Grub Street

Finally, science is figuring out how we're going to shrink our guts and end the nation's obesity epidemic: We simply have to stop eating for sixteen hours at a time, every day, for the rest of our lives. The approach really seems to be working for mice, anyway. A new study by the Salk Institute finds that mice restricted to eating a high-calorie diet only during an active eight-hour period, then refused food during the rest of the day, are nearly as trim as a sample of mice kept on a low-calorie, low-fat diet. (A third group of mice could eat whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and they quickly became a bunch of fatasses.) "We have to come up with something that is a simple alternative to calorie counting," the study's lead biologist tells the L.A. Times. And while starving ourselves is easier than counting calories, it's also idiotic.

Serious Eats goes on a Soho eating binge with Andrew Carmellini, where they start at Dominique Ansel and end at Milady's, with a lot of food and scoop in between. Over at Melvin's Juice Bar, Carmellini says he was was iffy about the au courant juice obsession, "until John Cusack was staying at The Greenwich Hotel where he brought his juicer and started juicing for me. He made this pear-kale juice and it was then, then I started to understand." Yup, Carm can say anything and we'll listen. [Serious Eats]

Peter Khoury files a yearning piece in the Times about his quest to find a new roost in the year since Elaine's shuttered. "Like dozens of other people, I am part of the Elaine’s diaspora," he writes. Trying out other restaurants and bars has been "a sort of speed dating." And he's been getting around, dropping into Donahue's, Campagnola, Nicola's, Sardi's, "a hideaway bar in Midtown that shuns publicity and has a great Côtes du Rhône," and finally settling on Neary's as a sort of replacement. But it's not the same. "After one year in the post-Elaine’s world, I can say that for me there is still no place that makes up for the loss of Elaine’s, and there might never be." [NYT]

Safeway is in the process of cleaning up two aisles of shit-storm after a butcher was fired, rather than admired, for saving a pregnant woman from being kicked in the stomach — a backwards move that customers across the country are vociferously outraged by. Then, at Safeway’s annual shareholder meeting, senior vice-president and general counsel Robert Gordon made a stupid and offensive joke that equated Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi to "hogs," and now he's on the express line to demotion. [Slate]