"restaurants" news and stories

Hey, Stella!: You made it into the 2010 Fine Dining Hall of Fame from Nation's Restaurant News. Joining Stella -- Times-Picayune critic Brett Anderson's favorite upscale dining spot in New Orleans -- are Chicago's perennial winner-of-awards, Alinea (best restaurant in America, according to Gourmet, in 2006), with Grant Achatz (above) named Outstanding Chef of 2008 by the James Beard Foundation); Melisse, Josiah Citrin's seminal French dining room in Santa Monica; and Thomas Keller's New York Haute spot, Per Se.

Hey, Lidia, you got an award, too. Lidia Bastianich, that is -- host of TV's Lidia's Italy and owner of New York's Felidia restaurant, was honored as a Fine Dining Legend by the magazine.

Once again, longtime restaurateur Mildred Pierce walked away with nothing, making her the Susan Lucci of the resto biz.

Move over Portland, Seattle and Boston, you bastions of tree-hugging, earth-friendly eco-action. It's official. The greenest restaurant in America is in Omaha, Nebraska. That's right...Omaha.

The restaurant, The Grey Plume, was crowned by the Green Restaurant Association (GRA) after they broke two GRA records. It's the first restaurant in the country to meet the association's SustainaBuild standard, and has accumulated the most GRA points to-date of the nearly 315 restaurants participating in the certification program.

According to chef Clayton Chapman, those greening efforts included specifics like the installation of energy efficient lighting, construction of the bar, booths, doors, flooring and more from renewable or reclaimed wood; using compostable or recycled material in to-go packaging; integrating a full-scale recycling and composting program, and much more.

While some green-facility advocates say the greenest building is one that's already in existence, Chapman says the restaurant's initiatives were made possible because they're part of Omaha's new Midtown Crossing project.

"In order to do what we did, you have to start from scratch," says Chapman. "Our sustainability efforts were things we were going to do whether we were certified or not, but certification keeps everyone honest, and helped us implement all these green initiatives -- everything from sourcing things like soda to recycled drywall."

If dining out with your baby has left you wondering if the kids will be in high school before you can enjoy a peaceful restaurant meal, check out the advice from our friends at TheStir. They've laid down five rules that will help you decide where, when, and how to make an away-from-home meal with kids a lot less stressful. For one, don't decide to try the latest four-star chef's place with your pride and joy in tow. Of course you want to expose your children to great cooking at an early age, but maybe baby doesn't want to sit through a seven-course tasting menu. If he could actually do that it might be a matter for the Guinness Book of Records. Visit TheStir for more great tips.

If you look solely at the fish we consume here in America, we're a predictable crowd. Since at least 2001, shrimp, canned tuna and salmon have placed first, second and third on the "Top 10 Consumed Seafoods" list published by the National Fisheries Institute every single year. Yawners. (Plus, tuna used in canning, other than albacore and skipjack, is overfished.) But according to a Wall Street Journal story, chefs are increasingly turning to undervalued species as a way to keep the menu interesting, and possibly quell demands placed on other overfished species.

Take cuttlefish, for example, which is cut into strips and paired with a flatiron steak at Miami's Area 31, while sheepshead (a fish known for its human-like teeth) is on the board at nearby AltaMare. Other chefs are turning to finfish like pompano, golden tilefish, triggerfish or hogfish. The BP oil spill played a role in the fish swapping as well. At New Orleans-based Cafe Atchafalaya, North Carolina rockfish was used as a substitute for their traditional redfish and crawfish-stuffed flounder.

"In general, expanding the base of fish from which we choose from is a very good idea," says Tim Fitzgerald, marine scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund. "One caveat, though, is if we switch a lot of our sourcing to less common or overfished species, or those that are farmed in destructive ways, that's not a good thing. But if we can identify species of fish that have healthy populations and can withstand the extra demand, that's wonderful."

This weekend, there's going to be a 10-foot pastrami sandwich at the Brooklyn Flea, but, despite the fast-food bigger-is-better craze, no one will dare you to eat it. This inedible behemoth is the latest structure from New York artist and School of Visual Arts professor Kevin O'Callaghan, and that meat is all rubber. That tooth-pick tassel? It's made from old menus. Your old take-out menus, in fact.

The unveiling of the large-scale piece, along with a 10-foot packet of take-out essentials (utensils, condiments, napkin), is the end of a week-long press run for SeamlessWeb.com, the international online food-delivery and takeout site. Their new campaign involves the slogan "(Less Paper) More Eat," and a big red truck circling the city to collect consumers' old menus. In exchange, you get a fortune cookie with a redemption code to use on the site's 5,000 featured restaurants in 27 cities across the U.S, as well as in London. And they've enlisted O'Callaghan to turn those paper menus into a piece of art. (FYI, he also designed the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards and is the subject of the newly released book, Monumental: The Reimagined World of Kevin O'Callaghan, which chronicles his long career.)