I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant On TripAdvisor: Once upon a time, long before I began selling my face by the acre for features on VICE dot com, I worked other jobs. There was one in particular that really had an impact on me: writing fake reviews on TripAdvisor. Restaurant owners would pay me £10 and I'd write a positive review of their place, despite never eating there. Over time, I became obsessed with monitoring the ratings of these businesses. Their fortunes would genuinely turn, and I was the catalyst. A Restaurant Ruined My Life: Seven years ago, I was an analyst for Telefilm Canada, earning a paycheque by sitting in a grey cube and shuffling box office stats. At the end of each day, I would rush home to my wife, two daughters and truest passion: making dinner. The sights and smells of my kitchen were balms to my soul. Vladimir Mukhin offers Japan a culinary reminder that Russia is just next door:  Chef Vladimir Mukhin is spearheading a culinary revolution in … [Read more...]

Why mushrooms may be the best food to fight aging: New research reveals that mushrooms are “without a doubt” the highest known single source of the antioxidants ergothioneine and glutathione, which are both associated with anti-aging properties. A team of researchers from Pennsylvania State University found that mushrooms are surprisingly full of both compounds, and that some of the 13 species they tested contained vastly higher levels than others. Common white button mushrooms, for instance, had low levels of the two antioxidants compared to some other mushrooms but still higher levels than your average non-mushroom food. The winner “by far” was the wild porcini mushroom, which is convenient since it’s also delicious. And even though some foods lose their health benefits when you cook them, the antioxidants in the mushrooms appear heat-stable and thus unaffected. The research was recently published in the journal Food Chemistry. Jeremiah Tower Is Done With These Gimmicky Food … [Read more...]

The Thrill of Losing Money by Investing in a Manhattan Restaurant: If you live in New York City long enough and appear to be successfully employed in an industry that Bernie Sanders dislikes, you will be asked at some point to do three things: sponsor a table at a vanity fund-raiser, become a “producer” of a Broadway play, and invest in a restaurant. I had no trouble declining the honor of hosting a benefit or helping “Hedda Gabler” back to the stage. Nuns open restaurant offering free food in London – named ‘Nundos’: An order of nuns has opened a restaurant in East London offering free food, named “Nundos”. Sisters from the Daughters of Divine Charity opened the temporary – or “pop-up” – restaurant in Shoreditch on Tuesday offering “food for the soul”, such as chicken soup and lentil broth, free of charge. John Besh restaurants fostered culture of sexual harassment, 25 women say: Madie Robison said she was done with the uninvited touching from a male colleague, the comments about … [Read more...]

The Politics Of Pizza: How Italy's Flag And Food Are Deliciously Intertwined: A nation's flag embodies a defining aspect of its identity. It could be related to geography (the rising sun in Japan), nature (the maple leaf of Canada or the cedar of Lebanon), religion (the Christian cross or the Islamic crescent and star), political ideology (the hammer and sickle) or mythology (the Welsh dragon). In a new book on flags, A Flag Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of National Symbols, Tim Marshall explores how a "piece of colored cloth" can arouse profound emotions of loyalty, love and pride in the breasts of its citizens. Celebrate Autumn’s Harvest with Food Tank’s Fall Reading List: For fall, Food Tank has compiled a list of 17 books we hope will educate, inform, and inspire. As the weather cools and we turn to more savory foods, learn about the history of butter, duck season in France, and the life of Patience Gray, the visionary behind the modern slow food culture. For … [Read more...]

NY restaurants - under threat? Des Gunewardena, the chairman of D&D Restaurants (the old Conran group), was in even more ebullient form than usual when I bumped into him recently over lunch in the newly opened second branch of Blacklock in the City of London. His mood, he explained, was primarily due to the fact that he had recently returned from New York. 'They may have Trump', he observed, 'but the city is so confident and positive that they set an example to us all.' With that, he moved on to enjoy some well-grilled meat with his long-standing lawyer. José Andrés and World Central Kitchen Have Served 130,000 People in Puerto Rico: José Andrés and team have surpassed the 100,000 meal mark. Over a week since arriving in Puerto Rico to help those affected by Hurricane Maria, Andrés and his nonprofit World Central Kitchen have served a total of 130,000 meals out of mobile kitchens, restaurants, food trucks, and the Coliseo de Puerto Rico, the island’s largest arena — smashing a … [Read more...]

