MenuPages

The refashioning of junk foods as slightly more healthful items is nothing new, but recently, we've noticed something extreme happening in the snack world, and we're not sure what to make of it.

We never got the appeal of Snackwells, because we're pros at not watching what we eat, and there are just so many snack-able foods in this world that haven't come out of plastic wrap. That said, the whole class of slightly-less-terrible-for-you snack foods seemed innocent enough if you were really fiendin' for a sugar fix, and we couldn't really condemn their existence.

However, the times? They are a-changing, and there is a whole new frontier beyond Snackwells. The plethora of low-fat or sugar-free prepackaged sweets lining the racks of bodegas is already mind-boggling, but the ways that junk foods can be turned "healthy" does not end there.

Why, just last week, we walked into a drugstore only to be confronted with a "Snickers: Charged" bar, which contains caffeine, taurine, and B-vitamins. B-VITAMINS! In your candy! After the jump: some of the more head-scratching happenings in snack food and beverage offerings across the nation.

In March 2007, Coca-Cola unveiled Diet Coke Plus, which is basically just regular old Diet Coke... but fortified with B-vitamins, magnesium, and zinc! This totally means that we can stop eating vegetables, and start chugging soda, right? All flippancy aside, we have mixed feelings about a gambit like this. On the one hand, if you were chaindrinking Diet Coke to begin with and switched over to Diet Coke Plus, you're probably not worse off. On the other, the more likely outcome seems like a whole slew of arguments about how diet soda is "good" for you. We have yet to see anyone downing a Diet Coke Plus though, so it's probably too early for outrage (or ringing endorsement).

On the candy front, our attention was brought to a claim that Gummi Bears might be good for your teeth. Xylitol, the sweetener used in Gummi Bears, helps combat a certain kind of tooth decay. We're thinking that someone out there should promote the refrain "four Gummi Bears three times a day keeps the dentist away!"

Finally, we're still stuck on that amped-up Snickers, which is meant to jumpstart a midafternoon slump. The press release from Mars includes the choice tidbit that the new candy bar "offers consumers a bar of substance and a delicious and satisfying way to tackle the afternoon hours when one needs to ‘re-power.’"

Of all of the ways that we've seen junk foods revamped into healthier incarnations, this is the one that seems the most wrong. What's next, junk food manufacturers of the world? Marshmallows with 50% of our daily value of fiber? Calcium-fortified Twinkies? The line has got to be drawn somewhere.

Gummi Bears May Be Good For Your Teeth [Slashfood]
First Candy Bar From Snickers Brand Provides A Boost of Energy with Caffeine, Taurine, and B-Vitamins [Candy Addict]

Burger King just keeps getting negative press. Corporate headquarters asked (well, really more like told) franchisees that they need to stay open late, but they're not keen on the idea. Here's the story from CNN:

The franchisees, who filed the lawsuit Tuesday in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, also allege that Burger King's actions violate their franchise agreements, which had contained provisions for shorter hours.

Starting June 1, Burger King began to require that all franchisees keep their stores open until at least 2 a.m. local time on Thursday, Friday and Saturday to better compete with fast-food chains like McDonald's Corp. (MCD) and Wendy's International Inc. (WEN).

The franchise agreement states that stores only have to stay open until 11 p.m., according to the lawsuit.

The company also required stores to open at 6 a.m. instead of 7 a.m. Monday through Saturday.

Burger King Franchisees Sue Over Late Hours [CNNMoney]

The office or school cafeteria, a little corner of the food-service industry rarely covered in these parts, deserves some credit. The same group of people makes lunch or dinner or both every day for the same other group of people using roughly the same ingredients on whatever cycle their deliveries happen to be on. And nobody riots except, occasionally, prisoners (and Darth Vader, in this hilarious Legos video by Eddie Izzard).

Some cafeterias, such as Google's, have a reputation as gourmet. Others are hallowed — see Gridskipper's list of some of Washington D.C.'s powerful lunchrooms, including the Supreme Court and the WTO. Some really suck (think every public school and also prison and also many offices). All, however, share a few key traits:

• The line: It's not a cafeteria if you don't move your little plastic tray down a metal line with the food all behind some pane of glass. Or some similar setup. There's something very comforting in this, as it brings a strong sense of order to the chaotic problem of figuring out what to eat for lunch. Or it's depressingly like an auto plant. You choose.

• The workers. It seems there's more interaction with cafeteria workers than with service staff in off-site lunch spots. While most deli counter staff will make your sandwich with little interaction, cafeteria workers are famous for providing the friendly exchange that helps brighten your day, or the surly banter that encourages you to eat outside the office now and then. When you think about it, you see these people just about every work day. Probably more than most of your friends.

• Plastic-covered desserts on little plates. Dessert tastes better when it's served like this. Don't know why. Don't care, really. Sometimes, at home, we cut a slice of cheesecake onto a little plate, cover it in plastic wrap and stick it in the fridge for an hour, just to re-create the effect. No, not really.

• They are going out of style. This is disturbing. The office cafeteria is definitely on its way out, as companies look for ways to reduce overhead and employees look for ways to not eat institutional food delivered by SE Rykoff. But that's nothing new. They've been going out style for decades now and they will never really disappear. As much as you'd like them to.

This is all by way of expressing a bit of envy for a sous-chef friend who is preparing to join the staff at Google in his former capacity as a web writer. Some people have all the luck, food-wise.

Darth Vader In The Cafeteria [Maniac World]
Washington D.C.'s Top Workplace Cafeterias [Gridskipper]
Google Food Photo Blog [Flickr]

[Photo: Just a workaday lunch at Google via Brett L./Flickr]

• Blu Pizza e Cucina has tasty pizza, but you have to navigate a "massive, maddeningly designed menu filled with so many typesetting tricks—stars, moons, diamonds, forks and knives, red flags, chartreuse boxes, nutrition notes, unattributed quotes—that you can barely discern whether you're ordering a meal or navigating some distant, dizzying land." [Miami Herald]

• Lee Klein looks for a few meals under $10. He finds that La Boite A Pizza isn't half bad. [Miami New Times]

• The Taiwanese-Buddhist fare at Shing Wang Taiwanese Vegetarian, Ice & Bubble Tea is sure to hit the spot. And there's bubble tea and shaved ice! [Miami Herald]

• There is excellent barbecue to be had on Sunrise Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, and it's not too hard to find it. [Broward-Palm Beach New Times]

• The food is consistently very good at Cafe Seville and the rabbit is "rave-worthy." [Miami Herald]

• Ironwood Grille doesn't pass muster. When it tries to be creative, it's not good. Otherwise, it's just OK. [Palm Beach Post]

• New Yorkers are taking their dining rooms to the streets this summer. [NY Times]

• A Chicago coffeehouse serves up conservative politics with its lattes. [Chicago Tribune]

• Investigators are closing in on the farm that produced those pesky tainted peppers we've heard so much about. [AP/MSNBC]

• Cities looking at banning fast food in poor neighborhoods. [Slate]

Photo of plain cheesecake, above: chernwei/flickr

Here's an intriguing one from Sashertootie on Flickr with red beans with a graham cracker crust. Looks pretty tasty, no?

This one has a brownie on the bottom and peanut butter cups on top. Want. Now. From mmmm, brains on Flickr.

I love love love this idea. Totally doing this for my next party. From ::fanny::.

Deep fried cheesecake? Seems...superfluous. From Scuzzi.

Melissss shares a great shot of a cheesecake that has a cookie crust and another layer of cookie on top. Looks heavenly.

Michael's Genuine Food & Drink isn't participating in Miami Spice, but that doesn't mean the restaurant isn't joining in the prix-fixe fun. From Sunday, August 3 until Tuesday, September 30, the restaurant will offer prix-fixe lunch and dinner specials of $22 and $35, respectively. The catch — it's not available on Fridays and Saturdays. We've included the menu after the jump.

Michael's Genuine Food & Drink [MenuPages]
Michael's Genuine Food & Drink [Official Site]

GENUINE PRIX FIXE LUNCH MENU

APPETIZER (choice of)
• Soup of the Day
• Panzanella, rustic bread salad with local heirloom tomatoes
• Crispy Sweet &Spicy Pork Belly with kimchi, crushed peanuts & pea shoots

ENTRÉE (choice of)
• Chopped Salad with tomato, avocado, cucumber, carrot, onion, olives, chickpeas & tahini dressing with choice of grilled free range chicken breast or grilled shrimp
• Pulled Pork Sandwich with celeriac slaw & homemade BBQ sauce
• Wood Roasted Fish Of The Day with sautéed escarole, grilled lemon and Provencal vinaigrette

DESSERT (choice of)
• Summer Peaches with blueberry cobbler ice cream, fennel Madeline, orange dust
• Chocolate Cremoso with sea salt, extra virgin olive oil, sourdough crostini & espresso parfait

GENUINE PRIX FIXE DINNER MENU

APPETIZER (choice of)
• Housemade Country Paté, mustard remoulade, grilled sourdough
• House Salad, assorted greens, heirloom tomatoes, pickled carrots, radish, piave vecchio cheese, herb vinaigrette
• House Smoked Sockeye Salmon Rillettes, preserved Meyer lemon, cornichon, crème fraiche, sourdough crostini

ENTRÉE (choice of)
• Wood Oven Pizza, braised beef, smoked tomato, grilled eggplant, with bufala mozzarella, pecorino romano
• Grilled Rib Eye Cap Steak, Greek faro salad, french feta, salsa verde
• Pan Roasted Local Yellowjack, charred fennel & citrus salad, citrus glaze

DESSERT (choice of)
• Summer Peaches with blueberry cobbler ice cream, fennel Madeline, orange dust
• Chocolate Cremoso with sea salt, extra virgin olive oil, sourdough crostini & espresso parfait

To hear some analysts tell it, yesterday's left-field news of Bennigan's restaurants' chapter 7 bankruptcy is a harbinger of doom for the casual dining industry. From the Wall Street Journal's Market Watch blog:

"These restaurants share many subtle and complex challenges that extend beyond this difficult economic climate," says Ron Paul, president of Technomic. "To some extent, they've become victims of their own success--a mature category with too many units and not enough differentiation, at least in the eyes of consumers."
According to Technomic, the top 20 casual dining chains in the category in which Bennigan's operated had unit growth of 45 percent during the most recent five-year period, well beyond the growth in demand.

We listen to a lot of Marketplace on NPR and this story hits a few notes that have gotten a lot of play over the last year or so: You spend money faster than you can make it, make commitments that your wallet can't keep, and eventually you go broke and lose your house. This seems to be a general trend in the U.S. right now, from gigantic corporations down to individuals.

But there's another trend out there that might lend a hopeful counterpoint to the tired "sad music" they keep playing on that show, at least as far as eating is concerned: It could be, just maybe, that with the rise of the Food Network, the chef as rock-star, and the growing national obsession with eating fresh, local, creatively prepared foods and, the market for the kind of mass-produced family meals in which Bennigan's specialized is shrinking.

This is obviously not a hopeful sign to investors and employees over at the ill-fated chain, but to the national health and well-being, it's a good thing. To get really out there with it, there's a chance that these lean economic times and simultaneous food chic could do wonders for the nation's health: huge, meaty, deep-fried meals become too expensive and go out of fashion, while locally produced fruit, vegetables and proteins become the cheap and trendy option for more Americans. High oil prices may put more of us on bikes, riding to the farmers' market or co-op instead of the ever-pricier and low-quality mega-chain. Healthy lifestyles by necessity!

There will certainly always be a place for casual family dining chains such as Bennigan's, TGI-Friday's, Applebee's, etc. But based on yesterday's news and the subsequent analysis, it seems those gambling on Americans' obscene gluttony may have over-drawn.

Bennigan's files for bankruptcy protection [AP]
Bennigan's Bankruptcy Indicative of Larger Casual Dining Woes, Says Technomic [Market Watch]
Starbucks closing 600 stores in U.S. [AP/B-Net]
Marketplace [NPR]

[Photo: A Bennigan's in Seoul, Korea via Rhett Sutphin/flickr]

• Rice costs triple what it used to in North Korea, which the World Food Programme warns is on the brink of a serious food crisis. [The Guardian]

• The Whole Foods-Wild Oats merger is stuck in court for the time being. [NYT via Salt Lake Tribune]

• Chef-driven restaurants are in store for the new terminal at JFK airport. Maybe people will actually want to show up early for their flights now. [NYT]

• About 13 percent of the average American family's food comes from outside of the United States. [Chicago Sun-Times]

• Australia is just getting the ball rolling on the trans fat issue; their food labels don't even have to list trans fat. [Canberra Times]

The big news today is that Bennigan's has abruptly gone belly up. According to an AP report, the company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, and that company-owned — but not franchisee-owned — Bennigan's and Steak & Ales are closed. It's pretty crazy how quickly it all went down:

The general manager of the Bennigan's, located at 11460 North Kendall Drive, told CBS4.COM that he received a phone call Tuesday morning informing him to cease operations effective Tuesday. Monday was their last day of business.

Employees and management teams were not given any warning at all.

"I am as upset as all of the employees are," said the general manager who did not want to be identified.

Bennigan's files for bankruptcy protection [AP]
Bennigan's Restaurant Chain Abruptly Shuts Down [CBS4]
Bennigan's Grill & Tavern [Official Site]
Steak & Ale [Official Site]

Photo: Dogbert10/flickr

Unfortunately, we are skilled in neither software development, large-number theory, nor ad sales. Basically all we have to offer the world is our totally uninformed opinion on everything, plus set of moderate home-cooking skills.

Enter the Google cookbook. This slim little volume was put in our hands the other day, and we feel a little bit like we've been handed the holy grail of the intersection of food- and internet-nerdery. It's 76 spiral-bound pages, and it's not available in stores, on eBay, anywhere &mdash unless, of course, you are a 6-year user of GoogleAds, in which case you get it in the mail along with a spiffy black Google-branded apron.

