Raw Horse For Breakfast
Monday, June 25, 2007

Every now and then I end up in a conversation about what's the weirdest thing you've ever eaten. Sometimes I tell the story of losing a bet in a Japanese bar once in which I said I'd eat anything on the menu and being served three sparrows, roasted, on a stick, with beaks and claws attached. But usually I tell the story of going to my boss while living in a small rural town (the story is relayed in LEARNING TO BOW) and being served raw horse.

Well, raw horse is back! The NYT runs a story about the tuna shortage and how some sushi bars are resorting to deer and horse instead.

First, the backstory:

In this seafood-crazed country, tuna is king. From maguro to otoro, the Japanese seem to have almost as many words for tuna and its edible parts as the French have names for cheese. So when global fishing bodies recently began lowering the limits on catches in the world’s rapidly depleting tuna fisheries, Japan fell into a national panic.

Nightly news programs ran in-depth reports of how higher prices were driving top-grade tuna off supermarket shelves and the revolving conveyer belts at sushi chain stores. At nicer restaurants, sushi chefs began experimenting with substitutes, from cheaper varieties of fish to terrestrial alternatives and even, heaven forbid, American sushi variations like avocado rolls.

“It’s like America running out of steak,” said Tadashi Yamagata, vice chairman of Japan’s national union of sushi chefs. “Sushi without tuna just would not be sushi.”

Now the solution:

The restaurant’s owner, Shigekazu Ozoe, 56, said the current situation reminded him of the last time he had no tuna to sell — in 1973, during a scare over mercury poisoning in oceans when customers refused to buy it. At that time, he tried to find other red-colored substitutes like smoked deer meat and raw horse, a local delicacy in some parts of Japan.

“We tasted it, and horse sushi was pretty good,” he recalled. “It was soft, easy to bite off, had no smell.”

If worse comes to worst, he said, he could always try horse and deer again. The only drawback he remembered was customers objecting to red meat in the glass display case on the counter of his sushi bar.

“One customer pointed and said: ‘You have something four-legged in your fish case? That’s eerie!’ ”

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Posted by B Feiler at 10:29 AM 0 comments

What's Worse than a Water Sommelier?
Monday, June 11, 2007

A Water Sommelier Apologist.

From the WSJ:

“Water sommelier” turned out not to be the pseudo-job that Time’s Joel Stein expected it would be, he says after lunching with bottled water specialist Michael Mascha (no link available). Mr. Mascha, a former wine sommelier who has written a book about specialty water, quickly allayed Mr. Stein’s skepticism by pre-emptively declaring that water has no smell, little taste and costs too much in most restaurants. But Mr. Mascha insists that high-quality bottled waters have unique mouthfeels that can affect a fine-dining experience. In Mr. Mascha’s view, water, whether still or sparkling, has three distinct qualities: the size and amount of bubbles; whether it is alkaline (generally sweet) or acid (generally sour); and density, measured by total dissolved solids, or TDS.

To his surprise, Mr. Stein found himself relishing each water pairing Mr. Mascha selected — a Vichy Catalan from Spain for beef tartar; a medium-carbonated, high-calcium water with tagliatelle; and an almost mineral-free New Zealand water named Antipodes with a salad of tomatoes and Burrata, an Italian cheese. As a guide, Mr. Mascha suggests treating high-TDS waters (above 800) like red wines and low-TDS waters like white ones. He also recommends pairing water that has small bubbles with subtler dishes to avoid overpowering the food.

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Posted by B Feiler at 7:01 AM 0 comments

The Goats That Saved the South
Tuesday, June 5, 2007

For years, no one has known to do with kudzu. Now, there's a new idea: "Get Mikey to eat it. He likes everything!"

Especially if Mikey is a goat.

First called “the miracle vine,” kudzu eventually came to be known as “the vine that ate the South.” It grows at an astonishing rate of a foot a day, smothering flora, swallowing houses and blanketing the landscape.

Now embedded in the South, as well as in parts of Oklahoma, Texas and some Northern states, kudzu can be found on at least a million acres of federal forest land, and probably millions more acres of private land, said James H. Miller, a research ecologist for the Forest Service.

While not the worst invasive plant species, “kudzu is probably the most recognized invasive plant in the world,” Mr. Miller said.

On Missionary Ridge, which bisects Chattanooga and where homes command stunning views of the valley below, the battle with kudzu is constant. Of particular worry for the city were vines that draped over the mouth of the McCallie Tunnel, which cuts through the ridge.

Enter the goats.

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Posted by B Feiler at 11:08 AM 0 comments

Paula Deen V. the Pork Packers
Monday, June 4, 2007

A friend forwarded me this press release. It seems Paula Deen, the Food Network superstar from Savannah, is in hot water with the pig processors.

