Starbucks: This cup of coffee does not cost any four dollars, and the company that makes it would like you to remember that. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

 

by Todd Kliman

All things are revealed in time; the new economy just has a way of hastening the process.

Last year, as the markets went into a free-fall, Starbucks cut jobs and closed stores. Now, with the financial picture darkening by the week, and with consumers looking at cheaper alternatives from McDonald's, Dunkin' Donuts and others, the Seattle-based coffee colossus has called for new measures.

Slashing prices? Cutting store hours?

Nope. None of that.

The company that bid you to see it as somehow different, as a kind of anti-McDonald's -- eco-friendly do-gooders sharing a cup of joe with the community and encouraging you to follow your bliss -- is now going the route of the big, bad burger chain.

How Starbucks is emulating the golden arches, after the jump...

Continue reading "Starbucks Moves Ever Closer To Offering You Fries With That" >

Hooters faces competition: At this 2006 Las Vegas Hooters opening, competitors seemed few and far between. Ethan Miller/Getty Images

 

by Todd Kliman

Big-time restaurants are laying off sous chefs, portion sizes are shrinking dramatically and splashy theme restaurants are dead. The crisis continues to deepen for the restaurant industry in America, with business off dramatically in most big cities from this time last year. The hope among the hopeful (what few remain) is that budget nights, deep discounts and a return to classic comfort cooking at all levels will rouse restaurants from their slump.

It seems unlikely.

There is, however, a restaurant concept that continues to thrive amid extraordinarily tough times. A concept that seems to be impervious to the vagaries of the market. The "breastaurant."

One new kid on the block takes on the current champ, after the jump...

Continue reading "The 'Breastaurant' Business" >

Roquefort: We've got bad news for those of you who think this looks delicious. AFP/Getty Images

 

by Todd Kliman

And you thought "freedom fries" was the most shockingly egregious example of ugly Americanism.

Now comes word that the Bush administration, in its final days, waged a holy war against stinky cheese.

According to a front-page story in yesterday's Washington Post, the administration "imposed a 300 percent duty on Roquefort, in effect closing off the U.S. market. Americans, it declared, will no longer get to taste the creamy concoction that, in its authentic, most glorious form, comes with an odor of wet sheep and veins of blue mold that go perfectly with rye bread and coarse red wine."

If you like that sort of thing.

Of course, if you do, you probably also have a fondness for French truffles, Irish oatmeal, Italian sparkling water and foie gras ("fatty livers of ducks and geese," in the words of U.S. officials), all of which were slapped with prohibitively high tariffs.

What this is all about, after the jump...

Continue reading "The War On Openness Becomes The War On Stinky Cheese" >

Alice Waters: The famous Berkeley local-foods advocate, seen here looking friendly at a book signing, had a substantially less friendly run-in with another chef at an inauguration party. Scott Wintrow/Getty Images

 

by Todd Kliman

The big story in the food world this week was not that Top Chef host Tom Colicchio might have saved cookbook author Joan Nathan's life by performing a Heimlich maneuver on her at a pre-inaugural party at her house in Washington, D.C. on Sunday.

It's what took place in an upstairs room of that same house.

Marian Burros disclosed the closed-door mano-a-mano between feisty ex-White House chef Walter Scheib and righteous locavore Alice Waters for the New York Times' Diner's Journal blog.

How the feud started and how it ended, and why even a good "-ism" is still just an "-ism," after the jump...

Continue reading "Alice Waters Was a Foodie Hero. Now She's the Food Police." >

by Todd Kliman

My inbox was nearly gummed up this week with friends and family writing to ask if I'd seen the new video from Barack Obama making the rounds.

Pronouncements from Barack the putative economic savior? Wise words from Barack the cool-headed healer of our bitter partisan divide?

Nope, shrewd judgments from Barack the food critic.

The President-elect and his thoughts on Dixie Kitchen, after the jump...

Continue reading "The President-Elect As Food Critic: What Barack Obama Was Up To In August 2001" >

Cristeta Comerford: The White House chef (seen here in 2002) is staying put. Maybe it was the macaroni and cheese. Getty Images

 

by Todd Kliman

The New York Times has quashed the raging food-world rumors about the possibility of a new White House chef.

And now Walter Scheib can say it: I told you so.

Scheib is a former White House chef who cooked for Clinton and Bush the Younger. I called him two weeks after the election, as breathless readers were flooding my e-mail inbox with questions about who Obama would appoint for the role — as if chef were a cabinet position only slightly less important than Secretary of State.

Speculation had centered on celebrity chefs with Chicago ties. Predictably, circumstantial evidence had supplanted the need for real, actual evidence.

Rick Bayless? readers asked me. After all, the Obamas love his Chicago restaurant Topolobampo, and go there on special occasions.

