My favorite dish of the evening was John Penn's Haricot Vert Salad, a refreshing medley with some of the tastiest tomato and olive garnish I've ever had.
Penn is visiting from England, and when I lived there, I ate to live, not because I wanted to eat. If Penn's salad is any indication, he has the potential to greatly improve the food scene on the other side of the pond. He's a culinary teacher too… so he's passing his knowledge to others! There's hope!
The Risotto with Veal Sweatbread & Crawfish Moussaka was rich and flavorful, but not my thing.
As many tasting as there were at the reception, there wasn't nearly enough of it to make a real meal out of it. The ticket price was for quality, not quantity. There were also very few vegetarian options. That's unusual in a city that is normally veggie friendly.
My initial impression of Chicago Gourmet is good. But I do wish the price tag wasn't so high (although I'm told that it is much less expensive than similar events in New York) because everyone should have the opportunity to taste the best Chicago has to offer.
Will folks pay the price and show up for events today? Or will corporate sponsors make up the majority again? I'll keep you posted! No matter what, I'm looking forward to good eats. And I'd better get to it.
Although most of Stephen Starr's empire is located in Philly, he does also have a couple of restaurants in New York, one of which is a second Buddakan.
Concurrently, a quiet, under-the-radar, and wholly obscure little movie by the name of "Sex and the City" came out last spring and it just so happens that one of the most "important" scenes in that cinematic oeuvre was filmed at New York's Buddakan. Frank Bruni of the New York Times has a piece up today that is mostly based around a conversation he had with Starr last week about the filming of "Sex and the City," why Starr did it, and what it has meant for business at Buddakan.
We learn that
Mr. Starr said that when the movie’s producers asked him if they could use his restaurant, he said an instant and emphatic yes, even though it meant shutting the restaurant down for a day and a half of filming.
The movie’s producers, he said, paid him $50,000 to do so. That’s less, he said, than the restaurant’s gross revenue over that period would have been, but he wasn’t troubled by the shortfall. In fact, he said, he would have let the producers use the restaurant for free.
And he would have done so even though he had no guarantee of an explicit reference to Buddakan in the movie, which — to both my recollection and his — did not in fact mention the restaurant by name, at least not before the final credits. (I didn’t stay for those.)
Since the movie was released, hordes and hordes of tourists, trending female, have flooded through the doors of Buddakan, faithfully taking pictures of themselves in the same spot where the "Sex and the City" scene was shot. Although Starr laments all of the Cosmos that his staff has had to mix up, it sounds like he's basically laughing his way to the bank.
You read that right. As if the city's hot dogs, pizza, and Italian beef — oh, and the Taste — weren't enough, Chicago is putting itself on the haute culinary map this weekend with the inaugural Chicago Gourmet, a weekend-long festival of food and wine.
While much of the talent is homegrown — Frontera's Rick Bayless, Top Chef's Stephanie Izard, Gale Gand of Tru and PBS — the festival's got global reach, with chefs and wine experts flying in from all over: from Terrance Brennan of New York's Picholine and Maricel Presilla of Hoboken, NJ's criminally delicious Cucharamama and Zafra, to Mpuhe Dhlomo of Africa Meets Europe in Durban, South Africa and Francesca Marsetti from Milan's Brasserie Iseo Brescia.
Of course, MenuPages will be on the scene as well: special correspondents Bridget Houlihan and Tammy Green (of the can't-miss dining podcast Chicago Bites) will be bringing their formidable skills to the table, filing regular reports throughout the weekend, starting with tonight's opening night gala.
For cop-out Friday, check out this classic Sesame Street video with Grover doing his best impression of yours truly as a waiter. No, not really. But seriously? If we're ever called upon to take up the mantle of the service industry once more, we're totally going to forgo a notebook in favor of Grover's rhyming memory technique. "Round and tasty on a bun..."
