Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I also meant to comment about the pix. I didn't understand what I was supposed to be looking at in the Mercury event photos. I would lose those. Event shots are fine to include to show the breadth of the types of events you do but make sure they're good professional shots like your food photos and that we know what we're supposed to be looking at.

What are you trying to say with each photo? And then make sure the photo says it and the caption supports it. Like, the Mercury event...were you trying to communicate that you can do large cooking demonstrations or that you can do a full kitchen set-up outside? Neither point was clear in the photo.

If you don't have great event photos, don't use 'em. Use food porn like JerzeeTomato suggests.

JerzeeTomato makes a great point about menus. I too would like to see more than one sample menu with sample pricing. It seems to me that your style is to customize each menu based on preferences and event so you don't want people to pick an existing menu necessarily. So even showing a sample menu for different types and different size events with approximate pricing would be helpful. If possible, each menu should have different items so people can see all the different kinds of things you can cook.

By the way, about seasoned oils. I made the mistake of using fresh ingredients one year (garlic, chile peppers, herbs) only to later learn that I could have given everyone botulism. (Heh, so much for the ego that year, eh? Thankfully, nobody got botulism.) You can only use dried ingredients in oils. Fresh ingredients is fine for vinegars.

I have made strawberry jam from strawberries I picked at a pick-your-own farm. I just used the jars you can get at the grocery that looks like quilt-cut glass and made labels on my ink-jet.

I have also made a variety of seasoned vinegars, oils and marinades. I got bottles and corks from CostPlus (Pier 1s predecessor) for about $2. I created my own labels (front and back) using clear shipping labels. I seem to remember melting a red crayon in with white canning wax to seal the corks. I tied it off with raffia.

I have made tongue-in-cheek prayer candles with my own labels (front and back). You can get blank candles in tall glasses and wine bottle gift bags at the dollar store. Word of warning: I ended up having to use a glue stick on the back of the labels to get them to actually stick to the glass. I was using 2"x4" white shipping labels. Never had that problem before the candles.

I have a friend who makes elaborate boxes of baked goods like Jerzee Tomato. It seems like there's at least a dozen different items, each individually wrapped in decorated cellophane bags that you can get at The Container Store and placed in a larger holiday box also from the Container Store, and then packs them in a larger box for shipping. I shudder to think how much she spends because I know she does this for at least a dozen people and ships them cross country.

CostPlus has lots of great stuff for bottling and packaging and they're not as expensive as Pier 1 or The Container Store.

Also..

Unforgetable - should be unforgettable

On your opening page, need to fix the spacing after comma on needs and wants. Or on your "about us" page, should read: "With over 23 years of professional culinary experience, Chef Jason.." (missing "of" and a comma"

Little things throughout, like missing accents and hyphens (i.e. award-winning chef, sautéed). Fairly picky, I know, but I'm a professional proofreader - that's what I do!

This might make me a grumpy nitpicker in your book, but I'd kindly point out that you did ask for people to give their feedback..and if you ask for feedback (and constructive criticism), it might sting a little.

I wondered about chefs' intolerance, but my family hates my plant-based diet too . . .

I live at home right now. My mother has adopted an all-red-meat diet since I went pescetarian. I feel bad contributing to the decreased health of my family, but there's not much I can do. I offer to cook for them frequently (especially since my mother hates having to cook) - but my mother and brother refuse all ethnic and all meatless meals (my dad likes everything, and gets really, really angry if I don't make enough food to share).

On our last family vacation, my college-age sister threw a temper-tantrum, yes, a temper-tantrum, because the menu at one restaurant did not include chicken. By that, I mean that it had terayaki chicken, which she did not feel like. And she didn't like fish, pork, or beef, except for hamburger, but she didn't feel like hamburger, and next time *she* was picking the restaurant, because if she couldn't eat here, I shouldn't be able to eat somewhere else.

She's also the girl who went to a Vietnamese restaurant - and ordered a strawberry smoothie.

I'm the family member on a "restricted diet" - but I'm used to being flexible - packing snacks, ordering salads sans bacon or baked potatoes, etc. So I too am annoyed by relentlessly closed-minded eaters. But I think there's a distinction between a vegetarian/ vegan/ allergy-related "food restriction," and someone like my sister, who could, but didn't "feel like," eating any of the options on the menu.

I won't lie - I certainly don't understand some food restrictions, and I know that some diets would not work for me, just like I understand that my diet would not work for some other people.

I do get annoyed by people who don't want to try new foods, especially ethnic foods (It seems closed-minded to assume that only Europeans and their descendents, not to mention Kraft Foods, can produce edible meals) - but I guess we all prove a bit crazy and snobby when it comes to food preferences.

maggiesara, please don't go on like that...I laughed so hard I nearly hurt myself.

Re profitability of vegetarian dishes, no question that they're more profitable than meat or poultry dishes when costed on the basis of raw materials. But if you factor in labor, the cost can rise significantly. At a mid-level restaurant, the steak may well arrive already portioned, so it's just a matter of slapping it on the grill. Sprinkle some breadcrumbs on a halved tomato and stick it under the broiler, dish up a portion of the mashed potatoes that accompany half your entrees, and you're done. Chicken breast, salmon fillet...same story.

