Outback Steakhouse has been sending out $25 gift certificates to food bloggers in an apparent attempt to get them to come in and write about the restaurant. Just $25? Cheapskates. It's enough to lead you to believe they're trying to bribe you, but not enough to be an effective bribe. So food bloggers—Just take the money, then write about how your steak tasted like pee. [Endless Simmer]
Colleges are now trying to lure prospective students by amping up their dining hall menus, adding fancy foods like lobster and something called "pho." "I didn't apply to Bates, because, well, I ate there, the meal was not very good," says Lucas Braun, a 17-year-old senior at Westtown School. Hey, college food is bad for a reason. So you'll spend less time in the dining hall and more time learning shit. Now get back to studying so we don't have to waste time teaching you everything four years from now when you're our intern.
Momofuko Ko is, as NYT food critic Frank Bruni tells us, "a new restaurant from David Chang, and David Chang is at this point the New York restaurant world's equivalent of Tiger Woods or Roger Federer." It has 12 seats. Their democratic Web 2.0 booking system requires everyone—yes, everyone—to go online at 10 a.m. and make reservations for the limited number of seats available that week. We love the idea. No calling Graydon Carter's office for a chance at the Waverly: here's the one place in New York where your precious connections and friends can't get you preferential treatment over the slobbering masses lining up for their share of the fancy chow-time.
Break out the picket signs, the corporate scabs, and the Woody Guthrie songs, because it's time for all the proletarians in the Time Warner building to unite for a good old-fashioned boycott! Of the exclusive, employee-only Park Cafe! According to a righteously angry email being passed among CNN employees on the 7th floor, "on April 1 (Next Tuesday) prices are going up, frequent diner cards are being eliminated and the place will now close an hour earlier at 2:30p every day. If ever a situation called for a BOYCOTT... THIS IS IT!" By god, I can almost hear Samuel Gompers and Big Bill Haywood clawing their way out of their graves to rush to these employees' assistance! So what are the workers fighting to protect? An inside tipster describes the Park Cafe's democratic atmosphere:
Germans: they have so much time on their hands! Some German guy with a website took the time to photograph the pictures of 100 different food items on their own packaging; then, photograph the actual food item inside. Then, post the whole mess on the internet [Funtasticus via Coudal]. The results, as you might imagine, are frequently disgusting. So we've culled the list for you down to the five biggest disparities between the advertised product and reality. Before you eat any more packaged German food, you must see this:
One reason for the evergreen popularity of those "explaining the coming financial collapse for dummies" pieces is that 99% of journalists—even on the business beat!—don't know a damn thing about money and finance, and writing these pieces is a convenient way to get paid to try to figure it out. New York weighs in wth "An Idiot's Guide to Financial Crises", the casual version of the New York Times' Can't Grasp Credit Crisis? Join the Club. New York's take is more personal: apparently a recession means that Adam Sternbergh will lose his job! Considerably more alarming: the recession is already causing the prices of cheeseburgers and bagels to skyrocket. [NYM, NYM]
Midtown Lunch, a food blog devoted to finding Midtown cuisine, tips us that New York Times writers were lining up with Port Authority staffers for free food at Sophie's Cuban on 40th Street between seventh and eighth. They're starving! And they probably even had to walk there! I'm still banned from Whole Foods for taking too many samples. Nice to know that part of me will never change. [via Midtown Lunch]
Did you know that people who write about food for a living tend to be fatties? It's true! Except for the Times' dreamy James Bond of gastronomy, Frank Bruni. The point is that some food critics have realized that scarfing down daily heapings of pork bellies and passing it off as a professional expense is no guarantee they won't keel over from a heart attack, and is a guarantee they will have a hard time seeing their own genitals. Even pork-loving wild man Mario Batali is threatening to start exercising! By chasing a greased sow in his Crocs, perhaps. But even while some of the wiser gluttons are easing back, says the Times, their stupider brethren—embodied by one man—just can't stop with the sausage:
Celebrity Food Network chef Robert Irvine, revealed to be a big fat liar recently by a St. Petersburg Times investigation, has been let go by the network. He spent his last day as host of "Dinner: Impossible" in Washington, DC, cooking Japanese food for a party of 250. Maybe he can go back into the Army, they always need fast cooks like that. [TMZ]
The celebrity foodies among you will be pleased and scared to know that homebot Martha Stewart is "poised for multi-platform expansion opportunities" now that she has acquired Emeril Lagasse's New Orleans-based food empire for a cool $50 million. BAM!, we say predictably. The only losers in the deal? Those Penn students who were complaining a few weeks ago about a false rumor that the entertaining multimillionaire Emeril would be their commencement speaker this year. Instead, they got stuck with boring multibillionaire Mike Bloomberg. Enjoy the following clip involving Emeril and bologna, back before he totally sold out:
Robert Irvine, the nerdy, crewcut, heavily muscled celebrity chef who rose to fame with his show "Dinner: Impossible" on the Food Network, may be suffering from a serious case of pants-on-fire. Irvine had big plans to transform the fine dining scene in St. Petersburg, FL with two new fancy restaurants. He ran around town entering partnerships, hiring consultants, and generally proclaiming himself to be a food VIP. But the local paper noticed that, three months after the scheduled opening date, the new restaurants are still unfinished construction sites. So they did some investigating [SP Times], and it turns out that most of Irvine's big-shot credentials are just a huge pile of unseasoned poop!
