Free Republic

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...

It is possible to create jobs, have healthier diets and improve the local economy by re-birthing local agriculture on small plots of land. Each pound of lettuce or eggs or beef shipped from California, Latin America or Mexico raises our dependency on foreign oil. And buying food from far away costs us jobs locally. Some communities have figured out a new path forward that fixes all that. North Carolina’s Rutherford County has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation. Yet some 6,000 families own between 5 and 20 acres of land, and chefs in nearby Charlotte are in...

We live in a backwards world where great things happen to bad people, bad things happen to good people, and where Sarah Palin is considered a legitimate presidential candidate. The greatest example of the inverse nature of our universe is the success, or lack of success found by restaurants around the world, particularly the United States. We live in a world where Noah’s Bagels nears bankruptcy while McDonalds thrives on our fatty flesh (and charging for sauce packets? GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE.). In a list published by The Street, twenty restaurant chains are at risk of going under....

Following bankruptcy filings by Sbarro, Perkins and Marie Callender’s this year, new data suggests that other popular restaurant chains are in danger of following suit. TheStreet.com recently looked at restaurants based on their Altman Z-Score. The website says the score is based on “several aspects of a company's financial health -- including working capital, total assets, total liabilities, market capitalization, sales, retained earnings and earnings before interest & taxes (EBIT) -- to forecast the probability of it going bankrupt within two years.” Since it began the scoring system in 1968, TheStreet says the formula has been 72 percent accurate in...

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Ohio legislature is on the verge of approving one of the country's most wide-reaching bills allowing concealed firearms in places that serve alcohol, including bars and stadiums. Lawmakers who support the measure argue that Ohio is merely catching up to 42 other states that already allow concealed carry permit holders to tote their firearms in booze-pouring establishments. But that's not the whole story. No two state laws are the same. Some allow it in restaurants but not bars. Others prohibit guns in stadiums. Some block firearms in nightclubs. Some states have no law addressing the issue...

Of the 204 new Obamacare waivers President Barack Obama’s administration approved in April, 38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district. That’s in addition to the 27 new waivers for health care or drug companies and the 31 new union waivers Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services approved. Pelosi’s district secured almost 20 percent of the latest issuance of waivers nationwide, and the companies that won them didn’t have much in common with companies throughout the rest of the country that have received Obamacare waivers. Other common waiver...