Fascinating,
Useful,
Delicious, and Nutty Food Links
By Tom Fitzmorris
The Best Airlines For Dining. This food writer ruminates on why airline food--even on long flights--has become so bad. And finds a few islands of goodness out there. Click here for details.
German Restaurants May Be On The Way Back. The new edition of the Michelin red guidebook shows nine restaurants in Germany with the top rating of three starts--a third more than last year, and more than in any country other than France. I hope some of it comes here! Click here for details.
Why Restaurant Reservations Are Easier To Get. Some places in New York are overbooking, to make sure tables don't sit empty for long. So what if cusotomers have to hang in the bar longer? Another reason why dining in New Orleans is more fun than other places. We always have tables. Click here for details.
Lobster Declines In Popularity. Lobster hasn't been selling as well in restaurants as in past years. The reason seems to be the gourmet cachet the crustacean has. People think they're saving money by not getting lobster, even when it's not the most expensive item on the menu. Click here for details.
Chefs Reaching Frantically For New Ideas Recall Dairy Queen. The photo with this story from the New York Times displays a swirly cone. It was made by the chef of an upscale pizzeria. The value is in the toppings. Click here for details.
Paul Bocuse Opens A Fast-Food Restaurant. Bocuse is a three-star Michelin chef in France, one of the world's most famous. Is there no end to the lunacy? Click here for details.
Months With An "R" Arrive. The advice that you shouldn't eat raw oysters in months without an "R" in their names is very old. It started in New York City, and spread everywhere oyster bars went. But does it have any real meaning? Interesting article on the subject from the New York Times. Click here for details.
Just The Smell Of Brewing Coffee Calms You Down. I never could understand products like cold-brewed coffee, because they remove the wonderful aroma of brewing coffee from the experience of having it in the morning. Now we learn that the fragrance of java has more than aesthetic appeal. Click here for details.
Catfish Eating Habits Moving Upscale. The price of catfish feed is having effects on the catfish-farming business. Some of the farmers are even giving up the business. The photo with this article may explain the problem: they're letting the fish grow too big. No word on what the wild catfish are eating, but we know for certain that it makes them taste better. Click here for details.
What Do The Candidates Eat? Maybe that's a clue to what kind of president each would make. This article from the Wall Street Journal explores the favorite restaurants of Barack Obama and John McCain. And those of their wives--which, of course, probably have more effect on their actual dining than their own tastes. Click here for details.
Democratic Convention To Serve Healthy Eats--But Angers The South. The planners would like to emphasize fresher, lighter fare at its events. This immediately angered those whose idea of good eats includes lots of fried chicken and pork chops. Click here for details.
American Fried Comes To Scotland. Hold onto something: their frying haggis in Scotland. With fish and chips, candy bars, and a lot of the junk people are frying here in America. Click here for details.
The Hot East Coast Burger Chain Faces Imitators. Their name is Five Guys, and they've boomed by making upscale (but not too) burgers that lack nothing in the juiciness department, along with fries cut from fresh potatoes. Better than fast food, but not as good as, say, Bud's. Now others like it are appearing everywhere. Click here for details.
Biofuels Are Making Food Prices Rise. You've probably heard this. But would you believe a seventy-five percent rise as a result of turning corn to ethanol and the like of that? So says the World Bank. The Bush administration says it's three percent. Click here for details.
Think Your Sushi Is Exotic? Try These Other Japanese Delicacies. This report reveals that Japanese rarely eat miso soup at the beginning of a meal, love a seafood stew called oden that we've never seen here. And how about junsai, the Japanese answer to okra--because of its sliminess. Click here for details.
The Secrets Of Deviled Eggs. And this one will surprise you: the favored special ingredient used by chefs to make this very homely old appetizer is caviar. Eggs in an egg. Click here for details.
