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It was a current iPhone commercial where I was recently reminded of “The Ketchup Conundrum” by Malcolm Gladwell: The article zips by in a milli-second, as a finger flips through the virtual pages of an iPhone screen. Originally published in The New Yorker in 2004, “The Ketchup Conundrum” is an intriguing account of food and marketing. If you’re like me, you have at least five kinds of mustard on hand at all times. And according to the article, lots of other folks are the exact same way.
As an aside, the Heublein Company (mentioned in [... read more ...]
S'more Pots du Creme: Scharfenberger Chocolate Custard, Graham Crackers, and Toasted Marshmallow Fluff.
Last Tuesday felt like the last warm day of 2010. Whether or not that proves to be true, tomorrow can only tell. It’s very possible that November or December might offer an odd sunny day here or there — that happens fairly frequently here in Northern California — but as far as planning a picnic was concerned, Tuesday just seemed like the last sure-shot bet of the season. Instinctively, and with the last vestiges of summer quickly fading into fall, I felt like [... read more ...]
[UPDATE: The rumor below has since been confirmed, although chef Todd Humphries will not be going to the CIA, nor Jeanty at Jack's, as he mentions in the comments.]
Folks, the stories don’t get much more wild than this one, but I’m going to roll with it anyway, since that’s part of what I do: I’ve just heard that the Martini House in St. Helena will be sold to Flemings Steakhouse. I’ve been mulling this one over all morning, thinking about the possibility of this rumor being true, and what it could all mean to the Napa Valley. What [... read more ...]
The Main Event: Blackened Pacific Halibut with Crispy Pancetta New Potatoes, smothered in Sauce Anthony.
Here in the Napa Valley, hosting a dinner party this time of year can be a mighty tall order. The problem is finding enough guests with free time, since so many folks in the valley remain hopelessly preoccupied during harvest and crush. Among most of the people I know, they’re either working long days in the cellar, or they’re working long nights in the kitchen (tourism in the Napa Valley also hits its peak this same time of year). No doubt, as September [... read more ...]
These days, when a rising-star chef leaves any given restaurant, it has the potential to become news. Here in the Bay Area, we’ve seen this phenomenon recently with Nate Appleman exiting SPQR and with Jeremy Fox leaving Ubuntu. For the guests who have come to appreciate these restaurants, the departure of an executive chef can introduce many question marks, and quite possibly, a large degree of doubt. It all makes perfect sense, of course, since today’s professional chefs now have true rock-star potential. When David Lee Roth left Van Halen, it was certainly an issue for the band’s early [... read more ...]
 I’m not sure if the following recipe appears in Morimoto’s cookbook or not, but a couple months ago, when I tasted the delicious pork belly sliders at the pre-opening festivities at Morimoto Napa, I decided that I really needed to learn to more about the Iron Chef’s approach to swine. Fortunately, I have a friend and former chef-school roommate who has cooked at one of Morimoto’s East Coast restaurants, so he’s actually executed this pork belly recipe dozens of times, if not hundreds. As I found out, the recipe itself doesn’t really contain any guarded secrets or esoteric [... read more ...]
After a satisfying breakfast at the Brown Sugar Kitchen in West Oakland last week, I drove up to Black Oak Books on San Pablo, a place where I can always kill a couple hours by browsing their used cookbook section. I have a penchant for kooky old books that are long out-of-print, and when I had discovered an old copy of 1962′s “An Illustrated History of French Cuisine” by Christian Guy, I was hoping that the book would be filled with lots of great vintage illustrations, as the title seems to suggest. Unfortunately, this wasn’t really the case, at [... read more ...]
As a blogger, I feel as though I have the journalistic privilege of running with any rumor I please, so long as I remain completely upfront about it. Sometimes these rumors prove true, sometimes not. But I did wish to mention that the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, which had been officially delaying its new development in Napa’s Oxbow District (ever since the U.S. economy tanked last year), has now allegedly pulled the plug on its planned Napa location. The Ritz-Carlton launched the project over three years ago, when construction of the Ritz-Carlton Napa was first announced back in April 2007, after [... read more ...]
The 10-hour pork shoulder looks and tastes like pork belly, although this California-sized portion might not pass muster in the South. With everything else on the menu, however, it was plenty of swine, and the rich sauce certainly added some weight to this particular dish. The baked cranberry beans, which provide the bed underneath, were perfectly cooked.
I have friends who live in Marin County who are mighty quick to dismiss the culinary options north of the Golden Gate. It is puzzling, in my mind, that such an affluent community has so few top-notch dining options in the [... read more ...]
I thought this was an interesting snippet from one of Jonathan Gold’s latest columns in the LA Weekly, regarding the prevention of culinary espionage among some of Koreatown’s most venerable cold noodle joints:
“As generations of K-town denizens have discovered, it may be easier to steal gold from Fort Knox than it is to smuggle naengmyon out of the Corner Place: Nobody is going to reverse-engineer the broth on Corner’s watch. Chil Bo Myun Ok, the other famous Koreatown naengmyon specialist, also forbids takeout orders of the noodles — the last time a friend tried, I was sure that [... read more ...]
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