→ April 30, 2008
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Mesa Grill.

Friday afternoon found me in Manhattan, and I had about a 45-minute window for lunch while I was downtown, so I decided to fulfill a long-standing goal and headed to Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill. Overall, I was quite impressed, especially after the disappointment of Mario Batali’s Otto last year.

I sat at the bar and asked the bartender which fish dish he would recommend; without hesitating, he pointed to the ancho chile-honey glazed salmon. It was, as promised, outstanding. The salmon was covered with an ancho chile rub, seared, then glazed with honey and roasted. The three sauces (a spicy black bean sauce, an unidentified sauce that seemed to be based on roasted peppers, and a jalapeño crema) were all layered underneath the fish, so I could start by tasting the fish on its own and then add sauces to my liking. The spicy black bean sauce was the best option, spicy but not hot, with an earthy flavor that helped offset the spiciness both of the sauce and the rub. The crema was the worst, with almost no flavor, like little dollops of bland crème fraiche. The salmon was prepared medium-rare, slightly below where I like it, but the fish was incredibly fresh.

The pre-meal bread options are a bit different. One was a very plain, fresh white-flour roll, good because it was still warm, but otherwise not bringing much to the table taste-wise. The other was a corn muffin, although that doesn’t give you much of a feel for it. It was cornbread, shaped like a muffin, packed with yellow corn, made mostly with stone-ground blue cornmeal, with flecks of bell and jalapeño peppers, dense and moist and definitely heavy on the fat (which keeps a muffin or cake moist). I had a hard time getting through the entire muffin, although I toughed it out in the end.

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→ April 16, 2008
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Kentucky eats.

Food notes from about 24 hours on the ground in Kentucky…

Ramsey’s Diner is a local Lexington chain promising home-cooked meat and three meals, but it couldn’t have been more of a letdown. I went with the pot roast, which is the type of slow-cooked dish in which meat and three restaurants specialize, and chose pinto beans, fried okra, and mashed potatoes as sides. Nothing, and I mean nothing, was good. Everything except the small cornbread stick lacked salt. The pot roast was dry, tasteless, and grey, and they skipped the critical step of browning the meat before braising it. The mashed potatoes tasted cheap and thin. The okra missed the salt most sorely. And the cornbread stick was dry enough to use as a bat in the world’s smallest game of baseball. The only minor pleasure of the meal was dessert, as Ramsey’s serves pies from Missy’s, which is apparently a local pie-shop icon. I went with chocolate meringue over coconut, fearing the coconut might be sickly-sweet, and the chocolate was in fact quite sweet, but at least the custard brought a strong chocolate flavor (milk chocolate, but I’m trying to be positive here), and it was topped with a generous quantity of meringue.

For breakfast the next morning I wanted to see downtown Lexington, so I went to Tolly-Ho’s, allegedly a UK institution. The food sucked, which is all you need to know about Tolly-Ho’s. Fortunately, I was a few minutes’ drive from Spalding’s Bakery, established 1929, and was fortunate enough to walk in when a batch of glazed donuts had just come out of the fryer. One was enough, sixty cents’ worth of golden brown deliciousness, not too airy, with a real crust to its exterior. The selection is limited so I imagine it’s hit or miss, and it’s not a typical donut shop serving coffees and lattes, but that donut was worth the little drive. It’s across from the Jif peanut-butter plant (I was surprised not to see giant tanks of corn syrup on the property) on US-60.

