Omnivore Atlanta

How’s your gaydar for names? Can you, just by looking at a name, tell if it belongs to a gay bar or a steakhouse? Take the test.

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It matters, according to new research:

Whether your companions are overweight or skinny and how much they put on their plates can greatly influence how much you eat. New research shows if we eat with skinny people, we tend to mimic their food portions, regardless of how much they take. However, if we eat with overweight companions, we generally try to adjust our portions to be different.

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Andrew Smith, the (amazingly prolific) author of Eating History, will be speaking 7:30-9:30 p.m. Mon., Nov. 16, at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts (1927 Lakeside Pkw., Tucker):

Food historian Andrew F. Smith will recount—in delicious detail—some of the major moments that made contemporary American cuisine, as described in his brand new book, Eating History: Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine, from Columbia University Press. The style of American cooking, along with the ingredients that compose it, has never been fixed. With a cast of characters including bold inventors, savvy restaurateurs, ruthless advertisers, mad scientists, adventurous entrepreneurs, celebrity chefs, and relentless health nuts, Smith pins down the truly crackerjack history behind the way America eats.

The event is co-sponsored by the Culinary Historians of Atlanta, which maintains a Facebook page (e-mail deborah.duchon@gmail.com). There is also a separate Facebook page for this event.

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This is pretty groovy. Illy is marketing cups designed by one of my favorite film directors:

This signed and numbered, limited edition illy Art Collection cup set was designed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar for illy caffè. Almodóvar’s six-cup series – each entry paired with an equally vivid saucer — takes inspiration from six of the famed Spanish director’s most admired films; Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990), High Heels (1991), The Flower of My Secret (1995), Bad Education (2004) and Volver (2006). The individually decorated cups depict his signature themes of love, women — including his favorite lead actress Penélope Cruz — desire, passion and family.

They’re kind of retro-garish and expensive, but if you’ve got money to burn, go ahead and buy a full set.

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Come and get yo soul food, well well
Good old-fashioned soul food, all right
Everythang is for free
As good as it can be
Come and get some soul food

This Atlanta-based group invented the phrase “Dirty South,” which a certain popular blogger has adopted.

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Check out the Biosphere Farm, which allows you to grow your own veggies and fish in your kitchen:

But perhaps most dramatic is the self-contained biosphere farm, created by Philips, to provide fish and fresh produce 52 weeks a year.

It will also deliver fresh hydrogen, which can be used to power a car, and run on food waste from the kitchen.

The plants produce oxygen, which is fed into the fish tank to keep the occupants happy.

The tank is kept clean by shrimps, which can also be eaten.

I had a similar contraption back in the ’70s to grow, um, herbs. But it didn’t include a fish habitat.

(Photo courtesy of the Mail Online)

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File this under “news that totally sucks.” Elisa Gambino (right) has announced the closing of her store, Via Elisa. Although she will continue marketing her sauces under the same name, she will no longer be making her pasta, by far the best available in the city. She writes:

Via Elisa’s store – but not our sauces — will end what has been a glorious seven-year run in Atlanta at the close of business on Saturday, October 17, the latest victim of an unforgiving economy.

Though that will mark the last day we will make our award-winning pasta and the last day our store will be open, I want you to know that we will continue to make our sauces, whose sales have grown despite the economic climate.

Since the line of Via Elisa sauces sold at Whole Foods Markets throughout six states in the South does very well, I will focus on developing Via Elisa as a sauce company. All three of our sauces – Passionately Perfect Tomato, Diavoletta and Sofia’s Sicilian Caper – are available in 16-oz. and 32-oz. jars.

Between the flooding and the economy, there has been much sad news here in Atlanta, and when I think of the loss that so many people have suffered, this bit of news seems trivial in comparison. I am thankful to all of you who have supported Via Elisa since we opened our doors in 2002. I have been overwhelmed by your kindness and dedication to the success of Via Elisa and I hope you will continue to support the sauces as I streamline our business. I have always enjoyed delivering pasta to the people in the neighborhoods, markets and our store. I am confident I will enjoy promoting and selling our sauces as well.

