It's Not Just A Bug, It's A Fine-Dining Feature At This Thailand Restaurant

It's Not Just A Bug, It's A Fine-Dining Feature At This Thailand Restaurant : The Salt : NPR:

"In his tiny kitchen, chef Thitiwat Tantragarn throws a handful of raw bamboo caterpillars into a hot skillet and sautés them with olive oil, paprika, cumin, salt and pepper. Seconds later, the cream-colored larvae are crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. Tantragarn adds white wine, then spoons the bugs, brown beady eyes and all, over grilled scallops and Jerusalem artichokes before sending the plate out to the dining room.

This is Insects in the Backyard, a restaurant in Bangkok that is turning bugs into haute cuisine. It opened in the city's trendy Chang Chui market in July.

In Thailand, it's not hard to find ant eggs, crickets and bamboo worms at markets and restaurants if you know where to look. But Insects in the Backyard is the only fine dining establishment in Thailand where the entire menu is devoted to bugs. The worms, crickets, grasshoppers, beetles and caterpillars here are paired with less intimidating grains, seafood and vegetables, "so it's not too scary for people who want to try our food," says Tantragarn."



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Neapolitan-Style Pizza Making Wins UNESCO Heritage Status

Can't Be Topped: Neapolitan-Style Pizza Making Wins UNESCO Heritage Status : The Two-Way : NPR:


"On Wednesday Pizzaiuolo, the art of Neopolitan pizza-making, was added to UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. ...

The practice of pizzaiuolo consists of a few stages: first the dough (water, flour, salt and yeast) must be kneaded by fist for at least 15 minutes, then allowed to rest and rise for 12 hours. Next balls or panetti are formed and left to rest some more. Then the dough is stretched and beaten into a circle. Finally the toppings are added, and the pizza is placed in the oven and rotated with a pizza shovel to ensure uniform baking. Two minutes is all it takes."

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Reinventing The Meaning Of 'Whole Grain' Bread

'The Hardest Bakery Possible': Reinventing The Meaning Of 'Whole Grain' : The Salt : NPR: "Jonathan Bethony admits the breads he'll be churning out at Seylou Bakery & Mill, which just opened this month in Washington, D.C., might not appeal to everyone.

The dark crusts of his pain au levain have a charred appearance and complex flavors to match their hue. Inside the loaves, a toothsome chewiness gives way to the tang of sourdough and a taste that can only be described as distinctly wheat-y.

But those characteristics are not an accident. They're the fruit of a baking process that is pushing the envelope of what's possible — and palatable — when working with locally sourced, freshly milled whole grains.

"



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It's bon. Have a bonedro

Just when you think that after 40 plus years in the wine trade you have tried everything along comes my brother David with a bottle of bonvedro. Barossa grown, red and fruity. From a grape of Portuguese origin Australians used to incorrectly call carignan
Because I'm the unsophisticated brother I'll finish this bottle of 2016 Village Belle Bonvedro after chilling it a bit. And then I'll broach another one.
I'm sure it will pass the two bottle test.
Details at
http://www.glug.com.au/index.php…

Red wine makes you sleepy, but spirits make you confident

Red wine makes you sleepy, but liquor makes you confident — Quartz:

"Unofficially, everyone knows that different kinds of booze will give them a different kind of night. But now, data from one of the largest surveys on drug and alcohol use finally prove it: hard liquor gives most people that extra ~swag~."

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A return to Russian cooking

Kachka: The Word That Saved A Family During WWII And Inspired A Chef : The Salt : NPR:

"On a sunny weekday afternoon, chef Bonnie Morales leads me past the Q subway line in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. We are going shopping for Russian food.

Morales owns Kachka, a restaurant in Portland, Ore., that serves food from the former Soviet Union. It's one of the most popular places to eat in one of the hottest food cities in the country.