• Europe is concerned that their condensed milk could be of the tainted Chinese variety. [New York Times]
• People in Japan and Taiwan have already become sickened by the melamine-tainted milk. [Washington Post]
• Hong Kong residents are staying as far away from food imported from China as possible. [Bloomberg]
• Here in the U.S., we don't need to worry about tainted food because the FDA has the resources to stay on top of it. Oh wait. They totally don't. [Chicago Tribune]
• Even amidst the financial meltdown, there's good news for at least one group of rich people: McDonald's shareholders. [LA Times]
• This week's food section may as well be titled "We Love Garces and Vetri." One of the lead articles is "Chefs of Philly's Future," in which LaBan dissects Philly's changing fine dining scene, and how Marc Vetri and Jose Garces fit into this landscape (or have shaped it). To sum: fine dining has relaxed, but not in the sense of being lazy &mdash rather in that of being less stuffy.
• Next up, we have the history of Marc Vetri &mdash his beginnings, what makes him tick, and so forth. He gets props for bringing real Italian cooking to "a town simmered in a century's worth of Italian American red sauce and meatballs, but Vetri dared to forgo the penne marinara and Caesar salad."
• Jose Garces gets the same kind of treatment, but in this profile, the accolades are for being "Latino way before Latino was cool. Before it was prefixed with nuevo." Both profiles include videos of the chefs making one of their dishes, which is beyond cool.
We wrote about the delightfully eccentric Kenny Shopsin, of New York's Shopsin's, but a couple days ago and that same night, he appeared on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. For those readers who have never been to Shopsin's, and may perhaps never go, this clip is a pretty stellar example (minus a lot of cursing) of what to expect from Mr. Shopsin. For those who have, he's in fine form, no?
The video is a fun watch, not only for the way these two banter (seriously, have two people ever looked more perplexed and befuddled by the other?), but also, because of what they cook up. Mac and cheese pancakes? A pancake with a tiny little burger in it? S'MORES PANCAKES? Kenny Shopsin is truly blowing our mind with all of these reinventions!
What's more, this video &mdash plus all of the Shopsin-mania swirling around the release of his cookbook &mdash just happens to fall during the same week as National Pancake Day, which is tomorrow. As far as coincidences go, this one could hardly get better: Shopsin has whet pancake appetites nationwide + you basically have no recourse but to stuff your face with pancakes tomorrow.
We can't all rush to Shopsin's for mac and cheese pancakes, but that doesn't mean that there aren't mighty fine pancakes to be found elsewhere in the country. So run on down to Honey's Sit 'n Eat tomorrow and remind yourself what a real short stack tastes like. Hell, order yourself a side of macaroni and see what happens.
This week's BusinessWeek has a pretty hi-lar-ious article about "up-and-coming" artsy neighborhoods in cities across the country. Among the neighborhoods mentioned? The Mission in San Francisco, Echo Park in Los Angeles, and our own childhood neighborhood, Jamaica Plain in Boston. Also given a nod? Our own Northern Liberties.
According to the ever-cutting edge folks at BusinessWeek,
Northern Liberties north of Center City has become one of the hottest neighborhoods for young artists and hipsters who frequent the area's teeming restaurants and bars. Prices for homes have been rising but affordable space is still available, especially in the neighborhood's northern limits.
It's not the idea of the availability of affordable space that's funny, so much as the fact that there is nothing "new" about the up-and-comers, so much so that we couldn't help but question where the reporter has been for the past, oh, 5-10 years (and that's being incredibly generous).
Anyway! The point is not to ridicule poor, clueless, Mr. Gopal, but rather to say that the wealth of awesome (and sometimes even slightly posh) dining options in NoLibs are a pretty trusty indicator that the neighborhood has arrived already.
For example, we think that one would be pretty hard pressed to find something like Bar Ferdinand with its distinctly upmarket tapas ("membrillo stuffed fried Manchego, frozen apple foam, walnut membrillo puree"?) in a neighborhood that was still truly undiscovered. Same thing for Sovalo, really. We love it to death, but anywhere that offers duck confit is hardly a signifier of grit.
