It weighs in at 222.5 lbs. and comes courtesy of Nonni’s Restaurant in Concord, N.H.  Anyone wanna takes bets as to whether or not it was fully cooked on the inside?

On the NY Times small business blog, Bruce Buschel shares 50 things restaurant servers and staff should never do.

1. Do not let anyone enter the restaurant without a warm greeting.

2. Do not make a singleton feel bad. Do not say, “Are you waiting for someone?” Ask for a reservation. Ask if he or she would like to sit at the bar.

3. Never refuse to seat three guests because a fourth has not yet arrived.

4. If a table is not ready within a reasonable length of time, offer a free drink and/or amuse-bouche. The guests may be tired and hungry and thirsty, and they did everything right.

More establishments should heed the advice of #4.  The list is handy for not just restaurant servers and owners, but also customers.  It’s a nice road map for determining if a place goes above and beyond.  There are too many restaurants in your city to eat at a place that doesn’t provide excellent service.  The next 50 will follow next week.

From the mad chef himself: “They are not a pilot for some new, family friendly, watered down follow on. They are instead brief, often violent, alt versions of NO RES–representing things we could never have done on the actual show-or the way things should have gone on the show–or animated acknowledgments of what already went terribly wrong on the show. Or, for example, my take on the network’s “Travel Bug” promo campaign–about which I was, shall we say…dubious.”

Episode one has already hit YouTube, but others in the web series will hit on the Travel Channel website. [via]

Thomas Keller, world-renowned chef of The French Laundry/Per Se/Bouchon had the chance to rekindle his relationship with his absentee dad shortly before the old man passed away at 86.  Really, if you read one story about how cooking and family and forgiveness can heal a soul, buff out the hard edges to a person, this would be it. “Mr. Keller ate many of the dishes in the book with his father at Ad Hoc. Even after the accident they would go, despite the physical challenges of getting his father out of the house. Ms. Cunningham said she used to worry about how customers might feel watching the famous chef feed his father.“Here he was taking care of his father just like a baby,” she said. “For Thomas, it didn’t make the slightest difference. Whatever he could do to make his dad comfortable he did.””

One of the problems of any kitchen, especially small ones, is how to store spices.  Sure you could throw them in draw or get one of those rotating carousels, but honestly, those aren’t particularly good solutions.  Right now, I’ve got these small magnetic tins attached to the side of my fridge.  The problem with that is they aren’t particularly attractive and they always get knocked off into the vortex between the fridge and counter.  You know, that nefarious space where things go to disappear and die.

Anyway, for $44 Yanko Design has created this cool Zero Gravity Spice Race.  It comes with 12 custom spice canisters and a magnetic base that half of them will stick to, making use of vacant wall space. So you can get your spices to hang above the stove or where ever, but definitely out of the way.

Given how the Bills’s season has unfolded, and well, the past 80 some odd years, isn’t it time the City of Buffalo receives good news?: “Most experts predict that wing prices will continue to rise at least until the Super Bowl in February, when a lot of wings are sold and prices peak. Even afterward, demand looks set to remain strong. Pizza Hut announced this month that it would expand the availability of its wings menu, which it calls WingStreet; in 3,000 stores today, the menu will be added to 2,000 stores in the near future. Adam J. Scott, a founder of Wing Zone, an Atlanta-based chain with 80 restaurants in 20 states, said the days of cheap wings might be gone forever. That is, unless something changes on the supply side.”

It shouldn’t be too hard to genetically modify some chickens in a giant factory warehouse in the middle of America to keep cheap wings on the table.  Afterall, the City of Buffalo needs this.  They depend on this.  Can’t we think of them?  If not me? [via]

Huntington, W.V. is the unhealthiest part of the good ole U.S. of A.  No?  Don’t believe me?  Try these stats on for size, courtesy of the CDCA: Nearly half the adults are obese, the area leads the nation in incidences of heart disease and diabetes; the poverty rate is 19 percent almost 50 percent of people 65 and older have lost their teeth. 

Grim shit all around. 

Luckily, though, they have British superstar chef Jaime Oliver on their side.  The Super Chef has become something of a healthy-food community organizer over the past several years and the NY Times gives him the lengthy profile treatment. 

Earlier that day, Oliver met with a pediatrician, James Bailes, and a pastor, Steve Willis. Bailes told him about an 8-year-old patient who was 80 pounds overweight and had developed Type 2 diabetes. If the child’s diet didn’t change, the doctor said, he wouldn’t live to see 30. Willis told Oliver that he visits patients in local hospitals several days a week and sees the effects of long-term obesity firsthand. Since he can’t write a prescription for their resulting illnesses, he said, all he can do is pray with them.

