Both Katz’s deli and Shake Shack have
Both Katz’s deli and Shake Shack have had “Z” malfunctions on their signs. Something in the NYC water?
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kottke.org posts about food
Anthony Bourdain’s menu of overrated, trendy items. (
Anthony Bourdain’s menu of overrated, trendy items. (via eater)
When the water sommelier comes over, I reach for my gun.
The Paleolithic Diet “is the diet that
The Paleolithic Diet “is the diet that man evolved on, the diet that is coded for in our genes”. The diet consists of avoiding grains, beans, dairy, sugar, etc.; eating meat/chicken/fish, eggs, fruit, veggies, nuts, etc.; and increasing your intake of root veggies and organ meats like liver.
More Business Lessons From the Coffee and Donut Guy
A few years ago, I posted an entry about a Manhattan coffee and donut vendor who let his customers make their own change.
When an environment of trust is created, good things start happening. Ralph can serve twice as many customers. People get their coffee in half the time. Due to this time savings, people become regulars. Regulars provide Ralph’s business with stability, a good reputation, and with customers who have an interest in making correct change (to keep the line moving and keep Ralph in business). Lots of customers who make correct change increase Ralph’s profit margin. Etc. Etc. And what did Ralph have to pay for all this? A bit of change here and there.
I get my occasional donut in another part of town now, but I noticed something similar with my new guy. Last Friday, the woman in front of me didn’t order anything but threw down a $20, received a coffee with two sugars a moment after she’d stepped to the window, and no change. As they chatted, I learned that the woman pays for her coffee in advance. The coffee guy asked her if she was sure she owed today. “Yep,” she replied, “It’s payday today; I get paid, you get paid.” Handy little arrangement.
Where did that number come from?
Meg and I were getting ready to go out to breakfast at some obscenely early hour on Sunday morning. I retrieved a pair of jeans from the floor.
J: Hey, there’s some change in these pants.
M: Breakfast is on you, then.
J: Yeah, if we’re going to eat, like, 68 cents-worth of breakfast.
Then I reached into the pocket to find out how much was actually in there…from some purchase I don’t recall making. 68 cents exactly. In olden times, that would have been taken as a harbinger of something, that virgins would need to be sacrificed on mountaintops to appease the gods. Meg shrugs and says, “you should post that to your blog.”
Also, Grey Dog on University has the best hash browns I’ve ever eaten.
Paul Ford is making a difference. “That
Paul Ford is making a difference. “That barbecue sizzle? Locally raised (ten miles from home), humanely slaughtered heirloom pandas.”
Determining the amount of energy it takes
Determining the amount of energy it takes to bring food from farm to table is difficult, but it looks as though shipping in food from afar is, in some cases, more energy efficient than food produced locally and that the transport energy might not matter as much in comparision to the amount of energy it takes to grow the food in the first place. “And it turns out our own part in the chain is often the most damaging, since when we drive to the supermarket, we might come back with only a few of bags of food in the car boot. Such a trip is far less fuel efficient than the one taken by that same food on its way to the supermarket in a truck packed with the assistance of load-optimisation software, which determines how to stack cargo so that barely an inch of empty space is left in the back of the vehicle.”
Photographs of girls with meat hair. No
Photographs of girls with meat hair. No further description needed, I trust. See also the meat-themed art of Victoria Reynolds.
Update: More meat art from Pinar Yolacan. (thx, jen)
Le Pain Quotidien uses stale bread for
Le Pain Quotidien uses stale bread for menu holders on their tables. Clever design.
Following an editorial in the NY Times
Following an editorial in the NY Times by Steven Shaw about doctors’ food recommendations for pregnant women, my wife Meg wrote a post about how she ate while pregnant. “I found my balance between enjoying food and tolerating risk, and it included the occasional Wellfleet on the half-shell. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the recommendations, and to live in fear of every bite of food you put into your mouth. But that makes for a very stressful, anxious, long nine (plus) months. And that certainly isn’t good for the fetus.”
Short video feature on how Pixar rendered
Short video feature on how Pixar rendered all the food in Ratatouille. (thx, meg)
Ratatouille opens today and it’s got a
Ratatouille opens today and it’s got a score of 94 on Metacritic, which puts it in a tie for 6th place on the all-time list.
Regarding the food plagiarism business from yesterday,
Regarding the food plagiarism business from yesterday, Ed Levine reports that he visited both restaurants yesterday and has some further thoughts on the situation. I think he nails it with this observation: “He was her right-hand man for six years, with complete and unfettered access to her creativity, recipes, craftsmanship, and even the combination to her safe. Charles is a smart, fiercely independent, tough-minded chef and businessperson who misplaced her trust when she gave her chief lieutenant all that access. McFarland, bereft of his own ideas, decided to open what is, for all intents and purposes, a clone of Pearl.”
