As if there weren’t already enough reality shows about cooking, Bravo announced the launching of “Top Chef Masters.” The details don’t really matter, but the judges are slated to be a guy who works for Saveur, former New York magazine restaurant critic Gael Greene, and a guy from Britain.
A question: is Greene (that’s her in the center) going to continue her tradition of only being photographed wearing hats that obscure her face? Because that’s going to look really ridiculous on television.
The Internet can take us to many great places and show us so many great foods, more than any single blog can feature. At least until now. Enter This is Why You’re Fat, which features food after fat-loaded food. You know, the kind that show up on Digg and in The New York Times and, occasionally, here.
It’s the honoring of — and the electronic lusting after — such foods that makes them ever so slightly more acceptable to consume. Not that anyone regularly eats a deep-fried Twinky on a stick dipped in chocolate syrup, or a seven-pound breakfast burrito or a mega stack of Double Stuff Oreo. But enough people are constantly trolling for salty, greasy crap to shovel (me included) that deep dish pizza vending machines make economic sense.
This theory is akin to Suicide Food’s notion that by showing more animals who are happy to be eaten we are desensitized to the fact that we’re eating animals, and ones often ill treated at that.
Tomorrow, from 10 to 11 a.m., you can hear me and Jim Duncan, food writer for City View, Relish and The Iowan, on The Exchange with Ben Kieffer. We’ll be discussing my pig slaughter and other food issues. You can call in or send an e-mail with questions or comments if you wish.
You can listen on an IPR news station or the network’s online steam.
From Michael Ruhlman’s Twitter feed and a friend comes a New York Times story about possibly the most overly baconed dish ever.
Essentially, it’s a bacon placemat wrapped around Italian sausage.
Drool.
Update:
The Kansas City Star has a better headline: “Bacon Belly Bomb is a Big Hit.”
Hanging on a bulletin board in a small Iowa town, among the ads for dog grooming and used snow blowers (each printed on colored letter paper with those easy-tear tabs with preprinted phone numbers) was an similarly styled ad for a steakhouse.
A 10 percent share in Joesph’s Steakhouse to be exact. To quote the flyer:
10% Interest in Joseph’s Steakhouse downtown Iowa City (property only) This is an established high end steakhouse and seafood restaurant located in the heart of Iowa City at 212 South Clinton Street 319-631-3268
Seems an odd way to sell a stake in a restaurant to me.
Today I’m reminded of a lesson I learned in a reporting 101 class:
People die.
People do not pass away. They do not meet Jesus. They do not cross over. They are not lost.
People die.
Burger King’s”Whopper Virgins” campaign is brilliant. But, and I’m not saying we should keep burgers all to ourselves, traipsing into Inuit villages and towns in Eastern Europe and homes in Thailand with Big Macs and Whoppers is nothing short of sick.
I’m honored Jim Duncan named me best new food writer in his food-year-in-review column in the Des Moines alternative weekly City View.
This “new media” Iowa journalist wrote old fashioned rings around other young food reporters in traditional media — by practicing self examination without self indulgence and by teaching readers about his subjects.
A ridiculously nice thing to say. While he cites this blog, which embarrassingly hasn’t been updated since September (I promise to do better), I’d urge you to look at my A Pig in Three Parts package.
I try to look choosy when I’m at the store getting a couple bottles of wine; picking up a few to closely inspect the varietal and hints of the terroir. But really I’m trolling the low-end stuff. $6-per-bottle is my wheelhouse. And I say yea or nay based on pretty much on label design alone.
But when it was time to jump to a higher price point, how could I resist a 2005 Chateau Des Moines for $13 at Dirty John’s? It’s actually French, imported by a West Des Moines company. It was just all right. Better after it breathed for a couple hours.
At least it wasn’t Chateau Chunder.
Originally published in The Tampa Tribune on Sept. 4, 2008
TAMPA – Good food has amazing curative powers. Thick tomato soup with drizzled olive oil at a Tuscan wine bar rescued me from car sickness induced by bouncing around wine country in a full backseat. Three-bean soup from the grocery store a block away from my college apartment cured my hangovers. A four-hour, eight-course meal from then-under-the-radar chef Grant Achatz cured me of the flu.
To that list add SideBern’s foie gras appetizer with caramelized peaches, pine-nut puree and sherry reduction. The dish rescued me from an impending cold.
Though it may have been the heirloom Berkshire pork belly, cooked sous-vide (a cooking process that involves vacuum sealing food in plastic and cooking it for long periods of time in warm water) and served with figs, walnuts and Taleggio cheese that has been blowtorched.
SideBern’s, described nine years ago in these pages as “a hip cousin to venerable Bern’s Steak House,” is still good at mixing the hip and the elegant. The interior, which hasn’t changed in a decade, features high ceilings, high-backed banquettes and classy blue sheer curtains.
But since executive chef Chad Johnson and chef de cuisine Courtney Orwig took over for popular Jeannie Pierola in December, the pair have slowly been putting their personal stamp on the menu. The dim sum and all but a vestige of Pierola’s “One World Cuisine” are gone. The outstanding cheese selection remains. Less elegant – but thoroughly respectable – meats, such as bison and pork belly, have appeared. The food has kept its edge.
But at times the hipster thing goes too far: When seated, each guest is presented with a 12-by-18-inch steel clipboard. Sorry, dear dining companion, if I accidentally smacked you with the unwieldy menu.
Picking an entree dish from that menu is still a pleasurable chore, and any of the constantly changing options would be a good bet. On a recent visit, we ate SideBern’s seared duck breast with pears and port glaze, filet mignon au poivre with wild mushrooms and creamy peppercorn sauce, and a great buffalo striploin with smoked hummus and pepperoncini sauce. Each lived up to our high expectations.
If picking one entrée is too much of a struggle, SideBern’s offers a five-course tasting menu for $75. Paired wines are a $35 option. But that may make the struggle to decide worse; for each of the five courses, diners choose between two options.
The desserts, a specialty of both SideBern’s and Bern’s, were a slight letdown. The chocolate beignets – five of them – were overcooked and accompanied by a dunk tank each of peanut butter, raspberry and orange sauces. The $8 Ultimate Milkshake, offered in any flavor of the house-made ice cream, wasn’t the best we’d ever had (it was too airy), but where else can you get a goat-cheese-and-almond shake? And the letdown says more about the quality of the entrees than the quality of the desserts.
Service was generally superb from the moment we walked in without a reservation until the time we left, but we had a few nit-picks: Our bread was served with butter that was still ice cold and unspreadable, and on three occasions, a dining companion was asked if he was still “working” on his entree before he had finished his meal. Between the unnecessary euphemism for “eating” and its repetition, we felt pestered.
Still, even with the changing of the guard in the kitchen, SideBern’s remains a beacon of hope on Tampa’s culinary landscape.