And then there's the vegetarian risotto. For the sake of convenience, let's assume you bring in your vegetable stock -- which is wasteful as hell, but does save someone endlessly cleaning and trimming the scraps of onion, mushroom, turnip, etc., and reducing it down and down and down until it actually has some body and flavor. Assume something relatively simple -- an asparagus and morel risotto, say. Somebody has to trim and peel all the asparagus, slice it, and par-cook it such that when it's turned into the rice base, the bottoms will be tender but the tips won't be overcooked. And somebody has to clean the morels, which can be sandy little buggers and harbor all kinds of creepy crawlies that no vegetarian (or anyone else, for that matter) is going to want to find on the plate. However, giving the morels a good solid rinse will leave them waterlogged, since they soak up moisture like mad, so you've got to go one at a time, cleaning each one individually. And then there's onion and garlic to mince, never mind that if you've got a halfway decent restaurant you're making the risotto to order, so someone's got to stand there stirring the damn stuff.

And that's for a bog-standard vegetarian entree, with no little zip or wow factor. I recently bought two vegetarian cookbooks that absolutely blow me away -- I can't wait to cook from them (Cafe Paradiso and Cafe Paradiso Seasons, for those playing at home, coming out of a truly incredible veg restaurant in Dublin). These dishes have some major wow factor. But many of them also involve a LOT of trimming and peeling and chopping before anything hits a pan. There's just a lot of labor there, compared with the labor involved in firing a chunk of protein, and labor costs money.

Sure, some protein -- especially if you're going for a wow --is a PITA as well. The person who invents the self-shelling shrimp will win my undying gratitude. But as much as I loathe shelling and deveining shrimp -- and it is just about my least-favorite kitchen chore -- it can't compare with, say, podding and shelling fava beans. Spend an hour on the shrimp, and you've got enough cleaned protein to feed a small platoon. Spend an hour on the fava beans, and you've got enough for maybe three portions, assuming it's a side-dish.

And then, seasonality comes in. Chicken is chicken, in May as in November. But tomatoes are not tomatoes in January, and if I'm putting vegetarian dishes on my menu in the winter -- and I don't live in Fresno -- I have a choice between serving a LOT of cabbage and root-vegetable stews (for which it's tough to get the punters to pay up) and using tasteless, expensive, out-of-season, flown-in-from-Chile produce, which will both piss off the locavore types and, again, send my food costs spiraling up.

And finally, the majority v. minority issue. I've got one incredibly hard-working kitchen porter. I can have him spend his time shelling and deveining shrimp, or peeling fava beans -- he can't do both. How many customers are likely to want the shrimp, if I put it on the menu, v. the number that are going to opt for Favas en Suprise? With finite resources, I have to choose between playing the majority and playing to the minority. As it happens, it makes sense to offer something that the minority can eat, so that mixed parties will be willing to come to my restaurant. But for every "minority" dish I put on my menu, I have to further restrict the number of "majority" offerings, and it becomes a pretty delicate financial balancing act.

Understand, I'm not arguing against restaurants' offering vegetarian dishes; rather, I'm suggesting one reason why the restaurant community, as a whole, may have some hostility toward vegetarians.

On another note -- because hey, it's two in the morning, and I got the keyboard, baby -- I used to have a friend in L.A. who would often have dinner in restaurants with his mother. The two of them would engage in a game I though of, privately, as "Who's More Allergic?" J would look at the menu and say, "I kind of like the idea of the beet salad, if they could make it without the hazelnuts." And his mother would say, "Oh god, beets, I even look at a beet and my blood pressure starts shooting up, I can feel the veins in my forehead starting to pulse." And J would say "Wow, the veins-thing, that's exactly what happened to me when I went to Maggiesara's house and she was cooking apples." And his mother would say, "Please, don't talk to me about apples. I was at your sister's, she gave little Sophie a glass of apple juice, they were in the kitchen, two rooms away, and I started breaking out in hives." And J would say "I used to have the hives-problem, but ever since I started drinking two glasses of pure spirulina-juice every time I went to the bathroom, the hives haven't been a problem. Well, at least, not with whole apples. Applesauce is another story."

And on and on and on. It became very clear that in their family, being a delicate flower conferred some kind of specialness -- everybody must race around making sure that every trace of apple has been wiped away, that nothing with beet-sugar in it or beet juice or pickled beets or maybe just the letter "b" has been anywhere near the house for at least 30 days. And in restaurants, of course, waiters are sent scurrying back and forth to the kitchen to determine whether the vegetarian dumplings have any soy products in them, whether the salad dressing is soured with lemon juice or (horrors!) vinegar ("it's FERMENTED," J explains with terrifying gravity), whether the "Buddha's Stir-Fry" can be prepared "without any nightshade vegetables" in it, etc.

J and his mother are nuts -- and, happily, hardly representative of any community of restricted eaters I can think of. But they do illustrate the extent to which a lot of people use food in ways that have nothing to do with nourishing the body and pleasing the taste buds. And I think that those of us on the outside who get dragged into these scenarios -- waiters, chefs, home cooks whose only sin was in inviting someone over for dinner -- have reason to resent being forced to play a roll in someone else's tedious psychodrama.

Thanks all for pointing out the spelling errors, and for your input all-together. Some of you had legitimate input and some I felt were just grumpy nitpickers. For the legit ones I say thanks, to the nitpickers I say, “then let me see the site you have designed (if you’re a non-techi) and I will learn from you”. I am not trying to be rude, but some of you were. I do not spend my day fishing around blogs to find someone to rag on. I have two kids, a 4 y/o girl and a 2 y/o boy which I currently watch during the day while my wife is at work and while I currently try to get this thing up and running (while supervising them). I took them out of day care to save $300.00 a week to put back into the business (which I just started several days ago). Anyone who has kids can surely identify with that, and the chaos it in tales. But anyways thanks again for the input and constructive criticism and I look forward to more interesting conversations on serious eats.