Or what about Art Smith, a 2-time James Beard Award winner who opened a restaurant called Art and Soul on Capitol Hill just before the election? Mere coincidence? Or was this Smith's way of positioning himself for the gig?

I rang Scheib. He couldn't have been blunter.

What Scheib had to say, after the jump...

Continue reading "There's No New White House Chef — And One Man Knew It" >

by Todd Kliman

I gave money to an Iraqi spy.

Actually, something worse than money -- a good review.

A few days ago, I opened the Washington Post to learn that a man named Saubhe Jassim Al-Dellemy pleaded guilty in federal court to a conspiracy charge, admitting he had been a spy for the Iraqi government for two decades -- including the regime of Saddam Hussein.

I immediately had two thoughts, and both of them made me queasy.

The first was of my mom, who opened the Post one morning after the 9/11 attacks to discover that Mohammed Atta had gone to the same medical practice she did. She didn't finish her toast.

What you find where you're not looking, after the jump...

Continue reading "'The Last Thing You'd Expect': Remembering the Spy who Fed Me" >

The birthday boy: Heath and Deborah Campbell ran into a problem when they tried to get a birthday cake for their son — Adolf Hitler. Rich Schultz/Associated Press

 

by Todd Kliman

Think the story of the shoe grenades lobbed at President Bush was weird?

This is weirder.

A New Jersey couple has taken issue with a ShopRite store in Greenwich Township for impinging upon their freedom by denying their request to inscribe their 3-year-old son's name in icing atop his birthday cake.

The boy's name? Adolf Hitler Campbell. (He looks like a teeny version of Sammy Hagar.)

Little Adolf, in case you were wondering, is not an only child. He has sisters. Heath and Deborah Campbell have a daughter named JoyceLynn Aryan Nation and a daughter named Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie — the latter a presumably misspelled homage to Heinrich Himmler.

Anyway, ShopRite deemed the cake request — the third such try the Campbells have made in three years — "inappropriate."

But a local Wal-Mart stepped in and agreed to take the assignment, apparently deciding it was not going to get in the way of a free-speech issue. (Of course the chain had no such difficulty, some years earlier, in banning the sale of Dixie Chicks albums in its stores).

Initially, a Wal-Mart spokesman said the company would not put anything "illegal" or "profane" on a cake, adding: "Our No. 1 priority in decorating cakes is to serve the customer to the best of our ability." In light of the controversy, it has since decided to "review" its policies.

Want more?

It gets better, after the jump ...

Continue reading "What's In A Name? And What's On That Birthday Cake?" >

The humble taco: A critical turning point in the economy, or...just a taco? iStockphoto.com

 

by Todd Kliman

How bad's the economy?

Dot-com darling Yahoo! yesterday laid off 1,500 employees (bringing to nearly 100,000 the number of laid-off tech workers this year).

Almost lost amid the exiting of the techies and the soundings of doom in Silicon Valley was this odd little tidbit: A small outfit called Tokbox parked a taco truck outside the Yahoo! compound, handing out tortas, burritos, two-ply tacos — and job applications. The video-chat start-up was looking to fill — count 'em — five positions.

But what does it mean? After the jump...

Continue reading "How A Taco Changed Our Thinking About Dot-Com Job Losses" >

Appetite suppressant? A crime-museum survey of last-meal preferences turns up a sizzling favorite. iStockphoto

 

One of the things chefs do for fun is to sit around at the end of service, knock back lots of red wine and ask each other: What would you want for your last meal?

(When they're not smiling it up for cooking shows and pitching non-stick skillets, chefs can be a morbid lot.)

Engaging in a little morbid fun itself, Washington, D.C.'s
The National Museum of Crime and Punishment (yes, there's a museum for everything) recently posed that last meal-question to its visitors.

In hopes of provoking thought, the museum's questionnaire offered a few examples, listing the actual last suppers of four mass murderers:

• Saddam Hussein, brutish even in his selection of food (boiled chicken, rice and hot water with honey)

• Ted Bundy (he declined a special meal and was given the traditional breakfast)

• Timothy McVeigh, obsessive to the end (two pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream)

• and John Wayne Gacy (a bucket of KFC original recipe chicken, french fries, a dozen deep-fried shrimp and a pound of strawberries)

More than 500 people took part in the survey. And as might be expected, pizza, ice cream, lobster, hamburger and steak all rated highly.

But none of those foods was the winning meal.

What took the end-of-the-line trophy? After the jump ...

Continue reading "For Your Last Meal, Would You Choose The Whopper?" >

by Todd Kliman

Looking to spruce up your Thanksgiving meal? Three words: cognac mashed potatoes.

A clever riff on hidebound holiday fare from Bobby Flay? A "kicked-up" concoction from Emeril?

