• Fresh or frozen, fish is the best. [MP: Chicago]

• It's the most wonderful time of the year for farms. [MP: Philadelphia]

• Are you counting calories and pennies? A farmers market could be your new best friend. [MP: San Francisco]

• Limoncello popsicle martinis? YES. [MP: South Florida]

• Today's a lucky day for the Chinese. You'll need luck getting a reservation in a restaurant, church, event hall, or any other place that might have to do with a wedding [Xinhua]

• Could it be possible that those calorie counts popping up on chain restaurant menus are more complicated than they seem? [Los Angeles Times]

• As the 2008 Olympics kick off, a look at a different kind of "sport:" Competitive eating. [LA Times]

• Lunch has a new hero in actor Michael Douglas (natch). [Times Online]

We finally gave in to the massive hype surrounding Mad Men and watched all of season one over the course of last weekend. Although we were stubborn to the end, it turns out that everything we'd read about it is true. The acting is superlative, the sets, costumes, and historical references completely impeccable, and the whole tone of the show really captures the tense, feverish excitement of the advertising industry in 1960.

What we weren't expecting, but were totally taken with, was the incredible attention to food and dining in 1960. Once it hit us that food comes up constantly on the show, we started scribbling down notes about everything they put in their mouths. (Dirty! But true.) After the jump, the Mad Men diet.

From our notes, and with some help from the Television Without Pity forum on Mad Men, it seems that when people weren't drinking heavily, they were eating lots of oysters Rockefeller and caesar salads. Other items on the Mad Men menu?

For drinks (easily one of the main food groups): whiskey, scotch, Manhattans, Rob Roys, vodka gimlets, and martinis. The employees of Sterling Cooper truly own the idea of a liquid lunch, and that's not even considering all of the bracing swigs knocked back behind closed office doors.

Home-cooking on the show is standard 1950s fare: celery with cream cheese, many a pot roast, a ham generously cloaked in a layer of pineapple, Waldorf salad, and a parade of casseroles all make appearances. Some of the dishes are probably best left to history, but many left us with a powerful desire to revive retro canapes. All in all, very Joy of Cooking!

Finally, if you were dining in New York's finest restaurants of 1960, you might have expected to see the following on the menu: goulash, beef wellington and other foods wrapped in dough or puff pastry, caviar, shrimp cocktail, rumaki, and classic desserts like baked Alaskas. We bet it all tasted pretty good, but didn't they ever get bored?

Aside from making us want the cocktails/not want most of the food, watching has made us wonder: how outdated will our food seem fifty years from now?

[Photo: authorwannabe/flickr]

• The service might be a little slow, and there's no a/c, but the food at Red Light sounds unbelievably good. [Miami New Times]

• The food is both eco-friendly (organic!) and healthful (nothing fried!) at Green Gables Cafe. [Miami Herald]

• Need a cup of coffee? Try one of these places. [Miami Herald]

• Gail Shephered is embracing the mackerel, which is not overfished, probably doesn't have tons of mercury, provides lots of heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids, and is prepared beautifully at Blue Fish in Delray Beach. [Broward-Palm Beach New Times]

• Unlike most restaurants that bill themselves at "Mediterranean," Mazza's focus is Greek and Middle Eastern as opposed to Italian. [Miami Herald]

You may not actually kill for fried chicken, but at least one guy was willing to take a murder rap for, among other things, a big pile of KFC and Popeye's.

An AP story on CNN today reports that Tremayne Durham, 33, of New York City, confessed to killing a former employee of an ice cream company after the company wouldn't give Durham a refund on an ice cream truck he'd bought. Savvy negotiator that he is, Durham saw a long string of potentially cruel and unusual prison food in his future and made a delicious plea deal:

Durham agreed to plead guilty to murder -- but only if he could get a break from jail food. The judge agreed and granted Durham a feast of KFC chicken, Popeye's chicken, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, carrot cake and ice cream.

