*A GQ interview with David Chang where he talks about plans to expand to Sydney and Toronto in 2012.

I was there last year and just fell in love with Australia—holy shit, the produce, the proteins, the fish. This place is insane. Why wouldn't you want to open a restaurant out here? We're going to try to use only Australian ingredients, with the exception of some fermented products from Japan and some wines from France.

*What Malcolm Gladwell reads.

Since my brain really only works in the morning, I try to keep that time free for writing and thinking and don't read any media at all until lunchtime, when I treat myself to The New York Times--the paper edition. At this point, I realize, I am almost a full 24 hours behind the news cycle. Is this is a problem? I have no idea. My brother, who is a teacher, always says that we place too much emphasis on the speed of knowledge acquistion, and not the quality of knowledge acquistion: I guess that means that the fact that I am still on Monday, when everyone else is on Tuesday, is okay.

I don't want to shock anyone, but we may have been mislead. I think I saw the Olive Garden commercial touting their cooking school about 15 times before the message internalized and I realized that Olive Garden was talking about a cooking school to which they send their chefs and managers. I don't know if any of you have been to an Olive Garden lately, but I think they need to take a look at the curriculum. Turns out the school is more of a vacation, then educational facility.

I was a manager at Olive Garden and was sent to their culinary institute in Tuscany back in 2007. It was more like a hotel, during the off-season, with restaurant on site. They would let the Olive Garden come and stay in all the rooms and they would use the restaurant as a classroom for maybe an hour here or there and talk about spices or fresh produce for a minute before going site seeing all day. The only time we saw the "chef" was when she made a bolognese sauce while taking pictures with each of us to send to our local newspapers. Basically, yes, they send people to Italy every year. As a manager I still got paid my salary and didn't have to use vacation time, it counted as "work". They paid for everything from meals, sightseeing, flight, everything except souvenirs. But in return, they sent pre-written articles to out local newspaper with fake quotes from me and a group photo. Also every year when they would run the promotion, I was supposed to wear a special "chef" coat and make conversation with guests who ordered the promotional meals.

Tom Haverford was riffing about food on Parks and Recreation and I had to transcribe it. If I knew how to use the computer, I'd just put up the clip on Youtube, but this is how I do it.

"'Serts are what I call desserts. 'Tretres are entrees. I call sandwiches, sannies, samdoozles, Adam Sandlers. Air conditioners are Cool Blasterz with a z, I don't know where that came from. I call cakes, big ol' cookies. I call noodles long ass rice. Fried chicken is fry fry chicky chick. Chicken parm is chicky chicky parm parm. Chicken Cacciatore is chicky catch. I call eggs pre-birds or future birds. Root beer is super water. Tortillas are bean blankies. And I call forks food rakes."

Here's a list of the 129 service rules for La Bernardin in New York City from a chapter in Eric Ripert's 2008 book, 'On the Line'. The list was published on 4 or 5 different pages by the Star Tribune, and I figured they'd be better all on one page.

1. Not acknowledging guests with eye contact and a smile within 30 seconds. First impressions count!
2. Not thanking the guests as they leave. Last impression!
3. Not remembering the guests' likes and dislikes!
4. Not opening the front door for guests.
5. Silverware set askew on the tables.
6. Tabletop that isn't picture perfect.
7. Forks with bent tines.
8. Unevenly folded napkins.
9. Chipped glassware.
10. Tables not completely set when guests are being seated.
11. Dead or wilted flowers on the tables.
12. Tables that are not leveled.
13. Salt and pepper shakers that are half empty.
14. Salt or sugar crusted inside the shakers.
Read the rest of this entry »

The recipe for Coca-Cola is a long held secret, but it seems like This American Life discovered it. Well now.

Companies like Pepsi have deduced the general ingredients on their own, none have unlocked the "Merchandise 7X flavoring" that gives Coke its unique taste and bubbly burn.
...
The secret 7X flavor (use 2 oz of flavor to 5 gals syrup):
Alcohol: 8 oz
Orange oil: 20 drops
Lemon oil: 30 drops
Nutmeg oil: 10 drops
Coriander: 5 drops
Neroli: 10 drops
Cinnamon: 10 drops

Serious Eats

I've been doing a lot of food events around Boston the last year and a half or so, and I'm not sure how good of a job I do posting about them here. One of the things I've been working on is pop up restaurants. We were featured in a story in the Globe about our pop up in a coffee shop. For Valentine's Day Weekend, we're putting together a restaurant inside of a chocolate factory. Gotta say, that's a pretty good Valentine's idea, huh?

I made these Oreo Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookies tonight. I'm pretty happy with how they came out. The Oreos get soft, which is nice. I think I made the cookie part a little bigger than they were supposed to be, because they took longer to cook, but... You know, still worth it. Food bloggers take much nicer pictures.

The Daily Meal with a linkbait-tastic list of America's 50 Most Powerful People in Food. I don't want to spoil the surprise, but #1 is you. First chef doesn't show up until #6. Steve Jobs is #5. I do have to compliment TDM for not putting each person on the list on a separate slide show slide. It's something not often seen anymore, but much appreciated.

Ferran Adrià and his brother Albert have opened a new tapas bar, 41 Degrees, in Barcelona, and by next month, they'll open a restaurant next door called Tickets.

The Adrià brothers, Ferran and Albert, plan to open a sit-down tapas restaurant near by next month. It will be called Tickets, will cater for 50 diners at a time and will take reservations. Last year, Adrià announced that he would close El Bulli for two years. From 2014, the restaurant in the town of Roses, about 100 miles north of Barcelona, will reopen as a creative culinary foundation serving the odd meal for the lucky few.

Also noted in the article, El Bulli was losing £412,000 a year. This translates to roughly a lot of US dollars, and helps explain why it's closing/reopening as something more of a culinary foundation. I'd heard it was losing, but didn't know how much.

While we're here, I have a couple other Adria articles I'd tabbed, but not linked to yet:

Here's a 2003 NY Times Magazine article trumpeting Spain's transcendence in the world of food.

Spain rising, France resting. The more attention I paid, the more I noticed everywhere this invidious comparison, between smug, stagnant France and innovative, daring Spain. It seemed, as Trotter suggested, a shift in the zeitgeist.

Profile of Adrià and El Bulli in Vanity Fair.

Book excerpt from The Inside Story of El Bulli and the Man Who Reinvented Food.

2006 profile from the New York Times, and 2007 profile from The Observer.



"Those who want to live experiences cannot be cowards. We endeavor a cuisine for non-cowards."

I don't even know if Curry Prawn exists, but I couldn't help it. Do you have something else that fits?