The Dieline examines 50 such bottles that would get my business whether or not the product is any good.  Despite the overabundance of Absolut Vodka bottles, it’s nice to see three Portland spirits make the list. 

That both 12 Bridges Gin and Lovejoy Vodka (both are crafted by Integrity Spirits, whose Trillium Absinthe also made the list but I haven’t partaken yet) are excellent tasting spirits in their own right is an added bonus.

If you’re wondering that’s the Hawthorne Bridge on the bottle.

I’m not surprised by any of the breweries on this list, nor am I surprised by their ranking.  I don’t really consider Sam Adams (Boston Brewery) a craft brewery anymore.  They’re just too big, too national; they’ve traded in their quality of product for the ability to compete with the macro-domestics.  But otherwise, you can’t go wrong with any of the breweries on this list.  They’re all making great, quality beers.

My 10 favorite from this list would be (in no particular order): Deschutes, Magic Hat, Matt Brewing Co. (Saranac), Stone Brewing, Dogfish Head, Lagunitas, Brooklyn Brewery, Rogue, Abita, and Shipyard.

Perhaps most significantly, the meat of the business isn’t particularly good. On Friday, I stopped into an Arby’s for the first time this millennium. It was clean, and I noticed an array of products beyond the bare-bones menu I recall from my Midwestern youth. Moneybox may be a food snob, but he is a nondiscriminating connoisseur of street food and greasy fare who still makes the occasional run for the border at Taco Bell. (Don’t tell Mrs. Moneybox.) But even I had difficulty completing the reporting for this assignment. Forget about salads and vegetables. As I scoured the menu—the gyro, the french dip, the patty melt—I had difficulty identifying anything that had gone through less processing than uranium. A few bites of a roast beef sandwich slathered with goopy cheddar sauce, and I was done. On the food chain, the thinly sliced beef is about as far from Boar’s Head deli meat as Boar’s Head oven-roasted ham is from the vaunted jamón Iberico.

Well, okay, it probably is the roast beef.  But the restaurant doesn’t even have anything else to offer customers aside from it’s namesake sandwich.  Not a good business decision.

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]

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.

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]

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]

“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!

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>

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.

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.

Gizmodo explains the ins-and-outs for making a truly great cup of coffee.  There’s a lot of great advice! But.  For most people who buy already-grinded beans from the supermarket and throw it into Mr. Coffee the best thing you can do to take your coffee experience to the next level is to buy a conical-burr grinder and a Bodum French Press.

Drink it black until you’ve developed a palette for the varying tastes of coffee beans (buy good beans too from a place like Stumptown or your local coffee house) and then go back and read Giz’s piece and use their advice to then take your coffee making/drinking experience to a whole’nother level.

I’ve been using the French Press/burr grinder (mine’s not conical and on the low-end at $50) method for a few years now and I haven’t been disappointed.

IS THERE ANY BEST, SAFEST WAY TO NAVIGATE A MENU?

Scratch off the appetizers and entrees that are most like dishes you’ve seen in many other restaurants, because they represent this one at its most dutiful, conservative and profit-minded. The chef’s heart isn’t in them.

Scratch off the dishes that look the most aggressively fanciful. The chef’s vanity — possibly too much of it — spawned these.

Then scratch off anything that mentions truffle oil.

Choose among the remaining dishes.

According to a new study by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, it was our ability to eat fish which prevented human populations from thinning when there were game shortages.   

Such flexibility may explain why modern humans thrived in ancient Europe while Neanderthals perished, says Hervé Bocherens, a biological anthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “If modern humans were hunting big game, like Neanderthals, they would compete with them and deplete the resources.”

When big game were scarce, modern humans could have survived and even flourished by eating fish and smaller animals. Neanderthal populations, by contrast, probably shrank and eventually disappeared in areas from which their more limited meal options disappeared.

Of course, the scientists who studied the bone collagen of comparable neanderthals and humans were working with a tiny sample size, so it’s possible this study is moot.  It seems, however, that there would be an intrinsic evolutionary advantage to having a well-rounded diet.

