Last day of the month

As regular readers of this blog know, I always remind all waiters to take the last few days of each month to take an especially close look at their uniforms. A waiter should alway be checking their uniform pieces out, from shirts and pants to aprons, jackets, ties and shoes. But it’s easy to let [...]

A couple of new milestones

First of all, I finally made it to the front page of a Google blog keyword search! I typed in waiter, and there my last post was, lurking at the bottom of the page like a lamprey stalking a shark. Second of all, I’ve gone from a Technorati rating of ~1,200,000th most popular blog to [...]

Foreign restaurants also hit by worldwide recession

    Restaurant traffic woes a global problem by Lisa Jennings PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y. (Aug. 25, 2009) During the first quarter, foodservice traffic was down in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, and it was essentially flat in Canada. Total spending at foodservice outlets declined during the first quarter [...]

Chefs on Charlie Rose last night

                  Charlie Rose is on vacation right now, so his shows are compilations of shows done earlier in the year, grouped by common topics. Last night, he ran clips from his interviews with David Chang, Ferran Adria and José Andrés (with Andrés serving as interpreter), and Tom [...]

Kitchen tool of the day – Silpat

Silpat? What in the heck is that? This:               It’s a silcone impregnated plastic baking mat.  It starts as woven fiberglass and then it’s coated with a heat-resistant silicone-impregnated plastic. It’s a true time-saver when baking. Nothing sticks to it; not cookies, not melted cheese, not dough, not anything. [...]

Top Chef Episode 2

                  Well class, what have we learned? The “hot” ice queen chef will disrobe just for you. Crap…I mean craps, it’s what’s for dinner. Bravo missed an opportunity by choosing a real bachelor/bachelorette party instead of doing a bachelor/bachelor or bachelorette/bachelorette celebration, although it did give the [...]

Steakhouses work the bar angle to attract guests

Premium steakhouses are using expanded bar offerings, in both the food and drink realm, to bring guests back to their dining rooms and bars. They are offering smaller and less expensive variations on their normal fare, almost in a tapas style. They are also rolling out signature drinks in order to capture a younger demographic. [...]

It’s the little things

Managers are funny beasts. In order to stay sane, they tend to have certain things that they focus on in order to do things like doing the closing or maintaining the operation of the restaurant because you can’t check 100% of everything in the restaurant. I know that I was a bit of a freak [...]

Thanks to Jim for his plug on my post on phở

I’m very grateful to Jim for mentioning my post on that great Vietnamese dish, phở. I didn’t know that I was capable of writing an encomium. I must be a hell of a writer! Seriously, just a note about that post. It was a knee-jerk reaction to a mailing-list characterization of phở as “bland” (or [...]

Top Chef Las Vegas Redux

              As you might know, I was shaken by the appearance of Vegas showgirls in the Quickfire challenge, although I suppose I shouldn’t have been. So, it took me a little while to get back to watching the rest of the episode. So kids, what did we learn? We learned [...]