restaurants, wine and food australia: February 2018

Sunday, February 25, 2018

The restaurant tipping debate

The Limitations of American Restaurants’ No-Tipping Experiment - The New Yorker

Dozens of restaurants have experimented with alternatives to tipping, but many, citing lost business, have quietly returned to accepting gratuities.

Research conducted by Michael Lynn, at Cornell University, who is the foremost academic authority on tipping, has shown that people of color receive lower tipsthan their white colleagues, which arguably qualifies tipping as a discriminatory pay practice. The system perpetuates sexual misconduct, because service workers feel compelled to tolerate inappropriate behavior from customers who hold financial power over them. As restaurant prices have risen, gratuities—which are tied to sales, as a percentage—have too, so that there is now a substantial and hard-to-defend disparity between the pay of the kitchen workers who prepare food and the servers who deliver it. ...
In Lynn’s study of online customer ratings, mid-scale restaurants suffered more after instituting no-tipping policies than upscale ones, where, he hypothesizes, customers are less price-sensitive. This suggests that, for the time being, success with tip-free programs may be restricted to the very high end. But that won’t necessarily stop other restaurants from trying. Despite the ethical virtues associated with going tipless, restaurant owners’ primary motivation to do so is likely financial. Minimum wage is rising across the country. If the tipping system remains, restaurants will have no choice but to raise menu prices in order to pay their staff. Servers will then double-dip, so to speak: they will benefit from a higher base wage while their tips also increase as menu prices climb. In other words, the best way for restaurants to keep prices low is to eliminate tipping. The biggest thing holding them back is customers’ suspicion that doing so is a ripoff.

Professor Lynn's tipping research papers

"Ugly Delicious" on Netflix with reviews from NPR and New York Magazine

Chef David Chang Dishes On The 'Ugly' Side Of 'Delicious' Food - NPR

Chef David Chang's new Netflix show Ugly Delicious dives deep into how some of his favorite kinds of foods — from pizza to fried chicken — are made all over the world.
Chang tells Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson the term that became the show's titleoriginated as an Instagram hashtag, and an inside joke with his cooks.
"The most delicious stuff is like a bowl of curry on rice, and that's not gonna inspire a cookbook or a cover of a Bon Appétit magazine," Chang says. "And all of this food [history] is sometimes not being told, and it's not being appreciated enough in the world we live in right now."
...

On his favorite thing he ate while making the show
That's pretty easy. Well, I'll say domestically it was the crawfish at Crawfish & Noodlesi n Houston, eating Viet-Cajun crawfish, which is a tremendous modern-day fusion that's happening before our very eyes. It's a merger of Vietnamese flavors and Cajun, which are very similar, believe it or not.
"And internationally I would have to say it's the real-deal Peking duck in Beijing, cooked over jujube wood that's processed in a very special way that produces the most fabulous duck skin and juicy, juicy meat. That's a dish that I would travel to China just to eat. I really would. It's that good.

Ugly Delicious Is Satisfying TV That Will Make You So Damn Hungry - New York Magazine

A lot of TV shows with a celebrity chef behind them are implicitly ego-driven enterprises designed to build those chef’s brands. Chang is definitely front and center in Ugly Delicious, chowing down, steering the conversation, and breaking bread with some pretty famous friends. (Aziz Ansari, Jimmy Kimmel, Steven Yeun, Ali Wong, David Simon, Gillian Jacobs, and Nick Kroll all make cameo appearances, along with an array of well-known chefs and food writers.) But the show never feels like it’s all about Chang. In fact, Momofuku barely comes up in conversation.
Ugly Delicious is instead driven by Chang’s interest, as well as the interests of other experts, like Meehan, in not just digging into the portions that are placed in front of them, but really digging into why certain types of food feel so personal and culturally specific even while they’re being appropriated and modified to serve consumers always chasing the next trend. Ugly Delicious is informative, entertaining, and enriching, and I can’t recommend it more highly. After watching it, I also couldn’t get my hands on a taco fast enough.

No show diners

From The Observer in the UK comes this story:
Eateries ask for money up front, others name and shame in fight to beat empty tables

Restaurateurs from independents to major chains are naming and shaming “no show” guests, requiring deposits and even selling tickets for tables. ... Now the Casual Dining Group, which owns the Bella Italia, Café Rouge and Belgo chains, is backing the campaign. James Spragg, its chief operating officer, said: “This is an issue we are going to support.” ... the group was considering asking for a small deposit, say £5 a head, for parties of six or more, with a chance to cancel up to 48 hours before. The scheme could be tested in the next few months. He said the issue was being fuelled by online booking services, which allowed diners to book a table from their phone with a click.

Thursday, February 22, 2018

The McDonald's vegan burger - firm, weighty, a tiny bit smoky with a note of instant ramen

Even The Hamburglar Might Like McDonald's New Vegan Burger (We Did) - NPR

When McDonald's recently announced the introduction of a vegan burger in Sweden and Finland, Twitter responded with a mix of earnest enthusiasm (@themodvegan: "So exciting- I hope we're next"), a little disgust (@JenaRoberta: "why would a vegan ever...support a company that sells millions of dead cow burgers a day?), and a touch of guilty hand-wringing from aging ideologues (@siniauer: "Feels like I'm cheating the 90's me").
As someone who has spent the better part of two decades wandering up and down the vegetarian spectrum, I'm with the last caller. But the overall thumbs-up emanating from the Twitterverse says a lot about the changing nature of vegetarianism, and the market driving this move.
According to a recent poll by Animal Rights Sweden, almost 1 in 10 Swedes is now vegetarian or vegan. Among the under-30s, the figure is an even more staggering 1 in 5. But perhaps the most eye-catching statistic from McDonald's viewpoint is that half of Swedes expressed an increased interest in choosing vegetarian options during the last year. It's these folks, the flexitarians, who are the McVegan's real target audience. ... Firm, weighty, a tiny bit smoky with a strange — but not unpleasant — note of instant ramen, the patty comes topped with a generous dose of McFeast sauce (a vegan "special sauce"), lettuce, tomato, onion and pickles.

Another reason to drink red wine - fight tooth decay

From London's Daily Mirror 22 February 2018

Have you eaten before?

Helpful Waitress Asks Recently Seated Couple If They’ve Eaten Food Before https://t.co/RZQ3To34tw pic.twitter.com/g303w3ZASn
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 22, 2018

Monday, February 19, 2018

Celebrating National Drink Wine Day

Celebrate National #DrinkWineDay with Bacchus, the Roman god of wine. On this bronze from our collection, he sits in a rocky landscape with his wife, Ariadne. pic.twitter.com/03rwpsE6Sn
— J. Paul Getty Museum (@GettyMuseum) February 19, 2018