Kachka

A Return to Russian Cooking

by Bonnie Frumkin Morales, Deena Prichep and Leela Cyd

Hardcover, 389 pages

Now, Morales has a new cookbook — also called Kachka. Its publication inspired this jaunt to Little Odessa, the kind of neighborhood where the child of Eastern European immigrants feels at home.

"Because there's such a concentration of people from the former Soviet Union," Morales explains.

People like Morales' own Russian Jewish immigrant parents. (Her husband is part Mexican; her maiden name is Frumkin.) She was born in the Chicago area, and as a child in the early 1990s, her relatives flocked to the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Every week, it seemed, her parents threw another party welcoming new arrivals with a spread of cold appetizers called zakuski.

"



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Lost Kitchen Restaurant Made Chef's Small Hometown A Dining Destination : The Salt : NPR

Lost Kitchen Restaurant Made Chef's Small Hometown A Dining Destination : The Salt : NPR:



"One of America's most coveted dining experiences is a 40-seat restaurant in a converted grist-mill in the rural village of Freedom, Maine.



Chef Erin French, who is self-taught, opened the Lost Kitchen in her hometown of Freedom without much of a plan. She loved the space, and at first thought she would make English muffins and offer brunch, not convinced that the village of just over 700 people could become a dinner destination.



"When I first decided that I wanted to do this, everyone thought I was completely crazy," French says. "Why would anyone come all this way to have dinner?""



Well, come they have — in droves. French's food, with its focus on local, fresh, unpretentious cooking, has created a legion of fans. Each year, the restaurant opens reservations on April 1. But this year, things got out of control.



"The phones rang to a point where our security system went down and we had over 10,000 phone calls stream in in the matter of a few hours, French says. "The entire restaurant was booked."



Booked for the whole year. Calls came in from as far away as New Zealand, along with offers to open another restaurant in Las Vegas. But French first learned to cook in her dad's diner and is committed to keeping things simple.



"The food at Lost Kitchen is not Earth-shattering or ground-breaking in any way, and it's not fancy — we don't sous vide anything, we don't make foams or fancy purees, it's just simple food," she says. "I don't want anyone to feel intimidated when they look at this and I never want to plate a dish that you have to look at it and say, 'What is it?' "

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Chinese police find 14,000 bottles of fake Penfolds wine in counterfeiting scam

Chinese police find 14,000 bottles of fake Penfolds wine in counterfeiting scam:



Beijing: Shanghai police have seized 14,000 bottles of fake Penfolds wine being sold by counterfeiters in China.



The fake Penfolds wine was being sold through Alibaba's online flea market Taobao, as well as pubs and karaoke bars.



The three-month investigation followed a complaint to Alibaba by Australian wine company Treasury Wine Estates that suspicious retailers were charging "extraordinarily low prices" for Penfolds wine in its fastest growing market.



Alibaba called in police, who said at a press conference on Wednesday that 13 suspects had been detained, including Mr Dai, a wine dealer who was selling fake Penfolds for 200 yuan ($40) per bottle online, while it should retail for 600 to 3000 yuan ($120 to $595).'via Blog this'

Scotch versus Sturgeon as alcohol pricing fight returns to court

Scotch versus Sturgeon as alcohol pricing fight returns to court: "A long awaited legal challenge pitting Scotland’s powerful whisky producers against the Scottish National Party’s flagship health policy on binge drinking will be fought out at the UK’s highest court this week.

The Supreme Court will on Monday hear a case brought by alcohol producers against the Scottish government over its plans to tackle excessive drinking by imposing a minimum price on alcohol. 

The policy was championed by first minister Nicola Sturgeon when she was health minister, and was passed by the Scottish parliament in 2012 with a majority of 86 votes to one. Its objective was to reduce alcohol consumption by imposing a minimum unit prices — initially set at 50p per unit of alcohol."



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A bottle of Grange for you?

