One of the last surviving chains from the golden age of Southern cafeterias is abandoning the classic cafeteria model for buffet-style service.
"It's a completely different experience from what folks have been accustomed to," Furr's Jill Gouge Laird says of the restaurant's new Fresh Buffet concept. "Now they really control the experience."
As recently reported by the Dallas Morning News, the Texas-based chain has opened nine Fresh Buffets over the last five years, and plans to open as many as a dozen additional stores by 2012. Existing restaurants will continue to operate as cafeterias, but Laird confirms all future outlets will be structured as "scattered buffets."
So much for a menu of blood oranges and garlic: The owners of a planned "Twilight"-themed eatery in Forks, Wash., say they're studiously avoiding vampire cuisine.
The logging town of Forks, as depicted in Stephenie Meyer's hugely popular series of teenage romances, is overrun with vampires. But, according to Annette Root, the real Forks has a bigger problem.
"It's very difficult to find something to eat in Forks after 8 o'clock," sighs Root, a "Twilight" gift shop owner who's opening the Lodge in Forks.
The gap between tamales and the Thanksgiving table is continuing to narrow as an increasing number of Mexican-Americans are stuffing their holiday masa with pumpkin and sweet potatoes.
Tamales have been a festive food ever since the Aztecs and other early Meso-Americans served them in conjunction with their religious rituals, says Claudia Alarcon, an Austin-based writer who's kicking off the University of Texas' Foodways of Mexico speaker series this week with a talk on tamale history. While tamales aren't associated with winter holidays south of the border, Alarcon says "I'm pretty sure in every U.S. state where Mexican-Americans live, they have tamales for the holidays."
Cookie exchanges are so passé in southern Louisiana, where swap-minded cooks are now trading cupcakes, cheesecakes, pralines and single slices of pound cake.
The potato is enjoying newfound popularity at tailgate parties, thanks to its terrific versatility and low cost. (But if you have cash to spare, the editors suggest pairing grilled potato kebabs with Zinfandel.)
What's a fair without food? Residents of Broward County, Fla., are about to find out.
As the Broward County Fair doesn't have a fairgrounds of its own, it found itself homeless this year after its previous host, the Fort Lauderdale Stadium, closed for renovations. Scrambling for a solution, the fair relocated to a shopping mall.
"We'd rather have something than nothing at all," said the volunteer who answered the fair office's phone.
The Pompano Citi Centre has plenty of space for competitions and exhibits -- the spelling bee is scheduled for a room over LensCrafters, and student gardeners will display their plants at Lowe's -- but there's no room for rides or food vendors. According to the volunteer, who identified herself as Denise, the only food at the fair will be the canned beans, pound cakes and other edibles submitted for judging.
The classic Thanksgiving menu -- which has become so standardized that nearly 90 percent of Americans report eating turkey to celebrate the holiday -- is a virtual parade through the food pyramid, with nearly every known food group admirably represented. Looking for grains? Try the cornbread stuffing. Craving fruit? Have some cranberry sauce. In a vegetable mood? You've got your pick of mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes and green beans (mixed with mushroom soup, for an extra veggie bonus).
But, for the last half-century, one food group has been conspicuously missing from the typical Thanksgiving table. Confronted by the usual festive spread, a Pilgrim would no doubt ask: "Whither the shellfish, Prudence?"
Lobsters, clams and mussels were almost certainly served at the 1621 feast that's come to be commemorated as the First Thanksgiving. While the Pilgrims weren't especially fond of seafood -- Plimoth Plantation's culinarian Kathleen Wall says the community considered shellfish "the last of God's blessings" -- the settlement's proximity to the sea meant waterborne creatures were a staple of harvest meals, alongside earthy corn porridges, turnips and grapes. Pilgrims and Wampanoags supped on seal, swan and extravagantly large crustaceans.
"They talk about these lobsters that fed three sailors," Wall marvels.
Most every plate I clear looks pretty much the same: There's a typically a stain of sauce where the protein sat, a few unwanted onions shoved to the side and a spoonful or two of uneaten vegetables.
But over the course of an average evening, I'll usually encounter at least a half-dozen diners who have a very different sense of what it means to be done. These eaters -- and I'm using the term loosely here -- push back from the table after taking a few dainty bites. While every restaurant-goer is entitled to enjoy a meal in his or her own way, the under-attacked plate puts the server in a rather awkward spot.
Hard as it is for vocal diners to imagine, there are plenty of customers who are shy about saying their steak's overcooked or potato was served cold. Their untouched plates are very tactful cries for help, which is why I never whisk a still-full plate away without asking whether everything was OK.
The problem is, sometimes everything is OK, except that the diner has an eating disorder. Or was just dumped by the guy sitting across from her. Or sensed a case of swine flu coming on. Not only are guests understandably reluctant to talk about such things, they often seem to resent my posing the question.
Kathleen Wall, the colonial foodways culinarian at Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Mass., understands not everyone wants fruit in their Indian pudding: She just wishes the detractors could find more civilized ways of expressing their distaste.
