Eat My Florida

Now that the 3G iPhone is up and running (sort of), you can make use of it’s brand new, true GPS system to do more than just get directions and illegally track people. Why not use it to find some food?

Urbanspoon, a two year old Seattle company, has launched a free iPhone app that uses the GPS (or the triangulation system on old phones) to search for restaurants that are, theoretically, in your general vicinity. Usually this type of software is only geared towards the bigger metro areas with established dining scenes — which would likely mean that our own Bay area is out of luck — but Urbanspoon recently added Tampa/St. Pete to it’s list. Awfully nice of ‘ya.

No iPhone? Well, you can still log on the old fashioned way and do an actual web search on Urbanspoon’s site, as well as read local reviews culled from the rags (ours included) and customer reviews riddled with shills. Web-browsing … clunky, but it still works.

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Twelve cans of the stuff arrived to our office today from Mountain Dew headquarters, high in the mountains. We got four of each flavor. Our editor (at CL’s Sarasota paper) Jonathan Maziarz was the first to try it. He opened the bright blue can that’s Infused with Wild Berry Fruit Flavor and Ginseng. I overheard the following statements as he drank and worked on his important editor duties:

“There’s an interesting smell coming from the can… Hm. It’s not wholly offensive….Actually, there’s a really profoundly bad aftertaste…Ew, it’s like Newark in my mouth.”

I drop one off on arts writer Amanda Schurr’s desk, the pink can With a Blast of Strawberry Melon Flavor and Ginseng. “Thanks. Ew,” she says, upon looking at the can. “I can hardly wait.” Several minutes later I hear her open the flip top. “Oh, God,” she says. “Some little drops got on my finger and I actually tasted some of it.” She adds, “It tastes like fake strawberry and melon flavor and Mountain Dew, which is to say it tastes repulsive.”

I try the one in the black can, which is Charged With Raspberry Citrus Flavor and Ginseng. Mmm. It reminds me of popsicles from the ice cream man on my neighborhood street when I’d been working hard all day building forts and assaulting my younger brother. “Dew drinker designed,” it says on the can.

Food science is kind of scary that way when you think about it. So invasive is their market analysis, so powerful are they in commandeering our nostalgia, that they’ve managed to replicate the sensation of a tri-color Mr. Tasty Time popsicle from the mid-‘90s and package it in a little black can that they mail to my place of business. I’m trying to become a man, Mountain Dew, to live a brave and productive life without reverting to my helpless childhood. Don’t even try this shit. We are immune.

-Justin Richards 

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During the South Beach Food and Wine Festival a few weeks back, garrulous food entertainer Anthony Bourdain and enviable food writer Michael Ruhlman debuted the first annual Golden Clog Awards. Some of the awards — like “best achievement in offal” or “chef’s chef award” — were designed to recognize the duo’s favorite guys in the industry. But nobody cared because the other awards were juicy, inside-baseball slams of the biggest names in food.

One of the victims was GQ Food Critic Alan Richman, who won the coveted Douchebag Award “for the best example of twisted, repressed, or compromised “I’d rather be making lemon bundt cake with My Cat, Mr. Mufflesworth” journalist who actually HATES food and hates the people who make food even more.”

As if to prove the point, Richman penned a revenge review of Bourdain’s restaurant Les Halles. He hated it — perhaps rightly, most folks recognize that Les Halles is nothing to get excited about — and spent an inordinate number of words on Bourdain’s “Chef-At-Large” status at the restaurant. Bourdain doesn’t make any bones about the fact that he rarely works a line anymore (just check out the episode where he sweats through a night in the kitchen at Les halles with Eric Ripert), but Richman was gunning for Bourdain, no matter what. The thing is, Bourdain has a sense of humor about his distance from the kitchen and is largely unfazed by the attack. He told Grub Street: “It was like being mauled by Gumby. Afterwards, you’re not sure it even happened.”

Maybe Richman’s lobbying for back-to-back Douchebag awards. Way to hog the glory, dude.

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While I’m working up the chutzpah for a new blog segment where I interview restaurateurs after my review of their establishment hits the paper, for good or ill, I thought I’d throw down some letters about a couple of recent reviews in Sarasota.

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I win again! The past few months — ever since Laura Reiley took over for Sherman — the Times and CL have reviewed the same restaurants on the very same week on several occasions. I’m sure that she follows similar rules about waiting long enough to let the restaurant find it’s footing, but not so long that the place is old news, whenever possible, so the coincidence is understandable. I’m just glad CL comes out on Wednesday, so my reviews get a 24 hour head start.

More interesting than that, however, is when our opinions differ. With Cheap, we differed a lot. Chalk it up to a difference in palate, the usual night-to-night variances in a restaurant’s performance, or even a fundamental disagreement in what food should be like. In any case, restaurant reviews are like any other type of criticism: you need to figure out how well the reviewer matches your own preferences before you can determine how to use the review.

When it comes to Cheap, who do you guys agree with?

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Abut a month ago, the New York Daily News hired a brand new restaurant critic with a gimmick: she’s a food blogger and she’s not anonymous. You can read here in the corporate fluff piece how she feels it’s important for “readers to have someone to identify with” and how “her radar will be tuned to determine whether she’s getting special treatment.” A bit naive, in my opinion. A lot of people seem to agree.

