Effort Underway To Improve School Nutrition

April 29, 2011
Written By: Travis Brown

SNOW HILL -- After spending more than a month working with local elementary school cafeterias as part of a Team Nutrition Grant program, Chef Paul Suplee called the effort to improve school nutrition a success. He did admit, however, that it was a small step but expressed hope that it would lead to similar efforts in the future.

Suplee, culinary arts instructor for the Worcester County Technical High School, and his students teamed up with cafeteria workers at five local elementary schools to design sets of easy-to-make yet nutritious meals that could then become part of the school’s regular menu. Suplee and his students spent one week cooking and planning with each school. At the end of the five-week period, the schools will share all of the meal ideas that had been generated with their counterparts, resulting in a widely expanded cafeteria menu for all of Worcester County.

“We’re just trying to educate the kids,” said Suplee. “So far we’ve had good results.”

He stressed the fact that the perceived worry over lack of nutrition in schools isn’t as dramatic as many believe and praised the cafeteria employees his team worked with as having done an incredible job, especially since they are always working with limited resources.

In response to that scarcity of funds and resources, Suplee used a portion of the $30,000 Team Nutrition Grant to outfit some of the more underequipped kitchens with new chef’s knives and other small-ware.

“They need to have the tools to do their jobs,” said Suplee of the cafeteria workers.

Read the complete story here.

Chefs' Recipe for Recycling - Repurpose, Reinvent

Remember the stereotypically lavish chef of kitchen lore who would roast an olive inside a little bird inside a bigger bird on up to an ostrich, and then throw away everything but the olive? That guy wouldn't last too long in Bay Area kitchens.

Driven both by thrift and the desire to keep the planet cleaner, chefs are finding new uses for items that once would have been flung in the garbage, recycling and reusing just about everything but the squeak.

"Everything we use has value. Someone harvested it, someone grew it, someone cared about it," says Russell Moore, chef-owner of Camino in Oakland.

At Camino, Moore reuses fruit cores to infuse brandy, candies citrus peel for garnishes and sautes the outer leaves of greens with oil and olives to make herb jam for the cheese board.

Water is served in old gin bottles; wood for the dining room fireplace comes from orchard prunings; and the restaurant's seats are reused church chairs and pews. Leftover wine is turned into vinegar.

At San Francisco's Zuni Cafe, chef and co-owner Gilbert Pilgram also makes vinegar from leftover wine. And the kitchen sees the appeal of peelings, too. Pea shells flavor fish stocks, and in the summer, the liquid generated by making tomato concasse (peeled, seeded and chopped tomatoes) is used to thin the organic tomato juice for Bloody Marys. In winter, the juice drained from organic canned tomatoes is used in pizza sauce.

Sometimes reducing waste is about convenience as much as conscience.

Read about more ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle here.

Teen Chefs Whisk Their Way Toward Scholarships

NEW YORK — The stakes were high Tuesday as 19 young chefs from New York City high schools whisked crepe batter, chopped herbs and seared chicken breasts in a competition for scholarships worth up to $100,000.

The two-hour cooking challenge at the Institute for Culinary Education in Manhattan was part of the Careers through Culinary Arts Program, or C-CAP, which has awarded nearly 5,000 scholarships since it began in 1990.

The program started in New York and has expanded to seven locations including Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. It has helped to train hundreds of culinary professionals, a couple of whom were back Tuesday as judges.

"It made all the difference in being where I am today in my career," said Kelvin Fernandez, 25, a graduate of the program who is now chef de cuisine at the Strand Hotel in Manhattan. "It gives you the opportunity to network."

The atmosphere in the two adjoining kitchens where the students wielded knives and sauté pans was intense. The students were required to prepare two recipes: a classic French chicken dish and dessert crepes with pastry cream and chocolate sauce.

Each student carefully laid out his or her mise en place — salt, pepper, butter, mushrooms, eggs. They yelled "Behind, behind!" as they rushed around the crowded kitchens.

Hansel Serra from the High School for Hospitality Management was the picture of concentration as he placed a towel under his cutting board to steady it, then began dicing shallots.

Serra's shallots ended up chopped so finely they could have been mistaken for grains of rice. His parsley and tarragon were tiny specks of green.

"It's in the wrist, really," he said afterward.

Read the complete story here.

Sixty Great Chefs + Versailles = An AVERAGE Meal?

VERSAILLES – The generals in crisp white uniforms plotted their strategy in the grand Hall of Battles in the Palace of Versailles. They were there not to recall the military victories of France’s past depicted in the graphic paintings lining the walls, but to celebrate the ritual of dining.

Inspired by the United Nations designation last year of the French meal as part of the "intangible cultural heritage of humanity", 60 of the world’s big-name chefs gathered at Versailles on Wednesday to help prepare a $1,270-a-head dinner for 650 guests in black tie, fancy dress and a fair amount of fur and feathers.

The dinner was a public relations extravaganza for the Relais & Chateaux hotel and restaurant group, which brought in its own chefs and paid $114,000 to rent Versailles for the night. (The cost of electricity, water, security and staff members was extra.) Les Grands Tables du Monde sent several chefs of its own.

Versailles is the most glorious chateau in the world, the place where Louis XIV raised fine dining to an art. But it is also a museum without a kitchen. A long, white marble corridor with sculptures of kings and noblemen had to be lined with 17 portable work stations, each consisting of one table, one oven and one electric burner, but no gas or running water.

