Jewish delicatessens may now be known for knishes, latkes and pastrami sandwiches, but back in their heyday, during the 1920s and 1930s in the theatre district in New York, they also served beluga caviar, pâté de foie gras and Chateaubriand steak. Jewish classics were gussied up and defiled: chopped chicken liver was served with truffles. Treyf, like oysters and pork chops, was eaten with abandon alongside kosher delicacies.
That reminds me…a trip to Katz’s is looooooong overdue.
Noma: My Perfect Storm is a feature-length documentary about chef René Redzepi and his Copenhagen restaurant Noma, which is currently ranked #3 in the world.
How did Redzepi manage to revolutionize the entire world of gastronomy, inventing the alphabet and vocabulary that would infuse newfound pedigree to Nordic cuisine and establish a new edible world while radically changing the image of the modern chef? His story has the feel of a classic fairy tale: the ugly duckling transformed into a majestic swan, who now reigns over the realm of modern gourmet cuisine.
The film is out Dec 18 in theaters, on Amazon, iTunes, etc.
If you’ve ever wanted to see a video about how to cook a pot-infused Thanksgiving turkey shot in the style of a Requiem for a Dream heroin-shooting sequence, you have come to the right place. (via devour)
Born in 1915, Clara Cannucciari survived the Great Depression and, when she was in her 90s and with the help of her grandson, made a YouTube series about meals and cooking techniques used in that era. Watch as Clara cooks a 3-course Poorman’s Feast, a relatively rare treat in those lean times.
In the ruins of Herculaneum, a Roman town destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, a carbonized loaf of bread was found. The British Museum had chef Giorgio Locatelli recreate the recipe as best he could.
Things start to get really interesting around 3:25, where Locatelli tries to recreate the unusual markings found on the bread…that hanging string around the edge is a little genius.
Katherine Rosman recently wrote an article for the NY Times called How Organic Avenue Lost All Its Juice about a small NYC-based chain of juice stores recently going out of business. The piece is also a quote gold mine reflecting the zeitgeist of contemporary Manhattan.
“I kind of freaked out,” she said. “I was distraught. I lost my yoga for a minute.”
There is an admitted emperor’s new clothes quality to paying $25 for a lunch of vegetable shavings and a smoothie made of Swiss chard, cashew milk and Himalayan salt.
You can’t build a long-term business off what Gwyneth Paltrow likes.
A lot of vegans I know are now making stews out of meat bones and dairy.
From the New Yorker Food Issue,1Lauren Collins examines how the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list comes together. I haven’t eaten at any of these sorts of restaurants in years (for a lot of reasons), and this bit gets to part of the reason why:
The restaurants in the upper reaches of the list tend to fall into a certain mode. They are all the same place, Giles Coren once conjectured in the London Times, “only the face changes, like Doctor Who.” Just as there is Oscar bait, there is 50 Best bait. “It’s opening up in Beijing,” David Chang said, imagining the archetypal 50 Best restaurant. “It’s a Chinese restaurant by a guy who worked for Adrià, Redzepi, and Keller. He cooks over fire. Everything is a story of his terroir. He has his own farm and hand-dives for his own sea urchins.” Hearing about 50 Best winners, and having eaten at a few of them, I started to think of them as icebreaker restaurants — places that create moments, that give you prompts. This can be exhilarating, or it can be infantilizing. It is the dining experience as Cards Against Humanity.
Not to be confused with the NY Times’ Food Issue, which was out this past weekend.↩
Update: Until recently, the high-resolution images from this collection were not freely available to the public. After some agitation by Parker Higgins of the EFF, the Department of Agriculture decided to post high-res JPGs of each painting for free download. Higgins recently gave a talk about how it went down. This is a good example of the value of the public domain (and activists like Higgins)…without those images being available, neither Slate or I would have written about the collection, and who knows what someone who read them will do with that information. Maybe nothing! But maybe something cool! It’s worth putting it out there to find out…governments should be in the business of increasing the possibility space of their citizens. (via @stvnrlly)
But for the love of Julia Child and the sake of every other soul in the restaurant, particularly the underpaid line cooks sweating their way through another Saturday night shift, please, please stop describing your food preferences as an allergy.
From Nathan Yau at FlowingData, a look at the places in the US where people need to make the longest drives to visit a grocery store.
The nearest grocery store is more than 10 miles away in about 36 percent of the country and the median distance is 7 miles. However, a lot of these areas are rural with few (if any) people who live there.
Wyoming contains very few grocery stores:
And Nevada is even more of a food desert. Looks like Massachusetts, Delaware, and New Jersey have plenty of grocery stores everywhere. (via feltron)
Big news out of Manhattan: Dining out is about to get turned on its head. Union Square Hospitality Group, the force behind some of New York’s most important restaurants, will announce today that starting in November, it will roll out an across-the-board elimination of tips at every one of its thirteen full-service venues, hand in hand with an across-the-board increase in prices.
