Box boss Simon Hammerstein helped kick off a wave of restaurateur ogling back when he and David Chang were photographed for Esquire’s “Angry Young Men” spread last September, and this weekend the Times went back to the well by dressing Hammerstein up in a $2,950 Duncan Quinn suit (they let him keep his ratty sneakers for feet cred). It looks like this trend will never end, so we’re just going to try to suck it up. As long as we don’t see Michael Psilakis walking the runway next Fashion Week.

Related: The Fusionistas [NYT]
When Chefs Play Dress-Up

Fresh off the heels of Esquire’s Best Sandwiches in America comes Detail’s Best Breakfasts in America. We’re beginning to think that these features are a little played out. Since Alan Richman’s “The 20 Hamburgers You Must Eat Before You Die” spread in GQ last year, it seems every major man mag is looking to create its own Saveur 100, gathering up the most picturesque greasy spoons west of the Pecos. But who is going to get to all these places, anyway? And since they tend to be written by committee, why should we believe that they are good? They are fun to read, we’ll admit. And we don’t squawk at their only giving New York two picks (Barney Greengrass and Mei Lai Wah Coffee House). New York is a horrible breakfast town, where you can’t even get buttered toast, much less good shredded hash browns or scrapple.

Breakfast in America [Details]
Related: Esquire Sandwich Survey Is Spot-on

The best stories in this month’s crop of food mags are old. Saveur, which leads the year off with the Saveur 100, runs highlights from the WPA’s unpublished 1937 opus, America Eats, a documentary record of American foodways that is only now seeing the light of day; the images excerpted here are evocative and beautiful and make us eager to see the America Eats book to be published (finally) later this year. Gourmet is devoted to southern cooking, with a wonderful, previously unpublished “What Is Southern?” leadoff essay by the late Edna Lewis, formerly of Café Nicholson. Bon Appétit goes with a “Green Issue” with a long piece by Blue Hill’s Dan Barber on vegetables, an ecofriendly meat guide by sausage guru Bruce Aidells, and a moving essay on a vegetarian who returns to the meat wagon because of sausages. Food & Wine is something of a bore, consisting mostly of lists of “Tastes to Try in 2008,” most of which were short on detail and long on obviousness. (Fiamma has a new chef!) Finally, Food Arts, which won’t come out till later this week, has a major service feature on beef, along with an essay by French Culinary Institute techno whiz Dave Arnold on hydrocolloids, a class of gelatins big in molecular-gastronomy circles.

The Times Magazine’s annual examination of “big ideas” brings news of some culinary innovations such as a food-processing technique that helps farmed fish taste more like wild fish (encouraging fast-food companies to make the switch to the former) and packaging that will allow us to tell whether supermarket meat is rotten, which is of no consequence to those in another article who practice “vegansexuality” by forgoing liaisons with carnivores. The most curious item, though, explores French Culinary Institute head Dave Arnold’s ingenious method of combining two of our favorite things — booze and pickles — by pickling cucumbers with a martini’s worth of gin and vermouth. Watch the video and you’ll see the dapper Arnold use a vacuum machine to turn the cucumber opaque while gin rushes into its air holes — easily the hottest thing in mixology since the “hard shake.”

The Edible Cocktail
Tell-Tale Food Wrapping
Vegansexuality
Fish-Flavored Fish [NYT]

The food magazines are all in full-tilt holiday mode this month, but there’s some interesting stuff in there in spite of all the boilerplate. Saveur leads out with a massive roasting package, but the mag also includes an equally useful (if not equally pornographic) service feature on Champagne. There’s also a nice personal essay by Dana Bowen about electric slicers as a totem of holiday feats past. Food & Wine is a big old mess of Yuletide content, but the issue includes their Best Restaurant Dishes of 2007, and the sole New York representative is, you guessed it, the Bo Ssäm. (Sigh.) There’s also the excellent profile of Tailor’s Eben Freemen mentioned here recently and everything you want to know about what chefs are doing in New Orleans and Lake Tahoe. (Which in our case would be nothing.) Gourmet is all recipes and entertaining, as dull as paint, with, amazingly, an article about Padma Lakshmi’s chutneys with no image of the lady herself. (An article on the raising of Kobe cattle, though, fascinated us.) Finally, Food Arts brings their year-end trend piece, on the strange confluence of health consciousness and conspicuous consumption, as well as a piece by Pichet Ong on the rise of the celebrity pastry chef. Not a bad month in all.