I had a little time to kill before going to back to the Louisville airport, courtesy of a high school coach in Tennessee who decided at the last minute to skip his top pitcher’s start this week, so I drove to Louisville and went to Mark’s Feed Store for lunch. Mark’s is another local chain, but the food was better than the food at Ramsey’s. They specialize in barbecue; for $8, I got the small babyback ribs platter – I was still full of donut at that point, three hours after eating the thing – which was four ribs and two sides. The ribs had a thick bark on the outside and were basted in a mild barbecue sauce that was a little sweet, but not Tennessee-sweet, but I found the meat to be a little bit dry. To be fair, I was there after the lunch rush, and it’s possible that I ended up with meat that wasn’t fresh out of the smoker. The “smoky beans” were too sugary but had a good texture, and their green beans side comes with pulled pork mixed into it rather than bacon or ham hock. They serve burgoo, a Kentucky specialty stew that is traditionally made with some unusual meats, like squirrel, but I asked the server what was in it and she said pork and beef and other less interesting types of animal. Also, the meal came with one piece of grilled white bread. I have never quite understood the purpose of that, although I’ve seen it many times at southern Q joints. Is it just a side? Am I supposed to construct some sort of open-faced sandwich? Of all the starches in the world to serve, soft white bread was the choice? If I’m in the Say-uth and I’m having some sort of baked flour product, I want biscuits or cornbread. Or both, which, after all, is the #1 reason to visit a Cracker Barrel. White bread? Toasted on a flat-top grill? I just don’t understand.

Finally, I should mention two places at Logan Airport in Terminal A, which is the Delta terminal. There’s a Legal Seafood Test Kitchen which has some interesting dishes at double-digit dollar prices, but I didn’t see much that appealed to me. I did like what I ordered: a crab-meat club sandwich, with a generous portion of shredded crab meat (I can never remember which part of the crab that’s from, but it’s not lump meat), a couple of thick slices of bacon, and lettuce on brioche bread. There’s barely any mayonnaise on the sandwich – just enough to hold the crab meat together between the slices of bread – and it’s a good-sized portion. The other place, Lucky’s Lounge, is a culinary disaster, and there’s a nonzero chance I got a mild case of food poisoning from eating there. So you might want to skip that place.

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→ April 9, 2008
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Florida panhandle eats.

On the heels of a rainout at FSU, I had dinner at the bar at Cypress, a fine-dining restaurant in downtown Tallahassee. I decided to go tapas-style and order three starters as my meal, two of which were excellent.

I began with the salad special, local organic baby spinach with red onion, goat cheese, and candied pecans, served with a poppyseed vinaigrette and topped with duck confit. I left a few poppyseeds. The duck confit was outstanding – not that I’ve ever had bad duck confit – while the spinach leaves were very fresh and unbelievably green. All the dish lacked was a little heat, because it hit so many other dimensions of flavor, from the sweetness of the pecans to the tang/acidity of the cheese and the vinaigrette to the slight bitterness in the spinach.

The second dish was a blue crab cake tower, with two crab cakes, each sitting on a tostone, then stacked on top of each other, with a jicama-melon salsa on top and a smoked onion-jalapeño tartar sauce on the bottom. The crab cakes weren’t made from lump meat, but that would be my only real complaint, as they still had great crab flavor and a red pepper kick, which was nicely complemented by the creaminess of the sauce and the faint sweetness of the melons in the salsa. The tostones were sort of irrelevant, since it required a lot of work to cut them into manageable pieces.

The last dish was a pecan-crusted quail which turned out to be a pecan-battered quail, and it was the one disappointment of the evening. The interior of the quail was undercooked, and while I know that game is typically served medium-rare, I find quail that’s cooked less than medium to be gamey in texture and flavor. The accompaniments lacked the balance of the earlier dishes, and the smoked tomato vinaigrette and sweet pickle relish created a rather low pH for the dish as a whole.

I loved the food but was most impressed by the little things at Cypress. They make their own breads in-house every morning; my bread basket had two miniature buttermilk biscuits as well as two pieces of a fantastic sponge bread, with a perfect crust and very soft interior. Because I said it was my first time at the restaurant, I received a “gift from the kitchen,” a watermelon shooter with diced heirloom strawberries and a hint of mint in the liquid. And most impressively, even though I didn’t complain at all about the quail, the bartender, Grant, took it off of my bill because he noticed how much food I left on the dish after practically licking the previous two plates clean. It was an unnecessary step but indicative of an awareness of the importance of customer service.