A peaceful vigil will be held outside Paula Deen's June 2nd 4pm cooking show in front of the Century Tel Arena, 2000 CenturyTel Center Drive in Bossier City, to ask the chef to end its relationship with Smithfield, the abusive pork processing company. A "Smithfield, Tar Heel -free" fish fry for the community will follow.

Concerned community members from will attempt to deliver a letter to Paula Deen written by Smithfield workers from the company's massive pork plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina seeking a meeting with Ms. Deen. Organizations across the country are vowing to follow the chef during her tour until she accepts the letter and agrees to hear the concerns of the families working at Smithfield. Shreveport is the first in that tour.

The letter explains the injustices that Tar Heel's predominantly African American and Latino workers have to face everyday by the sponsor of Deen's national tour, Smithfield Foods. They will also be giving out literature to the public to raise consumer awareness about the abuses the workers suffer. The company was found in various legal rulings to have assaulted, intimidated and used racial epithets against its workers. Many workers say that they suffer crippling injuries, are fired when they can't keep up with the work and then left without health insurance or the ability to earn a living.

During a recent April appearance by Deen in Washington, DC a mother of three who was injured while working at Smithfield, attempted to peacefully deliver the letter asking Deen to meet with her and other Smithfield workers and was escorted out by security.

"We want to be able to cook for our families just like you do, but if you have had your finger cut off from working at Smithfield, you can?t" said former Smithfield worker Lenora Bailey who had been injured on the job and was subsequently fired. "We are just asking Paula to not support a company that is causing so many of our families to suffer. We want her to do the right thing. She should use her influence to ask the company to stop abusing us. "

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Posted by B Feiler at 7:03 AM 0 comments

Lookout Famous Amos!
Thursday, May 31, 2007

The newest baker on the blogosphere, the Feilerettes favorite boy toy:

Actually, it’s very rare that I get to taste any of my recipes made by other people. I know people make them – friends call and you, my wonderful friends in the blogosphere, write – but generally they don’t make them for me, which is one reason why last night’s dessert, a variation on My Best Chocolate Chip Cookies, was so special. The other reason was that the cookies were made, from start to finish, with only one or two fatherly assists, by Mitchell, a 9-year-old with definite tastes.

Because Mitchell knows what he likes, he made some decisions about the recipe. He wanted chocolate-chip cookies, but he didn’t want “plain” cookies, so he made a Playing Around variation, Cocoa Chocolate Chip Cookies. He likes cookies softer than crisper, so he made his a little bigger and baked them a tad less. Because he loves cookies when the chips are gooey, he served them warm. Finally, because he’s as busy as the rest of us, he made the dough ahead of time, shaped it into balls, refrigerated the mounds, and then popped them on the baking sheet and slid them into the oven just as we were finishing our main course.


The cookies were a hit all around: we all loved them; I was delighted beyond measure to see Mitchell make them; and Mitchell was, like all of us bakers, so happy that he had made everyone around the table happy.

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Posted by B Feiler at 5:08 PM 0 comments

Drink Local
Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Hooray! This is likely to get me in trouble at home, but what an excellent idea. Years ago I tried to help can the "fresh ground pepper" cliche by refusing it at every restaurant I attended. It didn't work. Maybe I can take the same magic and help kick the "what type of water would you like?" scam at many restaurants.

DON’T bother asking for Fiji, San Pellegrino or any other designer water at either Incanto, a restaurant that opened in San Francisco in 2002, or at Poggio, which opened in Sausalito, Calif., two years later.

All their water comes out of the tap. It’s filtered before it reaches the table, but it’s from the public water system, just the same.

“Serving our local water in reusable carafes makes more sense for the environment than manufacturing thousands of single-use glass bottles for someone to use once and throw away,” Incanto explains at its Web site.

These two Bay Area restaurants were pretty much alone in kicking the bottle habit until Alice Waters, the godmother of things organic, sustainable and local, banned bottled still water at Chez Panisse in Berkeley last year and started serving only house-made sparkling water this year. Then the press took notice. Now other California restaurants, like Nopa in San Francisco, are following suit. Even an ice cream shop — Ici, in Berkeley — has jumped on the non-bottled-water wagon.

And now, with a little push from Ms. Waters, an important New York City restaurant is coming on board.

It’s a big move in the restaurant industry, which, if you extrapolate from the amount of water it buys, takes in at least $200 million to $350 million from bottled water a year, according to the restaurant consultant Clark Wolf.

The “eat local” movement first became popular in California, so it makes sense that “drink local” is catching on there as a way to reduce the environmental costs of manufacturing and transporting bottles of water, as well as the mountains of plastic that end up in landfills.

