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Building an Effective Cocktail Program

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:00:00 GMT

Building an Effective Cocktail Program
Start Date: Mar 15, 2010 6:00 PM
End Time: Mar 15, 2010 8:00 PM
Location: Gabarron Foundation, New York, NY 10016
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Gabarron Foundation

149 East 38th Street

New York, NY US 10016

Culintro Cocktail Series

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 23:00:00 GMT

Culintro Cocktail Series
Start Date: Apr 12, 2010 6:00 PM
End Time: Apr 12, 2010 8:00 PM
Location: ilili, New York, NY 10001
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ilili

236 5th Avenue

New York, NY United States 10001

Restaurant Technology Powered by The Culintro Report

Tue, 11 May 2010 19:00:00 GMT

Restaurant Technology Powered by The Culintro Report
Start Date: May 11, 2010 2:00 PM
End Time: May 11, 2010 4:00 PM
Location: TBD

TBD

The Future of Restaurant Design Series

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 23:00:00 GMT

The Future of Restaurant Design Series
Start Date: Jun 14, 2010 6:00 PM
End Time: Jun 14, 2010 6:00 PM
Location: TBD
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Culintro is bringing the world of Design & Food together in a discussion regarding Restaurant Design: Perspectives on Trends, Reviews, and the Future.

TBD

Cocktail Series

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 23:00:00 GMT

Cocktail Series
Start Date: Jul 13, 2010 6:00 PM
End Time: Jul 13, 2010 8:00 PM
Location: TBD
Event Details:

Network with peers and leaders in the restaurant industry.

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Chefs Inspire

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 23:00:00 GMT

Chefs Inspire
Start Date: Sep 13, 2010 6:00 PM
End Time: Sep 13, 2010 8:00 PM
Location: TBD

TBD

Innovative and Creative Restaurant Marketing

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 23:00:00 GMT

Innovative and Creative Restaurant Marketing
Start Date: Oct 26, 2010 6:00 PM
End Time: Oct 26, 2010 6:00 PM
Location: TBD

TBD

Bartenders swap places

Alina Munoz — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:00:00 GMT

Paul Clarke, Special to The Chronicle

Sunday, May 24, 2009

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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 recent night at Heaven's Dog in San Francisco, Jim Romdall's first - and only - shift at the bar quickly turned into a debate about thermodynamics.

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Romdall and bartender Jon Santer discussed the difference between stirring a drink with hand-cracked ice from a special Kold-Draft machine and using regular Kold-Draft ice. "They did experiments both ways and took digital thermometer readings," recalls Erik Adkins, the restaurant's general manager. "It's one thing to say why we do something different from you, and another thing to actually prove it."

This debate was not merely academic (nor, as some might expect, just a way to kill time during a slow spell at the bar). Romdall is the bar manager at the craft-cocktail bar Vessel in Seattle, and one of a growing number of bartenders across the country who have made it a professional priority to visit and work at bars in other cities. On the same trip to San Francisco, Romdall also tended bar at the Alembic and at Bourbon & Branch.

These bartenders take on the role of drink-pouring exchange students, learning the bartending culture that's unique to each city and sharing recipes and techniques that they use back home.

For Romdall, the benefits of guest bartending are clear.

"There's no way to learn as much as when you step behind someone else's bar," he says. "I came back from San Francisco a better bartender."

Bartender exchanges began in March 2008, when Philip Ward, then the bar manager at Death & Company in New York, swapped places for a week with Thomas Waugh, then working at the Alembic. (Waugh has since moved to New York to tend bar, in effect making the exchange permanent.) In the following months Ward worked with the makers of St. Germain elderflower liqueur - which covered some of the travel and hotel expenses for participating bartenders - to arrange exchanges between bars in New York, London, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. Other companies have funded similar projects; earlier this year, liquor giant Remy Martin sent Bourbon & Branch bar manager Erick Castro to work as a guest bartender at the Edison in Los Angeles.

While some trips are underwritten by liquor companies, most guest bartenders arrange these events on their own, while visiting a city for work or play. Over the past year there's been a particularly vibrant exchange between bars in other West Coast cities. In September, Alyson Dykes from Teardrop Cocktail Lounge in Portland, Ore., worked two nights behind the bar at Nopa; in April, Teardrop owner Daniel Shoemaker spent three nights in Seattle, mixing drinks at Vessel. Later this spring, Range bar manager Brooke Arthur plans to spend several days in Seattle, working at Vessel. Adkins and Shoemaker plan to swap places for a week this summer.

For bartenders, these visits are a great opportunity not only to experience other cities but also to offset some travel expenses. "I was already going (to San Francisco) on vacation, but it was like, 'I can get paid for this? Where do I sign up?' " says Anu Apte, a Seattle bartender at Rob Roy and Vessel who worked a guest-bartending shift at Beretta in March.

Customers enjoy such changes of face, too. They were "pretty welcoming to the idea of bartenders from Seattle making drinks that might not otherwise make their way to Beretta," says Ryan Fitzgerald, a Beretta bartender who has worked guest shifts in Boston. "And the owners liked it, because it was (on) Monday and Tuesday night and we had a lot of people coming to check them out who might not otherwise have come in."

Fitzgerald says drinks such as Apte's gin-based Saffron Sandalwood Sour introduced customers and other bartenders to ingredients they hadn't previously considered. Romdall, who is adding a cocktail flavored with rhubarb to Vessel's bar menu after Castro's work with the tart vegetable during his nights at the bar, says playing host to guest bartenders has provided similar insight.

While guest-bartending gigs may only last a few nights, both the bartenders and bars involved have found that the benefits last much longer. Since Romdall's visit, "we've had a lot of Seattle people come by," Adkins says. "They'll come in and say, 'We heard about you from the bartenders at Vessel,' so right away we don't have to figure out what they've come for. We can jump right in with talking about good cocktails."

Saffron Sandalwood Sour

Makes 1 serving

This drink by Seattle bartender Anu Apte incorporates the savory flavor of saffron and sandalwood into a crisp gin-based cocktail.

2 ounces gin
3/4 ounce fresh lime juice
1/4 ounce fresh lemon juice
1/2 ounce (3 teaspoons) saffron syrup, purchased (see Note) or home-made (see recipe)
1 teaspoon Angostura bitters
1 egg white
-- Sandalwood powder for garnish

Instructions: Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker and shake hard, without ice, for 10 seconds, to aerate egg white. Add ice and shake well for 10 seconds, then strain into chilled cocktail glass. Sprinkle a pinch of fresh sandalwood powder on the foam as garnish.

Note: Saffron syrup may be purchased at specialty food stores or Indian food stores.

Saffron Syrup

Makes about 1 1/2 cups

Use 3 teaspoons in the Saffron Sandalwood Sour recipe. Refrigerate the remainder for another use.

1/4 teaspoon saffron strands
1 tablespoon near-boiling water
2 cups sugar
1 1/4 cups water
1/4 cup rose water

Instructions: Steep the saffron in the near-boiling water for 15 minutes.

In a heavy pot over medium heat, combine the sugar and 1 1/4 cups water and stir until sugar is dissolved and syrup comes to a boil.

Combine the saffron water with the rose water, and add to the syrup. Simmer for 5 minutes. Let cool before using.

Hemingway Solution

Makes 1 serving

This cocktail by Vessel bar manager Jim Romdall was served at several San Francisco bars during his visit earlier this spring.

1 1/2 ounces aquavit (Romdall suggests Krogstadt from Portland, Ore.)
1/2 ounce Luxardo maraschino liqueur
1 ounce fresh lime juice
1/4 ounce simple syrup
3 small sprigs of fresh thyme
2 mint leaves

Instructions: Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker. Add ice and shake well for 10 seconds. Strain through a fine-mesh strainer into a cocktail glass.

Paul Clarke is a contributing editor at Imbibe magazine and publisher of the blog the Cocktail Chronicles. E-mail comments to wine@sfchronicle.com.

Jun 5, 2009 8:00 AM

A Little Taste of Somewhere Else

Wed, 27 May 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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 carry small bills in one convenient pocket and extra napkins in another; and enjoy the freedom of eating on your feet. Most of all, leave room for more — who knows what’s behind that puff of smoke at the next grill.

Five fairs are especially tempting:

INDONESIAN FOOD BAZAAR May 31, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., behind Masjid al-Hikmah, 48-01 31st Avenue (at 48th Street), Astoria, Queens. (Bazaars are also planned for June, July and August.)

Several times each summer, the small parking lot outside the al-Hikmah mosque in Astoria is awash in aromas and flavors that seem straight out of an Indonesian kampung, or village. Most of the vendors are home cooks who otherwise offer their food by special order only; almost everything is $5 or less.

Look for gado-gado and lothek, a pair of vegetable salads with crunchy highlights, awash in sauce that’s hand-ground (and spiced to order) for each customer; combro, a deep-fried, chili-spiked croquette of grated cassava; satay plates of skewered beef and chicken, accompanied by peanut sauce and blocks of sticky rice; the long-simmered stew called beef rendang; chicken or beef noodle soup; and cendol, iced coconut milk laden with green rice noodles and tiny cubes of colored jelly, and laced with palm sugar.

PHILIPPINE INDEPENDENCE DAY FESTIVAL June 7, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Madison Avenue between 24th and 26th Streets, Midtown.

The festival commemorates the country’s independence from Spain, but you’ll be reminded of its long ties with the United States by the marching bands and beauty queens in the accompanying parade, and by pop-rock performers on a stage.

But in lieu of hot dogs and hamburgers, grills sizzle with skewers of chicken and beef, and slices of pork belly; even in the midafternoon crowd, you can’t miss the aroma. The vendors lining both sides of the avenue push combo platters that may run $10 or $12, but almost everything is available à la carte. Also look for chicharron bulaklak, deep-fried “pork ruffle fat”; skewered balls of ground fish with spicy sauce; fritters bedecked with shrimp; fried bananas; laing, chopped taro leaves slow-cooked with coconut milk, spices and shrimp; cuchinta, steamed rice cakes accented with shredded coconut; and halo-halo, a “mix-mix” of shaved ice, condensed milk and colorful sweets (beans, corn and yams all qualify).

SWEDISH MIDSUMMER FESTIVAL June 19, 5 to 8 p.m., Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park, near Battery Place.

This ages-old European festival (from a time when “summer” was reckoned around an older agricultural calendar) is a major holiday in Sweden, nowadays celebrated on the Friday nearest the solstice. Much of the revelry — children’s games, fiddle music, folk dancing — centers on the greenery-draped midsummer pole. Drinking songs may be on the program, too (though since this event takes place in a city park, alcoholic drinks are celebrated in absentia). Flowered headgear optional.

Many festival-goers immediately join the line for the buffet (about $20) and heap a plate with sliced salmon, meatballs, new potatoes, salad, perhaps pickled herring, while friends spread picnic blankets on the park lawn. Shorter lines lead to tables staffed by a handful of Swedish restaurants, with à la carte fare. Look for a korv, a hot dog with an indulgent garnish of shrimp salad, relish and toasted onions; and waffles with jam and whipped cream.

RAKHAING THINGYAN BURMESE NEW YEAR WATER FESTIVAL July 12, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., J.H.S. 56 schoolyard, Madison and Montgomery Streets, Lower East Side.

In steamy Burma, the Thingyan celebration typically accompanies the New Year itself, sometime in mid-April; in New York, the appropriate weather for a water festival settles in several months later. Playful splashing, and the occasional water gun, are generally confined to one corner of the festival, beside a stage for traditional Burmese song and dance, though the swelter of the blacktop schoolyard makes a good soaking increasingly attractive.

A less messy option is a bowl of shwe yin aye, whose loose translation is “something that cools you.” It drenches sticky rice, coconut, assorted colorful agars and scissor-snipped white bread in several ladles of coconut milk and tapioca pearls. Other dishes (most are about $5) include mohinga, or fish noodle soup; shrimp fritters tossed with watercress, cucumber and fish sauce; and mont kyar si, hand-rolled rice-flour dumplings with shredded coconut.

MYANMAR BAPTIST CHURCH FUN FAIR Second or third Saturday in August, noon to 6 p.m., 143-55 84th Drive (near 143rd Street), Briarwood, Queens.

Although the church itself now resides in Elmhurst, this annual afternoon of fun (low-key karaoke in Burmese and English) and fellowship (under shaded communal seating) still makes its home in a Briarwood backyard. For the day, tented tables surround the grassy enclosure, and members of the congregation dole out home cooking.