• I stayed in the Fort Walton Beach area Friday night after seeing a game in Niceville and got takeout from a little Thai place in Fort Walton called Thai House. The kitchen had just closed but they were willing to make me some pad thai to go, but I’m sorry to report that it had zero taste. I was a little put off when I discovered that it had no heat; I was asked how spicy I’d like it, and I said, “Just a little bit,” after which the woman who took my order said, “Mild.” That’s not the same thing to me, and what I got was mild, not a little bit spicy.
• On the drive from Niceville to Tallahassee, there ain’t much for lunch, so I stopped at a Sonny’s BBQ, which is a chain of Q joints I’ve seen all over Florida. Don’t waste your time. Their “signature” baby-back ribs had no flavor whatsoever, while the BBQ beans were almost as blah, and the corn bread was sickeningly sweet. The only acceptable item was the fried okra, straight out of the fryer with a crispy crust made with stone-ground cornmeal.
• I hit Paschal’s in the Atlanta airport for Sunday breakfast. I ordered their chicken hash, which is more of a stew with onions and chicken stock thickened with some form of starch, although it was pretty good even if it wasn’t really a hash. The main problem was the service, as the waitress screwed up two parts of my order, and the coffee, which was what my cousins in Italy call acqua sporca – dirty water, which I could see through when I held the glass mug up to the light.

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→ April 4, 2008
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Quick hit – Paschal’s at ATL.

So I’m in travel limbo here, waiting at Atlanta-Hartsfield on a connection that’s already delayed 90 minutes, which will mean I’ll be lucky to get to tonight’s high school game in time for the first pitch, but it did give me time for a proper lunch. I went to the Paschal’s full-service location in Terminal C, and by the depressed standard of airport food, it’s off the charts.

Paschal’s is an Atlanta institution, so applying my philosophy to always start with a signature dish when possible, I went with the fried chicken, getting sides of green beans and black-eyed peas. The dinner comes with a generic house salad and two mini-corn muffins for $9.95. The best part of the meal, unsurprisingly, was the corn muffins, made with stone-ground meal and little sugar, containing plenty of fat (I’m assuming butter, but it could have had some bacon fat mixed in). The fried chicken – a quarter-white, which was a small disappointment because I assumed it would be a quarter-dark – was perfectly cooked, not a bit dry, with a slightly salty crust that didn’t lose its crunch even after ten minutes. The black-eyed peas were delicious but I expected bits of salt pork or ham hock in the mix; the green beans were unremarkable. I also liked the sweet iced tea, even though I normally hate it because it’s too damn sweet. (I take my iced tea unsweetened with a squeeze of lemon.) This sweet tea was too damn sweet, but the flavor of the tea reminded me of Thai iced tea without the sweetened condensed milk. Total bill including a 20% tip was $15.20. I believe there is at least one other Paschal’s location, by the ticketing counters before security, and there may be more in other terminals.

My only real complaint is that the food took a long time to arrive, since airport restaurants tend to move quickly, but I suppose that’s the price of getting true fried chicken.

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→ April 1, 2008
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“What’s a rhubarb?” “It’s a plant.”

So Martha Stewart is making rhubarb desserts today – a fool (for April Fool’s Day, hah) and a grunt. But she said one thing that caught my attention:

The leaves are deadly poisonous … They are toxic, oxalic acid and you can really die from it. And you notice in the fields, at the farm, the horses never go near, the chickens, nobody goes near the rhubarb.

While it’s true that rhubarb leaves are poisonous the cause isn’t oxalic acid, which is found in many foods, including cocoa, spinach, carrots, and berries. Spinach contains enough to all but wipe out the calcium found in the vegetable, because oxalic acid combines with the calcium to form calcium oxalate, an insoluble compound that can build up and form stones in the kidney or gallbladder. If oxalic acid was the only toxin at work in rhubarb leaves, it would take several pounds to kill you.