Creole-Cajun Watch: New Jersey. We don't know why there aren't more restaurants serving Louisiana food around the country, but it's always nice to read about one out there somewhere. Toobad they have to make do with tilapia. Click here for details.
The Impending Worldwide Escargots Shortage. It's already struck France, where people are running down the streets screaming. Click here for details.
The World's Best Power Breakfasts. The annual survey from Forbes Magazine. They include glitzy hotel places and diners, too. Click here for details.
Making Pizza In The Lab. Reducing crust, sauce, and cheese to equations, to make the perfect New York pie. Click here for details.
Are You A Locavore? That's someone who only eats food grown in the vicinity of where he lives. I'll bet we in New Orleans get closer to doing that than they do in most other parts of the country, what with our favor for local seafood. Local meats are harder to find. Local produce is becoming easier, with the advent of more farmer's markets. Here's a story all about this growing movement. Click here for details.
Organic Cocktails. Oh, please, please say this isn't for real. It is? Yes. organic vodka, gin, rum, and whiskey. Somehow the two words don't go together: organic booze. Click here for details.
Typefaces On Menus Say Something About The Food. That's what people seem to think, according to a study. If there are a lot of words in a tiny typeface, a diner is likely to think that the dish is complex and hard to prepare. Other oddities came out of this report. Click here for details.
Coffee Prevents Heart Disease. You may drink up to six cups a day. How many espressos is that? How does this translate into coffee and chicory? Click here for details.
The $185 Hamburger. Yes, really. The maker? Burger King. They said they'd make a hundred of them only, and sold them out quickly. And no, the price wasn't inflated by having Champagne or a lobster added to it. The $185 bought you a Kobe beef burger. Click here for details.
Clark And Blake Brennan Open In St. Joe., Florida. The sons of Pip Brennan, one of the owners of Brennan's on Royal Street here, have opened a new seafood restaurant called School of Fish in St. Joe, near Apalachicola. On the other hand, their Royal B restaurant in Destin has closed. Click here for details.
Waiter-Free Restaurants. They're real restaurants with serious food, but they work something like fast food places. You use a swiped card to place orders and pay. It's been received well in England, where most of these places are. Click here for details.
Eating At The Bar: World's Best Restaurants. This article from Forbes concentrates more on bars with spectacular views than unforgettable food, but a few of them have both. So Emeril's and One and Clancy's aren't here. But worth a look, with a slide show. Click here for details.
Raising Your Own Vegetables Without Dirt Under The Fingernails. Why, you get someone to come in and do it for you, of course. This is a growing business in New York right now, stemming from businesses that come through office buildings maintaining the plants. We have the latter in new Orleans, so why not? Click here for details.
We're Eating 25 Percent More Soup In Restaurants. That's the good news. The bad news is that most of this growth has been the result of the effective efforts of companies who sell ready-made soups to restaurants. All the restaurant does is open the plastc bag and warm it up. Yes, there is gumbo and turtle soup made that way, and you probably have eaten it, perhaps even in a very expensive restaurant. Click here for details.
Eating At The Bottom Of The Food Chain. If you're concerned about eating more than your share of the big, inefficient end of the seafood chain--tuna being about as high as it gets--relax. Here in New Orleans, we're bottom feeders. Oysters are there. So are shrimp and crabs and catfish. From outside our area, mussels and scallops. All this is explaind fully in this article about bottomfeeding. Click here for details.
Like Wine Tastings, Coffee Cuppings Show Comparative Quality. Years ago, when I was consulting for a local supermarket chain, I often attended "cuppings" at the roaster that made the store's private blend. It was as fascinating to detect small differences as a wine tasting is. It was inevitable that the opportunity to pay for such an experience would arrive. Click here for details.
Unaffected By Economic Downturn: Drinking. TDavid Martin, the founder of Martin Wine Cellar, once told me that in good times people came to his stor to buy beverages for celebration, and when times were tough they'd keep coming in to take the edge off the pain. That seems to be confirmed by recent drinking trends around the country. Consumption is steady. Click here for details.