Most items are $5 or less, including a dish described by the church pastor as “near the river” rice noodles, flavored with cilantro, orange-brown fish sauce, bright yellow pickled bamboo, and red pepper, and paired with a refreshing, clear fish-and-shrimp broth. Also look for fried dough with bean paste and onion slivers (the stretching, thwacking and folding of the dough is a show in itself); papaya salad prepared before your eyes; chicken curry with noodles; a plate of chewy pork parts with cucumbers and hot sauce; and moist, dark brown banana cakes

May 27, 2009 8:00 AM

AIA/ LA Restaurant Award Nominees Chosen

Alina Munoz — Wed, 27 May 2009 12:00:00 GMT

	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 Restaurant Category, 3 in the Café/Bar Category, and 2 in the Lounge/Nightclub Category. The Jury Awards will be announced at the Restaurant Design Awards Ceremony on June 26th. In the meantime, PEOPLE’S CHOICE AWARD The Jury’s top selections in each category are listed below and we invite everyone to vote for your favorite architecturally-designed restaurant, cafe/bar, and lounge/nightclub. The highest recipient of votes in each category will be announced at the Awards Ceremony and declared the winner of the 2009 AIA\|LA People’s Choice Award!

May 27, 2009 7:00 AM

From France, a Lesson in Loving Food

Wed, 20 May 2009 13:15:00 GMT

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 than sacrosanct. But at the group’s first American event, a benefit scheduled for September at the museum P.S. 1 in Long Island City, Queens, New Yorkers will have a chance to taste the cooking of a new generation of Parisian bistro chefs.

Alexandre Cammas, one of the founders of the organization, said the name, which he coined in 1999, is a combination of food and feeling, the opposite of the rigid standards usually applied to gastronomy.

“We want to shake things up and make French food sexy again,” said Mr. Cammas, who is in New York for several months.

The Fooding formula, with thousands lining up to get food from chefs cooking for charity, has been entrenched in New York for a couple of decades. But it’s much less common in other countries.

Le Fooding-New York, on Sept. 25 and 26 from 7 to 10 p.m., will support Action Against Hunger, the international charity that is the beneficiary of the French events. Tickets will cost $30, with 1,000 people expected each night. They will be fed by six different chefs, from Paris and New York, each evening.

Despite its democratic agenda, the group plans to offer a V.I.P. ticket for admission at 6 p.m., at a higher price to be determined, an idea Mr. Cammas said he got after speaking with potential sponsors and chefs in New York.

Drinks will be sold, but not “at nightclub prices,” Mr. Cammas said.

Le Fooding events often have live music, although it has not yet been worked out what entertainment there will be at P.S. 1.

While the group cares little for restaurant décor, it puts a great deal of effort into the graphic design of the programs. Several New Yorker cover artists will take part in the Queens event.

The French chefs who will cook are not international stars but instead members of a younger generation, who have turned their backs on haute cuisine, and whose kitchens are on the hot bistro circuit, like Yves Camdeborde, who founded La Régalade and now owns Le Comptoir du Relais.

Those who have signed on to come to New York include Mr. Camdeborde, William Ledeuil of Ze Kitchen Galerie, Alberto Herraiz of Fogón, Stéphane Jégo of Chez l’Ami Jean, Christophe Pelé of La Bigarrade and Inaki Aizpitarte of Le Chateaubriand, all in Paris.

And though Mr. Cammas insists the group is not interested in “stars,” New York will be represented by high-profile chefs including Daniel Boulud, April Bloomfield, David Chang and Wylie Dufresne, among others.

Le Fooding, whose full name is Le Fooding d’Amour because that makes it “sound very French,” as Mr. Cammas put it, publishes a guide to 800 restaurants in France. But the group has no plans to put out a guide here.

“You already have plenty of those,” he said.

May 20, 2009 8:15 AM

Reservations about OpenTable's IPO?

Alina Munoz — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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.

Still, as Bloomberg reports, this would only be the fifth tech IPO in as many months this year, a far cry from the tech boom of the late 1990s where five IPOs sometimes took place in as many minutes. OpenTable would be defying the odds.

All Things D's John Paczkowski seems unconvinced. He cites the fact that the restaurant industry is doing terribly in the current recession. True. But Erick Schonfeld over at TechCrunch points out:

Revenues through the nine months ended September 30, 2008 were $41.3 million, a 41 percent increase from the same period in 2007. The company makes money from the restaurants, which pay both subscription fees (54 percent of revenues) and reservation fees for each diner that shows up through the system (42 percent of revenues). It also makes a small amount on installation fees (4 percent of revenues).

Keep in mind those 9 months of 2008 were technically during the recession. And revenues were still up 41 percent pre-recession. That's impressive.

An argument can also be made that OpenTable holds the distinction of being the most dominant online reservation site, by far. It seems, according to Schonfeld's above analysis of their revenues that they have also barely begun to tap the revenue potential of their database of diner preferences. Imagine the value of that data to restaurants - it's analogous to what facebook can sell to companies for marketing based on their users' interests.

So despite the restaurant industry's current troubles, investors should, and probably will, see OpenTable's value in the long term. It's set to price post-close Wednesday.

May 20, 2009 8:00 AM

AMERICAN PIE

Tue, 19 May 2009 13:00:00 GMT

Italians are wrong. Not about cars or suits. About pizza, and they’re not entirely mistaken about that, only about crusts and buffalo-milk mozzarella. They’ve got the tomato part right. Pizza was created by the Italians—or maybe by the Greeks, who brought it to Naples, but let’s not pile on the bad news. Right now it justly belongs to us. We care more about it. We eat more of it, and unlike the Italians, we appreciate it at dinner, at lunch, and at breakfast, when we have it cold, standing up, to make hangovers go away. Italians don’t really understand pizza. They think of it as knife-and-fork food, best after the sun goes down.

Pizza isn’t as fundamental to Italy as it is to America. Over there, it plays a secondary role to pasta, risotto, and polenta. To be candid, I think they could do without it. Not us. Over here, it’s one of the few foreign foods we’ve embraced wholeheartedly, made entirely our own.

The simple truth is that pizza in its most primal form—cheese, tomato, crust—is perfect food. It’s good for vegetarians, even though it contains no vegetables. It’s good for us meat eaters, chiefly because we don’t care much for vegetables but also because pizza is one of the few foods where the absence of meat isn’t missed. (Although, when I think about it, a little sausage never hurts, especially if it’s crumbled up rather than sliced.)

It’s the absolute best food for sharing (unless you’re in love, in which case we’re talking about an ice cream cone). It’s the healthiest of treats; the strictest mother wouldn’t argue that pizza is bad for kids. It’s the most versatile delivery food, because it reheats much better than Chinese, and if you accidentally burn it, pizza is still good. Most important, at least to me: Pizza gives pepperoni a reason to exist.

A word here about Naples, the home of Italian pizza. That’s supposedly where the pie reaches its pinnacle, in a distinct and idiosyncratic style that some American pizzamakers—let’s resist calling them pizzaioli, as the Italians do—are trying to emulate. They’re going for hotter ovens, puffier crusts, and weepy buffalo-milk mozzarella on top. I’m not impressed. Not by the genuine pies in Naples, and usually less by American imitations, although the mission has a certain nobility of purpose.

I’ve eaten in Naples. From the ancient, brutally hot ovens emerge pies that most Americans wouldn’t recognize. The crust is charred and puffy in spots but tragically thin and pale beneath the toppings. The sauce is chiefly chopped tomatoes, sometimes fresh and sometimes canned, but almost always vivid and bright. (Those San Marzano tomatoes are as good as advertised.) The cheese is mozzarella, but the Italians are proudest when they can substitute fresh mozzarella from the milk of buffaloes and label their pies Margherita DOC. (It sounds like a wine thing, but it’s also a pizza thing.) In my opinion, buffalo mozzarella is pizza’s second-worst topping, exceeded only by whole anchovies—no hot, smelly fish on my pies, thank you. After that, those pizzaioli guys add oil, lots of it, and more liquid is precisely what tomato pies do not need.

This is what happens when a Neapolitan pie comes out of the oven, after it’s been cooked a remarkably short time: The nearly liquefied glob of buffalo mozzarella—now resembling a snowman melting on a warm March afternoon—has become runny. Water drains from the tomatoes. Oil joins the flood. All that excess liquid has to go somewhere, which is why the bottom crust turns to mush, not that it was ever particularly crispy.

This is why Italians need a knife and fork. This is why our pizzas are better than theirs.

we have, remarkably, seven distinct kinds of pizza in this country, starting with those Neapolitan imitations that represent style over sustenance. Our most famous (and nonconformist) is probably the Chicago deep-dish pie, essentially a casserole. The crust is sometimes burdened with cornmeal or semolina, and sometimes it is flaky and sweet, like those on fruit pies. It isn’t much like the crust on any pizza outside Chicago, but this style isn’t about crust. It’s about massive amounts of cheese and sauce.

Deep-dish pies became popular in the 1980s when branches of Chicago’s Pizzeria Uno spread everywhere and Americans lined up. It was the last time we felt as strongly about pizza as we do today. I have no recollection of why Americans felt such a need to eat deep-dish pies, although I was elbowing and pushing alongside everyone else. I asked a Chicago friend to remind me, and she said, “They’re carbohydrate-and-cheese bombs. We’d buy a frozen one and throw it in the oven. Two hours later, it was ready.”

She wasn’t exaggerating by much. Indeed, uncooked deep-dish pie is still sold frozen in Chicago, and the instructions say it can be put into the oven that way. Pizza is odd in that its baking times vary widely. What other food sometimes takes two or three minutes to cook and sometimes an hour or more? All my life I’ve wondered about the difference between Chicago’s famous Pizzeria Uno and its almost-as-famous Pizzeria Due, and after traveling there, I found the answer. The numbing wait is one hour at Uno, two hours at Due.

There’s a minor variation on deep-dish that remains fundamental to Chicago: the stuffed pie, number three among the seven distinct species. This is a deep-dish pizza that’s been supersized and topped with a second crust that’s so thin as to be almost invisible. The stuffed pie is the black hole of pizza-eating, thicker than a deep-dish, and when I sat down to eat one, I couldn’t get through a single slice.

More widespread than any of those styles is the pan pizza, sometimes known as Sicilian and sometimes as square. This is a richer, heavier version of focaccia—a soft flat-topped bread prepared with olive oil. Pan pizza is easily at its best in Detroit, where aficionados seek out the corner slices that have caramelized edges blackened through contact with the hot pan. A crunchy bottom, blissfully created by the same process, is also a virtue. Most people, when they think of crunchy pizza, have an unrelated pie in mind, the thin-crusted ones known as Roman-style, tavern-style, or bar pizza. These crusts, at best, have a bit of suppleness; at worst, they are reminiscent of crackers.

The most curious of all pies is grilled pizza, invented at the restaurant Al Forno in Providence, and too wonderful to be dismissed as a regional peculiarity. The idea of grilling a pizza doesn’t sound promising: Dough is put on a (hopefully) charcoal fire, flipped, topped, and grilled some more. This results in crusts far more delicious than the sum of their grill marks, so irresistible I turned to a pizza authority to help me understand. Peter Reinhart, a baker and author, understood my bewilderment. He said, “Basically, grilled pizzas are fried dough. The pizza dough sits in oil, and the oil is seared into the crust. How can you go wrong?”

And then, finally and most wonderfully, comes the American pie, actually a recent phenomenon, probably invented by and certainly popularized by Chris Bianco, the godfather of American pizza, who opened Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix in 1994. The pie he prepares and that others emulate is as much about bread-baking as it is about crust-making. It’s primarily identified by two vital, distinct, and non-Italian elements: a golden glow and a chewy yet velvety interior. Such crusts have a resemblance to ciabatta, the light and porous Italian bread.

The American pie is more than crust. It is explosively inventive, with toppings as ingenious as American cuisine gets. In San Francisco, the heartland of innovative toppings, I found fresh thyme instead of dried oregano, Taleggio and Fontina cheeses instead of mozzarella (it’s my belief that getting beyond mozzarella sets a pizzamaker free), and a basil chiffonade instead of basil leaves. A pause here to reflect on the misuse of fresh basil by Italians. They seem to think of it as decorative rather than flavorful, and they spread not nearly enough of it on their fabled-but-flawed Margherita pies.

