Beware! Allergens abound at most eateries. Photo: Dan4th/ Flickr
Hanna Raskin's first waitressing job was at a small Greek diner in Michigan. In the 15 years since, she's worked at a chop suey joint in Mississippi, an exclusive Arizonan country club, a vegetarian eatery and an Irish pub. She currently picks up odd shifts at a seafood eatery in the North Carolina mountains, where she cracks crab legs for helpless tourists. This is the second in a series of posts.
My mother, who has a severe shellfish allergy, hasn't tasted seafood since the Eisenhower administration. Since she hasn't a clue whether crustaceans are salty, sweet or sour, she suspects they're lurking everywhere on the menu: "Now, does this cheesecake have any shellfish?" she'll ask her very patient server.
As a kid, I cringed at my mom's fastidiousness. Because really, who would put shrimp in granola? But with chefs now fusing ingredients at a breakneck pace and food allergies multiplying at an unprecedented rate, my mother isn't the only one asking. Twelve million Americans suffer from food allergies, and they're demanding that restaurants accommodate them.
The Westport Flea Market's Burgermobile. Photo: Emily Farris
"Hey, that's a nice truck!" a young boy yelled at Joe Zwillenberg as he tried to park his Burgermobile at a dog show last weekend. "Where'd you get it?"
Zwillenberg didn't hear the boy. He was too busy concentrating on parking the thing. "I gotta be careful," he said. "I don't wanna scrape the bun."
Well, kid, if you're reading this, the Burgermobile is from New York City. When visiting the Big Apple in April, Zwillenberg -- the owner of Kansas City, Mo.'s Westport Flea Market Bar and Grill -- met artist Matt Targon, who specializes in promotional vehicles. While discussing Zwillenberg's business, Targon declared he'd always wanted to make a burger car. After a little negotiating, Targon told Zwillenberg, "I'm going to make you the best hamburger vehicle ever."
As far as K.C. residents are concerned, mission accomplished. Since arriving in the city's Westport neighborhood earlier this month, the Burgermobile has captured the attention of nearly every passerby, as well as their cameras. It's exactly what Zwillenberg had in mind.
Lonesome Valley's Canyon Kitchen. Photo courtesy of Lonesome Valley
With the competition to sell exclusive mountain lots becoming increasingly cutthroat, developers have begun using black-eyed peas and collard greens to lure prospective buyers through their gates.
Planned communities in the Southeast have long relied on free rounds of golf, celebrity appearances and swanky wine-and-cheese soirees to show off their properties. But Lonesome Valley, an 800-acre spread in Cashiers, N.C., is perhaps the first development to acknowledge the quickest way to a Southern land hunter's wallet is through his stomach: The development last month unveiled Canyon Kitchen, a weekends-only restaurant helmed by superstar chef John Fleer.
"We have 200 lots here and about 50 that we've sold," explains food and beverage manager Sallie Peterkin. "So we've invited the public. We've got reservations coming out of our ears."
Ubuntu Sommelier Daniel Sarao Photo: Michelle Branton
At Ubuntu, Napa Valley's acclaimed vegetarian restaurant slash yoga studio, it falls to wine director and general manager Daniel Sarao to find harmony between the lush bounty of on-site gardens and a vino list sparkling with biodynamic sips.
The son of Italian immigrants who taught him an appreciation for wine, Sarao put himself through college and grad school working at restaurants, cutting short a trajectory towards a liberal arts Ph.D. for the life of a full-time oenophile. We chatted with him about the myths around pairing wine with veggies (yes, you can drink red!), the wonders of caramelizing and five inexpensive summer sippers to pair with grilled veggies.
Are you a vegetarian? I am not a vegetarian. The chef is not a vegetarian and neither is the owner. But we believe that vegetables can stand on their own. We are breaking the stereotype.
How much of what you serve comes from your garden? Right now we get about 75 to 80 percent of our ingredients from [our garden]. Our goal is to get almost everything from there. It makes an amazing difference. Squash and peppers are [in season] right now.
Learn more, plus five great wines for under $25 to pair with vegetable dishes, after the jump.
