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kottke.org posts about food
Forbes has a list of 10 chef “tastemakers”, including Thomas Keller, Alain Ducasse, and Grant Achatz.
Here’s the recipe for the sandwich that Adam Sandler makes in Spanglish; he was taught how by Thomas Keller. “I’m told that making sure that the yolk doesn’t break until you cut the sandwich is key.”
An intrepid New York magazine reporter waits for meals at various NYC restaurants and reports back as to whether they were worth the wait or not. Shake Shack? Worth the wait. (via meg)
Charlie Trotter bails out of his planned restaurant in the Time Warner Center and it seems that Vongerichten’s steakhouse might not be far behind. As I can attest from a fantastic birthday gift dinner, Per Se is doing quite well.
Awesome set of food photos with little people on them. They’re buried in a Flash interface (grr, Flash), but it’s worth the trouble to find them. Skip the intro, click on “minimiam”, and then select one of the “galeries” (primeurs, gourmandise, etc.). (via dtb)
Smart toast
I had this idea the other day that instead of having to open my laptop or turn on the TV to check the weather report, my toaster could burn that information onto my breakfast toast as a passive information delivery mechanism. I knew that people had wired toasters to print images on them, but I didn’t remember that someone had done the weather thing already. That got me thinking about what other information a toaster could print on bread. A graph of the previous day’s DJIA activity? Photo of your kids? The Red Sox score from last night?
There are constraints, of course. Bread is not exactly a high resolution medium. A course wheat bread would be difficult to print on while a dense rye might give you a couple dozen ppi to work with. But then you run into a contrast problem…toasted rye bread isn’t much darker than untoasted rye bread. Now, if you were to use Pop Tarts, they’re a little more high-res, a finer grained paper. You might even be able to print a few lines of text if the heating elements were precise enough…your stocks, meeting schedule for the day, top news stories, shopping list, the 5-day forecast, or a serial short story that you read over a few breakfasts (you could call them Breakfast Serials™!!). Or maybe toasters will be free in the future, with the toaster companies making their money from advertising printed on your morning toast, not unlike the free newspapers they hand out in the NYC subways.
Though what would be even better is wifi-enabled Alpha Bits. Just connect the box to your local network, pour yourself some cereal, and view the five most recent headlines from your RSS reader floating in your milk. Then right click your bowl to open up links on the screen in your refrigerator. That and a rocket-powered hoverbike, please.
If you spend any time in restaurants, you might find May We Tell You About Our Specials This Evening? as hilarious as I did.
Subway has gotten rid of their Sub Club cards and stamps, citing the greater ease of fraud these days with color printers and such. Before they stopped it, my dad cashed in his entire supply of cards, eating free for about two weeks.
As discussed previously, there’s a whole lot a restauranting going on in Chelsea on 10th Ave these days. If two is a trend, what do you call all of this?
Epicurious lists ten hated restaurant trends. “To enjoy the brioche bread pudding, it’s really not necessary to know the name of the farm that supplied the eggs.” (via tmn)
Neat article on Charlie Ayers, Google’s former chef, and his future plans to open his own eco-aware restaurant.
Someday we’ll all tell our children about the epic cupcake battles of the early 00s. This one time, I got frosting all over my shirt. It was brutal. (via meg)
Oddly, chef Thomas Keller (not the poker player) has never tasted “Oysters and Pearls”, one of his signature dishes. “In the ten years it’s been on his menu, he’s never once tasted it, and now is too superstitious to even think about it.”
The lofty world of food reviewing gets some much needed profanity and street-sensibility in this article, Food Critic Tears Radish Canapes With Salmon Mousse A New Asshole (The Onion, of course).
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