Food plagiarism
Rebecca Charles, owner of the Pearl Oyster Bar in NYC, a seafood place modeled after hundreds of similar restaurants in New England offering similar menus, is suing a former employee (of six years) for copying too closely her restaurant and menu in opening his new place, Ed’s Lobster Bar.
Many parallels here to the design/art/film world…what is mere inspiration versus outright theft? The key question in these kinds of cases for me is: does the person exercise creativity in the appropriation? Did they add something to it instead of just copying or superficially changing it? Clam shacks are everywhere in New England, but an upscale seafood establishment with a premium lobster roll is a unique creative twist on that concept brought to NYC by Charles. An upscale clam shack blocks away from a nearly identical restaurant at which the owner used to work for six years…that seems a bit lame to me, not the work of a creative restaurateur. Who knows how this stuff is going to play out legally; it’s a complex issue with lots of slippery slope potential.
Meg has more thoughts on the issue and Ed Levine weighs in over at Serious Eats with information not found in the NY Times article. It was Ed who first raised the issue about Ed’s Lobster Bar earlier in the month.
Update: I forgot to link to the menus above. Here’s the menu for Pearl Oyster Bar and here’s the menu for Ed’s Lobster Bar. For comparison, here are the menus for a couple of traditional clam shacks: the Clam Box in Ipswich, MA and Woodman’s in Essex, MA.
NY Times on the rise of OpenTable,
NY Times on the rise of OpenTable, which wasn’t exactly an overnight success. To me, the thing that pushed OT over the edge toward acceptance wasn’t so much the public-facing business (let your customers make reservations online) but the software that the restaurants were provided to keep better track of their customers and their habits. It used to be a big deal that Four Seasons Hotels tracked the preferences of all their customers but now any restaurant with the OT system can easily do the same. “Doug Washington, a co-owner of Town Hall, said the notes were not just helpful, they are occasionally indispensable. Next to the name of one regular, who has a habit of bringing in women he is not married to, is an instruction to make sure the man’s wife has not booked a separate table for the same day.”
Patton Oswalt, who does of the voice
Patton Oswalt, who does of the voice of the main character in Ratatouille, shares some details to look for in the film. “Everything that Ian Holm, as the evil Skinner, does — especially his teetering-on-the-edge-of-insanity rant to his lawyer about that ‘rat’ that no one else sees but him. The animators I talked to had so much fun rendering his lines — ‘An animator’s dream’, according to one of the character design staff. Also, the animators used his toque like the shark’s fin in JAWS — you always see it moving closer among the stoves in the kitchen. Hilarious.” (thx, martin)
Ratatouille
With its latest film, Pixar manages to achieve something that few other big Hollywood films do these days: a convincing reality. The body language & emotions of the characters, the machinations of the kitchen, the sights and sounds of Paris, and the dice of the celery, Ratatouille gets it all right, down to the seemingly insignificant details. As we walked out of the movie, my wife, who has spent time cooking in restaurants (with Daniel Boulud, even), couldn’t stop talking about how well the movie captured the workings of the kitchen. To be sure, a G-rated kitchen but a true kitchen nonetheless.
I’m not quite sure how this is possible, but the people in Ratatouille acted more like real people than the actors in many recent live action movies (especially the rats), like they had realistic histories and motivations that governed their actions instead of feeling scripted and fake. The world of the movie felt as though it had existed before the opening credits and would continue after the curtain fell. Systems that have arisen through years, decades, centuries, millennia of careful evolution and interplay with one another were represented accurately and with care. In The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander writes of the quality without a name:
There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of a person, and the crux of any individual person’s story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.
Pixar’s search for this quality in the making of Ratatouille is impressive. And in a way, necessary. In order to draw the audience into the film and make them forget that they’re watching animated characters in an animated world, the filmmakers need to get everything right. Motions too exaggerated, motivations glossed over, plot too uncoordinated, and the whole thing loses its sense of authenticity. People need to act like people, omelettes need to sag off of spatulas like omelettes, and the only woman chef in a haute cuisine French kitchen needs to behave accordingly.