So, um, remember that Swiss Chef we reported on, who was playing with the idea of using human milk in his restaurant dishes? Yeah, well guess who lurrrrved that story? PETA, of course.
The animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals hopped right on the human milk bandwagon, sending a letter to Ben and Jerry's co-founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield asking them to replace cow milk with human milk in their famously counterculture-embracing ice cream.
In response to our letter, Ben and Jerry's issued the following statement: "We applaud PETA's novel approach to bringing attention to an issue, but we believe a mother's milk is best used for her child." Hey, guys, that's our point: Cow's milk is for baby cows.
Funny. The idea of breast-milk-based food made the rounds as recently as April 1. As a joke. But perhaps all this attention will legitimize the stuff enough for some local joint to give it a try? Well, you can always search our menus to find out.
• If it weren't for that pesky financial crash, this Chinese food safety thing would be really big news. As it is, you may not have heard that all sorts of potentially contaminated products are being yanked in all sorts of countries. [CNN]
• When San Francisco passed a health-care mandate, some restaurants tacked on a surcharge. Now a New York City grocery store is doing the same and blaming the high cost of energy. [Newsday]
• A London restaurant is offering a meal meant to replicate the diet of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton. It contains 6,000 calories, but no penguin. [Times Online]
• Pity the French. Really. They had a good thing going with the long lunch, and now they're not only cutting that short, their options are shrinking as restaurants across France shutter in these tough times. [Business Week]
This is news guaranteed to set anyone with even the most cursory interest in the Philly food scene a-twitter! Two of the city's most acclaimed chefs coming together to make one six-course meal? It probably does not get any better than this. Well, at least for palates &mdash the wallet is another matter, as the dinner will make it $200 lighter. What's the cause of this unbelievable, albeit not necessarily intuitive, pairing? From the release:
This collaborative dinner will be a celebration of the launches of their respective first cookbooks, Latin Evolution (Lake Isle Press, September 2008) and Il Viaggio Di Vetri: A Culinary Journey (Ten Speed Press, October 2008).
Good enough for us! If one is interested in going, "tickets for this spectacular dinner event are available by calling Brooke Everett at Amada at (215) 625-2506, ext. 109. Seating is limited to 50 guests. Reservations are required." Although certainly not off-setting the cost, both of the cookbooks are part of the admission price.
It's not often that dining opportunities like this come up, and although the price tag is high, it's pretty much guaranteed to be worth it. It should be noted though that the dinner is not "collaborative" in the sense that they will be creating six dishes together, but rather in the sense of being a collaborative evening. The way things will play out is with three courses at Amada, private trolley to transport the 50 lucky eaters to Osteria, and then three courses at Osteria. Each course come with wine pairings.
• This week's Field Guide covers tacos. Ostensibly in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, which started on September 15, but is any explanation necessary? We say no. Anyway... among the many great suggestions are goat meat tacos at La Lupe, as well as veal cheek tacos as Distrito.
• Elsewhere in the food section, Adam Erace reviews Distrito">Distrito. It's not without imperfections, but Garces is basically untouchable these days. Service glitches were found, as well as easily fixable flubs (too small tortillas, for example), but overall "Distrito’s collection of playful small plates echoes the exuberance of its design, as well as the joie de vivre of Mexico City."
• And lastly, Sidedish rounds up a whole slew of fall wine and beer events, with a couple miscellaneous tips thrown in (Phileo, Du Jour Cafe @ Symphony). The last two items, Sangria Happy Hour at Chick's, and Philly Beer Week have got us really jazzed.
I've known quite a few picky eaters. A roommate once dated a guy for a year who would only eat in chain restaurants. (My reaction: "And you went on more than one date with him?") A friend is terrified of mayonnaise and begins to hyperventilate at the mere thought of mayo being in anything she's already ingested.* And I once dated a guy who wouldn't eat eggs or anything with even a hint of spice. (That relationship ended very, very quickly.)