And so it seems, that England is once again trying to subvert the national pride and cultural cuisine of Scotland by claiming that haggis is in fact and English delicacy dating to a 17th Century recipe book.  If ever there were a reason to paint their face blue and storm from the highlands with sword in hand, this would be it.

Hmmm.  So this exists.  I’m just going to shake my head Japan and marvel at the stuff you come up with.  But the truth is, would you want to be friends with anyone who actually thinks eating boob pudding is what?  Funny?  Ironically cool? Anything other than creepy? [via]

LuxiRare’s “Lollipop-Pie” offers a delectable answer to the problem of portable pie.  The best ideas are solutions to problems you never knew you had.  But all along you’ve had a pie problem.  They’re just too big to carry in your pocket for a jolt of sugary goodness.

Luxi explains thus:

I want a couple of bites, and I want to be done with it. I want to pop open my bag when I’m hungry and taste a little sweetness. I don’t want commitment. I want to be promiscuous with my food. […]

Rotating flavors. Grab and go. In and out. Blackberry, pumpkin, apple, banana…my favorites. You see I am very slutty about my food.

More info and pictures of the process to make these can be found here.

I give up.  The greatest thing ever has already been invented.  It’s pie on a stick in a bite-sized form.  The wheel was pretty great and all, but I think you can see it hanging it’s head in wonder. [via]

I’m not an expert, but I understand the strain that overeating sugary and chemical-processed foods, lack of exercise, bad genetics, high-fructose corn syrup and several other factors have on my flabby torso. 

The problem with this latest attempt by the New Yorker is that they don’t really seem to care about breaking new ground. 

In America today, by contrast, obtaining calories is very nearly effortless; as Power and Schulkin observe, with a few dollars it’s possible to go to the grocery store and purchase enough sugar or vegetable oil to fulfill the average person’s energy requirements for a week. The result is what’s known as the “mismatch paradigm.” The human body is “mismatched” to the human situation. “We evolved on the savannahs of Africa,” Power and Schulkin write. “We now live in Candyland.”

The evolutionary account of obesity is a powerful one—indeed, almost too powerful. If, as Power and Schulkin contend, humans are genetically programmed to put on weight whenever they encounter plenty, it would seem that by this point virtually everyone in America should be fat. Meanwhile, several million years of hominid evolution can’t explain why it is just in the past few decades that waistlines have expanded.

The most alarming thing for me is the size of food portions when you eat out.  Everything is three or four times as much as you should be eating in restaurants and forget eating at the movie theater.  The small popcorn and small soda are the equivalent of the large 10 years ago.  Everything is enormous. 

Before McDonald’s discovered the power of re-portioning, it offered just a small bag of French fries, which contained two hundred calories. Today, a small order of fries has two hundred and thirty calories, and a large order five hundred. (Add fifteen calories for each package of ketchup.) Similarly, a McDonald’s soda used to be eight ounces. Today, a small soda is sixteen ounces (a hundred and fifty calories), and a large soda is thirty-two ounces (three hundred calories). Perhaps owing to the influence of fast-food culture, up-sizing has by now spread to all sorts of other venues. In a 2002 study, Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University, and Lisa Young, an adjunct there, examined the offerings, past and present, at American supermarkets. They found that during the nineteen-eighties the amount of food that was counted as a single serving increased rapidly. A similar jump showed up in cookbooks; when the researchers compared dessert recipes in old and new editions of volumes like “The Joy of Cooking,” they discovered that, even in cases where the recipes themselves had remained unchanged, the predicted number of servings had shrunk. According to the federally supported National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the bagels that Americans eat have in the past twenty years swelled from a hundred and forty to three hundred and fifty calories each. If, as Wansink argues, people are relying on external cues to determine their consumption, then the new, bigger bagel is sneaking in an additional two hundred and ten calories. For someone who is in the habit of eating a bagel a day, these extra calories translate into a weight gain of more than a pound a month.

These articles always remind me of something food journalist Michael Pollian says, and I’m paraphrasing here, but it’s a good place to start regarding your dietary intake: don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

In otherwords, if it’s microwavable, instant, processed, prepared, frozen, comes with food coloring or additives, it isn’t food.