Read the whole article. It's excellent, including quotes from a school district that banned bottle water: When they first did it, everyone was up in arms. A year later no one complained. And an advocacy group that calculated the amount of fuel necessary to bring a boat load of water from France: An equivalent of 700 cars a year on the road. Even if you calculate in hyperbole, well done! And then this:

Dr. Gina Solomon, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, the environmental advocacy group, said there is no reason to believe that bottled water is safer than tap water, though there can be problems with either. The public water supply is much more stringently regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency than bottled water is by the Food and Drug Administration. The E.P.A. requires multiple daily tests for bacteria, for example, with the results available to the public; the F.D.A. requires weekly testing, which does not have to be reported to the agency, to the states or to the public.

“The rationale for buying bottled water is a fantasy that has a destructive downside,” Dr. Solomon said. “These companies are marketing an illusion of environmental purity.”

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Posted by B Feiler at 6:25 AM 0 comments

Savannah Mustard With Your Crumpet, Ma'am?
Thursday, May 10, 2007

An answer to the Savannah Mustard Conundrum (not quite the Feiler Faster Thesis, but hey)? A reader writes:

Savannah mustard is just a variety of mustard greens.Look at Park Seed Company website -

Mustard Savanna Hybrid
Brassica juncea Savanna Hybrid
20 days. The earliest Mustard Green we grow, Savanna Hybrid begins bearing huge, tasty green leaves less than 3 weeks after planting! The leaves are very uniform and quite abundant on strong plants, which hold their harvest in the field much longer than open-pollinated types. A superb choice for high performance and great yields, plus mild, fresh flavor.

Sow seed outdoors in early spring or, for fall crops, 6 to 8 weeks before first fall frost. Space seedlings 1 to 2 inches apart in rows 15 inches apart. Pkt is 1/16 oz. (1025 seeds).

Seeds Item # 5618
Mustard Savanna Hybrid
Fair enough, but this doesn't explain how it got the name Savannah?! And, by the way, does it have the 'h' at the end or not???

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Posted by B Feiler at 7:06 AM 1 comments

Savannah Mustard?
Monday, May 7, 2007

Another post about the State Dinner on Monday night: I come from Savannah, GA, in fact from five generations of Savannahians. I also am a contributing editor at GOURMET, though I admit that I know far less about food than I know about, say, Savannah. Thus, you can imagine my surprise to hear on C-SPAN that the menu for QEII (NB: not proper etiquette; don't spell this way at home!) contains "Savannah mustard." Savannah mustard?! Any clues?

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Posted by B Feiler at 8:18 PM 0 comments

Pass the Peas, Please

My favorite line from an article in the NYT about the Queen's eating habits in advance of the white-tie State Dinner Monday night at the White House:

The guidebook includes the queen’s dietary restrictions. “She doesn’t like spicy food,” said Anita McBride, Mrs. Bush’s chief of staff.

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Posted by B Feiler at 8:01 AM 0 comments

Foie Gras Fatwah Expands
Friday, May 4, 2007

The foie gras fatwah that we discussed here a few months ago, when it reached Chicago, is now promised for L.A. in 2012. (By the way, this is not HDTV, where all of television has to be shot on new equipment. Why set the ban so far out?) Anyway, given all the blowback, can you make a PC foie gras? The NYT explores:

It may make the birds feel better. But yet to be seen is whether it will please the animal rights activists who helped California enact a law that will ban foie gras starting in 2012, got Chicago to outlaw the sale of foie gras last year and are threatening similar action in other parts of the country.

Mr. Brock and other producers in the United States and Europe have been trying to find ways to make foie gras that will overcome the objections of those who see their work as an act of cruelty while still pleasing chefs and connoisseurs.

But unlike producers of beef, pork and chicken, who can respond to criticism of their practices by returning to kinder, preindustrial methods of raising cattle, pigs and chickens, foie gras producers have no such bucolic past to fall back on. Since the time of ancient Egyptians, making foie gras has involved doing something unnatural to ducks or geese: fattening their livers by force-feeding them, typically, nowadays, for the last 12 to 21 days of their lives.

Opponents say the procedure using feeding tubes is painful and sickens the birds. Foie gras advocates say the birds do not mind because their gullets are naturally expandable, to let them gorge before migrating.

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Posted by B Feiler at 8:00 AM 0 comments

Molecular Gastronomy
Monday, April 9, 2007

Foam isn't just for Spain anymore. It's come to Georgia. The AJC on bringing science into the kitchen:

The immersion circulator is one of the many new tools transforming restaurant kitchens. Like never before, today's chefs turn to technology, both equipment and chemical, to distinguish their cooking. Some chefs are self-conscious practitioners of "molecular gastronomy" —- the high-end branch of cuisine that uses food science to confound the diner's expectations and engage their intellectual involvement. Others are simply looking for ways to make their lamb chops more tender, their carrots sweeter and their desserts silkier on the tongue.