After Wednesday's sentencing, Durham was to get the rest of the deal -- calzones, lasagna, pizza and ice cream, his defense attorney confirmed. They will pay the tab.

Fortunately for Durham, he won't have to walk the green mile, but he was able to get a hell of a meal out of the deal anyway. Just goes to show, no matter how dire the situation, it sometimes is possible to have your fried chicken and eat it, too.

Defendant trades murder plea for KFC, pizza [AP/CNN]
Final Meal Requests [Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice]

[Photo: jslander/flickr]

• The latest victim of unsafe food stuffs? Boy Scouts. [Washington Post]

• When will people learn that pre-made sandwiches are a Bad Thing? [Boston Globe]

• As New York goes, so goes LA: calorie counts might be added to the menus at Angeleno chains. [LA Times]

• Not necessarily food-related, but did you know that there were two unrelated tiger attacks in Missouri within the past week? TWO! [Detroit Free Press]

“Parents want to feed their children healthy meals but America’s chain restaurants are setting parents up to fail,” said CSPI nutrition policy director Margo G. Wootan. “McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, and other chains are conditioning kids to expect burgers, fried chicken, pizza, French fries, macaroni and cheese, and soda in various combination at almost every lunch and dinner.”

Besides being almost always too high in calories, 45 percent of the kids’ meals at the 13 chains studied by CSPI are too high in saturated and trans fat, and 86 percent are too high in sodium. That’s alarming, according to CSPI, because a quarter of children between the ages of five and ten show early signs of heart disease, such as high LDL (the “bad” cholesterol) or elevated blood pressure.

What's a parent to do? Well, for starters, steer clear of these restaurants, since the adult dishes are notoriously calorie-laden as well. Another idea: share your meal with the kids. It's a win-win situation really; you consume fewer calories, your kid gets something more interesting than the standard chicken nuggets and fries, and you save money. Nowhere is it written that children's diets need to consist solely of burgers, fries and unnaturally shaped pieces of fried chicken. They might even like sampling from the grown-up menu.

Option #3: go to Subway. The sandwich chain had the most nutritionally acceptable options for kids with juice boxes, apple slices, raisins and yogurt to accompany mini-subs.

Obesity on the Kids' Menus at Top Chains [CSPI]
Kids' Meals: Obesity on the Menu [CSPI]

Photo: AFP via ABC Australia

• Here's the first review of Cita's Italian Chophouse, and it's a good one. [Blind Mind]

• Danny provides photographic evidence of his meal at Choice Cafe, which looks amazing. [Daily Cocaine]

• Puerto Sagua Restaurant's Cuban comfort food hits the spot on Miami Beach. [FoodTastic!]

In a relationship as tenuous and charged as that between server and customer, it seems like almost any mistake can be plugged into the phrase, "there's nothing worse than..."

It's just that, when you're hungry and somebody else is controlling the flow of food to stomach, you're really in their power. They can make you squirm with an action as minor as leaving a plate up on the order window for an extra couple of minutes if they want to. Of course, you have a fair amount of financial power over them, too in the form of that gratuity you'll calculate at the end of the meal.

Even though we all know tipping is customary here in the U.S., sometimes it escapes the casual or infrequent diner just how important it is to the livelihood of the service staff. In a review of the new book based on the blog Waiter Rant, Wall Street Journal writer Moira Hodgson reminds us:

A lot of customers don't seem to know that waiters are rarely paid a proper salary. In New York, where the minimum wage is $7.15, they receive just $4.60 an hour, with the assumption that tips will make up the difference. Waiting on tables is a job where the compensation depends on the whim of the customer, and [author Steve]. Dublanica has been working for tips for the better part of a decade.

However, in these increasingly lean times, when people don't want to give up dining out altogether, at least one news source found they are cutting back not just in drink orders or frequency of nights out, but in tips. To which we say, "booooo." An article in the Harrisburg, Pa. Patriot News, picked up by Nation's Restaurant News, found servers and bartenders reported getting smaller tip percentages in addition to smaller total sales.