It is possible, however, that there’s a second compound at work in rhubarb leaves that works with the oxalic acid to make them toxic. One suspect is a form of anthraquinone glycoside, which is present in rhubarb roots and has been used in traditional medicine as a laxative. The anthraquinone glycoside(s) in rhubarb leaves may work in tandem with the oxalic acid to have a toxic effect, although there doesn’t seem to be any hard evidence to back that up.

I have no idea why I posted this other than that I like rhubarb.

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→ March 25, 2008
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Phoenix eats, 2008 edition.

We’re leaving Arizona on Thursday, but since I doubt I’ll hit anywhere new before we go, here’s my workup of new Phoenix restaurants. I’m going to start with the best recommendations, and then proceed to the neutral reviews and then the trashing.

We had two real hits for dinner on the trip. One is a two-location mini-chain called Blu Burger, which offers gourmet burgers with significant choices to customize your meal. You have your choice of seven burger types, but there’s not much reason to go here and order something other than the ½ pound burger made from American Kobe beef, also known as Wagyu, from the name of the breed of cattle. The result is the best burger I’ve ever tasted, due to the higher fat content of the beef (although the beef is higher in unsaturated fat and oleic acid than most beef), resulting in a buttery texture and a mellow, rich beef flavor. From the choice of burger, you move to four choices of bun, more cheese options than I care to think about, at least sixteen toppings and thirteen sauce/condiment options, as well as a choice of French fries, cole slaw, field greens, sweet potato fries, or onion rings as your side. I’ve tried the French fries (they’re beer-battered, which is just weird) and the sweet potato fries (blah, and a little soggy), but the attraction is the burgers. My personal favorite combo so far is fresh mushrooms, pickles, red onion, romaine lettuce, goat cheese, ketchup, and Dijon mustard. They do have other sandwich options, but who cares?

The other hit dinner spot is Los Sombreros, a Mexican restaurant in south Scottsdale, south of Old Town and disturbingly close to Zorba’s Adult Video Shop. Los Sombreros serves authentic Mexican cuisine with a healthy selection of margaritas and a sizable wine list. The standard chips/salsa package includes two salsas, one mild with chunks of roasted peppers, the other spicy with tomatillos and smoked hot peppers. Their carnitas dish is delicious and overgenerous – it’s too much pig for me to eat in one serving, and comes with a scoop of fresh guacamole, a side of their peppery Mexican rice (with none of that gritty tomato-sauce nonsense you get in most crappy Mexican joints), and their black beans, which have never seen the inside of a can and come with a sprinkling of queso fresco. The best part of the carnitas dish is the inclusion of all of the ends of the pork, which is always the place for the best flavor. I also tried their puerco en chipotle, a similar cut of pork in a spicy green salsa, with a little bit of queso Oaxaca melted on top; the pork was moister in this dish, although I missed the guacamole from the carnitas platter, while the salsa was identical or close to the great smoky/spicy version that came with the chips. I tasted the mole poblano but found that the spicy/earthy mole flavor completely overshadowed the chicken. My wife went for the chicken enchiladas on both visits and raved about them, while my daughter was happy just to eat the rice. I’m not much of a drinker, but I decided to try their basic margarita, which contains tequila, triple sec, and sour mix, and liked the balance of lime/lemon flavors against the tequila, which was present but never overwhelming. (The last time I tried straight tequila was almost twenty years ago, in college, shortly after which I nearly blinded myself by forgetting to close the top of the photocopier before pressing Copy. Good times.)

We also found a solid gelateria in north Scottsdale, just south of the intersection with 101, deep in the shopping center that contains a Borders and a movie theater. Called The Sweet Life, it was founded by two men whose grandfather owned a gelateria in Italy, and they’ve really nailed the texture of true gelato, which is very hard to find in any U.S. gelateria. Their caramel gelato was outstanding, not too sweet, with a solid balance of that burnt-sugar flavor that all caramel ice creams should have. The chocolate had a good cocoa flavor but tasted shallow to me, as if the gelato itself was too low in fat, which is possible since gelato is typically made with egg yolks and milk but not cream.