Why are they doing this? In part because cooks get the shaft at restaurants:
Under the current gratuity system, not everyone at a restaurant is getting a fair shake. Waiters at full-service New York restaurants can expect a full 20 percent tip on most checks, for a yearly income of $40,000 or more on average — some of the city’s top servers easily clear $100,000 annually. But the problem isn’t what waiters make, it’s what cooks make. A mid-level line cook, even in a high-end kitchen, doesn’t have generous patrons padding her paycheck, and as such is, on average, unlikely to make much more than $35,000 a year.
The drop in soda consumption represents the single largest change in the American diet in the last decade and is responsible for a substantial reduction in the number of daily calories consumed by the average American child. From 2004 to 2012, children consumed 79 fewer sugar-sweetened beverage calories a day, according to a large government survey, representing a 4 percent cut in calories over all. As total calorie intake has declined, obesity rates among school-age children appear to have leveled off.
I’ve been a dedicated soda drinker1 since at least high school. But this summer, I started cutting back. The big reason is that my kids are getting old enough to read labels and wonder why I’m consuming so much sugar, the little blighters. “All that sugar is not good for you, right Daddy?” they would say. And they’re completely right of course and I couldn’t argue with them on that point, so I’ve been drinking a lot less of the stuff. I haven’t cut it completely out of my diet but I treat it more or less like every other food or beverage I consume: everything in moderation.
Pepsi, not Coke. And back in Wisconsin, we called it “pop”.↩
Mario Carbone is a chef and restaurateur who, with his partners, runs a number of NYC restaurants like Dirty French, Parm, Carbone, and Santina. Carbone borrowed and modified his mother’s recipe for meatballs and put it on the menu at one of his restaurants. In this video, a clash of home cooking and fine dining, Mario and his mother Maria get together to cook and fight over the provenance of these meatballs.
I love the brief exchange at ~4:00 where Mario admits to using a French technique to make his mother’s Italian meatballs and Maria responds “Ah. See?” with a healthy helping of side-eye. (via @CharlesCMann, whose description of the video — “A ferocious Oedipal power struggle over meatballs” — I cannot improve upon)
Lucky Peach is coming out with a cookbook called 101 Easy Asian Recipes. I’ve always been a little intimidated by Asian cooking.1 Other types of cuisine seem easy: French is butter & salt, Italian is olive oil & garlic, American is roast chicken & burgers. Plus, Asian cuisine is a huge umbrella of wonderful foods from all sorts of different cultures that it’s difficult to know where to start. I’ve been wanting to cook less Western at home, and I’m hoping this cookbook will give me some good ideas on how to proceed.
Truthfully, I’ve always been a little intimidated by cooking in general, but as I’ve been doing it more often over the past couple of years, some of that trepidation has fallen away.↩
Making a sandwich completely from scratch took this guy six months and cost $1500. He grew his own vegetables, made his own butter & cheese, made sea salt from salt water, and harvested wheat for bread flour. And that’s with a few shortcuts…he didn’t raise the cow & chicken from a calf & chick or the bees from a starter hive.
Ever wondered how to pan-fry a steak with a charred crust and an interior that’s perfectly medium-rare from edge to edge when you cut into it? How to make homemade mac ‘n’ cheese that is as satisfyingly gooey and velvety-smooth as the blue box stuff, but far tastier? How to roast a succulent, moist turkey (forget about brining!) — and use a foolproof method that works every time?
Who would have guessed 15 years ago that this self-styled rebel, who wrote about waitress blow jobs and shooting heroin in his best-selling 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential, would become America’s contemporary answer to, say, Mark Twain — our most enthusiastic chronicler of life outside our borders?
From a trademarked pastry to the entire concept of “street food,” a trend follows a predictable path, one that’s consistent whether applied to technology (the hype cycle identified by tech research company Gartner), youth culture (Fuse Marketing’s five-point map), or gastronomy (the eleven-stage process broken down in the food-culture-skewering book Comfort Me With Offal). However detailed your drilldown, the story is the same: Something bubbles up for one reason or another, feeling right to a small group of people who are open to new ideas and who speak with loud, influential voices. More people pick up on that right-ness, and then more people pick up on the fact that people are picking up on something, ultimately reaching a critical mass of interest and awareness.
At this point, most of the early adopters tend to fall away: trends are driven at different points in their life cycles by a desire to fit in and a desire to stand out; if someone’s engine is the latter, she’ll cut and run when adherence to the gospel of locavorism becomes more about the former. Once Starbucks puts a flat white on their menu, cortado devotees start eyeing matcha. Once your mom buys bacon-scented hand soap for the guest bathroom, there’s an unshakeable pall cast over your Benton’s-washed bourbon. When something makes that leap into ultra-mass culture, showing up on t-shirts at Target and as a punchline on the Tonight Show, it’s a sign that its original engine — novelty, exclusivity, difference — has worn out.