Take Joe Truex's banana bread pudding. Truex, the chef at Repast in Midtown, serves this showstopping dessert by the slice. It is crisp and crunchy with pecans on the outside, and so sheer and puffed on the inside the effect is nearly surreal. His recipe?

"The guts of the pudding are very traditional," says Truex, listing cream, eggs, bananas and stale bread.

But Truex's Rational brand adjustable steam oven takes it to the next step. He sets the oven to 180 degrees with 100 percent steam and inserts the oven's corded probe into the heart of the pudding. When the internal temperature reads a precise 173 degrees, the pudding is at maxi puff.

Truex uses a more time-tested method to crisp the pecans. "I just pop the slices in the deep fryer," he says with a little native Louisiana drawl in his voice. "We're in the South, right?"

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Posted by B Feiler at 7:02 PM 0 comments

Call at Midnight
Thursday, April 5, 2007

A few years ago I wrote a piece for GOURMET called "Pocketful of Dough" about how to bribe your way into a restaurant. That makes me a magnet, and a sucker, for similar stories. The WSJ did an exhaustive study of how to crack an uncrackable reservation. The results are behind the firewall, but here are a few tips.

Nearly 400,000 attempted reservations later, we discovered some basic rules for booking tables anywhere, as well as some that apply to specific restaurants. One rule: Plan ahead -- but not too far ahead. It turned out the "sweet spot" for advance booking is four weeks out, a window that gave us a success rate on OpenTable of about 47%. That dropped to 35% when we tried to book 40 days ahead.

Not that spontaneity doesn't pay off. From Excelsior in Boston to New York's Morimoto, certain restaurants shared a pattern. Tables were plentiful with about two weeks notice, then scarce a week out. But around Thursday the week we wanted to dine, a bunch of spots opened up -- the likely result of restaurants confirming reservations two or three days out then putting cancellations back in the system.

There are also techniques to be learned from people who make it either their business or their hobby to get into so-called impossible places. Aren Sandersen, a 28-year-old software engineer in San Francisco, spent several nights, throughout the course of a few weeks, staying up late and pinging OpenTable again and again, searching for a table at the famously difficult French Laundry in the Napa Valley. Eventually, he discovered that success was most likely if he set his clock to Time.gov, then clicked "reload" at exactly 11:59:55 p.m.

After what he calls an "exquisite," meal at the restaurant, Mr. Sandersen created a Web site called TheSandersens.com where he posted his tips and started offering a free service to help others book at the restaurant. "Are you struggling to make French Laundry reservations? Tired of calling and getting only busy signals?" a note on the home page reads. "No longer!"

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Posted by B Feiler at 8:03 AM 0 comments

Just saw an employee feather-dusting jars of whey protein!
Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Few things are brilliant. This is brilliant.

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Posted by B Feiler at 8:00 AM 0 comments

"Pancetta Isn't Smoky"
Monday, March 26, 2007

Food fights aren't just for the NYT critics anymore. A week after Frank Bruni found himself in a showdown with an angry restaurateur over a bad review, the Washingtonian critic finds himself in the same place.

Bad reviews are an occupational hazard of the restaurant business, and most chefs just bellyache or cry in their soup. Not award-winning Roberto Donna, who's started a high-profile food fight with Washingtonian magazine dining editor Todd Kliman. Donna is so upset about the review in this month's issue that he's starting a blog to critique local restaurant critics. "If you want to write a bad review, that's fine," he told us. "But write it with the truth."

Donna's Bebo Trattoria in Arlington was roasted by Kliman, who compared it to the Italian chef's famed Galileo restaurant: "The same self-satisfaction. The same arrogance. The same carelessness." The decor? "All the drama and warmth of Dulles Airport." The service? "Gray and joyless."

But what infuriates Donna are what he's said are glaring factual mistakes about his finances and the food: "It's full of lies." It was his corporation, not himself, that declared bankruptcy and the majority of the $2.5 million debt has already been paid -- all a matter of public record, he said. He also claims Kliman got food preparation wrong (branzino was grilled, not roasted; pancetta isn't smoky).

Now Donna is rounding up his fellow chefs for a blog on inaccuracies in local food reviews -- much like New York's Kobe Club owner Jeffrey Chodorow, who has vowed to start blogging about New York Times food critic Frank Bruni's reviews. Donna's unnamed blog is slated to begin next month, and he's printing up thousands of bumper stickers for his customers and fellow chefs: "Don't Believe the Washingtonian."

When I was growing and someone in my family went on a tirade about something nobody else got an exercised about, we all said, curtly, "Write a letter." Looks like that line would now be replaced with, "Start a blog."



