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kill / cook / eat

Mark Zuckerberg, foodie:

This year, my personal challenge is around being thankful for the food I have to eat. I think many people forget that a living being has to die for you to eat meat, so my goal revolves around not letting myself forget that and being thankful for what I have. This year I’ve basically become a vegetarian since the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself. So far, this has been a good experience. I’m eating a lot healthier foods and I’ve learned a lot about sustainable farming and raising of animals.

The clock is ticking on how long it will take an ambitious food entrepreneur to open the first “kill it, cook it, eat it” retail space in a major metropolitan area. It would be the natural evolution of urban food retail (i.e. wine bars, boutique grocers, cooking schools) and the local food movement: a clean, well-lit place where sophisticated urbanites can experience the guilt-wracked thrill of slaughtering their own chicken...and then poaching it in white wine.

To maximize site utilization, they’d offer a series of classes on sustainable urban farming, slaughtering techniques and best practices in home butchering. The space (with staff and animals) would be available after hours for private kill/cook/eat events, perfect for team building or birthday parties. And with the right set of equipment, kill/cook/eat could come to you, extending the “home-delivered meals” concept a bit further.

There’d be the obvious logistical challenges, of course – animal transportation, waste management, zoning, etc. But with the right branding, kill/cook/eat can command a significant price premium over other other urban food experiences. After all, it’s not about the meal, it’s about being more thankful for the food you have to eat.

achatz profile pieces

Two massive profiles of Alinea's Grant Achatz, one in the Chicago Tribune that (finally) passes the torch to Achatz from Charlie Trotter, and one in the New York Times that compares Achatz to Michelangelo and his business partner Nick Kokonas to Medici. Sure, both pieces are full of hyperbole. But go eat at Alinea and tell me it isn't earned.

where to eat in half moon bay

Yesterday we threw the kids in the car (not quite literally) and after dropping extended family at SFO trekked across 92 to Half Moon Bay. Yes, it was cold and rainy. But we needed to get the munchkins out of the house before they destroyed it. And each other. And us.

Before leaving, I emailed friend of the show and HMB resident Andrew Anker and asked him for some restaurant recommendations. He came through with a great list, and in the spirit of service blogging he's posted it to quid.pro: 7 Places to Eat in Half Moon Bay. It's a good list, and more proof that top tens are so over.

scharffenberger tofu

John Scharffenberger (just typing the name makes my mouth water...) is now CEO of Hodo Soy Beanery, "an artisan food factory that makes products from organic, non-GMO soybeans."

Prediction: gourmet tofu will go mainstream in the next 24 months.

i am not a food blogger

But I'm a blogger who likes food. And this week I had three dishes at three restaurants in New York that are worth mentioning.

1. The filetti pizza at Motorino Pizza in the East Village. People in SF's East Bay (including me!) love to talk about how great the pizza is there (and it is!) but the filetti at Motorino's on Monday night was delicious. (Of course the food geeks at the table told me that the guy that used to be there (Anthony Mangieri -- who appears to be more than a little obsessive about pizza) is coming to San Francisco. Which is good.)

2. The breakfast potatoes at Markt in the Flatiron district. I had these on my last trip, and had forgotten about them. But when my eggs, potatoes and toast arrived this morning, I remembered. Delicious, with the right amount of peppers and onions layered on top.

3. The tagliatelle with meat sauce at Il Bastardo, again in the flatiron district. Il Bastardo is one of those places you'd probably walk right by, especially if you're a real food blogger. And the place itself is one of those cavernous places that probably had its back room rented out more often than not in the go go days, and is open until 4 am for the clubbers, but their taglietelle was great. The pasta was perfectly cooked, with a generous helping of just-sweet-enough meat sauce. Paired with an unknown sangiovese, it hit the spot.

There you go! Now I'm a food blogger.

restaurants should do the math for you

So I can't believe I haven't blogged about this before, because every time I'm out with a group of friends for lunch or dinner I'm reminded of this idea...and then proceed to bore my dining companions with it. But here it is.

