• Restaurants in Chicago are seeing sales pick up after a slow last year. [Trib]
• Despite last week’s oil spill, New Orleans seafood is not tainted. [NYT]
• Gwyneth Paltrow says she would be a restaurateur if she wasn’t a movie star. [Google]
• Restaurants use a plethora of tricks to turn over tables, like playing loud music, which causes people to chew faster. [CNN]
• Consumers are demanding that popular products, like ketchup, eliminate high-fructose corn syrup, but scientists say the syrup isn’t any worse for you than sugar. [NYT]
• Now that home bread baking is more popular, starters, blobs of yeast, flour, and bacteria, are the subjects of great fascination. [WSJ]
• Tequila is gaining prominence in the high-end cocktail scene. [NYDN]
• Once shunned by wine drinkers, plastic corks now account for more than ten percent of corks on the market. [WSJ]
