Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I took a ride over there to see what the fuss was all about. The produce looked good and I even saw orange raspberries for the first time. However, I really wasn't pricing anything out nor did I quiz Cindy the Fish Lady about the provenance of her product.

It has been ingrained that Chinese food should be cheap (in price).

That statement is true in the way that the restaurant operators have positioned themselves. I eat in Boston's Chinatown at least three out of five days a week, everywhere from sit down dim sum to Ding Ho takeout ($4 option), and you know what?, 99% of the food outlets in Chinatown are the equivalent of grubby diners everywhere else. Would you pay top dollar to eat at dingy place with confusing menus, shoddy service and a suspect health code adherence policy? No. Do you expect the exotic at a diner? No. It's simple, casual food with no pretensions on price, where the operator is dependent on daily volume, not the overall customer Maslow satisfaction.

Can you take it upscale and trendy? Of course you can. Just look at the Golden Temple out in Brookline. Food so good that it was rumored that ecstasy was an ingredient. They run a clean operation, provide valet service, a real bar, a DJ and comfortable decor, not to mention a staff that doesn't visualize their customers as cattle. And they can charge at a price level on par with a very good steakhouse, and have been doing it for quite a while now. So it's not that Chinese food isn't hip, it's that the vast majority is sold as simple everyday fare.

There are so many things that can be improved in the Chinese food industry that the list goes ad infinitum, but if you consider the proliferation of Asian restaurants (Thai, Indian, Japanese especially), it leaves no doubt that American are basically begging for more and better choices. There is plenty of business to go around and it's up to the operator to decide which market segment to pursue.

I broke down and had the chocolate-banana thingy with an espresso shot this morning. After filling up the cup, half of it remained in the blender. So much for my caffeine. I'd have to rate it slightly better than chocolate milk, and certainly as something that I could make better at home. For $4.50, I'll pass.

Grrr. By far one of my favorite blogs. I guess that one day we'll look back and remember teh internets when it was interestingly unsanitized.

Let us hope that sometime in the future, archaeologists will not find all of this crap in one place and label our civilization as the Dean People.

Please tell me that the NYT didn't get their info from this blog and a phone call to Santi Santamaria, a man who denounces snobbery yet charges $375pp for a tasting menu in his kitchen. Hutzpah, I say, on both accounts.

The backstory reads like a run of the mill pissing contest between two chefs whose food most of the world, including myself, will never taste. Maybe the hue and cry will go up once McD's comes out with a foam-based McRib, but until then I'll keep both feet on the ground.

Can a site aiming to cover an entire niche market come from one corporation's mouthpiece?

A site, Brew Blog, aiming to cover an entire niche market, is sponsored by the Miller Brewing Co. I hope that answers your question.

Any use of a blog as a marketing tool is not only sleazy, it is stupid and transparent and the minute the masses get a whiff of it, it loses all credibility.

Both masthead and metadata clearly proclaim the blog to be a product of the Miller Brewing Co. If anyone of the masses had read the article, they would've noticed it revealed not only the ownership of the blog, but also its intent: to further message control in the age-old war between cheap beer manufacturers. Also, as a small note, the Brew Blog is trade publication, with little of interest to people outside of the specific industry. It is not seeking an honest assessment of its product or service, and the fact that they're using a widely adopted concept (the blog) to needle their competition and put anachronistic newsletters out of business is what makes it blogging great.

You could always use Amazon's Mechanical Turk and have hundreds of otherwise unemployed street urchins bang on the....wait, they're getting better publicity by denying Bruni a spot than they ever would by letting him in. Never mind.

I've been a fan of the oven/tinfoil pouch method for awhile. AB has a pretty good recipe that I saw on his show a couple of weeks back. It's easy, clean and the fish tastes great.

Is it payback or living up to the dubious award?

When you mess with douchebags, you should expect douchebag behavior.

After watching the show, I looked up the menu and to be completely honest, it entirely depicts the current casually upscale dining experience: one step above Applebees, one step below a steakhouse.

Whether you like the show or not, I still see a double standard applied here.

Iron Chef, and by virtue the Food Network, are corporate entities, just like Robert Irvine, Inc. Both have used reality show conventions and television sleight-of-hand to get over on the public at large, yet for one excuses are offered and for the other its the yardarm and the piñata stick for three days.

The man hasn't been convicted of anything, yet by all accounts Serious Eats has aided and abetted in a week-long smear campaign while at the same time downplaying the unfortunate comments of someone who got a behind-the-scenes look of a show in which apparently there is a vested interest.

What happens in then end if all Irvine did, albeit on a grander scale, what most people do to their resumes?

I remember reading his wikipedia entry awhile back and was somewhat concerned about the dates of his naval service not quite coinciding with those of Prince Charles, but I didn't pursue it further.

Honestly, which TV personality isn't full of bull?

Crispy around the edges. Juicy in the middle.