Australia's Penfolds Grange has long been considered a top-drop, but now a collector has paid top dollar for the pricey plonk. #9News pic.twitter.com/07deCbV5j6

— Nine News Melbourne (@9NewsMelb) July 21, 2017

Try a little Irtish moss

Want To Eat Green For St. Patrick's Day? Do It The Irish Way — With Seaweed : The Salt : NPR: "the Irish have a long history of eating seaweed. The reddish-brown fronds of dulse (Palmaria palmata), also known as dillisk or duileasg, were a nutrient-rich supplement for early diets, and Irish moss (Chondrus crispus), or carrageenan, thickened milk into pudding. But the practice gradually declined."

Seaweed was eaten to keep alive during the Great Famine of the mid-1800s, and for many in Ireland, it never quite shook this association as a vestige of an older, poorer time. It's sold as a snack food at the centuries-old Ould Lammas Faire in Northern Ireland, but as something of a quaint tie-in to the festival's past (much like Renaissance Fair-only al fresco turkey legs). More often than not, seaweed was harvested not to be eaten itself, but to fertilize the fields to better grow other crops.

But in Ireland — as in many places — people are looking to change that. Prannie Rhatigan of Streedagh, County Sligo, first started teaching about seaweed in the 1990s. "When I would ask participants what seaweeds they knew of or had eaten, most looked at me blankly. A few people volunteered dulse or Irish moss," Rhatigan remembers. "Now when I give courses, everyone has eaten a wide range."'via Blog this'

Why Pu'er, A Complex Tea, Draws Rapt Fans And Big Dollars : The Salt : NPR

Why Pu'er, A Complex Tea, Draws Rapt Fans And Big Dollars : The Salt : NPR: "Though we most often see tea (camellia sinensis) in the shape of neat ornamental bushes with small leaves, these can grow into trees with large leaves if left alone, and the assamica variety that produces pu'er grows particularly large. And though we sometimes think of tea as fermented, in truth, black and oolong teas oxidize when they are exposed to air. Most teas, unlike pu'er, do not undergo fermentation with bacteria and yeasts.

That fermentation can produce a wide array of complex flavors – from the poorly processed and moldy (like Falkowitz's first taste) to a palate so desirable that some pu'er has commanded a higher price per gram than silver. At its best, Falkowitz says, pu'er provides a kind of "bodily revelation, with a finish that lasts for hours.""



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Is Wagyu the World’s Most Overrated Steak? - Bloomberg

Is Wagyu the World’s Most Overrated Steak? - Bloomberg: "“I hate the stuff,” says a butcher and author of a new cookbook dedicated to beef. He’s not alone."



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Not much love in this review of WA's Young Love Mess Hall

Young Love Mess Hall: Someone should be arrested for crimes against food | The West Australian:

The Young Love Mess Hall is not only the apogee of hipster branding, it represents the apogee of hipster cookery with its pretensions, tone-deaf palate and ingredients so alien to each other it’s like wearing Manolos with a tracksuit. In other words, what at first blush might appear daringly individual, clever, anti-establishment and avant-garde is actually just BS.
When it opened last year, a bloggy person wrote that “Young Love Mess Hall is one of the most arresting venues opened of late”. No question: someone at Young Love should be arrested for crimes against food.
Which is not what bloggy person meant. Bloggy person was impressed.

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A rave review from London for a Sydney restaurant

A visiting restaurant reviewer extols the virtues of Lennox Hastie's wood fired cooking.

Firedoor, Sydney: special and unmissable:  Nicholas Lander in The Financial Times

‘The octopus was exceptionally sweet, having been cooked slowly in embers and then roasted in a wood oven’

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Rush to find natural vanilla substitute as pod prices soar

Rush to find natural vanilla substitute as pod prices soar: The Financial Times

It is made from petroleum, cloves, Norwegian spruce trees and has even been extracted from cow dung. Now the world’s flavour companies are scrambling to find additional sources of vanilla flavouring as prices for beans have soared to a record.

Vanilla prices have more than tripled in the past two years to $450 per kilogramme, due to hoarding by local middlemen and crop collectors in Madagascar, the world’s largest producer. The surging price has been exacerbated as an increasing number of large food companies have pledged to use “natural” flavourings made from food sources.