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Posted by B Feiler at 8:00 AM 0 comments

Snow Job
Friday, March 23, 2007

Okay, enough with the Bruni bashing. Here Frank Bruni has a thoughtful blog about why we should call to cancel our reservations at restaurants when it snows.

This blog has on many occasions been a forum for me — and for readers who submit comments — to vent about the hoops restaurants make us jump through, the rules to which they subject us, the hauteur and aloofness they project. And some of the most spirited discussions on this blog have been about the cumbersome aspects of making reservations at restaurants: the interminable busy signals, the demand that diners call back to confirm, etc.

So let’s take a second and acknowledge a way in which diners regularly abuse restaurants. On rainy nights, on snowy nights, on nights when the weather turns horrid all of a sudden, many diners hunker down at home, decide not to go out — and don’t bother to call the restaurants at which they have reservations and announce their changes of plans.

My conversation with the hostess on Friday was informed by, and merely confirmed, that fact, which I knew because restaurateurs over time had told me that the rate of no-show’s spikes whenever the weather tanks. Even before I reached the restaurant, as I leapt over corner snow banks with characteristic clumsiness (there was no point in my past when I or anyone who observed me saw ballet or gymnastics in my future), I thought: it’s a no-show night. And then I got to the restaurant and thought: yes, it’s a no-show night.

The lack of showing is understandable. The failure to call isn’t.

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Posted by B Feiler at 8:00 AM 0 comments

Now You Love Me
Tuesday, March 20, 2007

On with his head! Jeffery Chodorow, who last week suggested in the NYT that he would lop off the head of reviewer Frank Bruni for panning his latest restaurant, this week suddenly loves him after he praised his room service at a hotel. WWD:

When New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni praised Ono's room service fare at the Hotel Gansevoort on Wednesday, some saw a peace offering to Ono owner and self-declared Bruni archenemy Jeffrey Chodorow, who publicly banned Bruni from all his restaurants after the critic savaged his restaurant Kobe Club. Wednesday's feature on room service, conceived before Bruni's Kobe Club review but executed after it, did more than praise Ono's wasabi béarnaise. It also sent a message to Chodorow that, despite his promise to handsomely reward an employee who bars the critic from any of his restaurants, Bruni found a way in anyway. Reached at his restaurant opening in London, Chodorow acknowledged the loophole Bruni found: Chodorow's obligations to the hotel. "And even if the room service waiter recognized him, he wouldn't be able to turn around and take the meal away, either," he admitted.

But Chodorow had a new appreciation for the critic: "I think these are the kinds of stories he ought to do. They're interesting stories — I think it provides a more objective basis," he said. He clarified: "I think Frank Bruni is a good writer, I just don't feel that he's a professional who can be a restaurant critic." Latest on the list of unintended benefits of Chodorow taking out a $40,000 ad in the Times blasting Bruni's expertise and starting a blog to excoriate him: a gift of corned beef and prosciutto from Mario Batali's father, and a letter from a Kobe Club china vendor proffering a $2,500 credit. "I have not paid for a dinner in a restaurant since the ad," Chodorow said.

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Posted by B Feiler at 8:01 AM 0 comments

The Best Burger in America
Monday, March 19, 2007

Be careful what you wish for. From the AJC:

The walls of Ann's Snack Bar are filled with awards and accolades from every publication in town. But there's something about "Best Hamburger in America" that has a different ring to it.

In last Saturday's Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition, veteran food reporter Raymond Sokolov bestowed the grand title on this eight-stool Kirkwood restaurant's "World Famous Ghetto Burger" after eating dozens of hamburgers coast to coast and everywhere in between. Since then, owner Ann Price has been besieged with business at her ramshackle, blink-and-you'll-miss-it, 35-year-old joint.

"It's driving me nuts down here!" Price, 63, bellowed from behind the counter where a dozen or more of her iconic double-patty creations sizzled on the flattop grill, reddened with seasoning salt and draped in yellow cheese. "I don't have the space!"

"Miss Ann," as loyal regulars call her, prefers to work less like a short-order cook and more like an itamae-san at a sushi counter —- crafting each burger sequentially, starting with a mound of loose meat cupped in her palm. She carves slivers from a whole onion over the burger as if she were peeling a potato. She crisps bacon in the deep-fat fryer, toasts the bun on the griddle and hand-spreads thin veneers of every known condiment. Sokolov termed the results a "masterpiece" and "the next level of burgerhood." Among the better-known wimpies it bested: Los Angeles' famed In-N-Out Burger and chef Daniel Boulud's $32 foie-gras-stuffed burger at DB Bistro Moderne in New York.

