Meet The Team / Jennifer Lawinski

A Japanese elementary school kicked off a whale of a controversy during its observance of a national week to commemorate lunches in public schools.

For its special menu one day last week, Azabu Elementary School in central Tokyo's Minato ward served the students whale meat, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The School Affairs Section of the Secretariat of the Minato Board of Education said in a written statement that each school was free to plan its special menus that week, and the goal was to include "traditional, local, historical, and cultural dishes," a blogger for the paper wrote.

A Chicago woman is suing McDonald's after an employee allegedly spit in her face when she tried to order a late-night (or early morning, depending on how you see it) cheeseburger, the Chicago Tribune reported.

According to a suit filed in Cook County Circuit Court on Wednesday, Sarah Theines claims the incident occurred when she pulled up to the drive-thru of a McDonald's in Chicago's West Side to order a cheeseburger at 3:50 a.m. one morning last December.

The suit alleges an employee told her in "an aggressive and unfriendly tone" that she couldn't order the burger -- only the breakfast menu was available.

Cookbooks from high-profile cooks and celebrity chefs -- including Giada De Laurentiis, Bobby Flay, Mark Bittman, David Chang, Martha Stewart and Alice Waters -- have gone digital.

Popular cookbook publishers Clarkson Potter and Ten Speed Press released 88 cookbooks as full-color e-books, optimized for color e-readers like the iPad and Nookcolor.

The titles will also be digitally available in black-and-white for Amazon's Kindle and other non-color digital readers. More than 2,600 e-cookbooks are available in Amazon.com's Kindle store. Barnes & Noble's Nook bookstore has more than 1,700 digital titles available.

While some, like Flay's Throwdown!, are from the fall 2010 list, 81 of the titles (such as Waters's The Art of Simple Food) are from the backlist.

The owners of Michael Jordan's The Steakhouse NYC, which overlooks the famed lobby of Grand Central Terminal, are bankrupt. No, not His Airness; the restaurant group just licenses Jordan's name.

The Glazier Group, which owns the New York steakhouse and six Strip House restaurants, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S. Southern District Court on Monday, Crain's New York Business reported.

Owners Peter and Penny Glazier said the group's restaurants and catering venues, including Bridgewaters and the Twenty Four Fifth ballroom near Manhattan's Washington Square Park, will not be affected. (The Michael Jordan's Steakhouse at Mohegan Sun Casino, in Connecticut, is owned by the Cornerstone Restaurant Group, with no affiliation to the Glazier Group.)

"We are restructuring corporate debt," Peter Glazier told Crains. "We tried to make a deal with our lenders, and we could not." The restaurants, he added, are "doing very well."

A cheeseburger in a glass, a potent PB&J, a liquid BLT -- it's time to take the sandwich into cocktail hour. Literally.

In honor of National Sandwich Day on Nov. 3, Flor de Caña rum has teamed up with mixologists to turn sandwich classics into tasty libations.

The Sandwich Cocktail menu created by the Nicaraguan rum company features "crustless cocktails" -- the Peanut Butter & Jelly, the Cheeseburger and the BLT.