This is an interesting state of affairs. In comparison, the live action movies have become the cartoons. Not all of them, but certainly many Hollywood movies have. Spidey 3, Transformers (I’m guessing), Die Hard 4 (guessing again), anything Eddie Murphy has made since the mid-80s, Wild Hogs, Blades of Glory, RV, etc. etc. I could go on and on. So what are we to make of a cartoon that seems more real than most live action movies? How about we stop thinking of them as cartoons or kids movies or animated films and start considering them as just plain movies? I’d put Pixar’s five best films — Toy Story 2, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, and let’s throw Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant in for good measure — among the best big budget films made in the last 10 years, no caveats required.
Oh, and I don’t want to give away the ending, but I will say that Ratatouille also has something to say about critics and criticism, a topic that’s currently under debate in foodie circles and has been discussed many times in different areas of the blogosphere. It almost seems as though the film’s message is aimed partially at bloggers, and for those that care to listen, that message is both encouraging and enlightening.
For Pixar, the making of Ratatouille included
For Pixar, the making of Ratatouille included some time in real kitchens and restaurants, complete with a stop at the French Laundry for some face-time with Thomas Keller.
Researchers are developing a diet pill made
Researchers are developing a diet pill made from hydrogel…it swells in your stomach, making you think you’re fuller than you actually are. And I’m contractually obligated to say: Just add water!
The sushi economy
Adding sushi to the ever-growing list of everyday consumables as economic indicators: steak, Big Macs, Starbucks coffee, Coca-Cola, and cigarettes.
This page generates a random pizza for
This page generates a random pizza for you. I got a thin crust pie with red sauce, topped with mozzarella, red peppers, tomatoes, black olives, green peppers, and breaded chicken. Yum?
Photos of people from around the world
Photos of people from around the world and the food that they eat during the course of a week.
Steak house index
Can the health of the high-end steakhouse business predict the future health of the overall economy? See also: the Big Mac index, the Starbucks index, and the Coca-Cola index.
King Kobayashi’s long reign is over. Joey
King Kobayashi’s long reign is over. Joey Chestnut broke the record for eating the most hot dogs in 12 minutes yesterday: 59 1/2. He bested the previous record by a whopping 5 3/4 dogs.
Update: To put this in perspective, Chestnut bested the old record by roughly 10%. This would be like running the 100m dash in 8.8 seconds, long jumping 32.5 feet, or completing a marathon in 1:51.
Last 100 posts, part 8
Here are some updates on some of the topics, links, ideas, posts, people, etc. that have appeared on kottke.org recently (previous installment is here):
The Celluloid Skyline exhibition at Grand Central is well worth checking out…I was up there this past weekend. Pentagram collaborated with Saunders on the exhibit and wrote up a brief piece on how it came together.
My short post on Nina Planck’s reaction to the recent “death by veganism”, as she calls it, of a baby boy is a good reminder that I don’t always agree with the things I link to. My only criteria for posting a link is that it’s interesting, whether I think it’s right or wrong or am still trying to form an opinion about it. Anyway, I got lots of mail about this one, much of it that said that the parents’ veganism was beside the point — which the prosecutors and jury in the subsequent criminal case agreed with (thx, matt) — and that a headline like “Death By Stupidity” was probably more appropriate. After all, you don’t see “Death by Omnivorism” headlines every time a baby with a more traditional diet dies of starvation.
Debra from Culiblog pointed out that contrary to Planck’s assertion that “there are no vegan societies”, the Jainists practice vegetarianism and veganism. On the other side of the aisle, meat fan Michael Ruhlman chastised Planck for going too easy on vegans, saying that “Veganism is a colossal arrogance, a refusal to admit to our own nature, a denial of our humanity. Sometimes it kills people. And it’s not very much fun, besides.” You can imagine the discussion that generated…although it was nothing like the 300+ comment thread on MetaFilter.
My opinion of Cars improved with a second viewing.
Discover’s chat bot conversation reminded a reader of this old interview with the Ask Jeeves search engine (thx david). Back in 2002, I interviewed ELLEGirl magazine’s AIMbot:
jkottke: Do you do anything to celebrate or recognize the changing of seasons?
ELLEgirlBuddy: do you do anything to celebrate or recognize the changing of seasons? that’s a tough choice.
jkottke: yes, to celebrate or merely recognize. that is a toughie.
ELLEgirlBuddy: yes to celebrate or merely recognize that is a toughie? i dunno.
jkottke: you seem like an actual 13 year old girl.
ELLEgirlBuddy: i haven’t really made a decision ‘bout that.
jkottke: growing up is tough, isn’t it?
ELLEgirlBuddy: i dunno.
And whoever posted the chat bot story to Digg (5696 Diggs and counting!) used the exact wording from my original post. You’re welcome!