In the easiest of circumstances, obtaining a Ghetto Burger can be a time-consuming process. Now it's a trial to just get your foot in the door.

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Posted by B Feiler at 8:01 AM 0 comments

Food Fight at the NYT
Thursday, March 15, 2007

Poor Frank Bruni. To be the NYT restaurant critic in the age of the blogosphere can't be much fun. More than one blog is dedicated to attacking his reviews on a weekly basis. I was briefly approached a few years ago about applying for this job. It was unbelievably flattering -- a never-in-a-lifetime experience, as my wife called it -- but once I looked into the workload, eating out a dozen meals a week, I was daunted. Bruni got the gig and while he is much reviled in the restaurant world, he's now facing a new kind of counterattack. The WP has the details:

Everyone at the Kobe Club knew the drill: When the New York Times critic comes for dinner, the whole place goes on high alert.

Whoever recognizes him raises the alarm. The chef prepares two of every dish the reviewer orders, so he can taste-test a duplicate of the entire meal before sending it out to the table. Waiters are attentive but not overbearing. And the owner, Jeffrey Chodorow, keeps a respectful distance.

When the moment of destiny finally arrived in the form of Frank Bruni, the Times restaurant critic since April 2004, every procedure was followed to the letter, according to staffers and Chodorow. After Bruni departed, the Kobe Club's general manager called Chodorow at 2 a.m. and made a bold prediction: We're getting three stars.

Wrong. On Feb. 7, Bruni awarded zero stars, which for a dining establishment aspiring to top-tier status in this town, the restaurant capital of the USA, is a failing grade with a side order of crow. He found a "rubbery" pork chop, "limp" iceberg lettuce, "gluey" mashed potatoes and a clam with a "metallic tang."

"We ate his meal in the kitchen," recalled Chodorow, who was livid. "We would know if something was off." Chodorow then shelled out $40,000 to take out a full-page ad in the Dining Out section of the Times two weeks later.

In his broadside, which took the form of an open letter to Bruni's boss, Chodorow said Bruni had launched "personal attacks." He questioned the reviewer's credentials, citing his previous job in Rome, covering politics, the pope and other general news subjects. He promised to start a blog with a section called "Following Frank," in which he would review the critic's reviews.

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Posted by B Feiler at 8:00 AM 0 comments

Five Stars or I'll Sue You
Friday, March 9, 2007

This story passes some sort of jumping the shark test for me, or is it plate of shrimp. I think it's the latter. Either way, I've now heard about it from several different sources. Here's the NYT:

THE review, published last month in The Philadelphia Inquirer, was three sentences long. It praised the crab cake at Chops restaurant in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., but said the meal there over all “was expensive and disappointing, from the soggy and sour chopped salad to a miserably tough and fatty strip steak.”

The resulting libel lawsuit was 16 pages long. It did not dispute that the steak was lousy. Rather, it said that Craig LaBan, a restaurant critic for The Inquirer, “ate a steak sandwich without bread, not a strip steak, and therefore had, and has, no personal knowledge of the quality of the Chops strip steak.”

By comparing “a $15 steak sandwich to an upscale dinner strip steak,” the suit said, Mr. LaBan and The Inquirer libeled the restaurant, hurting its reputation and business.

The suit joins a long line of court encounters between sharp reviews and the restaurateurial ego, and, if the earlier cases are a reliable guide, it is doomed.

True, a Dallas restaurant owner not long ago extracted a re-review from The Dallas Morning News in exchange for dropping a libel suit. A suit over a description of wine as “dreadful plonk” is pending in a New Jersey court. And last month a Belfast jury hit The Irish Times with a verdict of 25,000 British pounds (about $50,000) over a review that included the assertion that the chicken Marsala was “so sweet as to be inedible.”

But American judges have apparently never punished even tough, mean and wrongheaded restaurant reviews. As the federal appeals court in Manhattan put it in 1985, “reviews, although they may be unkind, are not normally a breeding ground for successful libel actions.”

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Posted by B Feiler at 7:03 AM 0 comments

"Vegetarians Should Probably Take a Pass on Feiler's"
Friday, March 2, 2007

Somewhere over the rainbow, in Madison, Wisconsin, a pot of gold!

And the blogger, Madison A to Z, loves it. "In a word: Don't let the facade fool you (in one sense or the other)." Plus, it's cheap! "JM ate the queen cut prime rib with french fries and a lemonade. Nichole ate the broiled walleye with the twice-baked potato and a lemonade. The bill was $21 plus tip." Beat that Nobu. Here's their review:

So, OK, we confess - pulling in to Feiler's parking lot, next to the KFC in the shadow of the Beltline off Verona Rd., we felt like we were getting in over our yuppie heads. Feiler's turned out to be a really friendly place, though. We didn't get any of that barfly swivel-glare-at-the-new-people action that sometimes makes Eating in Madison A to Z uncomfortable.

