The persuasive stereotype of the rude French waiter

Is Your Waiter Rude, or Merely French? A Debate Is Revived - The New York Times

Few cultural stereotypes are more pervasive than the surly French waiter.
In the 1985 movie “European Vacation,” Chevy Chase and his family meet a Parisian garçon who, after insulting the brood, offers them dishwater to drink.

s

Well, in Canada recently, Guillaume Rey, a waiter at Milestones Bar + Grill in Vancouver, British Columbia, filed a complaint against the restaurant’s parent company, Cara Operations, after he was fired for being combative, aggressive and something of a bully. His defense? He’s not rude, he contends. Instead, he’s French and his former bosses are discriminating against his culture and heritage.
The argument is a novel one, but with enough traction that one member of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal who reviewed the complaint agreed that Mr. Rey deserves a hearing.

A Tasmanian makes one of the world's best whiskies

The world's best whisky awards announced in London this week include the Tasmanian produced Sullivan's Cove American Oak Single Cask as the World's Best Single Cask Single Malt.
The other award winners:

World's Best Rye - 291 Colorado Rye Aspen Stave Finish

World's Best Grain - Bain's Cape Mountain Whisky

World's Best Bourbon - 1792 Full Proof Kentucky Straight Bourbon

World's Best Blended Malt - Taketsuru 17 Year-Old

World's Best Blended Limited Release - Ichiro's Malt & Grain Limited Edition

World's Best Blended - Johnnie Walker Gold Reserve

World's Best Single Malt - Hakushu 25 Year-Old

The fine Japanese art of mixing drinks

This is a "should read" for cocktail lovers.And how about that recipe for the Line Cocktail!

Good libations: Examining the evolution of Japan's rich cocktail culture | The Japan Times:

The Japanese way of bartending is like “a time-capsule of 1930s international bartending,” [ cocktail historian David] Wondrich says. But given its foreign origins, how on earth did Japanese bartenders gain such outsized influence in worldwide mixology? And are they really keepers of the flame for some long-forgotten school of cocktail arts?
To answer those questions, let’s first turn back the clock to 1860. This marks the appearance of Japan’s very first Western-style bar, inside the Yokohama Hotel, also known as the Hotel Hufnagel after its Dutch owner. It was a hastily constructed affair surrounded by a tall fence designed to keep locals out. Perhaps this was for the best: The Hufnagel’s guests were a crusty lot of seamen, merchants and adventurers whose drinking games included firing their revolvers at a clock on the bar’s wall.
“There wasn’t much to do, other than drink,” says Kazuo Ishikura, a writer specializing in the history of Japan’s cocktail culture. “Foreign residents were told by the authorities to stay inside at night. If they ventured out, there was a high chance they’d be surrounded by samurai with a grudge against foreigners.”
A recipe for needing a stiff drink, to be sure. But the Hufnagel offered only beers, wines and liquor — straight up.

“The first bar to serve actual cocktails opened in Yokohama’s International Hotel in 1874,” Ishikura says. “The bartender, Mr. Purvis, was so popular that he was caricatured in the English-language humor magazine Japan Punch.”

Line Cocktail (1924)
All but forgotten today, this represents one of the very earliest cocktails known to have been created locally, by a Japanese bartender named Yonekichi Maeda.

⅓ oz dry gin
⅓ oz Benedictine
⅓ oz Italian vermouth
Two dashes of bitters

Shake over ice, strain and serve. And here’s the trick: Garnish with a small portion of pickled rakkyo onion, slightly crushed. It’s a — how to put this kindly — uniquely local touch.

 

'via Blog this'

The racket of third party endorsements - gold medals to influence the gullible

There's a nice little racket going on in the wine industry these days. It's called giving quality endorsements for money.
Let me explain. Those wonderfully pretty gold medal stamps you see on wine labels and in advertisements from retailers: most of them are near enough to worthless as a guide to quality.

The game is played this way. Establish a wine show and charge producers an entry fee. Make sure that everybody wins a prize. Hey presto and yours will be a show that wine companies want to enter. Lots of wonderful revenue for organisers and attractive stamps to mislead consumers into thinking the products displaying them must be worthy.
This a con trick being performed on a massive scale with drinkers being the ones conned.
Now of course there are some legitimate shows but even medals from them are worth being sceptical about. Just look at the different judgements delivered by the various shows around Australia. A gold in one place can be a mere bronze or unrewarded somewhere else.

