Bourdain & Co. Give Their Picks for Beard Chef NYCWe spoke to a number of food-world luminaries, several of whom will be voting in this year’s James Beard Awards, and asked for their picks for Outstanding Chef NYC.
Beef
Epicurious Delves Deep Into Tipping, Ethnicity, and YouTubeFood blogs tend to give the issue of race a wide berth, but Michael Y. Park over at Epicurious has a sobering post about tipping and ethnicity that’s a must-read. Park doesn’t take any position on the question itself, but he reminds us what a charged topic it really is: Aside from relevant links to vitriolic waiter blogs, there’s a mesmerizing video of a woman who had a run-in with a waiter after leaving an $8 tip on a $164 check. We won’t say how the video ends, but it’s not so safe for work.
Tipping Stereotypes [Epicurious]
Back of the House
‘Gourmet’ Relaunches Itself on the Web, and We ApproveGourmet magazine’s new Website launched today, and, having test-driven it, we have to say it’s a pretty sleek piece of work. We often wondered why Gourmet, traditionally the leading food magazine, had so much of its content buried in the vast, boggy mystery that was Epicurious.com. (After a year of trying, we could never sort out what Epicurious was supposed to cover, even though it always has a lot of great content.) But now Gourmet seems to have finally gotten its act together. It’s all there, fully formed: original videos (the first is a Fabio Trabocchi demo), clips from Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie TV series on PBS, classic articles from around the magazine, and the full database of all the recipes, among other things. It’s a great resource, and we’re glad it finally happened.
Gourmet Magazine Website
NewsFeed
Epicurious Blog Will Soon Have Actual Bloggers Epicurious, the Web arm of the Condé Nast food empire, has always been extremely confusing for us. Gourmet’s blog, Choptalk, has writers from all over the world. But the Epi-log blog seemed to be written by only Tanya Wenman Steel. On Monday, the malnourished Epi-log will get an actual roster of contributors, headlined by Rick Bayless, writing on chefly topics, and Melissa Clark, on cookbooks and recipes. “We decided to create this blog party months and months ago because I wanted to enhance the blog with more voices from all over,” Steel tells us. So who else is ready to post?
Beef
Even Peeps Aren’t Safe From Brooklyn High-HatsThe level of Brooklyn sanctimony is always sky high, but this flyer, just posted on Epicurious, really takes the cake. Even innocent Peeps aren’t secure from freewheeling vegetarian assaults! But what really told us that Brooklyn had passed beyond the fringe was the fact that Gourmet food editor Ian Knauer, the poster, far from having a bit of sport at the flyer, goes even further. Though disavowing vegetarianism himself, he points out that if you are truly an orthodox believer, not only shouldn’t you eat marshmallows, but even sugar has the marrow taint: “Both the largest and second largest producers in the US use bone char filters made from beef bones.” Judas priest! Is there some kind of vegan-ethics Olympics going on in the 718 that we don’t know about? Never mind. We know the answer already.
Peep This [Epicurious]
