Quirky Manhattan eatery Shopsin’s not moving to Brooklyn as previously reported.
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Wired magazine reports on the revolutionary food and strange equipment (antigriddle!) used by chef Grant Achatz in the kitchen at Alinea. “The technology allows us to get to the essence of food. It allows you to be more true with flavor, not less true.”
Typographica reports on a food + typography event going on in San Francisco today on cookbook design. Someone do a similar event in NYC, please.
Science blog Cocktail Party Physics has a list of “physics cocktails” in the sidebar (scroll down a bit). The Black Hole is “so called because after one of these, you have already passed the event horizon of inebriation.” Boy, am I a huge sucker for physics puns.
Cheese by Hand is a project by Michael Claypool and Sasha Davies to “capture the experience of cheesemakers around the country, in their own voices, and share them with consumers and cheese fans everywhere”. Jasper Hill Farms cheese = great; audio about JHF approach to cheese, even better. (via megnut, who, if you haven’t noticed, is blogging up a storm about food lately)
Taste of Chinatown tomorrow (4/22) in NYC. Taste a variety of Chinese food for not so much money.
Bouchon Bakery has dog biscuits with foie gras and bacon in them. Taste test verdict? “Not good for humans. Good for spoiled dogs.”
Long, varied, and interesting recap from a participant at the 2006 United States Barista Championship. The drink he prepared for the competition (scroll to the bottom for the recipe) was called Coffee and a Cigar, a coffee drink with tobacco in it. “The tray never touches the table - ever. That’s just a faux pas that I think should result in immediate disqualification. What reason is there to place your dirty tray bottom on your clean table? None.”
Because of their Dollar Menu (which doesn’t feature any of their recently added healthy menu items), sales at McDonald’s have risen sharply over the last three years. In the article, a McDonald’s rep calls the Egg McMuffin “a very nutritious sandwich”. I like me some McMuffin, but if you look at its nutrition info (22% of your daily saturated fat and 77% of your daily cholesterol…and a McMuffin isn’t that big), it’s hard to imagine the circumstances under which you could call it “very nutritious”.
eGullet has serveral publicly available online classes you can take, including this one on wine tasting. Looks like a great resource.
Ed Levine gets served a hot dog at Per Se. “I’m quite sure this was the first time Thomas Keller ever served anyone a hot dog in one of his restaurants.” Let’s see if this works…I totally want a hot dog next time I’m at Per Se. (via the eater)
At lunch today, I ordered the pizza of the day, a BLT pizza. When it arrived, it was completely missing the L and had green peppers on it instead (which was apparently how it was supposed to be). That got us joking about how the restaurant just tosses random ingredients in their dishes and we amused ourselves for (probably) far too long by coming up with different not-so-tasty combinations.
We ordered the apple crisp for dessert (me: “I love apple crisp”) and digging in upon its arrival, we discovered that half of the apples were actually peaches. (WTF?) Then the waiter showed up with an iced tea instead of Jonah’s espresso — an actual mistake this time, they were for another table — but the damage was done and I was spraying apple/peach crisp/cobbler all over the place from laughing so hard about our meal from the Random Cafe.
McGriddle Fan Fiction group on LiveJournal. “Keep it focused on breakfast products. I don’t want to hear about any french fries.” (thanks, thirteen) -dj
A list of the world’s 50 best restaurants for 2006, compiled by Restaurant magazine. Here are the winners from previous years.
Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is now out. Here’s a NY Times piece about Pollan hunting for wild boar that uses material from the book. I loved The Botany of Desire.
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