It was the placemats, of all things, that put us at ease. They've got a cartoon of a posh couple pulling up to a caricature of Feiler's Cocktail Lounge and Cultural Center, plus an outhouse, a peeing dog, and Bert in a tree. The top-hatted ponce is saying to his date, "Let's eat here, it looks like a nice respectable place." T-shirts are also available to commemorate Feiler's recent anniversary.

As for the food, JM's salad was fine though the honey dijon dressing left a little something be desired. While no connisseur, he described his prime rib as "only OK" although the portion was well-sized. His meal highlight was the french fries which were golden and crisp. Someone changes their fry grease often. All in all, it was a great supper club choice.

For Nichole, there weren't a lot of appealing menu choices (vegetarians should probably take a pass on Feiler's). The walleye was a bit dry, but butter and tartar sauce both helped. The salad bar reminded us of Grama's kind of salad - iceberg lettuce, shredded carrots & other typical veggie toppings, coleslaw, pickled beets, and real bacon bits on a 4' cart with wheels.

The lack of swivel, the tongue-in-cheek placemat, and the general down-hominess of Feiler's won us over (as did the chance to use a $15 coupon). Best of all was the waitress, who juggled half a dozen tables with aplomb and friendliness. It all added up to a pleasant stop.

A free Feiler's T-shirt to the first person who submits a review to Feiler Faster.

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Posted by B Feiler at 7:01 AM 1 comments

Dr. Ruth Disses Me
Thursday, February 15, 2007

Mrs. Feiler Faster is in a social/business group that had a members-plus-spouses dinner tonight at Per Se in New York. (By the way, Per Se may have been the least romantic place in New York tonight. It seemed like mostly business dinners, very few couples, unless you count Nicholas Cage clinging to a woman in a too-red dress.) Anyway, don't ask me how, but the guest of honor was Dr. Ruth. She pointed out proudly that she had been on CNN and Fox News earlier today and gave us all signed copies of Dr. Ruth's Sex for Dummies.

At one point, she came over to my table, I shook her hand, someone brought up WALKING THE BIBLE, and she announced, "I have that book." A few minutes later I called over to Mrs. Feiler Faster. "You're missing an interesting moment here," I said. "Dr. Ruth turns out to be a WALKING THE BIBLE fan."

"I didn't say I'm a WALKING THE BIBLE fan," she quickly corrected. "I said I owned WALKING THE BIBLE."

Praised by President Bush and dissed by Dr. Ruth in the same week.

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Posted by B Feiler at 7:11 AM 0 comments

Dish.com
Wednesday, February 7, 2007

One of the stressful things about living in New York and being a contributing editor at GOURMET is that I get asked several times a week to recommend places for visitors to eat. One of the realities of being someone who travels a lot, has a wife who travels a lot, and is the parent of 21-month-old twins, is that I rarely eat out in New York these days. I never know what to say.

Bloggers to the rescue! The NYT profiles the hyper-competitive, hyper-gossipy New York food bloggie scene. Some highlights:

THERE are almost as many new ways to read about the restaurant world as there are blogs. Grub Street (nymag.com/daily/food), New York magazine’s food blog started in August last year and written mostly by Josh Ozersky, 39, and Daniel Maurer, 28, has a regular “Restroom Report.”

Zach Brooks, author of Midtown Lunch, chronicles the comings and goings of sidewalk carts and restaurant traffic between 32nd Street and Central Park the same way paparazzi follow every step of Angelina Jolie.

Eater has a recurring feature called “Brunibetting” that sets odds on how many stars Frank Bruni, the restaurant critic of The New York Times (who has his own Times-sanctioned blog, Diner’s Journal will bestow in his reviews. Last Tuesday, the odds were set on Gordon Ramsay at the London: Zero Stars: 9 to 1; One Star: 5 to 1; Two Stars, 3 to 1; Three Stars: 6 to 1; and Four Stars: 1,100 to 1. On Wednesday, Mr. Bruni’s review appeared, awarding the restaurant two stars.

Clever features are nice. But being first with news about openings and instant judgments about dinner is more important.

“I’m just a dude with a ridiculously opinionated stance on all things food,” said a 36-year-old blogger who calls himself Augie. He has a day job at a Wall Street firm that, he said, might not appreciate the time he devotes to his blog, so he requested anonymity. His site, Augielandaugieland.blogs.com), made a splash after he ate at the Japanese restaurant Morimoto in Chelsea on 10 consecutive nights and filed a detailed review.

