NYC’s Top-Rated Cupcake; Zeta-Jones Doesn’t Care About CookingSugar Sweet Sunshine comes out on top of Zagat’s new survey of the city’s top cupcakes. [NYP]
No Reservations had a $10,000-a-week food budget and in Catherine Zeta-Jones a star with zero interest in cooking: “I mean, if I was playing a brain surgeon, could I actually do brain surgery?” [Entertainment Weekly]
There are now the same number of Dallas cooks as New Yorkers on Top Chef. [Dallas Morning News]
Related: ‘Top Chef’ Non-Winner Lia on What Went Wrong
Mediavore
Restaurants Sue to Keep Calorie Info Out of Sight; Online Reservations DominateThe New York State Restaurant Association sues the city to stop having to reveal calorie information. [Nation’s Restaurant News]
The days of making, and keeping, reservations off-line are over: OpenTable has come to dominate the restaurant business. [NYT]
In a Times op-ed, the Zagats plead for real regional Chinese cooking to come and save us from egg foo yong. It would be a revelation, they say — “Imagine … what it would be like to discover for the first time Memphis-style barbecue, New York deli food, soul food and Creole, Tex-Mex, Southwestern, California and Hawaiian cuisines all at once.” [NYT]
Back of the House
Reservation: Impossible?If the advent of reservation scalpers like PrimeTime Tables and Weekend Epicure didn’t prove that good reservations are more in demand than ever, an article in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal pretty much makes an open-and-shut case. They used OpenTable, a free online reservation service, to try to get spots at the top 40 restaurants in the world, and often struck out; after 3,000 tries — calling every half-hour for six weeks straight — they still couldn’t score a 7 p.m. table at Del Posto. They do report some small triumphs: A San Francisco software engineer figured out how to get a reservation at the French Laundry by reloading an OpenTable page at exactly 11:59:55 a month in advance. And in fact, the free service is probably your best bet, despite the many strikeouts. Still, we prefer to simply call the same afternoon.
How to Get the Ungettable Table [WSJ]
Related: The Death of Paid Reservations?