Hiding The Higher Food Costs In Menu Pricing. Restaurants have historically been reluctant to raise menu prices. (No matter what you may think to the contrary, my figures prove this to be true.) But the costs of food and other things are going up so fast lately that many restaurants have figured out ways to sneak extra charges onto checks. Kind of like the way the airlines are now charging for checked baggage. Click here for details.
Restaurants Make Their Own Soft Drinks. It's typical for restaurants of all kinds to mix their own Cokes and root beer and Seven-Ups on site, with systems that bring the syrup, water, and carbonation together at the last moment. Now some restaurant are experimenting with making their own syrups to create unique flavors of soft drinks for its customers. Click here for details.
Restaurants Are Intentionally Built To Be Noisy. I've told you this for years, usually after someone complained about how hard it is to have a conversation in many restaurants. But there's a reason restaurants make their dining rooms acoustically lively, and this article explains it well. Click here for details.
Beer Glasses Are Shrinking. To make a long story short, it's because beer is getting more expensive, and beer drinkers notice any price increase. But they also notice that their brews are not lasting as long. Click here for details.
Hamburgers On Haute Cuisine Menus In France. Another defeat for the French, is what it sounds like to me. Can we not escape the spread of our great but omnipresent American specialty? Click here for details.
Broccoli Changes Your Genes. The benfit of that newly-discovered action is that this is a cancer-fighting thing to have going on. Especially for men. Click here for details.
The Most Fattening Foods Of Summer. A slideshow designed to make us aware of the deadliness of eating these things. But the photos are so good that I went right out and got a rack of ribs (slide #2). Click here for details.
The Evolution Of The Slider. The slider, in case you've never heard the expression, is that thin, square hamburger served on a matching bun with steamed onions. White Castle and Krystal made them famous. Now, in New York and elsewhere, sliders are turning up on upscale menus. They're still at White Castle, of course, bringing up an interesting question answere din this article. Click here for details.
Eat Less, Age Less. Cut 300 calories a day, sez this new report, and a hormone that fights the ffects of aging gets more active. Another time-for-happiness tradeoff, but. . . Click here for details.
Creating Masters In Mixology. We know that the return of the cocktail in recent years has brought with it a slew of new drinks, but where are they coming from. Guys like this, who spend all their time researching new ways to mix a drink, and teaching others the ropes. Click here for details.
Burger Research In Laboratories Worldwide. What's the best way to cook a hamburger? Especially if you're starting with meat that's lower in fat than the traditional grind? This is being tested ad nauseum in food labs as far away as Argentina. Click here for details.
Saturated Fat May Be Good For You. Yes, it's another swing in the back-and-forth reports on almost everything we eat. In this story, we learn that since eating meat and butter and the like raises HDL, maybe it's a good idrea to eat it. Interesting and credible logic. Click here for details.
How To Choose A Corkscrew. I did a search on the words "regular waiter" today, and this is one of the items that came up. A whole site devoted to corkscrews. More interesting than you'd imagine. Click here for details.
Not Making Dinner Plans Leads To Burgers, Fries. The critical moment seems to be two hours before dinner. If you haven't figured out where you're going (if you're going out at all), then you'll likely eat fast food. The younger you are, the more true this is. Click here for details.
Taco Trucks In Trouble In Los Angeles. The new law says a taco truck can't stand still for mor than an hour. That's what killed them here. One of their enemies: stationary restaurants they park in front of, siphoning off business. More controversy in the article. Click here for details.
Restaurant Institutes All-Screwcap Wine List. And you won't believe where it is. Disneyworld! Click here for details.
Cocktails Make Strong Bones. No kidding: medical studies seem to indicate that those who have one or two cocktails or glasses of wine a day have a lower incidence of bone problems, especially hip joint issues. Imagine if the drink is a brandy milk punch what big bones you'll have! Click here for details.