A supply of Via Elisa pasta and ravioli is available at Whole Foods Markets here in Atlanta (as we have just shipped out a fresh batch). You know where to find it! We will also continue to accept your orders until October 16 and I hope you will stock up. Everything we make freezes well.

On a closing note I want to thank the incredible and dedicated staff of professionals who work here at Via Elisa. Without Dave, Tina, Bess, Noe, Maryland, Darnell and Dahlia, Via Elisa would not have been possible. Their dedication to Via Elisa has inspired me daily and has kept me going over the years. Their contribution to the business has been immeasurable. Please thank them when you come to the shop.

And please do come by, say hello and pick up your pasta, ravioli, sauces, meats, cheeses, vinegars and oils at least one last time. The store will be open and we will be here making pasta through Saturday, October 17, and we would love to see you.

As I have always said, a two-pasta day is a good day! And if you are looking for sauce, all of our 16-oz. sizes are still on sale at Whole Foods Markets in the South for only $3.49 until October 13th.

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Gourmet magazine ceases publication. The Dining Room at the Ritz Carlton closes.

And now French culture completely collapses.

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Who will be first? Holeman & Finch or Abattoir? The Utne Reader reports:

You know that funny little red thing on the top of a rooster’s head? It’s called a cockscomb, and as Francine Segan recounts for Gastronomica, it’s very tasty:

What are these morsels that look like the fingers of a doll-sized woolen globe? . . . We take a taste. The spikes are slightly gelatinous, with hints of delicate frog-leg flavor. “Delicious” is the consensus.

Segan stumbles upon this rare ingredient on a trip to the Piedmont region of northern Italy, where cockscomb is a vital ingredient in a stew known as la finanziera, a 200-year-old dish that also utilizes a rooster’s wattles and testicles (among many other ingredients). The cockscomb seems to be the star of the show, though, which makes sense given the amount of work that goes into its preparation.

(Photo courtesy of the Silicon Valley Watcher)

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At a recent lunch, a friend was complaining that it’s hard to find a hamburger cooked rare in our city, despite the epidemic of new burger joints. According to the New York Times, there is very good reason for that. Today’s paper includes a lengthy story in which the writer, Michael Moss, traces Upton-Sinclair-like, the hamburger whose E. coli contamination left Stephanie Smith paralyzed:

Meat companies and grocers have been barred from selling ground beef tainted by the virulent strain of E. coli known as O157:H7 since 1994, after an outbreak at Jack in the Box restaurants left four children dead. Yet tens of thousands of people are still sickened annually by this pathogen, federal health officials estimate, with hamburger being the biggest culprit. Ground beef has been blamed for 16 outbreaks in the last three years alone, including the one that left Ms. Smith paralyzed from the waist down. This summer, contamination led to the recall of beef from nearly 3,000 grocers in 41 states.

Read the entire article, with its account of slaughterhouses that refuse to sell meat to companies that insist on rigorous testing,  and you’ll never complain again about your hamburger being overcooked.

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Editor’s note: Last night, Thursday October 1st, was the last night of service for the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead. Long considered one of Atlanta’s best (if not the best) restaurant, the closing marks the end of an era for a certain style of fine dining in our city. It’s hard to know how to cover an event such as this – our friends over at the AJC have done a great job of covering the story from a news and dining angle, and I wanted to look at the event from a different perspective. So I asked Eli Kirshtein, chef at Eno and contestant on the current season of “Top Chef,” to give me some impressions of his meal there last night. He was kind enough to oblige.