"I've had people stand in front of me and spit the fruit into their hands," Wall says. "People who are nice and rational."
Rational about all things, apparently, but Indian pudding, the centuries-old sweet dish that's so beloved it has its own holiday: Today is National Indian Pudding Day, an annual celebration of what Plimoth Plantation's Web site calls one of the nation's "ugliest, yet great tasting, bi-cultural culinary treats."
Its name notwithstanding, Indian pudding isn't a Native American specialty. "It's called Indian because of the cornmeal," Wall explains. Other ingredients include milk and molasses, a byproduct of the thriving 19th century sugar trade. While a recipe for Indian pudding didn't appear in print until 1796, references to the mushy snack appeared as early as 1740.
What's more Southern than pecan pie? At Thanksgiving time, it's a blackberry jam cake with a dollop of Charlotte custard sauce.
Festival goers at Mamma Mia, Daphne's annual edible celebration of the Alabama town's Italian heritage, will be able to weigh in on their favorites this year, selecting a People's Choice winner.
Experts reveal a fail-safe recipe for deep-fried turkey: three minutes a pound at 340 degrees (and, for best results, don't bother with a newfangled electric turkey fryer).
Just as Southeastern oyster producers are clamoring for the government to stay out of their business, catfish farmers have launched a new ad campaign asking for more regulation of their industry.
Catfish farmers contend imported seafood should be held to the same stringent standards now applied to imported beef, poultry and pork. Unlike those commodities, which are inspected by the USDA, imported seafood is the domain of the FDA. According to government reports, only 2 percent of the 5.2 billion pounds of seafood that entered the U.S. last year was inspected.
"People are taking it for granted that everything's inspected, and they need to know what's going on," CFA president Joey Lowery says. "This is something that shouldn't even be negotiable, food safety for the American people."
A fast food restaurant manager went to the extreme in training his staffers on how to handle a hold-up situation: his method scared paying customers and earned a serious reprimand from local police.
A manager of a Sonic in St. Joseph, Mo., recently staged a lunchtime mugging, recruiting someone to enter the restaurant with a real-looking toy gun and hold it to an employee's head. Problem was, employees weren't the only ones taken by surprise: When authorities received frantic reports from panicked customers of a potential hostage situation, they sped to the restaurant to resolve it.
"The officers quickly determined this was a training exercise," St. Joseph Police Department commander Jim Connors recounts. "We forcefully got the message across that's not expected behavior."
The declining prestige of Frenchified cuisine has done little to dent the global appetite for frog legs, much to the consternation of conservationists who say the industry could soon eradicate certain species of the slippery amphibian.
A Swiss animal rights group this week called upon gourmands to boycott frog legs, comparing harvesting a frog for its thighs to killing an elephant for its tusks. But the University of Adelaide's Corey Bradshaw says the world's consumption of more than 1 billion frogs a year isn't just wasteful: It's threatening many frogs' futures.
"Just like fish, they're being unsustainably harvested," Bradshaw says. At most restaurants, he adds, "they'll be just skinned legs. They'll not be able to tell you what species they are."
That's a problem, Bradshaw adds, because nearly one half of frog species are facing extinction. Even Rayne, La., which is the world's Frog Capital, is forced to import the amphibians from China.
Acknowledging that even the most fastidious foodies can't say no to Popeye's spicy fried chicken, Dirty South Wine'sHardy Wallace has made the dish the centerpiece of what he claims is the world's first-ever online food-and-wine pairing competition.
"There are a lot of online wine tastings, but no one ever does pairings," Wallace explains. "As much as I love wine, it's useless without food."
Wallace has recruited five respected wine experts to submit their picks for the best vino to sip with Popeye's celebrated chicken, Cajun-battered fries and red beans and rice. He and 50 friends will sample the selections at a party next Wednesday; While the festivities will be live-streamed from Wallace's house, he's also urging wine-and-chicken lovers to play along at home and report their findings via Twitter.
At stake is the title of Dirty Bird King (or Queen) -- and a lifetime of potentially enhanced Popeye's enjoyment.
When restaurant-goers talk about the scary things they've encountered while eating out, their conversation usually edges toward hygiene infractions and undercooked food. But what really frightens diners is the sight of a server without a notepad.
Like most servers who daylight as journalists (there are more of us than you might imagine), I'm perfectly comfortable taking notes while talking. Still, I won't break out pen and paper for parties smaller than five. That's because I believe writing down orders disrupts my eye contact with my customers and detracts from my ability to build relationships with them. Good service calls for more than mere transcription.
But I suspect my high-minded reasons for not taking notes wouldn't fly with the most skeptical guests, who like to insist I won't be able to recall their request for grilled salmon. "Are you sure you're going to remember this?," they'll ask repeatedly.
If a guest seems especially anxious, I'll make a point of writing his or her order down. But here's what I'd like to tell those nervous Nellies: Yes, I am going to remember your order. Because while the menu may bewilder you, I've been serving from it for years. It takes more than a house salad with ranch on the side and a medium-well steak to confuse me.
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