Beard and . . .

What would you do if you were a participating judge for the James Beard Awards this year? Let’s say you were a Twin Cities based adjudicator, fully versed in the work of the five nominees in our region. Three of those nominees are 112’s Isaac Becker, Alma’s and Brasa’s Alex Roberts, and Solera’s and LBV’s Tim McKee.

Do you vote for the kid from Milwaukee or Indianapolis? That would be a cop-out, and frankly, our three homeboys are all more deserving. Now the results don’t come out until June when the winners are announced in NYC, and for the umpteenth year in a row, I can’t make it because of a prior commitment, which bites. But I did have to vote for one of the lads, and I will be happy to share that with everyone at the last possible moment. But the question is, who would you vote for, and most importantly, why? Check out the James Beard website for all of the nominees in several categories.

****

Want to see something hysterical? Check out the Deep End Dining website and the fun video that Eddie Lin and I made in Los Angeles last week.

****

An finally, in what might be the most horrifying piece of news that has ever come across my desk, proving once again that there is no accounting for taste of any type. The Emmy nominations came out, and the she-devil of the Food Network garnered a nomination that I am sure she is so proud of:

Outstanding Achievement in Hairstyling: Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee, Food Network 


As my friend Dan Barreiro says, you just can’t make this stuff up.

New Restaurants and Celebrity Sightings

Good news for St. Paul-ites. Finally, The River City outpost of Salut, the wildly successful Edina French American brasserie, opens mid-June, according to what I hear. That’s good news for Grand Ave. denizens in particular, and I can guarantee you it will do wonderful business there. It’s an easy concept to like, serving accessible food in a comfy space, it’s priced right, and it sits smack-dab in the middle of one of the most underserved restaurant areas in the metro.

**** 

Speaking of openings, 3 Squares opens today in Maple Grove, part of the Blue Plate Restaurant Company’s family of restaurants that includes Highland Grill, Edina Grill, Groveland Tap, and Longfellow Grill. In today’s sketchy economic times, a casual restaurant serving recognizable fare is exactly what the ‘burbs need more of.

****

The Bayport Cookery’s Morel Mushroom Fest begins May 8 and will run until June 28. This year’s twist is Jim Kyndberg’s Ten Year Celebration Dinner, a ten-course meal honoring Jim’s ten years of ownership at The Bayport Cookery. Ten years is a heck of a run and worth celebrating under any circumstances. Check out its website for reservations.

****

For Food Network fans, Bobby Flay will be at Mall of America on Sunday, May 11. Flay will be signing copies of his first full-color, fully illustrated grilling cookbook, Bobby Flay’s Grill It! The event runs 3–5 p.m.

****

In other FN news, Paula Deen is going into syndication, something we need less of, not more. Deen has a few problems to deal with. Remember last year when I wrote about her Smithfield sponsorship and the inherent conflict with sponsorship from a company with a worker health history such as Smithfield?

Well, Atlanta-area churches are joining a campaign to get Paula Deen to meet with injured and abused workers from Smithfield, the company she promotes. Rev. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Rev. Lowery, Danny Glover, Susan Sarandon, Judge Greg Mathis, National Hispanic Leadership Conference, and others have mounted a national campaign to support the Smithfield workers and are pressing Deen to follow up on her promise she made in previous interviews on Larry King Live to meet with these Smithfield workers who have been fighting for more than a decade to improve the working situation in Tar Heel, North Carolina.

According to an e-mail I received from friends in the South,

"At the Smithfield Tar Heel plant workers suffer crippling injuries. They endure excessive line speeds and receive inadequate training to do their jobs. A 2007 Research Associates of America report, using company data from federal safety and health reports, reveals that injuries at Smithfield Tar Heel went up 200 percent between 2003 and 2006.

In 2006, a federal appeals courts enforced the National Labor Relations Board decision that found that the company assaulted people, harassed and threatened violence against the Tar Heel workers during an election in 1997. Human Rights Watch, an organization that normally documents abuses by foreign governments, published two reports, in 2000 and 2005, decrying the dangerous conditions and numerous abuses that workers faced at the Tar Heel plant. Similar to the Kathie Lee Gifford controversy, the ministers want Paula Deen to meet with workers and are appealing to her sense of morality and faith to ultimately speak out on their behalf."

Food for Thought

OK. Remember when Levain and Auriga and Five closed, Seth left Cosmos, and I announced I was out on the ledge, so to speak, over the local state of restaurant affairs? Well I am back on a ledge. Except this time, it’s the ledge of global food production, world hunger, and the threat to our international security.