A quick google search of the google cookbook turns up surprisingly little: various corners of the internet, but nothing epic, nothing quite at the level that we, in our little nerdy heart, feel this deserves.

So we're doing this the right way: THERE IS A GOOGLE COOKBOOK! AND WE HAVE IT! IN OUR HANDS RIGHT NOW! AND WE ARE SHARING IT WITH YOU! RIGHT NOW! AFTER THE JUMP! (also: foie gras-stuffed falafel!)

First, gigantically, the cover:

The book is divided into four seasonal sections, starting with spring and moving through to winter. Each season is separated by a handy little tab, and each gets its own circular logo. The recipes in each season's TOC are divided into categories: Appetizer, Soup, Salad, Entree, Vegetable, Starch, Dessert. It's great. It's so earnest.

We're utterly charmed. We deeply, deeply love the variety of these dishes &mdash Wood-Roasted Lobster with Garlic Crisps and Blood Orange-Cilantro Vinaigrette! Sweet Potato, Spinach, and Shiitake Mushroom Gratin that calls for an entire gallon of heavy cream! Motherfreaking Foie Gras-Stuffed Falafel that is categorized under salad!! Can we just point out that in a cookbook of only forty-three recipes, two call for foie gras?

If you, like us, are now harboring very complexly detailed fantasies about working for Google, allow us to present to you Chef Wade Tamura's Fried Chicken, recommended for fall:

[Photo: Google cookie, via billypalooza's Flickr]

Today's an exciting day, food-blog-wise. You all know "The Waiter" over at Waiter Rant, right? Well, no longer! Now you know a man named Steve Dublanica, a former waiter who writes a blog and whose book debuts today.

The New York Post has the story of a man who shared in print many of the things the rest of us former service industry types wait to tell people until they're too drunk to remember. Serving food that may have come into contact with the floor, giving everybody decaf coffee, regardless of their order, spitting in food, these things happen. Not necessarily by Dublanica himself (well, the coffee thing, yeah) but they do happen, and he'll tell you about it.

For the last four years, Dublanica has made no move to cover up any potentially shocking aspect of the service industry as he cranks out sometimes bitter, sometimes philosophical, sometimes funny essays. He naturally kept his own identity and that of his restaurant a secret, and "Cafe Machiavelli," somewhere in suburban New York, remains unnamed.

Now that he's a big-time author, however, Dublanica has to do things like radio appearances on Bloomberg and Leonard Lopate, guest-blogging for Powell's Books, and being the subject of feature articles in the New York Post, so he had to come clean. He also quit his job, apparently. Now who's going to introduce you to terms like "crop dusting?"

Secret Service: The Waiter Gets Mad — And Gets Even [NY Post]
Waiter Rant [Official Site]

[Photo: An anonymous waiter via independentman/flickr]

Looks like Palm Restaurant, one of the original Merrick Park tenants, has closed up, according to an article in today's Herald:

The Palm, the swanky steak house that adorned its walls with caricatures of celebrities like tennis star Pete Sampras, singer Jewel and Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle (pictured), has called it quits in Coral Gables.

One of the original Village at Merrick Park restaurants, The Palm served its last meal on Sunday, the company's Washington, D.C., headquarters confirmed.

Since The Palm opened in October 2002, Fleming's and Morton's had joined it on the Gables steak-house scene along with veterans Ruth's Chris and Christy's. Service continues at The Palm's longtime Bay Harbor Islands restaurant, according to a manager there. The chain has more than two dozen locations nationwide.

Gables Palm is gone [Miami Herald]
Palm Restaurant [MenuPages]
Palm Restaurant [Official Site]

Photo: mag3737/flickr

• Produce gets sunburn? Apparently so — and now sunscreen, too. [IHT (AP)]

• L.A. chefs forced to become "food police," journalistic puns ensue. [LAT]

• There's $1.6 billion in food and beverage advertising targeted at kids. [NYT (AP)]

• Despite speculation, the EU has approved the merger of Mars and Wrigley. [Forbes]

• Weakened economy means more eating at home means higher profits for Kraft. [NYT]

(Also! MenuPages humbly suggests the New York Times revise their capitalization policy with regard to particles, because we stared at that Kraft headline for like a full two minutes, unable to parse it, before realizing the lowercase "in" was not a preposition.)

We got word today that Creolina's in Fort Lauderdale is closed. The restaurant, open since 1991, served Louisiana-style Cajun food for 17 years and now is likely another casualty of the recession. It seemed popular, and it's not like there's much competition on the Cajun food front.

There's no answer at the restaurant, and an attempt to reach owner Mark Sulzinski was rebuffed, so we're not quite sure what's going on, but if you have any information, let us know!

UPDATE: Thanks to Pete and Mike, who left comments below, we learned that the building's owners didn't renew Creolina's lease so that they could expand their bar next door. But there's hope: apparently Sulzinski is looking for some space to re-open in one of the western suburbs.

Creolina's [MenuPages]

New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni expressed surprise today at seeing a modest Manhattan eatery, La Sirene, included on an Open Table list of the city's 10 best:

But I wonder. Is this somehow another sign of how Internet-savvy the restaurant’s chef and owner, Didier Pawlicki, is?

As I noted in my review, he personally replies to almost each and every diner comment about the restaurant on the Citysearch web site, either thanking happy diners or reasoning with unhappy ones.

Has Mr. Pawlicki or someone in his corner gamed Open Table? Or have his aggressive Internet ways spawned an especially Internet-oriented, Internet-activist clientele?

While marketing firms offer business owners like Pawlicki search optimization and other online services, this could be a case of general customer satisfaction that filtered all the way to those customers' online habits, or maybe some very shrewd outreach. The premise of Bruni's blog entry seems to be that Pawlicki is either an online marketing genius or a culinary genius, and indeed he may be a little of both.

At MenuPages, we editors get a chance to see the user-review sausage being made. It's thanks to a personal look at every user-submitted review that we rarely end up on Eater's Adventures in Shilling. And this process gives some insight into how so-called "black pr" (or sock puppets or shills or some possibly nicer, yet-to-be-coined name) works. It's not hard to spot a shill, but what is hard is determining what we'll call here a partial shill.

This may be somebody who knows an owner or staffer and eats at the restaurant as a paying customer and then is asked to post a glowing review. It may be someone known to the staff or owners who actually receives something for free in exchange for a good review. It may be a staffer or owner trashing the competition.

But it can be very hard to pinpoint, in the larger discussion, when a satisfied customer becomes a shill. Would it be a conflict of interests if a restaurant owner, circulating amongst tables of chatty satisfied diners, mentioned that he'd appreciate any feedback in a certain online forum? Probably not. What if he then sent over a dessert or a coffee? Well, yes, then it would be a payoff.

But what if he was planning on sending out that dessert or espresso anyway and the topic of online reviewing came up naturally in conversation? Well, the adage says something about the appearance of conflict of interest being tantamount to actual conflict of interest, but if everything were that strict, restaurateurs and diners would only ever discuss the weather. And where's the fun in that?

Also, doesn't it make sense that an increasingly net-savvy dining public would naturally post a lot of positive feedback if a particular restaurant regularly impresses? Of course, and you won't find a much more net-savvy group than lower Manhattan diners.

What does all that say about Pawlicki and La Sirene? Well, we don't know yet, but one sure thing is that La Sirene is now on our radar for the next time we're hungry in TriBeCa. Something's working for him.

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other
New York Dining [Open Table]
La Sirene [MenuPages]
La Sirene [Official Site]

[Photo: via La Sirene official site]

A couple of Friday reports helped shed a little light on the recent fiasco of a salmonella scare that started with tomatoes and ended with red-faced public health officials.

According to an AP story on the ABC News website, part of the difficulty in conducting a speedy, efficient investigation had to do with poor record keeping that was a result of weak regulations lobbied for by fruit and vegetable growers themselves:

The industry pressured the Bush administration years ago to limit the paperwork companies would have to keep to help U.S. health investigators quickly trace produce that sickens consumers, according to interviews and government reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

The White House also killed a plan to require the industry to maintain electronic tracking records that could be reviewed easily during a crisis to search for an outbreak's source. Companies complained the proposals were too burdensome and costly, and warned they could disrupt the availability of consumers' favorite foods.

The apparent but unintended consequences of the lobbying success: a paper record-keeping system that has slowed investigators, with estimated business losses of $250 million. So far, nearly 1,300 people in 43 states, the District of Columbia and Canada have been sickened by salmonella since April.

The rest of the story goes on to be a rather stinging rebuke of the lobbying groups that won the weakened regulations, but perhaps the unintended consequence of this coverage is that it essentially gives the FDA an out:

"If the FDA had been given the resources and authority years ago that it asked for to solve these kinds of problems, I think we would have solved this already," said William Hubbard, a former FDA associate commissioner.

On July 3, Minnesota e-mailed the feds. After tracing credit card receipts — to find what the restaurant's healthy customers didn't eat — there was good evidence that the jalapenos were sickening people. And, officials had a diagram tracing the pepper shipments all the way back to three farms in Mexico.

One of those farms shipped peppers through the same large warehouse in McAllen, Texas, where Food and Drug Administration inspectors weeks later would find a single contaminated Mexican-grown pepper being packed by a neighboring vendor.

AP: Food Industry Bitten by Its Lobbying Success [ABC]
Pepper tip helped salmonella hunt continue

[Photo: Jalapeno peppers via Florian/flickr]

Abokado in Mary Brickell Village has gotten a reputation for being a bit too pricey, and we’re guessing that’s behind the restaurant’s initiative to offer prix-fixe deals, such as the three-course business lunch and the three-hour Abokado Social happy hour (from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.). We popped in after work on Friday to give the lower-priced happy hour menu a sampling. Select cocktails and house wine were $6 (yes, that’s first on the list—it was happy hour after all), rolls were $7, and hand rolls were $5 or $6. Also on the menu is a single Abokado Nacho—a delicious concoction of spicy tuna, avocado and cucumber served atop a deep-fried tempura shiso leaf. While this is one of the most popular dishes at the restaurant, consuming more than one Nacho tends to make people reach for the Rolaids, so we were pleased to see that a single leaf was available for ordering. In total, we had three rolls (the spicy tuna roll is amazing but hot, hot, hot!) and two drinks, and our bill came out to roughly $40. The amount is comparable to what we spend at some of our other fave sushi spots, so color us sold on Abokado Social.

A photo of the menu after the jump...

Abokado [Official Site]
Abokado [MenuPages]

• Iowa workers protest conditions at a kosher meatpacking plant. [New York Times]

• A DC raw foods restaurant will be nation's first "crowdsourced" restaurant, offer oat-hemp balls. [Washington Post]

• Users of Los Angeles food banks are hungry. [LA Times]

• West Bank Palestinians are thirsty. [Chicago Tribune]

• Meanwhile, in Japan, they're going wild for eel drinks. [San Francisco Chronicle]

Tobacco Road is celebrating 96 years on Monday, and in honor of the birthday, the restaurant is offering 96-cent burgers. Stop by on Monday between 11:30 a.m. and 8 p.m. for your cheap burger. You can't just show up empty-handed though; print out this page and show it to them when you get there. Keep in mind that you also have to eat it there; no cheap burger take-outs.

Tobacco Road [MenuPages]
Tobacco Road [Official Site]

Photo: RetoTo/flickr

Lately, Brooklyn-based duo Matt and Kim have been in pretty heavy rotation in our music library. These guys are just so poppy and summery, it's great. But we had no idea just how fun and apparently food-obsessed they were until seeing this video. Look at that! Wouldn't you totally like to have lunch with these two and talk about things like Mr. Potato Head's psychological problems or how awesome frozen grapes are? Answer that after you watch this, the funnest foodiest music video ever:

Matt and Kim [Official Site]

• Mac and cheese, please, filled with fancy ingredients. [MP: Boston]

• Oh, let's just have a basic dinner: a tiny bird drowned in Armagnac. [MP: Chicago]

• A crepe would not be creepy! [MP: Philadelphia]

• Can we just have some damn coffee cake that won't kill us? [MP: San Francisco]

• How about just some fish that won't give us food poisoning? [MP: South Florida]

Palm Beach County will now be hosting its own restaurant month in September called
Flavor Palm Beach. You know the routine: an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert for one low fixed price: $20 for lunch and $30 for dinner. The list of participating restaurants won't be released until August 15, but in the meantime, you can get on the mailing list and register to win a Flavor meal for two.

Flavor Palm Beach [Official Site]

• EPA bans carbofuran residue on domestic and international foods, food safety advocates rejoice. [Washington Post]

• The New Orleans Times-Picayune is reviewing restaurants for the first time since Hurricane Katrina. [New York Times]

• McCain sees Obama's trip to Germany and raises him a visit to an Ohio German restaurant. [LA Times]

• New England based grocery chain thinks Whole Foods stole its slogan. [Boston Globe]

• Colorado scientists can tell you just how good (or bad) your senses of taste and smell really are. [San Francisco Chronicle]

Just think — local beef, from Cuba? Well, so it's not local in the strict 100-mile interpretation, but still. John Parke Wright, a Florida rancher whose ancestors were very involved in the Havana-Tampa trade route, is just waiting for the day he can set up a cattle operation on the island. Here's why:

"From 1860 to 1960, Cuba had some of the best land for cattle in the Western hemisphere," says Wright. In 1960, Cuba had about 6 million people and 2 million cattle, but now has only 2 million cattle for 12 million people, he explains.

"There's a tremendous need to restock Cuba's ranches, and the opportunity has to be given to people like me," he says, adding that he'd start out by sending 3,000 head of cattle, tractors, trucks, and irrigation equipment to Cuba as soon as the two nations adjust their policies to allow for that.

Photo: justydrink/flickr

Looks like Chef Allen's will be undergoing some renovations this week; the restaurant is closed for the rest of the month and won't re-open until August 1. According to the press release, it'll sport "a sleeker, modernized interior, including a larger bar area, a private wine room, and two party rooms." A new menu is in the works as well that will focus on locally caught sustainable fish and regional produce. All this in a week and a half? Seems ambitious.