The last stop among the top recommendations was in Tucson, at a bakery/sandwich shop called Beyond Bread. This is the place Panera wishes it could be, but never will, with fresher ingredients, outstanding bread, and a pretty solid chocolate chip cookie, although I have to confess that Paradise Bakery, for all its flaws, is still the chocolate chip cookie champ for m.e

On to the neutral reviews … Near ASU’s campus is a small, poorly labeled barbecue joint called Urban Campfire. I went with their pulled pork sliders – three small sandwiches overflowing with pulled pork, with a small side of beans. The pork’s texture was great, but I have no idea how it tasted, because it came drowned in a very hot barbecue sauce. That’s hot in terms of temperature – it had to be boiling when the pork was added – and spice, which crushed my taste buds by the time I’d gotten halfway through the plate. If you try the place, ask for the sauce on the side, or just try the beef ribs, which looked like a better choice.

Sushi Dozo is located in an old fast-food building on Miller Rd in Scottsdale, between Camelback and Indian School. The sushi here was solid-average, but not great, and given the cost of good sushi, I generally don’t go back to any sushi place that wasn’t great. The salmon in the nigiri was fresh, but had a very, very faint off taste to me, as if there was a small bit of mayonnaise mixed in with the wasabi that was holding the fish to the rice. I tried a few different rolls but wasn’t blown away by their spicy tuna or their unagi. It’s passable in a pinch, but Sapporo in north Scottsdale is still better, and several people told me to try Stingray nearer to Old Town for better sushi.

The Old Town Tortilla Factory is fine for what it is, which is an attempt to fuse Mexican cooking with upscale American cuisine, although I was surprised at their inability to cook pork properly. I ordered one of their “signature” dishes, a ten-ounce pork chop served with a raspberry-ancho chile sauce over garlic mashed potatoes and sautéed vegetables. The veggies turned out to be 90% zucchini and squash, which doesn’t rank high in either taste or nutrition. The sauce was very good, better than I expected given the weird nature of the combination, but the heat of the chiles kept it from becoming too sweet. The problem was the pork chop, which was well-done; you can’t cook pork chops or pork loin past medium if you want your customers to be able to chew it. My wife ordered a pork in chile verde sauce and had a similar problem – the meat wasn’t the typical pork shoulder, but was a loin chop that had been roasted and sliced. Her meal came with flour tortillas that had clearly been made by a machine. The best part of the meal was the thick, freshly-made potato tortillas that came in lieu of chips and salsa.

On to the duds … Cantina Laredo in the Kierland area of North Scottsdale is trying to do what the Tortilla Factory is, providing upscale Mexican cuisine in a fancy atmosphere. The food sucks. I can’t remember the last time I had a meal that bland, and I certainly didn’t appreciate paying that much for it. I ordered an enchiladas mole dish, and all it lacked was salt, flavor, and spice. My wife had the same complaint. And they get extra points off for offering guacamole made at your table for $9. Guacamole should be made ahead of time and given a chance for the flavors to develop. Table-side guacamole will either be a disappointment or loaded with salt to mask the mistake.

The 5 & Diner made a list of the area’s best burgers that I found in one of those local magazines aimed at tourists, but unlike Blu Burger, it didn’t measure up. The beef was nothing special, the burger was dry, and the fries had come out of a freezer bag. Next.

Blue Agave is another kicked-up Mexican joint, located in the same shopping center as The Sweet Life, and while their food tasted fine, their service is a huge problem. The sides on both of our plates were lukewarm at best. The refried beans on my dish had a skin on them, which comes from overcooking or sitting at room temperature or both. The salsa had been puréed. Even the fish tacos weren’t quite right, with red cabbage and too much cilantro – I didn’t know cilantro could taste bitter, but it didn’t – instead of the standard green cabbage and sauce.

