Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Thanks for doing this review! I made reservations at B and B Ristorante at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas, and was really having a tough time figuring out what I should order off the menu. The menu at B and B is pretty much identical to Babbo, and every item that you reviewed were items I was wanting to try; now I have it confirmed. Thanks!

Poor little ME for being too broke to eat Babbo's pig, lamb, goose, and duck.

There are no words. These cupcakes are beyond awesome! Happy belated b-day, Naomi!

@Dee711
I appreciate your spirited response in defense of stopping gavage (force feeding) of ducks/geese. In objective studies, this practice was shown to be detrimental to the health of the birds, leading to early death and active avoidance of the feeding practice by ducks and geese.

While the overall results of this practice are negative, the report of the European Union's Scientific Committee on Animal Health and Animal Welfare on Welfare Aspects of the Production of Foie Gras in Ducks and Geese stated that "there is no 'conclusive' scientific evidence on the aversive nature of force feeding", and that evidence of injury is "small." "The EU committee examined several experiments carried out by INRA (Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique) to detect pain or distress by looking at blood hormones, and found that no definite conclusions can be drawn from these studies." (quoted from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foie_gras_controversy).
I accept that I am ignorant and possibly a glutton but I also DO empathize with non-human creatures (as a middle-sized mammal, I do not trumpet human exceptionalism too much) and am a proponent of raising animals humanely. For that last reason, I feel that fighting the cruelty of gigantic feed lots, horrific pig farms, and torturous chicken pens is a more urgent cause than the fixation on gavage and foie gras. Just an opinion. Does this mean that I lack "empathy for the suffering of animals"? I do not.

Best of luck in your fight for animal rights.

RE: Dee711

If the ducks' livers actually burst we couldn't eat them! I love how anti-foie gras people simply MAKE UP things about it that are absolutely FALSE. The livers bursting is only second to the fallacious claims that the livers of foie gras ducks are diseased. Once again, it wouldn't taste good if they were diseased and we wouldn't eat them.

People fail to understand that ducks have a drastically different anatomical make-up than humans/mammals do. Duck livers have evolved to store lots of fat (something human livers, regrettably, cannot do) in preparation for migration. They aren't sick or diseased, they are just engorged (admittedly artificially) as they would be if the duck were migrating and had plentiful access to food.

Furthermore, the force-feeding process is far less painful/cruel to ducks than it would be to humans. Ducks' throats are coated to the point that many ducks can swallow entire fish whole (and alive) so that the actual act of stuffing a feeding tube down a duck's throat is relatively painless (not to mention only 2 or 3 seconds long). Also, ducks breathe through a hole in their tongue/beak, which is exposed to the air during the force-feeding process allowing them to breathe the entire time.

The thing is that anti-foie gras activists attack it because it is an easy target that allows people to falsely anthropomorphize ducks/make up facts about them because no one knows anything about foie gras/ unite people against an ostensibly elitist product that most Americans have never tried/nor care about. Their real target is getting rid of meat consumption in general (particularly the FAR MORE CRUEL factory farms where most of this nation's meat comes from) and they choose foie gras because its an easy visceral thing to get people to warm up to them.