"review" news and stories

Ever since anonymous masses were granted the power to push a "publish" button, there's been debate over the validity of consumer-generated restaurant reviews. Fueling the skeptical fire early this month, Time's NewsFeed blog reported on a restaurant in Chicago that received a poor review on Yelp before the restaurant even opened.

According to Sylvia Rector, a Free Press restaurant critic on Freep.com, people who frequently use these types of sites "develop a critical eye for reviews, factoring in the writer's experience and history." Besides poorly informed bloggers, one should be especially wary of phony reviewers like PR people, competing restaurants and other biased parties. So what should you look for?

"If a restaurant opens and gets three or four glowing reviews the first day," Rector says, "you have to wonder if they were written by the owner's friends and relatives." Also, question reviews that are outdated (restaurants do change), those that are "different from most other comments" or those "with an absence of specifics." You can't drop a bomb without a reason -- if the food was intolerable, why? If a review is particularly out of place, check the poster's profile or other reviews he or she made on the site.

Padma, Gail, Tom, Mark Peel and the troops. Photo: Bravo

Note to "Top Chef" editors: You fooled us. As with any reality show with a dozen-plus contestants, the ones who get the most face time in the early episodes are usually the superstars, or the ones who'll be packing their knives and going home.

By that logic, perma-cryer Jesse -- who managed the ignominious feat of having the lowest scores in the previous two episodes -- was marked for doom this week. But at least she owned her status -- or lack of it -- as the loser of last night's quickfire challenge: "I'm on the bottom again -- balls!"

Frank Bruni reviews the Choco Taco. Video: ABC's Nightline.

As we mentioned last week, outgoing Times critic Frank Bruni will be on ABC's Nightline this evening, talking about his childhood bulimia and taking down the Choco Taco.

"I believe that food that rhymes is almost always better than food that doesn't rhyme, don't you?" he says in the outtake released to the press, in which he calls a reporter "namby-pamby" for ordering a soft-serve ice cream cone instead of his own adventurous "South of the Border" choice.

Who knows if new national critic Sam Sifton will have Bruni's talent with one-liners, but we do know that, after reading this morning's (very accurate) description of the dinner review process, we will miss him: About a woman who "fumed" if her steak arrived at the table already cut, he writes, "People are as strange about eating as they are about love. They want what they want."

Perhaps our favorite description, though, is of those who just don't eat. One friend demanded that they order a fatty porterhouse with fries, and then "She commenced such frantic knife and fork movements that a veritable cloud of dust rose around her -- I was reminded of a Road Runner cartoon. When the dust settled 15 minutes later, I took a close look at her plate, and almost nothing was missing. The food had just been reconstituted and rearranged, a Picasso of its former self."

If this is the stuff of his new memoir, we'll be reading it.

Photo: Amazon.com

'The Great Big Butter Cookbook'
Edited by Diana von Glahn
Running Press -- 2007
Buy it on Amazon

Not unlike meat, butter has gone through a renaissance of late. Scorned as recently as a few years ago, it's now being embraced. And as anyone who has tucked into a bar of European butter lately knows, it's good stuff.

"The Great Big Butter Cookbook," then, with its cover glowing with orbs of golden goodness, is a heart-stopping sight in the best of ways. Any book that has "Because Everything's Better with Butter" as its subtitle makes a great first impression.

Unfortunately, as we flipped through its pages to see recipes for Microwave Cheesy Potato Soup, Broccoli and Cheddar Soup and the frightening-looking, bright-yellow Double Cheese Souper Bowl, all of which glow golden with butter and cheese, we started thinking that maybe there can be too much of a good thing. A quick peek at the copyright reveals that, hmm, this book is copyrighted by the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board.

See what we tested and whether you should buy the book after the jump.

Some cooks reach for Sriracha, the ubiquitous Thai hot sauce, in a pinch. Others swear by soy sauce. And then there are those who refuse to reveal (*cough, cough* butter) what made the dish you just demolished delicious. For our part, we've developed a tiny -- OK, midsized -- crush on an infused chili oil, and we need to talk about it.

Sid Wainer & Son's Domaine de Provence pepper-spiked oil is fantastic. A drizzle of the fiery goodness rescues storebought and homemade guacamole alike with a heady, late-blooming heat on the palate. According to owner Henry Wainer, it's also tasty on bruschetta. We plan to carry it on our person all summer -- potentially awkward in the 90-degree swelter -- using guerilla tactics to douse any crustaceans and pork we spy sizzling on the grills of party hosts. (Brooklyn, consider yourself warned.)

Wainer has been equally passionate about the oil since meeting its producer at a dinner in France 18 years ago. Such culinary serendipity, he declares, "enriches the world." Can't argue with that.