Perla. [Photo: Krieger]
This week, Pete Wells at the New York Times gives Perla, the new Greenwich Village Italian restaurant from Gabe Stulman and Michael Toscano two stars, calling Toscano's menu a "swaggering red-blooded version of Italian food" where the beef tongue is "soft as ice cream at the beach." And in Washington, DC, Tom Sietsema released his annual Spring Dining Guide, slamming O'Learys in Annapolis and the Foggy Bottom Founding Farmers location with just a half star apiece.
How are restaurants plying you into upping your tab with specialty drinks? By selling some of the top "growth beverages." Number one is any coffee that's not hot—think iced, frozen, slushed—as well as smoothies, iced tea, lattes, and slushy soft drinks. Cups and glasses of regular old liquid are soooo over. [NRN]
Frédéric Morin and David McMillan [Photo:Chuck Ortiz]
Joe Beef, The Liverpool House and McKiernan Lunchonette are three Montreal restaurants that have managed to hug the line between high and low brow with uncommon grace. Joe Beef has quickly become one of Montreal's best restaurants and a sort of French-Canadian mecca for American chefs and other food obsessives. Their cookbook, The Art of Living According To Joe Beef, came out last year and immediately struck a chord with many as a much-needed dose of humor and authenticity within a food (and wine) world that often takes itself a bit too seriously.
Here, in part 1 of an interview with chefs David McMillan and Frédéric Morin, and sommelier Vanya Filipovic, McMillan talks about why he thinks chefs should spend more time in the wine cellar, what wine means to French-Canadian culture, and why high-alcohol wines just don't make sense to him. Stay tuned for part 2 on Monday in which Morin and McMillan talk about everything from anal-retentive restaurants to locavorism.
Welcome to Hot Topics, in which chefs chime in on a major issue in food.
[Photo: Food & Wine Classic / Facebook]
With every passing year, there seem to be more and more food events — festivals, symposiums, charity functions, or some amalgam of the three — popping up across the country. Which begs a couple of important questions: which ones are worth it, and what are chefs looking for before they commit to traveling, spending time away from their restaurants, and investing money and effort into a production? With that in mind, we asked five chefs to reflect on the issue, which revealed that their main concerns tend to center around transparency, equity, rigor, and efficiency. But it's best to let them explain in their own words.
Here, now, Grant Achatz (Alinea, Chicago), John Currence (City Grocery, Oxford, Mississippi), Frank Falcinelli and Frank Castronovo (Frankies Spuntino, New York), and Michael Cimarusti (Providence, Los Angeles) take on the question.
Sand in your suit? Just wash it out with a nice, long shower of sugary soda. Sprite has installed beachside showers in Brazil made to look like huge, human-drenching soda fountains. Don't worry about getting the car seats sticky on the way home, though: it's just a promotional gimmick, and they actually spray water. [Gizmodo]
The most expensive restaurant in the country. [Photo: Masa]
Using what sounds an awful lot like actual math and research, the Daily Meal has come up with a list of the 25 most expensive restaurants in the United States. They used their own database, plus spending-tracker website Bundle.com and Zagat ratings to compile a list, and then started making calls to restaurants to find out the cost of a complete meal, plus one bottle of wine, tax and tip for their average party size.
The result: notoriously bank-busting Masa is number one, and nearly all the restaurants are either coastal or in Chicago or Las Vegas.
This is the blood of Christ, frozen for you. Brooklyn artist artist Sebastian Errazuriz took a bunch of wine to church, unbeknownst to the priest, who blessed it. Errazuriz then froze the wine on to popsicle crucifixes, and he's showing them at a Manhattan art gallery on Saturday. Transubstantiation never tasted so good. [Animal]
Anthony Bourdain's "wildly funny, irreverent tale of murder, mayhem, and the mob," Bone In The Throat, will be produced for film this year, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The first-ever big-screen Bourdain adaptation will be directed by a guy who's previously specialized in car and beer ads, and via TheWrap.com, director Graham Henman says they're moving the New York City tale to East London:
"With the exception of a few gems, Hollywood has been deficient in making a good restaurant film. With “Bone in the Throat” I am looking forward to doing just that and setting the film in London will allow me to take advantage of a city where the food scene is simply on fire."Bone In The Throat is the first of Bourdain's three novels. No word yet on any casting decisions.
· Bourdain's First Novel Heads To The Big Screen [TheWrap]
· Bourdain's 'Bone In The Throat' to Hit the Big Screen [Hollywood Reporter]
· Bone in the Throat [Amazon]
· All Anthony Bourdain Coverage on Eater [-E-]
[Photo: Travel Channel]
The world's longest pub crawl has lasted 28 years, thanks to the dedication of six dudes from the United Kingdom. Calling themselves the Black Country Ale Tairsters, they've spent every Saturday night trying out a new pub, visiting 16,337 pubs, hotels and wine bars across the UK and Europe, racking up 130 boxes of beer mats at 35,000 photos. And the crawl goes on. [DailyMail]
Next time you're bitching about your landlord, ask yourself: Have they ever tried to back my kitchen up with grease? Michelin-starred British chef Kevin Viner took his landlord to court for threatening to stop up the grease trap at his eponymous restaurant and, last year, cutting off the electricity while he was catering a wedding. The landlord, Eric Randle, says Viner owes him money for rent and utilities, but was given a "suspended" 28-day jail sentence. [Telegraph]
After two years of playing adorable, healthy Dr. Frankenstein with fruit, the Brazilian company Camp Nectar managed to grow actual fruit in the shape of those fruit juice boxes kids love to take in their lunches. Gizmodo calls it "objectively the hands-down best ad campaign in the history of the juice-boxing business." The incredibly annoying bastardized 'Old McDonald' jingle that accompanies the ad, however, begs to differ.
Whoops, Chopped host Ted Allen might have just outed his fellow Food Network star Anne Burrell in a SiriusXM show set to air on Monday. When radio host Romaine Patterson told Allen about his crush on Burrell "whether or not she's a lesbian," Allen reportedly replied: "I'm not going to put a label on Anne, but she is dating a woman right now." [HuffPo]
You know how when there aren't enough onions on your cheeseburger and it just makes you go so postal you want to throw concrete through the drive-thru window? That's what happened to two Tennessee men who have been charged with reckless endangerment and vandalizing a local McDonald's after receiving some "messed up" cheeseburgers. How did they get caught? One of them drunkenly tripped and was unable to get up. [The Smoking Gun via HuffPo]
If you thought that American restaurant critics were sometimes a little bit mean, well sure, but suck it up because they're here to tell you it could be a lot worse. Eatocracy interviewed a few critics for a piece about "the art of the bad review" — and the delicate balance of being nice enough to not be a jerk and being mean enough to satisfy your jerky readers.
Because, of course, people love to read takedowns. As Seattle Weekly critic Hanna Raskin explains, "Almost every time I wrote something negative, I get the feedback, 'I'm so glad you're telling it like it is. I'm so glad you said that.' And nobody ever says that when I write a good review." But apparently she's been holding back on those reader-favorite slams, telling Eatocracy that "in her negative reviews, the reader should infer 'that it was probably even worse.'"
Food writer Peter Kaminsky took on a challenge to eat healthy for a week, but ran into a bit of trouble at the airport, writing: "JetBlue says you can have your pick of all the wonderful restaurants in their terminal, but it's all doughnuts and pizza and cheeseburgers. The healthiest thing I could find was two Kind bars, so I bought them and ate them, and then I got the fabulously inauthentic, but not carcinogenic, hummus and whole-grain crackers from JetBlue." [GSNY]
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