Spitzer’s Corner Courts Bloggers With Tasting EventRob Shamlian might not be the biggest fan of bloggers, after they obsessively covered his fight to open Mason Dixon, but his other restaurant, Spitzer’s Corner, is extending the olive branch to them.
Momofuku Ko: a Dish-by-Dish BreakdownTina Wong, of the Wandering Eater, walks you through a dinner at Ko, and she tries her level best not to get carried away.
Mediavore
Ilan Hall to Open Tapas Truck in L.A.; Chefs Keep on BloggingTop Chef champ Ilan Hall’s rumored L.A project is now a restaurant truck that serves tapas and has a foldout bar. [MSNBC]
Related: For Ilan Hall, a Taco Shack of One’s Own
The president of Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., the California beef company responsible for the largest meat recall in American history, acknowledged yesterday the illegal slaughter of sick cows at his plant after a congressional panel forced him to watch the undercover video depicting the abuse. [WSJ]
Chefs’ blogs keep getting better and better, and there are increasingly more and more of them. At what point are they all just going to leave the kitchen and become full-time bloggers? [LAT]
Back of the House
Fake Ramsay Takes On Fraudulent Robert Irvine in Pseudo-BlogWe usually enjoy Newsgroper’s Gordon Ramsay blog considerably more than the man himself, but the current entry, in which “Ramsay” gives it to counterfeit knight Robert Irvine, is especially enjoyable. As Irvine was just fired from the Food Network for his impostures, and Ramsay himself is something of a put-on, a guy pretending to be Ramsay berating Irvine for pretending to be a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order just seems right.
Gordon Ramsay’s Blog: Liar, liar your apron’s on fire [Newsgroper]
Back of the House
Paul Liebrandt Stuns Web With Most Banal Blog Ever
Wonder chef Paul Liebrandt, presumably having some time on his hands while he keeps the world waiting for his restaurant to open, has started a blog, we read in The Feed today, and what a blog it is! The usually garrulous and acerbic Liebrandt’s posts are so brief, pointless, and banal that they can only be read as a middle finger extended into the blogosphere. Among the bombshells dropped:
Mediavore
Boston Mayor Makes Good on Super Bowl Bet; Diet Sodas Linked to MetabolicRemember that little food bet Hizzoner made with Boston’s mayor over who’d win the Super Bowl? Well, pay-up time has come, and our northern neighbors will be donating 100 cups of New England clam chowder, 42 lbs. of coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts, twelve dozen Boston cream pies and twelve dozen Parker house rolls, 100 Old Tyme hot dogs and 100 Al Fresco chicken sausages, twenty pizzas, five cases of Brigham’s Boston You’re My Home ice cream, five cases of Cherry on the Top frozen-yogurt bars from Elan, and 100 servings of Stonyfield Farm Organic Yogurt to City Harvest. Happily, no one has to eat it. [Zagat Buzz]
Drop that Diet Coke! Researchers have found a correlation between the consumption of diet soda and incidences of metabolic syndrome, a series of unhealthful factors that can lead to diabetes and heart disease. [NYT]
More bad news for fish: The FDA confirmed that several outbreaks of ciguatera fish poisoning have taken place across the country due to consumption of fish harvested in the northern Gulf of Mexico. [AP]
Back of the House
Best This, Best That … We Say, ‘Who Cares?’
The year-end rush to give out awards has started in earnest, and two totally meaningless such contests present themselves to us today. On Endless Simmer, the nominations are in for Eater of the Year and include Tony Bourdain, Padma Lakshmi, some locavores, and Joey Chestnut. Are you kidding? Why even ask the question? If Joey Chestnut, having vanquished Kobayashi and established himself as the greatest competitive eater in the world, doesn’t get this award, why bother giving it? The man deserves it just for eating 103 Krystal burgers in eight minutes earlier this year.
Click and Save
Desperate ChefsWives Resigned to Blogging the Pain
Chefs tend to be notoriously bad husbands and boyfriends, and the reason is obvious: They’re at work all night, they love to pop corks and hit the dummy pipe, and there are always foxy waitresses, servers, and even diners eager for the “fourth course.” But don’t despair if you’re stuck with one of these scoundrels. There’s a blog for you. It’s called Desperate ChefsWives of NYC. Essentially a one-woman support group written anonymously, it’s filled with details of her personal life, from her man’s addiction to plastic wrap to her discovery of other women in the same predicament via Google. “So many other women have e-mailed me who are in the same situation,” the blogger tells us. “They say, ‘I can’t believe you said that, because I say it all the time.’ Some lady in Ohio wrote asking me if she should leave her boyfriend. There are a lot of us out there.”