“Let’s be honest,” said Patrick Henriroux, chef of the two-star Michelin La Pyramide in Vienne near Lyon. “This is not about creating in a kitchen. It’s more like cooking on a camping trip.”

As vice-president in charge of the grand chefs for the group, Mr. Henriroux was camp director. He organized his high-profile and potentially high-maintenance gastronomic greats in teams of three before deploying them to their humble work stations. With so many knives, “I had to make sure they got along,” he said.


Daniel Humm of New York’s Eleven Madison Park paced up and down the long corridor. Hélène Darroze, one of only two women among the five dozen chefs, was hugged and kissed a lot. Marc Meurin of Le Château de Beaulieu bonded quickly with his kitchen-mate, Philippe Mille of Les Crayères in Reims. “We’ve been great friends for an hour already,” Mr. Mille said. For their brief time together, three-star Michelin chefs Marc Haeberlin, Michel Troisgros, Jean-Michel Lorain, Annie Féolde, Jean-Georges Klein, Patrick Bertron, Régis Marcon and Eric Pras and all the two-stars, one-stars and no-stars worked as equals.

By most accounts, even their collective talent could not overcome the logistical hurdles. Most of the raw materials had to be pre-cooked and prepared off-site by the caterer Potel et Chabot. The chefs were asked to offer inspiration from their signature dishes, but their task was less to cook than to slice, dice, heat and accessorize food wheeled in on metal racks or stacked in white boxes.

Adding to the complexity of the meal, each chef prepared one course for about forty people. The cold appetizer chefs chose scallops or lobster; the hot appetizer chefs sea bass or morels, and the hot main course chefs duck or saddle of lamb.

One chef ranted that the 2002 Dom Pérignon Millésime Champagne was insufficiently chilled. Another searched fruitlessly for more squares of Savoy cabbage.

Guests muttered that the caviar dollops on the lightly smoked sea bass were too cold, the gelled Breton lobster claws too bland and the canard de Challans too naked. “Where were the great sauces to celebrate history and tradition?” said Jean-Claude Ribaut, the food critic for Le Monde. “Everything was a little flat, just average.”

Louis XIV might not have been entirely surprised.

Read the complete story here.

Chefs: Is There Gold in Going Gluten-Free?

If Lyndhurst resident Melissa Van Riper wants a night out to eat with her husband, friends or family, her options aren't very plentiful locally. It's not that Lyndhurst doesn't have any good restaurants; you could throw a stone and probably hit one decent eatery or another offering everything from Chinese and Italian to Portuguese fare and Turkish cuisine. The problem is Van Riper has Celiac disease and unless a restaurant has a gluten-free menu, she doesn't dare go near it.

"I travel for gluten-free," said Van Riper, who is 27 weeks pregnant with her first child and fears her daughter will also have Celiac disease, which is a genetic disorder. "We go to Boonton, we go to Pompton Lakes, we go to all these places that have gluten-free food."

Celiac disease is a digestive disease that damages the small intestine and interferes with the absorption of nutrients from food. When Celiac sufferers eat foods containing gluten, a protein in wheat, rye and barley, it destroys the intestine's nutrient absorbing lining, or villi. If a person with Celiac eats gluten he or she suffers severe stomach pains, and prolonged gluten intake can cause malnutrition, no matter how much someone eats.

Adhering to a gluten-free diet is essentially the only way to tame Celiac disease's effects, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. About one in 133 people have it and many don't know it. Van Riper was diagnosed just over a year ago, having been through about 10 doctors before one actually performed a genetic blood test and colonoscopy to give her the proper diagnosis after years of suffering from severe stomach woes.

"I could have had it my whole life. I was gastrointestinal sick for seven years," said Van Riper. "Because I was so young, no one ever did a colonoscopy. People can have bloating, eat something and it doesn't agree with them; you keep getting stomachaches and may not know that you may have a genetic disease."


Lyndhurst's Health Administrator Joyce Jacobson, after hearing Van Riper's story, wants to do something about the problem. When Van Riper called about a month ago asking how she could obtain her marriage license, she also wanted to talk to someone about gluten-free awareness. Jacobson answered the call and found the issue confounding, but noteworthy, because the health department was in the midst of holding food handling courses. In her two previous classes with 42 attendees, not one, she said, offered anything gluten-free at their eateries. She had Van Riper come in and speak to the third class of 15 to inform them about the benefits of offering a gluten-free menu option. The two are now going to embark on an awareness campaign starting with an open community support group in May to any residents of Lyndhurst and surrounding communities that have Celiac or want to know more about it. Then they want to bring evidence to restaurants that Celiac is more common than thought and restaurants would benefit from offering gluten-free menu options.

Read the complete story here.

Does the "Mediterranean Diet" Really Exist?

Every Saturday, a fleet of cars and trucks pulls into a windswept parking lot just off the Mediterranean. Under flapping white awnings, women slit open eggplants the size of a large man’s thumb and stuff them with a mix of chopped garlic, red peppers and walnuts. This is Souk el Tayeb, the farmers’ market that has helped make Beirut a hot destination for globe-trotting foodies. But if you want to see how the new generation of Lebanese really wants to eat, you have to go somewhere else. You have to go to Roadster Diner.