*****

in searching for the twenty-five best pizzas in America, I traveled to ten American cities, the ones I knew had a lot of pizzerias or a lot of Italians. They seem to go together, although less so anymore. I visited 109 pizzerias and ate 386 pies, although almost never the whole thing. (Remember, I couldn’t finish a single slice of the stuffed.) I know what you’re thinking: You didn’t visit my favorite pizzeria. You missed the best.

I was forced to be merciless about this, because everybody I know has one of those, and everybody believes his is unsurpassed. In essence, a beloved pizzeria is almost always about memories. From friends I heard such claims as “Taking the first bite is to know perfection”…“Every bite is a party in your mouth”…“It has Italian authenticity”…“It is blissful in its crunchiness and perfect chew”… And so it went. There is no way of dealing with such devotion, so I decided to answer all demands that I visit an adored pizzeria with the same irrefutable (if unjust) reply: “No, I am not going to your pizzeria. Your pizzeria is no good.” In fact, on the few occasions when I was so badgered by a friend that I went to one of them, it was no good. Not one prepared a commendable crust.

I include in the list of failed favorites two pizzerias beloved by President Obama: Italian Fiesta in Chicago’s Lake Park plaza (takeout only, so I ate on the trunk of my rental car) and Casa Bianca in Eagle Rock, California, near Occidental College, where he went to school. The pies at both had hard, bland crusts that didn’t look or taste handmade. Out of respect to our president, who has enough problems, I will leave it at that.

Within each of the ten cities, I ranged far. In New York, where I went to thirty-three pizzerias, I ate in every one of the five boroughs, and I ventured deep into the suburb of Westchester, where I live. (I briefly left the state to visit nearby spots in New Jersey but had no success there.) During my tour of Philadelphia, I journeyed to as distant a land as Trenton, New Jersey. (Again, no luck.) In Detroit I drove nearly 500 miles, a consequence of the local pizza diaspora. Phoenix was easy—there’s precisely one pizzeria, Bianco, that anybody recognizes as worth visiting. I would happily have broken my rule and gone to any other personal favorite—but nobody had one.

I tried Polish pizza in Chicago (not bad, except for the nearly raw egg on top), Indian pizza in San Francisco (pretty good, although reheated chicken dries out badly, despite the tikka masala sauce), Turkish pizza in New York (invariably called “pitza” and, because it’s made with pita dough, rather crackly), and Korean pizza in Los Angeles. (The Korean-style Hanchi Gold pie was topped with spicy bean paste, sweet-potato mousse, ground beef, onion, bell pepper, olives, corn, mushrooms, edamame, jalapeño, bacon, Cheddar cheese, marinated calamari, sour cream, garlic, and parsley, and when you have that much piled on, it’s hard to tell the potato mousse from the sour cream.)

Overaccessorizing was far from the worst problem I encountered. There is a dark side to the triumph of the American pie.

Pizza has become the gourmet food of the recession, and the men who create these pies consider themselves artists—narcissistic, reclusive artists, at that. I’ve told you about Margherita DOC. These eccentrics specialize in Pizza OCD, bringing obsessive-compulsive disorders to the once simple business of making pies.

They often refuse to take reservations, thus guaranteeing themselves long lines of worshippers. Their primary weirdness, however, is preparing not quite enough dough for the day ahead so they might turn away the last few desperate customers. Even if they are doing this to ensure freshness, as they claim, they could rely on a practice perfected in modern times that would enable them to never run out of dough—it’s known as refrigeration. Or they could prepare more than enough, but that would create the possibility that a ball or two of the dough that they love more than their customers would have to be thrown out.

These guys find multiple ways of being annoying. At Pizzeria Bianco, a friend and I ordered four pies that we shared with the people who had stood in line with us for more than an hour. Still hungry, I tried to order a fifth, but I was cut off like a roaring drunk in an American Legion hall, told that I had reached my limit. At a pizzeria (I do not recommend) in Chicago, I was informed when I called that I had to order ahead of time, although there is no menu on the restaurant Web site and the lady on the telephone refused to tell me what pies were available. Pizzerias now inhabit a space once occupied by snooty French restaurants, and they are smug, too. One pizzeria in Brooklyn (I do not recommend) lets you know that its pork is sustainable, its beef grass-fed, its eggs organic, and its grease converted into biofuel. (If only as much attention had been given to crusts.)

I have a final thought: ovens. Uniform and very high heat produces the best pies, which is why coal ovens have rightfully been so respected. The coal adds little to the taste, and in fact a retired pizzamaker in New York City, Sal Petrillo, now in his eighties, told me a secret of the trade. He said that at the old Frank’s on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, where he worked with his brother Frank for twenty years, the most important person was the guy who moved the pies around the coal-fired oven. He made certain they were evenly cooked.

A wood-burning oven, in particular the very smoky one at Pizzeria Bianco, can add a pleasant (if superficial) aroma, but I don’t believe wood is behind glorious crusts. Gas and electricity frequently do as well. At Tacconelli’s in Philadelphia, the oven is heated with oil. The truth is that great pizzas aren’t made by great ovens; they’re made by great cooks.

alan richman is a gq correspondent.

AMERICA’S 25 BEST PIZZAS
By Alan Richman

(CHICAGO)
1. Great Lake
Mortadella pie

I phoned at 6:15 p.m., ordered a cheese pie, asked when I could pick it up. The reply: 8 p.m. When I arrived a few minutes early, two of the fourteen people seated in the tiny storefront shop were eating. The rest looked exasperated. Nick Lessins, the Polish-Czech co-owner and pizzamaker, seemed happily oblivious. I stood inside, watching for twenty-five minutes as he fashioned three pies, mine among them. No man is slower. He makes each as though it is his first, manipulating the dough until it appears flawless, putting on toppings one small bit after another. In the time he takes to create a pie, civilizations could rise and fall, not just crusts. His cheese pie, prepared with fresh mozzarella made in-house, grated Wisconsin sheep’s-and-cow’s-milk cheese, and aromatic fresh marjoram instead of basil, was slightly shy of unbelievable. The next day I returned to try the same pie topped with fresh garlic and mortadella, the dirigible-sized Italian sausage that looks like bologna, tastes like salami, and is usually cut into chunks. He sliced the meat very thin and laid slices of it over the pie the moment it came out of the oven. The mortadella, with its combination of burliness and creaminess, was a meaty addition to the earthy, bready crust. This pie—creative, original, and somewhat local—represents everything irresistible about the new American style of pizza-making.

(BROOKLYN)
2. Lucali
Plain pie

Lucali, around since 2006, is an old candy store done up to look like an old pizzeria, and there’s an eerie glow about it. I’m not getting spiritual. There really is. Owner and pizzamaker Mark Iacono stands behind a candlelit counter, wearing a white T shirt, looking mysterious and troubled, our first poster-boy pizzaiolo. It drives the women crazy, or at least the ones who went there with me. “He’s out of a romance novel,” one of them practically sobbed. (To me he looked like the character played by Nicolas Cage in Moonstruck, except with two hands.) Lucali takes no reservations, and standing in line is a necessity, although the staff is courteous and tries to alleviate the suffering by taking a cell-phone number and warning when your turn has arrived. More good news: Every pie that Iacono prepares is worth the wait. I picked the simplest of his creations, in essence a Margherita, although there’s no menu and none of the pies have names. When I asked what to call it, I was told “plain pie.” It has tomato, mozzarella, fresh basil, buffalo mozzarella, and a sprinkling of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, enormously satisfying for a pie so simple. The crust stands firm. The mozzarella melts exquisitely. The basil is wildly fresh. Should you need additional toppings, go for thinly shaved porcini mushrooms, so good I was tempted to put a second Lucali pie on my list.

(SAN FRANCISCO)
3. Pizzeria Delfina
Panna pie

I sat at the cramped counter, watching a young woman standing in front of me crimp dough. She crimped and crimped, building in air holes with each purposeful squeeze of finger and thumb. Delfina has easily the best crust in San Francisco, an unusually successful fusion of Neapolitan and American styles. The pie placed before me looked slightly pale, but it had a yeasty aroma and a lovely sweetness. It was unlike any other I found, prepared with tomato sauce, heavy cream, basil, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and olive oil—and priced at a remarkable $10. Indeed, heavy cream does seem peculiar, but if you think about the Italian evolution of cheese for pizza—mozzarella becoming fresh mozzarella and then becoming fresh buffalo-milk mozzarella, each one richer and milkier than the one before—heavy cream is the natural expression of where Italians intend to go. The final addition, shavings of tangy, salty Parmigiano-Reggiano, is a brilliant step in the creation of an extraordinarily well-balanced pie.

(PHOENIX)
4. Pizzeria Bianco
Margherita with prosciutto

Before Chris Bianco, superhero, founded the artisan American-pizza industry, all was seemingly lost. The honored pizzerias with their ancient coal-fired ovens run by families that had arrived with Columbus were settling for pies with moribund crusts. Not that eating at Pizzeria Bianco, which accepts reservations only for jumbo parties, isn’t annoying. You get in line, although if you’re lucky you can grab one of the galvanized-metal chairs left out front. You become parched in the heat and ask the nice person behind you to save your spot while you walk over to Bar Bianco, next door, and buy a glass of faded Rioja from a bottle opened the previous day. You fear you’re not going to get in, because the place seats only about forty. Even if you’re pretty far up in line, as I was, you don’t know how many friends of the folks ahead of you will suddenly materialize and march in before you. (The answer: plenty.) On the other hand, waiting outside is like a big communal party, and had I not become chummy with one regular, I would never have ordered a Margherita pie topped with prosciutto. This fellow had three of them on his table, and he said it was all he ate. Chris Bianco’s fabled Margherita has a smoky and slightly scorched crust, too delicate to handle most toppings, but the uncommonly subtle, tender, and porky Italian prosciutto was a superlative option. Prosciutto is usually not one of my preferred toppings, because it’s often tough, but here it was icing on the crust.

(PROVIDENCE)
5. Bob & Timmy’s
Spinach-and-mushroom pizza

There’s no Bob or Timmy at Bob & Timmy’s. Last I heard, they’d sold to Rick and Jose, and I don’t think those two were there on the quiet weekday afternoon when I arrived with a guest. Our companions were a lonely waitress and a guy drinking at the bar. Bob & Timmy’s is a small tavern with beer bric-a-brac, captain’s chairs, reproduction Tiffany lamps, and a TV that remained on even though nobody was watching. Maybe in another era it was a bar for whalers, but there were no whalers around, either. I tried peering into the kitchen at the huge indoor charcoal grill, curious about grilled pizza, but the cook rushed to the door and chased me away. I’m pretty confident he was the cook, because I didn’t see anybody else back there. The menu is vast, but I stuck to simple variations, and every one was expertly prepared. The pies came in standard grilled-pizza format, irregularly round but cut into squares. The crust appeared too skinny to be interesting, but it seemed about the best flatbread I’d ever eaten. The vegetable toppings were remarkably fresh, and it occurred to me that freshness is something we rarely think about when contemplating what pizza we admire. The pie I loved most had three cheeses, the dominant one being feta, which adds tang and saltiness. Now I understand what every Greek must already know: Feta, spinach, and mushrooms are an astonishingly compatible combination.

(NEW HAVEN, CONN.)
6. Sally’s Apizza
White pie with potato

Sally’s is ancient, in an old Appalachian way. I can’t believe the men’s bathroom has been cleaned since 1938, when the pizzeria opened for business. Service was equally dismal. I noticed regulars getting some attention, not so much that they appeared pampered, but the rest of us waited about ninety minutes before our first pies appeared. To me, Sally’s should be renamed Sartre’s Apizza, home of absurdity and despair. I wasn’t there on any particular holiday, April Fools’ Day or Halloween, but the somnambulant staff wore weird outfits—nutsy party hats, outdated ties, Bermuda shorts, and T-shirts (in winter). I wondered if Sally’s was the headquarters of a work-release program for the culinarily insane. The customers weren’t impressive, either, especially the lady in the booth across from mine, fast asleep. Out of this agonizing ambience appeared a pie of incredible finesse, a tour de force, a white (no tomato sauce) pizza prepared with thinly sliced potatoes cooked to an artful golden brown, a scattering of equally faultless onions, and a masterful touch of rosemary, all perfectly complemented by Sally’s crust, a bit denser, chewier, and thinner than the one up the block at the equally fabled Pepe’s. By the way, I bet Sinatra got great service when he ate here.

