The great coc au vin controversy

Several seasons ago, Top Chef contestant, Casey Thompson, was undone by her take on coq au vin during an elimination challenge at The French Institute. Well, she wasn’t undone per se because it didn’t send her and her knives packing, but it cost her a win, even though it was possibly the best dish. What kept her [...]

From The Motley Fool: Waiter – there’s an iPod in my soup

Waiter, There’s an iPad in My Soup By Rick Aristotle Munarriz | February 18, 2011 | The two founders of BJ’s Restaurants (Nasdaq: BJRI) are striking out on their own with a new concept called Stacked. There won’t be waiters taking orders. Every table will have an Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPad, allowing patrons to scour the menu [...]

Article about tips, taxes and the IRS at Tip20! (the exclamation point is part of the blog’s title).

http://www.tip20.com/tips-taxes/25 This article is generally OK but still perpetuates some myths about how the IRS deals with tips and taxes. They are correct that the IRS will use credit card slips to determine whether cash tip reporting is accurate (see below) However, they miss the mark when it comes to the old 8% reporting standard. [...]

I’ve been a bad blogger…

…because I really haven’t had the time to keep up with the ever-expanding universe of restaurant bloggers. Normally I like to give a little review and add links to fellow bloggers individually because I think that they deserve credit for their hard work and I like to make it easy for my readers to decide [...]

“Don’t be scared of the sommelier”

A nice article about how to take advantage of the sommelier, written by Nashville’s only sommelier (as far as I know, she’s the only one). http://www.tennessean.com/article/20110216/LIFE02/102160313/On-Wine-Don-t-scared-sommelier?odyssey=mod%7Cnewswell%7Ctext%7CEntertainment%7Cs Statistically speaking, most restaurant guests will never interact with a sommelier. There can’t be more than 1% of all restaurants in America that employ the services of a sommelier, [...]

Worst.Fears.Realized.

’nuff said.

Valentine’s Day

Many words have been spilt on the waiter’s perspective of Valentine’s Day. Amateur night. Uncomfortable proposals. Weird prix fixe menus. Buttkickings. You know the drill. So I’m going to simply mention a few things. Amateur night refers to the fact that this is some people’s limited exposure to dining out each year. A lot of [...]

Dish of the day – crudo

Crudo is the Italian combination of the two culinary concepts sashimi and ceviche. Obviously, it involves raw seafood and it made with some acidic component, olive oil and sea salt. Ceviche differs in that it’s actually a cooked dish, the cooking coming from marinating seafood in an acidic liquid, usually citrus based. It’s usually cut into [...]

Serving the business dinner pt. 1

I’ve discussed this before, but it seems appropriate to delve into it again. There are a couple of variations on the business dinner. The first is the small non-business business dinner. This would be your standard table of business types (up to about 6 – 8 people). This is a gathering of people with shared [...]