Knock-Back Jokes, the Dregs

I got zero input from people. Jomo did raise an eyebrow. Here are the last two:

You stumble onto a peculiar varietal. Do you:
a) blog about it;
b) rave about it to your wine purveyor;
c) leave a 5-minute voice mail at BevMo for Wilfred Wong;
or d) don’t sweat it since Dottie and John will "discover" it in 18 months.

Bonus: Match the items in the two columns:

1. Dottie
2. Malbec
3. Thousand Oaks Chardonnay from 7-Eleven
4. Walt Mossberg

a) John
b) Can't miss with charred meats
c) "Light and almost as refreshing as a Slurpee"
d) "Ask me again if I’ll fix your computer. Go ahead, ask me."

Knock-Back Jokes

Additions welcome.

Layoffs at newsrooms are rising. Do you blame:
a) the whole bloody Internet;
b) lousy media unions;
c) too much corporate debt;
or d) operational inefficiencies holding up Dottie and John's expense reports.

The Dottie and John "Tastings" Video Drinking Game:
• Every time they clink their glasses, drink.
• Every time they mention each other or a family member, drink.
• If bored and are drinking when they drink, drink three times and start the video all over again.

The tasting note "Last night: aging OK, hints of melon and spice, weak finish" is by:
a) Dottie;
b) John;
c) Dottie and John;
or d) the hooker they got off Craigslist to hear them blab about wine.

Recipe: John McCain’s Alphabet Soup

The fawning food press and popular books like "The United States of Arugula" love name-checking the big shots like Daniel Boulud and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Not name-checked are those like Ivan Arias, who basically are cheated out of the equivalent of a tab for two at the swanky eateries where they work as much as 60 hours a week. This smacks of grotesque since these chef-owners often give away free dinners to their BFFs as a matter of doing business.

http://tinyurl.com/4rro5q

Here’s how we know what’s going on: The lawyer for the restaurateurs picks up campaign talking points and blames the patchwork of antiquated rules and regulations. Also the trial lawyers.

Tip of the hat to my Latin brothers.

Scenes from the Class Struggle

Had a whole post concept going earlier, but got stymied. In the interim there's this:

http://tinyurl.com/5wb5gt

The real content is in the comments. My favorite:

> "If you have to ask, you can’t afford it. If you can’t afford it, you should have asked. Didn’t mother teach you *anything*?"

Where's the Geek Love?

I’m coming to this whole subject quite late, but that’s what happens when you work Sundays and have a chance to catch up. (Credit goes to Valleywag.)

Apparently, a lot of geeks have noticed that coffeehouses have started bitching about overhead like wages and rent. The coffee people have added it all up in Excel or even Google Docs, imagine, to figure out they need to make $100 an hour in sales so people can do their Bedouin thing on somebody else’s couch and connection instead of a cubicle.

I love this: "Coffee? Commodity retail has such low margins! Get a business plan and sell something else. Like private space so we can take a meeting."

Use the Body, Now You Want My Soul

By popular request I am putting a thought together on body sushi, which appears to be the latest fad in theme dining.

(The theme of themes is in and of itself one of my least favorite things with food, but then again I’m pretty religious in my idealization of the whole process. To wit: Chicken is best eaten with your hands. When approaching pho, take the soup spoon in the left and grip the chopsticks with the right, or vice versa. The grand, non-negotiable order of the universe should be Champagne and shellfish first, then a Caesar and then your main course. Butcher-block paper on the tabletop is to be kept smooth, not curled up by arms and elbows, with doodling welcome. Most people do without the parenthetical graf and just say this is anal. Fine.)

I sent the story to the attention of the main Lefty Bistroan because I wondered whether people were so understimulated that they have to eat off naked people to get excited about something, or whether the guys on the business side were looking for a quick way to rack up the tabs. Then as I was gorging on Spitzer stories, the answer appeared in the aptly titled Wealth Report column of the Wall Street Journal. Here’s why the megawealthy want high-class hookers:

> The most popular reason was “unique experiences” (71%), followed by “higher-quality experiences” (57%). Conventional wisdom says that the rich visit escorts to avoid messy breakups or extra demands for cash. But the study shows otherwise: “No strings attached” ranked last as a reason.

As they say in the service industry, enjoy.

"Item! Been to 21 and Le Cirque?"

The Jackie Harveyish headline above is funny, because ... because I think it is, anyway. Raymond Sokolov's latest column in the Wall Street Journal, "Bay Watch," isn't funny, and not just because I think it isn't, but because it's plain crap writing that should have been spiked, yesterday or in 1998 or whenever.

Sokolov -- oops, sorry, he says "We" -- "didn't expect to be wowed at Aqua [...] where we had an acceptable lunch a few years back and remember it only as less boring than our dining companions." (Maybe one companion resisted the urge to say "Waiter? Bring me the lobster bisque so I can pour it down this guy's pants." "We'll" never know.) Then there's blah blah blah about venerable Aqua chef's "cutting-edge mix of militantly San Francisco foods," foie gras, abalone, pork belly, chanterelles, this and that. It's like dashing through Whole Foods! Maybe the Journal should send a reporter out shopping.

Skipping his bit about Ame, "an experiment in japonaiserie," the piece jumps to that hot new place, have you heard of it? Boulevard's emphasis is on "local ingredients and basic techniques with a twist." It's a very short graf, even with the deconstruction of the suckling pig from Manteca.

The East Bay vs. West Bay premise is tired and dorky, the "survival guide" approach is spurious except for those on expense accounts and the Wall Street Journal reveals itself, again, to be completely out of its element on this kind of coverage. Next time just call it Frisco so the rest of us can skip and enjoy Perbacco in peace.