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Let This Spirit Moo-ve You: Make Way For Milk Vodka

Let This Spirit Moo-ve You: Make Way For Milk Vodka : The Salt : NPR:

"The sweet, high-fat milk of about 260 head of cattle — Holsteins crossed with Norwegian Red and Fleckvieh — is separated into curds and whey. The curds are used to make award-winning cheddar cheese. The whey, once a waste product used for pig feed, is processed using a special strain of yeast to convert lactose into milk beer that is then distilled into vodka. It takes about 20 liters of milk to produce enough whey to make one liter of vodka.
... Black Cow, which is clear like conventional vodka, is sold in glass bottles to allow customers to see the spirit. And one sip makes it clear that milk vodka tastes nothing like milk."



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These Australian Chefs Are Taking on the World ... and Winning

These Australian Chefs Are Taking on the World ... and Winning - Bloomberg:



"With a number of Australian chefs picked for prestigious kitchens and a growing appreciation of their laid-back style,  2017 should be a big year for their impact on the global food scene. Start with these six, then sniff out your own Antipodean talents."

Beau Clugston, Head chef and co-owner of Le 6 Paul Bert, Paris
Frankie Cox, Executive chef, Two Hands Restaurant and Bar, New York
Dave Pynt, Head chef, Burnt Ends, Singapore
Morgan McGlone, Culinary director of Commissary, Hong Kong; head chef, Belles Hot Chicken, Australia
David Thompson, Restaurateur and chef, Nahm, Bangkok; Long Chim, in Singapore & Australia
Bao La, Head chef, Le Garcon Saigon, Hong Kong

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Choose your review and take your chances on WA restaurant Hamptons

John Lethlean in The Weekend Australian 4 February 2017:

On Trip Advisor: Hamptons given four out of five stars with a note that it ranked number one of 11 City Beach restaurants.

The lead review on Zomato's Popular Review section gave it the maximum five.

The influence of food blogs

A Restaurant Critic on How Blogs Changed Restaurants:

"Thanks to the great digital blog boom, there are no hidden mysteries in the formerly mysterious food world, and everyone knows everything at the same time. Cooks used to have to spend years fighting their way up the ladder of great Darwinian kitchens to attain superstar status; now they just have to come up with a few photogenic stunt dishes, and the zombie hordes will find them. In the old pre-blog days, restaurant critics were like miners, shining our creaky headlamps on discoveries for our rapt readers, but now those of us dinosaurs who still roam the dining landscape are more like carnival barkers, attempting to herd the crowds of informed, unruly diners from one ephemeral attraction to the next."

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My kind of parliament free beer for members

Belgian Parliament Votes to Keep Free Booze In the Break Room | FWx:


... despite concerns from its own ethics committee, the Belgian parliament recently decided to keep a perk its members have enjoyed since the 1990s: free beer and wine. ...

While investigating an incident of poor behavior in parliament – one member calling his colleague by a racial slur – the ethics committee suggested that “stricter rules” surrounding alcohol – specifically, free beer and wine in the coffee room – could improve debate discourse. (Sounds like a bit more than a “coffee” room to me.) “Some MPs tend to become quite unpleasant if they have been drinking,” Danny Pieters, the committee chair, was quoted as saying by Nieuwsblad, adding, “At other workplaces this is no longer the case.”

However, after chatting things over will other party leaders, Chamber President Siegfried Bracke reportedly decided that any alcohol issue was “non-existent,” stating that the committee was basically overstepping its bounds because the aforementioned racial slur incident had nothing to do with free booze. ...

Possibly the most interesting aside to this story, however, is why the Belgian parliament started getting free alcohol in the first place. According to Nieuwsblad, citing parliamentary member Herman De Croo, he said that he introduced free beer and wine when he was Chamber President because too many MPs were going out and getting drunk in the local cafes instead of attending debates. 'via Blog this'

Chocolate Tomatoes?

