Great story today in NYT by the frugal traveller, Matt Gross.....about the virtues, the wonders, the delight of Happy Hour in Seattle, Washington. Because of our iceage licensing laws, Toronto can't have Happy Hours, half price cocktails, although as Gross describes, Happy Hour is great for tourists and for restaurants....

"THE dining room at Cascadia — one of Seattle's top restaurants, with a cutting-edge chef, luminous décor anda cellar lauded by Wine Spectator — was empty. No one sat on the green banquettes, eating Alaskan king crab with white-truffle gnocchi under the coppery mahogany paneling, and empty wineglasses sparkled on white tablecloths. Only an occasional wandering waiter disturbed this stillness.

Across a frosted-glass divider, however, Cascadia's bar growled with energy. Every stool was taken on this Friday night, and upscale Seattleites mobbed the lounge and the sidewalk tables, where the setting sun warmed their faces and melted the ice in their cocktails. Of course no one was at dinner — this was happy hour.

To the Frugal Traveler, no phrase is more inspiring than “happy hour.” The prospect of two-for-one drinks and post-work camaraderie fills his heart with hope. If only every hour could be happy! But in Seattle, those 60 minutes of joy have been elevated into evenings not only of cheap drinks but also of discount gourmet snacks at the classiest restaurants. From midafternoon till long after midnight, one can graze on the delicacies of the Pacific Northwest, and still get change from a Jackson.

...."Euphoria commenced around 4:30 p.m. at the Triple Door, a sleek downtown club ....and office workers came trickling in to snag tables. I sat at the long bar, drinking a cantaloupe martini that tasted too sweet until a plate of salty, spicy squid — stuffed with ground pork and garnished with cilantro — arrived to balance its sugars. (The snacks come from neighboring Wild Ginger, often ranked among Seattle's best restaurants.)

...."Nell and I ...made our way to Brasa, a southern-Mediterranean restaurant that celebrates happy hour by halving its bar menu prices. No mere snacks here: my $5.50 chorizo pizza was enough for us both, and as Nell and I chatted with an actor sitting next to me, we drooled over his $6.50 lamb burger. It looked like it would go well with an Alpine martini.

Harbord Street is as good a gastronomic stroll as I can find within a mile of where I live. It offers a couple of blocks of Food Med, Messis, Olive and Lemon, Harbord 93 and until recently Kensington Kitchen, beloved of vegetarians. But KK is now shuttered ( it has announced it will open elsewhere) and been replaced by Tati Bistro which has the neat pretty look of an oldfashioned French maid and a smart burgundy façade. Poitiers-born Laurent Brion, formerly of 8 Resto Lounge, is one of the owners as well as the chef, and his menu, which is hung outside, proclaims Tati’s mission: classic bistro fare from snails to steak tartare to moules mariniere. And yes, it’s named for that winsome comic Jacques Tati (Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday). In fact Tati’s bicyclette is part of the bistro’s logo.
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Leslie Brenner writes in today's LA Times that the first Michelin Guide to the city's restaurants is "amateurish, confusing and barely credible." Brenner, the editor of the LA Times' food section, recalls how Michelin flubbed its New York and San Francisco guides and sums up: "What a clueless way to take over the world."

Yes, here's another example of the lethal result of globalism. Just as everyone else wants to go local, Michelin has gone global. Michelin was the brand name for great French food, its inspectors were hardwired to understand the philosophy and le gloire of French food. Foodies could rely on the star system, saved up for the three-star meal by a Rebuchon or Savoy. Even a one star was a reliable treat. So why has Michelin thrown away its reputation?

The dismal answer is that it's succumbed the zeitgeist of the age - global jealousy. Michelin boosted tourism, it glorified French food and made food a tourist destination. France is the top world tourist destination. And Michelin was cruelly exclusive. Other countries wanted a piece of the action. Why can't our restaurants be rated too? True, our cuisines are different, PC for inferior, but even so in the name of global harmony er trade, everyone should be included. Why can't there be a UN subcomittee on global resto equality? Even the French began knocking Michelin as too elite. In 2004, a rogue Michelin inspector claimed that a third of France's three-star restaurants were untouchable, they could never lose a star. Demoralization set in among the three-star set, three top chefs renouncing their stars.