(LOS ANGELES)
7. The Grandma
Tomato pie

The pizza is old New York. The mood is old L.A. Tomato Pie is a minuscule shop, entirely modern, hidden in the rear of an irregularly shaped strip mall not far from Hollywood. On a warm day, you might want to take advantage of Tomato Pie’s unique alfresco dining—orange fiberglass tables, blue fiberglass umbrellas, and an array of classic O’Keefe & Merritt kitchen stoves. Long ago, when Los Angeles was the oddball dining capital of America, casual restaurants specializing in such phantasmagorical settings were everywhere. On this day, a friend and I were seated indoors, in a tiny room entirely devoid of comforts, admiring crusts that I thought were the best in the city. Then I bit into a slice of the Grandma—a traditional and gorgeously assembled pizza with crushed tomatoes, fresh garlic, and a scattering of mozzarella, basil, oregano, and Pecorino Romano—I’m a sucker for Romano cheese. My friend and I simultaneously looked up and said, “This is great.” Indeed it was, the ingredients fresher than most, the crust unusually soft and tender, with a crisp bottom and a fluffy, nutty center. We shared a slice with a young mom named Katie, who insisted the pizza was better a few blocks away. Note to Katie: Your favorite pizza is no good.

(NEW YORK CITY)
8. Co.
Margherita

The Margherita here has buffalo-milk mozzarella, but the cheese is applied so expertly and melts so perfectly that the center of the pie doesn’t become a watery mess. All of us in New York who thought owner Jim Lahey knew only about bread now know otherwise. His Margherita, modest in size at a mere eleven inches in diameter, is so delicate that you will be inclined to finish the whole thing and immediately ask for another. A friend of mine, after eating two, said with awe, “I could do with another.” Lahey, revered owner of the beloved Sullivan Street Bakery, apparently had no difficulty becoming a master of crust—his is supple, thin, chewy, and charred, with very little outer ring. And yet, when I think about it, maybe tomato sauce is his strength. Co.’s seemed summery and fresh (although it turned out to be half fresh, half canned), and my jubilation was so apparent that a guy a few seats down looked at me and said disparagingly, “This sauce is no good. The tomatoes on pizza have to be canned.” He’s wrong, of course. I also had a complaint, but mine was sensible. I asked the waiter why the leafy basil had been blasted into a shriveled green blob, rather than being tossed on fresh immediately before serving, and was told that Lahey preferred cooked basil. In fact, customers can have it either way, so I recommend eating one of each.

(PHILADELPHIA)
9. Tacconelli’s
White pie

Sometimes there is no explanation for great pizza. Sometimes there are no great ingredients in great pizza, no specially sourced mozzarella, no hand-harvested garlic. I come from Philadelphia, and I had never heard of Tacconelli’s until recently, even though it was in business when I was growing up, going to school, and working there. What a wasted life. When I asked my waitress how it could have been that Tacconelli’s was unknown for so long, she said obscurity ended when yuppies discovered it, which was after I’d left town. (Finally, a reason to love yuppies.) Tacconelli’s does have a couple of quirks, the sort that I would have expected to bring early notoriety, but back then there were no bloggers to discover places like this. It has no prices on the menu, and when you call for a table you are asked to “reserve your dough” by letting them know how many pies you want. This insistence that you predict when you are going to be full before you start eating is one of the earliest known pizza affectations—it started in the ’80s. I suggest ordering too much, because every pizza here is wonderful, the crust from the huge, oil-burning oven an example of how tremendously satisfying an amalgam of thin, chewy, and crunchy can be. I loved the white pie, so much better than the sum of its packaged parts: ordinary part-skim mozzarella, granulated garlic, salt and pepper. In essence, it’s the ultimate expression of cheese on bread. A note on decor: The hydrangeas, roses, and African violets in the window are artificial. Of course.

(BROOKLYN)
10. Totonno’s
Margherita with pepperoni

The fire reportedly started from coals that had been removed from the pizza oven and stored overnight in a firebox. Damage was extensive. If this turns out to be an epitaph for the great Totonno’s in Coney Island, in business for eighty-five years until that fire closed it this past March, I hope it’s a worthy one. In my opinion, Totonno’s is—or possibly was—the template for the new style of pizzerias opening around the country, the ones where the owners prepare pies with deliberation, calculation, and stunning pride. The staff is slow-moving. If you are privileged to go there, you’ll almost certainly have to wait in a line. If it stretches out the door, you’ll have an opportunity to look over the neighborhood, mostly car-repair shops that park vehicles awaiting work on the sidewalks. The pies come in gorgeous hues, an artist’s palette of reds, blacks, and golds. The crusts are supple but crunchy. A friend who ate there with me a month before the fire said, “I know very good crust from the sound of it. As the roller cut through it, I heard the crispness.” The pies tend to be mild and understated, so the best option here is pepperoni, which adds heat and spiciness, and a good dose of dried oregano from one of the shakers scattered about the room. If you love old-style pepperoni pizza as much as I do, you’ll be looking forward to the day when Totonno’s returns.

(PORT CHESTER, NY)
11. Tarry Lodge
Clam pie

The clam pie, legendary in New Haven, is an oddity that seldom succeeds, since clams taken out of their shells and cooked atop a pizza invariably turn into rubbery bits. At Tarry Lodge, an Italian restaurant run by Mario Batali, something profoundly simple and fundamentally correct is done: The clams remain in their shells. On my visit they were Manila clams, delicate and sweet, briny and fresh, tiny beauties accented by the garlic, oregano, red pepper, and Parmigiano-Reggiano atop a thin, nicely charred crust. You have to work to remove the clams from their shells, but compared with everything else required to access great pizza these days, that isn’t much effort.

(NEW HAVEN, CONN.)
12. Frank Pepe
The Original Tomato Pie

I love the crust here—rather thick, quite soft, with nooks, crannies, colors, and char. I felt the same about the tomato sauce, not exactly what you would expect on pizza, a little more like a mild, chunky cooked pasta sauce. As I chewed and ate, ate and chewed, going through seven pies, trying one topping after another, it came to me: Keep it simple. The small, plain tomato pie without mozzarella and stunningly priced at $6.10 is pretty perfect when topped with plenty of silky, salty Pecorino Romano from the shaker on your table. The cheese is freshly grated each day. The single flaw in this pie? After adding so much cheese to so much sauce, you might have to use a knife and fork.

(HARRISON TOWSHIP, MICH.)
13. Luigi’s “the Original”
Gourmet veggie pizza

My nearly endless and seemingly futile quest to find a wonderful vegetable—not merely vegetarian—pizza somehow led me to Luigi’s, which looks like a roadhouse but is apparently a greenhouse. Topping a pie with broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, squash, mushrooms, and onions, as is done here, seems to promise a chaotic chorus of sad, shriveled, sacrificial plant life, and that isn’t the end of the potential problems. The crust contained sesame seeds, and the grated cheese was Asiago. The combination succeeded magnificently. The seeds contributed nuttiness and the cheese pungency to an array of vegetables that tasted remarkably fresh, to say nothing of cooked to order. The secret, according to the waitress: Toss everything on the pie, cook. That’s it.

(SAN FRANCISCO)
14. Gialina
Wild-nettle pie

My friend said the wild nettles reminded her of newly mown artichokes, a lovely if implausible image. I found them a little like broccoli, but fear not: They’re better than that. These were bright forest green as well as earthy, and they came with a spectacular supporting cast of pancetta (unsmoked bacon), sliced portobello mushrooms, and provolone cheese. The pie, prepared without tomatoes or mozzarella in a standard commercial pizza oven, nevertheless lacked for nothing. The crust, cooked longer than most, was bubbly, luscious, and buttery, a little like warm Italian bread. Still, it was the wild nettles that did it, perhaps the best vegetation—okay, second to broccoli rabe—to put on pizza.

(DETROIT)
15. Buddy’s
Cheese pizza

Buddy’s pizza crust is one of the best in America, although it’s unlikely you knew it was in the running for the championship. That’s because Buddy’s, as much a bar and sandwich shop as it is a pizzeria, specializes in Detroit-style square pizza, almost unknown outside the city. The crusts here are a little better than the competition’s, and almost every pizzeria I tried in Detroit did them well. The interior slices on a Buddy’s pizza are light, slightly crunchy, and extremely satisfying, but the goal in any Detroit experience is those slices at the four corners of the pan, where maximum blackening occurs. If you love the burnt ends on pork ribs, Buddy’s isn’t to be missed.

(MARINA DEL REY, CA)
16. Antica Pizzeria
Pizza del cafone

Antica is one of those pizzerias that endeavor to create a classic Neapolitan experience, not easy when you’re located on the second floor of a Los Angeles mall. A multitude of Italian products, from cookies to olive oils, augments the set design, but the best touch is a pile of fifty-five-pound sacks of genuine “00” pizza flour from Naples, the secret to supple crusts. The ones here were entirely successful—light, puffy, and charred. Pizza labeled del cafone—fool’s or peasant’s pizza—isn’t uncommon, and it doesn’t always have precisely the same ingredients, but the combination here was brilliant. Uniting crumbled sausage, broccoli rabe, and smoked mozzarella seems mighty sophisticated to me.

(SAN FRANCISCO)
17. A16
Romana pie

The crust is Neapolitan-style, well prepared, which means soft, soothing, and a little spongy, with pleasing burned spots. The sauce contains anchovies, which I absolutely can’t abide whole, although I appreciate them as well as the next open-minded fellow when they’re chopped up as a flavor element. That’s what’s done here, as it is so often in Southern Italy. I had another fright: Plopped on top of the pie were whole olives, but in this case French Niçoise olives, which are not aggressive enough to scare me away. In Naples such a pie is known as pizza romana, whereas in Rome it’s a pizza napoletana. Before I’d tried A16’s spicy, bold, exuberant version, I would have guessed that each city wanted to blame this pie on somebody else.

(PROVIDENCE)
18. Al Forno
Grilled pizza with roasted eggplant

Al Forno’s grilled pizzas are more than legends; they’re beauties. Our roasted-eggplant pie consisted of creatively arranged toppings on a flat and irregularly shaped crust, perhaps unintentionally resembling an artist’s palette. The pie was assembled with two cheeses, mild and creamy Bel Paese plus sharp and salty Pecorino Romano; dabs of impossibly delicious tomato sauce intensely flavored with eggplant; flecks of parsley for color; and shreds of mild, bright scallions that added a feathery texture. Al Forno was one of the first no-reservation restaurants in America’s modern era of dining. It set the standard not simply for grilled pizza but also for impossibly long waits.

(BOSTON)
19. Galleria Umberto
Square slice

The line fools you. After a half hour, you’re near the counter, a mere five or six customers ahead of you. The next pan, you think. Doesn’t happen, because nobody settles for one slice. Everybody wants six, maybe eight, to go. Galleria Umberto is as big as a cafeteria, rarely crowded but always with a line. The slices are Sicilian, which means squares, thick ones, airier and lighter than most, with a subtle crunch, a splash of tomato sauce, a scattering of cheese. It represents what Boston’s North End once was: bedrock Italian, absolutely old-world. When you get close, you’re sure it’s almost your turn, but an old lady who looks like she’s off the boat from Bari steps in front of you, and you let her, because she was here first and sat down to rest her feet. Strange thoughts come to those in line. Is it possible this place has only one pan?

(NEW YORK CITY)
20. Famous Joe’s
Slice

Once, this slice defined New York City. That was before pizza slices were supersized, became entire meals laden with wacky toppings and extra cheese. Joe’s crust, thin and flexible but not too soft, is perfect for street pizza. Atop it is not much cheese and not much sauce, merely enough, in ideal symmetry. You can ask for a topping, but then everybody in the tiny, cramped shop will know you’re from out of town. The crust has a few lovely burned spots, but the New York slice isn’t about the search for the perfect crust or the perfect sauce. It’s the perfect New York experience. A friend who came with me said, sadly, “In my youth, stores like this ruled the earth. Now they’re almost extinct.” You do know how to fold a slice like this, don’t you? No? I guess you are from out of town.

(FARMINGTON HILLS, MICH.)
21. Tomatoes Apizza
Pepperoni pie

Here you’ll find a coal-fired oven big enough to barbecue a cow, and here I found the purest expression of pepperoni pizza as I love it. Forgive me if you prefer your pepperoni thick (I don’t) or soft (I don’t) or covered by cheese and sauce—as is traditional in Detroit, but thankfully not at Tomatoes Apizza. The non-Sicilian crust was soft, slightly charred, and entirely appealing, the tomato sauce and cheese more than satisfactory. All was swell, but the precise pepperoni preparation was most appealing. There was lots of it, sliced thin, sprinkled with Parmigiano-Reggiano, and allowed to curl and crisp up in the oven. My compliments to Danielle, our waitress, who took the order, put down her pad, and under an emergency staffing shortage prepared our pepperoni pie exactly right.

(PHILADELPHIA)
22. Osteria
Zucca pie

Zucca means “squash.” Yes, I know. Nobody sitting around the house suddenly says to the wife and kids, “Hey, let’s go out for a squash pizza.” I’m telling you, it’s terrific. The crust is thin and crispy, not ordinarily my preference, but the sweetness of this pizza is great when matched with crunchiness and char. Oh, I didn’t say it was sweet, did I? Don’t worry. There’s a little sweetness, not too much. It comes from the golden raisins and the toasted pine nuts, not from the puree or cubes of squash. There’s cheese, too, mozzarella. That helps, right? I’m telling you that this is a stylish, intense, dramatic, and absolutely special pizza, and you’ll love it. I didn’t believe I would, but I did.

(BOSTON)
23. Santarpio’s
Homemade-sausage pie

Talk about old-world. As we walk in, the guy up front yells, “Tony, table for two.” Cases of beer are stacked in the back, next to the jukebox and a bank of gumball machines. The gas-fired oven operates like no other I’ve seen—it has rotating shelves that look like the ones in diners that display cream pies. The kid busing tables has to be playing hooky, and I expect a truant officer to walk in, blow his whistle, and start chasing him around the room. All the pies are exactly right, but the one with sausage is better than that. Santarpio’s crusts are hearty, a little roughhouse, very much in the baked-bread family, and the homemade sausage comes crumbled, skillfully integrated into the tomato sauce. I know for certain that the owners are proud of that sauce: On the steps outside, where you might find stone lions guarding the entrance to a library, stand two industrial-size Pastene tomato cans.

(DETROIT)
24. Niki’s
Cheese pizza with feta

I searched for the meaning of Greek pizza, a topic often discussed, undoubtedly because so many Greeks own pizzerias. I never found it, but the quest was worthwhile, because at Niki’s I discovered feta cheese as a topping. Niki’s doesn’t have Greek pizza. It has Detroit pizza, and one optional topping is feta cheese, which adds creaminess and tanginess while brightening up (and somewhat dominating) any pie. The feta here is crumbled, tossed atop the pizza, and baked. It becomes toasty and crispy, giving any pizza from plain to pepperoni a singular zip. Now that I’ve made this important discovery, my next goal is searching for the meaning of bouzouki music, finding out whether a man can go mad endlessly listening to it in Greek pizzerias.

(NEW YORK CITY)
25. Una Pizza Napoletana
Margherita

This is the most beautiful pizza in America, the outer ring grand and pillowy, the San Marzano tomatoes bright, the buffalo mozzarella dazzlingly melted. Neapolitan pizzas are undeniably gorgeous, and Una Pizza Napoletana replicates their style and attractiveness better than any other pizzeria in this country. This Margherita, an expression of purity and restraint, could be immortalized in a painting entitled Still Life in Pizza. Many admirers consider this the best pizza in America. I don’t go that far, but I believe it’s more enjoyable than almost any pizza in Naples—maybe in all of Italy.

May 19, 2009 8:00 AM

Restaurants Lacking Appetite For Expensive Equipment

Alina Munoz — Mon, 18 May 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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 conserve cash and they want to have menus that allow them to make money," said Selim Bassoul, chairman and chief executive of Middleby Corp. (MIDD), which makes ovens, ranges, grills and other cooking equipment.

Sales of commercial food equipment in North America, a $9 billion a year industry, are expected to contract about 6% this year as consumers opt to dine at home more often to save money. The pullback in spending has exposed years of excess expansion by restaurant chains that has left the industry bloated with locations, particularly in the sit-down casual category.

Nevertheless, Bassoul said casual restaurant chains remain interested in adding food items to boost sales as long as they can be prepared with a minimal amount of new equipment.

Middleby's recent acquisitions have targeted companies with unconventional cooking technologies that Bassoul believes will become more popular with restaurants in the coming years. Last year, the Illinois-based company acquired TurboChef Technologies, which manufactures ovens that require no special venting. In April, Middleby bought CookTek, maker of cook tops that generate heat through an electromagnetic reaction with metal pots and pans.

Other equipment makers also have been adjusting their product lines for a less robust restaurant industry.Illinois Tool Works (ITW) food equipment group is offering smaller-size models of its ovens for space-constrained restaurant kitchens.

"We're certainly not in the typical position we'd like to be in," said food group President John McDonough , adding that food equipment has traditionally been one of the ITW's most profitable businesses with operating margins near 20% .

Restaurant owners at the show said the reduction in customer traffic is forcing them to try new approaches to their businesses.

Melanie Briscoe , owner of a pizza restaurant in Homer, Penn., for the past 20 years came to the show to learn about offering more dessert items at her restaurant.

"I don't want to compromise food quality," she said about one of her options for raising profits. "I'd rather have something new to offer."

May 18, 2009 8:00 AM

From Frisée to Finance, It Has to Be Perfect

Mon, 18 May 2009 12:00:00 GMT

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 available to customers by special request, but on a recent afternoon, the chef and co-owner Daniel Boulud is sitting here in a white, double-breasted chef’s coat, ready for the latest round of taste tests for a restaurant called DBGB. His first foray into casual fare and his 10th restaurant, it is slated to open on the Lower East Side in about two weeks.

First up is a small dish of escargot and tomatoes topped with a puff pastry, which is set before him by Jim Leiken, 34, who will be in charge of DBGB’s kitchen.

“Did you hear the music?” Mr. Boulud asks as he studies the plate and grabs some silverware.

“Yeah, it sizzled,” Mr. Leiken replies.

Mr. Boulud chews for a moment, and then there is silence.

“I’m still not convinced,” he finally says, speaking with the sort of French accent that sounds authoritative in any discussion of flavor. “I mean, I love escargot and garlic, and all that. But I’m still thinking of doing a custard on the bottom and then a purée of escargot and then the puff pastry so you have almost a reverse tart.”

Known for his sumptuous menus and seamless service, Mr. Boulud — the name, brain and palate behind one of the country’s gold-plated dining empires — has already taken a bow for just about every round of applause that the industry has to offer. With the Dinex Group, a management company he co-founded, he and a team of managers and accountants oversee an operation with more than 900 employees in markets as far-flung as Beijing and Vancouver.

They have not misfired yet, but Mr. Boulud and his cadre might be trying their trickiest maneuver to date, creating DBGB at a moment that is smiling on fast food and little else. In this environment, you could forgive the man for cutting a few corners, or scaling back his ambitions.

But during Round 8 of recipe tests, on Tuesday, he refuses to grade on the curve. He stoically appraises entrees and appetizers in what feels like a marathon episode of “Top Chef” — except that this judge has helped conceive the dishes and never seems very pleased by the results.

The lamb ribs confit with roasted lamb leg and spring beans? “Maybe a little more herbs in it,” he suggests. The Maryland lump crab cake with a curry sauce and pickled radish? “More crab, less garnish.” The passion fruit crepe with mango slices? “We’re still not there.”

We sit across from Mr. Boulud, shamelessly pillaging the leftovers and thinking: huh? Each dish seems head-spinningly yummy, but Mr. Boulud summons enthusiasm only when he tries a sausage called the Vermonter, and he cracks a smile only after a forkful of beer-battered haddock beignets.

“I think it’s good,” he says, like a man enjoying a guilty pleasure.

A SELF-DESCRIBED “psycho” when it comes to details, Mr. Boulud, 54, had planned a Paris-meets-Texas diner before anyone had heard of credit-default swaps. The concept evolved a little, but not the price point. Homemade sausages and hamburgers will be the centerpiece at DBGB, and the average bill for a three-course meal will come to about $32, the price of an appetizer at Daniel, his flagship.

He brings to this enterprise something like home-field advantage, opening in the city that made him a culinary star. With that comes buzz; nearly every week, news about some element of the layout, design and construction of DBGB pops up on the most trafficked restaurant blogs in Manhattan.

But by Dinex Group’s own calculations, DBGB must generate $4.5 million a year in revenue to be profitable, not easy in a time that a spokesman for the National Restaurant Association called “the most challenging the restaurant industry has seen in several decades.” A consumer marketing firm, NPD, issued a report a few weeks back stating that national restaurant traffic had dropped for a second consecutive quarter.

“And there will be at least one more down quarter, maybe two,” says Harry Balzer, an NPD vice president.

In New York City, it’s been ugly at nearly all price levels.

“Does the word ‘bloodbath’ meaning anything to you?” asks Clark Wolf, a Manhattan restaurant consultant. “The fact is that if you built your restaurant business on all these Wall Street guys getting ridiculous bonuses selling stuff that turned out to be worth nothing, your business is in trouble.”

More than a few well-regarded New York restaurants, like Fleur de Sel and Bar Q, have closed in recent months, and many others are gasping. Gone are the days of private-room parties for 30 people, at $80 a head, with a few $1,500 bottles of wine.

Mr. Boulud isn’t the first to try to extend a gourmet brand from the high end to the affordable. He is hardly the most daring of those brand-extending chefs, either; his dishes are contemporary spins on French food, which he translates for Americans using ingredients rarely used in France, like Meyer lemons and risotto.

But nobody expects trailblazing invention from him, the sort associated with other French maestros. What distinguishes Mr. Boulud from his peers is that he emphasizes both hospitality and cooking.

“Daniel’s gift is that he’s actually interested in the people who are eating his food,” Mr. Wolf says. “It’s about his customers instead of his ego.”

IN late April, DBGB is a clamorous construction site near the corner of the Bowery and Houston Street on the ground floor of a new apartment building. You need to look under the plastic wrap that covers all the kitchen equipment to guess that a restaurant is being fabricated here. The dining room is a vast, concrete expanse. Men are drilling holes in the wall and ceiling, cutting sheets of metal, taking measurements. The leather banquettes are weeks from arrival, and there is still discussion about the design of the bar stools.

“It’s always like this,” says Dorothy Hom, who works for the company contracted to build DBGB. “It doesn’t look like a restaurant until right before you open the doors.”

Despite the name, which nods to CBGB, the famous punk rock club a block to the north, the restaurant’s design pays tribute to the area’s history as the restaurant supply center of New York. The walls will be lined with shelves and stocked with glasses and plates as well as pots and pans donated by great chefs from around the world. The kitchen is on the other side of the shelves, giving diners a semi-obstructed view of the cooking.

There is a weekly meeting here on Tuesday mornings, with Ms. Hom; Thomas Schlesser, the restaurant’s designer; Brett Traussi, the Dinex Group’s operations director; and Colin Alevras, DBGB’s sommelier. An agenda for the meeting is handed out, though it’s hard to hear anyone speaking over the din of saws and hammers.

You can hear enough to grasp that creating a restaurant is an endless series of decisions — the first few large (menu, location) and the next 7,000,000 tiny (where to hide an electrical cord). If there’s a guiding principle, it’s a preference for econo-class over luxury, without stinting on quality.

“This is a much smaller dishwasher than we’d like,” says Mr. Traussi, during a tour of the unfinished kitchen. “We also used a pot sink that was left over from the renovation of Daniel last year, and some old bar equipment, too.”

Plenty of decisions about DBGB are made on site at these Tuesday-morning meetings, but just as many come from the offices of the Dinex Group. Situated on the fourth floor of a Midtown building near Bryant Park, it has the open-air layout and décor of a dot-com start-up.

Many here are engaged in old-fashioned number-crunching — and there are plenty of numbers to crunch. After DBGB opens, there will be five New York restaurants, all of which are owned outright by Mr. Boulud and his partners. With the other restaurants — two in Vancouver, one each in Beijing, Palm Beach and Las Vegas — the company has management contracts with a variety of terms.

“When we manage a restaurant, we start making money from the first day,” Mr. Boulud explains. “When we own a place, it’s often five years before we earn the first penny that is clean of debt.”

