Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

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Followup roundup for February 9, 2011.

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

Staff Sergeant and Medal of Honor recipient Sal Giunta is leaving the military when his current tour ends in mid-June.

Giunta, 26, plans to move with his wife to Fort Collins, Colo. and will use the G.I. Bill to continue his education, according to Army spokesman George Wright.

You know, if I ran a public (or private) university somewhere, I’d come up with the money to offer Sgt. Giunta a full free ride for four years. Maybe he’d be willing to work part-time, perhaps as a mentor to younger students who could use some help?

The NYT reports on the controversy over early “Spider-Man” reviews.

Lucky J’s Chicken and Waffles has opened their sit-down restaurant. Until I visited their website, I had no idea how tough these guys have had it. I knew about the trailer theft, of course, but the death of a child, divorce, and reconstructive hand surgery? This guy sounds like Austin’s own version of Job. I’m going to try Lucky J’s this weekend; not because of the suffering, but because I like the idea, and because it’s sort of on my usual weekend path. (Man does not live by Torchy’s Tacos alone. Though I have to admit, the new location on Burnet Road is much nicer than some of the others I’ve been to.) Full report to follow.

The LAT would like for you to know that cockfighting is bad, m’kay? And not just because people sometimes get stabbed to death by roosters with blades.

Posted in Clippings, Food, Heroism, Theatre | 3 Comments »

Random notes: February 8, 2011.

Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

There are a couple of interesting things in the NYT this morning.

J. Paul Getty III passed away over the weekend. That’s a name (like Koo Stark, he said, tipping his hat in Lawrence’s direction) I hadn’t thought of in years. Getty was most famous as the victim of a kidnapping “by Italian gangsters” during which his ear was cut off. I knew he was something of a party animal, but I was unaware of his 1981 stroke (apparently the result of an overdose). I was also unaware that Balthazar Getty was his son.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles (and specifically LACMA) are trying to figure out how to maintain the Watts Towers, and how to get more tourists to a part of town that’s most famous for riots.

And the NYT has made their move:

…“Spider-Man” is not only the most expensive musical ever to hit Broadway; it may also rank among the worst.

Yes, this is a real review.

I would like to acknowledge here that “Spider-Man” doesn’t officially open until March 15; at least that’s the last date I heard. But since this show was looking as if it might settle into being an unending work in progress — with Ms. Taymor playing Michelangelo to her notion of a Sistine Chapel on Broadway — my editors and I decided I might as well check out “Spider-Man” around Monday, the night it was supposed to have opened before its latest postponement.

The fallout from the NYT decision should be interesting. The pin has been pulled from Mr. Grenade. He is no longer Ben Brantley’s friend. On the other hand, Charles McNulty in the LAT has Brantley’s back:

Julie Taymor’s $65-million, accident-prone production, featuring an erratic score by U2’s Bono and The Edge, is a teetering colossus that can’t find its bearings as a circus spectacle or as a rock musical.

And it looks like Peter Marks in the WP is standing with Brantley and McNulty:

What’s apparent after 170 spirit-snuffing minutes in the Foxwoods Theatre – interrupted by the occasional burst of aerial distraction – is that director Julie Taymor, of “The Lion King” fame, left a few essential items off her lavish shopping list:

1. Coherent plot

2. Tolerable music

3. Workable sets

Charles Willeford, call your office, please:

A man who was at an illegal cockfight in central California died after being stabbed in the leg by a bird that had a knife attached to its own limb, officials confirmed Monday.

In other news, the WP has discovered (reporter with a database!) that people in “Washington’s safest, most well-to-do neighborhoods” have registered more guns than people in “poorer, crime-plagued areas of the city”. I may have more to say on this later, time permitting.

Edited to add: I was in a hurry to finish that last post and hadn’t got to the Statesman yet, unfortunately. I previously noted the fires at several Austin restaurants, including the Green Muse Cafe. (There was also a recent fire at Habana, which I didn’t note for reasons that escape me at the moment.)

Anyway, APD made an arrest:

According to his arrest affidavit, [Martin] Gutierrez [the alleged arsonist – DB] said he believed a large tunnel system lay under Gillis Park near Oltorf Street and that people were being held there against their will. He admitted he started the fire at the Green Muse Cafe because he wanted to inform the public of the tunnel and “what was really going on here,” the document said.

Posted in Art, California Über Alles, Clippings, Food, Guns, Law, Obits, Theatre | 1 Comment »

“The Leonard Cohen of drinks”?