Chef Allen's [MenuPages]
Chef Allen's [Official Site]

Perhaps unsurprisingly given our occupation, the bulk of our life plans revolve around food and our bucket list is no different. We want to do the full tasting at The French Laundry and eat roast chicken at L'Ami Louis. We want to visit the food centers in Singapore and the open air markets in Provence. Most of all, though, we want to eat our way through the United States. There are huge regions we've never explored and we're very anxious to eat barbecue in North Carolina, gumbo in New Orleans, and ripe-from-the-tree avocados in California, to name just a few.

The pre-kickin'-it food plans of other MP editors are after the jump, but really, we're awfully curious about what's on your list, so leave it in the comments.

Helen, MP: Chicago:

• Ortolan. OMG totally absolutely Ortolan. This is my total absolute #1.

• Street food in Bangkok or Singapore (or both!)

• Butter-poached lobster at Per Se or the French Laundry (it’s never been on the menu when I’ve been there - sigh)

• Meat from an animal that I’ve slaughtered/hunted myself (cow? Sheep? I feel like I owe it to my carnivorousness to look something in the eye, then kill it and eat it)

• The duck fat fries at Hot Doug's in Chicago

• Oysters straight from the ocean – see them in the water, reach in, shuck, slurp. Repeat.

• Pibales – baby eels – outdoors, at 3 in the morning, drunk, in Basque Country

Adam, MP: San Francisco:

• Monkey Brains on the half, um, head. Just to see if I’d have the stones.

• Caviar. Lots of really expensive stuff, not the $12 budget shit I’ve had so far. What does a $100 mouthful of fish eggs taste like?

• Ostrich egg(s?)

Elsa, MP: Philadelphia:

• Like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, except with jamon, boquerones, and various chocolate things, I would like to eat my way through Spain.

• The other thing would be a seafood tour of the world, especially since there is so much potential for both incredible variety and the best things I have ever put in my mouth. Just think about the differences between say, Japanese, Icelandic, Croatian, and Peruvian seafood. Or, Spanish, Scandinavian, and Cape Verdean, etc.

What's on Your "Bucket List"? [Serious Eats]

[Photo: I Can Has Cheezburger]

• Linda Bladholm leads you on a great tour of the Indian, Indonesian and Filipino holes-in-the-wall downtown that cater to cruise ship workers. [Miami Herald]

• Did you know that restaurants have to pay $900 for the chance to participate in Miami Spice? Here's a good roundup of some of the better deals among the 100 or so restaurants participating this year. [Miami Herald]

• George's in the Grove might not be the best place for a quiet dinner, but if you want good food in a fun atmosphere, looks like it's the place to go. [Miami New Times]

• Fuegovivo gets two-and-a-half stars, sounds a lot like the many other Brazilian churrascarias that seem to be all the rage these days. [Miami Herald]

• It's only been open for a month, but the Jam Cafe is already busy with people stopping in for a snack or a light meal. [Miami Herald]

• Scott Simmons found lots to love at Bar Louie. [Palm Beach Post]

• Fresh from her trip to Guatemala, Gail Shepherd searches for some of the dishes she'd had on vacation. She found success at La Rosa in Lake Worth and El Chapin in Palm Springs. [Broward-Palm Beach New Times]

It happens every year about this time. Oppressive heat and humidity and general grossness make us nostalgic for the heady days of mid-April, when the temperature was mild and just about everything was newly in (or coming into) season. But one favorite was just on its way out, and right about now we miss it terribly.

Fortunately, there is hope yet for oyster lovers.

Traditional wisdom states that you must not eat oysters during months without the letter "r" in them. That is to say, summer months. A few years ago, while researching this story for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, we learned that that had to do with the oysters' spawning season--they get all milky and weird when they spawn.

According to this little New York Times item from earlier in the week, oysters and other shellfish — especially local harvests — can become contaminated from summer algae blooms or "red tides."

But there is hope yet, oyster lover. You don't have to wait until September to slurp. One thing we learned during our trip to the San Francisco Bay Area's oyster country is that some local farms are growing imported varieties, such as Kumomotos, from Japan, which spawn in alternate months from our North American regulars.

Also, as the Times points out, government regulations prevent aquaculture outfits from selling shellfish grown in contaminated water. Many growers finish their oysters in clean-water tanks, which flush out contaminants.

So there you go, you can totally eat oysters in the summer if you order the right kinds and make sure you go through government-regulated suppliers. The Oyster Guide website has a bunch of farms listed. Some even do mail order.

Being There: In The Raw [San Francisco Bay Guardian]
The Claim: Never Eat Shellfish in a Month Without an R [New York Times]
Where to Order Oysters [The Oyster Guide]

[Photo: The walrus and the carpenter from Alice in Wonderland via superfluous consonants/flickr]

• Rapper 50 Cent is suing Taco Bell for messing with his name. [Wall Street Journal]

• A look at the detective work that went into tracking down that nasty jalapeno [AP/Chicago Tribune]

• An Ohio woman charged with assault after throwing peanuts at her allergic neighbor [Fox News]

• Seems a Wisconsin grocery store owner might have been selling stolen fruit [Twincities.com]

• Rising food prices may be a culprit behind the rising crime rate in Manila [GMANews.tv]

Serious Eats linked to a Guardian story today about first date food dos and don'ts that promptly made me laugh. I think I've broken almost every rule on this list. Let's start with the very first sentence:

Most first dates take place in restaurants. God knows why.

So anyway, first rule: insist that your date picks the restaurant, which actually isn't a bad idea. Except what if he/she suggests a restaurant that isn't within an acceptable price range? How do you explain, no, sorry, I'm a cheap bastard who can't afford to take you there, even if we go Dutch. Yeah, upon further consideration, that's a bad idea. You make the date, you pick the restaurant.

Her other rules include avoiding the following foods: sushi and other food eaten with chopsticks (can get messy), spaghetti (same as chopsticks), garlic (bad breath), coffee (worse breath), oysters (too obvious), Brussels sprouts, beans, curry, sunchokes, fresh pasta, kimchi, any cruciferous vegetables, and tuna (all apparently in the flatulence-producing family). Also no-nos: sharing plates (huh?!) and having an extra drink.

After the jump, what MP editors have to say about this...

Carolina (MP: South Florida): personally, I think the "rules" are mostly bullshit. I eat whatever the hell I want to eat on a first date
Leila (MP: Boston): I try not to eat anything too messy
Carolina: what did you have on your first date with your boyfriend?
Leila: Well, we were friends first
the first time we ever had dinner (which was as friends), I had a bacon cheeseburger
the night we got together, I also had a bacon cheeseburger
i think i had one the other time we hung out as friends too
Helen (MP: Chicago): that wins
Carolina: I had steak frites with my boyfriend on our first date
Leila: that's a good date food
Carolina: it was ok. not that great, actually. Steak was overcooked.
Adam (MP: San Francisco): The last time I was on a first date we went to a Polish place and split a few things. Nothing spells romance like coleslaw and meatballs.
Carolina: the article advised against splitting anything
Leila: why? Splitting is romantic!
Carolina: I don't know. something about people being too polite to let the other person have the last dumpling or whatever
Adam: I also think really messy things like lobster or crab or barbecue, that can be a project, are a good way to break the ice
Leila: that's valid
Helen: assuming you're on a date with an adventurous eater
Leila: although i would say that on a first date, i am usually wearing something cute that I wouldn’t want to spill on
Helen: it could totally backfire
Adam: but that's another good thing about shellfish: you get a bib. Then you both look ridiculous
Leila: bibs are not sexy
Adam: you both look dumb and you both are eating so weirdly that you are prevented from even trying to be graceful. It levels the playing field for boors like me.
Leila: i am a delicate bacon cheeseburger eating flower. And! I would just like to point out that he was impressed by my love of greasy food.
Carolina: until my boyfriend came along, I out-ate every guy I'd ever dated. Like, at every meal. Easily. I was finishing food off their plates.
Adam: you know what? I disagree with the way this article treats alcohol too. I think having an extra drink on a first date is a good thing. It’s all about breaking the ice, right?
Leila: It's all about The Magic Zone. 2.5 drinks, y’all!
Helen: oh i just remembered that on a first date, this guy took me to sake bar decibel, which is this subterranean secret sake bar in the E. Village that is SO cool, but then he proceeded to destroy the awesomeness-points he got for introducing me to the place by attempting to order in Japanese. Which was incredibly pathetic.
Leila: on the night my boyfriend and i got together, we drank at least a pitcher and a half of beer and did karaoke. Truly, ours is a love story for the ages.

There you have it folks. Think of it as a sort of primer on where to take someone who actually enjoys eating out on a date.

What to Eat on a First Date [Serious Eats]
Are you ready to order? [The Observer via The Guardian]

Photo: IMDB

An article in today's Epi-Log stimulated waves of nostalgia for a Martin family favorite summertime tradition: The county fair. It was a fine article, but didn't really focus on food, so here's a follow up with some personal culinary favorites available at most county and state fairs.

Of course, the main rule is to eat things at the fair that you can't get anywhere else. If you're in Wisconsin, for example, get cream puffs, even though they're not traditional fair food. In Minnesota, eat nothing that doesn't come on a stick. In western Washington, top your burger with Walla Walla sweet onions.

But in addition to the regional favorites, pretty much all fairs bring with them a host of classics that you can get almost nowhere else. After the jump you'll find a few personal preferences. Feel free to comment with your own favorites/forgettables.

Must-eats:

• Funnel Cake. Duh. This is like the food of the fair. You don't have to eat it first but if you don't have one you really don't deserve to be here. We normally just go for one straightaway to get into the spirit of the thing.

• Unless you're a grownup and can drink beer, that weird lemon ice drink should be your beverage of choice. Soda pop is boring and for the other 50 weeks of the year. At the fair, you've got to go for something fruity but still junky. That sugary yellow sludge is perfect.

• Two words: DEEP FRIED: Get anything and everything you can find dunked in hot oil. Fairs are notorious for really crazy treats like fried candy bars and Twinkies. They also drop every kind of vegetable imaginable in the oil, so get one of each. And don't complain that you're full. There's plenty of time to not eat when you get home.

(An aside: One time at the Alameda County fair, when it was like a million degrees out, we were bravely wading into a tray of maybe five or six different kinds of fried vegetables with creamy sauces when our little clique wandered into one of the livestock areas with us in tow.

Suddenly we were trying to enjoy fried artichoke hearts with ranch dressing in the middle of a 100-degree room filled with 200 cows and their droppings. This is not the way to enjoy your food. Tell your friends to cool it for one freaking second and make them sit in the shade and eat fried with you. You'll all be the better for it.)

• Outlandish soft-serve. This gets overlooked sometimes, but a lot of those traveling carts carry weird flavors of soft-serve ice-cream like pistachio and banana. Get it dunked in chocolate or rolled in sprinkles and you're golden.

• Chili!

Don't Waste My Time:

• Caramel and candy apples need to make some room. Christ, why are these so popular? Who wants an apple? Nobody, that's who. Fine, cover it in gross candy approximation. It's still fruit. And on this one day when mother isn't forcing it down your throat, do you really want an out-of-season apple taking up valuable stomach real estate? No, you do not. Plus, they're super dangerous to losing a tooth, which would put you out of commission for the rest of the day. Steer clear.

• Sno Cones and Cotton Candy are soooooo boring. You may get a cotton candy to split amongst the group, but seriously? These are like the lowest-budget treats in the world. Any half-baked city hall or school district fund-raiser will probably rent a cotton candy machine or sno-cone cart and you'll get your fill of what is basically straight sugar then. Save it.

• Soda pop: See above.

• Why must every bastion of cart-based, hot-dog-dominated junk food such as the fair or the ball game also contain pizza? Unless you're getting it from an actual parlor, or at least a restaurant with a legitimate oven, pizza never any good. In fact, the fair variety is almost guaranteed to be undercooked and doughy and lame with like four pepperonis. Will America ever learn?

• Those huge lollipops are going to be fun for about two minutes and then they will become a burden. Resist.

Top Five Things To Do At The County Fair

[Photo: Funnel cake with M&Ms via ajagendorf25/flickr]

The Herald's got a good roundup of barbecue spots in Miami that venture away from the usual spots. (Except for Texas de Brazil. The couldn't find a better Latin-influenced barbecue joint than a humungous chain?)

We're craving the 'cue from Mama Lucy's in particular:

On Friday and Saturday evenings you'll find Lexuses, SUVs, antique convertibles and rundown pick-ups squished together in the tiny lot where people stand in line for the full slab ($21), half slab ($13) or for the regular rib sandwich ($6.50). The barbecue is a smoky, sweet, supple pork flesh doused in a rich crimson sauce bejeweled with fine black pepper dots. There's a cinnamon-y finish that leaves your fingertips smelling like a world where cholesterol is myth and caloric obsession, an abomination. The barbecue is served with a couple of slices of white bread -- a naked sponge cake for those who love the sauce just as much, (if not more than), the meat. Owner Jack Homes opened the venue 14 years ago as a tribute to the recipes of his late grandmother Lucy Palmer -- a native of Brunswick, Ga., who worked as a Miami-Dade metro bus driver for 25 years.

BBQ scene in Miami is smoking hot [Miami Herald]

• Slow Food is hoping to put on the "Woodstock of food" in San Francisco this Labor Day. [NYT]

• Grocers are now pulling jalapeno peppers from shelves in the next salmonella scare. [LA Times]

• Lack of preparation, poor record-keeping — there are a million things wrong with our food safety system. [WSJ]

• Grocers are adjusting to new consumer spending habits, thanks to inflation. [Star-Tribune]

• A proposed law would ban any new fast-food restaurants from opening in a 32-mile area of Los Angeles. [LA Times]

But. There's always a but. The gently mocking tone in the article ("what won't these rich people pay people to do?!") nagged at something in the back of our mind, and we weren't sure quite what it was until we ran across this op-ed in The Food Section. Here's the thing: what, essentially, is the difference between hiring an organic backyard vegetable garden consultant (which we are happy to make fun of) and, say, hiring a landscape designer and the requisite team of college students on break in order to lay out and mulch your zinnias (which we accept as totally okay)? Where's the real difference between buying a share in a CSA and asking The Fruit Guys to add you to their roster?