Problem: Deciding how much everyone owes for a group meal -- especially when there's a gratuity calculation is involved -- is hard. Well, not "eliminating our dependence on foreign oil with nucular energy" hard, but you know, hard in the way that "math" is hard....especially when said mathemeticians have had a few.

Solution: Restaurant checks should do the math for you, in a simple and straightforward way.

Imagine a restaurant check that looked like this:

Subtotal:         $210.00

Tip:          ___________

Total:        ___________

A 20% tip would be $42, for a total
of $252.  I counted 4 people in your
party, which would come to $63 per 
person.

Thanks!

Look, simple math! Isn't this what the future's supposed to be, fancy calculating machines doing the hard work for us? (And I'm not talking about that tip calculator iPhone app you paid $0.99 for.)

Two more things to note...

• There's no need to get too clever, and attempt to provide an exact accounting per diner based on what they order. This is already clever enough.
• There's potential upside for restaurants and their staff. Take the example above, where the tab with a 20% tip comes to $63 per person. Which means that some will inevitably just round that up to the bills they have on hand. If all four diners here leave $65 instead of $63, that's an extra $8 in gratuity, raising the tip from 20% to almost 24%).

OK then, got that idea out of my head. Now when I'm out with folks I can annoy them not only with the story, but also with the tagline "And oh! I blogged about this...didn't you read that post?"

grant achatz on creativity

From his intro to the Alinea Cookbook.

People like to think the creative process is romantic. The artist drifts to sleep at night, to be awakened by the subliminal echoes of his or her next brilliant idea. The truth, for me at least, is that creativity is primarily the result of hard work and study. The light bulb goes off unexpectedly at times, a consequence of associating everything I see, smell, hear and touch to food. ... The smell of a woman's perfume leads me to construct a dish around the emotionally powerful aspect of scent. And the accidental shattering of a wineglass makes me wonder how I can make raspberry that fragile. But more often, the new dishes I come up with are the product of methodology rather than inspiration.

More on the cookbook itself soon.

chefs and kitchen design

Metropolis has a great piece where some of the country's best chefs -- including Alice Waters, Grant Achatz and Wylie Dufresne -- talk about their kitchens. Here's a snippet from Waters on Chez Panisse...

Architects really need to think about all the waste a restaurant creates. That relates completely to an important part of the restaurant -- welcoming the suppliers into the kitchen. I'm obsessed with the fact that the back of the house has to be as beautiful as the front.

And Achatz on the process of designing the Alinea kitchen...

When I had the opportunity to build my own kitchen, I thought, Hey, let's wipe our heads clean of conventional kitchen design. I'd worked at the French Laundry, Charlie Trotter's, Trio, so of course I grew up in kitchens, and it shocked me that they were all kind of designed the same. Everyone followed each other.

I felt like nobody really looked at the food, which was a great irony of kitchen design. No one really looked at the style of cooking they were going to do and designed the kitchen around that. We were like, "Let's really look at the food and decide, based on the style of cooking, what we need. What do we need as far as equipment? What do we need as far as space?"

achatz on the alinea book

Via Alaina Browne, Gourmet has a great conversation between Grant Achatz, the chef at Alinea, and Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck.  A lot of the conversation revolved around the Alinea Book that Achatz and crew are self-publishing through Ten Speed Press. Blumenthal asked Achatz if self-publishing is helping to keep the price of the book down, and the response is worth quoting at length...

GA: Yeah, basically—you are the one controlling costs, and you have the power to hire the photographers you want and the writers you want. But ultimately we wanted it to be approachable on the price scale. If we make less money we make less money, but I wanted people to be able to pick it up. I think it would be great if we could get aggressive amateur cooks, and even people in the industry—it's priced at that point where it might infiltrate the market a bit more. It might educate people on what this cuisine is and why we do what we do. We focus in the book on dispelling some of the myths and some of the negativity that swirl around this type of cuisine. The critics are saying this is emotionless cuisine, it has no soul; so we're trying to combat those kinds of critiques, and when people get their hands on the book and read what we have to say, they might actually understand our cuisine a little better. It's worth the effort.