Memories of great grandfather in a new heritage blend red from the Barossa

Memories of great grandfather in a new heritage blend red from the Barossa:

Bagot Station Captains Table Barossa Valley Red Blend 2012. How could I resist it? Our Farmer family history has it that great grandfather John was brought out from England by Edward Meade (Ned) Bagot in the 1860s to look after his horse Cowra which won the Adelaide Cup in 1866 and 1867. This wine just had to be a winner.

'via Blog this'

Hoppy tasting beer without hops

Every pint of that craft beer you drink requires 50 pints of water just to grow the hops that give it flavour. Hence the search for an ecologically sustainable, and cheaper, alternative. And scientists from the University of California Berkeley believe theynhave found one. They have used used DNA-editing software to manipulate the genome of brewer’s yeast, splicing in genes from mint and basil plants as well as two from normal yeast in a way that boosted the production of flavors normally provided by adding hops during the brewing process. Details of their research were published this week in the journal Nature Communications under the title Industrial brewing yeast engineered for the production of primary flavor determinants in hopped beer.
Here's the Abstract of the article:

Flowers of the hop plant provide both bitterness and “hoppy” flavor to beer. Hops are, however, both a water and energy intensive crop and vary considerably in essential oil content, making it challenging to achieve a consistent hoppy taste in beer. Here, we report that brewer’s yeast can be engineered to biosynthesize aromatic monoterpene molecules that impart hoppy flavor to beer by incorporating recombinant DNA derived from yeast, mint, and basil. Whereas metabolic engineering of biosynthetic pathways is commonly enlisted to maximize product titers, tuning expression of pathway enzymes to affect target production levels of multiple commercially important metabolites without major collateral metabolic changes represents a unique challenge. By applying state-of-the-art engineering techniques and a framework to guide iterative improvement, strains are generated with target performance characteristics. Beers produced using these strains are perceived as hoppier than traditionally hopped beers by a sensory panel in a double-blind tasting.

The Glug Quartet - a mixed dozen reds from the Barossa and there's not a shiraz in the box

The Glug wine maker Ben Parker has been experimenting and used his skills to make this intriguing limited edition collection of:
Glug 'The Italian Job' Barossa Valley Montepulciano 2017 x 2 bottles; 
Glug 'The Wayward Child' Barossa Valley Pinot Noir 2017 x 3 bottles; 
Glug 'The Heartbreaker' Barossa Valley Grenache 2016 x 3 bottles; and 
Glug 'The Outsider' Barossa Valley Cinsault 2017 x 4 bottles.

Order at http://www.glug.com.au/index.php…
Personally I'm a Grenache man but the Cinsault really took my fancy

Queuing for a taste of Singapore's cheap Michelin starred meal

The Straits Times reports how hundreds waited patiently in line as Singapore’s Hawker Chan dished up his signature soya sauce chicken rice at British pop-up food market Kerb. Mr Chan Hon Meng was in London as part of a collaboration with Singapore Airlines and the Singapore Tourism Board. From 11.30am each day, only 200 portions of his soya sauce chicken rice box were served, priced at £6 (S$11) each.

A snaking queue had formed even before 10am, with some people waiting for up to two hours, according to posts on social media.
Many had to be turned away, but those lucky enough to sink their teeth into the dish said they had no regrets waiting so long.

The Hawker Chan brand is a spin-off of Singapore hawker stall Liao Fan Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice and Noodle, which was started by Mr Chan at Chinatown Complex in Smith Street. In 2016, he was awarded a Michelin star and his $2 chicken rice was touted as the world’s cheapest Michelin-starred meal.

After signing a deal with Hersing Culinary, he went on to open outlets around the world – three in Taipei, two in Bangkok and one in Melbourne. More branches are planned for Perth and Manila.

A new major French wine deception scandal - the Côtes du Rhône that wasn't

France's consumer fraud body the Direction Générale de la Concurrence, de la Consommation et de la Répression des Fraudes (DGCDRF) this week confirmed that almost half a million hectolitres of wine - about 66.5million bottles - was falsely sold under the Côtes du Rhône AOC label. This latest scandal affecting the French wine industry represents about 15% of annual production of the area.
The inquiry into the 2017 case found “a massive misuse of the Côtes du Rhône AOC by a significant business”, the DGCCRF said. Some of the falsely sold wine - some 10,000 litres - was passed of as the prestigious Châteauneuf-du-Pape AOC.

The consumer body did not name the company involved but said the CEO was being investigated for “deception and fraud”. He had been placed under legal supervision after a bail payment of €1m, and had also been “banned from operating” in his own business, the report said. Further information given to television channel France 3 said that he was a négociant from Vaucluse.

The Revue du Vin de France reports a source close to the investigation saying that, the merchant is Raphael Michel , one of the main traders of Vaucluse , who specializes in bulk wine.

