Hawk on chicken, New York City. Photo: D.Billy of I Am Not Lying
New Yorkers tend to throw fits about wildlife showing up in odd parts of their city. So we're unsurprised to hear that a local man was flustered when a large hawk flew into the restaurant where he was eating last week and perched on his lunch.
It'd be cruel to steal the story away from its hilarious original teller, whose best line was "I turned around to see it standing on my two-piece-with-side-and-soda combo, just chilling and looking out the window wistfully, as though a Sarah McLachlan song were playing in its head."
A phone call to the restaurant confirmed the tale, including the tidbit that a cook, Manoli (in the style of a true superhero, no one at the eatery knew his last name), whom a waitress describes as "pretty fearless," caught the thing in his bare hands when it flew into the kitchen. Said hawk was sent to the vet, who reportedly turned him over to a wildlife refuge.
There's no doubt about it: The cheese boom is in full swing.
Over the past several years, specialty shops have blossomed across the country, from southern California to Maine (including Blue Fog Market, Fromagination and The Cave), all with super-dedicated cheese selections. This month renowned Brooklyn, N.Y., restaurant Franny's became the latest eatery to open its very own specialty food shop, Bklyn Larder, just down the street.
Aside from an array of prepared foods cooked by chef Travis Post, Bklyn Larder has its own cheese room, with an appropriate humidity and temperature for aging and storing cheese. "This will enable us to carry larger amounts of cheese," says Francine Stephens, who, along with co-owner and husband Andrew Feinberg, co-founded the restaurant back in 2004.
In September of 2007, Feinberg attended the Slow Flood cheese festival in Bra, Italy to seek out unique and tasty cheeses to eventually carry at the still-in-the-planning-stages Larder. They can all be spied through the glass window of the shop's aging room. (Food voyeurs -- you know who you are -- beware!)
Vegemite -- the yeast-based savory spread that is a distant cousin of Marmite, and beloved by Kiwis and Aussies -- is getting a makeover for the first time in 85 years, the Times Online reports.
Kraft Foods surveyed hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders and Australians to find out how they took their morning dose of Vegemite, and found that many wished it was more easily spreadable, or paired it with cream cheese on toast. Thus, the new incarnation incorporates cream cheese and one other secret ingredient.
For many of us, the dread words conjure one glimmer of hope -- that a delicious carton of chocolate milk could be sipped illicitly, far from Mom's watchful, sugar-phobic eyes.
White, gluey pizza stuck to the plate by "cheese"; burger patties so flat they looked like they'd been stomped on by the gym teacher; the terror of sitting on one of those red shared seats with a classmate of the opposite gender (red means love, orange means friends) -- school lunch, in the best of times, can be traumatic.
When we stumbled upon this Web site of school lunches around the world we felt not terror, but rage.
Look at the French lunch: mussels, a steamed artichoke, baguette, cheesecake, half a pink grapefruit and French fries. Seriously? Was this staged purely to infuriate American diners raised on beaten-down chicken nuggets and gummy peach slices from a can? And French fries? Does a beret come with it, too?
So it's 5 o'clock EST. Did you make your last widget for the day? Answer the boss's last e-mail?
If "yes," read on. If "no," you've been warned. Because it's totally possible you'll lose the next 24 hours of your life to Endless Simmer's fantastically obsessive Top 10 Top 10 Food Lists.
Yeah, you read that correctly: For better or for worse, it's all there, from The Frisky's Top 10 Songs with Sexually Suggestive Food Metaphors (props for the Cibo Matto, guys -- but no Def Leppard?) to Lifehacker's genius Top 10 Food and Drink Hacks (we can open a beer bottle using a piece of paper?!). There's even a nod to the Creepiest Mascots and Bad Boy Bourdain's best takedowns.
These types of lists make all other tasks sort of disappear. So if we've just sent you hustling to iTunes to start typing out retorts to The Frisky or hunting for a sheet of 8 1/2-by-11 and a Negro Modelo, we apologize.
Today the steely, dry-humored Maggie Ruggiero (the woman behind an astounding fried cubano) faces off against bald-pated Ian Knauer, who pulls the cross-armed, stern smackdown stance off rather better. The ingredient du jour? Avocado, sweet and savory. The savory dishes both have a certain Asian flair and the sweet (shown above) basically blew our minds and made us want to go use a blowtorch on everything in our kitchen cabinets. Avocado marshmallow on a stick?! Maggie, let's be friends. Ian, not to be outdone, turns out a gorgeous avocado creme brulée.
The two share a window through which they taunt one another, like a modern day Statler and Waldorf. Maggie on Ian: "Razzle dazzle; flash in the pan ... [I'm] someone who enjoys eating food and not just playing with it." Ian on Maggie: "We were born on the same day. She's a little older than I am. She's got experience on her side. I have youth." Oh, snap! Check the video, vote and let us know who you think owned it.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that increased tariffs on Roquefort have been dropped. The news comes as a relief to the many gourmands and cheese enthusiasts who were bracing for what could have been a frightening, extended period bereft of the luscious, pungent fromage bleu.
The tariffs that were initially going to be imposed on Roquefort were a retaliatory move in reaction to the European Union's ban on hormone-treated beef. But after a provisional agreement, officials from the EU and the United States decided to drop both measures. So, while the U.S. removed threats of tariffs on Roquefort, the EU has gotten rid of bans on imported beef from the U.S.
The phrase "free hot dogs" is music to some folks' ears any time of year, but particularly with Memorial Day weekend around the bend.
Oscar Mayer has stepped up to start the grillmania: if you hit the site right now (until midnight tonight, EST) you can click your way to a coupon for a free pack of dogs. Unfortunately, you can't waltz right into the store, coupon in hand: It's a wait-for-the-mailman dealio. But it's still a pretty grand deal for those who could eat grilled dogs all summer long.