Shocking! Fast food, chain restaurant food and other snack food is sooo vile for your inner organs and blood. This “Good Morning America” bit on what happens to your insides when you eat crap is kind of gross in a truthy sort of way.

The thing is, though, you can feel it afterwards in how lethargic and disgusting your body feels, but to see it. Christ, to see it makes me regret my Independence Day weekend.

“Kobe burger”

If it grazed in Idaho, it’s not Kobe. It’s only Kobe if it comes from the Kobe region in Japan.

–”Shrimp Scampi”; “Eggplant alla melanzane”; “With au jus”

Respectively interpreted as “shrimp shrimp”; “eggplant in the style of eggplant”; and “with with juice.”

I understand the need to do this for chain restaurants, where they’re driven as much by marketing as they are by the (lack of) quality of their food, but for all other restaurants this type of bad writing happens more often than one would think.

World Famous.  That’s the one phrase that drives me absolutely bonkers.

There is nothing quite like the juicy slop, that delicate liberating feeling of never eating canned peaches in sugar water again. 

I’m concocting a recipe for peach-ginger ice cream, or something like along those lines once the harvest arrives in late summer.  If possible, the peach is criminally underappreciated — not unlike the pear.

Click here to view the embedded video.

- Australian wine prices have plummeted so much that a bottle of wine now costs less than bottled water.  If you like Penfold’s, Lindeman’s or um, Yellowtail now would be the time to stock up.  Of course, there is the possibility that you like bottled water more in this case, which would be understandable.

- Another reason not to move back to Massachusetts: if you fight a traffic ticket and win, they still charge you a $25 fee.

- Sarah Palin peaced the fucked out of Alaska in classic Palin style.  “The text, as posted on Gov. Palin’s official website (here), uses 2,549 words and 18 exclamation points. Lincoln freed the slaves with 719 words and nary an exclamation; Mr. Jefferson declared our independence in 1,322 words and, again, no exclamation points. Nixon resigned the presidency in 1,796 words — still no exclamation points. Gov. Palin capitalized words at random – whole words, like “TO,” “HELP,” and “AND,” and the first letter of ‘Troops.’”  And then not content with that, she took to Facebook and Twitter to say she was going to sue the entire internet for daring to suggest she left office because of the pending investigation of the Wasilia Sports Complex.

- NFL quarterback Steve McNair was murdered over the weekend, found shot to death.  Most of the press coverage was pretty unspectacular, but Pro Football Talk really did some excellent work breaking down all the developments and the less “family man” side of Steve McNair.  Usually, these types of murders are not random and happen because of events in motion.

- The Discovery Channel will air a tribute to Billy Mays July 9.

- NPR takes a look at the junk science behind Body Mass Index.

- I tried to watch Juno again last night but I could only stomach about 20 minutes of it.  The dialogue has aged even worse than I thought it would initially.  Anyway, I’m still curious about Diablo Cody’s next project with Megan Fox, Jennifer’s Body. Shock Till You Drop has the redband trailer for the flick.

- Rejoice and start drinking again.  Beer bellies are allegedly caused by genetics and not drinking excess amounts of beer.  Snore.  Call me when science reports that liver damage, violent rage, hepatitis and a puffy, red face are related to genetics and not drinking.

- How to bake cheeseburger cupcakes.  They’re good for the soul.

- Hulu has started posting ABC shows.

Click here to view the embedded video.

- I’ve been loving the hell out of Blind Pilot’s and Horse Feathers’s Hear Ya Sessions.  Two Portland bands that I can’t get enough of as it is.  Blind Pilot are a different band all together when Kati Claborn (if she isn’t the next Neko Case then I’ll be disappointed in her – she’s that freakin’ fantastic!) is playing banjo and harmonizing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

- “More than 800 surviving pages and fragments from the The Codex Sinaiticus, which was written in Greek on parchment leaves in the fourth century, have been reunited.”  The Codex Sinaiticus is considered the oldest known Bible in the world and can now be read in it’s entirety online.  via

- NPR has a piece about Merge Records’ 20th anniversary.