Apple Café is a local, health-oriented deli behind the Scottsdale airport. Their food was fresh, but really lacking in flavor, and we weren’t thrilled that the pancakes weren’t labeled as buckwheat, although to my daughter’s credit she still did some damage to them. They’re trying hard, but low-fat often does mean low-flavor.

Finally, I want to give an honorable mention to Chloe’s Corner, a little upscale corner-deli place in the tony Kierland Commons shopping center. I didn’t eat there, but my wife and daughter both loved their grilled cheese sandwiches, and they offer coffee for 25 cents a cup. We didn’t do breakfast out while we were here, but they do offer a number of hot breakfast options and it’s worth a try.

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→ February 29, 2008
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Robert Irvine Redux.

Brian Montgomery of the St. Petersburg Times dropped me a note this morning to point me to the most recent twist in the Robert Irvine saga. They’ve got statements from FN and Irvine on their site; the gist is that Irvine’s contract won’t be renewed after the current season, although Dinner: Impossible will (probably?) continue with a new host.

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→ February 21, 2008
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Iron Chef America exposed?

Reader Matthew S. pointed out this Village Voice article called “Iron Chef Boyardee“, in which the writer, restaurant critic Robert Sietsema, details his experiences at a taping of Iron Chef America. The basic gist is that what you see on TV is not terribly reflective of how things actually work.

His next column will be titled, “Sun to Rise in East Tomorrow?”

Sietsema starts off on the wrong foot by claiming that the “chairman” in the U.S. episodes is an actor (true), while the “chairman” in the Japanese episodes was “the rich guy sponsoring the gladiatorial game show” (false, and easily disproven – the guy was an actor). But then he reveals several facts about ICA that should have been patently obvious to anyone who watched the show:

  • The chefs know the “secret” ingredient ahead of time. Food Network has acknowledged (on its behind-the-scenes show) that chefs are given a list of three ingredients that includes the secret one. I’m not a fan of the pretense, either, but let’s be realistic – for the chefs to come up with five complex dishes on the spot and then parcel out work to two sous-chefs doesn’t seem remotely realistic to me.
  • The challenger isn’t choosing the Iron Chef against whom he wishes to compete. Again, it’s a silly pretense, but it’s not a surprise, either.
  • The frenetic activity seen on the broadcast is a product of editing; the actual cooking on the show is far more methodical. Again, I’m not sure why this is news. If you’ve ever seen a real restaurant kitchen in action, you know no one’s running around like a maniac, because that’s a good way to screw up a dish, fall, or impale yourself on your chef’s knife.

Sietsema discusses one pretense that’s a real problem, which is that the dishes prepared in the hour of the contest are not the ones presented to the judges. I always wondered how they got around the issue of having one chef’s dishes wait around for a half-hour during the other chef’s tasting period, and the answer is that they don’t: Both sides prepare the dishes anew shortly before the tasting. That’s the one point Sietsema makes that does undermine the validity of the contest.

He also makes the very valid criticism that the “judging” is, at least when Jeffrey Steingarten’s not there, insipid. He mentions Ted Allen making two pointed criticisms during the taping, which floored me, because on the edited shows Allen is the biggest chef-apologist on the planet. The judges are charged with rating two sets of dishes against each other, so the onus is on them to identify the small differences that allow them to rate one set higher than the other, yet the commentary on the show (and apparently in the tapings) is almost uniformly positive. That’s an easier problem to solve, of course – find some judges who aren’t afraid to speak their minds and piss people off. I wonder where they might find someone like that…

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→ February 19, 2008
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Cookware question.