Global Michelin is warm brown fuzzy - no more fearsomely expert inspectors. In LA, Brenner writes " What shocked me was that the book that purports to be the bible of fine dining is so poorly researched and lamely written that the ratings have no credibility. The terse European guides simply provide symbols and list signature dishes, but the L.A. edition's entries read like little puff pieces. At Giorgio Baldi, the chef "pulls out all the stops. . . . A whole roasted lobster . . . is a case study in rustic perfection." Here's Royale: "This fancy setting raises expectations that are not disappointed."

More warm brown fuzzy. Headlines screamed earlier in the week that Tokyo was now the world's culinary capital -- why Michelin's first Japanese guide had bestowed stars on EVERY ONE of the 150 restaurants in the city! Eight were given three stars.

London, by comparison, has one three-star restaurant, while Paris has 10 and New York just three.

Perhaps, muses the Financial Times, Michelin is playing to Japan's "advanced sense of etiquette, which goes to great lengths to avoid giving offence."

A fine way to reward gourmets who have for so long believed in Michelin's ability to pick the best.

Michel De Grandi, a long-time observer of Japan’s restaurant scene and Tokyo correspondent for Les Echos, the FT’s sister paper nails it: ”It seems a very strange policy to hand out stars to everyone – perhaps it’s for commercial reasons, to reach as many people as possible, but it’s somehow disappointing.”

There are chefs who committed suicide because they lost a star, he notes, ”and now, they give stars here to everyone?” Poor Serge Loiseau of the three-star Le Cote D'Or. He committed suicide in 2003 when he feared the loss of one of his three stars. If only he'd waited.....

First law of journalism : spell the names right. I broke it when I mispelled Lorenzo Loseto's name as Loreto. By any other name Loreto/Loseto is a splendid chef........

The rectangular white plate bears three pieces of seaweed wrapped tuna and yellowtail encased in transparent tempura, garnished with lentil cole slaw and lemongrass mayo….

Ok, I’ve trolled this picture gallery before. It’s classic Fashionista, global fusion rendered as Mondrian or Picasso or Riopelle. Too stunning to eat. But Michael, the pro taster who’s come along to George this evening, declares there’s atleast six textures/flavours in this minimalist beauty and they’re lingering happily in the taste zone. I am meanwhile having my own epiphany with a Dutch still life, an upturned saturno holding a tender butter poached chunk of lobster with roasted pumpkin, quinoa relish and gooseberry jam. We’re not quite sure we’ve grasped all the flavours because the garnishes are so small but Stephanie, our server is infinitely helpful. Even so, I challenge anyone to say they can actually taste quinoa or goosefoot, a bland pseudo-cereal from the foothills of the Andes.   more »

Want to make your life a country restaurant? This is enchanting account of a year in the life of the Part Family and their restaurant Les Fougeres, 15 minutes out of Ottawa in the Gatineau. Edible pics and terrific recipes...

When Legal Briefs, an old friend who’s a member of Law Society of Upper Canada, suggested lunch at the Osgoode Hall restaurant, I gave the high sign. I had read glowing reviews of past meals there - “a real find” and “one of the best kept secrets.” I also knew that earlier this year, the restaurant had a change of chefs but Legal Briefs has anecdotal evidence that the newbie is a good ‘un. Staff and Benchers welcomed the chef and a new accountant on the same day but it was Adam Foley who got the biggest hand. After all, says Legal Briefs, “Accountants are a dime a dozen, while good chefs are exceedingly rare.”

Then I heard Rumpole of the Bailey’s growl. “Smell a rat, old darling.”   more »

Next year it will be forty years since a bunch of scientists arbitrarily decided what the safe level of cholesterol was in the human body. In 1968, there was NO scientific basis for this diktat. All that was known, as I recount in my book Last Chance to Eat, The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World, was that too much cholesterol was linked to coronary disease. The safe level was set at 300 milligrams a day. In those days, the egg contained 278 milligrams of cholesterol. So a single egg used up all your approved daily intake of cholesterol. In fact, as was later shown, a food high in cholesterol had no actual impact on a human's cholesterol level -- it is the way the body processes foods that produces cholesterol.