Because as much as we're inclined to make fun of the folks who contract out their contributions to sustainable agriculture, we can't really look past the fact that (a) we are not exactly out there getting our hands dirty ourselves, and (b) we spent a good portion of our lunch hour today discussing how terrific it is to send our laundry out to a wash-n-fold service despite the fact that we have a completely free washing machine literally three feet from our bedroom, simply because it is so much more convenient to have someone else do it for us.

If we're willing to contract out our laundry for 85 cents a pound, to no ultimate global benefit, who are we to smirk at someone who allocates a portion of their disposable income to increase the demand for local produce, ethically-raised meat, and seasonal deployment of ingredients? Not to mention the jobs that it creates (and sustains): gardeners, small-scale farmers, responsible restaurateurs and chefs. And let's not forget that the people with enough money to outsource their virtuousness are the same people with enough money to subsidize community gardens, greenmarkets, food pantries, and get-kids-to-eat-their-veggies initiatives — all good things, all things we wish we spent more time working to further, but don't. Quite possibly because we are so lazy we can't even be bothered to fold our own t-shirts.

So, um, where exactly was that part worth mocking, again?

A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss [NYT]
Op Ed: Is Eating Local Earnest or Elitist? [The Food Section]

[Photo: CSA crop, via mikaela_'s Flickr]

Cita’s Italian Chophouse opens today in Coconut Grove. We can’t wait to try it, particularly since owner Ed Benitez is also bringing on board pastry chef Antonio Bachour (ex- of Nobu, Talula and DeVito). The Grove can pose difficulties for even the best of restaurateurs (the fabulous Christabelle’s Quarter was pitifully empty for brunch this weekend), but Benitez’s heart appears to be fully invested in the endeavor. “I wanted to create the kind of restaurant that I would visit regularly and welcome as a part of my community. I was emphatic about creating a concept where the food quality and service were absolute top-of-the-line, with an atmosphere as down-to-earth as the Grove itself,” he says. The 1,475 square foot restaurant was built out and designed by Benitez himself, who is also an avid fisherman. Cita’s will be serving premium cuts of beef, day boat fish selections and pastas made in-house daily.

These are the restaurant hours:
Dinner, Sunday – Thursday, 5 p.m. - 11:30 p.m. and Friday and Saturday, 5 p.m. - midnight.
Brunch, Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. - 3 p.m.

If you beat us to sampling it, don’t forget to report back!

Cita's Italian Chophouse [Official Site]

As much as I hate writing about the Starbucks closures again (I'm not a big coffee drinker, and I've never quite understood the cult of Starbucks), I know that lots of people depend on them for their morning coffee fix, and I'd like for these people to be prepared if their favorite Starbucks location is closing. The last thing we need in South Florida is a bunch of people going through caffeine withdrawals on the road. So here's the list of closures:

Palm Beach:
• 13910 Jog Rd in Delray Beach
• 1200 Town Center Dr (Abacoa) in Jupiter
• 801 N Congress Ave (Boynton Beach Mall) in Boynton Beach
• 11701 Lake Victoria Gardens Dr (Dowtown at the Gardens) in Palm Beach Gardens
• 3101 PGA Blvd (Gardens Mall) in Palm Beach Gardens
• 5100 PGA Blvd (PGA Commons Central) in Palm Beach Gardens
• 650 S Rosemary Ave (City Place) in West Palm Beach

Broward:
• 1100 W Broward Blvd in Fort Lauderdale
• 3399 N State Rd 7 (Lakes Mall) in Lauderdale Lakes
• 9439 W Atlantic Blvd (Coral Square Mall) in Pompano Beach

Miami-Dade:
• 9600 SW 160th St in Miami
• 750 NE 125th St in North Miami

A few thoughts: Palm Beach Gardens is really bearing the brunt of the closures, although after looking at the locations, it looks like the company might have really over-saturated the market there. I should note the Lauderdale Lakes closing also, which Michael Mayo at the Sun-Sentinel wrote was the one that Magic Johnson brought to town. It's one of the few Starbucks in predominantly black neighborhoods.

'Magic' evaporates at Lauderdale Lakes Starbucks [Sun-Sentinel]
Starbucks [Official Site]

Could this lean economy mark the beginning of the end of the homebody hipster — the college-educated, post-feminist indie-rocker with her baking pans and knitting needles and house cats? Maybe so.

A story on Marketplace last Friday explored the sharp decline in the popularity of knitting, which took off just as rapidly in the high-stress years after 9/11 terrorist attacks. "Worried women knit," one commenter said. But it seems the belt-tightening required in most households has left little room for that kind of hobby.

Similarly, the Associated Press reported yesterday that the long-running cupcake trend is, well, "slimming down" would be a weird phrase for it, but something like that. The new twist: Frosting shots. Get rid of all that annoying, costly cake and just give us the hard, sweet stuff for a buck and a half:

“It's kind of the cut-to-the-chase evolution of cupcakes,” says Tanya Steel, editor in chief of foodie Web site Epicurious.com. “I can imagine it being at parties. It's a great thing to have at an office party. It provides just a little bite of sweetness and yumminess without going whole hog.”

So maybe we're entering a new era of (figuratively) leaner, less-ironic/symbolic food trends, and hobbies (hopefully) borne of interest, rather than fear. Straightforward burgers seem to be holding steady, and large plates are making a comeback. This is a good direction. Just don't take away our lolcats. That hilarious meme needs to stick around forever. You can have the word "meme" back, though.

Knit 1, pearl 2, point and click [Marketplace]
Bottoms up: Frosting fans line up to take shots [AP/San Diego Tribune]
A Hamburger Today [Serious Eats]
Large plates make a comeback [SF Gate]

[Photo: via Kscakes lolcat builder]

• Finally! One lone salmonella-tainted pepper has emerged in Texas. But the mystery continues... [Discover/80Beats]

• Poor regulation of Chinese food production has U.S. Olympians worried about what they eat in Beijing. [ABC News]

• L.A. wants to close 400 fast food restaurants in order to save the obese from themselves. [WSJ]

• Food banks take a page from The Book of Ruth, start setting up gleaning programs. [USAToday]

• Want to eat sustainably and locally without actually doing anything? You lazy locavores are not alone! [NYT]

"I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free..."

Sometimes a thing happens that you don't want to happen, so you use your right to free speech and assembly and you make a ruckus and let the powers that be know of your position, and sometimes it actually works and you create a change, and that big national chain doesn't take over your beloved local cafe, or that international corporation stops funding human rights abuses in the name of profit.

And sometimes, just sometimes, the result you hope for is that your favorite Starbucks store remains open in the face of 600 planned closures. Why would you use your right to free speech and assembly to effect this change? Because you are a dork. Seriously, don't even talk to us. From the Wall Street Journal:

In towns as small as Bloomfield, N.M., and metropolises as large as New York, customers and city officials are starting to write letters, place phone calls, circulate petitions and otherwise plead with the coffee company to change its mind.

"Now that it's going away, we're devastated," said Kate Walker, a facilities manager for software company SunGard Financial Systems who recently learned of a store closing in New York City.

We defy you to claim that Starbucks is your only coffee option, whether you live in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Florida or yes, even Bloomfield, New Mexico. All of these cities had coffee shops before the inception of Starbucks and all will continue to have them after these stores close. And of all the letter-writing and petition campaigns in the world, this might be the least valuable. Really? This is worth getting into activism for?

This is not even a thing against Starbucks. They're just doing what they have to do in these lean economic times. If you really are "devastated" about the loss of your local green giant to the point that you will petition to keep it open, you, sir or ma'am, are a total dork.

Though now we know how it must have felt to be derisive of those who petitioned against these stores opening willy-nilly in the first place.

Full List of Store Closures [Starbucks]
Starbucks Gets Pleas Not to Close Stores [Wall Street Journal]

[Photo: People protest a Starbucks opening in New York via Yoonabomber/flickr]

Looks like Try My Thai in Hollywood is closed less than two years after the city government funded a new kitchen for the restaurant:

Owner Tai Vaz said the 15-year-old business "was not for me anymore."

"I didn't want to punish my customers for having lost my passion," she said, adding that tough economic times eased her decision.

For years, the restaurant was popular with critics, police officers, residents, tourists and many of the city's movers and shakers.

The family business first opened at 2003Harrison St., but in 2006 asked commissioners for an $80,000 grant to help move a block east. A number of influential people, including lobbyist Alan Koslow, took turns vouching for the owners.

...

Try My Thai is the latest in a string of businesses that have vanished from downtown despite financial help from the city. In March, the city hired a law firm to start collection proceedings against the owners of nationally acclaimed restaurant Michael's Kitchen and baby boutique The Casa Collection. The downtown redevelopment agency gave the two businesses a combined $175,000 in incentive grants, but they later closed.

Hollywood restaurant that got $65,655 from city is now closed [Sun-Sentinel]

Here's an interesting one we received this weekend for The Palm Beach Steakhouse titled "Don't go if you live in FL all year long:"

They only have their full menu for the tuorist, They did not have the surf and Turf they show on their site. They did not have the French Onion soup they show on their menu. When we asked about it they said that it was not the season for Lobster. I wanted to ask if it was not the season for Onion also. For dessert they only had mango cheesecake, which the waiter kept pushing. Very Disapointing,

The Palm Beach Steakhouse [MenuPages]
The Palm Beach Steakhouse [Official Site]

This weekend we entered, ordered from, sat in and ate food at, a McDonald's. Not just any McDonalds. This was a McDonalds in a low-end mall, in the middle of a day on a Saturday, just before we had to go to get some things from Target. It was truly disgusting.

As we sat, gnawing on a dried-out Southern Chicken Sandwich (note to cultish fanatics of this boring menu item: go to hell), trying to ignore the two grade-school children yelling at one another from either side of our table, we decided that this would be the last time we'd ever set foot in a McDonald's and, unless the situation seriously called for it (a nostalgic 6 a.m. "dawn patrol" surf trip in Seal Beach? Never going to happen, but OK, a Sausage McMuffin with Egg), we'd never eat their food again, either.

Now, with a grudge, we come to work Monday Morning to find this mess on Cracked, The 7 Most Bizarre Fast Food Industry Lawsuits and it seriously made our day. Pretty much everything in here is stuff you can't say on a family site such as this, so no quotes for you, but it is seriously funny, and will vindicate all your high-falutin' comparisons between modern fast food and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

The 7 Most Bizarre Fast Food Industry Lawsuits [Cracked]
Throwdown: Chick-fil-A vs. McDonald's Southern Style Chicken [Serious Eats]
The Jungle [Wikipedia]

[Photo: via zorilla/flickr]

• Global warming is killing the oysters. [Boston Globe]

• Oh good! "Fish Ebola" has been found in Lake Michigan fish. [Washington Post]

• Middle East dilemma: food or water? [New York Times]

• Where is Haiti's promised food aid? [Chicago Tribune]

• Hey! In the midst of a global food crisis, maybe it might be a little tacky to use fish to give yourself a pedicure! [LA Times]

Today was going to be a serious Friday. Today was going to be all about dressing down the FDA for suddenly declaring tomatoes safe after instigating a months-long salmonella scare that didn't identify the source of the outbreak but did cost the tomato-growing industry something in the neighborhood of a quarter-billion dollars.

Today was supposed to be for questioning the ethics of an administration that approves labeling something as grotesquely engineered as high fructose corn syrup "Natural." We were going to insinuate that high-level FDA officials were in the pocket of the corn lobby, even as they also approved a combined $1 million in bonuses for themselves, "pushing their pay above that of members of Congress, federal judges - and even some cabinet secretaries."

But you don't want to hear about that, right? You want Fun Friday. You know what you want? You want to see a pickle get electrocuted as a metaphor for converting to Christianity. Look, it lights up and smoke comes out! Can the FDA do that? Only listen to Grandpa John and don't try this at home.

Thanks FDA....for nothing. [Accidental Hedonist]
FDA Lifts Warning About Eating Certain Types of Tomatoes [FDA Press Release]
As FDA says tomatoes are safe, growers criticize agency [Sacramento Bee]
FDA Execs Reap Lavish Bonuses [CBS]
Holk V. Snapple civil verdict [Corn.org]
Man electrocutes pickle to demonstrate power of Christianity [Boing Boing]

• Lotsa Lebanese food in Beantown. [MP: Boston]

• In case you were wondering, it costs a lot to fill a Jacuzzi with Chicken McNuggets. [MP: Chicago]

• Mexican wrestling masks on restaurant walls? Yes, please! [MP: Philadelphia]

• Happy birthday, umami! [MP: San Francisco]

• Miami lives la bonne vie. [MP: South Florida]

At least 10 people in Palm Beach have contracted ciguatera from grouper, and from the details given in this Palm Beach Post article, it sounds like hell:

With blurred vision, aching joints and burning skin, the men struggled to hold down food. At night, they itched so badly that they scratched parts of their skin off and couldn't sleep.

The culprit: a dinner of yellowfin grouper that left the fishermen feeling as though they might die.

"It was the worst I've ever felt," said Tim Sperling, 52, of Jupiter, who along with John Ely, 50, of North Palm Beach, contracted ciguatera during a sport-fishing trip in the Bahamas in mid-June. "I didn't eat anything solid for eight days. I lost 14 pounds."

Aside from this fishing trip to the Bahamas that went very wrong, authorities have tied a few ciguatera cases to fish sold at a Whole Foods. Federal officials are trying to pinpoint the area where these toxic fish are hiding, so as to prohibit fishing there, but, well, given the government's recent inability to pinpoint the cause of the salmonella outbreak (and tomatoes don't move around!), we're not holding our breath. And we might stay away from the grouper for a while.

