Mike Sula has a mildly disturbing article in this week’s Omnivorous about the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s “Beef and Veal Culinary Center,” a test kitchen located in the Loop. What’s most disturbing about it is the timing, what with the Secretary of Agriculture coming down this morning on the side of meatpackers who want to slaughter and sell you downer cows.
So what’s the newest way to fancify your slab of drugged up, broken down bovinity? Nothing that cannot be purchased in every corner of the country by any given moron. Executive Director (and Kendall grad) Dave Zino related an anecdote about a particularly memorable focus group: “one participant said he didn’t like the [recipes] that called for dry red wine because he could never find it in powdered form at the grocery store.”
We’ll save you the rant about how beef ought to be a rare delicacy rather than a mass-produced staple, but we sincerely hope that the NCBA fails in its quest to increase Americans’ per capita beef consumption. Meanwhile, Omnivorous goes on to list nineteen burger options!
On the Bruno front, Pat visits a fairly humdrum Irish pub in Streeterville called D4 Irish Pub & Cafe that neither fully embraces its owners’ Irish roots nor the New American bar food angle they’ve kind of adopted. So you end up with corned beef deep dish pizza and pot pie and fish and chips, some of which is tasty, if not particularly interesting. We’re not really sure why Bruno chose to review it.
Far more interesting is our discovery, with the help of Mike Nagrant, of why we’ve been consistently unable to view Bruno’s reviews off the Sun-Times Dining page. Basically, if you click on the review link from the dining page, you get blank screen, but if you search for the article on the Sun-Times site, you get linked to a version that works. The difference has to do with URL naming conventions, and we emailed the correction to the Sun-Times’ web editor. They have not responded or made the change, depriving dozens of avid Bruno fans their weekly fix. A shame!
The Meat Pushers [Reader]
Old world, new reality [Sun-Times]
D4 Irish Pub & Cafe [MenuPages]
D4 Irish Pub & Cafe [Official Site]
[Photo: we’d have done the italicizing differently. Kindly Póg Mo Thóin]