Prime, David Burke’s quarter-million-dollar Black Angus bull, has his own web site. (thx, brian)
Regarding Alex Reisner’s excellent baseball statistics web site and, in particular, the pennant race graphs, here’s another interesting visualization of the pennant races…you can see the teams race to the end of the year like horses. (thx, scott)
Re: my post on better living through self-deception, I’ve heard that pregnant women tend to forget the pain of childbirth, perhaps because “endorphins reduce the amount of information trauma victims can store”. Also related tangetially is this article on research into lying and laughing, which includes this simple test to see if you’re a good liar:
Are you a good liar? Most people think that they are, but in reality there are big differences in how well we can pull the wool over the eyes of others. There is a very simple test that can help determine your ability to lie. Using the first finger of your dominant hand, draw a capital letter Q on your forehead.
Some people draw the letter Q in such a way that they themselves can read it. That is, they place the tail of the Q on the right-hand side of their forehead. Other people draw the letter in a way that can be read by someone facing them, with the tail of the Q on the left side of their forehead. This quick test provides a rough measure of a concept known as “self-monitoring”. High self-monitors tend to draw the letter Q in a way in which it could be seen by someone facing them. Low self-monitors tend to draw the letter Q in a way in which it could be read by themselves.
High self-monitors tend to be concerned with how other people see them. They are happy being the centre of attention, can easily adapt their behaviour to suit the situation in which they find themselves, and are skilled at manipulating the way in which others see them. As a result, they tend to be good at lying. In contrast, low self-monitors come across as being the “same person” in different situations. Their behaviour is guided more by their inner feelings and values, and they are less aware of their impact on those around them. They also tend to lie less in life, and so not be so skilled at deceit.
The skyscraper with one floor isn’t exactly a new idea. Rem Koolhaas won a competition to build two libraries in France with one spiraling floor in 1992 (thx, mike). Of course, there’s the Guggenheim in NYC and many parking garages.
After posting a brief piece on Baltimore last week, I discovered that several of my readers are current or former residents of Charm City…or at least have an interest in it. Armin sent along the Renaming Baltimore project…possible names are Domino, Maryland and Lessismore. A Baltimore Sun article on the Baltimore Youth Lacrosse League published shortly after my post also referenced the idea of “Two Baltimores. Two cities in one.” The Wire’s many juxtapositions of the “old” and “new” Baltimore are evident to viewers of the series. Meanwhile, Mobtown Shank took a look at the crime statistics for Baltimore and noted that crime has actually decreased more than 40% from 1999 to 2005. (thx, fred)
Cognitive Daily took an informal poll and found that fewer than half the respondants worked a standard 8-5 Mon-Fri schedule. Maybe that’s why the streets and coffeeshops aren’t empty during the workday.
Nina Planck on the recent death by
Nina Planck on the recent death by starvation of a baby fed a vegan diet by his parents: “I was once a vegan. But well before I became pregnant, I concluded that a vegan pregnancy was irresponsible. You cannot create and nourish a robust baby merely on foods from plants.”
Food design by Marti Guixe. I love
Food design by Marti Guixe. I love the 7-Step Cookie…it’s got numbered bite-marks that show you how to eat it. Some larger photos of some of his projects here. (via core77)
To ensure proper quality control over the
To ensure proper quality control over the meat at his restaurants, David Burke bought a black Angus bull for $250,000; the bull’s offspring provide steaks for his diners. “The purchase made perfect business sense, he said, because by breeding the same bull, the restaurant guarantees its steaks are of the highest quality.” He named the bull “Prime”. (via serious eats)
My wife Meg makes A Mean Chocolate
My wife Meg makes A Mean Chocolate Chip Cookie. That is to say, she asked her readers for their best chocolate chip cookie recipes, averaged the ingredient amounts, baking times, chilling times, butter consistencies, and other various techniques and baked according to the resulting recipe (which she includes so you can bake up your own batch). Some of the ingredients: “2.04 cups all-purpose flour; 0.79 tsp. salt; 0.79 tsp. baking soda; 0.805 stick unsalted butter, softened to room temperature; 0.2737 stick unsalted butter, cold; 0.5313 stick unsalted butter, melted.” Reminds me a bit of The Most Wanted Paintings project by Komar & Melamid, who averaged aesthetic preferences and taste in painting to produce works of art that appealed to everyone (to hilarious effect). (digg this?)
Five-cent Coca-Cola
The price of a bottle of Coca-Cola remained a nickel for more than 70 years, until 1959. “The price of sugar tripled after World War I before falling back somewhat; over the past six decades, the price of coffee has gone up eightfold. Coke itself was taxed first as a medicine, then as a soft drink, and survived sugar rationing. All the while, the price stayed at a nickel.”
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