From regular ESPN reader JKGaucho comes this intriguing question about cookware:

Keith, I have a non baseball question that I thought would be right up your alley, and maybe a blog entry on the dish if you had the time. My financee and I are in the early stages of registering for gifts and after going around to Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma, I found the experience rather overwhelming. If someone knows about what are the best pots, pans, knives, etc., I figure you do. I should say that when it comes to everything, easy to clean is preferred. How did you find the registering process and is there something that you would certainly avoid? Any suggestions on brands like All Clad vs. Calphalon or whatever if more than greatly appreciated.

Well, at least someone understands what marriage is all about: The gifts. Anyway, what follows is my reply to JKG.

Sure, happy to help. But there are no straightforward answers:

Pots and pans: Brand doesn’t matter as much as material. I had anodized aluminum for a few years; it’s easy to clean because it’s mostly nonstick, but the pans/pots are very heavy and you won’t be able to brown meats as well as you can with other materials. Now I have a better mix of materials based on how I use each pot or pan.

My current setup includes two anodized aluminum skillets (9″ omelette pan and 10″ deep skillet), a 12″ cast-iron skillet (heavy, but the best cooking material on the planet and quite cheap), an enameled cast iron Dutch oven (about $200) an aluminum stockpot, a stainless steel saucier with a cover, and a stainless steel saute pan with a cover. I also have a pressure cooker, but don’t use it all that often. Calphalon and All-Clad are both excellent brands. Avoid Teflon or other “coated” non-stick cookware.

Knives: This depends entirely on your hands. Go to a Bed Bath & Beyond or a Wms & Sonoma and get a salesclerk to open the case so you can hold the knives and see which is comfortable. I have J.A. Henckels’ Four-Star line and am very happy with them. I have one of the Five-Star knives (a santoku), and the only difference is that the handle has a different shape. You should get a chef’s knife (link goes to 8″; I believe mine is 9″), a paring knife, a serrated bread knife (9″ at a minimum), and a “slicing” knife (7-9″, narrower blade than the chef’s knife). If you expect to any butchering you might consider a boning knife. Get a honing steel, but avoid home sharpeners, which will destroy your knives. I like my santoku, but it’s not quite as versatile as the chef’s knife.

FWIW, the America’s Test Kitchen people rated the Victorinox Fibrox 8-Inch Chef’s Knife their best value at $23, and it’s $21 at amazon (see link). I haven’t tried it.

Registering – who knows, that was 13 years ago and I didn’t cook back then. But you named some expensive stores. I’d say register at Bed Bath & Beyond, which has most of the same stuff as W-S or C&B but way better prices on pots, pans, knives, and small appliances; and then use a higher-end store or a department store for flatware and silverware.

Also, if you intend to cook, register for a food processor and a 5-qt stand mixer. They are indispensable and expensive enough that you won’t want to buy them on your own. Other kitchen toys I use often: Stick blender (“boat motor”), blade grinder (for spices, not for coffee!), digital kitchen scale, roasting pans (get at least two different sizes), V-slicer (or a mandoline, if you have wealthy relatives), salad spinner, eight different colanders (and I use them all, often), electric carving knife, and a waffle iron with reversible grids that are flat on the other side for pancakes.

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→ February 18, 2008
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Robert Irvine’s Resume Improbable?

Courtesy of longtime reader Chris L. comes a link to a story in the St. Petersburg Times about Food Network star Robert Irvine, who appears to have fabricated parts of his resume and whose plans for a pair of big-time St. Petersburg restaurants are rapidly falling apart. Good work by the team that worked on this piece, although I would have liked to have seen some comments from the Food Network people (or at least the obligatory “no comment”). I’ve emailed the writer to ask if he reached anyone at FN on this topic.

Update: The article’s main writer, Ben Montgomery, told me that Food Network did not respond to his requests for comment, and that their food/dining blogger has also been trying to get a comment. You can see an update to the story related to the Princess Di wedding cake lie.

5:24 pm EST update: Ben sent me a link to a statement from a FN spokesperson over on the Mouth of Tampa Bay blog regarding Irvine. The gist seems to be that they’re distancing themselves from Irvine already.

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