But that was nothing compared to some of the people interviewed for this Globe and Mail article. One guy will only eat dry chicken, well-done steak and sauce-free veggies. (That's him in the video, attempting to eat pizza, which he did not like. Who doesn't like pizza?!) Then there's the other guy who has eaten the same thing for lunch for the past decade: peanut butter on crackers with a glass of milk.
The first inclination is to label them spoiled brats — which they are, to the same extent we all are; none of us is threatened with starvation, so we have the luxury of picking and choosing what we eat — but after reading through the comments too, I'm beginning to think that this isn't just some childish thing. These people have a serious disorder. Imagine how socially crippling it would be to not be able to hold down most foods. It made me feel a bit sympathetic towards these ridiculously picky eaters.
That said, God help me if I ever give birth to a picky eater. I love food too much, and I just don't have that kind of patience.
Wow, talk about a clash of the food-politics titans. Check out this debate between sustainable food guru Michael Pollan and Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant, held at a Google-sponsored forum.
They're talking about pretty important issues, and in a way, each seems like something of a caricature of his side. Grant wants to solve the world's hunger problems through the magic of (Monsanto) technology, while Pollan argues for many local, sustainable solutions, developed at a grass-roots level, by people so hungry they can barely keep themselves alive. There's an element of evil corporate suit vs. idealist college professor, but that's as much a pre-existing stereotype as it is a reality. They're both pretty astute and articulate.
It's good viewing, even if few of the world's problems are solved by the end. Most people don't want to eat crops that were developed in a lab, nor can they afford grass-fed steaks from New York's Blue Hill. But at least debates like this get companies like Monsanto out of the backrooms of government, and idealists like Pollan out of the ivory tower.
• The French are moving away from long, lazy lunches to sandwiches eaten at their desks, and cafes in Paris are suffering. Naturally, this is really big news over there, lots of hand-wringing involved. [The Independent]
• And now fast food is making serious inroads in the Mediterranean, and the kids are getting much fatter because of it. [NYT]
• Hot oatmeal is the top seller among the new food items at Starbucks. It's great news for the company since profit margins for the oatmeal are among the highest. Which is usually a good indication that it's so cheap and easy you should be making it at home. [Reuters]
• Scandal in the food industry: it seems there may have been some price fixing among California tomato processors. [SFGate]
• Kolkata (aka Calcutta) in India has banned smoking in restaurants after October 2. [Times of India]
Jose Garces is getting so much national press these days, and it makes us so happy. Relatively fresh off of his Iron Chef win, he appeared on CBS's The Early Show yesterday morning.
He was on the show to talk about Latin Evolution, his new/first cookbook, which also happens to be a pretty deeply personal collection. (He describes it as "a story about me and others like me, first-generation Americans who spoke Spanish at home and English at school, people who felt like outsiders in their neighborhoods but relished the camaraderie and comfort of the family table.")
The article accompanying the video includes several recipes (!!), so that one can attempt to recreate Garces' dishes like "Arepas with Oxtail Ropa Vieja & Avocado Espuma" or "Bananas y Azafrán: Caramel-Rum Bananas with Flourless Chocolate Cake & Saffron Custard." Yes please!
If you don't know this restaurant, you should: New York's Shopsin's, perhaps one of the quirkiest, oddest, most delightful, most infuriating restaurants in the world, which is presided over by Kenny Shopsin, who is himself one of the quirkiest, oddest, most delightful, most infuriating restaurateurs in the world.
Shopsin's is famous for any number of reasons: the 900-plus-item menu, the draconian dining room rules (no parties greater than 4, no two people at the same table ordering the same dish), the seeming infinity of Kenny's cantankerousness, the Calvin Trillin treatment in The New Yorker, the sign reading "All our cooks wear condoms."