A Chocolate Candy Aims To Make The World Think About Hunger? : Goats and Soda : NPR:

It is a very attractive truffle.
It's made of the usual ingredients — cocoa butter, sugar, chocolate — with a not-so-typical addition. Thirty grams of dried tomatoes from Nigeria.
And it was served at the World Economic Forum last week in Davos, Switzerland, with a very specific goal in mind: "to raise awareness on food waste and hunger," as stated in a press release.
That's a big job for a bonbon — and it's the reason for the tomatoes.
According to U.N. sources, up to 75 percent of the 1.5 million tons of tomatoes harvested in Nigeria each year are "lost." That can mean a number of things, from rotting in the field to falling off the truck on the way to market.
The Roca brothers, three Spanish chefs who are U.N. goodwill ambassadors, created the chocolate. "We are exploring food preservation techniques, such as the dried tomatoes used in this chocolate that can reduce food waste and create new market opportunities for young farmers," explains Joan Roca, one of the brothers. "Preserving tomatoes is our first goal."

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Spain's 'Robin Hood Restaurant' Charges The Rich And Feeds The Poor

Spain's 'Robin Hood Restaurant' Charges The Rich And Feeds The Poor : The Salt : NPR:

"On a frigid winter night, a man wearing two coats shuffles into a brightly lit brick restaurant in downtown Madrid. Staff greet him warmly; he's been here many times. The maître d' stamps his ID card, and the hungry man selects a table with a red tablecloth, under a big brass chandelier.

The man, Luis Gallardo, is homeless — and so are all the diners, every night, at the city's Robin Hood restaurant.

Its mission is to charge the rich and feed the poor. Paying customers at breakfast and lunch foot the bill for the restaurant to serve dinner to homeless people, free of charge.


It's become Spain's most sought-after lunch reservation.

The restaurant has poached staff from luxury hotels. Celebrity chefs are lining up to cook once a week. For paying clients, the lunch is fully booked through the end of March."



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Bountiful Beach Buffet: Fresh Seaweed Is Making Waves Among Foragers

Bountiful Beach Buffet: Fresh Seaweed Is Making Waves Among Foragers : The Salt : NPR:


Seaweed is high in protein, and contains Vitamin B12, iodine and omega-3 fatty acids. It can be a natural source of MSG, which helps provide a savory umami flavor in dishes. As such, seaweed can flavor soups, thicken sauces, be baked into bread or cakes, or dried and eaten like potato chips. Dennis Judson, who leads seafood foraging classes for Adventure Sports Unlimited, recommends making pickles out of seaweed, particularly bullwhip kelp, which is a long tube with a ball at the end that looks like a whip.

"I cut it into strips, like little donuts," says Judson. "Then I put it in jars and pickle it. Then I put the pickles in Bloody Marys. They're delicious."

Seaweeds are algae, not plants. They're divided into three types: red, green and brown. (Kelp is a type of seaweed.) Like plants, seaweed uses photosynthesis to convert sunlight into energy. While they can be harvested all year, they're usually at the height of growth in spring and summer. They often grow rapidly, as much as two feet a day.

Because of this, most seaweed can withstand ethical foraging. The important thing is to only take the leaf-like blades and leave the hold-fast — essentially, the roots of the seaweed — intact so it can keep producing.

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Great whites: with vines it's questions of time

Great whites: burgundy 2015: Jancis Robinson in the Financial Times

" It is generally agreed that, although the first few harvests may be particularly successful while crop levels are relatively low, the quality of the wine they produce increases as vines age. This may be partly because yields decline, so what remains is more concentrated, but older vines’ well-established root systems are also much better at withstanding the increasing problem of drought (young vines suffered water stress in Burgundy in 2015 — especially in Saint-Aubin). 