This is a travesty, and we know our readers would never think of fudging the tip, but what of the friend handling the bill when a group goes Dutch? What are your options if that person leaves a smaller-than-appropriate percentage on the bill?

Well, you can raise a polite stink, acting like the small gratuity was a group mistake and that all ought to cough up another dollar or so. But that's awkward. You can quietly slide a few more dollars into the check folder, but why should you be stuck making up for somebody else's bad manners?

Unfortunately, the thing to do, it seems, is to be just a bit gauche and either set about the tip calculation yourself, on behalf of the group, or chirp up about making sure not to forget the 20 percent. Sure, it's uncouth, but hey, so is splitting the check to begin with. And there's nothing worse than when that doesn't work out.

Take Your Own Damn Order [Wall Street Journal]
For restaurant workers, economy eats away at tips [Patriot-News via Nation's Restaurant News]
How to split the check? [Chowhound]

[Photo: via respres/flickr]

• New at this Olympics: etiquette classes for all American athletes that include things like "don't spear food with your chopsticks." [WSJ]

• Food consumption at the athletes' village is insane: 9,000 bananas, 4,000 liters of cooking oil and three tons of rice per day. [China Daily]

• Health inspectors have been working overtime for months to make sure that China's food supply is safe for the athletes and visitors. [AFP]

• The Brazilian soccer team have decided to stay in the athletes' village (in the past, they've splurged for hotels and brought their own food), but are having a difficult time asking for menu changes. [Reuters]

One of the particular objects in need of a good smuggling strategy, for us, is raw-milk brie. Not so much the question of storage (false-bottomed backpack, cheese wrapped in toweling), as the question of how on earth we would be able to keep ourselves from eating the entire freaking wheel before departing Country A, let alone entering Country B.

Well now the journey is a little bit shorter (though the temptation to consume en route is no less great): instead of having to haul in our illegal dairy products all the way from France and thereabouts, we can just take a quick hop and skip across the northern border: Hallelujah, Americans: Quebec has legalized raw-milk cheese!

Of course, it's not an unregulated free-for-all. To offset any potential health concerns, there are some restrictions being laid down:

Under the new rules, Quebec will require each cheesemaker to know his or her milk supplier personally, and to be knowledgeable about the dairy operation in question. As well, milk suppliers for this specialty segment of the market will be subjected to much higher standards of cleanliness than those imposed even on France's raw-milk cheese producers.

Quebec Legalizes Raw Milk Cheese; Many Americans Rejoice [Serious Eats]
Another good reason to say 'Cheese' [Montreal Gazette]

[Photo: raw brie (from Quebec!) via druckfehlerteufel's Flickr]

Even in the face of a shattering chapter seven bankruptcy, it looks like die-hard fans of Bennigans and Steak and Ale need not give in, entirely, to despair. The Orlando Business Journal reported Monday that two New York financial firms will be taking over management of the chains, and may spare them the wholesale liquidation that seemed almost certain:

Atalaya Capital Management LP and CRG Partners on July 31 told Orlando-based JRJ Restaurants Ltd., which operates two Central Florida Bennigan's restaurants, about the company's plans, JRJ Restaurants principal Tyrone Nabbie told Orlando Business Journal.

The firms said they plan to keep the franchise system's infrastructure intact in the wake of the Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing of the restaurant chain's parent company, S&A Restaurant Corp. and its affiliated companies, Nabbie said.

Rick Pastorek, president of BOL Inc. of Baton Rouge, which owns six Bennigan's in Louisiana and one in Memphis, Tenn., said Atalaya and CRG have had conference calls with franchisees, leaving him optimistic about the brand's future.

Report: Firms to take over Bennigan's franchise system [Orlando Business Journal]
Bennigan's franchise system taken over [Nation's Restaurant News]
Butters' Very Own Episode [Wikipedia]

[Image via Uncyclopedia]