- E Consultancy has a list of 16 Twitter shortcuts. Most of these things I had no idea about because I haven’t been digging into ways to maximize my Twittering.  But you can follow us here!

- If Homeopathic doctors ran the ER it would look something like this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

- And finally, I’m loving the hell out of Firefox 3.5.  It’s fast and great in that Firefoxy way.  Coincidentally, Internet Explorer has lost 11.4% of it’s market share since March 2009. Here’s to hoping that FF 3.5 causes it to lose so much more than that.

The NY Times examines how to make a perfect hamburger.  The first thing I do when I move to any city is try to find a burger joint and pizzeria that knocks my socks off.  So far in Portland, I’ve yet to find a pizza place that wows me, but I’ve had several good hamburgers.

The burger from The Slow Bar just about crippled my tastes buds and while the burger at Cafe Castagna was nothing special, it won me over with it’s enormous attention to quality.  The other night I polished off a burger from Stanich’s, which has a sterling reputation.  Unfortunately, it’s an unearned rep.  Though I prefer a thick patty cooked to order, I’m not against a thin patty, unless of course it seems pre-packaged or frozen beforehand.

The article comes with some great advice for preparing a burger at home.  Among this includes: treating the burger like a steak (sear the outside finish in the oven or cool section of grill); buy a 70-30 ratio of meat to fat; similar to grating your own cheese or grinding your own coffee beans — the only way to do both of these things — buy some quality meat and ground it in your food processor at home; be liberal with the salt; dimple the patty regardless of big it is or how you form it; put thought into the bun; and always use fresh ingredients.

A slideshow also accompanies the article, as do several recipes for making your own fixins, brioche buns and the Comme Ca Burger.

The burger is a simple food, but it’s not an easy food to make superb. There’s nothing worse than a poorly executed hamburger — either at home or out at a restaurant.  Any PDXers know a place to get a great burger?

Fancy Fast Food takes the craptastic meals you find at your average fast food joint and reworks them into fine dining dishes using no other ingredients.  This is actually fairly ingenius and demonstrates some really, really fantastic cooking skills. 

There are plenty of before and after pictures and recipes so that if you feel so inclined you can replicate this at home. 

These photographs show extreme makeovers of actual fast food items purchased at popular fast food restaurants. No additional ingredients have been added except for an occasional simple garnish

It’s basically fast food plastic surgery.  Sure, the Spicy Chicken Sushi looks great, but it’s still Popeyes chicken.  Which, um, is essentially their tagline: “Yeah, it’s still bad for you — but see how good it can look!”

Bourdain acknowledges that as “any seasoned traveler can tell you, the ‘best’ meals on the planet are the result of an ephemeral confluence of circumstances,” and makes convincing arguments for each of his picks, which also include Kansas City, Kan.’s Oklahoma Joe’s Barbecue, Tokyo’s Sukiyabashi Jiro and London’s St. John.

Others making the list include: ElBulli, The French Laundry and Per Se (both owned by Thomas Keller), Salumi (Mario Batali’s parent’s sandwich shop in Seattle), Russ & Daughters, Katz’s Deli, St. John’s in London, Sin Huat Eating House in Singapore, Le Bernardin in NYC, Etxebarri in Axpe, Spain, and finally, Hot Doug’s in Chicago.

Shop local.   North Carolina chef Amy Tornquist of Watts Grocery restaurant saves money while remaining committed to regional sustainable food. She tells Southern Living magazine “if it’s a decision between buying organic at the grocery store or fresh from your local farmers’ market, always go with local first,” and believes that small farmers primarily use organic growing methods, but may not have the size or money to be certified as organic.  Her farmers market tips include: getting there early for the best selection, and to build relationships with the farmers, not only to learn more about them, but they can often give you recipe ideas and tips on how to best use their produce.

Sold at Whole Foods for a mere $10 per bottle, the beer was created for the 100-year-old brewery Estrella Damm of Barcelona, with the intention of being the first beer to pair well with food.

But that’s a condescending attitude, since many chefs or brewers will tell you that beer already pairs as well with food as wine does.