Adding to the list of foods that taste great to some folks and terrible to others (cilantro, how you doin'?), here come innocent looking pine nuts.
"Pine mouth" is spreading from the U.S. to Britain and it's driving some eaters crazy, including a reporter from Britain's Daily Mail who downed a handful of the nuts. "Though I regained my taste after eight days, the only thing I could drink during that time was water," he says. "Drinking wine was like swallowing liquid metal. [emphasis ours]" Yeouch.
We've definitely sampled some pine nuts gone to the dark side, but this sounds out of control. Let's use Slashfood Science: Take the poll and learn more after the jump.
Frank Bruni is leaving the New York Times dining section. And food bloggers are freaking out.
In a world where restaurants live or die by the awarding of Bruni's stars, blogs like Eater declare this no less than an "Apocalypse." Bruni will be turning his attention to his new memoir come August, and will be a writer at large for the New York Times Magazine.
Now the hunt (and speculation) begins to locate a food critic with the ability to carry Bruni's swagger: Ryan Sutton at Bloomberg, one of the few fairly anonymous critics left in town? Perhaps the L.A. Times' S. Irene Virbila is waiting by her phone, since the Times has pulled from our rival city to the west (a la Ruth Reichl) in the past. Grub Street wonders if (gasp) a blogger will be chosen. And does anonymity, so hard to preserve in the Internet era, matter any more to Pete Wells, the dining editor at the Times?
Perhaps the most curious quote in Bill Keller's announcement is that Bruni "will be turning in his restaurant-critic credentials." Uh, could someone get us a copy of those? Is there, like, a laminated round of foie gras passed from critic to critic? Frank, just drop us a line and let us know.
Our wonderful (and similarly food-frenzied) friends at Chow asked a question today that may have some folks bristling: Is it ever OK to ogle a stranger's meal at a restaurant and ask what she's eating?
Etiquette writer Helena Echlin posits that "though it's OK to look, staring at people while they're eating makes them uncomfortable. If you need help identifying a dish, ask the server (avoid pointing if you can). Don't ask the person eating it." She notes an exception in the case of ridiculously close tables -- common in places like New York City and San Francisco -- in which case it would be absurdly formal to summon a waiter. Echlin interviews a restaurant expert who declares he "would never cross the imaginary wall" between tables.
In a crowded eatery with tiny two-tops, it's true that an "imaginary wall" can feel especially important. When a noisy couple are inches away, your demure chatter about the weather quickly turns into an extended dance remix with their loud argument about his mother-in-law.
Until this Monday, Babbo Pastry Chef Gina DePalma was the Kate Winslet of the culinary world, earning six James Beard Award nominations for the honor of Outstanding Pastry Chef but never taking the cake. The seventh time, though, proved to be the ... er ... icing. We caught up with DePalma this morning to chat about victory, pastry, her battle with ovarian cancer and her boss, the boisterous Mario Batali (aka Mr. Fanta Pants).
What did it feel like to the finally win a James Beard Award? I tried not to break down into tears. I tried to keep myself together up there. After seven years, you try to emotionally turn yourself off. In past years I thought it was such a big deal to win, but it still felt good.
Is that why you were emotional on stage? That was part of it. It's also been a very tough year for me. I don't know if you know, I have been battling ovarian cancer. I was diagnosed four days after my sixth loss. I had a huge operation and went through chemo and lost all my hair. I am still in treatment. It was stage four. It was end of the line, but they got it all in surgery.
Hear why salted caramels should die and why DePalma is afraid to rock orange crocs after the jump.
On one of the first gorgeous Saturdays of the spring, did Brooklyn foodies run to the park for picnic lunches or line the bars for springy cocktails?
Sure, some of 'em did. But 3,000 others, according to organizers, crammed the multicolored '70s-esque hallways of John Jay High School, aka P.S. 321, for a day of workshops, eats, panels and vendors called the Brooklyn Food Conference, promoting what a bright-yellow pamphlet trumpeted as "Local Action for Global Change."
Food world celebs roaming the halls included chef Dan Barber, speaker and TV host Anna Lappé and author-activist Raj Patel (whose classroom was so stuffed a volunteer had to turn fans away). Some attendees, all of whom attended for free, were a bit starry-eyed over certain sustainably-minded speakers. About Patel, local CSA organizer Meredith Modzelewski sighed, "I'm in love with him now." Find out more and see photos after the jump.
We'll be live-Twittering tonight's James Beard Media Awards and Monday's Restaurant Awards, so follow along @slashfood. Meanwhile, snack on these links to the nominated articles, recipes, reviews, food sections, sites, blogs and books.
Journalism Awards
For articles published in English in 2008.
Newspaper Feature Writing About Restaurants And/Or Chefs
Sea urchins, on the face of it, are not likely candidates for the title of Sexiest Seafood. Their spiny shells make them look like porcupines of the sea, and give little hint of the outrageously creamy, briny decadence that they contain. But this saffron-hued roe, whose complex, salty-sweet-sharp flavor profile is beloved by chefs, is now making diners swoon.
David Chang has been using sea urchin roe on his menu at Momofuku Ssam Bar and Ko for a long while, and now Michael White is making them the star of his menu at his new restaurant, Marea. A great article tomorrow in WSJ. magazine provides a peek at both White's droolingly anticipated new restaurant and at sea urchin, which is pictured in all of its spiny, golden glory.
Learn about the delectably slimy urchins after the jump.
We can change the way we make eggs -- scrambled, poached, fried -- but what about changing the eggs themselves? Mix up your scrambling routine with quail eggs.
Until this Monday, 
We'll be
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