The Michelin guide gives the media plenty of fodder today — the Los Angeles and Las Vegas guides are out today, the first ever Tokyo guide comes out on Monday, and the German guide came out yesterday. The takeaway: Thanks to a star for his $16 million restaurant Mix at the Mandalay Bay, Alain Ducasse has now become the most-starred chef at 13 stars (beating out Gordon Ramsay's 12 — perhaps why Gordo got a little pissy on Regis & Kelly yesterday). On the international front, Germany now moves ahead of Spain and Italy in number of three-star restaurants with a whopping 9 behind eternal front-runner France’s 26. It remains to be seen whether the Tokyo guide will change all that but (big surprise!) the Japanese are about as pissed as we were when Michelin set its giant inflatable foot on our shores. Quoth a Japanese food blogger: “These are French people who want to judge Japanese cuisine according to French standards. Japanese people who take part in this ought to be ashamed of themselves.” We hear you, brother!

Alain Ducasse regains crown as most-starred chef [Caterersearch.com]
Michelin guide steps out of West, into controversy in Tokyo [AFP]
Schnitzel Outcooks Spaghetti in Michelin Guide [Deutsche Welle]
Gordon Ramsay Loses Temper with Regis Philbin [Showbiz Spy]
Earlier: The Case Against Michelin

We often wake up with our collective head feeling like it might explode (speaking of which, has anyone tried this Berocca stuff? Supposed to work wonders). But today was a little worse, seeing as we stumbled across am New York's little number on “hidden bars.” Oh, our favorite trend piece has come back to us! Unlike the Times — which absurdly tried to spin this angle back in January (just as they had in 2000 and 2004) — this roundup is so vintage in its coverage that it trots out that ol' service-journalist pummel horse, Milk and Honey.

Alas, Gothamist receives all of this breaking info with a straight face and goes so far to allude to their own a “secret” bar: “the spacious and dimly lit [REDACTED] on Grand Street in Williamsburg that features an upstairs outdoor smoking patio, reasonably priced drinks and consistently great music on the house stereo.” (That's their redaction, not ours, and the name is also redacted in the user comments.) Please, people! If you don't want to spoil your "secret" hangout, why mention having one at all, right? And dancing around the name — what is this, Beetlejuice? If we utter the words "Larry Lawrence," are we facing disaster? Guess we'll find out.

Earlier: Times Rehashes ‘Secret Bar’ Trend, Snoozes on Goldbar News
Related: Hidden Manhattan Nightspots Recall Speakeasies [amNY]
Clandestine Bars? Please Do Tell! [Gothamist]

The latest issue of Vanity Fair features a profile of none other than Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi, who's promoting her new cookbook, Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet. Amid all the foodie talk, Padma actually reveals quite a lot about herself. A sampling:

• On the Top Chef Emmy nomination: "[It] was a big fucking deal.”

• On life without her ex-husband, Salman Rushdie: "I'm really fucking sad."

• On her new cookbook: "Finishing the fucking book was like being in labor for two years!”

• On hosting dinner party: "I pulled this out of my ass."

• On an AIDS charity she supports: "…we’re doing a campaign and an event and you should buy a fucking table.”

• On telling the press if she had a boyfriend: "My husband would call fucking Reuters."

• On a tabloid's coverage of her bra size: "…they said it was 36C. I said, 34C, motherfucker!”

• On her current living situation: "Now I’m staying in a fucking hotel with all my shit in storage."

Damn, Padma.

A Taste of Fame [VF]

It’s November in the food-magazine business, so expect feature after endless feature about Thanksgiving, and every imaginable variation on recipes for turkey and stuffing. Gourmet gives a pretty complete account, including big Turkey Day features on the fancy version, the Asian version, the Italian version, and even the vegetarian version. Bon Appétit is about the same, taking the big-name approach: Bruce Aidells on turkey, and Michael Lamonaco on potatoes, among others. A profile of Aidells and his meat-minded kitchen is in November's Food & Wine, as well as such year-round delights as domestic cheeses and a new brand of whiskey out of Oregon. Saveur, thankfully, limits itself to a nice article about a West Virginia farm, and then dips in on such disparate topics as kale, heritage chickens, prosciutto from Iowa, and other Saveur-like topics. We’re grateful for the respite; Thanksgiving is early this year but not that early.

Ah, had we the luxury to lie around and read densely packed food features! As it happens, there are two out now both worth your time. In the current New Yorker, everybody's favorite roving food writer, Bill Buford, does a number on the chocolate wars and the quest, now dominating the minds of choconauts, to find the perfect cacao bean. And here we were just coming up to speed on coffee! (The article is not online, but there's a cool slideshow from Buford's trip.) The other piece, on a subject matter we're much more familiar with, is a very fine feature from the Times magazine on the Lebewohl family and their efforts to relaunch, in the face of an increasingly alien world, the new and improved 2nd Avenue Deli.

A Counter History [NYT]
Slideshow: Food of the Gods [NYer]