On the other hand, 14 pounds in eight days? Sounds like the next miracle diet ready to hit South Beach.

Men recount agony at sea after eating tainted grouper [Palm Beach Post]
Ciguatera [Wikipedia]

Photo, of a yellowfin grouper, so you know what you're up against: Scubaben/flickr

• The FDA has finally lifted the ban on tomatoes. Um, does this mean we shouldn't have been buying them for the past few weeks? [New York Times]

• Jalapeño and serrano peppers, however, are still dangerous. [Chicago Tribune]

• All these food poisoning outbreaks are driving people right to their local farmers' markets. [Washington Post]

• The Pope thinks you're greedy. [Guardian]

• Well, maybe not those of you in the EU who want to start a 1.6 billion fund to combat the global food crisis. [LA Times]

The normally staid British newsmagazine The Economist has some real cheeky monkeys on staff. Let us explain.

Stephen Dubner is the co-author of the bestselling book Freakonomics and writes a blog of the same name for The New York Times. In a July 8 blog post, he called out a perceived spelling error in a recent Economist story:

"Consider this lead from a recent article about a huge Mexican mining company called Fresnillo, which was recently listed on the London Stock Exchange:

In the hills north east of Mexico City it is not uncommon to find Cornish pasties for sale.

They meant to write “pastries” but, considering that miners work really hard, they might also be hoping to encounter the kind of people who go shopping for pasties."

That's when The Economist decided to send Dubner a pasty in the mail.

More commentary is available over at Serious Eats and Net Writing.

Pasties, pasties everywhere [Freakonomics/NYT]

[Photos via Stephen Dubner/NYT]

We reported just yesterday that the folks behind Joley are temporarily running the restaurant at The Sagamore. But today we learned that rumor has it that its replacement will be an outpost of event empresario Barton G's restaurant. What a perfect fit — his artistic culinary creations (check out his Sashimi Snow Cones and Crispy Popcorn Shrimp) are perfectly paired to SoBe's "Art Hotel"...

The Sagamore [Official Site]
Joley Running The Restaurant At The Sagamore [MP: South Florida]
Barton G [MenuPages]
Barton G [Official Site]

A recent commentary on Marketplace really struck a chord, especially after a dinner some months ago that ended with married best friends bickering over the price of a drink, about eight eyeballs straining to reach the ceiling first, and the embarrassing situation of taking so long that the staff milled about the table, hinting with no subtlety at all that it was time to go.

While this is an extreme version of check-splitting, and was probably called for as it was not a regular dining group, Dan Ariely's assertion that splitting a check causes more mental distress, in total, than does one person treating, never seemed truer.

But there are a couple problems with his point that may not be surmountable, especially to younger diners. First, you need a regular group in which everybody is willing to join in this method. If one person wants the check to be traded from meal to meal, and one wants it to be split every time, it will never work.

Also, picking up the check for a table of four at a moderately priced restaurant can be cost-prohibitive, even for comfortably middle-income people. A meal for $60 might be a ding to the pocketbook, but a $240 check just blew your whole weekend's entertainment budget.

Still, Ariely's got a good point about the "pain of paying," and if you can get to where you only have to experience that pain every fourth dinner, you're doing pretty well. It's all about figuring out who'll pick up the first check...

Splitting the check increases the pain [Marketplace]

[Photo: revjim5000/flickr]

• Despite the manifesto that greets diners on the menu, Victoria Pesce Elliott thinks Fratelli Lyon is a winner. [Miami Herald]

• Lee Klein really enjoys his meal(s) at Por Fin, and he really loves the fact that you can get half portions. [Miami New Times]

• Stephen's Restaurant and New York-Style Deli is a New York oasis in Hialeah. [Miami Herald]

• The barbecue at Spoto's Oakwood Grill earns only mediocre marks from Gail Shepherd. [Broward-Palm Beach New Times]

• The Italian-Latin American combination is a pretty common one around here, and the Herald has a good roundup of places to sample the fusion cuisine. [Miami Herald]

• Here's a focus on three small, independent eateries in Broward County. [Miami Herald]

• So it's in a strip mall. Tentazione in Boynton Beach still serves excellent homestyle Italian food. [Palm Beach Post]

• A big huge study seems to support a low-carb diet and "Mediterranean regime." Screw that, though. Bread still rules. [AP/Yahoo]

• Though a bread habit can be dangerous when Subway employees apparently bake a knife into your loaf. [Reuters]

• Not just a producer: The government of India announced it's looking to make food processing its next big economic growth engine. [Press Information Bureau of India]

• And speaking of economic "engines," right here in our own bread basket Iowa corn producers are pretty proud of the massive popularity of E85 ethanol. [Wallaces Farmer]

We've got three new steakhouses coming our way, because clearly we have not yet had our fill of red meat. These really seem like the wrong types of places to be opening during a recession, right? Anyway, here they are:

• Morton's hasn't quite saturated the market enough, despite the recent opening of the branch in Coral Gables. A new Morton's will open up in The Crown apartment building on 40th Street and Collins Avenue on Miami Beach sometime either late this year or early next year. We imagine it'll likely be the latter. The company is also planning to open its first branch in Broward County later this year in the Broward Financial Center in Fort Lauderdale.

• BLT Steak, Laurent Tourondel's take on the American steakhouse, has chosen Miami Beach as its fifth location. It'll be located inside the Betsy Hotel. We made a couple of phone calls, but no one could give any specific information about the progress of the restaurant, except that it will be opening in the fall.

• Cita's Italian Chophouse definitely has an opening date: July 22. It's opening at 3176 Commodore Plaza in Coconut Grove. The focus, we're told, will be premium cuts of beef, fresh fish and homemade pastas. We're still working on getting a menu, but here are a few sample dishes: veal-pork-beef meatballs topped with whipped ricotta, fried basil and tomato sauce; papardelle with beef tenderloin, porcini mushrooms and wild herbs in a Cognac sauce; short ribs marinated in Barolo for 24 hours before being braised topped with whipped ricotta; and for dessert, something called chocolate sabotage, a sampling of five chocolate desserts.

We've recently become a little obsessed with the idea of "hacking" non-electronic, everyday things. For example there are these guys who hacked the McDonald's Menu, the well-known Starbucks iced latte hack (the ghetto latte), and now, with blazing turnaround time, the chocolate chip cookie hack.

You probably read the New York Times article last week that included advice to let chocolate chip cookie dough sit for 36 hours to fully absorb the liquid from the eggs. But who has 36 hours? Ridiculous. We want cookies now!

Well, Ideas In Food came to the rescue quickly with this handy hack of writer David Leite's painstaking findings: If you vacuum seal the cookie dough, it only takes about three hours for the liquid to absorb thoroughly enough to make those same perfect chocolate chip cookies.

What I can tell you is that the dough darkened and VacuumSealedDough became fully saturated, similar to the way that the dough usually looks after a couple of days in the refrigerator. It also changed the texture of the dough, making it a bit more elastic to the touch. The just made dough was too soft to shape and needed to chill, so I left in the fridge for about three hours before baking.

The resulting cookies were pretty damn good. They had a slightly cakey texture in the center with chewy yet crisp edges and rich buttery, caramel flavors. It was impossible to eat just one and I was thankful that I had not baked off the entire batch. Were they better than David Leite's? I really couldn't say. On the other hand I think it was clear that vacuum sealing did have a positive effect on the process, and from now on plastic wrap is out and vacuum bags are definitely in.

Vacuum Sealed Cookie Dough [Ideas In Food]
Perfection? Hint: It’s Warm and Has a Secret
HOWTO trick McDonald's into serving you "breakfast" at lunchtime and vice-versa [Boing Boing]
How to hack Starbucks [Slate]

[Photo: Chocolate chip cookie pie via Bakerella/flickr]

A tipster who chatted up Chef John Suley of at the mango festival last weekend let us know that Grand Crew Restaurant Group, the company behind Cafe Joley and Joley Restaurant is currently running the restaurant in the old Social spot. So we called up the hotel and got confirmation; Grand Crew is in there temporarily, until the hotel can find a more permanent tenant. In the meantime, it's going by the name of the Sagamore Restaurant.

UPDATE: We just received a copy of the menu. Looks like it's just a $38 three-course prix fixe. Entree options are: grilled chicken breast with garlic potato puree, sauteed spinach and honey shallot sauce; steak frites, hangar steak and bearnaise sauce; seared halibut, forbidden rice mushrooms with sake sesame sauce; and pappardelle with goat cheese, peas, lemon olive oil and basil. We'll have the rest of the menu online tomorrow.

Cafe Joley [MenuPages]
Cafe Joley [Official Site]
Joley Restaurant [MenuPages]
Sagamore Hotel [Official Site]

We've got some pretty big news around here: New York Media, the parent company of New York Magazine, has bought MenuPages. It's a natural partnership, and we're very excited about the whole deal, as it should give us more resources to better cover our markets. For more information, check out the New York Times article about the deal. We've included the press release after the jump:

NEW YORK MEDIA ACQUIRES MENUPAGES.COM

MenuPages to Continue as Distinct Multi-City Site

New York, NY, July 14, 2008 – New York Media LLC, the parent company of New York magazine and the Website NYmag.com, announced today that it has acquired leading restaurant listings Website MenuPages. Currently serving eight major markets, MenuPages will continue to operate under its distinct URL, MenuPages.com.

MenuPages currently attracts approximately 1.5 million unique users and 15 million page views per month to its thousands of detailed restaurant listings from eight U.S. cities. Combined with NYmag.com’s more than 5 million monthly unique visitors and 45 million page views, this acquisition creates a significant and immediate advertising opportunity for NYmag.com’s proven sales staff. NYmag.com’s restaurant menus will now be powered by MenuPages, and in the longer term, New York Media plans to expand MenuPages’ scope and depth while forming strategic licensing, advertising and distribution partnerships across the country.

“The acquisition of MenuPages is an exciting addition to New York Media’s restaurant and dining content offering. We’re thrilled to be able to extend our investment strategy to strategic acquisitions that compliment our existing assets,” said New York Media CEO Anup Bagaria. “We’ll continue to invest behind the talented staff at New York Media to drive organic growth as well as to pursue acquisitions on a selective basis.”

The MenuPages staff, led by the company’s President and Founder, Greg Barton, will move into New York Media’s Soho offices late in the summer of 2008 and will work closely with New York Media staff including General Manager of Digital Media Michael Silberman, Publisher Larry Burstein and Editor-in-Chief Adam Moss.

“MenuPages has built its traffic organically through consistent unmatched content quality and reliability,” said Greg Barton. “I am thrilled to be launching a new era for MenuPages; as part of New York Media, with its tremendous depth of resources and expertise, we will be able to work together to build a business that is a nationally recognized resource for restaurants and dining.”

About New York Media
New York Media is the parent company for the ground-breaking weekly New York magazine, founded in 1968, the Website nymag.com, the twice-yearly publications New York Weddings and New York Look, the events sponsorship division New York Events, and the national restaurant search Website MenuPages.

• Food pantry and soup kitchen usage is up 9 percent over last year in New York City. [NYT]

• The head of the World Bank says we're going to need $10 billion to offset the effects of food inflation over the next few years in developing countries. [AP via NYT]

• Did you know that the FDA spent $2.2 million over the past eight years on employee award ceremonies? [Food & Water Watch]

• In a slow market, realtors turn to food to lure buyers. Apparently freshly-baked pies or lemonade on a hot day make the idea of a mortgage go down a little easier. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]

While the Benihana experience was novel when Aoki introduced it in the mid-1960s, teppanyaki is about as authentically Japanese as a piece of chicken with a can of salsa dumped over it is authentically Mexican. It's considered Western food by most Japanese, and there is no doubt much snickering over American stupidity that we flock to it as an "ethnic" experience.

Aoki was as controversial as his restaurants: he was infamously combative and chauvinistic, had three wives (at least one a former mistress with whom he had a simultaneous family with the first wife), innumerable girlfriends, and proudly admitted that in one calendar year he had fathered three children by three women. He was the subject of a scathing story in New York Magazine in 2006, with which he cooperated fully — even with the realization that he might not be painted in a positive light:

A celebrity chef who couldn’t cook a dish, Rocky became a star by mastering the fine art of cheap publicity stunts. He posed for photos in the hot tub in his stretch Rolls-Royce and drove a cross-country race in a stretch Volkswagen bug. (“I also have stretch Corvette.”) He cameoed on Hawaii Five-O, won a national backgammon championship, and set a world record when he became the first person to cross the Pacific in a hot-air balloon (stamped with the Benihana logo, of course).

He was also on Japan's 1960 Olympic wrestling team (he didn't compete), survived a horrific speedboating accident in 1982, and often threatened to disinherit his children if they didn't live up to his standards of wealth and fame (his favorites: daughter Devon, who is an actress/model, and son Steve, who is a DJ with questionable facial hair).

Whether or not he will be missed is up in the air, but his contribution to America's culinary landscape — for better or for worse — is indelible.

Rocky Aoki, Founder of Benihana Chain, Dies at 69 [Bloomberg]
Rocky Aoki's Family Horror Show [NYMag]

[Photo: The Benihana experience, via Are Nold Rob Bore's Flickr]

We love it when restaurateurs suddenly discover MenuPages: South Florida. Not only because we like to get the word out about the site, but also because sometimes it can be a bit amusing. How can we tell? Well, it's easy, really. Here's an example: over the past 48 hours, we've received 10 wonderful glowing reviews — three from the same IP address — for J Mark's Restaurant in Pompano Beach. Clearly the manager and/or owner learned of the site and ordered a blitzkrieg of positive reviews to boost ratings. (Also guilty this week: John The Baker.) After the jump, we've included a few of the reviews that didn't make it onto the site because of the obvious shill factor.

