Articles for Culintro

Paul Clarke, Special to The Chronicle Sunday, May 24, 2009 PRINT E-MAIL SHARE COMMENTS (35) FONT | SIZE: Usually a bartender's first shift at a new place is mostly about the basics - learning the house cocktails, the preferences of the regulars. But on a ...

EATING outdoors is one of the joys of warmer weather. If you forgo a seat at the local sidewalk cafe, it can also be a remarkably inexpensive way to immerse yourself in an atmosphere that seems imported from Manila; or Jakarta, Indonesia; or maybe Malmo, Sweden. Every summer, New York holds dozens of food fairs and festivals with an international flavor. You’re well advised to arrive early to scope out the selections; shed any inhibitions about pointing, so you can order “one of those” and ...

09 AIA | LA 5th Annual Restaurant Design Awards A panel of distinguished jurors, composed of JONATHAN GOLD (Restaurant Critic, LA Weekly), CEDD MOSES (Founder/CEO, 213), MICHAEL PALLADINO, FAIA (Design Partner, Richard Meier & Partners Architects), LOUISE (LU) SANDHAUS (Graphic Designer, Louise Sandhaus Design - LSD) convened on May 21, 2009 to review this year’s entries and designate projects for recognition. Sixteen projects were selected as finalists for this year’s competition: 11 in

THE French take haute cuisine seriously. So the organization Le Fooding caused a stir in 2000 when it began celebrating a casual and egalitarian attitude toward eating, holding huge picnics in French cities, with bistro chefs serving food that people ate with their hands and wine that they drank out of plastic cups. NOTHING FANCY An event held by Le Fooding at Le Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Le Fooding might not seem so revolutionary in the United States, where fine dining is already less ...

OpenTable, the premier site for online restaurant reservations, is among several companies braving the anemic market for raising capital and giving initial public offerings a shot this week. Smart move or incredibly stupid? In an effort for full disclosure, I love OpenTable. The delight I feel in making a reservation with the ease of a mouse click - or now finger swipe on my iPhone - replaces the dread I used to face spelling out my ten-letter last name to snotty reservationistas. ...

Who makes the best pizza on earth? That is the eternal question, the one that must be answered. Because: Round or square, flat or stuffed, thick crust or thin, slathered in pork products or simply covered in cheese, pizza just might be the most perfect food ever invented. Which is why Alan Richman traveled more than 20,000 miles across the U.S.A.—the country that makes it best—in a search for the 25 best pizzas you’ll ever eat

CHICAGO -(Dow Jones)- Recession-battered restaurants are looking for new menu items to attract customers, but don't have much appetite for big investments in equipment, executives for commercial kitchen equipment makers said Monday. Relatively inexpensive types of equipment such as panini grills are drawing interest from cost-conscious restaurant operators searching for menu ideas at this week's National Restaurant Association trade show in Chicago. "They're looking at ways to ...

IN the middle of the kitchen at Daniel, a four-star restaurant on the Upper East Side, a set of steep stairs leads to a cozy little nook known as the skybox. It has one lacquered-wood table, room for four diners, a television and two large windows overlooking the action below. The space feels like the eating quarters of a yacht set in a tree house. Mr. Boulud, second from left in foreground, is trying to balance thrift and quality for this site, his 10th restaurant. The skybox is ...

Urban Studies A PASSER-BY might be forgiven for dismissing the block of Seventh Street between First Avenue and Avenue A as undistinguished; it lacks the chaos of St. Mark’s Place, the dense crush of Sixth Street’s Indian district. “Seventh Street is kind of a hideaway,” admitted Tony Yoshida, the owner of Kyo Ya, one of the city’s few Japanese restaurants to earn a Michelin star. But this block has quietly attracted culinary talent from around the world, resulting in a ...

WASHINGTON — In its effort to overhaul health care, Congress is planning to give employers sweeping new authority to reward employees for healthy behavior, including better diet, more exercise, weight loss and smoking cessation. Congress is seriously considering proposals to provide tax credits or other subsidies to employers who offer wellness programs that meet federal criteria. In addition, lawmakers said they would make it easier for employers to use financial rewards or penalties to ...

