Coaching for personal growth, change and development
Food makers and their suppliers will be wise to continue their drive into Asian markets, with a new report revealing the region will grow to achieve a 41 per cent slice of the global food retail market in 2020, a leap from 33 per cent in 2003.
Food Navigator
PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y. (March 14) – Approximately 62 percent of customer traffic for takeout comes from independent, full-service restaurants, while only 38 percent is from chain restaurants, according to a survey by The NPD Group, a market research firm based here.
Takeout traffic at independent casual-dining locations increased 6 percent in 2004, after being down 2 percent the previous year. Takeout traffic for chains was also up 6 percent in 2004. The survey showed that 44 percent of take-out traffic at full-service chains comes from people making a yearly salary of $75,000 or more. Forty-two percent of takeout traffic at independent units comes from people in that income bracket. Also, 22 percent of all takeout traffic at independent restaurants comes from people 50 years or older, but for chain restaurants 18 to 34-year-olds drive the takeout traffic.
Nations Restaurant News
Would you spend more than $100 a person on a gourmet seven-course meal created entirely of vegetables?
Judging by the growing popularity of vegetarian tasting menus at some of the nation’s most celebrated restaurants — including several in the Washington area — the answer is a decided yes.
From the glittering new Per Se in New York, where a nine-course vegetable tasting menu is $175 a person, to the posh Maestro in McLean, where a five-course meal from the “Colors of the Garden” menu is $105, to the innovative Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago and its $115-a-person vegetable menu, ambitious chefs are presenting diners with stunning multi-course meals that don’t contain a scrap of meat, poultry or fish.
And they aren’t apologizing for the cost, either. Exceptional vegetable courses that look and taste like works of art take as much or more time to do well as any other dishes, chefs say.
You can have anything you want at a Chipotle’s restaurant — so long as it’s some kind of a taco or burrito, reports Amanda Hesser in The New York Times Magazine (2/27/05). Condiments — Chipotle offers just three hot sauces to its customers. “Nothing to dilute the purity of the tightly swaddled burrito,” writes Amanda, who also observes that the formula seems to work — and suggests that it “represents a shift in American fast food … a triumph for the increasing number of diners interested in healthful, sustainable food.” As she describes the scene at the new Chipotle on 34th Street in Manhattan: “Fresh tortillas are heated on a griddle, then piled with fillings like rice flecked with fresh cilantro, naturally raised Niman Ranch pork and organic beans. Burritos, good-tasting if bulky, are rolled by the hundred.”
Reveries
Chipotle
From Tim Manners
Immaculate Sushi. Lunch or dinner there will cost you $350, and you don’t get to pick what to eat.
A meal at the 26-seat Masa is a three-hour affair, with all items selected and served in a “sequence … and rhythm” determined by Masayoshi Takayama, its chef and owner. The chef:customer ratio typically is 1:2. If you are seated “in one of the 10 seats at the hinkoki wood bar, sanded so frequently that you catch its faint scent,” you watch your sushi being prepared by black-robed, short-haired (or shaven headed) chefs “from just inches away.” As Frank Bruni relays it: “A chef makes your sushi a piece at a time, reaching for a pristine slab of fluke or Spanish mackerel and using a bone-handled knife to carve a sliver. He presses wasabi or maybe shiso flakes onto a bed of warm rice, lays the fish atop it and then anoints this jewel with soy sauce, yuzu or sudachi, a limelike Japanese fruit.” The effect is “an immediacy and intimacy unlike anything at more conventional restaurants or for that matter at other upscale sushi bars …”
A monster turkey big enough to feed a small village has been sold for £1,700 at auction in Aberdeenshire.
The 74lb bird will take more than 24 hours to cook and provide Christmas dinners for more than 100 people.
Washington Post
A proliferating number of sandwich chains such as Potbelly Sandwich Works, Panera Bread, Corner Bakery and Cosi that offer such items as tuna and Swiss cheese on multigrain bread, a grilled Italian panini on rosemary-onion focaccia, or tandoori chicken with roasted red peppers and vinaigrette in a flat-bread pocket.
It seems that trendsetters across the US are crazy about Boba and have been haunting their local Chinatown to find this underground beverage. Otherwise known as tapioca, bubble or pearl tea, Boba is a tea/milk drink flavored with syrup and laden with tapioca balls that lurk on the bottom of your glass. The drink is basically cold, sweet tea with chewy, gelatinous balls on the bottom that you suck up with an oversize straw. [Read more…] about A new alternative to coffee?