This one is titled "FANTASTIC FANTASTIC FANTASTIC!!!!:"

this has to be the greatest resturant i have been to in my life. i had the hawiian rib eye its flavor was unbalivable,the service was fantasic, the owners ariel and steve care enough to stop and check with each guest to ensure that they enjoy there expirence at this resteruant . over all theres nothing to say other than that this was truly a dining expirence i will remember.

Here's another one:

I recently visited the area and discovered J. Marks. The food was outstanding and the service was spot on. The eggrolls were delicious and the prime rib was some of the best I have ever had. I have recommended J. Mark's to my other friends that have visited the area and agree with me!!!! Steve and his team have done an outstanding job!!! Keep up the great work!!!!!

So, restaurateurs, as much as we enjoy the amusement, really, just don't bother. It's futile.

J Mark's Restaurant [MenuPages]
J Mark's Restaurant [Official Site]

Perhaps you saw Dickson Despommier on the Colbert Report last month, or maybe you first came on the name in today's FYI. Whatever. Point is, this guy is one weird public health scientist who is taking this whole "build up, not out" concept of urban design, and the locavore concept of eating food, and mashing them together in his hands to come up with something like this:

That there is a vertical farm, people. A place to grow food right here in the city, avoiding the costly, stinky diesel motors involved with trucking produce all over the country. Not exactly amber waves of grain, but still quite a striking symbol.

However, Armando Carbonell, chairman of the department of planning and urban form at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, states in today's International Herald Tribune article, "Would a tomato in lower Manhattan be able to outbid an investment banker for space in a high-rise? My bet is that the investment banker will pay more." That seems to be the rub.

You could design around sunlight problems and other functional hurdles, but in the end, city-center real estate is just really expensive, and shows little sign of getting less so anytime soon. How far into, say, New Jersey, would you have to build one of those towers in order to make it economically viable? And by the time you're that out of New York City, wouldn't it make more sense just to farm the regular way?

One hopes not. The vertical farm really should work. It's such a cool solution to a growing problem. Maybe they could put offices in it too, to jack up revenue. Maybe by the time one of these things gets built, produce will be so expensive that the tomato really could compete with the investment banker. For right now, it seems it's a project that would have to rely heavily on outside funding. But that could be ok, too.

Whatever the method, this really needs to get built, not just for practical reasons, but because it will bring us so much closer to a flying-car, curvy-building, jetpack-having future utopia.

The Colbert Report: Dickson Despommier [Comedy Central]
Country, the city version [International Herald Tribune]
The Vertical Farm Project [Official Site]

[Photo: via the Vertical Farm Project]

• Vertical farming is (a) quite possibly the solution to the food crisis, (b) SO COOL. [IHT]

• California becomes the first state to ban trans fats across the board. [SF Chronicle]

• 400,000 Japanese fishermen staged a one-day strike to protest fuel costs. [NYT]

• The "silent tsunami" of rising food costs hits hardest on ... sunflower seeds? [Forbes]

• Biochemists in Argentina work 'round the clock to find the perfect hamburger. [WaPo]

"I am not good at anything, but I can eat and I can ride a bike, so you put those two things together and I've got a chance."

What is this? an autobiography? No, it's a quote from a trailer for a documentary about the Tour de Donut, which has rolled through Staunton, IL, for 20 years now right around Tour De France time.

As Sidel Evans fights to keep the yellow jersey for Silence-Lotto with a one-second lead over Rabobank's Oscar Freire in France, here in the United states, athletes in a different league altogether fought to keep their lunch down Saturday as they ate up glazed doughnuts along with miles of asphalt.

Fortunately for all involved, the Tour de Donuts is a one-day race and not a multi-stage tour like the Tour de France. Still, to a rider stuffed with fried dough and struggling through the hilly terrain, it probably feels like it lasts forever. The 30-mile ride is set up like a regular one-day classic, with the minor difference that riders are given the chance to scarf doughnuts at two checkpoints along the way. Each doughnut consumed knocks five minutes off a rider's time, so it behooves riders to gorge, but they must not throw up.

"I don't think I'll make my goal. It's tough to hold it back now," Steve Striker told The Telegraph, of Alton, IL. It seemed incredible that people would do this race at all, but then it turned out the serious competitors pack in 20 to 30 doughnuts during the race. That would, honestly, kill us. Check out this trailer for the documentary, and, if you think you're tough enough, think about signing up for next year's race. It could be your chance for greatness.

Cyclists test their legs — and stomachs — at annual Tour de Donut [The Telegraph]
Tour De France [Official Site]

Didn't get your fill of Fourth of July celebrations? Move on to French national festivities.

In honor of France’s fête nationale, Bastille Day, the Biltmore’s French restaurant Palme D'Or will host a succulent feast tonight led by native French Chef Philippe Ruiz, who has created a five-course menu accompanied by wine pairings.

The evening’s festivities will also include a complimentary glass of Perrrier-Jouet Champagne upon arrival, live entertainment by French Canadian singer Manon Robert, and a commemorative gift courtesy of the hotel’s Executive Pastry Chef Olivier Rodriguez. Call 305-913-3203. Dinner is $69 per person; with wine pairing $119.00 per person plus tax and gratuity.

Palme D'Or [MenuPages]
Palme D'Or [Official Site]

You may have noticed that the blog was going a little haywire this morning. We had a few technical difficulties that took a while to sort out. It's amazing the havoc that one apostrophe that should've been a quotation mark in HTML code can wreak on a blog. But everything should be back to normal now.

This China Grill Management restaurant has been scaling down operations for the past month, but this week was the former hot spot's last. Even the bar at Social Miami at Sagamore, which remained open as the dining section was slowly dismantled, is officially closed now (although you can still get a drink at the Sagamore Hotel-operated bar near the lobby area). We wonder what new venture will take its place?

Social Miami at Sagamore [MenuPages]
Social Miami at Sagamore [Official Site]

• It's a DC burger extravaganza. [Washington Post]

• Rocky Aoki, may you rest in a heaven where Japanese chefs with sharp knives entertain fat midwesterners. [New York Times]

• If you're going to rob a house, you might as well bathe yourself in barbecue sauce. [WWMT]

• Once again, New York has the best food markets. [Village Voice]

• Starbucks is selling smoothies. Just don't call them smoothies or CEO Howard Schultz will drink your blood. You know, like the boogieman. [Serious Eats]

• Boston coffee shops get hip to this "local foods" trend they've been hearing so much about. [MP: Boston]

• We're very excited to welcome new Chicago editor Helen Rosner to the MenuPages family! She's been rocking it on the Chi-town blog all week. [MP: Chicago]

• Lions and pythons and black bears (oh my!) are for dinner in Philly. [MP: Philadelphia]

• Vodka cocktails and excellent produce? Yes, please! [MP: San Francisco]

• Mango-based bartering reigns supreme at one Miami restaurant! [MP: South Florida]

Remember when your mom first learned to use the internet and she sent you e-mails every day with links and jokes and whatnot in them? totally annoying, right? But sometimes you chuckle at the jokes, right? Good, because here are a bunch of waiter joke links for a lazy Friday:

• You may not eat soup ever again [Coldmud]

• A whole bunch of waiter jokes that barely leave the realm of the popsicle stick [Workjoke]

• The New Yorker's given quite a bit of cartoon ink to the subject [Cartoonbank]

• Finally, the Muppets take on that fly in the soup:

Happy Friday!

You all know that the Mango Festival at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden is happening this weekend, right? We went last year and had a lovely time, although unfortunately this year we won't be able to make it. It's worth the entrance fee just to see the vast collection of mangos on display, despite the fact that it was difficult fighting the temptation to grab one, peel it and dig right in.

This year's festival theme is "Mangos of Africa," and among the curator's choice selections are two cultivars from South Africa and one from Egypt. There will be different varieties of mango to sample, mango trees to buy for your own backyard, and all sorts of dishes made with mangos by local chefs.

And in honor of the mango festival, we present Chef Allen Susser demonstrating how to best cut a mango:

Mango Festival at Fairchild [Official Site]
Mangos Mangos Everywhere! [MP: South Florida]
Chef Allen's [MenuPages]
Chef Allen's [Official Site]

• Mint leaves may have given a Virginia family food poisoning. [Washington Post]

• Delivering drug-laced cookies to the police department is probably not the perfect crime. [Chicago Tribune]

• Restrictions are tightening up on pesticides, but is it enough? (No.) [LA Times]

• There's a drought in California. Is irresponsible water usage to blame? ( Probably!) [San Francisco Chronicle]

• OMG, we might have to walk further to get Starbucks. [New York Times]

Now that there's a new Batman movie out and all, how about we go retro with a look back at McDonalds' Batman Happy Meals from 1992?

McDonalds' Batman Happy Meals [YouTube]

• Ariston Restaurant gets three stars from Victoria Pesce Elliott, who particularly enjoyed the lamb. [Miami Herald]

• Lee Klein goes the Italian-Argentine (or is it Argentine-Italian) route at Bartolome in Miami Beach, where the grilled meats and salads are best. [Miami New Times]

• More Argentine-Italian on the Beach: Teodora's, which serves up huge portions. [Miami Herald]

• Looking for some bargains on South Beach? Here are a few ideas. [Miami Herald]

• French fries with rosemary and truffle oil...mmm. Of course, there's plenty more at Ilios, a Mediterranean restaurant in the Hilton in Fort Lauderdale that just got three-and-a-half stars. [Miami Herald]

• Gail Shepherd has a tendency to not get to the actual review part of her review until, say, four or five long paragraphs in. Normally, this would annoy us, but we're usually sufficiently entertained by the tangents. So, right: Saffron is good, and the tres leches is fantastic. [Broward-Palm Beach New Times]

• Charles Passy heads to the new Bice Bistro in Palm Beach Gardens (the more casual sibling of the other Bices in South Florida), where they make excellent butternut squash tortellini and lasagna. [Palm Beach Post]

This is how one's world gets expanded when one reads Coldmud: First, who knew that New Zealanders traditionally eat fruitcake at weddings? Not us. Second, turns out fruitcake is, not surprisingly, going out of style, in favor of (get your mind ready to be blown) cheese cake. No, not cheesecake, cheese cake. Look:

That there is a wedding cake made out of cheese. Isn't that beautiful? Don't you want one? See, the problem with wedding cakes in general is that they come at the end of the meal. After you've had several glasses of champagne, maybe danced a turn or two, and just generally partied down a bit, do you really want a big, sugary chunk of cake and icing? Or fruitcake? No, you do not. You want sustenance, and something to accompany that third glass of bubbly. Go, cheese!

The trend is taking hold outside New Zealand as well, especially in the UK, but the Kiwis probably have the most to gain from it, considering their traditional alternative: fruitcake. It makes you wonder.

Cheese takes the cake at weddings [Dominion Post]

[Photo: via gromgull/flickr]

• Some American consumers getting in on the ground floor of food production. [NY Times]

• Investigators pretty well stumped as to what caused that pesky salmonella outbreak. Maybe Jalepenos? [Sacramento Bee/AP]

• Using sea water to farm the desert in Mexico [LA Times]

• Iraq having as hard a time with its crops as with everything else [Chicago Tribune]

• Family grocery bills skyrocketing across the pond [Times of London]

This is easily the saddest thing I've read today:

"I think that in 20 years chocolate will be like caviar," says John Mason, executive director and founder of the Ghana-based Nature Conservation Research Council (NCRC).

"It will become so rare and so expensive that the average Joe just won't be able to afford it."

The reason for the worry? Cacao is a rainforest plant that likes shade and biodiversity, but it's grown as a monoculture in lots of sun, which drains the soil of any nutrients and halves the lifespan of the trees. So then farmers have to clear more rainforest to plant more cacao. They're running out of usable space in West Africa, where most of the world's supply of cacao is grown, and the yields are down quite a bit. This might not only deprive us of chocolate, but it could also wreak havoc on the economies of some of these cacao-producing nations.

There is some good news. It appears farmers and environmentalists have realized they have common goals and are beginning to work together. Cadbury is currently working with 60 farms in Ghana, according to the CNN article, to figure out how to do this sustainably.

And on the disease-fighting front, Mars is collaborating with the USDA and IBM on a $10 million project that will attempt to sequence the genome of the cacao plant, in order to develop varieties that are resistant to diseases like the fungus that recently devastated Brazil's cacao crop.

Chocolate's bitter sweet relationship with the rainforest [CNN]
Safeguarding the World's Chocolate Supply [NPR]

Photo: icyshard/flickr

I still love dating my husband. Recently, we had a date at the Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood. We began the night with dinner at Tatu Asian Bar & Grill. I fell in love with the decor immediately. It's a mix of deep red meets IKEA meets funky with old kung-fu movies projected on one wall.

We started off with their signature cocktail, the lychee-tini, a perfect blend of peach vodka, white cranberry juice, and lychee fruit. The wild mushroom potstickers paired nicely with the drinks.For dinner, we shared assorted sushi rolls (fresh and fabulous) and the Shanghai beef which was cooked perfectly and came with tempura fried onion slivers that melted in our mouths. Our waitress brought us a huge cone of sour-apple cotton candy and two fake tattoos with our bill — which somehow eased the pain of putting down the credit card. After dinner we caught an hysterical comedy show at The Improv, which was luckily just a few steps away from the lychee-tinis . . . I mean, Tatu. We topped off the night with a trip to the Casino — if only we'd had the sour-apple cotton candy and tattoos then. . .

Tatu Asian Bar & Grill [MenuPages]
Tatu Asian Bar & Grill [Official Site]

Photo: KTP Design Group

Aromas del Peru [MenuPages]
Aromas del Peru [Official Site]

Photo: Masala Cha/flickr

So is the guy a bigot, or just an asshole?

Something about this article in the San Francisco Chronicle about an ambiguously homophobic comment by a doorman struck the same chord as the ongoing debate in the New York food publications over dress code. Both discussions seem so open-ended and fruitless that the temptation is to say, "go to that establishment or don't go there but shut up about it."