Each restaurant is assigned a bookkeeper to track payroll and food costs. Alarms ring whenever gross margins drop below 10 percent. The chefs in each restaurant, all of whom Mr. Boulud has trained, have wide latitude when it comes to spending on ingredients, but if margins sag, forensic accounting will ensue.

“A few years ago, at Cafe Boulud, we couldn’t figure out why margins were so bad month after month,” says Lili Lynton, one of Mr. Boulud’s two partners. “Even the chef was baffled. We looked at everything and we finally realized — it was this reduction sauce, a really expensive reduction sauce, with truffles and mushrooms, which was in a bunch of dishes. Who would have thought? We figured it was the fish or the chicken or the meat. It was like a game of Clue, and the culprit was the gravy.”

A LOVE for minutiae is apparently a job requirement in this company. Consider the “mustard caddy,” a relish tray for DBGB that has taken months to design and is still a work in progress.

“Here’s the latest prototype,” says Michael Lawrence, assistant director of operations, sitting in a Dinex conference room. He has just retrieved an unadorned, dark-stained box, about 6 inches square and 4 inches deep.

“This is based on a sketch that Daniel drew — he’s a pretty good draftsman — and then we have a guy in upstate New York who will make them,” he said.

The idea was to build a snug little home for the collection of bottles, which will include two or three types of mustard, as well as ketchup, salt and vinegar. The box had to be durable, too.

“We were in here the other day slamming this box on the floor,” Mr. Lawrence says. “We also soaked it in water because these things are going to get wet.” He looked at the box with a bit of pride. “It warped a little but it stayed together.”

Mr. Lawrence has also taken the lead in choosing background music for DBGB, which he’s doing with Ear Networks, a company run out of the Hell’s Kitchen apartment-home office of Robert Drake, a sound engineer. The two have been fine-tuning the playlist for weeks, choosing from 45,000 songs in Mr. Drake’s library.

A few days after the mustard-caddy discussion, Mr. Lawrence invited a reporter along for a visit to Ear Networks, where he and Mr. Drake would designate tracks as “lunch,” “dinner” or “late night.” Generally speaking, the quiet stuff is lunch music — because nobody has been drinking — with livelier songs at dinner, and becoming more boisterous as the night wears on.

Mr. Drake clicked his mouse, and “Cowgirl in the Sand” by Neil Young blasted from the speakers.

“Late night or dinner?” Mr. Lawrence asked, shouting over the song.

“You tell me,” Mr. Drake said. “I was going to put it for dinner.”

“Yeah, it’s dinner, you’re right.”

In the end, DBGB will have a library of 4,000 songs and a sound system that can control the volume in different sections of the room.

For restaurants, music is one way to influence who shows up, or at least who comes back. You can aim at a demographic group by playing music that was beloved by its members when they were about 15 years old — the age when fandom typically leaves its most vivid tattoo. By that logic, DBGB is not exactly laying a welcome mat for the just-out-of-college set. There is little in the playlist that was recorded in the last 10 years.

That is no accident.

“It’s hard to get a liquor license around here, as you may know,” Mr. Traussi says, “and one of the things I heard when I canvassed people who live here is, ‘You’ll get kids in trucker hats and they’re never going to eat food and you’re going to turn into a bar before you know it.’ I think that’s an important concern. We’re not looking for that kid, right out of school who is 22 or 23. I think music is an important way to run a food-centric restaurant rather than a bar-centric restaurant.”

THE high-energy, persnickety style of the Dinex Group flows directly from the top. Mr. Boulud has a hard time ignoring the tiniest imperfections, and a harder time taking a day off. He describes the latter quality as a quirk that he really needs to work on.

Standing on East 65th Street near Park Avenue, on the sidewalk beside Daniel, he gestured to the apartment where he lives with his wife, Michelle. (The couple have a college-age daughter, Alix.) The apartment is almost directly above the dining room, a lifestyle choice that only a workaholic would make.

“I’m crazy,” he says with a shrug, pointing to where he lives. He spins one hand as if it holds a screwdriver. “I’ve got to fix myself.”

A 5-foot-6ish guy with the good looks of an anchorman and the eyewear of an architect, Mr. Boulud is an affable glad-hander when he’s working the front of the room, with an amazing ability to remember names and a warmth that can’t be faked. In the kitchen, he is serious and intense. He’s never been tantrum-prone like Gordon Ramsay, the British chef and reality-TV star, but he has said he’s capable of a good 10-second outburst.

He doesn’t seem particularly comfortable talking about himself or the source of his exacting standards. What he will say is that he’s been the same way since childhood, growing up on a 50-acre farm outside Lyon, France. He and his family raised chickens, goats and guinea fowl and grew vegetables and grains.

The farm taught him the fine art of frugality, a skill not normally associated with artistes of the kitchen. Everything was either consumed or repurposed, he recalls. If there was soup left over from dinner, you threw in some vegetables and bread and fed it to the pigs.

“A lot of chefs don’t have a natural sense of economy,” he says. “I was with one guy the other day and I had to show him how to peel a turnip, because the way he was peeling turnips, he was throwing half of it in the garbage. It’s not about being cheap. It’s about being proper.”

Mr. Boulud ran his first restaurant in Denmark, in 1980, and was executive chef at Le Cirque in Manhattan from 1986 to 1993. When he decided to light out on his own, Ms. Lynton, a longtime friend of Mr. Boulud’s wife and then a researcher at a Wall Street brokerage firm, offered to help put together a business plan and look for investors.

At the time, she was married to a man with a very wealthy uncle named Joel Smilow, who in 1992 retired from a business career that included plenty of leveraged buyouts and a stint as the president and C.E.O. of Playtex.

“I call myself a retired brassiere salesman,” says Mr. Smilow, now 76.

Already an active philanthropist, he was looking at the time for new investments that met two criteria: the venture had to be profitable, and it had to be fun. Mr. Smilow decided that Mr. Boulud’s venture would fit the bill if, and only if, he was the sole backer.

“I felt like if there were six investors, they wouldn’t get along with each other and they’d make life hell for the guy they were backing,” he explains. “That happens more often than not when it comes to restaurants.”

Mr. Smilow chipped in the roughly $2.5 million needed to open Daniel in its original location, on East 76th Street near Madison Avenue, the current home of Cafe Boulud, and he has bankrolled every subsequent opening or, in the case of DBGB, helped guarantee a bank loan. Naturally, Mr. Smilow gets the visiting-potentate treatment at all Boulud restaurants, not to mention bragging rights.

Years ago, Mr. Smilow attended a dinner party at a friend’s house in Florida, and the guests included Preston Robert Tisch, then a co-owner of the New York Giants. After the meal, over a cup of coffee in the living room, the two compared investments.

“Bob was a friend of mine and I said: ‘Bob, in a certain way, I think the same joy and pride you get by being co-owner of the Giants is what I have in my partnership with Daniel and the restaurants. The only difference is that every night we’re in the Super Bowl. And every night we win.’ ”

NOT surprisingly, the Dinex Group has a very precise idea of how busy DBGB must be. It needs to fill each of its 140 dining seats twice on high-traffic nights (Thursday, Friday and Saturday) and 1.25 times on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Anything in excess of those numbers — say 2.25 seatings on a Saturday night — is money in the bank. There are similar calculations for lunch.

Seated in his skybox at Daniel on Tuesday, Mr. Boulud finished his nibble-a-thon with a thumbs-down for a crepe with a brownielike chocolate center. (“It needs to be muddier.”) Then he tried to sound upbeat about his chances for succeeding in the worst economic environment in generations. Mostly, though, he exuded the uneasiness of a man who is unwilling to take much comfort in the winning streak of his past.

“It’s indulgence on a dime instead of indulgence on a dollar,” he said, summing up DBGB. Then he laughed and added, “Let’s hope we have it right.”

May 18, 2009 7:00 AM

Congress Plans Incentives for Healthy Habits

Mon, 11 May 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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 promote healthy behavior among employees.

Two Democratic senators working on comprehensive health legislation, Max Baucus of Montana, the chairman of the Finance Committee, and Tom Harkin of Iowa, have taken the lead in devising such incentives.

“Prevention and wellness should be a centerpiece of health care reform,” said Mr. Harkin, who regularly climbs the stairs to his seventh-floor office on Capitol Hill.

The White House agrees. One of President Obama’s eight principles for health legislation is that it must “invest in prevention and wellness,” a goal espoused in almost identical words by Republican senators like John Cornyn of Texas and Orrin G. Hatch of Utah.

Frank B. McArdle, a health policy expert at Hewitt Associates, a benefits consulting firm, said, “Wellness and prevention programs have become a mainstream part of the benefits offered by large employers, and it’s virtually certain that Congress will include incentives for such programs” in its bill. The goals of such programs are to help people control blood pressure, fight obesity and manage diabetes and other chronic conditions.

Under Mr. Harkin’s proposal, employers could obtain tax credits for programs that offer periodic screenings for health problems and counseling to help employees adopt healthier lifestyles. Programs could focus on tobacco use, obesity, physical fitness, nutrition and depression, he said.

Growing numbers of employers have adopted wellness programs after finding that they can lower health costs and increase the productivity of workers. Financial incentives include gift certificates and premium discounts or surcharges.

Critics say that holding people financially responsible for their health behavior is potentially unfair and that employers have no business prying into their employees’ private lives.

Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a research and advocacy group, said financial rewards and penalties were often a form of lifestyle discrimination. “You are supposed to be paid on the basis of how you do your job, not how often you go to the gym or how many cheeseburgers you eat,” Mr. Maltby said.

But federal officials insist that the rewards and penalties can be used in an ethical way.

Ethics experts at the National Institutes of Health have developed guidelines for assessing workplace wellness programs. In the current issue of the journal Health Affairs, the experts, Steven D. Pearson and Sarah R. Lieber, say the unhealthy behavior of some employees can affect co-workers by driving up costs for the group as a whole.

“The core ethical justification for penalty programs is that employees should be held responsible for voluntary actions that cause harm to others,” they write. But, they add, employees should be exempt from penalties when it is “unreasonably difficult or medically inadvisable” for them to meet a particular goal or standard.

In setting up wellness programs, employers must navigate a maze of tax, labor and insurance laws.

If, for example, an employer pays the cost of gym membership for employees as part of a wellness program, the payment is often counted as taxable income to employees.

Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health, which represents 300 large employers, said, “We would like Congress to change the law so it would not be taxable income if an employer provides a benefit to help employees stay healthy.”

Employers who reward healthy behavior may also run afoul of a 1996 law intended to prevent group health plans from discriminating against people because of their health status or medical history.

If an employer offers financial incentives to employees for lowering cholesterol, losing weight or stopping smoking, the amount of such rewards generally may not exceed 20 percent of the cost of coverage.

Many employers would like to offer larger incentives, and many in Congress want to let them do so.

May 11, 2009 8:00 AM

On the Street of Superlatives

Mon, 11 May 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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 profusion of “bests” that is unique even to the East Village.

“It is one of the streets or blocks in New York with the strongest concentration of good food,” said Ed Levine, a longtime food writer and founder of Seriouseats.com, a Web site tracking city food. “You can go around the world in one block. That makes it really unique for any neighborhood.”

Threaded between salons, spas, boutiques and an elegant stone church are a series of restaurants, food shops and dishes that have been declared “rare” “best” and “unusual” by the city’s food cognoscenti.

They include cupcakes at Butter Lane (“one of the best cupcakes in New York” according to Cupcakes Take the Cake), the Michelin-starred Kyo Ya (“ethereal,” raved TimeOut), sophisticated Greek food at Pylos (“operates with unusual grace,” noted The New York Times), Porchetta’s celebrated Italian pork sandwich (cited regularly by New York magazine as the city’s best) and innovative ceviche at a sliver of a restaurant named Desnuda (a “rare” find, said Time Out).

“It definitely has some magic on it,” said Maribel Araujo, the 33-year-old owner of Caracas Arepa Bar, another restaurant on the street.

Once a destination for Eastern European cuisine, specifically Polish and Ukrainian, only a few outposts remained by the time Ms. Araujo and her husband discovered the block in 2003, among them Odessa, a diner around the corner on Avenue A, and Veselka, a few blocks away on Ninth Street.

But changes to the East Village, and to Seventh Street in particular, had already begun.

Pylos was under construction. An upscale 24-hour diner called 7A had already opened next door. Ms. Araujo and her husband leased a tiny space at the corner near First Avenue.