It’s that “why do things bubble up in the first place” question that’s harder to answer. These things are always time-dependent, sometimes place-dependent, and usually driven by more than just food. (Ditto trends in tech or whatever. There are games beyond the game.)
“The thing that truly jumpstarts a trend is that it solves a problem we perhaps didn’t consciously realize needed solving,” writes Rosner.
Trends are driven by broader forces: Kale and quinoa are driven by an obsession with healthfulness and nutritional density, artisanal-everything is a backlash to the sterility of mass production, toast with fancy things on it looks incredibly pretty on Instagram. And not all these forces are consumer-side: The sudden glut of hip chicken sandwich restaurants isn’t the result of some shady collusion of culinary illuminati; rather, it nails the intersection of comfort food, Southern food, and fast-casual’s potential for extraordinary (and extraordinarily scalable) profits.
From The Message is Medium Rare, an appreciation of the ShackBurger, “a straightforward, honest-to-goodness burger”. It includes a review of the typography used by the restaurant:
These three typefaces artfully express the ethos of both the burger and the brand. Neutraface is the bun: sturdy, reliable and architectural. Futura is the patty: basic but bold. Galaxie is the lettuce: wavy, quirky and fresh. To the layperson this comparison may seem like a stretch, but designers know they are purposefully expressive.
A painting of fruit done by Giovanni Stanchi sometime in the mid 1600s shows that the watermelon has changed somewhat in the intervening 350 years.
That’s because over time, we’ve bred watermelons to have the bright red color we recognize today. That fleshy interior is actually the watermelon’s placenta, which holds the seeds. Before it was fully domesticated, that placenta lacked the high amounts of lycopene that give it the red color. Through hundreds of years of domestication, we’ve modified smaller watermelons with a white interior into the larger, lycopene-loaded versions we know today.
The Waffle House Index is an informal metric used by FEMA administrator Craig Fugate to evaluate how bad a storm is. Basically, whether the Waffle House in town is open or serving a limited menu can tell you something about how bad the storm was and how much recovery assistance is necessary.
If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That’s really bad. That’s where you go to work.
My ideal burger is bun, cheese, burger. Sometimes bacon. Ketchup on the side, so I can control it. Pickles — yes! Obviously. And the cheese thing has to be very clear: American cheese only. American cheese was invented for the hamburger. People talk about it being processed and artificial and not real cheese — you know what makes it real? When you put it on a hamburger.
But much of his burger manifesto is about what a burger shouldn’t be.
Grass-fed beef does not make burgers, in my opinion. It’s too lean and the fat content is not evenly distributed, so it can get a little mealy. But the dumbest burger in the world is the wagyu bullshit. It’s like 70 percent fat content — it’s disgusting. Would you eat a ground bacon burger? That’s what you’re doing with a wagyu burger. Or the idiots that have “kobe beef wagyu sliders with like a trio of ketchup” on their menu — that drives me insane. The inventor of the kobe beef slider is right next to the inventor of aluminum siding in the Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Seen Hall of Fame. And you know what’s even more stupid? The fucking customer that buys it because he’s like, Oooohh, kobe, and it’s like $21. God have mercy on their souls.
I love that Chang loves White Castle; I do too1 and make a trip to the one in Hell’s Kitchen about once a month without ever telling another living soul I do so. I agree with most of the rest of his list, 1 but would add one thing: no super-thick burgers, aka most burgers at fancy restaurants. They are too difficult to eat and the massive patty throws everything out of proportion and you end up with a mouthful of burger with very little of anything else. Blech. Balance, people!
I used to go to White Castle all the time with my dad and my sister when I was a kid, back when those sliders were 25¢ apiece. This was the early/mid 80s…there was no chicken sandwich or anything on the menu. I don’t even remember cheese being an option.↩
Especially the “I do not like a burger with a bunch of shit on it”, although one of my current favorite burgers, the Fedora burger at Bar Sardine, breaks that rule with sauce, cucumbers, and shoestring fries. Love that smashed bun. (P.S. My all-time fave burger, besides the ones I make at home, is the ShackBurger.)↩
Eater’s Nick Solares accompanies the proprietor of Peter Luger Steakhouse to one of the few remaining butchers in the Meatpacking District1 to see how she selects meat for the restaurant.
You know, that place with all the fancy shops, night clubs, and garbage people.↩
While reading this otherwise excellent article written by US soccer player Christie Rampone, I discovered a type of diet I’d never heard of before, the blood type diet (italics mine).