Another Reason To Avoid Dallas. A new chain called Twin Peaks has as its goal to be like Hooters but with better food. All guys, all the time. And the name should tell you what the servers look like. How about better food with better taste? Click here for details.
Guess What? You Like Cheaper Wines Better. A number of blind tastings (resulting in a couple of books and more) among non-oenophile wine drinkers revealed something I've been saying for years. Seems that the primary charge people who spend a lot on wine get from it is the satisfaction of having spent that much money on oneslef. And that if taste and aroma are the goals, moderate and even inexpensive wine deliver just as well. Click here for details.
From Extraordinary To Everyday. This article follows a few food items that started as exclusively for faddists, became trendy, and then were picked up by the population at large. Best recent example: pomegranate juice. Click here for details.
Prepared Food From Supermarkets Growing Faster Than Restaurants. Here's the trend the restaurant business has been wary of for years, picking up steam. Supermarkets now have such wide arrays of cooked, ready-to-eat foods--not to mention things like frozen pizza)--that many consumers are substituting a daily stop at the supermarket for one at the cafe. Fast food gets hit most by this, but so do neighborhood cafes. Click here for details.
How's McDonald's Doing With Its New Upscale Coffees? Not as well as they thought they would. What a surprise! This seems to indicate that people want more than just a good cup of coffee from their cup of coffee. And less of all the things that come with the fast-food experience. Click here for details.
Los Angeles: Hot Dog City. We always knew that L.A. was full of hotdogs and weenies, but this isn't what we had in mind. The Los Angeles Times reports an explosion in the number and quality of hot dogs on the West Coast. The trend embraces organic, fusion, and ethnic possiblities. And hot dogs are indeed showing up in some very expensive places. Click here for details.
Too Much Fiber, Not Enough Fat. Can you believe it? This is what one report on nutrition for children is saying is a potential problem. Too much heathy eating is as bad as eating too much unhealthy stuff. I'm sure glad I just ate that croissant. Click here for details.
Great New York Restaurant Becomes A Bistro. La Cote Basque, for many decades one of the greatest of the classic New York French restaurants, has been taken over by Chef Alain Ducasse and turned into a relatively low-end bistro. The name of the place is Benoit, and they're serving eggs, cassoulet, roast chicken, and other simple fare. Here's a full review.
Which Tomatoes To Avoid? The current salmonella outbreak caused by tomatoes doesn't affect all tomatoes. Louisiana-grown are okay. Here is an article that explains full wherethe problems are, and where they aren't. Click here for details.
Weak Economy Affecting Amount Of Tips. This story from the Los Angeles Times says that tipped employees in all fields are seeing a drop in the number and amount of the tips they receive. The article is about California, which has wider swings in such things than New Orleans does. But a check with a few waiters tells us that tipping is down a little bit here, too. Click here for details.
The New Sandwiches. Always popular, sandwiches have been going upscale for a number of years, as restaurants try to increase spending by their customers. The New York Times has an interesting survey of completely new sandwich ideas noted all over the country. No poor boys, but we know whay that is, don't we? Click here for details.
Why Garlic Is Good. The studies seem to go back and forth as to how good garlic is for your health. There's no question of its goodness in terms of flavor.) Here's a new study that may have found the active ingredient: hydrogen sulfide. No wonder it kills germs. Best news: nobody, but nobody has come up with anything indicating that garlic can possibly hurt you. Click here for details.
Stadium Food Goes Gourmet. Sushi is arriving in ballpark food course, along with barbecue ribs, Champagne, roasted salmon, and more real food. This could almost make me want to go to a Saints game. But the Superdome will probably be the last place to get on this delicious bandwagon. Click here for details.
To Keep Menu Prices Steady, Chefs Downsizing Portions. Food prices are going up, but the dining public is sensitive to menu price increases. So they use ruses to make smaller portions appear to be the same size or even bigger. Here's a good story about how they do this. Click here for details.
