"When you take a bite of that cod it's almost like you've got a breaded condom in your mouth." -- Gordon Ramsay critiques fish and chips served at a seafood restaurant specializing imitation crab and frozen fish. Read the rest
"Invasive species are an endless resource for food," says chef Bun Lai of Miya's Sushi in New Haven. Connecticut. Lai forages for invasive species every day and uses what he finds to make tasty meals for his patrons. Read the rest
An an all-you-can-eat buffet in Chengdu, China closed its doors after just two weeks because customers ate too much and also cheated, causing the owners to go over $100,000 in debt.
From Matador Network:
Hoping to attract a loyal following, the restaurant allowed diners to buy a $25 all-you-can-eat card giving them unlimited access to the buffet for an entire month. Upon learning this, Chengdu residents lined up to take full advantage of the offer, forming lines in front of the restaurant each morning. After gorging themselves, the diners decided to optimize their investment even more by passing the card on to friends and family, creating utter chaos inside the dining room and sending over 500 people through the buffet line (multiple times, of course) each day.
If you're about to order a fine meal at Mar-a-Lago, Trump's fancy club-turned-winter-White-House, make sure to steer clear of the fish. And the meat. And you might want to offer the server some hand sanitizer while you're at it.
Restaurant inspectors recently found 13 violations at the private Palm Beach, FL club. Among them, according to Miami Herald:
▪ Fish designed to be served raw or undercooked, the inspection report reads, had not undergone proper parasite destruction. Kitchen staffers were ordered to cook the fish immediately or throw it out.
▪ In two of the club’s coolers, inspectors found that raw meats that should be stored at 41 degrees were much too warm and potentially dangerous: chicken was 49 degrees, duck clocked in a 50 degrees and raw beef was 50 degrees. The winner? Ham at 57 degrees.
▪ The club was cited for not maintaining the coolers in proper working order and was ordered to have them emptied immediately and repaired.
The other violations weren’t so serious. Water at the sink where employees wash their hands was too cold to sanitize hands. And Mar-a-Lago was also written up for keeping rusted shelves inside walk-in coolers.
This is the most violations the kitchen has ever received. In the past, Trump used to check in on the kitchen to make sure things were running smoothly, and inspections came out pretty clean. But since he turned Mar-a-Lago into his political office (ethics conflict, but save that for another story), inspection results have soured. Read the rest
A fellow hoping to dine at an Ottawa McDonalds was informed by the woman serving him that they had run out of Junior Chicken sandwiches for the night. So he called her a bitch, argued for several minutes about the relevance and appropriateness of the term, raised other issues of interest to Men's Rights, and suggested she get on her knees to "service" him—all at steadily increasing volume and pitch. [via]
UPDATE: Someone claiming to be a personal friend of the man in the video provided information that suggests he is at risk, so I've taken it down for now. Read the rest
For his latest piece at Collectors Weekly, Hunter Oatman-Stanford spoke to filmmaker Lisa Hurwitz about the Horn & Hardart chain of cafeterias and automats. Despite being limited to Philadelphia and New York (a Boston branch was short-lived), Horn & Hardart was the largest food-service business in America from the 1930s through the 1950s. As it turns out, though, its famous automats were not especially automated, relying on hundreds scurrying cooks and kitchen staffers to fill entire walls of glassed-in compartments with plates of scrapple, deviled crab on toast, and nickel slices of apple pie.
Read the restUpon entering an automat, customers would head to one of the restaurant’s “nickel throwers,” who would give customers change to use at the banks of food-dispensing windows. “The most vivid and common memory that people have shared with me is of the amazing nickel throwers,” Hurwitz says. “Especially how, without even counting, the thrower could feel the exact change needed with her fingers. You’d give her a dollar, and she’d throw you 20 nickels across this beautiful marble or wooden counter.” Horn & Hardart’s machines accepted both nickels and quarters, though with such low prices, a few nickels often covered an entire meal: A cup of coffee was five cents; a ham and egg sandwich was ten.