You Call it Heparin, I Call it Sausage

The tainted heparin (blood-thinner) from pharma company Baxter has everyone in a tizzy. The WSJ sent a reporter to a heparin-extraction plant in China. Source material: pig intestines. And as one photo caption in this series explains, what doesn't turn into heparin is saved for sausage casings.

The captions say the stuff coming out of the intestines is "pulp." Is that a typo? Shouldn't it be "poop"?

Do Everyone a Favor, Dude: Dine Alone

> Jennifer Esposito, 28, an image consultant who lives in Rye Brook, N.Y., lived for four years with a man who ate only pizza, noodles with butter and the occasional baked potato.

Either give this woman a medal, or take away her meds.

Postcard from the Edge of a Waffle Breakfast

From Bistro friend Paul Festa's Southern film-screening tour:

Breakfast was at the Waffle House. The signage was so getto [sic!] that I was sure I had chosen a local favorite, but I wasn’t ten minutes in my cream-colored PT Cruiser (the gayest car in South Carolina and George combined!) when I saw another, and then another, and soon I realized that I had breakfasted at the iHOP of the south.

Click here to read the whole post, complete with sly Louis Prima reference.

Yuck? Pickles and Kool-Aid

This is less a "Yuck?" and more of a "Yuck!", combined with a sober acknowledgment that our little United States of Arugula isn't feeding the souls or any other part of the underclass. In places like the Sunnydale projects, people have trouble finding a market with fresh produce -- if they can get out of the apartment at all, as a story in today's Chron relates.

The finished products are placed on the table next to a tub of licorice and a jar of pickles soaking in Kool-Aid, another popular snack in Sunnydale's underground stores. As if he heard the oven buzzer, a young boy stops in and asks Sandy if she made cupcakes yet. He gives her 50 cents and she drops it into a black ceramic jar on her kitchen counter.

The Reds

Whew! Now we've gotta push back on the other red flesh besides tuna. This food blog is going to to turn into a guilt blog by the time I'm done.

here's a money quote that dovetails with my "send the marketplace a message" mantra:

> If price spikes don’t change eating habits, perhaps the combination of deforestation, pollution, climate change, starvation, heart disease and animal cruelty will gradually encourage the simple daily act of eating more plants and fewer animals.

I heard long ago that Harris Ranch had 100,000 head of cattle, and now the New York Times backs me up.

Blue Fin?

We all know about the king of ska, but here we're talking about the end of the king of sushi. Take my word for it or take Bob Simon's, but the marketplace has to, has to push/pull back on the supply chain.

We don't need every other restaurant opening on Geary to serve raw fish. We will run out, without a doubt.

Puck Me? No, Puck You

Here's Anthony Bourdain on Wolfgang Puck's bone to pick with foie gras. Typical Fight Club sandwich:

"I think he should stop worrying about cruelty to animals and start worrying about all the customers he's flopping his crap on at airports. ... He got squeezed and pressured and phone-called from all angles, and like a good German shopkeeper he folded and sold out the people hiding in the cellar next door. I got no respect."

http://tinyurl.com/2z6b26

Gary Danko Wants His Umami

The video I shot recently got good play over the weekend on WSJ.com:

Yay! This was a heck of a lot of fun. My colleague Stacey Delo also makes a lot of the work look easy. Have me over for soup and ask me about it.

Shot Across the Bouillabaisse

> A cook who is paid $15 per hour at 40 hours per week earns an annual salary of $31,200, while a server earning minimum wage plus the San Francisco median rate of $30 per hour in tips brings home $81,411 per year.

http://tinyurl.com/yv57uf

How the hell is this sustainable? Isn't it counterproductive? The good news is that our food and restaurant customs are spreading like wildfire all over the country. (It's been called our national cuisine, for lack of anything better to call it, and also because that's what it is.)

If we can't swing the prices here, at least we'll be able to enjoy interesting things somewhere else.

Breakfast Butt-rito

"We don't try to hide what these are," Haley said. "When consumers go to other fast-food places they feel like they've got to buy two of their breakfast sandwiches or burritos to fill up. This is really designed to fill you up."

Pizza My Heart

Everyone's noticed that this town has gone pizza-crazy recently. When I moved here 7 years ago, there was nary a good pie to be had (perhaps Pauline's was the pinnacle at the time).

Today there's a great diversity of dough, sauce and cheese on offer, and a much higher threshold to cross to enter the city's competitive pizza joint landscape.

It's not surprising that Michael Bauer has jumped on the bandwagon, starting a weekly blog entry about pizza around the Bay Area. So far, he did a good job nailing Gialina in Glen Park. But we'll have to wait and see what else he uncovers. One place we haven't tried that has been amped up in the press lately is the Pizza Place on Noriega, supposedly an East Coast-style dough thrower. When we do get around to sampling their pies, we'll share the verdict here first.

Kid Stuff

New link to some old colleagues: Gastrokid, a blog by ex-Standardites Hugh Garvey and Matthew Yeomans. A quick spin through their material yields this interesting tip: only buy meat that's on sale. Read on to find out why.

Try Waxing

> Mrs. Useloff, 36, was once a picky eater herself. Although she drank gallons of milk, she couldn’t abide raw fruits or vegetables. New foods with strange textures literally frightened her. The aversion lasted until her 20s, when she worked to overcome her fears. Even today, she refuses to buy cucumbers.

Probably because she already has one up her butt:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/dining/10pick.html

I'm having a fine day otherwise, but while suddenly irritating, let me ask this: If you have kids but don't blog about them, are they really there?