You can read Ruth Reichl’s Garlic and Sapphires for copious examples of how recognition can affect a dining experience - her Le Cirque review is a classic treatise on the subject - but the culture of dining critic anonymity isn’t universal. At The Times of London, pics are posted with critics’ bylines; no matter where you are, a Google image search can often turn up a pic or two of even the most circumspect reviewer. Here’s my pic.

As always, I’ll be dressing in drag, undergoing regular plastic surgery and faking my own death every few months, just to keep my mystery man image intact. Maybe image was the wrong word.

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I’ve always bristled at the oft-cited frugal tip that eating lunch at a nice place is a good way to get the cuisine at half the price. Maybe it’s just that Bay area and Sarasota lunches never seem to live up to the dinnertime promise of a pricey place.

After the lunch I just had at The Table on Hillview in Sarasota, I’m willing to single them out as an exception. My wife and I (her birthday, hence the Big Lunch) started with ceviche — tuna in a spicy chipotle and tart yuzu dressing, cubed shrimp with poblanos and radish, both served in edible tortilla cones — and small tostadas loaded with the luscious short ribs that are my favorite Table protein. Then came fried black grouper strips atop a brilliant salad of chayote and red onion dressed in citrus juice, nut oil and pungent dried herbs, along with a few crushed plantain patties. (Anyone who watched last night’s Top Chef will immediately realize that The Table’s “fish and chips” will immediately see the revision of classic downscale dish. This would have beaten Howie’s boring-ass pork and slaw hand’s down.) My wife settled on a dainty garden salad dressed with a rich and pungent olive/fig concoction.

All told, the bill came in under $60, including two glasses of wine, and it was as good or better than dinner at most of the nicer restaurants around town, and just about as satisfying as a full dinner at The Table.

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Back in the day, my predecessor Sara Kennedy reviewed Crazy Conch, but I had heard good things and wanted to see if this Tierra Verde fine dining spot was worth the drive. Check in next week to see.

Got any other out of the way, beachy island spots from anywhere up and down the coast?

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Yeah, I know. In retrospect, two stories dealing with hot dogs does seem like too much of a good thing, but this is the beginning of prime frankfurter season. Gorge away and start training for Dairy Inn’s annual Hot Dog Eating Contest on July 4.

To tide you over, here are some choice (and grotesque!) eating records, courtesy of the International Federation of Competitive Eating:

84 ounces of baked beans in under 2 minutes
46 dozen oysters in 10 minutes
247 pickled jalapenos in 8 minutes

Sound disgusting? I saved the worst of them for next week’s article.

Think you have what it takes to compete with the big boys (and girls)? God, I hope not.

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Your guide to drowning Devil Ray bullpen sorrows in a mountain of Atwater ribs and chili-cheese dogs. Grab some grub and stretch out in the empty upper decks of Tropicana Stadium, or spend some serious cash for a club seat, you still won’t escape the Yankee-crushing power of the Ray’s bats.

And a special treat for anyone who misses Max Linsky -

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This new Brazilian Steakhouse is almost too slick to fit into the Bohemian Gulfport scene. It’s also a budding chain, and Gulfport doesn’t feel like the ideal place to attract the mass chain consumer, but we’ll see. Cool bar, though.

Check it out and tell us what you think, before my review hits next Wednesday.

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Just a few tidbits that did not make it into the Chateau France review, for those of you who appreciate DVD extras:

- Many of the dishes came on plates that were organized and garnished exactly the same way — pate, steak tartare, some desserts — each with mint, blackberries and strawberries. The plates were also frigidly cold, which leads me to believe (unconfirmed) that the plates are pre-made before service and refrigerated until needed.

- While not abysmal, the service was disorganized and haphazard for such a setting — long waits for water (which whiffed of chlorine, unfiltered and straight from the tap), the wrong wine brought to the table, confusion about who ordered which dish, confusion about what wines were in stock. Everyone was dressed impeccably, however.

- Chateau France’s Crepes Suzette nailed that cloying orangey sauce, but the little pancakes were tough, chewy and dense.

- The joint was empty. It looked like only four tables were occupied on a Friday night.

Like I say in the review, I like Louro and I like Chateau France — at least on my previous visits to the St. Pete location. Hopefully Louro will find the right formula for multiple location success.

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Just received a letter from Linda Bernard about this week’s review of her Brisket Basket. Here’s my mistakes:
“The Brisket Chowder doesn’t have any vanilla in it, the predominant spice is Sweet Basil.” and “Neither the Chili nor the 5-Way Beans have any cardamom.” Very sorry Linda, could have sworn about the cardamom, but I should have confirmed it with you.

She also notes that - “We grind our brisket in house daily, however found that we had to also grind rolled Chuck and add that to the mixture in order cut down on the fat content and get the burger to hold up a little better with a little less flame-up. Same situation with the meatloaf, as the brisket when ground, proves a challenge to handle correctly.”

Even with the changes, it’ll be hard to pick either of those when the brisket sandwich is so damn good. Thanks for the letter, Linda.

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