A Chef At Baskin-Robbins. The ice-cream-parlor chain hired a real chef who ran serious restaurants in Boston to make up new flavors and concoctions. I went to the nearest location to try one and found that the parlor was out of that requisite flavor for the current creation. But it sounded good--mint and chocolate something or other. Click here for details.
Tell Me What You Eat, And I'll Tell You How You'll Vote. A research firm has found that Republicans drink Dr Pepper and eat Chic-Fil-A; Democrats prefer Pepsi and Church's. Some people think this has meaning; others write it off. The New York Times writer has penned preposterous articles about New Orleans, so I'm leery. But it's worth reading. Click here for details.
Salumi: A New Word For Your Menu Vocabulary. To make a long story short, the Italian word salumi translates more or less as "deli meats" in English. The Main refinement is that most salumi is pork-based. The word is unfamiliar enough to American ears that chefs and owners of upscale delis are throwing it around to add panache to their offerings. So don't be bowled over when you hear it. Here's more on the subject.
Food Network Builds A Reality Show Around Red Lobster. Which illustrates again the continuing downward spiral in the quality of the culinary content on the Food Network. Click here for details.
Before You Feel Good About Ethanol, Read This. The transfer of a tremendous portion of the American corn crop to automobile gasoline tanks is, according to the writer of this article, a source of food riots around the world. He has a point. A very worthwhile read. Click here for details.
Drinking Colas Weakens Bones, Study Says. Another reason to switch from sweet cold bubbly brown to more natural beverages, like tea and coffee and wine. Click here for details.
Miracle Fruit Makes Everything Sweeter. It's been around a long time, but hasn't caught on--until now, in a few spots in New York. Something in the fruit makes everything you eat afterwards taste sweet, by altering the way your tongue detects acids. Hmm. Click here for details.
Halal Chicken Turns Up At KFC. In its Detroit locations, Kentucky Fried Chicken is now offering items made with halal chickens. That's the equaivalent of kosher for Muslims, whose numbers are growing in Detroit. They have halal chicken both original and crispy. Click here for details.
Eat Breakfast, Lose Weight, Be Healthier. Not all breakfasts, of course, but most of them, including eggs and maybe even a little bacon or sausage. Seems that people who eat breakfast routinely are less likely to be overweight than those who aren't. Reason: the eggs keep you from wanting lunch as urgently, and cause lunch size to be smaller. Click here for details.
We're Eating At Home More, Out Less. For the first time in seven years, a larger percentage of American meals were taken at home than in restaurants last year. This turns up in restaurant sales numbers: more than half of the restaurants report their volume is down from a year ago. But not in New Orleans! Click here for details.
Pay What You Want For Dinner. I've been told by a few advisors that our subscription scheme for the New Orleans Menu Daily--in which you pay whatever you want--is insane. Yeah? Well, get a load of this: a few restaurants have taken up the idea. You literally pay whatever you want for dinner in these restaurants. Click here for details.
Eat Less, Get Sick. Maybe. If it's a lot less--say, thirty percent. And if you're a lab rat. But they think this may be true of humans, too. Click here for details.
The Women Are Coming! Restaurant kitchens are staffed about twenty-five percent by women right now. But professional cooking schools across the country--including the ones here--report that two-thirds of the students on the way up in the cooking profession are female. Click here for details.
Guess What'll Be Regulated Next: Salt. A movement is gaining momentum to have Congress authorize the regulation of salt in food, including the food that restaurants serve you. Amazing. Let's hop it stops outside our own kitchen doors. Click here for details.
The Good News: Food Poisoning In Not On The Rise. What a relief! The number of cases in the United States remained steady last year. The bad news: it didn't go down, after a few years of going up. Click here for details.