It describes itself as:

“We advise our clients during vinification, cuvee production and blend creation, in order to meet consumer expectations and to deliver first-class quality. Our range encompasses wines from the Rhone Valley, Languedoc, Provence and the South West which we supply to bottlers, wholesalers, winemakers and importers.”

Jump-Starting the Aquavit Renaissance

Jump-Starting the Aquavit Renaissance - The New York Times:

"Aquavit, or akvavit (literally “water of life”), is produced from a distilled grain or potato spirit and must be flavored predominantly with caraway or dill. There are usually other ingredients in the mix — like anise, fennel seed, cumin, cardamom and citrus peels — but the caraway or dill must be the lead botanical. (Aquavit is often referred to casually as “snaps,” but not all snaps can legally be aquavit; snaps is a more general term that includes spirits with flavors like berries, nuts, peppers or horseradish.)

 Aquavit is one of the few spirits in the world that’s traditionally paired with food. In Denmark, Aalborg’s red-label taffel (or “table”) bottling is classically served at lunch, chilled and neat alongside smorrebrod and pickled herring, backed by a Tuborg or Carlsberg beer. In Norway, there are special bottlings to pair with specific dishes such as herring, lutefisk and the epically stinky rakefisk.

In essence, aquavit is like a gin flavored with caraway or dill rather than juniper.

Given the current popularity of craft gins, it’s surprising that aquavit has not quite found a wider audience. In Denmark, a number of smaller, craft distillers are experimenting with aquavits that ratchet up the juniper flavor, while keeping the necessary caraway character."



'via Blog this'

Flippy the robot is off and cooking burgers

Flippy is now cooking burgers in Pasadena, California. The Caliburger chain unveiled its kitchen assistant this month which flips burger patties and removes them from the grill when cooked to order.

Miso Robotics, a leading robotics and artificial intelligence solutions company, aimed to augment commercial kitchen operations with advanced technology and developed Miso AI, a cloud-connected learning platform that powers industrial robotic arms.

The company says Miso AI combines 3D, thermal and regular vision to automatically detect when raw burger patties are placed on the grill and monitors each one in real-time throughout the cooking process. As the patties cook, Miso AI displays the cooking time on a screen that also alerts kitchen staff when to place cheese on top or when to dress a burger. It also enables Flippy to switch from using a spatula for raw meat and one for cooked meat. In addition, Flippy has the ability to clean spatulas while cooking and to wipe the surface of the grill with a scraper.

According to John Miller, chairman of Cali Group, “The deployment of Flippy in CaliBurger restaurants represents a major milestone in helping our staff produce mouthwatering burgers more consistently and in a timely manner. The ease of integration into our existing kitchen lines will also allow us to quickly install Flippy in more locations nationwide.”

An Ode To Leftover Curry: The Next-Day Treasure Of Coastal India

An Ode To Leftover Curry: The Next-Day Treasure Of Coastal India : The Salt : NPR:

"Fish curry inflected with coconut is a staple dish in the coastal Indian state of Goa. It's usually eaten accompanied by unpolished rice, fried fish and a dab of pickle. Once all the fish has been eaten up, the leftover curry is reheated over a low flame until it condenses and thickens. At that point, it is reborn as Kalchi koddi, which literally translates to "yesterday's curry.""



'via Blog this'

How Japan fell in love with salmon sushi

The Norwegian campaign behind Japan's love of salmon sushi | The Japan Times:

"Look at the menu of any sushi shop in Japan and you will almost certainly see salmon: fatty, tender and bright orange. And for good reason, in a 2017 survey by the seafood company Maruha Nichiro, the fish was found to be the most popular neta (topping) for the sixth year in a row, ranked far higher than the more traditional tuna and halibut.

 But salmon is a relatively new addition to the sushi menu making its rise to popularity remarkable, a story that is both an allegory of shifting taste trends across Japanese demographics and the opening of one of Japan’s most iconic cuisines, sushi, to the world.

 So swift has been salmon’s success that there is a stark generational divide when it comes to which neta is preferred. Many older Japanese start with lean white fish and work their way up to tuna, while younger generations prefer salmon.

 “20 years ago was when everything changed,” says Hideki Koike, the head chef at Masukomi Sushi Bar in Yurakucho, Tokyo. “There are still some restaurants without salmon,” he says. “But the demand is too great. You just have to serve it.”

 Behind salmon’s rise to popularity is the lesser-known story of a carefully executed Norwegian marketing campaign: Project Japan.