Egg sales plummeted. International heart associations condemned the egg. People ate in fear of the egg. It wouldn't be until 1999 that a study sponsored by the Harvard School of Public Health cleared the egg as safe to eat. But the damage was done. People remain scared of eggs.

In the meantime, the fear of the egg had been enhanced by the discovery that a bad bacteria, Salmonella E, had penetrated the the egg causing sickness. Word went out NEVER to eat a raw egg. Many great foods are made with raw eggs, steak tartare, chocolate mousse, meringues are cooked at too low a level to destroy bacteria etc.....The result is that eggs began to be pasteurized. Just as pasteurization diminishes the taste of milk so it diminishes the taste of eggs. Hollandaise sauce, one of the great mother sauces, tastes entirely different made from pasteurized eggs.

Buying LOCAL is now the only way to insure that you're getting vrai eggs because eggs do not have to be labelled pasteurized.

Does this mean they die less than other people?

Whatever, the news is obviously upbeat compared to last week's scare that obesity is killing us....

A group of federal researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute reports that there were more than 100,000 fewer deaths among the overweight in 2004, the most recent year for which data were available, than would have expected if those people had been of normal weight.

The group links causes of deaths to specific weights. Overweight people have a lower death rate because they are much less likely to die from diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, infections and that lower risk is not counteracted by increased risks of dying from any other disease, including cancer, diabetes or heart disease.

Their paper is published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Morimoto could be the best chef in the world but if he wasn’t a star of Iron chef, he couldn’t get a cookbook (Morimoto – The New Art of Japanese Cooking) published. I know, I know, there are far far too many cookbooks published and so many of them are repetitious – for heaven’s sakes how many books about baking bread could anyone want? But now it’s hard to get a any cookbook published unless you’re a TV star.

I’m not crazy about Iron Chef because I think it infantilizes food and cooking, but after sampling Morimoto’s cooking last week at a dinner at the restaurant Rain, which was part of his book tour, I did admire his imagination and technical skill. He’s the Faberge of the kitchen, a jeweller who designs food as eye candy, the long plates are display cases of diamonds, emeralds and rubies. Trouble is that the food’s appearance overwhelms its taste. Tasty food has so many different stages, first the smell and then the sensation of the food on the lips, in the runnels of the gums, on top and beneath the tongue, on the roof of the mouth…. But this ornamental food tends to be a singular sensation.

By far the most beautiful dish was a line of tiny saranwrapped pouches of caviar served on lemon cream. Dazzlingly ingenious with a subtle, elusive taste. The saranwrap turns out to be melt-in-the mouth obrato, a clear gel made from soy lecithin, one of the popular ingredients in molecular cooking. I eagerly turn to the recipe – is there any way I can make this? Confusion. The glossary says that obrato is made from water mixed with either rice flour of the pith of the stems from the rice-paper plant – not soy lecithin at all! And I’m not told whether I have to make obrato myself or whether I can buy it in readymade sheets. I google for advice, and check the cookbook’s sources, all in the US, without much success. I can have huge sheets of soy lecithin sent to me for insulation.

I have another go at a recipe. Morimoto Sashimi and Toro Tartare is a colourfield painting, two exquisite boxes, one containing mashed tuna and a line of caviare, the other containing lines of sour cream, guacomole, chives, wasabi and crunched up rice cracker. “This is a dish you could actually replicate at home” advises the copy.

Easy for the book to say but where’s the list of ingredients and techniques for replication?

And by including this advisory, the publisher suggests that the other recipes could not be made at home. If so, why a book at all?

I sample sugared salmon: it tastes like an inadvertent mix of leftovers - as if something fishy had fallen into a dessert.