Over the years, more restaurants arrived, some hidden down worn staircases or tucked into miniature storefronts. They represented dreams of immigrants and entrepreneurs in an East Village poised between its avant-garde roots and its gentrifying population.

Explaining exactly why the block has garnered so many culinary accolades is unexpectedly tricky. One theory has to do with the variety of ethnic groups that have found a home in the area, including Italians, Israelis and Southeast Asians. Another has to do with the preponderance of locally run shops and restaurants, encouraged by relatively affordable rents and intimate spaces.

“Even though you cannot deny that the East Village is a little more upscale,” said Suzanne Wasserman, director of the Gotham Center for New York City History, who specializes in the history of local food vendors, “these are businesses that are not chains. They’re small businesses, and small businesses are what make neighborhoods unique.”

Many of the block’s restaurateurs hoped to pioneer New York’s next food trend, from arepas (Venezuelan pocket sandwiches) to ceviche (the next sushi?).

“There are quite a few notable Greek restaurants, but they were all seafood,” said Christos Valtzoglou, the 57-year-old owner of Pylos. “My idea was to do something that represented the entire Greek cuisine.”

At first, Mr. Valtzoglou, who emigrated from Athens nearly four decades ago, was afraid that Seventh Street was too quiet to support a restaurant of his ambition.

Laughing, he said, “I am very happy to say I was proven wrong.”

May 11, 2009 8:00 AM

ONE-OF-A-KIND RURAL ESCAPES POISED TO BECOME THE MOST UNIQUE FAMILY EXPERIENCE IN THE U.S

noemail@culintro.com — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:00:00 GMT

www.featherdown.com Imagine leaving the frenzy of urban life and sinking into the restorative rhythm of rural living. Imagine watching the evening sky fade from the comfort of a spacious tent, and then gathering around a candle-lit table to enjoy a dinner prepared from local, fresh-picked ingredients without cell phones, email, or pay-per-view to distract from conversation. Imagine waking up to clean country air and the opportunity to gather fresh farm eggs for the morning’s breakfast. Imagine a vacation that allows you and your family to actually slow down rather than feeling pressured to race from one tourist site to another. That sweet dream is now a reality as Feather Down Farm Days, a one-of-a-kind agritourism concept kicks off its 2009 season in the U.S. Europe has a long-held tradition of families choosing to vacation on beautiful working farms. Recognizing a renewed longing for that authentic experience, Feather Down Farm Days was founded in the Netherlands in 2004. Since...

NEW YORK STATE TO BECOME GREEN RESTAURANT CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

noemail@culintro.com — Tue, 19 May 2009 12:00:00 GMT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Media Contact: Colleen Oteri Andrew Rigie, NYSRA E. Colleen.oteri@dinegreen.com Cell: 917-297-0376 P. 617-307-1175 NEW YORK STATE TO BECOME GREEN RESTAURANT® CAPITAL OF THE WORLD The Green Restaurant Association and New York State Restaurant Association Partner to make New York the Greenest Restaurant destination in the world. New York, NY – May 13, 2009. Today, the national non-profit Green Restaurant Association (GRA) and the New York State Restaurant Association (NYSRA) announce their official partnership in greening New York’s restaurants. With GRA’s 19 years as the industry standard for Certified Green Restaurants® and with NYSRA providing leadership for New York State restaurants for more than 70 years, this partnership is the most significant move to date in helping to create an environmentally sustainable restaurant industry. The partnership between GRA and NYSRA was facilitated through the efforts of Governor David...

The New York Yankees announced today their new general concessions lineup for the 2009 season. Led by Legends Hospitality, the exclusive provider of concessions, catering and merchandising services at

noemail@culintro.com — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

The New York Yankees announced today their new general concessions lineup for the 2009 season. Led by Legends Hospitality, the exclusive provider of concessions, catering and merchandising services at Yankee Stadium, the Yankees are committed to bringing QUALITY, CONVENIENCE, VARIETY and VALUE to fans in the inaugural season of Yankee Stadium. QUALITY Beginning this season, the Yankees are implementing a Fresh-To-Order system, which will provide fans with the freshest and hottest possible food. Approximately 70% of the newly constructed concession areas in Yankee Stadium will have cooking capability - almost twice the 40% standard for new ballpark construction and five times the 14% that existed in the original Yankee Stadium. This capability will allow the Yankees to drastically reduce the amount of pre-wrapped food throughout the Stadium. One of the most unique characteristics of the Stadium, and an example of the Yankees' commitment to serve Fresh-To-Order, is a window found in...

2009 James Beard Foundation Awards Nominees Announced

noemail@culintro.com — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK, March 23 /PRNewswire/ -- The James Beard Foundation, the nation's most prestigious recognition program honoring professionals in the food and beverage industries, announced today the nominees for the 2009 James Beard Foundation Awards. Susan Ungaro, James Beard Foundation President, hosted an invitation-only breakfast at JBF Award-winning chef Rick Bayless' and JBF Trustee Deann Bayless' highly-acclaimed Frontera Grill restaurant in Chicago, IL, where nominees in 52 categories were announced in the Foundation's various awards programs -- Restaurant and Chef, Book, Journalism, Design and Graphics, and Broadcast Media. Honorees in a number of special achievement awards, including Who's Who of Food & Beverage in America, Lifetime Achievement, Humanitarian of the Year, and America's Classics, were announced as well. For the complete list of nominees, please visit www.JBFAwards.com. Highlights from this year's list of nominees include: Outstanding Restaurant: Babbo...

New York Spirits Awards Debut, New York City

noemail@culintro.com — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

The New York Spirits Awards is dedicated to finding and honoring the very best of class in the spirits industry. The Awards will be the culmination of a two-day tasting competition covering all classifications of distilled spirits. Spirits brands are invited to submit their product for evaluation by a panel of judges who interact on a daily basis with the ultimate decision-maker--the consumer. Spirits importers, distributors, restaurant owners, mixologists, hospitality experts, liquor store owners--everyone who reaches and feels the impact of the consumer directly will be involved. New York, NY (PRWEB) March 12, 2009 -- Dori Bryant, President of The Polished Palate, and Adam Levy, Spirits Writer, today announced the debut of the New York Spirits Awards. The New York Spirits Awards is dedicated to finding and honoring the very best of class in the spirits industry. The Awards will be the culmination of a two-day tasting competition covering all classifications of distilled...

Culinary Concepts by Jean-Georges continues global expedition with the debut of Spice Market and Market by Jean-Georges at W Doha Hotel

noemail@culintro.com — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Culinary Concepts by Jean-Georges is pleased to bring the unrivaled cuisine and sophisticated dining experience of Jean-Georges Vongerichten to the Middle East with the opening of Spice Market and Market by Jean-Georges at the new W Doha Hotel & Residences. In partnership with Starwood Hotels & Resorts these highly anticipated restaurant openings mark the internationally acclaimed chef and entrepreneur's first foray into the Middle East. 'Doha is a region full of exotic spices and rich delicacies and I'm eager to infuse some of the signature dishes found at Spice Market and Market with the indigenous flavors of the region and a wealth of new ingredients. Guests at both restaurants will experience a unique menu of globally-inspired culinary creations that have become a hallmark of the Culinary Concepts brand.' said Vongerichten. 'We are excited to continue the expansion of Culinary Concepts with the debut of these exceptional restaurant concepts at the new W Doha,' said...

New Dining at Lincoln Center as Part of Its Dramatic Transformation

noemail@culintro.com — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

at65 to open in revitalized Alice Tully Hall on February 24th NEW YORK, Feb. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Lincoln Center will launch at65, a dining space in the dramatic, new Alice Tully Hall on Broadway and 65th Street. at65 will be a contemporary cafe and bar that will be open seven days a week to serve both concert patrons and the general public. According to Lincoln Center President Reynold Levy, We are transforming our campus into a more welcoming, more accessible place to enjoy the performing arts, and it is vital that we have more and better amenities for our guests. When our transformation is complete, we will be offering a variety of dining options in a range of price levels. The new at65 will serve not only our concert patrons but also casual visitors to our campus and our neighbors on the Upper West Side. at65 to offer breakfast, lunch, supper and full bar at65's name is a nod to both Alice Tully, the...

First ever professional organization for culinary industry-insiders launches in NYC

noemail@culintro.com — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

(February 2009 – New York, NY) Two culinary professionals by trade, and entrepreneurs at heart, announce today the launch of Culintro (Culinary Trade Organization), a professional organization for those involved in the culinary, restaurant and hospitality industries. With a mission to establish a one-stop resource for major trends, access to business professionals and a gateway to influence industry development, Culintro expects to grow to over 2,000 like-minded members in just the first year following launch. Culintro is a destination for both industry leaders and amateurs, and allows members access to proprietary tools and information, including a membership database, job board, panel discussions, seminars, Annual Achiever Awards event, and the first-ever Stâge Program. The Stâge Program places students from Universities all over the country in NYC’s & Chicago’s top kitchens. Pioneering the program are top chefs, Grant Achatz of Alinea, Jonathan Benno of Per Se, Brad...

Restaurant Manager

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 13:18:03 GMT

Title: Restaurant Manager
Description: GREENWICH VILLAGE BAR AND RESTAURANT FEATURING LIVE MUSIC SEEKING MANAGERS!!!!
Busy, popular and very well established Greenwich Village restaurant and bar seeks full-time manager to oversee front of house operations, including staff training and supervision, floor management, and a strong focus on customer service.

Applicant should be a strong hands-on leader, who is outgoing and energetic, and able to communicate confidently with customers and staff. Must possess great people skills & attention to detail and be able to work well under pressure. Must also be outgoing and energetic and a strong motivator with regards to promotions and incentive programs. Computer literacy, and some Spanish a plus.

We are an established restaurant with a casual and upbeat atmosphere, with live music, serving lunch, dinner and weekend brunch and our kitchen is open late night.
Experience of at least 2 years in the service and hospitality industry, whether in the form of manager or supervisor is a must!!!
NYC experience is also a huge plus!
Please fax resume to 908-709-4111 or reply to this email with resume.
Required Experience:
Education Required:
Planned Duration of Employment: Full Time

Contact info:

Hiring Manager (Add to Contacts)

Greenwich Village Restaurant

Restaurant Manager

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:19:03 GMT

Title: Restaurant Manager Description: Join one of New York City’s most successful Mediterranean Restaurant concepts. We are looking for a Manager to join our team. Our company is growing, so must the team.... Candidates must have at least 2 years of New York City Fine Dining experience. Additionally, the candidate should be: • Able to handle high volume and a fast paced environment. • Good leadership and communication skills. • Capable of reinforcing high service standards. • Capable of motivating and managing, with great leadership skills. • Experience with POS systems and computer in general (Micros a plus). • Experience with managing various departments a plus. Compensation based on experience. Please send us your resume with your salary requirement via e-mail. Include all your information in the body of the e-mail. No attachment will be open. We are taking resumes only via e-mail . Qualified applicants are considered basis of their...

Culintro Marketing Intern

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:10:56 GMT

Title: Culintro Marketing Intern
Description: Culintro is looking for a part-time marketing intern to help with day to day operations including:
- Social Media outreach
- Event Coordination
- Managing website programs (job board, membership...etc.)

Requirements:
- Needs to LOVE the restaurant industry
- Reader of the culinary websites (eater, grubstreet...etc)
- Good phone skills, organized
- Efficient on MAC & PCs
Required Experience:
Education Required:
Planned Duration of Employment: Part Time

Contact info:

Stephanie Kornblum (Add to Contacts)

Culintro

Culinary Manager

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Title: Culinary Manager Description: A new prepared foods store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn is seeking an energetic, fulltime Chef to join the owners on the management team. The store will offer modernized, seasonal comfort foods for takeout that are high in quality and presentation. This new store will mark the beginning of a line of store branded shelf products such as canned items, and sweet and savory snacks that rotate seasonally. The Chef Manager will serve as the head of culinary; responsible for weekly rotating menu creations and management of the kitchen staff, with a focus on food quality, cost controls and presentation. We are looking for someone who is reliable, flexible and who has a passion for continuously creating new recipes for both the prepared and shelf stable products. The ideal candidate will demonstrate creativity, knowledge in current culinary trends, ability to create menus around local, seasonal foods and have strong experience in menu development. We...