The Profile Of A Michelin Restaurant Critic. Dead giveaway: if the guy looks like a restaurant critic, he isn't. Other earmarks of a person who inspects eateries for the original star-awarding French guide series. Click here for details.
Vietnamese Chain Restaurants? There's a big one called Pho Hoa, with over 80 restaurants taking in $50 million a year. They say the biggest probelm is competing with the little pho shops run by their countrymen on a shoestring. Hmm. Click here for details.
Local Coffeehouses Helped By Starbucks. When the big national coffeehouse chain expanded tremendously into New Orleans, we worried about our home-grown coffeehouses. We needn't have. It seems that the Starbucks habit causes more people to go to all kinds of coffeehouses than before. Click here for details.
The Twenty-Five Best Foods For Your Heart. The ones we like best are 1, 4, 7, 8, 12, 14, 16, 19, 20, and 24. You can eat our share of 2, 3, 9, and 10. Click here for details.
While We're Eating Sushi, Japanese Eat Mac-n-Cheese. It's called yoshoku, and it's nothing especially new. Western dishes began making inroads into Japan's restaurants a hundred and fifty years ago, when the country began to open to the West. It has evolved into a unique style of cooking that has elements of East and West. Click here for details.
Chicago Backs Away From Ban on Foie Gras. After kicking up a national discussion a couple of years ago year by making foie gras illegal to serve in its restaurants, Chicago has repealed the law. The vote to repeal was convincing: 37-6. Click here for details.
History Of The Hamburger. Someone has written the book, at last. Here's an except from it, two long paragraphs, the first telling us what we already know, the second with a new perspective. The book is by Josh Ozersky, and is now in bookstores. Click here for details.
PJ's Will Call New Orleans Home Again. The Atlanta-based restasurant franchiser Raving Brands, which bought PJ's Coffee & Tea in 2002, is selling it back to a New Orleans company. New Orleans Roast and New Orleans Brew are owned by some of the investors who partnered with Phyllis Jordan to create the coffeeshop thirty years ago. Click here for details.
The End Of The Greek-Owned Diner. If you've ever breakfasted or had a sandwich in a diner in New York, you may have noticed Greek themes in the artwork, even though the food itself is not Greek. That's a decades-old tradition in the Northeast, revealing the erthnicity of the owners. But thats changing now, asd Greeks are largely selling their businessesm usually to to Asians. Click here for details.
Whatever Happened To The Old Spaghetti Factory? That question is asked now and then by Orleanians who remember the chain's restaurant downtown, around where the Hotel Inter-Continental is now. They left town, but are still in business, and getting ready to start a new concept. Click here for details.
Tea Protects Women From Heart Problems, But Not Men. This is another study confirming the already-known salubrious effects of drinking tea. Three cups a day (or one iced tea of the size my wife drinks) reduces the incidence of plaque in arties by 25 percent. But it doesn't help me, who must continue to rely on red wine and cocktails for this. Damn! Click here for details.
Check, Please! Goes To Web. The PBS program Check, Please!, in which normal diners (professionals in any part of the food business are not allowed) review restaurants on the air, is spreading to other cities via the web. Another death knell for my profession--or so some say. Click here for details.
Wheat Shortage? Prices Doubling For Bread And Pasta. It seems hard to imagine, but the United States (and the world) is facing a shortage of wheat. The prices have quadrupled in recent years, sending up the prices of everything that uses wheat flour. Main culprit: more land being used for corn to make ethanol. Here's how some reastaurants are taking it. Click here for details.
Stop! Mustard Thief! The fast-food industry, always looking for ways to jerk their already-large (compared with conventional restaurants) profits up another notch, have programs to keep customers from taking more condiment packets than they need. Someone very close to me stockpiles ketchup and soy sauce this way. The restaurants want her to reform her wicked ways. Click here for details.