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

That’s the NYT‘s description of sake: “passionately adored by a small cadre of loyalists, but relegated to the category of ‘mysterious obscurity’ among the masses.”

In spite of this unfortunate metaphor, the actual article, about Japanese restaurants in Las Vegas that serve very high end sake, contains some interesting bits. For example, there’s Frozen Beauty sake, aged for 12 years in cold storage and selling for a mere $2,388 per (720 ml) bottle.

The tale of Watari Bune, meanwhile, seems like something out of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” The sake is created from a rare strain of rice that is so vulnerable to the nibbling of insects and the pummeling of typhoons that it had nearly lapsed into extinction in Japan. But in the 1980s Takaaki Yamauchi, from a brewery called Huchu Homare, met an old farmer who wistfully told him that the lost rice used to make sake of unsurpassed deliciousness.

A hunt began. In 1989, Mr. Yamauchi managed to acquire 14 grams of Watari Bune seedlings that the Japanese ministry of agriculture had freeze-dried and stored in a gene bank. He planted the seeds, grew the rice and brewed what we might think of as a drinkable time capsule. Thanks to Mr. Sidel and his team, it can now be found around New York at restaurants like Sakagura and Robataya, where it costs $160.

And let us not overlook Divine Droplets, “made by hanging canvas bags of fermenting mash in a handmade ice dome, during the frigid winter in the Hokkaido Prefecture, and patiently letting the sake filter out in a slow, pure drip.” That’s a mere $72 a bottle. (I am assuming that all of these bottles are 720 ml, but I’m not sure; the NYT annoyingly doesn’t specify.)

Posted in Clippings, Food, Mixology | Comments Closed

Important safety tip. (#3 in a series)

Monday, January 31st, 2011

This has been said many times, in many places, but I think it bears repeating for reasons that I’ll illustrate shortly:

GPS systems are a guide and a tool. They are not absolutely perfect. They are human designed systems that can fail.

Also, no matter how insistent that voice is, and no matter how often it says “Recalculating”, your GPS system is not the boss of you. You are the person in control of the vehicle; you have the option to ignore it, mute it, or even throw it out the window. (I even know one person who took a perverse enjoyment in tormenting their car’s GPS system by driving in circles.)

Several things bring this to mind. Some folks who were attending Saturday’s SDC found that their GPS systems were showing a location for Korean Grill that was quite a bit off from the actual location. (By the way, Korean Grill is a pretty darn spiffy place; I recommend giving it a shot.) On Sunday, we had a similar experience trying to find the Gruene Door; somehow, we ended up in a residential area several hundred feet behind the Gruene Door, and more or less stumbled on the restaurant through pure luck. (Also: the Gruene Door was fantastic. I’d like to go back sometime soon.)

And then there’s this story from the Sacramento Bee:

“It’s what I’m beginning to call death by GPS,” said Death Valley wilderness coordinator Charlie Callagan. “People are renting vehicles with GPS and they have no idea how it works and they are willing to trust the GPS to lead them into the middle of nowhere.”

And then they get stuck in the middle of nowhere in 120 degree heat where there’s no cell phone service and wind up drinking their own urine to survive. Or just simply vanish until someone stumbles across their remains in the desert.

It does seem like there may be a little more to this than just GPS failures. (Why aren’t closed roads better marked? Perhaps with a big sign: “ROAD CLOSED. IF YOU GO PAST THIS POINT YOU WILL DIE.“) But the main problem still seems to be blind trust in a technology that can fail.

(Unfortunately, I can’t find a YouTube clip of the Hill Street Blues episode where Joyce Davenport lectures one of her clients on desert survival techniques. Too bad, because she’s actually got some pretty sound advice to offer.)

Posted in Clippings, Food, GPS, Safety, SDC | 3 Comments »

Dinner with Dick.

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

Or “Nixon In China: The Dinner”:

Nearly 40 years later, Mr. Tong will serve the menu again to about 60 invited guests on Jan. 31, after the Metropolitan Opera’s dress rehearsal for its staging of John Adams’s “Nixon in China.” The Zhou dinner figures prominently in the 1987 opera, by John Adams, which makes its Met debut next week.

I’d always thought that Nixon had rather crappy taste in food; his cottage cheese with catsup is notorious. However, at least according to this web site (which provides sources) the catsup thing is a base canard, and the Nixon family was quite fond of seafood. That puts the shrimp dishes in a new light.

Anyone seeking the full Nixon experience will naturally want to down a shot of maotai, which the restaurant will be pouring for $25 for a tiny cup.

