A new book, “The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine,” released in the United States last month, Rudolph Chelminski, a journalist friend of Loiseau’s, outlines the tragic story that may be increasingly relevant to Americans watching their own chefs ascend the ladder of celebrity.What the book does not cover is the reaction to Loiseau’s suicide among the French culinary elite. Some of the country’s most revered chefs have recently condemned the system that many believe led to Loiseau’s death — the critics and the obsessive cultivation of Michelin’s top ranking. Three chefs have renounced the Michelin rating system this year, giving up their stars or asking not to be rated.
Blog Page
the "sustainable" menu at Yale's Berkeley College
Yalie Cuisine. “We don’t want students to feel that eating well is suffering,” says Josh Viertel, explaining the philosophy behind the “sustainable” menu at Yale’s Berkeley College dining hall, as reported by Alison Leigh Cowan in The New York Times. Twist is, it’s the Yale students who can’t have Berkeley’s experimental organic meals who are suffering. They’ll do just about anything to have at the burgers of “grass-fed lamb and freshly picked mint … chicken brodo with pasta and greens and pork loin with fennel … They try to slip fake identification cards past the Yale employees stationed at the entrance. They don sweatshirts with the Berkeley insignia to make it look as if they belong …”
“Whatever they can get away with,” says Catherine Jones, Berkeley’s executive chef. It sure beats “picking from the same old nonorganic salad bars, scooping out the sugary cereals and chewing on chuck-patty hamburgers slipped into white bread rolls” like they do at Yale’s 11 other dining halls. The idea for this “sustainable” dining hall, yale.edu/sustainablefood, was hatched four years by Alice Waters, a chef, “when her daughter Fanny became a freshman.” The project started by turning “a vacant lot into a lush vegetable garden that doubles as a laboratory … The three-meal-a-day rollout came in September 2003.” The thinking is “that people and communities thrive when meals consist of locally produced, seasonal ingredients, rather than food that is shipped long distance or processed so it keeps.”
Reveries
Spicing Up the Food Scene
Much of PF Chang’s success comes from its operations practices, analysts say. Restaurant managers are partial owners in the eateries they run. This helps reduce turnover — the bane of the industry — allowing the company to deliver the key factor in a restaurant’s success: a consistent customer experience in food and service, says Sharon Zackfia, an analyst with William Blair & Co. in Chicago, who rates PF Chang’s stock outperform.
What also helps, says PF Chang Chief Executive Richard Federico, is that his places offer extras not found at many mom-and-pop Chinese restaurants: upscale decor, dessert menus, cappuccino, and a 50-bottle wine list. “PF Chang’s has offered an alternative without compromising product quality,” he says.
Business Week
Starbucks Speed
Starbucks Speed. How to serve drinks — and food — faster without making customers feel like “they’re in an Indy-500 pit stop,” is a key challenge facing Starbucks, reports Steven Gray in The Wall Street Journal. “This is a game of seconds,” says Silvia Peterson, Starbucks’s director of store operations, whose job it is to find ways to play that game better. It’s easy to understand why Starbucks hired her: According to Mintel International Group, mintel.com, “64 percent of Americans said they pick a restaurant based on how much time they have.” That’s why Silvia and “her team of 10 engineers” came up with bigger ice scoops, for example. That way, baristas only had to dip once for ice, helping to “cut 14 seconds off the average preparation time for blended beverages of about one minute.”
reveries
A generation on the go
Marketing experts agree on two things: People in their 20s are eating out, carrying out and driving through more than any other age group in history. And when they do go to the food store, they look for convenience. A lot of it. They don’t even have time to wash their lettuce.
Full article a t Baltimore Sun
Susan Ralston elevates Rock Bottom Brewery's pub fare to meet level of its handcrafted beers
People expect fine wine to equal gourmet cuisine. “So why shouldn’t great beer be synonymous with fabulous food? asks Susan Ralston, director of research and development at Louisville, Colo.-based Rock Bottom Restaurants Inc. “Cultivating that connection has pretty much become our mission?
Recognizing that handcrafted-beer drinkers have well-developed palates and crave more than pub grub to go with their favorite brews, Rock Bottom has been working to elevate the food side of its menu. New dishes and more-contemporary plate presentations have shown promising results. Highlighted in limited-time offers that closely link dishes with matching beers, the shift in focus helped increase comp-store sales by 3 percent to 5 percent and food sales by 3 percent to 4 percent over the last two years, says Marketing Director Marilyn Davenport.
Read the Article at Foodservice 411
Pop a tea pill if you can't have a cuppa
GUWAHATI, India (Reuters) – Feel like a cup of tea, but don’t have the time to brew one up? Pop a “tea pill” instead.
Indian tea scientists have produced a tea-flavoured pill that can be chewed or quickly dissolved in hot or cold water.
The brownish tablet weighs 0.3 grams and consists of 80 percent tea and 20 percent other flavours — a combination the inventors at the Tocklai tea research centre in Assam say peps you up just like a traditional cuppa.
“You can suck it, chew it or dissolve it in water the way you like to have it and still feel the taste of a real cup of tea,” said the centre’s director, Mridul Hazarika.
“As the liquid tea refreshes, this tea pill will also refresh the people because it contains pure tea ingredients.”
Hazarika said the centre had applied for a patent and the pill, with a bit more fine tuning, should hit the market in six months.
Indians drink a lot of tea but in recent years its tea business, the world’s largest, has faced growing competition from soft drinks.
Link
Family dinners, 24 at a time
When it comes to dinner, consumers want it all: active, individual lifestyles AND sit-down family dinners, preferably combined with convenience AND authenticity. Which means the food and beverage world is forever coming up with innovative, wholesome yet effortless ways to feed busy singles and families; from healthy ready-to-heat meals to online grocers such as FreshDirect. Now, add to this equation services like Dream Dinners, Dinner Helpers and Let’s Dish
read moreSpringwise