My Great Wine Isn't Yours. At wine tastings, there's always talk of bottle variations, which are taken seriously. Less appreciated are taster variations. Two people may get very different flavor and aroma characteristics out of the same wine, because their senses are different. Among other things, this makes wine ratings less important than most people tent to make them. On the other hand, they make for livelier tastings. Click here for details.
Women Chefs Increase Their Numbers By Almost Half. The article I'm about to direct you to is from Florida, but the trend is nationwide. The number of women chefs in restaurants is up between forty and fifty percent in the last seven years. The kitchen, long considered a male preserve, particularly in the language used and the testosterone-fueled dynamics, is being changed by women. Although not as much as some might wish or imagine. Click here for details.
The Chef Is Everything. A few restaurants--mostly in big cities, where they can keep all the seats filled all the time--are so small that the chef can do everything. Not only cook all the food, but serve it, too. The menus are limited, of course, but that lends itself to the kind of very particular tretament that's hard to accomplish in a large restaurant. Click here for details.
Chef Blogs. I think this is a great idea: chefs take time out of their day to published a few paragraphs on line about what's happening in their restaurants. If the chef doesn't do it, someone ought to. I imagine that it might even be worthwhile for a restaurant to hire a writer to do this, particularly if it's a group of restaurants involved. The writer could hang out and publish an online diary about special dishes of the day, interesting customers, and more. Click here for details.
Airport Food To Go? Time was when you'd do all you could to avoid eating food in an airport. Now some people like it enough that the restaurants are making up go boxes for their grub. Wow. Click here for details.
Redesigning And Combining The Fork And Knife. There's always somebody trying to reinvent the utensils with which we eat. I always like the spork--a hybrid of spoon and fork. I saw one once that also had a dull edge, making it a knife, as well. Here are a bunch of new approaches. Click here for details.
Fifty Best Hamburgers In America. This is an article from Restaurants & Institutions, a food industry magazine. It watches the burger biz closely because it's a very big biz. This article breaks up the burger world into five categories by price, and ranks them, with photos. You have to register (free) to read the magazine on line, but it's worth doing so for this article alone. Click here for details.
The Bad Rap On MSG Is Undeserved. It has been known for years that the "Chinese restaurant syndrome"--headaches and otehr problems laid at the door of monosodium glutamate--are in fact almost entirely mythical. But the stigma continues, and this great seasoning is underutilized. Click here for details.
Grass-Fed Beef On The Rise. For most of the lives of the current generation of steak connoisseurs, the standard of excellence involved corn-fed beef. The cows eat grass for most of their lives, then fatten up on corn at the end. Now some chefs and beef purveyors are putting forth the proposition that cattle whose entire diet is grass taste better. Jury's still chewing on that. Click here for details.
Pros Debate The Tip Jar. This article interviews owners and customers of restaurants that are right on the edge of the divide between tipping and not tipping, as well as authors of etiquette books. They come up with a simple answer as to whether you should tip or not. Click here for details.
Ten Best Business Lunch Restaurants. Another list from Forbes Magazine.There are a lot of steakhouses, most of them chains. Predictably, no New Orleans restaurants made the list. We have the food, but not the business. Click here for details.
One Reason Restaurant Prices Are Rising. They're paying more for food. You know this if you pay attention to the prices in supermarkets. Sugar and flour alone have skyrocketed in price lately. This article is from St. Louis, but give a good picture of how it is here, too. Click here for details.
Loudest Complaint Of Diners: It's Too Loud! That's what people have been telling me for a long time, and surveys lately report the same thing. Here's an article with facts on the subject, with a very funny headline. Click here for details.
No Recession In New York's Top Restaurants. This article from the New York Times by their restaurant critc tells of the newest major restaurants opened by that city's chef superstars. They're expensive, of course. And despite the business downturn in everything else. They're packed. Click here for details.
One Big Meal A Day Is A Bad Idea. New research shows that it increases risk from hypertension and cholesterol-related health problems. The same amount of the same food, spread over three meals, takes a smaller toll. Click here for details.
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