There's a lot to chew on in this discussion (ed.: seriously? chew on? bad pun), from the economics of publishing to the interpretation of the term "molecular gastronomy." Go read.

clever clever

File under I Wish I'd Thought of That: Vampire Cupcakes.

i want to try

In the Serious Eats Talk section flye3076 posts the simple statement "I want to try ______________." The community's dishing up fantastic responses; from Cabesa tacos to tupelo honey to guedeck clam to this gem: 

Hmmm. Good question. I suppose I'm waiting on someone in the Bay Area to offer fresh, live cobra that they'll pull from a cage, flay, cut the still-beating heart out of and serve to me in a shot glass of rotgut 'whiskey.'

dishing on l.a.

Michael Bauer (SF Chron food critic) visits LA and manages to dismiss an entire city full of restaurants in 500ish words.  "In the Bay Area, food is the driving force of successful restaurants. But in L.A., instead of paying attention to what's on the plate, just about everyone is rubbernecking to see who's in the house."

this is awful

Chef Grant Achatz of Alinea has been diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma of the mouth.   His statement:

I wanted to personally report that I have been very recently diagnosed with an advanced stage of Squamous Cell Carcinoma of the mouth. I have consulted several prominent physicians and will likely begin aggressive treatment within the next few weeks. I remain, and will remain, actively and optimistically engaged in operations at Alinea to the largest extent possible. Alinea will continue to perform at the level people have come to expect from us -- I insist on that. I have received amazing support from friends, family, and everyone who has thus far been told of the disease, and I look forward to a full, cancer-free, recovery.

michael mina

From the Chronicle pre-opening review of Michael Mina:   "It's as if every other chef has been playing checkers and Mina is playing 3-D chess."

confit byaldi

Thomas Keller's recipe for ratatouille; the one they make in the film.  Would be a great project with the kids after we go see the flick.

like butter

Cholesterol levels be damned:  if you're after that perfect steakhouse crust, what's wrong with a spreading a layer of butter on your steak?

well edited breakfast tacos

Via Ben and Mena, this outtake from the Sin City DVD of Robert Rodriguez cooking breakfast tacos is the most well-edited cooking video I've ever seen. You'll never again want to eat store bought tortillas after this.

naming by pairing

Via Serious Eats, this Kerry Miller Business Week piece on San Francisco's Amazing Food Wine Company's new wine brand, "Wine That Loves," which labels bottles by the food they should be paired with.  Think "Wine That Loves Pasta with Tomato Sauce."

A little Googling turned up a great post on Wine That Loves at Brand Autopsy, with this comment from Paul Williams of Idea Sandbox:

What's ballsy is that Amazing Food Wine is willing to let these particular wines stand for only one thing (pizza for one, chicken for the other). Most marketers would want to put the 20-items that their product pairs with... "Geez, aren't we leaving money on the table if people only buy the 'pizza wine?' when they have pizza?"

Would love to hear what our friends down at Vintage Berkeley think of this...

alinea tops gourmet's list

Congrats to Grant Aschatz and my friend Nick Kokonas of Chicago's Alinea for topping Gourmet's list of the 50 best restaurants in America (via Megnut).

I had the privilege of eating there this summer (eating's not really the right word for it...and I've been called pretentious but I'm not quite pretentious enough to use the verb "to dine"), and enjoyed (again...with Alinea "experienced" is probably the better word) the best meal of my life.  And then the next day Nick and I grabbed lunch and he told the greatest stories about meeting Chef Aschatz, lining up investors, renovating the building[1], marketing the concept, etc. I couldn't be happier for Nick and crew -- they've built something truly amazing in an incredibly short period of time.

[1] If you ever meet Nick, ask him to tell you the story of how he tiled the entryway basement of the restaurant himself in one all-nighter, just to show his contractor that "this is what it means to get shit done."

slugworth!

And now for something completely different, Hershey announced yesterday that they're buying Berkeley-based Scharffen Berger.  I'm anxiously awaiting the Berkeley City Council measure that will officially condemn the sale of the gourmet chocolatier to corporate shills that exploit children by selling them non-organic snacks laden with refined sugar and saturated fats.

I haven't been on the Scharffen Berger tour, but I hear there may be a chocolate waterfall involved.