Yahoo! Food helps you adjust to the coming recession with this "dressed up" Ramen "recipe," a truly sad collection of words to end up in a sentence together. Next week: how to make a rucksack and the fine art of pencil sales! This will certainly come in handy for anywhere from hundreds to thousands of people in the next couple weeks. [Yahoo]
What does 'Motherless Brooklyn' and 'The Fortress of Solitude' and 'That Other More Recent Book, What Was The Name Of It' author Jonathan Lethem eat? The same things most people eat: bagels and sandwiches and macaroni and cheese from a box, and sometimes fancy meals out at restaurants or at friends' houses. "I love Jonathan Lethem. Can we hear about his grooming habits and/or laundry secrets next? Please keep these peeks into his life coming!" writes a commenter who is probably not being sarcastic. [NYM]
Kim Severson writes in the Times today that the entree—that big thing you eat at dinner—is dead. It has been replaced by crudi, tapas, side dishes, salads and other non-entree things. Bald bear chef Tom Collichio agrees, saying, "Eating an entree is too many bites of one thing, and it's boring." Big ol' cook Mario Batali signs on too! "As a diner, the idea of me chewing 17 bites of one thing and another 17 bites of another is absolutely boring, and not how I want to eat." Which all means in the words of Ms. Severson, "The entree is Walter Cronkite." Blech! That means I fucking ate Walter Cronkite last night with some homemade applesauce and roast fingerling potatoes! You know what though; that dude is delicious! Interesting game: Substitute literary terms for culinary ones, and you have a regurgitation of the old media/new media debate. Wasn't it just months ago Pilates-loving Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said, "Reading a paper is too many bites of one thing, and it's boring"?
Last night at new Franklin Street neighborhood institution Brooklyn Label, a lot of messy-haired people got in touch with their Midwestern roots by eating concoctions with names like "Texas Casserole Massacre" and "Practically Perfect Pairing." Organizer Emily Farris, whose casserole cookbook comes out next Fall, was in high spirits. "I am running around like a crazy lady!" she said, doing just that. "I have to get some waters for my judges!" The water-needing judges included Adam Roberts, author of "The Amateur Gourmet," and a lady who is a sous-chef for the Food Network. Not a judge: Jordana Rothman, who writes about food for Time Out New York. "I'm not bitter or anything," she explained. "But I decided not to enter a casserole, either. Hmmph!" Also not bitter: The casseroles!
After reading the Voice's paean to the new garden of tempura called Barfry, we figured we had to check it out sometime. We really wanted to peek into Market Table, which is next door; it's Joey Campanaro of Little Owl's new place in what used to be Shopsin's, but it's only open for lunch these days. Dinner by Friday, they say. So we went to Barfry. As the name suggests, it is a bar that serves fried foods!
A sad day at our offices: Dom's Fine Food, the world's best little Italian grocery and our lunch spot of choice, is moving from its Lafayette home to 181 Grand St. The new incarnation will be lunch-only and will open mid-July. The full grocery version will open on Broome and Broadway end of September. Now begins weeks of hunger.
The Village Voice's food scribe Nina Lalli recently bemoaned the sheer meanness of the servers at Chef Iacopo Falai's Lower East Side bakery Falai Panetteria. As per Lalli, the service isn't only "scattered or overwhelmed or forgetful, but in our experience, the servers have been more than unfriendly. They've been a little scary." General consensus, both in our office and in other reviews, is: NO DOY.
CAA agents returning yesterday from a long weekend of team-building group pedicures at their Ojai retreat arrived back at the Death Star to discover their pampering wasn't yet over: According to Eater LA, popular Valley wiener purveyor The Stand officially opened a location right at 2000 Avenue of the Stars Monday, an outpost on the grounds of the evil agenting monolith's imposing new headquarters. While The Stand initially might not be able to match the offerings of the nearby Century City food court Fuddrucker's, whose delicious burgers made of fresh, thrice-ground infant-sirloin have become an agency lunch staple, if they quickly adapt to their built-in clientele's tastes, the convenience of being able to hastily gobble a baby-leg footlong just steps away from the office should make them an instant favorite of harried CAA drones.