I wonder who will try Morimoto’s recipes - then I realize it really doesn’t matter. The Iron Chef fans are no doubt falling over themselves to buy the book to go on their coffee tables beside the remote.

From Modern Manners, the Times of London...

What is the most irritating behaviour by waiters in a restaurant? Oliver Bennett, Oxford

Over-effusiveness. Reading out the grossly poetic menu when you have it before you as though you cannot read for yourself. Repeatedly filling your glass before it is empty, and without being asked. Repeated injunctions to "Enjoy your meal." The appropriate response is: "I shall do exactly as I want with my meal, thank you." But I am too polite to say this. Bringing your food late, and at different times for different people at your table. Muzak. Pretending not to notice when you signal to them. Hustling you to clear the table. Wearing labels with their first names. But the irritating behaviour of diners in a restaurant is worse, from mobile phones to noisy and show-off complaints. Let us resolve to go to a better class of restaurant.

Britain's Evening Standard reports.....


Santa has been told he must slim down, or face eviction from shopping centres at Christmas

Santa is being told to shift the pounds before Christmas - because the obese saint is failing to set a "good example" for children.


The traditional children's hero, best known for feasting on mince pies left out on Christmas eve, has always sported a bulging midriff.

But shopping centre bosses are giving the well-wisher his marching orders - to the nearest gym - to tackle the increasing problem of obesity.
...

Bluewater shopping centre in Greenhithe, Kent, has even gone one step further and set-up a Santa boot camp.
Fiona Campbell-Reilly, spokeswoman at the shopping centre, said: "Santa has been around for years, but society has changed and our Santa needs to reflect this.

"He will still be the same lovable jolly man, but will be fitter and healthier."

Despite Santa burning 600 calories an hour from delivering presents, the problem lies in the tasty mince pies left as a treat.

If he ate every single mince pie left for him by eager children in the UK he would gain an astonishing 721,000 lbs.

THIS MUST BE A NEWLY DISCOVERED MONTY PYTHON SKIT

The fickle finger of foodies has picked Lima, Peru as the locale of the choicest seviche, the sourest piscos, the freshest fish south of Mexico. No doubt true. But what about Peru’s original gastronomic delicacy – the cuy? The guinea pig is ancient Peruvian scoff. When the Incans weren’t worshipping the potato, their tribal dish – they were sloganeering “Raise guinea pigs and eat well.” Spoilsport European immigrants frowned on cuy eating and urged beef and pork. But the Incans were right. For the third of the population who still live in the high Andes, where only the potato thrives, the cuy is invaluable source of protein. So much so that Peru’s National Agrarian Research Institute has developed a super-cuy that weighs up to three kilos, enough to feed a family of four, and richer in protein than chicken, beef or pork.

The super-cuy looks like an infant sucking pig. I know. Earlier this year I was traveling in the Ecuadorean Andes when our bus stopped, the doors opened, and a young Che offered us a big fat cuy fresh off the grill. Smelled fantastic. I thought of shelling out six bucks for it, but didn’t. Most of us were suffering from altitude sickness and filling the bus with the rich aroma of roast cuy might have been the tipping point to something worse. Alas, I never again had the chance.

Where can I find a cuy in Toronto? I can hear the screams of protest as children hide their cute furry pets.

We have a handful of Peruvian restaurants in the city, and they’re typical neighbourhood restaurants, catering to immigrants longing for a taste of home -- for the warm friendliness of servers who treat customers like fellow human beings (Toronto should set up a service school in South America!) and for signature dishes like papa a la huincana (potatoes with creamy cheese sauce) and anticuchos, marinated grilled beef heart on skewers. I scan reviews which are mostly National Geographic boilerplate “Hey out there wonderful rainbow cultures”. Everything is good. Politically correct ideology, cultural relativism, is in play. I wonder whether the reviewers have eaten enough beef heart to know the difference between good and bad. Eating is a wholly subjective experience – and without an honest review to go by, I am taken aback to discover that even a marinade doesn’t prevent grilled beef heart from closely resembling leather soles.