"



'via Blog this'

A culinary furore in Naples, the birthplace of the margherita

London's Daily Telegraph reports that a Michelin-starred chef in Italy has triggered a storm of protest from pizza purists loyal to the original Neapolitan dish for daring to produce a “healthy” version of the humble margherita to which he has audaciously added wholemeal grains and cereals.

Ogni volta che Cracco sforna una pizza così, un Napoletano si suicida! pic.twitter.com/8qw112qPYy

— Avv. Ermetico ⚖️ (@AvvErmetico) March 11, 2018

Translated from Italian by Microsoft Every time Cracco bakes a pizza like this, a Neapolitan commits suicide!

The bearded Carlo Cracco put his alternative “crunchy” recipe, featuring petal shapes of mozzarella and a heavy tomato sauce, on the menu of his restaurant in the smart Victor Emanuel Gallery in the Italian business capital of Milan, charging as much as €16 (£12.50).

But his modifications of the original recipe was met with disdain in the proud southern city of Naples, the birthplace of the margherita.
Angelo Forgione, the Neapolitan writer, spearheaded the criticism, quipping that the new gastronomic creation was nothing more than “a cracked pizza”.
Another purist noted that Cracco, a former judge in the Italian Masterchef, recently lost a Michelin star at one of his restaurants. “After making his own ‘pizza,’ they took away not only his other Michelin stars but also his Italian citizenship and his driving licence,” the commentator said

Giving Australia a bad name

Farm Girl Café, Chelsea: ‘We don't stay for dessert, because we have suffered enough’ – restaurant review | Jay Rayner | Life and style | The Guardian:



"The menu at the Farm Girl Café features lots of initials. There’s V for Vegan. There’s GF for Gluten Free. There’s DF for Dairy Free. I think they’re missing a few. There should be TF for Taste Free and JF for Joy Free and AAHYWEH for Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here. If you examine the company’s website, and I would only advise doing so if you have strong teeth that can cope with a good grinding, you will learn that the Farm Girl group offers: “A holistic and healthy yet comfortingly simple approach to Australian Café culture.” Nope, me neither. Apparently, they like to use “nutritionally nurturing ingredients”, which sounds rather nice. I could have done with a bit of nurture, rather than the dishes that came our way.

... We do not stay for dessert, because we have suffered enough."



'via Blog this'

Bubbles, With Joy: Pétillant Naturel’s Triumphant Return

Bubbles, With Joy: Pétillant Naturel’s Triumphant Return - The New York Times: "Don’t call pétillant naturel the new bubbly in town. Don’t call it “the new rosé,” as Eater.com did in 2016 in an effort to encapsulate its trendiness. In fact, don’t call it the new anything.

This genre of sparkling wine, now known as pétillant natural, or pét-nat, is made by a method so old that the French term for it is “methode ancestrale.” It’s most likely how the original sparkling wine was made, however many centuries ago that was, although that was almost certainly an accidental creation."



'via Blog this'

Don't be a wine buying goat - get a case of the Barossa Goat

It's been back to the Barossa for me this last fortnight and there's one big advantage of staying with a winery owning brother. You get to try wines at his expense that have escaped your attention as a Glug internet customer! It makes for a very satisfactory holiday.

And amid all the sipping and swirling I have certainly discovered some gems that will be on my order form when I return to Canberra. Or perhaps I should say rediscovered some gems, for one of them is a wine I enjoyed when his Goat Square Barossa Shiraz first entered the Glug portfolio some eight years ago. I don't know why it dropped off my radar but I notice now that it's down to a most economical $9.99 a bottle.

How long it will be there I know not but I fear we consumers will be facing some price rises across the board in the very near future. The wine industry people I have been speaking and drinking with in the valley are in a happier mood than I have known for years. Australian wine exports are going gang-busters with the Chinese market becoming something of a bonanza as it soaks up surplus stock. For we drinkers it's probably a good time to restock the cellar.
My brother refers to the Goat as one of Glug's special wines.

The Barossa Valley is a small, rare, unique piece of the earth's crust and only from this spot do you get red wines which display such a powerful and unusual concentration of mid palate weight. At times the fruit is so intense as to appear sweet a feature which can make wines which live for 50 years. The Goat Square wines come from a group of vineyards in the northern Barossa and any that look more interesting and intense than others are separated for the Goat.
The wine is named after Goat Square which is an historic location in the centre of Tanunda which in the 1840s to 1860s was a weekend market place, particularly for livestock.
This is the 8th vintage and the second and final bottling of about 150 cases. The winemaker is Benjamin Parker and we refer to Goat Square as the salt of the earth.