Age and parenting make me think about longevity. I definitely believe one big reason for my longevity has to do with the dietary and fitness changes I made after being diagnosed with auto-immune conditions after giving birth to my youngest daughter Reece in 2011. For example, I’ve gone gluten-free and have started to eat to my blood-type. Also, a friend introduced me to a natural ingredient called EpiCor to help strengthen my immune system. I have taken EpiCor daily for the past three years and it has become a beneficial part of my daily routine of rest, recovery, working out, eating healthy, and being in airports and hotels more than my own house.
The underlying theory of blood type diets is that people with different blood types digest lectins differently, and that if people eat food that is not compatible with their blood type, they will experience many health problems. On the other hand, if a person eats food that is compatible, they will be healthier.
That theory is, in turn, based on an assumption that each blood type represents a different evolutionary heritage. “Based on the ‘Blood-Type’ diet theory, group O is considered the ancestral blood group in humans so their optimal diet should resemble the high animal protein diets typical of the hunter-gatherer era. In contrast, those with group A should thrive on a vegetarian diet as this blood group was believed to have evolved when humans settled down into agrarian societies. Following the same rationale, individuals with blood group B are considered to benefit from consumption of dairy products because this blood group was believed to originate in nomadic tribes. Finally, individuals with an AB blood group are believed to benefit from a diet that is intermediate to those proposed for group A and group B.”
As you might have already guessed, there is no evidence that eating your blood type is beneficial nor do the claims of differing lectin digestion have scientific merit. Homeopathic nonsense.
In a video called America’s Most Controversial Food, Zagat explores the controversy surrounding foie gras, including a visit to a production facility and interviews with chefs, a PETA representative, and an avian expert.
I eat meat (and foie gras) but many of the chefs in this video come off looking smug, petulant, and idiotic. I believe I’ve said this before, but I think in 50 years time, the idea of people eating animals will be widely viewed as wrong and barbaric, akin to how many feel about fur and animal testing now. (via devour)
Update: In a Washington Post column entitled Free Willy!, Charles Krauthammer makes a similar case for the future extinction of raising animals for meat.
We often wonder how people of the past, including the most revered and refined, could have universally engaged in conduct now considered unconscionable. Such as slavery. How could the Founders, so sublimely devoted to human liberty, have lived with — some participating in — human slavery? Or fourscore years later, how could the saintly Lincoln, an implacable opponent of slavery, have nevertheless spoken of and believed in African inferiority?
While retrospective judgment tends to make us feel superior to our ancestors, it should really evoke humility. Surely some contemporary practices will be deemed equally abominable by succeeding generations. The only question is: Which ones?
I’ve long thought it will be our treatment of animals. I’m convinced that our great-grandchildren will find it difficult to believe that we actually raised, herded and slaughtered them on an industrial scale — for the eating.
This advice from Amanda Hesser on how to get young kids to eat everything is 1000% solid gold:
You may wonder how we get our kids to eat kale and clams, and here is the answer: we make them (we’re warm but firm), and we don’t offer choices. Psychologists will tell you that kids respond to consistency and confidence. While I can’t say I’m great at this when it comes to bedtime, I never waver at the table. People don’t want to hear this because we live in the Age of Coddling but I strongly believe that kids need and actually crave guidance and direction, especially when they’re young. And since I also believe that we should eat the same meals as our kids — showing unity and companionship — I don’t want to eat boring food, so they’re not getting boring food.
This is exactly what we did with our kids and while it’s super difficult to be consistent and firm, especially with a picky kid, I recommend this approach wholeheartedly. My kids definitely have their preferences and would eat pizza and burgers for every meal if given the chance, but they eat a wide variety of different foods — including a lot of stuff I personally don’t care for (oysters and mussels for starters) — and are always up for trying new things. How else are they supposed to discover that they really like Sri Lankan food? (Which they do.)
This is smart: a startup design service called BentoBox just for designing restaurant websites. Entrepreneur magazine recently profiled the service.
The site conveys important information — location, hours and a phone number are featured prominently, as are frequently asked questions — in a visually appealing way that expresses the restaurant’s high-end yet relaxed atmosphere while also making you hungry.
This is what a restaurant website should do — namely, serve as an extension of its brick-and-mortar presence — and yet so many miss the mark, says Krystle Mobayeni. For years, Mobayeni ran her own web design agency. Clients included Rent the Runway, Sailor Jerry, the School of the Visual Arts, plus a few restaurants, such as David Chang’s Momofuku. While companies in other industries usually had a good handle on their web presence, Mobayeni noticed that the restaurants were struggling. There wasn’t a good platform that anticipated their needs and gave them an easy way to present themselves on the web, and so often, their sites suffered for it.
The number has been steadily dwindling the last few years, but it’s surprising how many restaurant sites are still Flash, don’t work on mobile, and make you work to find the location and opening hours. Some examples of Bento’s work: Parm, Fedora, and The Meatball Shop. Damn, now I’m hungry. (via @adamkuban)
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