Free Republic

The most recent development in the ongoing verbal sparring between New York Times dining critic Pete Wells and TV food personality Guy Fieri has escalated the bickering to a whole new level of unseemliness.Awkward, party of one! The most recent development in the ongoing verbal sparring between New York Times dining critic Pete Wells and TV food personality Guy Fieri has escalated the bickering to a whole new level of unseemliness. After Fieri defended himself to the dining community at large during an interview on the “Today” show Thursday, a panel of experts — comprised of Star Jones, Donny Deutsch...

Just telling it like it is — I like his style. Per Politico: John Metz, a restaurant franchisor who operates 48 locations of Hurricane Grill & Wings, several dozen Denny’s locations and a few Dairy Queens, told The Huffington Post Thursday that he’d join the growing list of restaurateurs piling purported Obamacare costs onto their customers and staff. In his case, though, he’s going to label it so all of his customers know about it. “If I leave the prices the same, but say on the menu that there is a 5 percent surcharge for Obamacare, customers have two choices....

Living in a big city, as I do, it isn’t hard for me to spend a lot on dinner. One big meal, and you can find yourself over $200 poorer, just for two people. Of course, it isn’t hard for me to spend very little on dinner either. I got fried pork chops and pork fried rice sent to me from the local Chinese takeout last night, and the whole meal cost me something like nine dollars. What is hard to get is a meal for $50 or so, and that seemingly innocuous fact speaks to an insidious trend not...

The crucial question must be asked of President Obama and Mitt Romney during the live telecast of next week's town hall-style debate at Hofstra University. Is “sausage or pepperoni” the new “boxers or briefs”? Pizza Hut is offering free pies for life to the brave voter who asks the White House contenders which of the two favorite toppings they prefer during the next presidential debate. "We recognize there are a lot of serious issues to be debated, but we also know a lot less serious — but no less important — ones are being discussed every night inside houses across...

A consequence of Obamacare. Darden Restaurants (Olive Garden, Red Lobster) is cutting all of its workers to 30 hours to avoid having them fall under Obamacare requirements. 185,000 people with less hours. But think of all the new part time jobs Obama is creating! Many other companies will do the same.

Michelle Roberts, AP writer writes in her piece San Antonio, restaurants fight fat by cooperating that San Antonio health officials, along with the help of the of our beloved Major Julian Castro, and the San Antonio Restaurant Association have decided to change the way food is consumed in this city. They are targeting local eateries and encouraging (read: threatening) them to offer healthier meal options, lest the restaurant be faced with future regulations or fines for non-compliance. The argue that the city is "getting heavier" and this is a viable options to combat that. Lest we succumb to the ravages...

TRAVELING in the United States, one often encounters food proudly touted as authentically “New York,” including pizza, hot dogs, cheesecake, Manhattan clam chowder, pastrami and loaves of rye. Sadly, such honorifics almost always prompt invidious comparison, resulting in a good laugh if not a few homesick tears. I still recall biting into a bialy about 15 years ago at the Broadway Deli, a favorite in Santa Monica, Calif., that closed in 2010. I was doing research on that scrunchy, savory Jewish-Polish onion roll. Identified as a “New York bialy,” its rubbery, pale appearance was fair warning. It came as no...

My husband was so homesick for Brooklyn that I resolved to find a New York-style restaurant here in Kansas City, a sort of “home away from home.” It would have to serve real Italian food, employ very loud waiters and feature at least one New York accent. In such a place an exile might find relief from the excesses of politeness, tranquility and non-homicidal drivers that plague the Midwest. Research beat a quick path to Lidia’s owned by the star of P.B.S.’s famed Lidia’s Italy. For weeks I poured over every cookbook the woman ever published. Culled from Kansas City’s...

My husband was so homesick for Brooklyn that I resolved to find a New York-style restaurant here in Kansas City, a sort of “home away from home.” It would have to serve real Italian food, employ very loud waiters and feature at least one New York accent. In such a place an exile might find relief from the excesses of politeness, tranquility and non-homicidal drivers that plague the Midwest. Research beat a quick path to Lidia’s owned by the star of P.B.S.’s famed Lidia’s Italy. For weeks I poured over every cookbook the woman ever published. Culled from Kansas City’s...

Friendly’s future is going to look a lot like its past – its distant past – according to new CEO John M. Maguire. It’ll be a future focused on ice cream and food standbys like Big Beefs, melts, fries and Fishamajigs, coupled with about five standard breakfast items. Gone will be menu items that Maguire said just don’t fit with the consumer’s notion of Friendly’s: the bourbon barbecue chicken, the quesadilla. “We have to focus on what our core customer wants,” he said. “I’m not sure anyone comes to Friendly’s for barbecue. But we have barbecue items on the menu.”...