Hanna Raskin's first waitressing job was at a small Greek diner in Michigan. In the 15 years since, she's worked at a chop suey joint in Mississippi, an exclusive Arizonan country club, a vegetarian eatery and an Irish pub. She currently picks up odd shifts at a seafood eatery in the North Carolina mountains, where she cracks crab legs for helpless tourists. This is the first in a series of posts.
The first time I saw a fellow server settle into a booth with her customers while taking orders, I was seriously concerned.
I was a veteran of both high- and low-end cuisine, but had never seen such a thing. I immediately assumed she was too tired to carry on, and never suspected she was angling for a better tip.
As folks who ate out in the early 1990s may recall, researchers discovered in 1993 that sitting down with customers -- like drawing a smiley face on the bill or wearing a flower in one's hair -- was a sure route to a bigger tip.
Just as the nation's gourmands have reached consensus on the superiority of country ham (the traditionally dry-cured hind hog quarter considered by some to be the culinary equal of Italy's prosciutto), one leading exemplar of Southern dining has practically shunted the dish off its menu.
Country ham is still available at Dillard House, the venerable North Georgia boardinghouse that's been overfeeding diners since 1915, but it's no longer among the dozens of all-you-can-eat plates automatically placed on every table. In the culinary equivalent of appointing a new porcine first chair, the restaurant has put sugar-cured "city" ham on its default dish list.
"We still have the country ham in the back for the old-timers who ask for it," a server told us when we visited last month. "But most people today seem to like the sugar-cured."
Food snobs who typically ignore the scattered, smothered and covered charms of Southern greasy spoons have begun flocking to former Waffle Houses, partaking of the latest trend in start-up eateries down South.
A new generation of enterprising chefs is taking refuge in the abandoned shells of retired chain restaurants, realizing their edible ambitions in the very spaces where truckers once drank too much black coffee and elderly women paid for their grilled cheese sandwiches in change. Formidable Mexican, Thai and Italian restaurants have taken up residence where eggs and hash browns once reigned.
The Southeast is dotted with former Waffle Houses and Huddle Houses (WH's cut-rate cousin), their industrial-strength kitchens still very much intact. For restaurateurs with limited budgets and a boundless appreciation of late-night Dixie dining culture, the allure is irresistible.
During their trip to New York this weekend, the Obamas dined at Blue Hill. To gastronomes in the New York metropolitan area, Blue Hill has long been synonymous with all things local, organic, humane, refined and good in the dining world.
So it was little surprise that bloggers and commentators jumped all over the Obama's choice of venue, analyzing the meaning and the message of their meal. Frank Bruni opined on the New York Times' Diner's Journal blog that Blue Hill was "the proper ethical call, the proper message to send, the proper restaurant segue from the planting of the White House garden."
But Blue Hill, as Bruni also pointed out, happens to be one of New York's most critically lauded restaurants, so it's not as if the Obamas were exactly sacrificing pleasure for politics.
Still, out of the many, many high-end restaurants that the Obamas could have chosen to patronize, there are relatively few that are so closely associated with the kind of sustainable and progressive eating that the First Lady championed with the planting of the White House garden.
The pick appears to be further evidence of the research that the Obamas have seemingly put into their food choices -- and further evidence of the food world's willingness to analyze the President's every bite, be it of hamburger, chili, or, yes, an impeccably fresh and impeccably local carrot.
'Carmine's Family-Style Cookbook: More Than 100 Classic Italian Dishes to Make at Home' Recipes by Michael Ronis with Mary Goodbody Photographs by Alex Martinez St. Martin's Press -- 2008 Buy it on Amazon
In the increasingly refined and innovative world of New York Italian restaurants, Carmine's remains proudly devoted to its red-sauce roots. It's a loud place with large portions and a complete lack of pretension: you'd just as soon find a foam or amuse bouche on its menu as you would a loaf of Irish soda bread or bowl of borscht. The focus is on Southern Italian food like grandma used to make -- think meatballs the size of a baby's head, shrimp scampi and garlic bread, not bruschetta.
It follows that the restaurant's laid-back, welcoming style would translate to its companion cookbook: "We hope," the introduction states, that the book's pages "will soon be stained with red sauce, dribbles of olive oil and sticky fingerprints, all happy accidents as you discover our recipes."