-Besha Rodell

The end of an era, for better or worse

By Eli Kirshtein

After sitting in the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton and seeing the restaurant take its last few breaths, I felt a weight come off my shoulders.  In the bittersweet moments that the restaurant’s final night of operation entailed, I realized that for so long, Atlanta chefs and restaurateurs have been held down by the philosophies of restaurants like the Ritz and Seeger’s.

The chef at the Dining Room was never American, and only in one instance was he not French.  While the Ritz in other markets has sometimes tapped local talent pools to source their top level chefs (most notably Ron Siegel in San Francisco), the Atlanta Ritz has always gone on a massive global search to find replacements for its departing chefs, somehow implying there were no chefs in Atlanta with big enough feet to fill the shoes. We’re now in a position where we can proudly say that the best chefs in Atlanta are from Atlanta. Look at Linton Hopkins or Anne Quatrano, the remaining gold standard for Atlanta dining.  While Günter and Joel headed for the hills, these homegrown chefs remained steadfast and committed, not only to their vision but the growth of the city. While conversing about the evening, one of my dining companions mentioned how it will be hard to go to more “serious” food cities because for so long we’ve had the ammunition to say, “Hey we have the Ritz!” Now we should proudly put our chin up and say, “Hey we have Eugene!”
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Too busy to impress your friends by joining them for a meal of trendy offal in a trendy restaurant?

Why not invite them over and pop open a can of something even stranger than offal, like scorpions, rattlensake, crickets with eggs or potted possum? It could be your very own dim sum from hell.

Check out the Telegraph’s photo feature of 26 (sort of) exotic canned foods. The pictures brought to mind one of the kitchen cabinets in the home of my Uncle Steve and Aunt Jock when I was a kid. It was stocked with rattlenake, chocolate covered ants, fried grasshoppers and much more.

I think these items appealed more to Uncle Steve’s sense of the absurd than to his actual palate. But all of those items, as I recall, were produced in earnest — not as a joke as a good many of those featured in the Telegraph’s story are.

Probably one of the early identifiers of my interest in food occurred when I tried desperately to open a jar of something strange fetched from that cabinet. When I couldn’t pry the lid off, I banged the jar on the counter. The jar shattered and I cut my self so deeply I had to go to the emergency room for stitches.

It’s odd how early in life our eventual fascinations often reveal themselves.

(Hat tip: Former CL staffer Rob Walton. Photo courtesy the Telegraph.)

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In my Grazing column two weeks ago, I wrote briefly about the ancient Romans’ penchant for disguising one food, particularly offal, as another, as illustrated in Petronius’ Satyricon.

The new issue of my favorite foodie mag, Gastronomica, features a 14-page article about the French’s own penchant for such culinary tricks during the 17th and 18th centuries. I haven’t seen the issue yet, but Marc Abrahams discusses it in his “Improbable Research” column for the Guardian. His article is headlined “When is a frog not a frog? When it’s a bird” and is illustrated with the Muppetesque photo above.

Abrahams writes:

The French will swallow almost anything, so long as it’s surprising to see and delightful to taste. Jennifer J Davis explains why in a study called “Masters of Disguise: French Cooks Between Art and Nature, 1651–1793.J” The 14-page report, replete with old drawings and few new photographs, is published in the journal Gastronomica.

“Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” Davis writes, “cooks engaged in a multitude of games in which one food masqueraded as another. Such games often played along the fault lines of alimentary taboos, as the cooked imitated the raw, the dead masqueraded as the living, and the injunctions of Catholic fasts were followed to the letter, if not the spirit, of the law.”

Religious fast days, especially, became opportunities for cooks to strut their ingeniously stuffed stuff. All things seemingly became possible. Vegetables took on the appearance of fishes. Fishes were made into simulacra of beef, pork, and other meats.

French chefs fried up frogs “en guise de” chicken. Going in the other direction, sometimes birds became faux amphibians.

Read Abraham’s entertaining summary but subscribe to the quarterly Gastronomica to read the whole article.

(Uncredited photo courtesy of the Guardian)

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Thillist reports that Eros Tapas Bar, which replaced Piebar, is now Ixtlan Ultra Lounge:

Just arrived in the former space of Eros Tapas Bar, Ixtlan retains the interior design of its predecessor (glass tent ceiling, stone floors, rooftop filled w/ rounded white backless couches), while boasting an all-new menu including “tapa-tizers” like Ixtlan Hot Fish (fried tilapia bites tossed in sweet chili sauce) and fire-grilled Filet Kabobs marinated in garlic, herbs, and the chef’s signature tzatziki. Also worthy’re char-grilled Sirloin and Turkey Burgers, Chopped Beef, Pulled Pork, and Chicken Breast BBQ Sandwiches, plus BBQ entrees like the Smoked Turkey Drumsticks and the 10oz Boston Pork Steak, aka the Rich Garces….

Cafe Sage Hill has taken over the Dusty’s Barbecue location at 1815 Briarcliff Road. It’s all about breakfast and lunch, Southern-style. …

A new restaurant, Croaker’s Spot, is opening at the corner of Edgewood Avenue and Boulevard, across from Danneman’s Coffee. It will feature seafood and soul food. …

The Iberian Pig (121 Sycamore St.) opens Monday night in Decatur. …

Abattoir is now open for lunch. …

Regina Charboneau, author of the Southern cooking blog for Atlantic Monthly’s food site, recently posted an article entitled, “Seven Lessons in Southern Hospitality.” Here is my fave “lesson”:

Decide a night or day that is the easiest night for you to entertain. Maybe you have a housekeeper that comes on Thursdays so entertain on Wednesdays so you will have help cleaning up, or entertain on a Friday because your house is already clean.

Right. The secret to Southern hospitality is a servant. Miss Scarlett knew it and so should you.

I find this bit of Southern hospitality advice kind of strange too:

Never apologize even if dinner is overcooked or undercooked. Make light of it, we are all human–just have plenty of bread (and wine won’t hurt). Whether you live in the North, South, East, or West, hospitality is hospitality–it is always a gift.

Well, fiddle-dee-dee, it seems the fried chicken is nearly raw. Y’all just have another couple of biscuits and I’ll get the peach cobbler warmed up as soon as I scrape the mold off it.

(Photo of Vivian Leigh and Butterfly McQueen, from Gone with the Wind, courtesy of Live Auctioneers.)

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Anne Zimmerman of Culinate attends a dirt tasting. Yes, really. A typical observation:

The mud from Pugs Leap Farm in Healdsburg was thick and dark and hearty, and smelled like a green pasture. After smelling the soil, we tasted chervil grown at Pugs Leap, then a chunk of egg from chickens raised at Pugs Leap, and finally a delicate slice of tomme cheese made from the milk of goats raised at Pugs Leap.

Would you believe me if I said I could taste the continuity? The chervil was delicate yet distinctly herbaceous, and the yolk of the egg had a creamy green freshness. And the tomme was soft, mild, and — can I say it again? — divinely green.

I was stunned. I’ve had some miraculous food experiences, but nothing that illustrated so convincingly the connection between the health of the land and the food that I put in my mouth.

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Here’s another example of human weirdness. Just thinking about eating a salad gives you permission to eat French fries instead:

Just seeing a salad on the menu seems to push some consumers to make a less healthy meal choice, according to a Duke University researcher.

It’s an effect called “vicarious goal fulfillment,” in which a person can feel a goal has been met if they have taken some small action, like considering the salad without ordering it, said Gavan Fitzsimons, professor of marketing and psychology at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, who led the research.

In a lab experiment, participants possessing high levels of self-control related to food choices (as assessed by a pre-test) avoided french fries, the least healthy item on a menu, when presented with only unhealthy choices. But when a side salad was added to this menu, they became much more likely to take the fries.

No wonder Mickey D’s and others have added salads to their menus!

(Graphic courtesy of Find Fitness Here.)

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Like, have you been to El Bulli? Because if you haven’t … check out Eat Me Daily’s review of this new book.

You should also check out author Pim Techamuanvivit’s website, replete with video.

(Photo courtesy of Eat Me Daily)

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The worst thing about late summer is the lack of good apples. But the harvest is underway and I’m looking forward to my daily consumption of Fuji apples. I still prefer the Fuji over the Honeycrisp, which has acquired a huge following in the last couple of years.

Now, there’s a new apple — the SweeTango — which is a cross between a Honeycrisp and a Zestar (never heard of it). It’s not available in our area this year, but should be next. It’s been in development 10 years. Maybe they’ll change the name by the time it reaches us.

You can learn all about it on SweeTango’s own website, where you’ll also find this video:

(Hat tip to Michael Erickson of Fifth Group Restaurants)

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OK, so now maybe I’ve seen everything. People bring their dogs to Starbucks at Ansley Mall constantly, but today is the first time I’ve seen anyone bring a baby miniature horse.  Actually, there were two of them, both on pink leashes brought by two men wearing cowboy hats.

Note that the horse above sports pink hooves. It being Ansley Mall, I thought it was politically correct to ask if this were a male or female horse. The owner looked at me blankly and finally said, “Duh, get a clue.”

“Is that some kind of special paint for horse hooves?” I asked.

“No, it’s just ordinary nail polish,” he said.

“OK. Well, do they have like a litter box that they share?” I asked.

“They stay in the back yard,” the owner replied.

“Ask him if they curl the eyelashes,” a shy friend whispered to me. The horse did indeed have amazingly long lashes, but I declined asking further questions, since the owner seemed annoyed.

Anyway, I think I want one.

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Happy Labor Day, something of an anachronism, considering how little influence organized labor has in our society today (although union membership has been increasing slightly, but mainly among government workers, in the last few years).  Still, it’s worth remembering that Social Security, the minimum wage and the 40-hour work week were all in large part the result of union organizing. And organized labor has been advocating national health care for decades.

Appropriately, Slow Food USA has organized “eat-ins” all over the US, including Atlanta, today in order to call attention to the forthcoming debate over the Child Nutrition Act, which is up for renewal. It may be too late for you to get to an eat-in, but it’s not to late to get involved in other ways.  Slow Food has created a “Time for Lunch Platform” that outlines changes that would significantly improve the Child Nutrition Act and school lunches.

Children remain the most oppressed members of our society. They have very few autonomous rights and the child welfare system generally fails to protect them. They eat what they’re given to eat. Poor childhood nutrition plays a significant role in developing unhealthy lifetime eating habits. It’s no coincidence that the obesity rate is skyrocketing in a country that puts vending machines full of crap in its school lunchrooms.  Some years ago, the French — alarmed by their children’s consumption of fast food — initiated mandatory classes in developing taste.  (I’m not sure of the status of these classes today.)  I don’t think we’ll see that occurring here.

The summer before my senior year in high school, I was a volunteer in Atlanta’s first Head Start program. I was assigned to a public school downtown on English Avenue. Arguably the Great Society’s most successful program, Head Start endeavored to help kids from poor families get ready for their first year of school. And part of that was a good breakfast and lunch. (more…)

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FOR THE LOVE OF IT: Laura Nolan gave up the rat race to tend bar at Euclid Avenue Yacht Club.

Wearing a black V-neck and sterling silver earrings, Sarah Whistine sits near the pool tables at Georgia State hangout Sidebar, talking on her cell phone between shifts. She’s been working here for almost a year now, and at first glance seems like any other student working her way through college at a sports bar. But Whistine is not a college student. She has a degree as a physical therapist assistant from Black Hawk College in Illinois, and turned 30 last month.