It actually starts as two beers, Mr. Adrià said: a straightforward lager and a German-style weissbier that is seasoned with orange peel, coriander and licorice. Because each ferments at a different rate, the beers are not blended until just before bottling in black 750-milliliter wine bottles. The marriage undergoes a second fermentation in the bottle, like Champagne.

The beer has been compared to a Chardonnay with a floral aroma, hints of citrus and spice with a mild, balanced body.  I haven’t had it yet, but it honestly sounds like an unfiltered Belgium-styled witbier.  Not unlike say, Allegash White.  Not exactly the ground-breaking beer you would expect from Mr. Adria and people are already quick to point out it’s snobbish flaws.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a James Bond action figure, but now the ladies (and some men) can take Daniel Craig home in a lickable popsicle thanks to Del Monte Foods’s “license to chill” pop.

Del Monte Superfruit Smoothies said artists “worked tirelessly” to recreate a shirtless sculpture of 41-year-old Craig in the scene where he emerges from the sea in Casino Royale, the twenty-first film in the James Bond series.

So there’s that. (Having problems uploading photos at the moment, we’ll update with pics when we can, natch.)

Dan Neil, for the La Times, looks at the ins and outs of the newest, douchiest wine going: Ed Hardy. 

The wine is yet another notch in the lifestyle brand belt for Christian Audigier.  The Ed Hardy line is a tattoo-themed street wear imprint of the French fashion megalomaniac. 

(The actual Ed Hardy is a bay-area tattoo artist.  Hope he’s getting paid well to have his name sullied.)

Since Audigier has slapped the lameness of “Ed Hardy” onto just about everything and anything from toothbrushes to clothing, why not wine sold exclusively at your local Whole Paycheck? 

The Ed Hardy label helps address a specific problem in the wine business, according to Nicolas Vice President Gene Schaeffer.

“There’s nothing really new and exciting in the wine business,” Schaeffer says. “When this idea came along I thought we could develop new wine drinkers.”

Claude Ruau-Choate, the wine buyer for Whole Foods in California, says the same. “In the long term, we’re trying to build an audience,” Ruau-Choate says. “This is the perfect introduction. It’s fun. Wine doesn’t have to be difficult.”

As for the wine itself, Neil describes it as “not half bad,” which is really saying it’s not that good.  It’s probably a good starter wine, the kind you drink when you’re also drinking Natty Light.  In other words, when you have no taste or discerning sensibilities. 

No wine doesn’t have to be difficult.  But does it have to be douchy either? [via Buzzfeed]

He also ranks the 10 best cities in America to eat pizza, which includes the likes of New York, Detroit (huh, what?), San Francisco, Chicago and New Haven.  Glad to see both Providence and Boston make the list. 

Pizza is a difficult food to pin down; yes, it’s essentially dough, sauce, cheese and toppings.  But in those scant ingredients the pizza is different from location to location and every city has their own unique style, whether it’s grilled, deep dish, Sicilian, thin crust, tavern style, bar style, Greek, Neapolitan, artisanal, brick oven, coal fired, etc. 

But there’s no truer maxim than “there may be pizza better than others, but there’s no such thing as bad pizza.”  My grandpa said that once (probably not) and so this list is more of a primer, a road map to finding great pizza.  Doesn’t mean the pizza you like isn’t good or doesn’t deserve recognition. 

The List (courtesy of Slice)

01. Great Lake (Chicago)
02. Lucali (Brooklyn, NYC)
03. Pizzeria Delfina (San Francisco)
04. Pizzeria Bianco (Phoenix)
05. Bob & Timmy’s (Providence, R.I.)
06. Sally’s Apizza (New Haven, Conn.)
07. Tomato Pie (Los Angeles)
08. Co. Company (Manhattan, NYC)
09. Tacconelli’s (Philadelphia)
10. Totonno’s (Brooklyn, NYC)
11. Tarry Lodge (Port Chester, N.Y.)
12. Frank Pepe (New Haven, Conn.)
13. Luigi’s “the Original” (Harrison Township, Mich.)
14. Gialina (San Francisco)
15. Buddy’s (Detroit)
16. Antica Pizzeria (Marina Del Ray, Calif.)
17. A16 (San Francisco)
18. Al Forno (Providence, R.I.)
19. Galleria Umberto (Boston)
20. Famous Joe’s (Manhattan, NYC)
21. Tomatoes Apizza (Farmington Hills, Mich.)
22. Osteria (Philadelphia)
23. Santarpio’s (Boston)
24. Niki’s (Detroit)
25. Una Pizza Napoletana (Manhattan, NYC)