Roadster is a chain of 1950s-Americana restaurants. Its original motto, “There goes my heart,” evokes both Elvis and his artery-clogging diet. The Roadster in my Beirut neighborhood had a life-size statue of a grinning black man with huge white teeth singing into a microphone. Unlike the strenuously authentic Lebanese restaurants beloved by tourists and visiting food writers, Roadster’s nine retail franchises across Lebanon are always packed with locals.

In Europe and the United States, the so-called Mediterranean diet — rich in olive oil, whole grains, fish, fruits and vegetables and wine — is a multibillion-dollar global brand, encompassing everything from hummus to package trips to Italy, where “enogastronomic tourism” rakes in as much as five billion euros a year. Studies at Harvard and elsewhere correlate the Mediterranean diet with lower rates of heart disease, diabetes and depression. In America, health gurus like Mehmet Oz exhort followers to “eat like a Greek.” But according to data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Mediterranean people have some of the worst diets in Europe, and the Greeks are the fattest: about 75 percent of the Greek population is overweight.

So if the Mediterranean diet is not what people in the Mediterranean eat, then what is it?

Find out by reading the rest of the article here.

Charlie Trotter, a Leader Left Behind?

Charlie Trotter stood in his chef’s whites before an audience of high school students in the Studio Kitchen, the private-dining annex to his eponymous restaurant here. The students, dressed to the nines and seated at a banquet table, were from Providence-St. Mel, an academically rigorous Catholic school in the city’s rough East Garfield Park neighborhood.

They were there as Mr. Trotter’s guests, part of what he calls his excellence program, wherein, three nights a week, 50 weeks a year, youths from disadvantaged backgrounds are treated to an elaborate multicourse tasting menu, a tour of the restaurant and a succession of inspirational speakers, often including the chef himself.

As waiters whirled around the students, removing empty plates and filling Champagne flutes with sparkling organic grape juice from Germany, Mr. Trotter listened approvingly as a commis named James Caputo expounded upon the importance of discipline and teamwork. When he was done, Mr. Trotter thanked him and asked him to hang on for a moment. “Chef, ” Mr. Trotter said, “on a scale of 1 to 10 -- 1 being, oh, I don’t know, a Russian gulag, and 10 being nirvana -- how would you rate what it’s like to work for me?”

“Ten, easily,” Mr. Caputo said.

At this, Mr. Trotter pretended to look affronted. “Ten? That’s all?” he said.

This was obviously shtick, but it was also a sly acknowledgement of his reputation as fearsome autocrat. Though he can be genial and very funny, he has never been able to shake his label as a tyrant of fine dining.
In fact, it’s the main way his name has been coming up of late. Grant Achatz, the chef and an owner of the Chicago restaurant Alinea, devotes an entire chapter to Mr. Trotter’s scariness in his new memoir, “Life, on the Line.”

Otherwise, Mr. Trotter hardly seems to figure in the national food conversation anymore. In the very years when Chicago has gloried in newfound recognition as a major restaurant destination, with the spotlight trained upon alumni of Mr. Trotter’s kitchen like Mr. Achatz, Homaro Cantu (of Moto), Giuseppe Tentori (of Boka), and Graham Elliot (of Graham Elliot), the man who put the city on the fine-dining map has somehow fallen below the radar.

November’s inaugural Michelin guide to Chicago restaurants was telling. Alinea, the standard-bearer of technologically forward cuisine, got three stars, the guide’s highest rating, as did the modernist seafood restaurant L2O. The one-star tier was rife with relative newcomers of gonzo-hipster bent like Longman & Eagle, where the menu features a wild-boar sloppy Joe. In between, at a dutiful but unsexy two stars, was Charlie Trotter’s.

“I’d be lying if I said I don’t feel sad about that,” Mr. Elliot said. “I mean, I wanted to quit every day I worked there, but I’m proud that I got through it, and in some ways I look at Charlie as my father. To see him getting two stars instead of three, and not getting any articles or anything, it makes you feel bad — like seeing your dad lose his job.”

 Read the complete story here.

Thirteen Indiputable Universal Laws

A friend shared these in this morning's e-mail:

Law of Mechanical Repair - After your hands become coated with grease, your nose will begin to itch and you'll have to pee.

 Law of Gravity - Any tool, nut, bolt, screw, when dropped, will roll to the least accessible corner.

 Law of Probability -The probability of being watched is directly proportional to the stupidity of your act

 Law of Random Numbers - If you dial a wrong number, you never get a busy signal and someone always answers.

 Law of the Alibi - If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the very next morning you will have a flat tire..

 Variation Law - If you change lines (or traffic lanes),
the one you were in will always move faster than the one you are in now (works every time).

Law of the Bath - When the body is fully immersed in water, the telephone rings.

Law of Close Encounters -The probability of meeting someone you know increases dramatically when you are with someone you don't want to be seen with.

Law of the Result - When you try to prove to someone that a machine won't work, it will.

The Coffee Law - As soon as you sit down to a cup of hot coffee, your boss will ask you to do something which will last until the coffee is cold.

Law of Physical Surfaces - The chances of an open-faced jelly sandwich landing face down on a floor are directly correlated to the newness and cost of the carpet or rug.

Wilson's Law of Commercial Marketing Strategy - As soon as you find a product that you really like, they will stop making it. 

Doctors' Law - If you don't feel well, make an appointment to go to the doctor, by the time you get there you'll feel better. But don't make an appointment, and you'll stay sick.

Chefs Create Countless Variations of the Veggie Burger

THEY were the four syllables that had the power to make both carnivores and vegetarians ringe: veggie burger.

For meat-lovers, the veggie burger was long seen as a sad stand-in that tried to copy the contours and textures of a classic beef patty while falling pathetically short of the pleasure. And for meat-refusers, the veggie burger served as a kind of penitential wafer: You ate this bland, freeze-dried nutrient disc because you had to eat it (your duty as someone who had forsaken the flesh) and because at many a restaurant or backyard barbecue, it was the only option available.

If that has been your mental framework since the days when Jerry Garcia was still with us, it might be time to take another bite. To borrow a phrase from the culture that produced it, the veggie burger seems finally to have achieved self-actualization.

Across the country, chefs and restaurateurs have been taking on the erstwhile health-food punch line with a kind of experimental brio, using it as a noble excuse to fool around with flavor and texture and hue. As a result, veggie burgers haven’t merely become good. They have exploded into countless variations of good, and in doing so they’ve begun to look like a bellwether for the American appetite. If the growing passion for plant-based diets is here to stay, chefs — even in restaurants where you won’t find the slightest trace of spirulina — are paying attention.

“I just think it’s important to accommodate everybody,” said Josh Capon, who opened Burger & Barrel in SoHo last fall and quietly slipped a chickpea-based veggie burger onto a menu heady with pork chops, charcuterie and carpaccio. “And I don’t think somebody should feel like they’re eating an inferior burger. If you’re going to do a veggie burger, it should have that richness and mouth feel and overall texture. When you pick it up, it should eat like a burger.”

He will get no argument from Adam Fleischman, the owner of the expanding Umami Burger chain in Los Angeles. Even though his Earth Burger includes no meat, it offers the taste buds a gooey, decadent tradeoff by dandying up a mushroom-and-edamame patty with ricotta, truffle aioli and cipollini onions.

At Cru, a largely vegan and raw-food-focused cafe in that city’s Silver Lake neighborhood, the dietary and structural restrictions only seem to open up pathways of metamorphosis. Cru’s South American sliders are made of sprouted lentils and cooked garbanzo beans pulsed with garlic and spices. They’re deep-fried, dressed with a mojo sauce of blood orange and paprika and Peruvian aji amarillo chilies, and served on leaves of butter lettuce instead of a bread bun.

“We’re trying to stay away from that dry, tasteless veggie burger thing,” said Cru’s chef, Vincent Krimmel. “We have a lot more to play with now.”

Reda the complete story here.

U.S. Now Drinks the Most Wine in World

The United States has passed France as the world’s largest consumer of wine.
 According to the wine industry, wine shipments to the U.S. from U.S. states and foreign producers grew 2 percent last year to 330 million cases with an estimated retail value of $30 billion.
 France and Italy still lead the world in per-capita wine consumption, but the U.S. is catching up.

Read the complete story here.

Chefs Take The Deprivation Out of Lenten Fridays

No matter how much you like fish and chips, they can get tiresome if you eat them every Friday during Lent. And there’s no need for monotonous fare, unless you choose it as a form of abstinence.

“People are looking for something different than fish and chips,” said Richard Daniels of Quincy, a chef at Stars on Hingham Harbor.

Daniels and other chefs cook up lobster mac ’n’ cheese, pan-seared scallops, linguine with shellfish and other fish and pastas dishes that have complex flavors but are relatively easy to prepare. And some chefs reinvent dishes strongly associated with meat by replacing the meat with a variety of fresh, high-quality ingredients and seasonings.

“I have fun playing with tons of ingredients and creating a contemporary fusion kind of food,” said Pankaj Pradhan, chef and owner of Red Lentil, a 2-year-old vegetarian restaurant on the Newton/Watertown line.

Years ago, Catholics might have felt unusual on meatless Fridays. But today, many non-vegetarians choose meatless meals at least once a week, prompted by concerns about fat in their diet, animal welfare and the environmental stress of meat production. About half his customers are not vegetarians, Pradhan said.

“People come who have eaten meat their whole life, but they want to try things unrelated to animal products,” said Pradhan, who prepares food inspired by the cuisines of Mexico, Italy, Greece, the Middle East and India, where he grew up. “They’re thinking about their health and the environment.”

Shepherd’s pie is one of the most popular dishes at Red Lentil. After experimenting with combinations of protein, vegetables and carbohydrates, Pradhan created a dish with layers of mashed Yukon gold and sweet potatoes, spinach, corn and soy sausage, served with a gravy made from ground cashews and soy milk and drizzled with cilantro sunflower pesto. Other meatless adaptations are sweet potato quesadillas, moussaka pizza and brown rice risotto with roasted butternut squash, red peppers, peas and goat cheese.

At Stars, Daniels serves vegetable risotto to complement pan-seared scallops.

“This method uses high heat and sears in the juices so the scallops don’t dry out,” he said.
Since Daniels introduced lobster mac ’n’ cheese several years ago, it has become the second most popular dish during Lent, after fish and chips. Bearing little resemblance to traditional macaroni and cheese, cavatelli pasta is baked with shiitake mushrooms, fresh peas and lobster pieces in a sauce of cream, white cheddar and parmesan. It’s topped with bread crumbs and white truffle oil.

Read the complete story here.

Fresh Sprouts at School

When you think about it, farms and schools have the same goal: to plant seeds and nurture growth. At Sunset Beach Elementary School the figurative ideal has gone literal. Seed-planting, plus a healthy dose of support from educators, parents, farms and the community, has sprouted and nurtured students' love of gardening and their taste for locally grown fruits and vegetables.

On the school campus, students tend a garden and an orchard, thanks to donations from the community and support from the Kokua Hawaii Foundation. The 'AINA Kine Student Farmers' Market Club funds a biweekly healthy snack supplied mostly by local farms, and a weekly lunchtime salad bar comes via support of the foundation.

All this focus on local, healthful food began converging at the school in February 2009, when parent Erin Delventhal noticed that fruit from neighborhood trees was "left on the ground half the time."

"I knew they could be put to good use, so I set up a meeting with the principal and Kim Johnson of the Kokua Foundation, who also has kids at the school," she recalls.  The school organized a farmers market club for students and asked the community to donate home-grown produce for the first sale. On market day they had a table full of food that generated $180 in one hour.

"When we asked the club what they wanted to do with the money, they said they wanted to provide the students with a healthy snack," Delventhal says. "The first snack was watermelon."

Since then, 15,000 healthy snacks have been served to the student body.

"Working with local farmers, I am usually able to purchase produce that is allowed to ripen naturally," says Delventhal. "Buying local gives the students the best-tasting snacks and, ultimately, influences their food choices. For instance, after serving starfruit from Poamoho Organic Produce in Waialua, we saw students lining up, quarters in hand, ready to purchase starfruit at the student farmers market."

Several months after that first market, the club received a grant from the foundation to plant a garden at the school. It also hosted a community tree drive that led to an orchard of guava, starfruit, kumquat, orange, lemon, lime, tangerine, grapefruit, sapodilla, wax jambu and sweetsop trees. Under the trees, the children planted sweet potato, pumpkin, zinnias,
gardenias, lilikoi and pineapple.

Meanwhile, the school organized a fresh lunchtime salad bar.

Today, produce from the school garden takes its place on the farmers market table alongside donations, and Thursday lunches include a trip to the salad bar. And the students love it.

Read the complete story here.

Purist Chefs Ban Ketchup, Decaf and Toasted Bagels

At a pea-size Lower East Side bistro known for its fries, the admonition is spelled out on a chalkboard: No ketchup. At a popular gastropub in the West Village, customers cannot have the burger with any cheese other than Roquefort.

And at Murray’s Bagels in Greenwich Village and Chelsea, the morning crowd can order its bagels topped any number of ways but never — ever! — toasted. “It’s really annoying, because a toasted bagel is kind of fierce, right?” Jamie Divine, a product designer and frequent patron, said with a hint of an eye-roll.

New York has spawned a breed of hard-line restaurants and cafes that are saying no. No to pouring takeout espressos, or grinding more than a pound of coffee at a time. No to taming the intensity of a magma-spicy dish. And most of all, no to the 21st-century conviction that everything can be accessorized to the customer’s taste.

“People just assume that every restaurant should be for everyone — I could understand that if we were in a town with, like, 20 restaurants,” said David Chang, whose small empire of Momofuku restaurants is known for refusing to make substitutions or provide vegetarian options. “Instead of trying to make a menu that’s for everyone, let’s make a menu that works best for what we want to do.”

He added, “The customer is not always right.”

This coterie of food purists — or puritans, perhaps — is hardly limited to New York. The chef-owner of the Michelin-starred Chicago restaurant Graham Elliot does not serve decaffeinated coffee at his new sandwich shop and coffee bar, Grahamwich, because, Mr. Elliot said in an e-mail, “we decided to let our inner purists shine through and showcase coffee for what it is — a flavorful, caffeinated elixir.”

Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant, recalled a San Francisco spot that would not supply salt or pepper because the chef supposedly seasoned every dish perfectly.

But New York has a hallowed history of persnickety cooks: Kenny Shopsin became something of a cult figure for the litany of rules — including no parties bigger than four, and no more than one order at each table of any particular dish — enforced for years at Shopsin’s diner in the West Village, now a small outpost at the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side.

Arthur Schwartz, a food writer and historian, recalled a restaurant that the New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme opened in Manhattan more than 20 years ago that also prohibited dining companions from ordering the same dish. “It didn’t last very long,” Mr. Schwartz said, “because in those days we all said: ‘Too many rules. New Yorkers are not going to do this.’ ”

Yet in a city filled with newcomers seeking a sense of belonging, rules can be part of the attraction. “One reason people go to a particular restaurant is they want to feel part of a particular community,” Mr. Schwartz said — even if that community is based on nothing more than a shared appreciation for carefully tended espresso that never touches a paper cup.

“You’re supposed to drink espresso fast,” said Caroline Bell, an owner of Cafe Grumpy, explaining that paper lets the heat dissipate too quickly.