To order you will find it on the Glug site at
 Goat Square Barossa Valley Shiraz 2015.
As something of an expert BWS and Dan Murphy shopper I can tell you that when it come to value for the dollar the wines of Glug beat hands down those I often buy when I forget to restock on-line.

Further to our piece on No Show Diners comes this take from the Daily Telegraph

Click to enlarge

The great vodka con - are you a goose to pay for Grey Goose?

So you want to sell a vodka in the United States. Well here are the rules as laid down by the government in Title 27, Section 5.22 of the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Code.

Note that vodka must be distilled or treated until it is, quote, "without distinctive character, aroma, taste or color."

A rule like that does not allow much scope for product differentiation. So is there actually one between Dan Murphy's special at $29 and the Grey Goose at $68?

National Public Radio in the US set its Planet Money team to find out.

Can we make our own premium vodka? We learned that a lot of companies actually buy a vodka concentrate in bulk from a handful of suppliers. Then they just add water. So we've got a hold of a sample, brought it here into the studio... Added some water... And sent it to a lab along with a sample of Grey Goose and a sample of some of the cheapest stuff we could find. A few days later, we got a call from Neva Parker. She's the vice president at White Labs in San Diego. She ran our vodkas through what they call a comprehensive spirits test.
Based on that information, Neva, which of these three vodkas would you suspect should be the cheapest, least-desirable vodka?
NEVA PARKER: If I had to choose based on this analysis alone, I would say number one.

PASHMAN: That was the Grey Goose. And the ultra luxury choice...
PARKER: Number three.
PASHMAN: Number three was the cheap stuff. Now, to be fair, Neva did say the differences in all three samples weren't anything most people were going to taste. She compared the reports.
PARKER: I mean, look at these. They all look very similar as well.
PASHMAN: Very similar - we did talk to Grey Goose. Their global brand ambassador, Joe McCanta, took issue with our test.
JOE MCCANTA: Obviously our product was decanted into another bottle. And when that happens, it kind of compromises, you know, our understanding of any testing that's done on the product afterwards.
PASHMAN: He also argued that the odorless, tasteless law is more about distinguishing true vodka from vodkas that have stuff like fruit and sugar added. Pure vodka is its own category.
MCCANTA: Every vodka within the category will have its own characteristics, which would be largely attributed to the raw materials used to make the spirit or even the process used while distilling the spirit. So yeah, that's definitely our take on it. And that's why - you know, that's why we feel very proud of our process and our ingredients.
PASHMAN: So our one lab didn't detect any tasteful differences even with our homemade vodka. And the law seems pretty clear to us. But Grey Goose insists there is a difference. They also invited us to come have a drink with them. We are willing to continue our research.

Coming to fast food outlets - a healthier and environmentally friendlier burger starring mushrooms

The idea of the blended beef-mushroom burger came from New York's Menus of Change initiative of the Culinary Institute of America and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The pair came together "to realize a long-term, practical vision integrating optimal nutrition and public health, environmental stewardship and restoration, and social responsibility concerns within the foodservice industry and the culinary profession." This week SONIC, the largest chain of drive-in restaurants in America, is bringing items from the Menus of Change to the American public.

According to the Culinary Institute, the two burgers SONIC is adding to its menu are the kind of menu change that's "a powerful, and previously underappreciated, way to drive improvements in our health and our planet."

NPR  reports:

The idea is that mixing chopped mushrooms into our burgers boosts the umami taste, adds more moisture and reduces the amount of beef required for a burger. And reducing the need for beef has a big impact on the environment. According to the World Resources Institute, if 30 percent of the beef in every burger in America were replaced by mushrooms, it would reduce greenhouse emissions by the same amount as taking 2.3 million vehicles off of our roads.

Sonic, though, isn't stressing the saving-the-planet angle. In a press release, the company's vice president of product innovation and development, Scott Uehlein, said that its new blended cheeseburgers, which contain 25 percent mushrooms, will "deliver the juicy savory deliciousness you expect from a burger in a way that makes you feel like you're getting away with something."
The company promises that people eating the burger will get all this flavor but "none of the guilt" but does not reveal whether the guilt reduction will come from cutting calories or greenhouse gas emissions.

Giving Scotch a feminine touch to go with a female Colonel Sanders

A woman is about to come striding out on the world's most famous Scotch whisky label. Makers Diageo are launching Jane Walker on the United States market with a limited edition of 250,000 bottles. The aim is to make whisky more appealing to women and if it works Jane will become Johnnie's regular partner.

Perhaps the new look will was down well the new KFC smoky mountain barbecue chicken that has country singer Reba NcEntire.

Touchscreens and table manners

From recent issues of London's Daily Telegraph: