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I went to Porter House, my favorite restaurant. I was with a woman who was not with me for free. I think she had a filet with some kind of a salad and no vegetables, and I think she had wine. I don’t drink at all. I just had unsweetened iced tea.
She didn’t charge me for dinner, because I wouldn’t pay somebody to eat with them. But as a part of the night, she was like, “Yeah, we can go out and eat first, if you want,” so I was like, “Oh, okay,” and then we went home and kind of hung out. I had her for technically an hour, but she was cool with doing something else beforehand because she was kind of familiar with me, so she didn’t mind going out and eating. So we spent probably two and a half hours together.
Comedian Jim Norton Has Salmon in New York, Uni in L.A. — Grub Street New York
Did Jim Norton say he took an escort to get steak dinner???
Posted on July 7, 2012 with 3 notes
Source: newyork.grubstreet.com
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Eddie: Well, the crux of the issue for me is this… Immigrants, my parents and myself included, are exposed to years of ridicule. I was made fun of for my stinky lunch upwards of 10 years. Immigrants of our parents’ generation have largely given up any hope that Americans will like their food.
Francis: Word.
Eddie: Then, to have these CIA grads come through, repackage the food, and sell it back to me at a premium is just ludicrous.
Is it Fair for Chefs to Cook Other Cultures’ Foods?
Conversation between food writer Francis Lam and chef Eddie Huang about immigrant food and fancyfying immigrant food to suit American upper middle class palates.
Source: gilttaste.com
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They are shocked by the rare flesh of the lamb, although it’s the most perfect I’ve ever tasted. (“Dangerous,” says Xiao Jianming, who refuses to touch it. “Terribly unhealthy.”) The sequence of delicious desserts is an irrelevance for these visitors from a food culture without much of a sweet tooth. (The only dish they relish, curiously, is a coconut sorbet.) They are also mystified by the custom of serving tiny,personal portions of food on enormous white plates, and find the length of this meal served à la russe interminable.
Culture Shock: 2000s Archive : gourmet.com
From 2005: three chefs from Sichuan enter the French Laundry… “World’s best restaurant” is in the palate of the beholder.
Source: gourmet.com
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B. was my first long-term boyfriend, and thus the first man I looked forward to feeding on a routine basis.
I had spent the first half of my twenties fumbling my way through a sort of boxed set of attractive but woefully unsuitable males. Our brief entanglements would be fun but underwhelming, and the food I cooked tended to function mainly as a prelude to carnality. It was a thrill to possess such a means of seduction, but it was short-lived; I always ended up doing the dishes on my own.
From Sex Cake to Spurned Salad
Since I grew into a fantastic home cook, every guy I saw long-term ended up gaining 10-15 lbs. And after breaking up, I knew he was over it when those 10-15 lbs would be gone.
I don’t miss dating, courtship, whatever but I do miss making someone fat and happy.
Source: gilttaste.com
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16 minute Thomas Keller tribute wankfest maybe worth watching or listening to in the background. If you don’t want to watch, most salient part is Keller won’t hire you if your golf game isn’t good, and he makes his hires caddy for him. That changed my view of him, for sure.
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Finer Dining Through Chemistry
JOHN McINTYRE
on Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli, and the
molecular gastronomy revolution.
Galletas de Arroz y Parmesano by Charles Haynes http://bit.ly/zN9djn (Some rights reserved)
Colman Andrews
Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli and the Man Who Reinvented Food
Gotham Books, October 2010. 301 pp.
Ferran Adrià, Albert Adrià, and Juli Soler
A Day at elBulli: An insight into the ideas, methods and creativity of Ferran Adrià
Phaidon Press, October 2008. 528 pp.
Lisa Abend
The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrià’s elBulli
Free Press, March 2011. 295 pp.
Ferran Adrià
The Family Meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adrià
Phaidon Press, October 2011. 383 pp.
El Bulli, known among chefs and the people who follow them as the best restaurant in the world, performed its final dinner service last summer. Since then, the man behind the restaurant has been busy, among other things, teaching a culinary physics course at Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In what forum or form we will next experience the food of chef Ferran Adrià is a mystery. But in the meantime, we have reading material and time to sort out just how much the man has altered the international culinary landscape — and which of his innovations will be but beautiful, passing follies, a chef’s bravado that called on ephemera like air and foam to bring him the fame of the world.
Sometime around the year 2002, public consensus conferred upon Adrià the title of Greatest. For little more than the chance to chop his garlic, world-class chefs left their nests and headed to Spain to work at the globe’s most famous restaurant, the place that had pioneered what the chef called avant-garde cuisine. There, Adrià and his staff playfully mixed flavors and ingredients and served them up in unexpected forms, as in an early dish of smoked tuna with gelatin triangles made from tomato, licorice, and pistachio and garnished with figs and pine nuts. In the service of deconstruction, he has forgone carrot soup to serve carrot air with mandarin orange accents (made with the help of a siphon bottle equipped with nitrous oxide cartridges). Another dish, a concentrate of green peas that arrived in a spoon, looked and moved exactly like an egg yolk: it was dinner as trompe l’oeil. International travelers flocked to the tiny town of Roses, where they were told not only what they were eating, but how to eat it. Serving a single strand of spaghetti and parmesan, a waiter might instruct: “Try to do it complete. Put it in your mouth and suck.”
Posted on April 4, 2012 via with 7 notes
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You see them all across the country, in shopping malls and street corners, suburban towns and city centers: zombie restaurants.
Many of the undead are part of familiar chains that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this year: Friendly’s, Chevys, Sbarro, Perkins. The zombie restaurants, barely bringing in enough cash to cover basic expenses
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Mr. Fallon said that zombie operators cut costs to the bone to stay in business.
“It has nothing to do with the quality of the food or serving the customer,” he said. “It’s just a financial play.”
Bankrupt Chain Restaurants Are Still Holding On - NYTimes.com
The business of feeding America. Time to stay home and cook instead of feeding these zombies.
Posted on January 1, 2012 with 22 notes
Source:
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Across the room, Pepsico representatives blended fine dining and American fast-food with Asian and Italian ingredients by serving Ruffles Molten Hot Wings flavored potato chips with daikon, sugar snap peas and romanesco broccoli.
In Napa Valley, Worlds of Flavor Conference Points to Future - NYTimes.com
Stop, you guys. Seriously. Stop it. The pig is tired of wearing lipstick and mash-ups are only awesome when the parts click together.
Posted on November 25, 2011 with 1 note
Source:
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This is food? This is food. Flash-frozen chocolate foam is the centerpiece of this Alinea dessert composition.
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Salad at Alinea. Baby lettuce still growing in dirt, sprayed with salt-and-pepper flavored water. Patrons snip the leaves themselves, putting it straight into their mouths.
I was laid off 2 days before my birthday in 2009, a dismal blessing. I miss health insurance and payroll, but I haven't bought bread since the pink slip because I have time to bake.
Sometimes I'm a serious job hunter, sometimes a serious slacker, but mostly, I'm an underemployed, freelance Jaqueline of many trades including writing and dogsitting. Either way, I scrapbook my finds and activities here for your benefit and amusement.
Follow me on Twitter if tv/movie/pro-cycling spoilers and unplanned live tweets won't hail on your parade. And yes, I do work blue so don't be huffy with me if you don't like cursing or merciless roasting of public figures.
You can look at my other blog Fashion Corpuscle if you like fashion. The ruins of my crumbling Tumblr blog empire awaits internet archaeologists.
Gainful Unemployment is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