The national percentage of jobless bachelor’s degree holders has doubled from 2.4 percent to 4.7 percent over the past year, according to educational attainment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But because Atlanta holds more opportunity than some other areas in the state, laid-off locals from this educational group often take service industry jobs while they continue to hope for a position in their field, said Bureau of Labor Statistics economist Steve Rondone, who works in Atlanta.

Continue reading “Feature: Higher hospitality”

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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The New York Times asks:

Are online user reviews better when they are written in the heat of the moment or after the writer has returned to the home computer and had some time to cool off? That is the question facing review sites like Yelp and Citysearch when they build mobile applications.

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The Times-Georgian in Carroll County features an interesting story about a local goat farm that can’t keep up with the demand for its cheese.

[Co-owner Mark Stevens] sells to some exclusive restaurants in Atlanta, including Canoe, WaterHaven Restaurant and Star Provisions of Bacchanalia. Miller’s on the Square in Carrollton sells the cheese in an exclusive agreement with the dairy.

The goat farm sells out of cheese every day and is doing so well the partners plan to expand their operation this spring. They will double the size of the cheese kitchen and add a second pasteurizer. At that point they will be producing about 200 pounds of cheese a day….

[Stevens has] shown goats on the national circuit since he was 10, and has learned to recognize the characteristics of a good producer. [Partner Daniel] Young, a licensed judge with the American Dairy Goat Association, is also well versed in how to pick a good goat. Their combined knowledge has led to a herd of about 100 outstanding goats, some born as far away as Washington state. And good goats are what make a good goat cheese.

“What makes our cheese so good is our goats are so well taken care of,” Stevens said. “The happiness of our animals, that’s our number one goal. It is so true what the commercial says – happy cows make good milk, happy goats make good cheese.”

Weirdly, the article does not mention the brand name of the cheese or the name of the farm.

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The Utne Reader’s website features an article about two chefs who have opened sustainable sushi bars. The article summarizes the five most endangered fish:

Take salmon, number one in U.S. popularity. Wild fish are pricier than farmed, and aquacultured salmon are voracious feeders, crowded like factory hogs in filthy ocean farms. Ditto hamachi, also known as amberjack. Most wild shrimp are bottom-trawled, a practice as devastating as slash-and-burn, while farming shrimp often entails ecological destruction. Unagi, freshwater eel, are snatched and penned young before they can breed, then fattened on wild fish. And the numbers of bluefin tuna, which is nearly always wild caught, are crashing about as precipitously as stock prices.

A bigger problem with the five—dubbed the toxic five—is that they also tend to be a sushi bar’s biggest profit makers. Meaning that, even if a chef wanted to do the right thing and banish them, the economics of the sushi bar are skewed in favor of keeping them in the case.

It’s pretty amazing how much sushi Americans are eating:

In 2007 Americans picked up chopsticks and dipped 2.5 million sushi meals into slurries of wasabi and soy sauce. It’s a figure capped with a question mark: Is sushi as we know it—from prepacked supermarket rolls to exquisite omakase meals—doomed, inevitably, to extinction?

Consider the face of most American sushi: It is the realm of monster maki: hefty, gooey with spicy mayo, often deep-fried, and lavished with layer upon layer of fish. Like meat lover’s pizza and the Croissan’wich, monster maki were born in the USA, for people with a seemingly bottomless craving for proteins and no fear of calories. Not to mention an apparent lack of curiosity about where the rolls’ hefty layers of seafood originate.

“We’ve somehow moved ourselves into this strange relationship with food,” says Sheila Bowman, manager of outreach for Seafood Watch at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. “Look at how Americans eat shrimp. Forty years ago, you most likely ate five shrimp a year, probably in a shrimp cocktail on Christmas Eve. Now we just gorge on them whenever we want. Some things simply should not be all you can eat, and fish is one of them.”

The article was written by John Birdsall and was excerpted from Edible San Francisco.

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Then you’re one application away from a burrito. Check out Chipotle’s latest marketing gimmick.

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