But that's not how problems get solved. "You don't like that the back of the bus, Ms. Parks? Well, I don't like hearing about it, so just walk." No, that doesn't work at all. Nor is it really analogous, but you get the point. So let's get into it a little.

To summarize, the San Francisco issue was with a gay man dressed in an outfit he described as, "totally faggy" who was told by a bouncer at an "edgy and popular bar" that, "Obviously this is not your kind of place." Writer Chris Colin wonders weather the bouncer was being homophobic or just gruff, and asks, "as a society, how do we disentangle generic rudeness from bigotry?"

Meanwhile, a debate has been simmering in the comments boards of New York Times critic Frank Bruni's blog and Adam Roberts' Amateur Gourmet site over the appropriateness of dress codes in restaurants. Roberts contends that dress codes are outdated relics (my words, not his), while Bruni makes the case that a restaurant has the right to control its ambiance by controlling what people wear.

Initially, I was inclined to agree with Bruni. It is the restaurant's prerogative to control it's atmosphere, after all, and it does feel a little cheap to go to a three-figure dinner and still feel like you're on the subway. But on some level, isn't a restaurant that hands an under-dressed patron an ill-fitting loaner jacket saying, essentially, "Obviously this is not your kind of place?"

"Maybe it's looks-ism. It could be you're too straight for a gay bar. Or too gay for a straight bar. Or too rich for a poor bar. This one's such a gray area," Selisse Berry, founder of San Francisco's Out & Equal Workplace Advocates, states in the Chron article. That's a good word, and it seems to apply to both the doorman and the dress-code issue.

Roberts states that the younger generation of mid-to-high-end diners feels comfortable going to dinner in whatever attire they want because the food is the focus, not the dress. "We're looking at Gourmet, not Vogue, before we head out the door," he writes.

A restaurant with its own future in mind would want to attract these diners, but at the same time can't risk alienating its regulars, who are used to coats and ties and cocktail dresses. Similarly, a bar that stays popular because it stays "edgy" can't neuter its staff's personality, but it can't risk alienating customers with gruffness that seeps over into bigotry, even perceived bigotry.

So what are bars and restaurants that want to have a say in their own atmosphere to do? Well, a modicum of flexibility and politeness all around would be a good starting point. Perhaps the bouncer could have conveyed the same message while avoiding offense by saying something like, "wow, that's a hell of an outfit. I think you look cool, but I hope you won't feel uncomfortable inside."

The Maitre d'hotel of a restaurant that insists on keeping a dress code might put its jacketless clientele at ease by sympathizing with them: "I'm sorry sir, I know it's boiling outside, but you may find the climate in the dining room a little too chilly without a coat. Perhaps this gray one?" The restaurant could also benefit from having some halfway decent coats on, and bending to a patron that adheres to the spirit, if not the letter, of its rules.

Overall, though, no person or establishment will ever please everybody. As long as an establishment treats its customers fairly and respectfully, and serves them a hot meal, a cold drink or whatever else they order, it seems debates over dress codes and attitudes may have to be relegated to the dinner table.

And that is where it will do the most good, anyway. By continually discussing and debating our mores, our society becomes stronger. With any luck, in time, alienation and hostility surrounding these issues will give way to humor and grace, and that would be simply delicious.

Homophobic, or just edgy? [San Francisco Chronicle]
When You're All Dressed Up, You Need Somewhere To Go
No Jacket Required (An Anti Dress-Code Manifesto) [Amateur Gourmet]

[Photo: via slushpup/flickr]

• Despite a recent recall of 5.3 million pounds of beef, our meat is totally safe. So says the secretary of agriculture. [AP]

• Farms are dying off, but produce festivals live on! [NYT]

• Need to lose weight? Try writing down everything you eat. No cheating! [San Francisco Chronicle]

• Staff of the AP Beijing bureau give their restaurant recommendations for Olympic spectators. On the menu: deep-fried starfish. [Welt]

• An instant menu translator — genius! [BusinessWire]

On one hand, any visit to New York's 2nd Avenue Deli is elevated from good to heart-stoppingly great via the free bowl of gribbenes, a.k.a. chicken skin fried in chicken fat, that's plonked down on our table when we sit down. So it stands to reason that if the fried skin of the humble chicken is spectacular, then the fried skin of the magical, wonderful pig will be transcendent. On the other hand, they make footballs from the stuff.

Speaking of sports. Our favorite farm league team, the Brooklyn Cyclones, has decided that the relationship between the pig and baseball needs to move beyond the Denny's Grand Slam, and are coming down squarely on the side of Pork Rinds Are Awesome with their upcoming themed evening: A Salute To The Pork Rind, sponsored by Utz brand pork rinds.

The salute will involve plenty of pork rind-related activities:

One of the between-inning contests will also feature two fans diving into a pool of pork rinds for a hidden treasure, and another will see contestants toss pork rinds at a target.

You've got to pre-register to participate in the pork rind contest, so if you find yourself planning to be in Coney Island next Monday, drop a line to Ricky Viola. Willy Wonka, eat your heart out.

[Photo: pig made of pork rinds, via Brooklyn Cyclones]

Gail Shepherd over at the New Times brought our attention to the regional locavore guide in the latest issue of Food & Wine. The magazine tapped local expert Allen Susser of Chef Allen's for information. He has some excellent suggestions, although what most interested us was the part about how he trades free meals with his customers in exchange for mangoes from their backyards. You've probably got to bring a whole bunch of mangoes, but we've seen how many fruits these local trees produce — that shouldn't be a problem.

Food & Wine's Guide for Florida Locavores [Short Order]
Locavore Resources: Southeast [Food & Wine]
Chef Allen's [MenuPages]
Chef Allen's [Official Site]

Photo: Nancy Galdo/flickr

Can’t wait until Miami Spice for the opportunity to experience the city’s best dining without denting your wallet? The eating extravaganza is still a month away, but 1 Bleu at The Regent is offering a Miami Spice Preview menu Mondays through Thursdays through the month of July. The promotion invites diners to experience a three-course meal at the Cordon Bleu-affiliated destination for $23 for lunch and $36 for dinner.

Dinner appetizers include choices such as Hawaiian yellowfin tuna carpaccio, Serrano ham with melon, and a salad of organic greens, wild berries, toasted almonds and crumbled feta cheese. Second course selections include Florida grouper served in a salsa verde, alongside clams, sweet peas and a potato confit; and a fragrant civet of duck served with lentils and citrus scented salmon with carnaroli. For dessert, choose from a Bleu Chocolate Bar served with chocolate mousse or coconut almond ice cream and Greek yogurt panna cotta, complemented by a wild berry consommé and honey tuile.

1 Bleu [MenuPages]
1 Bleu [Official Site]

How do you demonstrate your commitment to solving world hunger? Do you attempt to eat enough in one sitting to feed a third world family for a couple days? If you're a leader of a G8 country attending that summit on the Japanese Island of Hokkaido, the answer is, "maybe yes."

As they put on their serious faces and sat to discuss the growing global food crisis, the leaders of the Group of Eight industrialized democracies (that's Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), were served a total of 24 courses — six for lunch and 18 for dinner — that included such staples of the working poor as, "milk-fed lamb flavored with herbs and mustard and roast lamb with crepes and black truffle." Good, solid, peasant food to put them in touch with the pressing issues of the day.

Or not. Here, have a look at the menu:

The feast, according to the UK's Daily Mail, drew its share of ire from critics:

Dominic Nutt, of the charity Save the Children, did not approve.

'It is deeply hypocritical that they should be lavishing course after course on world leaders when there is a food crisis and millions cannot afford a decent meal,' he said.

'If the G8 wants to betray the hopes of a generation of children, it is going the right way about it. The food crisis is an emergency and the G8 must treat it as that.'

In 2005, at the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, world leaders promised to increase global aid by £25billion a year by 2010 and raise aid to Africa, the world's poorest continent, by £12.5billion. But the bloc of rich nations is only 14 per cent of the way towards hitting its target.

Of course it's unrealistic to expect world leaders at a high-powered international conference to snack on grilled cheese and baked potatoes, but the already maligned rich-guys' club isn't going to win friends by rubbing the world's face in its sumptuous meal. We're going to see no small amount of schadenfreude when and if the United States has to accept foreign aid from someplace like Venezuela. Oh wait...

G8 Summit [Official Site]
Summit that's hard to swallow - world leaders enjoy 18-course banquet as they discuss how to solve global food crisis [Daily Mail]
CITGO's Low Cost Heating Oil Program [CITGO]

• Rising food costs means Europe is close to capitulating on GM produce. [Reuters]

• We have the technology - so why can't we find the salmonella? [WaPo]

• Coca-Cola paying out $137.5 million to settle a shareholder lawsuit . [Tribune/AP]

• D-8 on the food crisis: Right up there with oil in the "grave threats" category . [NYT/AP]

• G-8 on the food crisis: Planning to "discuss the subject more in the afternoon." [NYT/AP]

Avoiding any "best thing since..." jokes will be hard on this, the 80th anniversary of the invention of the bread slicer. One of the most significant advances in the development of the sandwich, Otto Rohwedder's historic creation followed on the heels (sorry) of the pop-up toaster, which debuted in 1926.

Rohwedder deserves accolades not just for inventing a really useful thing, but for his apparently tireless pursuit of lunchtime convenience. Even after a fire destroyed his original blueprints, he did not loaf, but persevered and finally came out with an improved model that wrapped what it sliced.

By making possible such sandwiches as the club, the grilled cheese and the tuna melt, Rohwedder definitely sealed his place among the upper crust of American inventors. A toast is definitely in order!

The Best Thing Since, Well, Turns 80 Today [Serious Eats]
Inventor Of The Week: Otto Rohwedder [MIT]
History Of Sandwiches [What's Cooking America]

[Photo: Black forest rye bread via Dan4th/flickr]

Forgive my enthusiasm, but nothing brings out my inner cheerleader like sushi that thrills both my palate and my wallet. The new RA Sushi outpost in South Miami, which opened last week, satisfies both of those requirements. I've been to Ra Sushi before, at the chain's Palm Beach Gardens location, but my memories of that visit consist of a room that was cavernous but largely empty, and rolls that weren't bad, but weren't memorable either. Either the menu's changed, or this location is spicing things up, because my Saturday afternoon dining experience was excellent.

For a brand new spot, I was surprised at how many people were there at 3:30 pm. I was also pleasantly surprised at the attentive staff, who didn't let a water glass remain unfilled or an empty dish sit on the table for more than a few seconds. Upon introducing herself, the waitress immediately explained to us that the restaurant has two different kitchens, and that items from the hot and cold menus will come out at different times and independently of each other, so that we could plan our meal accordingly.

I wasn't terribly hungry on my visit, so I've yet to try several of the dishes that were calling out to me (Pineapple Cheese Wontons and Scallop Tempura, I'll be back for you!). But my Tunacado — slices of barely-seared Ahi tuna paired with just-ripe avocado — was light, healthy and tasted heaven-sent, particularly since I've been mourning the disappearance of a similar dish from Domo Japones' salad list). My husband's Viva Las Vegas roll was a mouthful (steer clear of it on a first date), but its spicy kick was well worth the disdainful look I received from fellow diners after trying to eat a piece in a single bite.

It was too early for cocktails on my visit, but the drink prices almost tempted me into indulging in a midday happy hour. The martinis were almost all $8, and the signature drinks were $7. Bottoms up!

RA Sushi [MenuPages]
RA Sushi [Official Site]

There are two things that I love to do — eat and sing. Give me a way to put those two together and I'm in heaven — which is why I'm a karaoke junkie. Am I a good singer? I've been told "NO," but singing karaoke fulfills my need to be on stage performing in front of a live audience, whether they like it or not. If you're like me and want to enjoy some good food in between belting out power ballads, then head to one of your local eateries for "Karaoke Night." Here are a few ideas for every night of the week:

Mondays: Neighborhood Sports Grill, from 8:55 p.m. to 1 a.m.
Tuesdays: Bru's Room Sports Grill from 8:55 p.m. to 1 a.m.
Wednesdays: Quarterdeck Seafood Bar from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m.
Thursdays: Duffy's Sports Grill from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m.
Fridays: Upper Deck Ale & Sports Grill from 9 p.m. to midnight
Saturdays: Landlubber's Raw Bar & Grill starting at 8 p.m.
Sundays: The Coffee Scene (15955 Pines Blvd in Pembroke Pines, (954) 441-2364) from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m.

Always call the night of to confirm. Fill your bellies and sing your hearts out!

Photo: Suzanne Gaudet Benefit

A recent court case in England might not debunk every urban legend about Pringles, but it is revealing about the "potato" chip in the iconic can: turns out Pringles don't count as "crisps" in Britain because they are made from less than 50 percent potatoes.

While suspected by most reasonable people to be the case, the ingredient revelation came as evidence in a recent British tax law case in which Pringles owner Proctor and Gamble argued that its product should be exempt from the so-called Value Added Tax normally applied to potato chips (crisps, as they call them there) because, according to the Times Online,

Pringles have a potato content of about 42 per cent. “As a result, this appeal is allowed because regular Pringles are not, on the facts found, ‘made from the potato, or from potato flour, or from potato starch’ within the legal requirement and are exempt from VAT,” [Mr Justice Warren] said.

Fry and Fry Again [About.com]
Pringles are not chips in England [Slashfood]
Crunch decision goes against taxmen as court rules a Pringle is not a crisp [Times Online]
Pringles Potato Crisps [Amazon]

[Photo: Pringles German Sausage flavor. There was doubt these are not an actual potato product? Via Jetalone/flickr]

• Lobster, lobster, lobster. [NYT]
• America's top July 4th cookout-related ask.com search items. [AHT]
• Meat meets fine art. [Pierre Menard]
• There's a food so disgusting that prisons use it as punishment. Of course, someone had to taste test it. [Slate]
• Fresh from the fancy food show, a list of 2008's best new gourmet sodas. [Mouthing Off/F&W]

Tomorrow is the annual Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest. The gambling odds are in and Joey Chestnut and Kobayashi will both be there. Local media is all about it.