So, thoughts on pizza, styles, locations, etc.  I will say, that the pizza in Portland has a few good spots, but I generally find it over-priced and not that good.

Caroline McCarthy has a rundown of food trucks using Twitter to bolster their business and advertise their fresh offerings.  If you’re thinking these food trucks are disgusting purveyors of street meat, then you would be wrong.  There are high-end trucks targetting yuppies and business workers. 

Goat cheese is the new black. Introducing goat cheese cheesecake, asserted the Twitter account for a Manhattan food outlet called the Dessert Truck one morning in April, a few hours before it opened up shop at its semi-regular haunt on the corner of St. Mark’s Place and Third Avenue.

The Dessert Truck is usually in good company. Walk out of the Astor Place subway station into Cooper Square, the gateway to the St. Mark’s and Bowery nightlife strips, and depending on the time of day you can buy a cup of coffee, an order of Thai chicken, a Belgian waffle drowning in whipped cream, or a cone of local-ingredients-only ice cream–or, for that matter, goat cheese cheesecake–without ever setting foot inside a storefront. If you ask whether you’ll find them there the next day, your server will likely tell you to keep tabs on the truck’s Twitter account.

In case you’re looking for one in your city, Buzzfeed has compiled a list of about 20 or so food trucks on Twitter from varying cities.  Most of them are in New York, LA and San Francisco, however. 

Photo by Caroline McCarthy.

But Frito Lay potato chips, a subsidiary of Pepsi Co., has launched a new advertising campaign to position themselves as everyone’s “local” potato chip. 

Frito-Lay is one of several big companies that, along with some large-scale farming concerns, are embracing a broad interpretation of what eating locally means. This mission creep has the original locavores choking on their yerba mate. But food executives who measure marketing budgets in the millions say they are mining the concept because consumers care more than ever about where their food comes from.

“Local for us has two appeals,” said Aurora Gonzalez, director of public relations for Frito-Lay North America, which is owned by PepsiCo. “We are interested in quality and quickness because we want consumers to get the freshest product possible, but we have a fairly significant sustainability program, and local is part of that. We want to do business more efficiently, but do it in a more environmentally conscious way.”

The original “eat local” movement, an amalgam of food and environmental politics, came of age a decade or so before the term locavore was coined in 2005.

You’ll excuse me if I don’t go throw up in my mouth for a second.  Look, I’m all for for large companies to market their product in whatever manner they see fit, but as consumers don’t for one second be fooled into thinking that Frito-Lay is local.  They’re not.  And it’s laughable that they would be so audacious to even attempt a marketing campaign based on that notion. 

The locavore philosophy eschews large farming operations in favor of small farm community; it stands against bland,  mass-produced foods shipped across the country, the use of chemicals and certain agricultural practices, like raising animals in small, confined areas.

It is, in essence, what the organic movement was intended to be before that was co-opted by large corporations. 

Two quotes are telling in the NY Times article:

1. “The local foods movement is about an ethic of food that values reviving small scale, ecological, place-based, and relationship-based food systems,” Ms. [Jessica] Prentice [inventor of the term locavore] said. “Large corporations peddling junk food are the exact opposite of what this is about.”

2. “The ingenuity of the food manufacturers and marketers never ceases to amaze me,” said Michael Pollen, the author of “In Defense of Food” and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine. “They can turn any critique into a new way to sell food. You’ve got to hand it to them.”

But just in case you needed a website to let you know if the time is right because you don’t live in Boston, there’s a website for that:

Is it iced coffee weather?