This is so bad, but amazing, no terrible, omg I want one, 1,500 calories in one sandwich, but donuts! burger! bacon! cheese! I don’t know.  I just don’t know. 

Anyway this was a big hit during Massachusett’s Big E, where 17,000 of them were sold.  Apparantly, it originated in Georgia (figures) but has since been exported to Scotland where they deep fry this (because Scotland has figured out how to deep fry everything).  I would get drunk and eat this, that’s all I’m saying. [via]

And yup, that was the sound of the French’s gastronomic and cultural street cred going up in a poof of smoke.  I honestly find this funny, but in a sad sad way that McDonald’s is opening a restaurant and a McCafe at the most visited museum in the world.

“This is the last straw,” an art historian working at the Louvre, who declined to be named, told the Daily Telegraph. “This is the pinnacle of exhausting consumerism, deficient gastronomy and very unpleasant odours in the context of a museum.”  He went on to say, “I’m not against eating in a museum but McDonald’s is hardly the height of gastronomy.  Today McDonald’s, tomorrow low-cost clothes shops.”  The horror!

In a hilarious response to protesters over their 18.2% Tokyo brew, Scottish brewer Brewdog, located in Fraserburgh, rolled out a 1.1% brew which they called Nanny State — a “mild imperial ale containing more hops per barrel than any other beer ever brewed in the UK” and yet no alcohol.  So what good is it, other than making a justified point?

BrewDog founder James Watt explained on his blog: “Anyone who knows BrewDog, knows beer, or anyone has more common sense than a common (or garden) gnome will know that the scathing and unrelenting criticism we faced was pretty unjustified.  If logic serves the same people who witch-hunted and publicly slated us should now offer us heartfelt support and public congratulations.”

But that’s not the case, as the group making the complaints, Alcohol Focus Scotland, said the name Nanny State is indicative that Brewdog was not taking their complaints seriously.  Obviously.  Alcohol Focus Scotland should understand better than most that the point of drinking is to get drunk and that most binge drinking (well here in the states anyways) occurs from the consumption of macrobrewed, low-alcohol piss beers like Bud Light, et. al.  It certainly doesn’t occur from specialty microbrews that cost a good deal.

<shakes head in disbelief>Puritans.</shakes head in disbelief>

If Massachusetts State Legislators have their way the Fluffernutter (a Boston delicacy pronounced fluff’ah’nuttah) will become the official state sandwich.  The dessert-like sammy is essentially a combination of fluff and peanut butter spread ideally between two slices of Wonder Bread.

It’s strange now to think how I used to eat these for lunch practically everyday as a child. Now? Not so much. My stomach is repulsed by the very notion.

Still, I consumed so many that I began experimenting with various combinations as an early teen (some do drugs & alcohol, I did fluff) — fluff with jam, fluff with banana, fluff on toast, grilled fluff (same culinary method as the grilled cheese), triple decker fluff, deep fried fluff with bacon, etc.  This probably explains why I’m a fat ass and my cholesterol level hovers around 250. 

Surely a restuarant would clean up with a deep friend fluffernutter dessert.  Small squares of peanut butter and fluff deep fried and topped with whipped cream and  a fresh berry sauce/compote.

Remember when drinking PBR was great because it was cheap and because everyone else seemed to think it was somehow “cool?”  I mean, in terms of personal branding and cultural flag waving.  There’s something a bit punk-rock (corporately, anyways) about PBR. 

Well, anyways, for whatever reason PBR because the choice of a certain generation, like Pepsi!, instead of other cheap piss-water beers (High Life, Keystone, Olympia, et. al.). 

“Hipsters boosted PBR sales by 17 percent that year, and sales are up a good 24 percent this year, more than other “subpremium” beers that have spent more advertising dollars trying to appeal to recession slummers.”   Now PBR is repaying those peeps by raising their prices as much as $1.50 more than the other piss-water beer brands. 

What this means is that certain people are going to learn to say Champagne of Beers awfully fast.  At the end of the day, sometimes a cold watery-lager tastes great, but spending that extra $2.50 to get a dank six-pack isn’t going to break the bank.

You know you’ve reached the apex of fried-food science (artistry?) when someone, regarded as a genius in the field, essentially gives up and just decides to fry butter. At that point, you might as well deep fry the moldy leftovers that have been sitting in the back of the fridge for the past month. And yet? I secretly want to try it.