No reviews even hint at the existence of the great cuy. But then I couldn’t find cuy on Lima’s top menus, or on the menu of Raza, Montreal’s swanky Cuisine Nuevo Latino with a menu that includes a foie gras empanada (that’s more like it!) and squash with mushroom foam. We don’t have a Raza - but then I doubt whether Montreal has a restaurant like Boulevard Café which for the past 29 years has been a gently flickering beacon of laid-back Peru in the Annex – and with one of the most congenial patios in the city.

The Bon Vivant and I have been prematurely celebrating Halloween when we arrive around 9 pm on a Saturday night. The BV is still wearing his fang mask – an immediate icebreaker which makes the owner owner/chef Lirio Peck laugh and gets us seats in the crowded dining room. I haven’t been here for a while and I’m impressed all over again at the restaurant’s assured ‘tude. We are primed for noise – what’s Latin America without maraccas – and can’t believe it. The music is upstairs in the Romantic Latin Lounge, Frieda Kahler colours and oxblood tiles, but downstairs, we are talking without shouting even though we’re surrounded by the I-pod gen. It’s as if we’ve all come to escape the pressure cooker and just relax.

Service is idionsycratic. Striped Sweater, we fail to get his name, is ultra-helpful. I try again to really like the supersized Pisco sour, but I love the huge plate of mussels on the half shell, cooked in cilantro and lime salsa with spicy mango. We propose a chicken tamal (a stuffed corn husk) but Striped Sweater’s face turns upside down, his mouth making a no. Instead he urges us to the crabmeat quesadilla, smoked gruyere, jalapenos, baby shrimp and tomato and cilantro salsa. The marinated and grilled shrimps in a spicy winey garlicky sauce are cooked a point. Neither of us are crazy about a traditional Peruvian fish stew which features monkfish and shrimp in an indistinct way.

Where are the Andean faves – beef heart and potatoes? Usually potatoes come with everything, even rice. I fear for the future of Peru when I have to ask for a potato! Striped Sweater nods smilingly and returns with yucca frites. They’re airier than potatoes. And the wine list has low markups. The agreeable Kim Crawford Pinot Noir costs a mere 50% more than the LCBO price.

The evening takes on a dreamy quality when a past employee arrives to celebrate her birthday. A family party. These folks live their work. Striped Sweater says he’s been here for 13 years, another server has been around equally long. It’s wonderfully unreal. Looking out the window I see a masked Pierrot dodging and ducking down the street among the scuttling leaves. The present recedes in a moment of magic realism... What a rich evening out.

**1/2 Boulevard Cafe 161 Harbord at Borden
416-961-7676 Dinner, food plus tax: $82

Egregious Error: Jerry Horton, Gallery Grill’s general manager, is responsible for the restaurant’s imaginative wine list. Congratulations Jerry. I mistakenly credited Anne Martin, a sommelier who starts a column in Canadian Living in February. Two other errors crept in on little cat feet. Gallery Grill has no “The” before it and brunch is on Sunday not Saturday. Thank goodness, the three stars are inviolate.

For more on NOISE, go to ginamallet.com

Tony Gagliano of St. Joseph Media which publishes Toronto Life does not own the restaurant Via Allegro. On the other hand Felice Sabatino, one of Gagliano’s best friends, does.

Which may explain equally well why Toronto Life has assiduously promoted Via Allegro over the past eighteen months without ever actually reviewing the restaurant as the public know it. .

April 2006: Via Allegro is no.7 on Best Restaurant List.
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The city's foodie clique is agog. Toronto Life, the city monthly that provides restaurant listings and mini reviews has thumbed its nose at the boss, Tony Gagliano, who owns St. Joseph Media which publishes Toronto Life, and whacked Gagliano's own restaurant, Via Allegro.

Now Toronto Life's anonymous reviews are admired for the art of evasion. "The food is simple, high-end Italian done with more panache than the neighbourhood usually offers. Salads are beautifully judged..."

So I was astonished to see the gloves taken right off for Via Allegra...surely a first....