Every vigneron likes to boast how old their vines are, and many a label all over the world carries the (unregulated) claim of Old Vines, Vieilles Vignes, Viñas Viejas, Vinhas Velhas or Alte Reben. But with really old vines, yields can fall to seriously uneconomic levels, and the vines themselves are sometimes so fragile that they are easily susceptible to fatal damage in the vineyard. Yet, replanting is a long and expensive process.

Ideally the vineyard is left fallow for a few years and then, once replanted, it will be at least 10 or 12 years before the vines are mature enough to produce even half-decent wine."



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The World's First Celebrity Chef

Marie-Antoine Careme Was The World's First Celebrity Chef : The Salt : NPR: "The bustling Paris streets were rutted and caked in thick mud, but there was always a breathtaking sight to behold in the shop windows of Patisserie de la Rue de la Paix. By 1814, people crowded outside the bakery, straining for a glimpse of the latest confection created by the young chef who worked inside.

His name was Marie-Antoine Carême, and he had appeared, one day, almost out of nowhere. But in his short lifetime, which ended exactly 184 years ago today, he would forever revolutionize French haute cuisine, write bestselling cookbooks and conjure up extravagant, magical feasts for royals and dignitaries."

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Some wise thoughts on the horrors of restaurant design from an old colleague

Robert Hogg on his Facebook page is worth repeating to another audience.

The price of a presidential cocktail

The cheapest cocktail at Donald Trump's new D.C. hotel is $24 https://t.co/wCsgcfr3Pj

— Grub Street (@grubstreet) January 7, 2017

A depressing forecast for independent restaurateurs

Why America's Restaurant Industry Is in a Bubble About to Burst - Thrillist:


The American restaurant business is a bubble, and that bubble is bursting. I've arrived at this conclusion after spending a year traveling around the country and talking to chefs, restaurant owners, and other industry folk for this series. In part one, I talked about how the Good Food Revival Movement™ created colonies of similar, hip restaurants in cities all over the country. In the series' second story, I discussed how a shortage of cooks -- driven by a combination of the restaurant bubble, shifts in immigration, and a surge of millennials -- is permanently altering the way a restaurant's back of the house has to operate in order to survive.
This, the final story, is simple: I want you to understand why America's Golden Age of Restaurants is coming to an end.

Across the nation, restaurants like AQ -- chef-driven, ambitious, fine-casual dining spaces that straddle the gap between neighborhood fixtures and destinations -- are the ones closing their doors most quickly, mainly for a reason above: labor costs. And it's happening everywhere -- research firm NPD Group reported that in 2016 the number of independent restaurants in the US dropped 3%, while chains increased, and said the majority of those independent restaurants closing were sit-down. The reasons the costs are going up are complicated, involving a mix of laws and taxes and other inherently unsexy things.

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How has arestaurant "no tips" policy worked out?

After Experimentations, Where Are We On No-Tipping Restaurant Policies? : NPR:

Ailsa Chang talks with restaurateur Danny Meyers about how a no-tipping policy at Union Square Hospitality Group's restaurants, which include Gramercy Tavern and The Modern, has fared a year in.
"CHANG: Well, what about complaints about higher menu prices? Are there customers who are confused about why those prices seem way higher than they used to be?

MEYER: Well, what we decided to do with our program, which we call hospitality included, is that we would give you one price on the menu. So if your chicken costs $28 on the menu, that's the cost. That's going to cover the linen, the flowers, the cook, the reservationist, the server, the wine director, the rent. There's not an additional line on your bill for gratuity. And so it is a jolt when you first see it. But we've not, to my knowledge, lost any guests. As a matter of fact, what we've gotten over this past year is an overwhelmingly strong thumbs-up chorus from our guests.

CHANG: I was going to ask you, have profits been affected at all?

MEYER: Well we've seen an initial dip in every restaurant. And then as our managers learn to operate under a new economy, they tend to come back up."