Desperation aside, the author’s own domestic situation seems rather stable, which kind of detracts from the site’s entertainment value, you know? What it really needs is more sob stories! We want a blog that reads like a chef-y telenova! But given what goes on in those naughty chef circles, it’s only a matter of time. We’ll wait, breath baited.
Also, the real question: Who’s her husband? What chef has inspired his wife to blog? Check out the site for yourself; your guesses (and yes, we expect you to have some) in the comments below, please.
Desperate ChefsWives of NYC
Back of the House
Chefs Knock Food Blogs to the Latest Food Blog
On the heels of Citysearch’s food-blog launch comes still another source of restaurant news: the NYC debut of Metromix (still in beta, it seems) and its own food blog Deep Dish. The juiciest item so far is a roundup of chef banter from the New York Rising Stars Revue awards. Not that the rising stars seem to have been that deep in their cups when they were interviewed (food blogger rule of thumb: Wait till they’re at the after-after-party), but some of their responses sure are punchy.
NewsFeed
Jean-Georges Schools Chodorow in the Art of BloggingSo it’s not anywhere near as dishy as Chodorow’s site, but it seems Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s two-week-old blog is at least sticking to its promise to update us every Tuesday on “what I’ve been cooking, where I’ve been traveling, and what I’ve been thinking.” (It’s a Blogger site with a pretty standard template — did Jean-Georges make this himself?) Even if he isn’t slamming Bruni and Platt, Vongo is at least confessing to cooking with a machine developed for Kentucky Fried Chicken (scandalous!) and getting his daughter’s birthday cake from a bakery instead of from his dessert man Johnny Iuzzini (c’est impossible!). Another shocker: “I love eating in New York. From the tacos and margaritas at Los Dados (where I often stop after a night of cooking at Spice Market).” Jean-Georges is still cooking at Spice Market?
Jean-Georges Vongerichten [Blog]
Back of the House
We’re on the Pavement, Thinking ’Bout the Restaurants…
The cri de coeur a reader sent in last week in the form of a Ginsbergian ‘Howl’ has inspired us. What would the likes of Ginsberg, the Beats, and their admirers think of today’s restaurant world and its absurd come-ons? What would Bob Dylan circa 1965 think of it? Well, owing to the magic of aggressive marketing, the new Website for the Dylan boxed set allows us to see for ourselves. Just click here.
Gastronomic Homesick Blues [Dylan07.com]
Related: A Restaurant World ‘Howl’
NewsFeed
Amateur Gourmet: Real Book, Virtual TourAdam Roberts, the self-styled “Amateur Gourmet,” has been getting so much play lately that he may have to get a new sobriquet. First came his elevation into the Serious Eats family, then an appearance in the New York Times, and his book, The Amateur Gourmet, drops today. Like his counterpart Danyelle Freeman, Roberts is riding the blog gravy train straight to the top. But unlike Freeman, whose new gig at the Daily News is strictly old media, Roberts is promoting his new book with a “virtual book tour” that will bring him to practically every food blog you can think of, and not a few that you can’t think of. “I’m doing a Q&A with Ruhlman, and visiting Orangette, David Leibovitz, Gluten Free Girl, and The Girl Who Ate Everything over the next few weeks,” he tells us. Gluten Free Girl? There will be one real-world reading, at the Park Slope Barnes & Noble on September 24. For the rest of the tour, Roberts is dancing with the one that brung him. We can’t say we would argue with that plan.
Amateur Gourmet [Official Site]
NewsFeed
What to Read While You Wait for Tailor to Open — Sam Mason: The Novel
If you miss following Sam Mason’s quixotic adventures now that the Launch is kaput, fear not — an anonymous blog Sympathy for the Restaurant Industry is offering “meta-fictional restaurant drama set in present day New York City, served in a convenient serial” and the first story details, in rather purple prose, the agonies of Sean Kasen (sounds kind of like Sam Mason if you mumble it, no?), a young, media-plagued chef opening his first restaurant who is up against “the punishment that comes when you attempt to create something perfect but fail” and also the fact that “being handsome and very talented when you are a chef is a burden.” Oh, the humanity!
NewsFeed
Epicurious Blog Will Soon Have Actual Bloggers Epicurious, the Web arm of the Condé Nast food empire, has always been extremely confusing for us. Gourmet’s blog, Choptalk, has writers from all over the world. But the Epi-log blog seemed to be written by only Tanya Wenman Steel. On Monday, the malnourished Epi-log will get an actual roster of contributors, headlined by Rick Bayless, writing on chefly topics, and Melissa Clark, on cookbooks and recipes. “We decided to create this blog party months and months ago because I wanted to enhance the blog with more voices from all over,” Steel tells us. So who else is ready to post?