And then, of course, there is the food: Blisters on my Sisters (sort of like huevos rancheros), Egg Nachos (exactly what it sounds like), Slutty Cakes (pancakes filled with pumpkin and peanut butter), Mac n Cheese Pancakes (another self-evident one) ... and that's just breakfast.
We realize, of course, that not everyone is at this very moment in New York City and able to go to the cramped space in the Essex Street Market to have Kenny make you a Chicken-Fried Hamburger. So now, the Chicken-Fried Hamburger comes to you!
Eat Me: The Food & Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin is coming out tomorrow from Knopf, and it could not be a more awesome cookbook. Organized around chapters like "The Story of Shopsin's Turkey, or Why I Hate the Health Department," and studded with 70s-era photos of Shopsin's kids taking baths in the sink and straight-faced portraits of Kenny's everyday kitchen utensils, this is certainly not your mom's copy of Joy of Cooking. In fact, it probably makes Joy of Cooking blush and giggle the red off its cover.
After yesterday's public head-scratching on the San Francisco blog over OpenTable's handling of large parties (in this case at Medjool), we got a response to our question of why reservations for, say, 12 people, sometimes can't be accepted through OpenTable, but can be accommodated after a phone call directly to the restaurant. OT spokeswoman Shannon Stubo wrote in an e-mail:
The availability you see on OpenTable.com is a direct reflection of the way the restaurant has set up its reservation book. Each restaurant sets its book up differently to accommodate the unique dining patterns and management needs of that particular business. When a diner searches OpenTable.com for restaurant reservations, the results reflect the actual book availability at that restaurant at that point in time.
Because a restaurant may have the flexibility to reconfigure tables during service (combining two tables for two into one table for four, for example or reassess the expected completion time of a previous dining party), hostesses are sometimes able to accommodate diners by phone. Large parties require a certain amount of operational attention, and restaurants occasionally want a human to make that decision based on what’s currently going on in the restaurant.
The takeaway: Use OpenTable to make dinner reservations, but if you can't get one, and you really want it, don't give up. Maybe the restaurant has a waiting list they can stick you on, or maybe they got a last-minute cancellation that hasn't made it into OT's system. As convenient and wonderful as OpenTable is, there's little substitute for good old human problem solving. And if all else fails, there's always bribery, for which OT doesn't have a button.
In one of most appealing marketing ploys that we've read about recently, ABC is sending a pie truck across the country to promote the second season premiere of Pushing Daisies. We don't watch the show, so we were a little confused about the pie connection, but with minimal research, discovered that the protagonist is a pie-maker who owns a shop called the Pie Hole. Which, incidentally, is the name of the mobile pie truck.
The tour is called the "Touch of Wonder Tour" (yeah, we know), and is making 10 stops across the country. Departure point: Los Angeles, destination: New York, with the second to last stop in Philly this Friday, the 26th.
We are telling you about this, not because we are susceptible to gimmicky promotional gambits, but because the Pie Hole will be giving out free pie. The truck makes it's Philadelphia visit from 10am-2pm at The Shops at Liberty Place, and it seems that we can expect "free pie, pie-cutters, spatulas and more." Not only that, "footage from the show will play on plasma TVs, and waitresses on whimsically decorated daisy bicycles ride on by." Boy howdy!
Tom Colicchio has a lot going for him. A pile of wildly successful 
Although most of Stephen Starr's empire is located in Philly, he does also have a couple of restaurants in New York, one of which is a second 
• Bostonians are dumbstruck with grief after a grease fires one of the area's best burger joints. [
If you don't know this restaurant, you should: New York's 
And then, of course, there is the food: Blisters on my Sisters (sort of like huevos rancheros), Egg Nachos (exactly what it sounds like), Slutty Cakes (pancakes filled with pumpkin and peanut butter), Mac n Cheese Pancakes (another self-evident one) ... and that's just breakfast. 