But we were curious about what other competitive eating contests are out there.

• New York's San Gennaro fair holds an annual cannoli eating contest.

• In Philadelphia, the Wing Bowl is an annual tradition.

• The Illinois State Fair hosts an annual horseshoe sandwich eating contest.

• Fast food chain Krystal hosts an annual hamburger eating contest.

• Rocco's Pizza in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn hosts an annual pizza eating contest. Something tell us New York likes these.

• And appropriately for July 4th, an apple pie eating contest is held each year in Murphysboro, Illinois.

Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest [Wikipedia]

• Save money by visiting mom-and-pop places like Jamaica Kitchen and Dewan Restaurant. [Miami New Times]

• Colored marshmallows! On skewers! Love it! [Miami Herald]

• We're trying hard to imagine the tasajo ravioli with a black bean sauce at Jianella It sounds...intriguing. [Miami Herald]

• Pelican Landing, long a waterfront hamburger and hot dog stand in Fort Lauderdale, undergoes an upscale makeover (well not too upscale) and now offers a number of tropical frozen drinks and dishes like coconut fish and chips and a grilled watermelon salad. [Miami Herald]

• John Linn checks out a couple of local Mexican restaurant chains. [Broward-Palm Beach New Times]

We have just about 24 hours before Takeru Kobayashi and Joey Chestnut compete to put the nation off its food for the rest of its collective birthday in the Nathan's hot dog eating contest. Until then, however, what better way to celebrate our independence and day off from work than with a local favorite hot dog?

Our great nation boasts regional takes on many classic foods, and hot dogs are no exception. From half-smokes in Washington, DC to the weird monster known as the Chicago dog, a foot of pressed meat scraps on a bun doesn't say anything about a person's identity more than in the U.S. With that in mind, have a look at this little collection of photos from MenuPages cities around the country. Then go pick up a frank!

Chicago has one of the most recognizable dogs, if only for its unlikely construction and Technicolor toppings [via Benimoto/flickr]:

More after the jump!

South Florida's a bit all over the map. Transplants from other cities and countries bring their favorite ingredients along with them. Here's a classic from local fave Dogma Grill [via their website]:

San Franciscans eat a lot of hot dogs while staggering home through the Mission District late at night. These puppies come wrapped in bacon and topped with grilled onions and peppers This photo accurately captures the feeling of ordering one of these things [via brandi666/flickr]:

Bostonians get all kinds of weird junk on their dogs, because they love ordering from Spike's Junkyard Dogs, which serves things like a Buffalo Dog, with bleu cheese and wing sauce, and a Samurai Dog, with teriyaki sauce and sauteed onions. See how stoked these guys are? [via willismonroe/flickr]:

Finally, we've saved Philadelphia's trademark dog for last because it is the downright gnarliest. This monster, known as the Texas Tommy, not only comes wrapped in bacon, but smothered in neon cheese sauce. Beware! [via freakapotimus]

Kitchen 305 recently opened up at the Newport Beachside Hotel & Resort, in the space previously occupied by Chef Michael Blum's Michael's Kitchen. The 3,200-square-foot eatery is outfitted with an open kitchen, eight-person chef’s table, 100-inch flat screen and a 40-foot bar. Check it out for yourself during this cooking demo, summer prix-fixe menu launch and book signing by celeb chef Marc Cummings.

Celebrity chef Marc Cummings, a trained and certified Master Chef at the prestigious Cordon Bleu in Paris and author of Tastes of the World: 50 Original Recipes for World Class Entertaining, will make a special guest appearance on July 11 and July 12 to launch the Kitchen 305 summer prix-fixe menu, which will be available through the end of August.

The four-course, $24 menu ($36 with wine-pairings) includes the signature Blue Medal Caesar Salad, which has been awarded five Blue Medals by the Master Instructors at the Cordon Bleu; a 22-Minute Parmesan Shrimp Risotto, a dish that won top in its competition against rivals of the Cordon Bleu, the Escoffier of Paris, and a So, So Juicy Rosemary Chicken in Brown Butter. Save room for dessert, a homemade Not Your Grandma’s Strawberry Shortcake topped with a Grand Marnier Cream.

Chef Marc Cummings will demo the menu to the public on Friday and Saturday evening at 7:30 pm. Added entertainment includes chef trade secrets — like how to cut an onion without letting your eyes water — followed by a cookbook signing. Tastes of the World will be available for purchase for $15.

Cooking demos begin at 7:30 pm Friday, July 11, 2008 and Saturday, July 12, 2008. For reservations, please call 305.749.2110.

Kitchen 305 [MenuPages]
Kitchen 305 [Official Site]

Hello local foodies! I am so excited to be the new stringer for Broward and Palm Beach Counties, so please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a 28 year old who loves to eat — especially food I don't make myself! Although I'm a native Floridian, I never go in the sun without sunscreen and, therefore, have been given the self-imposed title of "Whitest Girl in Florida." I'm a decent cook, but food just always tastes better to me when someone else makes it, which is why my husband and I eat most of our meals at restaurants or by take-out. I've been called Sally (as in "When Harry Met Sally") because I can sometimes (who am I kidding? MOST TIMES) have the same ordering techniques ("I'll have the B.L.T, with crispy bacon, but I want the lettuce on the side, unless it's Romaine, then I won't have lettuce at all . . ."), although I've never gotten quite as excited as she in a deli. I'm really looking forward to sharing my local discoveries with you and hope you enjoy reading about them!

• Rich becoming organic farmers as peak oil survival strategy? [NYT]
• Once more into the breach: E. Coli beef recall hits 20 states [DFP]
• China: chocolate industry's last great frontier (until India) [Reuters]
• As global apocalypse nears, bourbon sales are through the roof [AP]
• Adroit NZ man sells imaginary "soul" to Hell Pizza Co. for $3800 [West]

We were always taught to be wary of eating foods laced with mayonnaise on hot summer days for fear of eating something contaminated with excessive bacteria. But that fear really only applied to homemade mayonnaise (which, we highly recommend making, by the way — just not for a picnic); the preservatives in commercial mayo keep bacteria at bay. In fact, it seems to retard bacterial growth:

One prominent study published in The Journal of Food Protection found, for example, that in the presence of commercial mayonnaise, the growth of salmonella and staphylococcus bacteria in contaminated chicken and ham salad either slowed or stopped altogether. As the amount of mayonnaise increased, the rate of growth decreased. When temperatures rose to those of a hot summer day, the growth increased, but not as much as in samples that did not contain mayonnaise.

The Claim: Mayonnaise Can Increase Risk of Food Poisoning [New York Times]

Photo: SevenCubed/flickr

Chocoholics can't quite complain about Peterbrooke Chocolatier's modus operandi. The Jacksonville, FL-born chocolate company dips everything from Oreos and pretzels to potato chips and s'mores in mouth-watering European chocolate. According to the company, they're even the people who invented chocolate-covered popcorn. Now, Peterbrooke is posing a threat to waistlines across Coral Gables, with the opening this week of its sweet shop at 227 Aragon Avenue (305-446-3131). On top of all the diet damage it already poses, the chocolatier plans to remain open until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, just in case any of us should suffer from a late-night case of the munchies. Somebody please get me a bigger pair of pants!

Peterbrooke Chocolatier [Official Site]

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]

So this funny little item came across Chow's Grinder that seemed so off the wall at first, but on a second thought, it seems it not only might work, but sort of already does: Apparently public councils in Britain have hit upon a scheme to reduce sodium intake in the public: cut the number of holes in salt shakers from 17 to five. From the Daily Mail:

Research has suggested that slashing the holes from the traditional 17 to five could cut the amount people sprinkle on their food by more than half.

And so at least six councils have ordered five-hole shakers – at taxpayers’ expense – and begun giving them away to chip shops and takeaways in their areas.

Leading the way has been Gateshead Council, which spent 15 days researching the subject of salty takeaways before declaring the new five-hole cellars the solution.

Officers collected information from businesses, obtained samples of fish and chips, measured salt content and ‘carried out experiments to determine how the problem of excessive salt being dispensed could be overcome by design’.

They decided that the five-hole pots would reduce the amount of salt being used by more than 60 per cent yet give a ‘visually acceptable sprinkling’ that would satisfy the customer.

Naturally, commenters on the Daily Mail site have already found a way around the reduction in hole number, and are communicating this in less-than-polite terms:

I'll let these brain dead morons into a secret. If it ain't salty enough, just shake for longer and add more. P.S. Where's the firing squad?

So yes, Lee is technically right, but take it from us, reducing salt speed most definitely does reduce salt amount, especially for those who don't want to spend five minutes in a restaurant flailing a salt shaker around.

As for whether it's any of the British government's business how much salt its citizens are eating, well, we'll leave that to the Brits to decide.

A British A-Salt on Bad Eating Habits [Grinder]
Now health and safety cut number of holes in chip shop salt shakers [Daily Mail]

[Photo: Salt Shaker via L. Marie/flickr

Hi readers! You may have noticed a couple of exclamation-mark-heavy posts recently (I'm working on it), so I wanted to briefly introduce myself: I'm a local writer and editor, as well as the new Miami-Dade stringer for MenuPages. Due to long hours, crazy deadlines, an inherent laziness and my utter lack of cooking skills, I eat out constantly, and I'm willing to drive just about anywhere to quench a craving. I look forward to sharing my dining discoveries with you — and hearing about yours!

• Sbux, overextended in crap real estate markets, to close 600 stores [Trib]
• Soon-to-be-much-emailed list of 101 picnic ideas from Mark Bittman [NYT]
• Criticized & embarrassed FDA adding a hundred labs to salmonella hunt [USAT]
• Group: food packaging claiming immunity boost should stop doing so [UPI]
• Cracker Barrel, lining America's empty highways, is in the crapper [Reuters]

As much as you hate to waste a perfect-for-a-getaway three-day weekend, astronomical airfares and gas prices have you grounded this 4th of July. But just because you’re staying in town doesn’t mean you’re doomed to trying to figure out the mechanics of that long-forgotten grill that’s lurking somewhere in your garage (let’s face it: fireworks are much more fun when they’re intentional). There are plenty of local festivities that offer barbecue and picnic opportunities—but we’ve rounded up the ones with grub so good you’ll be seeing stars:

Acqualina’s Annual 4th of July Barbeque: The celebration takes place at Costa Grill (pictured below), the resort’s Hamptons-style beachfront dining option, and will feature a full barbeque from the restaurant, as well as pasta selections from Acqualina’s other to-die-for dining spot, Il Mulino. 12pm-4pm. Tickets are $55 for adults and $27.50 for children. 305.534.0081 ext 14. 17875 Collins Ave., Sunny Isles Beach.

Coconut Grove July 4th Celebration: The idyllic Grove streets will be packed with people this Friday, as well as the usual suspects: food stands, music and fireworks. The part that packs a punch? The neighborhood tradition includes a hot dog eating contest. 4pm-10pm. Free. 305.221.9395. Peacock Park, 2820 McFarlane Rd., Coconut Grove.

4th of July Family Fest: If hot dog consumption isn’t where you excel, show off your grill skills at this fest’s Rib Cook-Off contest. There will also be a live reggae concert with Inner Circle, and fireworks after dark. 4pm-9pm. Free. 305.634.5791. Charles Hadley Park, 1350 N.W. 50th St., Miami.

Upper Eastside Miami’s 11th Annual 4th of July Celebration: This family-friendly gathering features children’s rides, music, fireworks—and, if you’re seeking to inspire your tots to pick up some domestic traits, lunch prepared by the Boy Scouts. At 7pm, Taste Catering will deliver dinner. Event is free, dinner is $15. 6445 N.E. 7th Ave. at Biscayne Boulevard.

Regent Bal Harbour 4th of July Celebration: Beat the heat at Aqua Soleil, the ultraluxe Regent Bal Harbour’s poolside eatery, with a “casual” buffet menu consisting of Kobe burgers, grilled skirt steak and other delectable bites. 12pm-10pm. Tickets are $65 per person. 305.445.5400. 10295 Collins Ave., Bal Harbour.

The samples were beyond excellent, but in the end, what we found most notable about the Fancy Food Show was the glimpse it provided into the American pysche. Take the picture above: busts of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain carved by the good folks at Sabra Hummus. Are they not terrifying? After the jump...well, in the words of Liz Phair: "Check out America, you're looking at it babe."

This might be as official as it gets: In its report, The State Of American Cuisine, published today, the James Beard Foundation found that Americans see burgers as the most iconic food of this great land. The patties beat out barbecue, fried chicken, macaroni and cheese and apple pie, in that order.

Of 298 Americans surveyed by the foundation in 2007, 90.8 believed there is an iconic, national food. Of those, 44.4 percent identified it as burgers. But participants also identified the words "region" or "regional" as most defining American cuisine.

Ironically, burgers are anything but regional, at least within the United States. They are the opposite. They are ubiquitous. Every city or region in the country has a local cuisine, and none of it is burgers. Yet all those cities and regions have a local place that does the "best burger ever," at least according to the locals, and does it differently from everywhere else. A paragraph within the white paper addresses this contradiction:

Even as survey respondents touted the diverse influences of American food, from its native products to its immigrant imports, they chose as typically American dishes those which function as neutral canvas for whatever palette one chooses to personalize it.

The State Of American Cuisine [James Beard Foundation]
James Beard Foundation [Official Site]
The Hamburger is the 'Most American' of Foods [A Hamburger Today]

[Photo: A burger from LA's Pie and Burger via jslander/flickr]

• Wal-Mart going local on produce to save money [Reuters]
• If A-B won't go quietly, InBev will go hostile [TO]
• Did you know: mayonnaise is a mild preservative [NYT]
• Drug mushrooms good for long-term mental health [AP]
• $10 a bushel corn if the summer is too hot [Tribune]