The list of clever end runs around California's recent ban on the sale of foie gras continues to grow. First it was the restaurant that claimed exemption from the law because it's in a national park. Now comes an eatery that says the ban doesn't stop a business from giving foie gras away to customers. The owner of Chez TJ in Mountain View, CA, says he hasn't bought any new foie gras since the ban went in to effect on July 1, but that he did stockpile it in advance of that date so that he could later include it...

Food news and views on the Bay Area's most surprising flavorsThe perception of a meal ahead can be highly influenced by what's on the menu. Presupposing that it is clean and relatively free of unappetizing spelling errors, what's most important is that a little bit of care has gone into how food is worded. There's a trend amongst high-end restaurants to just describe the barest elements of a dish on the menu ("Beef, Kumquat, Pine Cone") and leave the rest up to the diner's imagination. Others overdescribe so that there are absolutely no surprises. It's all a delicate balance, though:...

Slick-fingered Bay Area thieves are stealing restaurants' used kitchen grease, a product that six years ago was so worthless that some restaurant owners would illegally dump it down the drain instead of paying for proper disposal. The leftover cooking oil, yellow grease, is the easiest material to turn into biodiesel. And as the alternative fuel's popularity has increased, so has its selling price, making it a target for thieves willing to go through the trouble of pumping or siphoning the grease out of storage barrels. "It's liquid gold," said Daniel Rugg, director of engineering at the Four Seasons hotel in...

With sales slipping, Olive Garden is trying to win back customers who have fallen out of love with the nation's largest Italian chain. It is a major challenge for Orlando-based Darden Restaurants, which owns Olive Garden, Red Lobster and other brands.

The recent release of Ken Burns’ “Prohibition” documentary has raised many good questions about the subject of alcohol control. For Michigan, the questions are timely. Gov. Rick Snyder’s 21-member Liquor Control Advisory Rules Committee will soon present its ideas for alcohol control reform, and would be wise to think and reform boldly. Michigan’s laws and rules governing alcohol control have been treated like the play things of politicians and powerful special interests for decades. They are not as protective of public safety as neo-prohibitionists want people to believe, and are actually protectionist in many ways, treating different businesses and people...

RALEIGH – Emergency room visits by North Carolinians experiencing heart attacks have declined by 21 percent since the January 2010 start of the state’s Smoke-Free Restaurants and Bars Law. State Health Director Dr. Jeffrey Engel reported the results to the Justus-Warren Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention Task Force this morning. “We pushed for passage of this law because we knew it would save lives,” said Governor Bev Perdue, who signed the law into effect. “Our goal was to protect workers and patrons from breathing secondhand smoke and we are seeing positive results.” The N.C. Division of Public Health report cites...

Del Posto and Babbo have the same celebrity chef as an owner, reputations for impossible-to-get reservations, and customers who can afford, say, Del Posto’s seven-course “menu tradizionale” at $145 a person. It is not unreasonable to imagine that a good number of those customers make a living on Wall Street. So their reaction after word spread on Wednesday that Mario Batali had mentioned them in the same breath as Stalin and Hitler was to let their hefty wallets do the talking and threaten to cancel their hard-won reservations. Some complained on Twitter, some on the Bloomberg terminals they use to...

In an interview with The Daily Caller, former National Restaurant Association board chairman Joseph Fassler offered a firm defense of GOP presidential front-runner Herman Cain, along with an explanation for how Washington’s best kept secret — the identities of Cain’s sexual-harassment accusers — was also kept from the association’s board. “The accusations? It’s a hatchet job, in my opinion,” Fassler told TheDC from his Phoenix, Ariz. office. “My gut tells me it’s a hatchet job. He gets a lead, he gets some traction, and the next thing you know, here come these allegations. It’s sad.”

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain’s campaign is accusing Politico of “unsubstantiated personal attacks” after the news outlet published a story Sunday night claiming two unnamed women made sexual harassment allegations against the candidate more than a decade ago. “Fearing the message of Herman Cain who is shaking up the political landscape in Washington, Inside the Beltway media have begun to launch unsubstantiated personal attacks on Cain,” J.D. Gordon, Cain’s spokesman, said in a statement provided to The Daily Caller. Gordon continued: “Dredging up thinly sourced allegations stemming from Mr. Cain’s tenure as the Chief Executive Officer at the National Restaurant...

A chef at a restaurant in Wales admitted he shoved a kitchen worker down the stairs after a critic called the food they had served "disgusting." Charlie McCubbin, 51, is the owner-chef of The River Cafe in Glasbury-on-Wye, which was visited by Sunday Times critic AA Gill. Bruce Gray, defending, told the court that at the end of his meal Gill was asked whether he enjoyed it. "Iin his rather flippant manner, his response was: 'Disgusting'," the BBC quoted Gray as saying. "I say this to give you some idea of the stress of working in an environment where reputation...