"But on some evenings, at least, the food can disappoint, and the restaurant can operate according to an obvious class system, where evidently deep-pocketed patrons and regulars are served with courtesy and grace, and diners not fitting that description can face maddeningly indifferent—and even openly hostile—service. On one recent visit on a busy Wednesday evening, it takes more than 40 minutes for a server to bring bread to the table and nearly an hour for anyone to arrive with water—not a good beginning for a restaurant with pretensions of being one of the world’s best. Empty prosecco glasses sit unnoticed for 20 minutes. And when a sommelier brings the evening’s first wine pairing, he announces, “This is pinot noir, from France,” and turns to walk away. “Can you tell us more?” a diner asks. “It’s from 1997,” the sommelier says, looking impatient, turning again to leave. The diner: “Can you tell us who made it?” The sommelier, a veteran employee here, responds, “What, and do you also want to know the size of the shoes of the winemaker who grew the grapes?”"

What brave soul wrote this? Chris Nuttall Smith who recently resigned as TL food editor but left behind this billet-doux.

John Tierney's Science blog has excellent commentary on junk nutrition....."Before we pass any more laws on what to eat, I wish we’d take a harder look at how often the supposed experts in nutrition have been wrong before... "

The science writer Gary Taubes in Good Calories, Bad Calories, writes that .... unlike science, nutritional hypotheses are not properly questioned and requestioned."

In science,

"Outstanding questions are identified or hypotheses proposed; experimental tests are than established to either answer the questions or refute the hypotheses, regardless of how obviously true they might appear to be. If assertions are made without the empirical evidence to defend them, they are vigorously rebuked. In science, as [the philosopher of science Robert] Merton noted, progress is only made by first establishing whether one’s predecessors have erred or “have stopped before tracking down the implications of their results or have passed over in their work what is there to be seen by the fresh eye of another.” Each new claim to knowledge, therefore, has to be picked apart and appraised. Its shortcomings have to be established unequivocally before we can know what questions remain to be asked, and so what answers to seek — what we know is really so and what we don’t. “This unending exchange of critical judgment,” Merton wrote, “of praise and punishment, is developed in science to a degree that makes the monitoring of children’s behavior by their parents seem little more than child’s play.”

But nutrition and obesity research don’t work this way. "The other problem with public health-related research is that the beliefs not only infect entire fields of science, but they spread beyond the science to the public, the politicians, etc., and so the number of those individuals invested in the erroneous belief grows exponentially and it becomes almost impossible to eradicate it or correct it."

"If public health research functioned like some of the harder sciences — high energy physics being the one I know best — then researchers would be ridiculed and perhaps even run out of the field for over-interpreting their evidence or publicly presenting the results of sloppy experiments or basing claims on premature evidence and none of this would have happened.

You can think of this kind of brutal response to bad science as an immune system that serves to protect reliable knowledge from infection by the infinite number of bogus but compelling ideas that are out there. The last place you want a science to find itself is where obesity research is today, with hypotheses of causation that can explain none of the pertinent observations, but yet are believed so fervently that no one can challenge them without being ostracized or declared a quack."

Tierny then asks "Is he right about the lack of an immune system in these fields of research? And if so, what can be done about it?"

the Sunday Times of London screamed "THE NEW RULES FOR DEFEATING CANCER!"

"Being even slightly overweight can increase the risk of a range of common cancers including breast, bowel and pancreatic cancer," an expert panel pulled together by the World Cancer Research Fund, has concluded.

The Times report continued" The largest review of links between diet and cancer, incorporating more than 7,000 studies, concludes that there is convincing evidence that excess body fat can cause at least six different types of the disease."

Cause is quite different from "can increase the risk".....But the dumb public doesn't read the fine print.. If we took the rules seriously we would now all drop red meat, bacon, all cured and salted meat, all sugar, starch and alcohol...no, wait a minute, alcohol is good for those with heart trouble... guess you have to choose...will i die from alchohol induced cancer or from alcohol deprived coronary?

"It's about time we had another good, old fashioned, hysterical, health scare, it's been at least five minutes since the last panic."
Mark Lyndon, London, UK