When some customers at the three outposts in Brooklyn and Manhattan became, well, grumpy over the lack of takeout espresso, Ms. Bell instituted a policy meant to be taken more with a wink than with the snarl of the cafe’s logo: Patrons can get an espresso to go, if they pay $12 to drink it from a porcelain cup they can keep. “People actually do that,” she said. “There’s a guy that comes in every day to Chelsea with that cup and gets espresso.”

Some restaurateurs say they limit choices because it allows them to serve items consistently prepared the way they want.

“Cooks are creatures of habit,” Mr. Chang said. “To do this ‘Can I get this with no olives, can I get the salad chopped, sauce on the side’ — some of those special requests are ridiculous. My personal opinion is that a lot of people say they have a special allergy or they don’t like something so they can get better service.” 

Read the entire story here.

Beef Industry Carves a Course

Cattlemen's Group Promotes Red Meat, Trains Recruits to Win Over Consumers

by Stephanie Simon

Colorado native Jen Johnson loved raising cattle and eating steak, a lifestyle some of her friends at Princeton University found a bit hard to swallow. 

Ms. Johnson tried winning them over with sheer enthusiasm. But she soon realized she needed help persuading her salad-nibbling sorority sisters to order steaks. So she went back to school to get her MBA—Masters of Beef Advocacy.

The National Cattlemen's Beef Association, which represents beef producers, launched the MBA two years ago. The course trains ranchers, feedlot operators, butchers, chefs—anyone, really, who loves a good, thick rib-eye—in the fine art of promoting and defending red meat.

Nearly 2,000 graduates have completed the program. The cattlemen aim to train at least 20,000 more, in the hope of building a forceful counterweight to the animal-rights advocates who denounce beef production as inhumane, and the vegetarian activists who reject beef consumption as unhealthy.

The advocacy effort comes at a tough time for the beef industry. Beef consumption in the U.S. plunged from a high of 94 pounds a person in 1976 to less than 62 pounds in 2009, according to the American Meat Institute, a trade group representing beef processors.

School districts across the country have adopted "Meatless Mondays" and are dishing out bean burritos in lieu of burgers. And this winter, the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued new dietary guidelines advising consumers to replace some of the meat in their diet with seafood.

Meanwhile, veggie evangelists at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have turned heads with ever-more-racy campaigns, including sending models clad only in strategically placed leaves of lettuce to hand out tofu hot dogs on street corners nationwide.

PETA says its tactics work. Last year, the nonprofit fielded 850,000 requests for "vegetarian starter kits" packed with recipes like Tofu Tamale Pie and testimonials from celebrity supporters like actress Natalie Portman.

"We're winning," said Bruce Friedrich, a PETA vice president.

Not so fast, the MBAs respond.

Beef has its own celebrity backers—actor Matthew McConaughey has done radio spots—but industry strategists decided that the best way to promote the product was to put the men and women who produce beef front and center.

Their goal: convince skeptical consumers that the shrink-wrapped sirloin tips in the supermarket aren't artery-clogging commodities mass-produced on factory farms, but wholesome meals turned out with great care by hard-working families. To that end, MBA students are encouraged to strike up conversations with strangers.

Ranchers are urged to talk about the hours they spend caring for cattle—all those trips to the pasture at 3 a.m. to help a laboring cow give birth. Retailers could mention nutritional facts—that a three-ounce serving of eye-round roast has just slightly more fat than a skinless chicken breast, for example.

Ms. Johnson, 26 years old, has taken to sending email blasts to her friends from Princeton, describing a morning she spent artificially inseminating cows or explaining how grazing helps ranch land thrive. The majority of beef cattle in the U.S. are raised on grass on family-owned ranches before they are sent to feedlots for fattening and then on to the slaughterhouse for processing.

"We can change the dynamic of the discussion going on with the consumer with two phrases: We care and we're capable," Daren Williams, an executive at the cattleman's association, told a recent MBA class in Denver.

But critics of the industry say true transparency about how burgers come to be may backfire.
Constant reminders that a juicy quarter-pounder was once a wobbly-legged, big-eyed calf may put some people "in the mood to have a steak," said Michael Pollan, who has written several books critical of modern beef production. "For others," he said, "it puts them in the mood to become a vegan."

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Cooking for the Commander in Chief

As world leaders and celebrities streamed into the White House last month for the highly anticipated state dinner honoring China's President Hu Jintao, White House executive chef Cristeta Comerford had a discomfiting thought: "In five minutes we're going to serve 200 people. This is not the time to fail." She donned her Dolce & Gabbana bifocals, a move signaling to her staff that it's "game on," she said, though in the heat of preparation, her glasses often steam up and she'll wind up casting them aside. (She recently found them in the refrigerator.)

The importance of last month's dinner went beyond its usual social value. When Mr. Hu visited in 2006, he was invited to lunch, which the Chinese took as a slight. So, at a time when the U.S. is pressing Beijing on economic issues like the value of its currency, but relying on its help with thorny regional problems like North Korea, the pressure was on to underscore the value of the relationship by pulling out all the culinary stops.

The Chinese asked for a "quintessentially American" dinner. What does that mean to a Philippines-born, French-trained chef, married to a chef of Irish descent? To Ms. Comerford, quintessentially American "reminds you of home." Her family Thanksgiving table is an amalgam of Mayflower and Manila, some 20 dishes prepared by the couple with baking help from their 9-year-old daughter, Danielle. The chef's sweet potatoes are a presidential favorite: She roasts them with oranges and star anise.

