A few of the best stories spied elsewhere on the Web this week:
Learn some new holiday cooking and baking skills with this roundup of Thanksgiving cooking classes across the nation.
Not surprisingly, an Aloha, Ore., man was fined $300 for calling 911 to complain about his botched McDonald's drive-through order.
Design icon Isaac Mizrahi will sell tartan-topped cheesecakes from Junior's on QVC in early December.
Los Angeles' popular Kogi Korean Taco Truck gets a tricked out Toyota Scion Kogi xD Mobile Kitchen that's fully loaded with a grill, a sink and an Alpine Sound System.
Restaurant consulting firm Baum + Whiteman released its 2010 food and dining trend forecast, which claims "fried chicken is the new pork belly."
Former New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni sold the TV rights to his memoir, "Born Round."
New York Times blogger Bruce Buschel has done a great service by compiling a list of 100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do – if nothing else, he's given fed-up diners one more forum in which to vent their ever-mounting aggravations. Thanks for the break, Bruce.
Most diners and servers would stand behind the majority of Buschel's prescriptions, which include not cursing (Rule 45), opening Champagne without making a ruckus (Rule 29) and knowing what the bar stocks (Rule 81). But his list is far from perfect. While Buschel's document would make a fine training manual for butlers, it fails to acknowledge the realities of running a restaurant. Here's what Buschel apparently forgot:
Some things are beyond a server's control.
One of Buschel's first recommendations (Rule 4) is to offer a free drink to someone who's had to wait a long time for a table. "The guest may be hungry and thirsty," he explains. May be? I think it's a safe assumption that anyone who shows up at a restaurant is craving food and drink. But I don't know of a single server who's empowered to start giving that stuff away.
The same goes for Rule 23, which insists diners be alerted to 86'd items before they open their menus. Since the hostess usually drops off menus when she seats a table, cutting her off would require Usian Bolt-speed (and necessitate breaking Rule 33 – Do not bang into chairs or tables.)
Hostesses, of course, should brief diners on which items are no longer available. But often they don't, just as the kitchen often turns out the first appetizer on a ticket a full 12 minutes before the second appetizer is ready. I completely agree that servers should "bring all the appetizers at the same time" (Rule 60), but I won't let a tray of raw oysters sit in the window while a new guy struggles to properly heat a dish of crab dip.
Citing researched compiled by Mindset Media -- a "market researcher specializing in psychographics" -- the article discusses how the beer a person drinks can be a strong indicator of his or her personality. For instance, Bud drinkers are "sensible, grounded and practical," Bud Light drinkers can have "frat boy-like personalities," and Michelob Ultra drinkers "think highly of themselves and can be a little bit conceited."
The concept is interesting, but why spend all that money on "research"? Most people could come up with those same assumptions on their own. In fact, the list can be extrapolated even further... massive research grant hopefully forthcoming.
Pabst Blue Ribbon drinkers consider playing bass in a punk band "gainful employment" and have handlebar mustaches.
Miller Lite drinkers consider the consumption of 20 beers "moderate drinking" and include beer bongs on their list of "proper glassware."
Sam Adams drinkers love wearing the same Red Sox hat for their entire adult life and believe there's nothing wrong with hitting on someone else's girlfriend.
Guinness drinkers think the best football team is Manchester United and consider a fist fight a "night out on the town."
Busch drinkers think the best bar in America is their porch and consider a proper food and beer pairing to be "a pounder and a bag of Hardee's."
And snobby craft beers drinkers tend to be people like beer writers who think they have a right to make fun of others!
What other beers bring to mind distinct personality types? And what does your favorite beer say about you? Let us know in the comments!
Julia Child certainly could make a mean boeuf bourguignon, but did you know she could also whip up the building blocks of life?
It's kind of scary watching her describe scientific diagrams using her chef's knife as a pointer. But it's helpful for all us home cooks that she converts grams into teaspoons. Bon appetit!
Slashfood's sister site Urlesque found this wonderful Internet Meme Cake and others including O Rly? Owl, Snakes on a Plane and even a Rick Roll treat.
The Brooklyn, N.Y., cheesecake institution Junior's, founded in downtown Brooklyn in 1950, prides itself as "New York's Best Cheesecake," but it's now scrambling to clean up its reputation after photographs posted on the Internet over the weekend show some rodents enjoying a snack in the bakery's window display.
File this under Distraction of the Day. A new Web site, Cheese or Font?, tests your knowledge of fine cheeses and fonts. Diwani? Font. Tetilla? Cheese. Thanks Ulysses for pointing out this wondrous site!
Shaping fruits and vegetables as they grow on the vine is nothing new. John Czeski, an Ohio farmer, was harvesting pumpkins with human faces in the 1930s. But these adorable baby Buddha pears take playing with food to a whole new level.
A Chinese farmer been tinkering with modified pears since 2003, and this year he's reportedly grown 10,000 edible Buddhas. But are they too cute to eat? Tell us what you think in the comments below!
The model-actress-cook stars in a new video for the Eels' "That Look You Give That Guy." Band member Mark Oliver Everett told Slashfood's sister site, Spinner, that "I always dreamt of dating someone as beautiful as Padma Lakshmi. I should probably just go back to dreaming."
The video shows a date between the two with the sometimes burger eater feeding Everett's dog, Bobby Jr., and hawking her cookbook. Product placement brought to you by the Glad family of Padma.
Too tired or hungry to decide what to eat for lunch today? Soup sound boring? Already ate sushi yesterday?
Ponder no longer! Let the Wheel of Lunch make your mind up for you. Simply punch in your ZIP code and give the wheel a spin by clicking your mouse. The mighty wheel will pick a place near you, give you a link to its Yahoo review site, and send you out the door. Don't like the choice? Spin again -- especially if the wheel tells you to skip lunch (who does that?!).
How does a man with a price tag on his head -- or at least his face -- keep from having his photo snapped by fellow partygoers or folks out for a hefty reward? Former New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni explains the art of ducking the spotlight in this Skype video from Salon's Kerry Lauerman.
"I believe that food that rhymes is almost always better than food that doesn't rhyme, don't you?" he says in the outtake released to the press, in which he calls a reporter "namby-pamby" for ordering a soft-serve ice cream cone instead of his own adventurous "South of the Border" choice.
Who knows if new national critic Sam Sifton will have Bruni's talent with one-liners, but we do know that, after reading this morning's (very accurate) description of the dinner review process, we will miss him: About a woman who "fumed" if her steak arrived at the table already cut, he writes, "People are as strange about eating as they are about love. They want what they want."
Perhaps our favorite description, though, is of those who just don't eat. One friend demanded that they order a fatty porterhouse with fries, and then "She commenced such frantic knife and fork movements that a veritable cloud of dust rose around her -- I was reminded of a Road Runner cartoon. When the dust settled 15 minutes later, I took a close look at her plate, and almost nothing was missing. The food had just been reconstituted and rearranged, a Picasso of its former self."
If this is the stuff of his new memoir, we'll be reading it.
We've opined long and hard about our most hated foods here on Slashfood, but we like the twist that newish website Tweak Today, a photo- and mission-oriented oriented site, has chosen as today's topic: "What's something you don't like that everyone else loves?"
Though a few responses are cultural markers ("The Princess Bride," Elton John, Michael Jackson), we are seeing a slew of food-related numbers pop up there, from shrimp to melons to coffee to oysters. So now's your chance. Pop on over and express your loathing in pictoral form. Maybe grab some coffee first. Or don't, if that's how you roll.
What Can I Get You Folks? - Server Revenge
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