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We got drunk and invented America

A Survival Guide To Colonial Cocktails (So You Don't Die Drinking Them) : The Salt : NPR:

"Colonists, transplanted to a New World, were faced with the task of re-creating old recipes, often with unfamiliar new ingredients. Alcohol was a godsend in the Old World, sipped by adults and children alike. In the New World, imbibing called for experimentation. There was plenty of trial and error, and, in Grasse's view, an unexpected recipe for democracy.

"Before democracy, there were spirits, and from spirits we created taverns," writes Grasse in the book, "and it was in those taverns that we laid out the blueprint for a new kind of country. ... In other words, we got drunk and invented America.""



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A vegan version of the Atkins diet scores well

A Plant-Friendly Atkins Diet Gets High Marks On List Of 2017's Best Diets : The Salt : NPR:

"If you're looking for a diet plan that suits your lifestyle, a new list of rankings from U.S. News & World Report has you covered.

 Most dieters are familiar with commercial plans such as Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig — both of which continue to make the magazine's list for top diets. But a range of options offer fresh approaches, including the MIND diet, the Eco-Atkins diet (a plant-based, Atkins-style diet) and the Ornish diet — which is ranked top for heart health.

The annual rankings list includes 38 different diets, all of which have been evaluated by a panel of doctors, nutritionists and other health professionals.

"Each profile is an exhaustive look at what it's like to be on each plan," says Angela Haupt, assistant managing editor for health at U.S. News.

The diets are ranked in categories, from "easiest diets to follow" to "best diets overall" to "fastest weight loss.""



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One for the international jetsetters - the absolute best new restaurants in NYC

The Absolute Best New Restaurants in NYC: From New York magazine

In accordance with postmodern journalistic custom we have been forced, more or less at gunpoint, to number our favorite restaurants from one to ten, although as every seasoned restaurantgoer knows, that order could easily change depending on all sorts of factors, including the season, the time of day, what we’re planning on eating for dinner in four hours, how much change is in our pocket, and what wonderful delicacy we consumed for lunch yesterday.

The Absolute Best

1. Le Coucou
138 Lafayette St., at Howard St.; 212-271-4252"

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Visiting Tokyo? Getting a table at one of the most fashionable small restaurants just got easier

Trip to Tokyo? Ex-Goldman Trader Sells Secret, Top Dining Access - From Bloomberg

Getting into Japan’s top eateries is no easy task, especially for those who don’t know the language. Many places are hard to find out about because they rely on word-of-mouth and are tucked away on backstreets. With few tables in small spaces, the most coveted among them fill up fast. Visitors who use hotel concierges to seek a reservation often find out that a place is locked up for months.
Yamada, 38, offers a way around. Tableall secures the reservations by paying the restaurant in advance for a set-menu feast, then charges customers 3,000 yen ($26) per seat on top of the meal’s price. Diners incur charges if they cancel close to the booking date. ...
Tableall currently offers spots at 11 eateries in Tokyo. They include Kasumicho Suetomi, which has kaiseki course meals from 34,000 yen per person including the booking fee, and the Michelin-starred Tempura Motoyoshi, with offerings starting at 20,000 yen each. Seats are grouped as a package of two, but solo diners and larger groups can make special requests. The English-language website provides detailed photographs and information on the dishes and tableware they’re served on, biographies of the chefs, and precise map locations.

Common sense about sparkling wine - buy the Tasmanian

Champagne versus prosecco or sparkling wine: Choosing a good bottle is all in the bubbles — Quartz:



I have become a proud Tasmanian again. This Christmas and New Year I have eschewed champagne and delighted in the sparkling wines of my old home state. Mass produced champagnes of the major houses like Veuve and Moet and Mumm can not compete either in quality or price with the Tasmanian offerings.

This comment by an American wine writer gives the commonsense view:

Sparkling wine’s tiny and delightful pockets of air do not come from special bubble farms on the French countryside. ...There’s no reason you can’t make just as good of sparkling wine in other parts of the world,” says Robin Goldstein, a wine critic, behavioral economist, and the author of The Wine Trials.

I could not agree more.


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