What could be a better way to spend Memorial Day than a picnic in the sun? Shake out that red and white gingham tablecloth, fill up a cooler with the beer of your choice and maybe a pitcher of fresh lemonade, and load up your picnic basket with this delicious, portable lunch. More
For me, reading cookbooks that emphasize “entertaining” has always been kind of like reading Vogue: the glossy worlds they present are attractive but have very little to do with the world I live in. Wearing clothes and cooking are two things I do every day but still feel surprisingly inexpert at. Although I would love to arrange my own flowers and cook beautiful dinners for twelve while wearing a Miu Miu frock, the truth is that the process of having even one person over—dispatching the apartment’s larger dust bunnies, buying and making the food, figuring out what we’ll eat on—is so challenging for me that I’m lucky if I can manage to change into a sundress inherited from my mother... More
Photograph from Charles Haynes on Flickr Because I rarely think about color when I’m planning what to cook, I always feel guilty when I read about how important it is to one’s enjoyment of a meal. The thing is, I’m not sure how true that is for me. One of my favorite things about my family’s Thanksgiving is that everything on my plate is unapologetically brown, white, and delicious. And when my Tuesday night dinner at home has already taken twice as long as I thought it would to prepare, taking the extra ten minutes to clean and chop a dusting of green herbs or red peppers or yellow lemon zest almost never seems worth it. A Newfound Fondness for... More
I would have paid a lot more attention in high school chemistry if "Br" stood for dessert brownie instead of bromine, and "Sm" was mesculun salad with honey mustard, not samarium. At the Miracle of Science bar and grill in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a normal paper menu is replaced with a chalkboard periodic table. Drinks are apparently served from beakers and tables resemble lab benches. MIT isn't too far away, so there's plenty of chic geeks drinking to their patron saint Dmitri Mendeleev. [via Laughing Squid]... More
Japanese restaurants already have the habit of displaying menus in the form of realistic plastic models to give customers a clear idea of what they're ordering. What's the next step? Tables with LCD touch screens that display 3-D pictures of the food. It's the future.... More
-->If you knew each take-out menu you kept was worth $2, would you collect 10,000 of them like Daniel Rayas did for allmenus.com? Newsday profiles Rayas and his rise as a menu collecting master while scouring the streets of New York City and beyond. He's picked up a lot after four months of menu hunting, such as the best way to repair his worn-off shoe soles (cement), what the most common restaurant name is ("Great Wall"), and that Jamaicans don't believe in printed menus. Oh, and $20,000 for all the menus that he has collected, which allow him to live in the city and take care of his granddaughter. Europe may be his next menu-collecting destination. If only he... More
Former restaurant critic turned columnist Steve Cuozzo says that "Modern menus cheat, tease and sometimes lie outright." Cuozzo is talking about all the dishes he finds misdescribed on restaurant menus. "I've had boiled rice described as 'risotto' and dry shellfish masquerading as 'bouillabaisse'." His conclusion: "But most restaurants aren't out to deceive you—they just don't pay enough attention when choosing the actual words for the menu." I would agree and just add that often ignorance or lack of knowledge is to blame. What's the biggest "lie" you've ever seen on a restaurant menu?... More
I've always been annoyed by restaurants that can't be bothered to put their menus online, and I always knew I wasn't alone. From a recent letter to Eater LA's Complaints Dept: "I can't tell you how many restaurants I wanted to go to that have opened and closed before an online menu ever appeared on their website. I really think restaurants are stupidly missing a wonderful opportunity to sell themselves and their food by providing and up-to-date and complete menu. And don't just say the name of the item, describe it in detail. Sell your food, don't leave us guessing. I won't drive 20 miles to take a chance." But do you know what's worse than a restaurant that doesn't... More
The goal of the game was to order in one go, and so comprehensively that the server would not be forced to ask for even a single clarification. As such, every variable had to be examined, every corner of the menu explored, lest something—a complimentary glass of juice on a pre-set breakfast menu, for instance—go unnoticed. More