Nope, the combination is the creation of perpetually stoned-but-improbably-functional rapper Snoop Dogg -- who else would think to fuse Yankee tradition with hip-hop chill? -- who shared his, uh, recipe when he did a guest turn this week on Martha Stewart. (A pairing so inspired, so hilarious, it makes Klugman-Randall look quaint -- and every other "reality" show look forced -- by comparison. Note to network execs: get this ultimate salt-and-pepper duo a slot in prime time.)

Me, I don't dare make them -- I still remember being blasted for futzing with the sweet potatoes one year -- but I'd love to hear from anybody who's got nerve enough to give it a go.

Now, a Cristal-spiked gravy -- that I could maybe get with.

Todd Kliman is a James Beard Award-winning restaurant critic and the food and wine editor of Washingtonian magazine. The Wild Vine, his book about the Rosetta stone of American wine, is due in 2009.

(See Part Two of the video, after the jump.)

Continue reading "A Sweet Side Dish" >

Happy Thanksgiving!: Believe it or not, this is not the weirdest anthropomorphic turkey photo we found. iStockphoto.com

 

by Todd Kliman

My friend Leslie has a term for certain foods. Delivery vehicles, she calls them.

As in: a hot dog is a delivery vehicle for spicy brown mustard and sauerkraut. Or: birthday cake is a delivery vehicle for thick layers of frosting.

Turkey, to Leslie, is the ultimate in delivery vehicles, a big fat excuse to wolf down mashed potatoes, stuffing, rolls, gravy and all the other starchy goodies that dominate the Thanksgiving table -- things she actually looks forward to eating.

Leslie, you see, hates turkey. "Doesn't everybody?" she asks. "I mean, secretly?"

She has a point -- how often do you roast a turkey the other 364 days of the year? -- though it's a good thing she's not running for elected office. Can you imagine? In the era of the flag pin, disavowing an allegiance to the great-American bird is a little like asking to be tarred as a godless socialist.

The reason Leslie hates turkey, I keep trying to tell her, is because she hasn't really had turkey.

"What have I had?"

"You've had Butterball."

How and why to escape Butterball, after the jump...

Continue reading "Butterball Is Not Turkey, And Other Thanksgiving Truths" >

Wolfgang Puck: He has a few things to say about the new president, the governor of California, and not using old olive oil. Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

 

by Todd Kliman

Yesterday, I sat down to lunch with the irrepressible and always busy — 300 days on the road every year — Wolfgang Puck.

He'd breezed into the nation's capital for a wine dinner at the D.C. outpost of his 95-restaurant empire, The Source. The sleek, Asian-themed restaurant is a favorite of President-elect Barack Obama's, and a short stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.

Having long since built a reputation as the chef to the stars — his Oscar and Grammy parties are legendary, Spago remains the neighborhood restaurant for Hollywood royalty, and Sidney Poitier is the godfather to his children — Puck seems well positioned to be the go to chef in Hollywood-on-the-Potomac, if the predicted New Camelot materializes.

Over a three-hour-plus lunch at the excellent Ethiopian bistro Etete — a fitting choice, since Puck's new bride is Ethiopian — we feasted on lentil-filled sambusas and the Ethiopian beef tartare called kitfo, and the elfin master chef weighed in on a range of topics including: Obama, Schwarzenegger, foie gras, the faltering economy, Jessica Seinfeld, Leo DiCaprio, and his secrets for the perfect Thanksgiving turkey.

On Obama
"I hope for Obama that he will be interested in food. You had Clinton walking around with a hamburger, and I hope you don't see that. You know, I cooked for Obama in L.A. at David Geffen's. It's exciting. I think more than anything for me, it's how America is changing by not reelecting a follower of George Bush. I think in the long run it will do us a lot of good. I hope he'll be good for food. If the president goes out for good food, it sets a great example."

More about...well, everything, after the jump...

Continue reading " 'Eating a Bone-In Filet and Listening to Pink Floyd': My Lunch With Wolfgang" >

Gumbo He Can Believe In: Barack Obama prepares to enjoy some gumbo in a New Orleans restaurant. What kind of First Eater can we expect? Emmanuel Dunand; AFP/Getty Images

 

by Todd Kliman

So, okay: We know where Barack Obama stands on taxes, on Iraq, on torture, on health care. But what kind of First Eater will he be?

As the great gastronomer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said: "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are."

At this point, it's too soon to predict what an Obama cabinet will look like, much less guess at the contents of the Obama cupboard, but we do know this: In matters of taste, as in matters of state, the bold-minded president-elect rejects the false dichotomies (black/white, red state/blue state) that too often are used to divide and conquer.

Regular guy or arugula guy?

Republicans roared with delight when candidate Obama suggested to a group of Iowa farmers that they grow this pricey, peppery green, so beloved by the Whole Foods-set (there are no Whole Foods stores in Iowa). This was the first of many "-ists" to be pinned on him, in the innocent days before "terrorist," "socialist," and "redistributionist."