I tried searching for maotai online, but couldn’t find any sources. However, I did turn up this Washingtonian article that goes into more detail about the banquet.

At their table, Chou En-lai said proudly to Nixon that mao-tai, with its alcohol level of more than 50 percent, had been famous since the San Francisco World’s Fair of 1915. Chou took a match to his cup, saying, “Mr. Nixon, please take a look. It can indeed catch fire.”

Posted in Clippings, Food, Mixology, Music, Nixon | 1 Comment »

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSMOKIN’!

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

It’s been a week for fires.

First, the condo fire.

Next, Katz’s closes a day early. Then they catch fire as well. At this point, I half expect the building to fall over and sink into the swamp.

Then, someplace called the Green Muse Cafe (which I’ve never heard of) caught fire as well.

What next? A raging fire in the cedars off of Loop 360? (Come to think of it, that might make spring a bit more pleasant.)

Posted in Clippings, Food | 1 Comment »

A handful of randomness.

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

I intended to post this yesterday, but got sidetracked: the SF Weekly and the Bay Guardian have reached a settlement in their legal dispute. I’ve previously blogged about the dispute here, here, and here. (Hattip: Jimbo.)

I’m posting this only because it amuses me: the Statesman has posted the APD’s annual list of “local bars where drunken driving suspects reported having their last drink before hitting the road”. Particularly chuckleworthy to me is the large cluster of places in one block of 6th Street…

Speaking of the Statesman, there’s also a kind of neat profile of Austin writer, former Dell employee, and MonkeyBrain Books publisher Chris Roberson, who is taking over the current “Superman” story line with issue 707.

And speaking of things that amuse me, “Never Said About Restaurant Websites” pretty much hits all of my peeves (and Lawrence’s) save one. And we’ve both submitted that one. (Hattip: Daring Fireball.)

Edited to add: Here’s something else I wanted to blog but forgot: “The Now-You-See-It Restaurant“.

He signed a short-term lease for a space in SoHo whose landlord cannot promise that the building, likely to be demolished, will be around past July. In return he received a rent of about $9,000 a month, well below market rate.

…

He’s not paying for, or bothering with, a proper sign out front. The dozens of chairs, used, were bought on eBay for under $10 each, and if they’re not so durable, no sweat.

The bar, a mobile cart, will be stocked with only one brand of each spirit, and on a given night there will be just two whites, two reds and one sparkling wine.

…

Diners, for example, will be expected to set and reset the cutlery on their tables with utensils from drawers beneath. That way Mr. Fraser won’t need as many servers. It will save him money, he said, and translate into fewer intrusions for diners. “You’re visited only at points of the meal when you really need help,” he said.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food, Law, Media | 2 Comments »

Today’s bulletin from the Department of WTF?

Monday, January 3rd, 2011

The NYT has a regular feature, “Recipe Redux”, where Times writers revisit a classic recipe from the pages of the NYT, and attempt to update it for contemporary tastes/styles/availability of ingredients.

This week’s recipe was for Chocolate-Rum Mousse; the original actually sounds pretty good, at least to my unsophisticated palate.

So how did the NYT‘s chefs (Alex Talbot and Aki Kamozawa, who run the Ideas In Food website) update this recipe?

Talbot and Kamozawa considered making a terrine lined with the chocolate mousse and layering it with popcorn and more mousse, so the popcorn would behave like the chocolate wafers in icebox cake, softening and melding with the mousse.

Should have gone with that idea; sounds good to me. But, no:

Talbot and Kamozawa substituted beets for chocolate in the original recipe

Beets? Beets?! Were these people not loved enough as children?

Okay, let’s be fair: how did it come out?

After blending it together, 1966-style, they had a mousse that they liked a lot but didn’t quite love.

So…

…they whipped out their handy ISI dispenser (handy for some; it’s that magical tool that drove the foam craze) and made the mousse into a cloud.

To the cloud! Sorry. Here’s what I think they’re referring to when they talk about an ISI dispenser.

I asked Talbot whether readers might be daunted by a recipe that calls for an ISI dispenser. “We’ve grown and matured,” Talbot said, “and realized any recipe you put out there, no one really follows it. All it is is a suggestion: you might want to do this.”

Yeah. The original recipe sounds simple, straightforward, and relatively easy to prepare with nothing more than a blender and a stove. The new one requires relatively specialized kitchen equipment and sounds like crap.

I have to ask: if you did a side-to-side, A-B comparison, would Mr. Latte approve?