Ms. Comerford, 47, attended the food-technology program at the University of the Philippines. She got her start in Chicago-area hotels, including the Sheraton and Hyatt Regency near O'Hare airport. In Washington, she did a stint at Le Grande Bistro in the Westin Hotel before she was recruited by former White House chef Walter Scheib III to work at the presidential residence in 1995. Laura Bush appointed her to the top job in 2005, making Ms. Comerford the first female, and the first ethnic minority, to hold the position.

Her friendly manner carries an undercurrent of toughness. When her assistant suggested her "spring rolls" are a signature dish, she shot him a look and said, "No, that's not who I am." A Cristeta Comerford meal is known for its Asian spice, colors and "extra garlic," she said. One recent afternoon, she prepared seared lamb loin on chickpea purée for an Obama family dinner, the purée's strong garlic balanced by parsley and mint. The dish was finished with orange zest and streaks of vibrant finishing oil, made by cooking light olive oil with handfuls of parsley until the oil glows a vivid green.

Her starting point for the menu for the state dinner, as with any meal, was a review of the best ingredients available locally, arrayed on one of her stainless-steel work tables. Seeing the items together helps her to draw new lines between them, creating different combinations.

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U.S. Chefs to Honor French Dining at Versailles

Four star chefs from the United States are slated to take part in an international salute to the French way of dining in April at Versailles, the one-time home of French kings, just outside Paris. Thomas Keller and Eli Kaimeh of New York's Per Se, Patrick O'Connell of The Inn at Little Washington in Virginia and Daniel Boulud of New York's Daniel are among 60 "grand chefs" assembled for this dinner by Relais & Chateaux, a global network of about 500 hotels and gourmet restaurants.

This April 6 dinner in honor of French gastronomy marks the inclusion last November of the "Gastronomic Meal of the French" on UNESCO's list of  Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The dinner for 650 guests paying 890 euros ($1,200) each will take place in Versailles' Gallery of Battles.

Read more about the event here.

Just How Much Beef is in Fast-Food Meat?

That question emerged after a recent lawsuit alleged that Taco Bell was passing off mostly meat substitute as real beef in its tacos. The  Yum! Brands Inc. chain swiftly countered the accusations, taking out prominent newspaper ads stating that its seasoned beef was the genuine article, containing 88% beef, 3% added water, 4% seasoning and 5% other ingredients, such as oats and sugar.

The controversy exposed a conundrum for consumers. Despite extensive regulations governing certain areas of food processing, there are scant data available to the public about what really goes into some of their favorite restaurant meals. And what information is available—often on fast-food chains' websites—often omits crucial details.

Restaurants' food-content claims can be difficult to verify. When asked for the composition of several of their own dishes, most of the nearly 20 chains contacted by The Wall Street Journal declined to share numbers, citing the proprietary nature of their formulas. Federal regulations don't require restaurants to disclose such information, and there are no rules stipulating minimum meat content in menu items. While determining nutrient information, such as calories and protein, is relatively straightforward, food-testing laboratories say they can't definitively identify the composition of prepared food because the cooking process blends ingredients in a way that is tough to undo.

Unless a food lab knew for sure which ingredients were present, "there is serious potential to be seriously flawed" in estimating just how much of those ingredients are being used, says Kantha Shelke, an independent food technologist in Chicago. "It's a guesstimate at best."

The Taco Bell flap began with a lawsuit filed by a Montgomery, Ala., law firm on behalf of a California woman who claims that "a substantial majority" of the company's beef filling isn't beef. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, didn't provide supplementary evidence. One of the firm's lawyers, Dee Miles, told National Public Radio and other news organizations that tests found that about 35% of the filling was beef. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Miles now declines to comment, and his firm hasn't disclosed where or how tests were conducted or provided detailed results.

"The claims made against Taco Bell and our seasoned beef are absolutely false," Taco Bell said in the newspaper ads. The company didn't respond to requests for additional comment.

Read the complete story here.

Ambitious Chefs Buck the Economic and Culinary Trends

February 07, 2011|By Craig LaBan, Inquirer Restaurant Critic

Hold the obituary on fine dining, and pass the 12-course tasting menu, please.

It's a refrain chef Marc Vetri hopes to hear often after March 15, when his signature gem, Vetri, abandons a la carte dining altogether for $135 tasting menus, a decadent splurge previously required only on weekends.

In a move that seems counter to these recessionary times, not only is the city's best Italian restaurant raising the cost of midweek dining, but Vetri is also shaving six seats from the townhouse dining room. At 36 before, it was already a picture of tight-squeeze intimacy.

"When people walk in and just order an appetizer and entree and then leave, they're not getting what we really set out to offer. They're not getting the whole experience," says Vetri.

The upscale moves may foretell a trend on the horizon born of pent-up desire, as other young chefs have plans to open small venues dedicated to gastronomy. Ambitious tasting menus elsewhere are also gaining new traction.

The notion seemingly flies in the face of the most recent currents, which have brought mainly trouble for "whole experience"-style fine dining, as white-tablecloth formality unraveled under the pressure of economic turmoil and a cultural shift toward more casual venues.

