(via boingboing)

Boingboing has a great video up called Food Fight by Stefan Nadelman, which portrays the history of war from WWII until the present, as reenacted by the regional food of the countries involved in the conflicts. He must have been taking a cue from my series on eating regional food for football games.

It’s extraordinarily well done, though it never feels quite right being represented by giant burgers.

Check out the video on BoingBoingTV here.

I’d just like to write a brief addendum to my post on the different ways restaurants approach Restaurant Week. After taking a long hard look at the places that have restaurant week menus (with enough skirt and hangar steak to fill a stadium), I’d like to add another category:

4. Places that normally cost less than 20 for lunch and 33 for dinner that do Restaurant Week to BOOST their profit by tricking you into paying more money for the same (or lesser) food:

There many places doing Restaurant Week this year in Boston where you’d be hard pressed to spend 20/30 per person unless you bought a bottle of wine. These sneaky establishments (I won’t mention names) realize that people assume that only the more expensive restaurants do Restaurant Week and that they by going for the prix fixe menu, they are getting a good deal. So in traipse the rubes and plunk down 3o bucks a head for a 20 dollar dinner. What’s more, out comes the cod fillets and skirt steak–surprise surprise–and you end up getting worse food than you normally would get, at double the price. Don’t be fooled! Check the regular menu prices and steer clear of any place that has a turkey club on their menu.

(via b3ta)

The folks at b3ta found a Austrian butchery that makes whimsical items out of meat–Ace of Cakes style. Among these creations are some highly x-rated works designed to please all the senses.

Check out images of their full range of products here (NSFW are the ones marked für Damen and für Herren).

They also have other items, such as bouquets of sausages and cartoonish pigs made from ham, but I’m sure you’ll just click on to the naughty stuff, eh?

(via BU Today)

Which items are the most important to have in your kitchen? Which gadgets are the most useless? Find out tonight when Chris Kimball, host of TV’s America’s Test Kitchen and editor of Cook’s Illustrated talks about all things related to kitchen gadgetry.

BU Today has a nice interview with him talking about the essential tools for an amateur cook to boost their cooking performance. In the article, he recommends Forschner Fibrox knives as good $30 alternatives to major brand chef’s knives, and lauds the importance of a good skillet. But for more info, I guess you’ll just have to attend the seminar!

From Boston University Food and Wine Seminar homepage:

The Kitchen Detective” with Chris Kimball

Join Chris Kimball, host of TV’s America’s Test Kitchen and editor of Cook’s Illustrated, for an informative evening investigating kitchen equipment. Discover the “must-haves” for every kitchen, as well as specific brands, new products, and things that just aren’t needed. With kitchen supply stores and catalogs full of gadgets to buy, come learn from the expert where to best spend your hard-earned cash.

$25 includes refreshments
Tuesday, February 26, 6-8 p.m.

It’s that time again. Time to spin the wheel and see which restaurants try will encourage new business, and which ones will drive away future clientèle.

Check out the fun Unofficial Guide to all things Restaurant Week at BostonChefs.com. The official guide can be found at BostonUSA.com.

When:
Sunday, March 9 through Friday, March 14, 2008
Sunday, March 16 through Friday, March 21, 2008

Cost:
Three-course Prix-fixe Lunch Menu: $20.08
Three-course Prix-fixe Dinner Menu: $33.08

From my experience, restaurants have dealt with Restaurant Week in three ways:

1. Scale down regular menu item portion size, operate at cost (or a loss), and hope to make it up in future business:
   Restaurants that do this are as rare as that ivory-billed woodpecker, but when you do find a restaurant that does reflect its usual service during Restaurant Week, it builds great customer loyalty for the present and future. See my previous Restaurant Week reports on Sorellina, Ruth’s Chris. Also Radius, Meritage, and Spire (now KO Prime) were good examples.
2. Have a new menu unrelated to anything the restaurant usually does, usually involving some skirt steak dish and grade Q ingredients out of the compost heap:
   This is, alas, the common trend in restaurant week. If you go to Restaurant Week, especially for dinner, chances are that this is what you get. Throw some skirt steak on the plate, add some “specials” made from leftovers ingredients from the real service, and there’s your Restaurant Week menu. These places usually come with snobby service (see my report on the Federalist, fortunately now Mooo) because the attitude is to dumb everything down for the plebs. Admittedly the servers are working for a fraction of the tips they usually get, but restaurant owners should realize this and act accordingly to make sure people aren’t forever turned off from their business.
3. Don’t have it at all:
   I don’t like this, but at least I understand it. If you can’t do something right, don’t do it at all. I was talking to someone from a major Boston restaurant, and they told me that try as they might, they just couldn’t make the numbers crunch for both their kitchen and their staff. So rather than put out sub-par food, they just dispensed with Restaurant Week altogether.

Overall, I feel that Restaurant Week is an opportunity for Chefs to share their art with a larger audience, so in an ideal world, all the Boston restaurants would be open serving their regular fare with impeccable service. But until this world indeed becomes ideal, and every man, woman, and child can laze under groves bacon trees clustered around pristine ice wine lagoons, well just have to enjoy Restaurant Week as best we can.

But chefs could also view this as a challenge worthy of every fledgling contestant of Top Chef: create a great meal indicative of the quality and ethos of your restaurant on a budget. Of the restaurants I’ve been to for Restaurant Week, No. 9 Park accomplished this task the best. So it can be done, and done well.

With that all said, it’s time to rack up the reservations, loosen the belt a few notches, and prepare to dig in. Happy eating!