This is a cookbook meant for weeknight family dinners and large gatherings, or any event, really, that calls for large helpings of comfort food. Flipping through it is a bit like visiting the Italian American Culinary Hall of Fame: Look, it's Meatball Heroes! And over there, Penne Alla Vodka! Long time, no see, Shrimp Fra Diavolo! They're all here, and they're all eager to please.
See what we tested and whether the book's worth buying after the jump.
To much of the country, charismatic Food Network star and restaurateur Emeril Lagasse has become, well, just another household name. But in Bethlehem, Pa., tucked in the foothills of the state's Pocono Mountains, Emeril has become a culinary heartthrob whose embrace has sent the locals into a frenzy.
For the residents of this overhauled steel town already gaga over the coming of its first casino, the addition of Emeril's Chophouse side-by-side with the slots is a coup. After all, the Yankee (he hails from Fall River, Mass.) bypassed New York City (where he has a second home) and Boston (an hour from his birthplace) for "Christmas City" to house his first northeast eatery.
The Bam! man was on hand Tuesday for a media luncheon, and is currently in Bethlehem overseeing a test run of his 230-seat restaurant for its sold-out Friday opening. Located inside an old steel mill building, the restaurant is fittingly outfitted with cast-iron steel flourishes and a menu combining Emeril's bayou style with the no nonsense meat and potato sensibilities of the region: "We are very sensitive to the market no matter where we are," he told us.
Chantelle Pabros, a sommelier at Chicago's L20, is widely considered a rising star of the wine universe. Entrenched among oenophiles since leaving high school, at a mere 26 she has worked alongside world-renowned talent including chef Laurent Gras at his seafood-centric eatery. Though Chantelle has few hard and fast rules about pairing wine with food, she offered a couple tips as we head into prime grilling season. We caught up with her this afternoon to talk burgers and vino.
Do you think burgers and wine go together? Yes, absolutely. Though we don't have burgers [at L20], I like pairing wine with them. There is this place here called Kuma's Corner. We normally drink beer there, but I am thinking about the possibilities of wines with their burgers.
How does one go about pairing the two? With pairing, things that you think would go well don't always go. It's trial and error. I start by thinking about the classic burger, cooked medium rare with really fresh lettuce, tomato, onion and a really intense mustard. Chantelle's five under-$25 burger-friendly wines 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.
Wednesday's episode of the New York City public radio show Soundcheck examined the cacophonous issue of music in restaurants -- which is certainly not a local issue.
Open kitchens and lively bar scenes increasingly come with a soundtrack, but what's music to one diner's ears is cause for another's indigestion. Restaurateurs argue that music plays a crucial role in defining an eatery's image: A shared plate of oysters is that much more romantic when accompanied by Nina Simone's velvet vocal stylings, while a late-night hamburger date might be enhanced by the moral motif of Kelly Clarkson's "I Do Not Hook Up."
But when does a restaurant's choice of tunes cross that delicate line between agreeable background noise and ear-bleeding annoyance? Is a little music always preferable to dead silence (punctuated only by the sounds of chewing and murmured conversation)? Does a restaurant's choice of music influence your decision to eat there? Or is it less the choice than the decibel level that shapes your experience? And, most importantly, who do you want to provide the soundtrack for that late-night burger?
He may be the David Chang of the West Coast. At 29 (two years younger than Sir David) Nate Appleman of A16 and SPQR is on the verge of opening an A16 offshoot in Tokyo, a new restaurant in San Francisco, has penned an award-winning cookbook and been showered with praise. Now, after three years on the nominee list, he is the owner of the Rising Star Chef James Beard Award. We caught up with Appleman yesterday afternoon to chat about his wayward childhood, why he lives in California, whole animals and his favorite kitchen utensil -- a bloody cleaver.
What did it feel like to finally win? The third time is the charm. It was incredible. It was kind of all surreal.
How did it feel when you were passed over for the second time? It was disappointing, but I thought, I got next year. (A Rising Star must be 30 or under.) What's it like to be the only non-New Yorker to win a national award? That's a huge, huge honor. It's not a secret that the awards are New York-dominated. To win from being outside of New York makes it that much sweeter.
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.
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.
During their trip to New York this weekend, the Obamas dined at 
'Carmine's Family-Style Cookbook: More Than 100 Classic Italian Dishes to Make at Home'
To much of the country, charismatic Food Network star and 
He may be the 
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