Walnut Street's Restaurant Row continues to crumble. Restaurant Week-style bargain menus abound year round. The Four Seasons Hotel has been exploring the potential of an independent operator for its luxurious Fountain Restaurant.

And in a bid to survive two years ago, Georges Perrier's bastion of prix-fixe luxury, Le Bec-Fin, embraced an a la carte menu for the first time in its four decades, even started serving hamburgers at lunch, before announcing last year plans to finally close - moves Perrier has since reconsidered and regretted.
"I think I panicked too early and made changes I should never have done," conceded Perrier, who said his prix-fixe menus, which range from $40 to $185, are now back up to 80 percent of his meals.

Indeed, the irony is as rich as beurre blanc. Perrier's legendary restaurant, of course, began its life at 1312 Spruce St. - the townhouse address where Vetri has now ascended to the hot list of an international dinerati, which sometimes comes in from London, L.A., Chicago, or New York (not to mention Rittenhouse Square) just for dinner.

Achieving that level of fame has been a steady evolution for Vetri, a James Beard Foundation Award winner. Vetri and his business partner, Jeff Benjamin, have since opened larger casual venues (Osteria, Amis) to offer more flexible options to the salad-and-pasta crowd. Thus, the flagship has become a focal point for Vetri's dogged pursuit to craft the nation's ultimate experience in alta cucina.

New Italian china and Venetian vases have been ordered. Snazzy new uniforms for the staff ("nothing formal - but playful!") are in the works. The vestibule is being rehabbed. A new chef de cuisine, former Vetri sous Adam Leonti, is due back from a six-month kitchen stint in Bergamo. And demand for the elaborate tasting meals, with their inventive seasonal dishes and hand-painted menus, has grown over the last two years from weekends only to half of Vetri's midweek meals, when a la carte was still an option.

Read the complete story here.

French Chefs Team Up to Safeguard Gallic Gastronomy

(Reuters Life!) - Worried that France's global gastronomic influence may be on the wane, 15 of its top Michelin-starred chefs are cooking up a plan to put it back on the menu and enlist the help of the state to promote it.

Critics of French cuisine argue that for too long it has rested on its laurels, not moving with the times to use alternative ingredients and adapt to a changing culinary world order as new chefs push the boundaries.

With that in mind, the who's who of French cuisine, including Alain Ducasse, owner of London's famous Dorchester and 26-Michelin star holder Joel Robuchon, gathered at the Eiffel Tower on Tuesday to unveil the country's first chef lobbying group -- the College Culinaire de France.

"We are in a time when everyone is working for themselves," Robuchon, who operates restaurants in Las Vegas, Monaco, Hong Kong and elsewhere, told Reuters TV. "We wanted to create a group that works together for the excellence of French gastronomy and export it overseas where it is still unknown."

The catering industry alone in France accounted for about 50 billion euros ($68.66 billion) in 2009 and is the fourth biggest private sector employer taking on almost 500,000 people each year.

Unlike other sectors, the chefs argue that the authorities have taken it for granted and left it to fend for itself.

"We want them (authorities) to take note and if possible help economically such as through marketing," Alain Ducasse told Reuters. "We have a beautiful past and we can look forward calmly, but competition exists and we shouldn't forget that."

The chefs' art, once dominated by a French swagger, has changed after thousands of budding cooks learnt their trade in France's top kitchens, only to ply their trade elsewhere and take the culinary experience to new levels.
For Guy Savoy, one of the chefs considered to have nurtured the lighter and more modern French cuisine, part of the problem is a sense of guilt about promoting France's heritage.

"It's not arrogant or pretentious to say France is the global essence of gastronomy ... it's the reality and we have to stop punishing ourselves just because one or two countries have a few cooks that make a lot more noise than a few thousand French chefs. This (association) is an attacking team."

The final straw was perhaps at this year's Bocuse d'Or -- the Oscar's of the cooking world held biennially in France's gastronomic capital, Lyon. French chefs were nowhere to be seen as the top three chefs all came from Scandinavia.

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Granola Leaves the 60s

Though it is strongly associated with the 1960s, granola has been around for more than a century. In 1863, sanitarium owner James Jackson created a graham flour product for his patients. He called it "granula."

Forty years later, at another sanitarium, John Harvey Kellogg created a similar product substituting oats for graham flour. He, too, called it granula — until he was sued by Jackson. Kellogg renamed his dried cereal "granola."

Granola did not really catch on, however, until a century later. The healthful eating movement of the 1960s started, with young adults rejecting generation-old political views as well as processed foods.

With an emphasis on whole grains and organic ingredients, cereal companies such as Kellogg, Post and Quaker Oats decided to rebrand and remarket their whole-grain granolas. In 1972, Pet Inc. introduced Heartland Natural Cereal, with the other cereal companies following close behind. And in 1975, Nature Valley rolled out the first granola bar.

Today shoppers can find granola in any flavor: vanilla, peanut butter, chocolate raspberry, maple cranberry; and with a variety of mix-ins: sunflower seeds, cashews, chocolate-covered pretzels and shredded coconut. With so many options, it can be hard to find one product with all the preferred ingredients.

Some consumers like dried fruit, while others do not. Some want a sweeter, more indulgent granola, and others want the bare-bones oats. There are even websites where you can order your own custom-made granola.

Read the rest of the story and learn everything you ever wanted to know about granola here.