Jean Georges, the flagship of the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, won the James Beard Foundation’s outstanding restaurant award Monday night and Drew Nieporent, a partner in Nobu and Corton in TriBeCa, was named outstanding restaurateur. Dan Barber of Blue Hill in Greenwich Village and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Westchester County won the outstanding chef award. The annual awards presentation was held at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. The rising star chef of the year award went ...

Washington, D.C. -- Farmers from New York Farm Bureau's board of directors met with 19 members of Congress last week to lobby for agriculture. "These visits are key to making sure our farmers are properly represented in any policymaking in Washington," said Dean Norton, president of New York Farm Bureau. It was the fourth D.C. lobbying trip organized by Farm Bureau this year, as several county Farm Bureau's have joined together on regional lobbying trips to make sure that agriculture's ...

Details of this year’s New York City Wine & Food Festival were released today. Here’s the release detailing what you can expect when it kicks off October 8, including a talk with Bourdain, the usual burger bash, and a southern-themed fête featuring Paula Deen, the Lee brothers, and others. (New York, NY – April 2009) – On the heels of a record-breaking 2009 Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival, founder and director Lee Brian Schrager, in collaboration with Southern Wine & ...

LED by Eater.com, the blogs went bananas over the closing of Kobe Club last week. Ha, ha!, they belly-laughed at the expense of owner Jeffrey Chodorow. He thought he'd prove Bruni, Platt and Cuozzo wrong, who all tore the joint to pieces back in February 2007! He dared to defy the Eater Deathwatch, currently snoozing but then at the top of its game! In fact, Kobe Club stank to the bone, and it's a puzzle how or why Chodorow kept the often near-empty venue afloat for so long -- an ...

Mr. White, the congenial chef behind Convivio and Alto, was referring to extension cords that hung like snakes from rafters inside Marea, his ultra-deluxe Italian seafood restaurant expected to open in early May on Central Park South. At least 45 workers milled around the dining room in early April, six of them flown in from Italy to install Indian rosewood paneling and a honey-colored onyx wall backlighted by tiny bulbs. But by precarious, he could just as easily have been talking about ...

Miami is known for many things — sun, sand and lots and lots of skin — but fine dining was not usually noted as one of its strongest attributes. That’s starting to change. With all the new hotels opening this year, a crop of eateries are springing up to join the old standbys like Casa Tua, Nobu and Ago. Among them is the first U.S. outpost of London’s Hakkasan, a Michelin-starred Chinese restaurant favored by celebs from Jennifer Lopez to Lady GaGa, which just opened at Miami megaresort ...

WAVERLY Inn . . . Waverly Out? That could be the Monkey Bar, the oft-reinvented Hotel Elysee dining venue reborn yet again, most glamoriciously, at the hands of Graydon Carter and partners. Lest you think it's the fated, Midtown second coming of the Vanity Fair emperor-in-chief's infamously exclusionary, hierarchically configured West Village place, be warned: There's not a bad seat in the house. Unlike Waverly Inn, Monkey Bar has an actual telephone number that takes reservations from ...

Mr. Liebrandt, hulking yet baby-faced, is the chef at Corton in TriBeCa, one of the most gastronomically ambitious and pleasurable new restaurants to open in the city in years. Ten years ago, he arrived to begin an on-and-off relationship with New York’s diners, filled with misunderstandings, reunions and provocations. At Corton, Mr. Liebrandt has found a refined, reformed cooking style and made a mutually nourishing commitment to his adopted city. “I have no contact with anyone in ...

April 20 (Bloomberg) -- Gordon Ramsay’s flagship London establishment dropped out of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list tonight and kept falling. The three-Michelin-starred venue failed even to make the Top 100 after coming 13th last year. To add to the woes of the British chef, known for TV shows such as “Hell’s Kitchen” and “Kitchen Nightmares,” his former friend Marcus Wareing’s new venue came in at No. 52. Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley -- on the site of the old Ramsay- owned Petrus -- ...

I recently spent a week in New York City, during which I ate no bad meals. Nor did I dine at outrageous expense. My wife was with me, and we had no checks much above $100 for the two of us, and many several dollars beneath that. Even in the plushest of times, I consider all restaurant meals $250 and above immoral, and will agree to be taken to them only by people I actively dislike. We had two meals -- a lunch and a dinner -- at our favorite Italian restaurant, Cellini, on East 54th Street, ...