Theres a Stuffed Quail in the Mail

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:48:09 GMT

Wall Street Journal
March 11th
Weeknight dinner in most American households is fast, easy, possibly tasty—but almost never elaborate. Several meal-delivery Web sites want to lift eating-in to a higher level by delivering high-quality prepared dishes to your doorstep...

Restaurants shift blame to weather for sinking sales

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:45:26 GMT

Nation's Restaurant News
March 11th
As the latest same-store sales reports come in, the effects of the severe winter weather that hit most of the country in January and February are becoming clear, and in some cases it isn’t pretty...

Cuisine or Death: The Real Chef's Moto

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:10:24 GMT

Salon.com

March 11th

Michael Laiskonis, Pastry Chef at Le Bernardin, discusses what drives him everyday : 'It's a truly exciting time to be a chef, but it's always taken certain kinds of personalities to excel in cuisine, to have that geeky kind of masochism that drives us to aspire, impossibly, to perfection in both art and athleticism...'

El Bulli Move Over; Noma climbs

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:10:01 GMT

Bloomberg.com

March 6th

While El Bulli tops the World’s 50 Best Restaurants Awards each year, Noma’s climb has been dizzying. In 2006, it was 33rd; in 2007, 15th; it came 10th in 2008 and third -- behind the Fat Duck -- last year, when it won the chefs’ award as the favorite among culinary masters. Could Noma become the new El Bulli?...

Ban of Salt in New York

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:03:11 GMT

Nations Restaurant News

March 9th

In an effort to reduce the amount of sodium in consumers' diets, New York Assemblyman Felix Ortiz has introduced a bill that would ban the use of salt in the preparation of restaurant food across the state...

Foragers track down hard-to-source ingredients

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:48:26 GMT

Nations Restaurant News

March 9th

A growing number of specialists are trying to fill in the missing links in supply chains of some of the more hard-to-find items at a time when sourcing and sustainability are becoming more important to consumers. Most chefs don’t generally have time to hunt through the woods on their own for obscure ingredients so they turn to on-staff foragers or sourcing managers...

Finally Taking Coffee Seriously

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:43:54 GMT

New York Times

March 10th

New York used to be a second-string city when it came to coffee. No longer.Over the last two years, more than 40 new cafes and coffee bars have joined a small, dedicated group of establishments where coffee making is treated like an art, or at least a high form of craft...

Squeezed! New Yorker's will do anything for a good meal

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:41:38 GMT

New York Post

March 10th

Elaborate meals cooked on hot plates. Sidewalk cellars that double as coat rooms. Bathrooms tucked in the back of kitchens. Welcome to the world of New York’s tiniest restaurants — where 'dining out' means 'squeezing in' and the mere act of sitting down requires the skills of an Olympic athlete...

Junk Food Tax Could Improve Health

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:38:28 GMT

ABC News

March 10th

'Policies aimed at altering the price of soda or ... pizza may be effective mechanisms to steer U.S. adults toward a more healthful diet and help reduce long-term weight gain or insulin levels over time,' the researchers wrote...

Tacos in the Morning? That’s the Routine in Austin

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:35:39 GMT

New York Times

March 10th

When it comes to breakfast tacos, Austin trumps all other American cities.Roberto Espinosa, proprietor of Tacodeli, espouses a slacker consumer theory of why Austin — a city thick with creative folk, techies, students and politicians — has embraced breakfast tacos...

Culintro in the Press

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:47:06 GMT

The Future of Food Journalism Press Compilation The Future of Food Journalism was quite the hit. MediaBistro, Huffington Post, Village Voice all had positive coverage. Check out Culintro's Press Recap from the event » Don’t stress about the Yelper who doesn’t know how to spell kidney. Just serve good food. - The Huffington post Culintro hosted a panel discussion about the future of food journalism. The overall message? Food journalism does actually have a future. - Village Voice The Huffington Post (February 10, 2010) The Future of Food Journalism What is the future of food journalism? Unfortunately for the attendees of Monday's panel discussion hosted by Culintro, no one expert can give a definitive answer. After selected nibbles (dried fruit, hunks of parmesan cheese, olives, and nuts) and sponsored vodka cocktails, the lubricated would-be food journalists, restauranteurs and restaurant industry pr reps sat down to hear Salon.com's Francis Lam, Time Out's...

Meet the Founders of Culintro

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:26:20 GMT

Stephanie Kornblum Stephanie was born and raised in Westchester, New York where she fell in love with food and recipes at an early age. After obtaining a Restaurant Business degree at Syracuse University, Stephanie worked at acclaimed boutique lifestyle PR and marketing firms, including KB Network News, Strategic Group, & The Hall Company. During these years she collaborated with some of the industry’s most esteemed names, as well as an eclectic array of restaurants, food products, and culinary events. Through these experiences, she has developed strong relationships with NYC chefs, restaurateurs, and industry media. Alina Munoz From an early age, Alina has had a keen interest in contemporary art and design. She decided to leave her native Texas for the Northeast to attend Haverford College, where she graduated with degrees in...

Culintro Board of Advisors

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:02:38 GMT

Got a question for the Board? Ask today! AvroKO Cynthia Billeaud Glen Coben Maureen Drum Mark Dunau Karl Guggenmos Steven Hall James Meehan Marc Murphy Tracy Nieporent Josh Ozersky Philippe Pezet David Rabin Andrew Rigie Michael Romano AvroKO AvroKO is an award-winning, New York-headquartered design and concept firm headed by four partners: Greg Bradshaw, Adam Farmerie, William Harris, and Kristina O'Neal. Founded in 2000, AvroKO has specialized in a variety of disciplines, including interiors, architecture, furniture, fashion, and graphic design. They also own and operate their own restaurants, including Double Crown, Madam Geneva, PUBLIC, and The Monday Room. AvroKO is currently at work on restaurants, lounges, hotels, residential developments and retail spaces worldwide. Cynthia Billeaud, Dinex Group Cynthia Billeaud...

Farmer's Tour

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:38:22 GMT

Cooperstown Cheese Company Bob Sweitzer and Sharon Tomaselli started making cheese as Cooperstown Cheese Company nearly three years ago, but in that short time were able to develop a wonderful alpine style cheese and win a second place ribbon at the American Cheese Society annual competition in 2009. Toma Celena, named after the first person to taste it and love it, is a very complex semi-hard and natural rind cheese that is nutty and fragrant, yet has slightly sweet undertones. The flavor lingers and is bold enough to match well with meaty red wines and broad enough to match well with spicy brews. Photo credits: Ulla Kjarval --> Bob Sweitzer and Sharon Tomaselli started making cheese as Cooperstown Cheese Company nearly three years ago, but in that short time were able to develop a wonderful alpine style cheese and win a second place ribbon at the American Cheese Society annual competition in 2009. Toma Celena, named after the...

Sponsors/Affiliates

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:53:58 GMT

Jump to our Affiliates. Sponsors Bulthaup G'Vine Hospitality Design (HD) Leblon Cachaça Metroelectro The Perfect Puree VeeV Açaí Spirit Wines of Chile Wooden Ships Bulthaup Bulthaup combines a history of fine European craftsmanship with technical precision using state-of-the-art manufacturing. This systematic approach is evident in all aspects of the process – from research and development to production and installation. Bulthaup guarantees individual design solutions, sets lifestyle standards and stands behind its flawless products. The company has showrooms in 18 North American cities. and can be found in 50 countries worldwide. For further information call 800 808 2923 or visit www.bulthaup.com. G'Vine G'Vine is a...

How To Protect Your Restaurant Recap

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:47:06 GMT

By Caolina Daza Carreño EcoCozina.com Culintro-Panel Series October 27, 2009 Carolyn Richmond and Will Regan, moderated by Josh Ozersky How To Protect Your Restaurant Panel Series was brought by Culintro to the Museum of Arts & Design with a contentious and relevant topic: Plaintiffs, allegations, and labor lawsuits faced by New York City’s restaurants. Ozersky, moderator of the panel, opened the discussion between Richmond, restaurant lawyer, and Regan from 3Sixty Hospitality, by portraying the impact that the current economic crisis is having on the restaurant industry and in a worrying prompting mood asked: What’s going on, why such hazard for restaurateurs? Bringing such issues to the table triggered the audience to understand the importance of enforcing New York City State Department of Labor (DOL) laws in their establishments. The discussion was essentially focused on the common restaurant violations: overtime wages, tips, service charges, and sexual harassment, as...

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:55:58 GMT

Eau de VeeV

From the "Dispelling Molecular, Defining Intellectual" Panel Event with Miguel Sanchez Romera

2 ounces VeeV Açaí Spirit
1 lemon slice
1 lime slice
1 orange slice
3 ounces tonic
Citrus wheel, for garnish

Shake the first four ingredients with ice and pour into a highball glass adding additional ice if necessary. Top with tonic. Stir and garnish with the citrus wheel.

*Alternatively, build in a highball glass over ice as listed above squeezing and dropping in the fruit slices. Top with tonic. Stir and garnish with the citrus wheel.

About VeeV

VeeV is The World's First Açaí Spirit™ and is simply a better way to drink™. Açaí (pronounced ah-SIGH-ee) is the exotic tasting Brazilian national fruit popularized by surfers and sports enthusiasts, and is thought to be the healthiest fruit on the planet. In the spirit of allowing consumers to enjoy tonight and save tomorrow, VeeV donates $1 per bottle sold to Rainforest preservation through The Sustainable Açaí Project and is proud to be the only certified carbon neutral spirits company in the world.

Dispelling Molecular, Defining Intellectual Cuisine Transcript

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:51:24 GMT

By Caolina Daza Carreño EcoCozina.com Culintro-Panel Series October 5, 2009 Chef Miguel Sanchez Romera Culintro’s founders Stephanie Kornblum and Alina Munoz warmly welcomed all guests to the exciting Panel Series: Dispelling Molecular, Defining Intellectual Cuisine by Chef Miguel Sanchez Romera, and thanked the special support from the sponsors who made the event a reality. A native of Spain, Chef Miguel Sanchez Romera spoke about the simplistic secrets of his Intellectual Cuisine and touched upon the inspirations of his 2010 MSR Restaurant project in Lower Manhattan. With a dynamic audience at the Municipal Arts Society in New York City, Romera began his talk by explaining his vision about Haute Cuisine: Today the world is suffering from high rates of malnutrition, both overfed and underfed; thus, it gives us the perfect opportunity to talk about cooking and fill in the enormous gap. His passion for cooking has been the result of more than fifteen years of work in...

Design Please, Well Done

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:31:40 GMT

Making a Mark—A Culintro Member's Reaction to The Future of Restaurant Design Conversation By Amanda Neville Partner, ThinkSo Creative Earlier this week, Brett and I attended a panel discussion sponsored by Culintro about the future of restaurant design. We were totally impressed by the panelists Glen Coben, LTL Architects, Paul Liebrandt, and especially AvroKO, which not only creates fabulous concepts and designs beautiful environments but actually opened a couple of its own restaurants where the firm’s talents are on full display Inspiration can turn into reality by paying obsessive attention to details and finding ways to do things just a little bit differently. Visionary restauranteurs pay attention to every detail and understand that if even one element is out of synch, it can change the whole dining experience. It made me think about how our business parallels theirs and about the creative challenges we share. Let’s take the strategy phase: When we start an identity...

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:13:07 GMT

Arándano

Featured cocktail from "Flavors of South America"

1 1/2 oz. Leblon Cachaça
1 oz. El Corazon Perfect Puree
5 blueberries
1/2 oz. Agave Nectar Syrup
1/2 oz. Lime Juice
1/2 oz. Cranberry Juice

In a mixing glass, muddle the blueberries with the lime juice and agave. Add other ingredients and shake. Strain into a rocks glass filled with ice and garnish with a few whole blueberries sprinkled on top of the glass.

Recipe designed by Somer Perez of Couture Cocktail Concepts.

Lorem ipsum survey

noemail@culintro.com — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:36:43 GMT

Objectives:

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Ut wisis enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci

Release Date: Jul 10, 2008 2:36 PM
Expiration Date: Oct 10, 2008 2:36 PM

Ut wisis enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:37:39 GMT

Nick Fauchald, Tasting Table

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:37:39 GMT

Brian Halweil, Edible magazines

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:37:39 GMT

Gabriella Gershenson, Time Out New York

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:37:39 GMT

Francis Lam, Salon.com

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:37:39 GMT

Lorem ipsum

2008-07-10T19:36:43Z

Instructor: Instructor

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