More recently, a New York Post Page Six item spread the (erroneous) word that the Obamas spent a night at the Waldorf Astoria and ordered lobster, champagne and Iranian caviar (not just caviar; terrorist caviar).

These stories tell you a lot more about the sticky residue of the culture wars than they do about Obama. At best, he's a foodie. But even that definition seems unlikely. He hates beets and asparagus. His favorite food is fried chicken, his favorite recipe is chili, and he's no stranger to the foods of deprivation -- In Dreams from My Father, he confessed that he ate grasshoppers, dog and snakes during his boyhood in Indonesia.

Conclusion: His tastes are as catholic as his sensibilities.

On the prospects for booze, pizza, and dining out, after the jump...

Continue reading "Barack Obama: First Eater" >

Halloween Is For Kids: Adults only mess it up with their clean teeth and fancy cocktails. iStockphoto.com

 

by Todd Kliman

I used to love Halloween.

It was the night of infinite possibilities, of dressing up and pretending to be anything you wanted -- anything at all -- and ditching the boring grown-ups and their dull, rule-driven world, if only for a few hours.

Which was pretty great in and of itself. But on top of that, there were rewards for this game of pretend. Candy rewards.

All that night, and for the rest of the week, too, we were obliged -- that's how the holiday worked; no one could pretend to tell us otherwise -- to feast on our loot, to gorge ourselves silly on miniature chocolate bars, Tootsie rolls, blowpops, lollipops, Candy apples, and all that other awesome sweet sticky stuff.

Halloween was sort of like Thanksgiving for pre-teens. Only much, much better.

That's not to say there weren't things to beware of in venturing out into the dark. There were bad people out there. Who did bad things. So of course it wasn't wise for small children to go unsupervised in strange areas, and we were advised, always, not to consume any piece of candy that wasn't wrapped.

But these were minor concerns. Halloween was fun. The funnest night of the year.

Now?

Now it's become a holiday so fraught with fear and hand-wringing, so wracked with earnest consideration of the issues of the day, that it's a wonder any parent bothers to send a kid out the door.

Naysayers and do-gooders wreck a perfectly good holiday, after the jump...

Continue reading "Halloween: A Holiday For Kids, Not Bartenders and Dentists" >

Cole Hamels Takes A Bite Out Of The Series: "I hold my cheesesteak in this hand, and then I pitch like this." Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images

 

by Todd Kliman

Mayoral wagers are as time-honored a sports tradition as talking trash, celebrating at City Hall, and stealing signs.

This year's World Series, which began last night, pits the Philadelphia Phillies against the Tampa Bay Rays -- a team with a long history of futility (the Phils have one title to show for their 125 years of existence) versus a team with a short history of futility (the ten-year-old Rays posted nine consecutive losing seasons).

On Tuesday, on the eve of the Series, the mayors of St. Petersburg, Clearwater and Tampa -- respectively, Rick Baker, Frank Hibbard and Pam Iorio -- engaged their Philly counterpart, mayor Michael Nutter, in the familiar foodie challenge.

More details and what they might mean, after the jump...

Continue reading "When Mayors Bet On Baseball, Does The Food Tell The Tale?" >

Alinea: We're not sure what this is, but it looks delicious, or possibly confusing, or possibly both. Lara Kastner/Achatz LLC

 

by Todd Kliman

On the heels of the biggest Wall Street collapse since The Great Depression, and at a time when the snaking lines at thrift stores and food banks recall images of the '30s, the most hotly awaited cookbook of the season hit stores this week -- looking for all the world like the last, great blast of foodie obliviousness.

Alinea is a collection of recipes (and paeans to culinary exploration) from the four-star Chicago restaurant whose chef, Grant Achatz, has taken the expression "playing with your food" to a head-shaking extreme. Flaunting bourgeois expectations -- like, for instance, the ones that say a meal moves from appetizer to entree to dessert, or the ones that militate for a separate-but-equal segregation of sweet and savory -- Achatz stages a kind of elaborate dinner-as-theater, candying bacon and suspending it from a trapeze, or sending out waiters with atomizers to spritz the air with the scent of pine (how else is a chef supposed to summon the smell of the forest?).

Continue reading "'Alinea': Treat Your Economic Wounds With Suspended Bacon" >

The cookie polls prove it: Voters go on gut instinct. Karmacamilleeon/Flickr

 

by Todd Kliman

Thanks to the ceaseless "news cycle" and a growing horde of media outlets, there is no end to polling data, and tracking of the candidates has become a daily and sometimes hourly activity.

Witness the aftermath of this week's faux-town hall debate, when a flurry of polls that night and the next morning showed Barack Obama had edged John McCain, and appeared to gain a bit of separation from his Republican rival. Or did he?

What the cookie metrics suggest, after the jump...

Continue reading "Forget The Polls; Track The Candidate-Cookie Numbers" >