Elsewhere, the piece talks about:

Restaurant Girl is the pseudonym of Danyelle Freeman, 32, a former actress who has been breaking restaurant news and filing reviews on her blog, www.restaurantgirl.com, since March 2006. By last Sunday, three days after her meal, an 829-word review noting that “the saga of E. U. continues” and including snapshots of the food and a criticism that the quail was so undercooked “it practically walked over to the table on its own,” was posted on the Web site.

Ms. Freeman had beaten to publication a rival blog, Eater, whose scribes had also been at the restaurant that night, and which on Monday reported itself satisfied with Mr. Nawab’s hamburger, noting that if E. U. survives, it will be “an underdog story for the ages.”

I, of course, don't have time to read them. But if you pick up any good tips, or if you discover a new place in town I can recommend to friends who ask me, pass them along! It's nice to live vicariously.

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Posted by B Feiler at 7:00 AM 0 comments

The Next Aphrodisiac
Tuesday, February 6, 2007

In an attempt to funnel new income to nomadic herders in the Middle East, the United Nations is trying to create demand for camel's milk on the global market. The organization hopes consumers will seek it out for nutritional reasons -- it's rich in iron and vitamins B and C, with antibodies said to help fight disease. How does it taste? Says a report in this month's GOURMET: It's sweeter than cow's milk, and rather salty. Here's the U.N.'s take:

In Tunisia, people will travel hundreds of kilometres to get hold of some. Herdswomen from Ethiopia and Somalia think nothing of riding a train for 12 hours to sell it in Djibouti, where prices are high. In N’Djamena, Chad, milk bars are mushrooming all over town.

Half way round the globe people consider it a powerful tonic against many diseases. The Gulf Arabs believe it is an aphrodisiac.

From the Western Sahara to Mongolia demand is booming for camel milk. But there just isn’t enough to go round. State-of-the art camel rearing is rudimentary, and much of the 5.4 million tonnes of milk produced every year by the world population of some 20 million camels is guzzled by young camels themselves.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) thus sees bright prospects for camel dairy products, which could not only provide more food to people in arid and semi-arid areas, but also give nomadic herders a rich source of income.

FAO is hoping financing will come forward from donors and investors to develop the sector not only at local level but help camel milk move into lucrative markets in the Middle East and the West.

“The potential is massive,” says FAO’s Dairy and Meat expert Anthony Bennett. “Milk is money”.

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Posted by B Feiler at 8:00 AM 1 comments

Live and Let Liver
Tuesday, January 9, 2007

You heard it first here on FeilerFaster, under the headline: Duckeasies and Free Gras after Foie Fatwah. Now the AP has gotten around to reporting that restaurants in Chicago are flouting the recent foie gras ban. ''We need to focus as much as possible on things that actually make people sick and kill people,'' said Health Department spokesman Tim Hadac. ''Our mission is to protect human health and not the health of geese and ducks.''

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Posted by B Feiler at 4:20 PM 0 comments

Duckeasies and Free Gras after Foie Fatwah
Friday, January 5, 2007

Who says civil disobedience is dead? Chefs in Chicago are taking all sorts of measures to get around the recent ban on serving foie gras. In one case, first reported this week, a restaurant served the delicacy free, since the law forbids only the sale of foie gras. "A [Health Department] department spokesman said the restaurant Bin 36 avoided a citation when health inspectors paid a surprise visit and found the restaurant was not illegally selling the liver delicacy but instead giving it away as a free side dish," something strongly hinted at on the menu.

In another case, a North Side restaurant-owner took the official warning from City Hall, threatening "punishment" if he continued to serve foie gras, framed it and set it beside his cash register. "We displayed it proudly," Doug Sohn, owner of Hot Doug's, a gourmet sausage eatery with daily specials including "smoked pheasant topped with foie gras chunks," was quoted as saying in the Tribune. "My customers and myself enjoy foie gras." The story also noted chef Didier Durand, who has conferred the priceless "duckeasies" label upon local chefs refusing to dishonor culinary tradition by refraining from serving foie gras.

Meanwhile, a Chicago Sun-Times story quoted a spokesman from the Health Dept as saying the issue is "without question the least-important thing we're called upon to do."

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Posted by B Feiler at 1:41 AM 0 comments

More Breaking Camel News
Friday, December 29, 2006

Feiler Faster is your source for daily camel news. Today: My pals over at GOURMET have a new blog, full of food talk (like where to get the best pomegranate molasses), travel talk (like who's the hottest new chef in Milan), and a talk talk. My fab-o editor, Jane Lear, who is both big hearted and very sharp with words, has one of the first posts, about her recent trip to Petra. A friend was recently emailing me about what she and her boyfriend should do before going to Jordan. My advice: Read this! Her tone, and her info, are great (even if the photo of her on a camel is alarming).

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Posted by B Feiler at 6:45 AM 0 comments

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