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food | 3 Comments »

Crimestoppers! (take 2).

Wednesday, December 29th, 2010

So we’ve mentioned previously the theft and recovery of one local food trailer.

We were not aware, until we happened to catch a local television newscast last night, that a second food trailer is also missing.

Last week, a few days before Christmas, thieves rolled off with Hook ’Em Up Tacos which used to sit just a few feet away from Perky Cups.

We have been unable to find any photos of the Hook ‘Em Up Tacos trailer. Nor have we been able to find any media coverage elsewhere (not even a Statesman blog entry), which makes us wonder.

In any case, we suggest that you be on the lookout for any unexplained trailers that mysteriously show up in fields or behind garages near you.

Posted in Food, Law, Media | Comments Closed

Quick update.

Monday, December 27th, 2010

We previously noted the Chapter 11 filing of Mangia Pizza.

Word comes to us now that the Guadalupe location has closed. As far as we know, the other locations are still open. (As a matter of fact, we had an…interesting meal at the Mesa location a few days before Christmas.)

Posted in Clippings, Food | 1 Comment »

Crimestoppers!

Monday, December 27th, 2010

What a day! Once again, we get to combine two more pet obsessions: food and the police blotter!

The Grinch, or someone equally mean, has stolen the main trailer of Lucky J’s Chicken & Waffles, an establishment we have not yet had the chance to try.

Luckily for Lucky J’s, they do have a second trailer (and I thought they were opening a sit-down eatery on Burnet as well), but in the meantime, please be on the lookout for a trailer that looks something like this:

Lucky J's

The actual trailer, as far as I know, does not have a hand holding a giant plate of chicken and waffles in front of it.

Edited to add 12/28: Put a leash back on the dagron. The trailer has been found. You may resume normal activities.

Edited to add 12/28 part 2: An arrest has been made.

Posted in Clippings, Food, Law | 4 Comments »

Breaking news!

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

Man, I wish I had one of those Drudge Report siren things to put up here.

Anyway, Katz’s Deli, an Austin institution famous for their slogan “Katz’s Never Kloses”, is closing January 2nd.

I need to get down there before the 2nd. They did a really good breakfast. And this reduces the number of Thanksgiving/Christmas Day dining options by one.

(Hattip: Mom.)

(Edited to add: A.T. actually sent this to me at 1 PM today, beating Mom by 2 hours and 38 minutes. However, Mom sent it to one of the accounts that goes to my phone, while A.T. sent it to an account I don’t read until I get home at night. So Mom gets the hattip, but A.T. gets an acknowledgment.)

Posted in Clippings, Food | 2 Comments »

Your Christmas present will be blogged.

Monday, December 13th, 2010

Mike the Musicologist came up over the weekend bearing gifts. Look what he got me.

(more…)

Posted in Food, Geek, Guns, Ice, Mixology | Comments Closed

Things you may have wondered about. (#1 in a series)

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

What ever happened to the very first commercial 747, Pan Am’s Juan T. Trippe? (Note the phrasing; the actual first 747 was only used for test flights, and is now in the Museum of Flight.)

The LAT has the answer; it became a (now closed) restaurant in South Korea. The couple who bought the plane paid $1 million for it, and “$100,000 plus” to have it dismantled and shipped; the LAT does not give a cost figure for the reassembly.

The LAT also does not tell us what kind of food the restaurant served; rumors that it was Seoul food are unconfirmed.

The airliner-restaurant trend quickly crashed. Several other similar restaurants shut down, and the couple found it difficult to make ends meet — it took a barrel of fuel oil every two days to heat the big plane. The location was also unfortunate because it is difficult to reach from a nearby freeway.

Nice to know that people in other countries make the same mistakes opening restaurants as people in the U.S.

Posted in Clippings, Food, Planes, Wondering | 1 Comment »

Sad news.

Friday, November 26th, 2010

Mangia Pizza, a local chain that specializes in a pretty good version of Chicago stuffed pizza, filed a Chapter 11 petition on Tuesday.

The 22-year-old company has two restaurants in Austin, one in Round Rock and a location at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. Two more Austin locations, at the Domain and on Lake Austin Boulevard, are independently owned and not part of the bankruptcy.

  1. I was previously unaware that those two locations were independently owned.
  2. “At the Domain”? If there’s a location at the Domain, I am unaware of it. There is a location in a strip center near-ish to the Domain, but not “at the Domain”.

Posted in Clippings, Food | 4 Comments »

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