I have been abroad for a while, and after coming home, I can tell you with utmost assurance, from both anecdotal and scholarly resources alike, that we are in for a sh*tstorm of problems related to the rice panic, the rise of Chinese and Russian food demand, and the falling strength of the dollar. I was in three European countries last week and spent a lot of time with farmers, fishermen, and restaurant employees. The situation in Europe is terrible, and you will read a lot about it in the coming weeks, I am sure.

The French housing market is about to crater, the average EU citizen is facing unprecedented economic uncertainty as food prices eclipse the reach of single earner families in the middle class and lower income families with two wage earners. The cover of the International Herald Tribune even ran with a story about this phenomenon. And watching Al Jazeera, BBC News, and China News for a few weeks would scare the crap out of the average American. Anti-Americanism, fear of economic uncertainty, rising Chinese nationalism of the type that burst into the news last year in Russia (remember the Putin youth stories!?), and a tidal wave of problems rumbling across the Middle and Near East (Pakistani political clashes, Muslim Brotherhood threatening Egypt’s Mubarak oligarchy, Iranian obstinateness, Iraqi everything . . .) are making traveling and news watching uncomfortable.

There seems to be a solution for our ailing image abroad in all this, and it’s food related. Why doesn’t the United States stand up tomorrow and announce a global hunger initiative aimed at getting food into the hands of the world’s hungriest? Why don’t we single-handedly take care of the UN World Food Programme’s money crunch? Why not stand up and show the rest of the world that in our country, we stand alongside the least fortunate in time of need? Well, probably because we can’t even do that in our own country.

A report out on Tuesday from the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production examined the impact of the growth and rampant use of factory facilities masquerading as farms where huge numbers of the cattle, swine, and poultry (some right here in Minnesota) are concentrated in such large numbers and in such close quarters for the sole purpose of speeding up both the growth process and the slaughtering timetables. The report’s conclusion was that we must end this practice or continue to create an ever-widening epidemic of environmental and health problems.  To quote, ”There is increasing urgency to chart a new course . . . (These facilities) often poses unacceptable risks to public health, the environment and the welfare of the animals themselves.” And the canard we have been sold for too long is that all of this is good for farmers. Wrong! As an AP story I caught so succinctly put it, “it is good only in that it has shifted rural Americas economic power from farmers to livestock processors.”

Remember, when only three companies control two-thirds of the beef processing in this country, something is wrong. It creates untenable health risks and an ad hoc food cartel, which will very soon have OPEC-like powers that will continue to marginalize the average consumer when it comes to choice and access to healthy, inexpensive quality food. Mark my words, this is happening right now. Eating well is becoming a class issue in this country and around the world.

And if that doesn’t piss you off and give you food for thought, check out these links:

Here is a link to a PDF of "CAFO's Uncovered". Do you know how much tax we pay to clean up after these sh*tholes—literally?

Here is a link to the new Pollan article in the NYT Magazine about the impending climate doom and why someone should plant a garden, or not.

How about going on a recession diet? Really!

Slate has an article on how food writers don't necessarily write about the cost of food. True enough, but that’s not every food writer’s job, is it? That being said, there is a cool idea or two in here. 

Has anyone seen the Vanity Fair green issue? This Monsanto article is amazing in its ability to show you the reach and power that companies like this one have in our world today.

Shipping food around the EU through the perspective of the humble kiwi. 

Truth in Labeling bugging anyone other than me? Chipotle's nutritional info just doesn't add up.

Conspiracy Theory

According to a WCCO piece I caught online by John Lauritsen, it is a weak economy to blame for Temple having to close its doors, rising food costs, a sluggish economy (let me tell you, this is a full-blown recession and could approach depression standards very shortly). I logged on to several local blogs and news sites and checked out the temper of the commentary, and several posters got it right. As they see it, and as I wrote four months ago, there will be a lot more closings across the region as the discretionary budgets of Minnesotans shrinks.

Temple was not a victim of the economy as much as it was a casualty of its own miscalculations of the marketplace. Restaurants close because customers don’t go. And Temple failed to create a compelling reason for being there. The food was poorly conceived and executed from the get-go, the chef was gone within the first year, and naked sushi is a more desperate attempt at wooing customers than half-price wine nights could ever be.  It’s an important distinction to make because restaurants still work, in good economies or bad, so long as they are resonant with customers and create a business model within their own four walls that allows them to quickly adjust their costs to stay in line with their weekly haul and customer counts. In rugged times, simply thinking (as I believe Pham did) that if you build it they will come is a mistake of the highest magnitude.

The reason I launched my BODY COUNTS in these pages last year was to illustrate the point that the amount of people in your restaurant on a given night is the single greatest indicator of long- and short-term success. We had to suspend our counts because travel schedules and the like in our office, but I would encourage readers to take some body counts as they make their way around town. You might see some interesting trends.

****

Heidi’s restaurant, Heidi and Stewart Woodman’s restaurant, appears in this months Condé Nast Traveler’s annual “Hot List” guide to the “world’s most exciting new establishments.” Check out the May issue of Condé Nast Traveler or visit the website.

****

IACP Awards were handed out not long ago and Lee Klein's November 22 article in the Miami New Times, "Eat Shit and Die,” won an award. Klein’s piece detailed the dirty little secret that food animals are fed feces in the American Ag system. Other secrets that I have heard and read about recently include, but are not limited to, male chicks thrown into trash cans as soon as they hatch in egg farms; male calves torn from their mothers at birth and slaughtered before they are one-day-old; pig farms slice off the toes, ears, and tails of live piglets using knives and no painkillers; meatpacking plants (slaughterhouses) keep it a secret that up to four out of ten animals are not properly stunned, and the list goes on.

For real conspiracy theory freaks, here are a few pieces of food for thought: Some think the USDA isn’t really interested in mad cow disease because finding it would be bad for business. The American Medical Association keeps it a secret that there is overwhelming evidence linking dairy products to cancer. The American Veterinary Medicine Association keeps it a secret that food animals are pumped with hormones and antibiotics, which are directly responsible for many antibiotic-resistant strains of disease. Anyone else care to chime in? In the light of the fact that industry spokespeople are now saying that the powers that be are willing to concede that downer cattle have no place in the food system, it might be time to start stirring the pot.

Well Awarded

We are in the midst of a global food crisis. Commodity prices have doubled and tripled, governments are in fear of being toppled by “hunger revolutions,” oil is at a record price, and starvation is becoming a rampant phenomenon on every continent. I fully concede this is not the best of times to be writing about fancy pants restaurants, but I am proud of the work that chefs around the planet are doing to diligently raise money—and awareness—for globally focused good works. Think about it: At every fundraiser, charity ball, and benefit, there is always food. And chefs and restaurants are always leading the charge to lend a hand, cook a meal, or donate a gift certificate in their own backyards or across a continent.

Last week in LA, I noted that Ripert, Flay, Puck, Torres, Ducasse et al. were all doing a dinner that put big money (100K) in the pockets of a local California charity, John Besh is forever raising dollars for Katrina victims and to promote the city of New Orleans, and JD Fratzke and Scott Pampuch were the first to start working the phones last year when the flooding disaster ripped apart the southern regions of our state. I think it is important to remember that cooking food in fancy restaurants is “steel juzt a shob Ahhndrew,” as Pierre Gagnaire told me the other day, and some would think it is crazy to indulge ourselves in this type of dining chat when starvation crisis is not an “if” or “when” but a “now” subject. But the restaurant industry is a huge part of the global economy, provides relief both spiritually and physically to millions of customers each year, and, most importantly, is one of the largest agents for change in a world that could use more of it.

Want to do something great for the world? Celebrate Earth Day today. Go to this link to learn about various activities happening around Minneapolis and St. Paul.

****

A few months ago, I was asked to be a part of the S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards process for 2008. For years I had been an avid fan of the rankings and musings, but this year was special since I got to be a judge for the event. The number one restaurant in the world was, for the third year in a row, Ferran Adria’s El Bulli, and seeing as how I have been lucky enough to eat in many of the top fifty restaurants on the list, I can tell you that E. B. was my top restaurant experience of the last couple of years as well. The Fat Duck was second and Gagnaire was third. The highest ranked American restaurants on the list were my old boss Thomas Keller’s French Laundry and Per Se in New York. Grant Achatz’s Alinea came in at number twenty-one, and the full list can be seen here.

Fergus Henderson’s St. John won the 50 Best Chef’s fave restaurant award, and there was a regional judges’ poll of local hot spots this year that also that can viewed on the website. Anyone have any problems with the rankings this year? Anyone planning to use this list as a guide on where and what to eat when you travel? Lunch alone at Gagnaire will cost you $500 without even touching the wine list. Lunch at Le Bernardin or Jean George can be had for approximately $50. Is it worth it? Well, I had approximately fourteen courses there the other day, and perhaps it was because I got to eat in the kitchen with the master himself during the lunch rush, but it was a transcendent experience. More on that some other time.

Gagnaire and I

Gagnaire working with one of his cooks

The shrimp course in five components

****

Speaking of congrats, a huge shout out to Adam Platt and the mspmag.com all-stars who are responsible for debuting Foodie File last week. FF is our new MSP communal food/restaurant blog. This is a great place to check out when you are online; you can catch up on local review gossip and original content, including material from MSP newcomer Stephanie March.