José Andrés, a naturalized U.S. citizen, has become the face of American disaster relief: Unlike the president, Homeland Security or the Federal Emergency Management Agency, José Andrés has no responsibility to respond to natural disasters, and yet the Washington celebrity chef has become a reliable presence in disaster zones, deploying his Chef Network to help feed thousands of displaced people. Andrés was among the first responders in Haiti and Houston, and now he and his crew from World Central Kitchen are on the ground in Puerto Rico, improvising ways to feed countless residents who are stranded without electricity, drinking water and food in the wake of Hurricane Maria. With little ability to speak with the outside world, Andrés has used his Twitter feed to keep followers updated on his progress in the U.S. territory. A Battle to Save the World’s Favorite Treat: Chocolate: The trees of the International Cacao Collection grow here in an astonishing diversity of forms, … [Read more...]

‘If the children grow it themselves, they’re more likely to eat it’: “These are peas,” says a tiny girl in a red bucket hat, her face a tapas of freckles. “We eat them for snack time. They just taste like ordinary peas; like you’d eat for your dinner.” I am standing in the Marlborough School allotment, tucked into the side of a sunny hill in Falmouth, Cornwall, surrounded by children no taller than my hip, as they chew on nasturtiums, studiously check the soil temperature and throw themselves on to the grass beside a bed of carrots to look for slugs. This is where groups of Marlborough students, aged five to 11, and their parents, come and grow their own courgettes, broad beans, kale, carrots and herbs, all to end up in their school dinners. London restaurants – at tipping point? I can still recall the details of a conversation 15 years ago with my friend Danny Meyer, the successful New York restaurateur, photographed above at his restaurant Maialino by Melissa Hom. He was … [Read more...]

'A dream job': chef Gabriel Gaté on eating his way through the Tour de France: French chef extraordinaire Gabriel Gaté may have the best job in the world. For more than half of the year he travels the spectacularly scenic route of the 21-stage Tour de France bicycle race, sampling produce from artisan cheese-makers, pastry chefs and winemakers. How Daniel Humm became the world's best chef: It had been snowing all night. The road down the mountain snaked through an icing of whiteness. Daniel Humm, the young chef whose cooking had brought a Michelin star to this patch of the Swiss Alps, had crawled into bed around three in the morning. Now he was up again, two or three hours later, his bones aching and his eyes bloodshot. Humm had to make it from his kitchen at Gasthaus zum Gupf in Rehetobel, Switzerland, to the market in Zurich, about 90 minutes away. He needed to buy the best lettuces and herbs from the countryside, the best lemons and oranges trucked in from Italy. His dishes … [Read more...]

Two Kitchens: an exclusive extract from Rachel Roddy’s new book, part one: Of course I thought Rome was glorious, but I didn’t want to stay. A month – three at most – then I’d return to Sicily to finish the clockwise journey I had interrupted. An area of the city called Testaccio tripped me up with its workaday, easy charm. It was where I met my partner, Vincenzo, a Sicilian, and it was nearly 12 years ago that we settled into a life there. Although Testaccio is in the heart of the city, it feels more like a village; it is where Roman food – distinctive, traditional and inextricably tied with the history of daily life of the place – seems to permeate everything. It was living in this quarter of Rome that the idea that “every cuisine tells a story” made absolute sense. I soon discovered that if you ask someone to show you how to cook something, they almost always give you a story too – be it a small domestic tale or a great, sweeping history. You also get lunch … possibly a rambling … [Read more...]

The New Foodieism: Like many of us, I spent the winter muddling through a mental miasma, pondering the meaning of life and democracy. I did, of course, think about “food” — how it’s produced, marketed, discussed, consumed, and so on — during my self-imposed hiatus from near-constant writing, which began more than 18 months ago. But I also wondered about its relevance. So much so that, after the election, I said that working on food issues had to take second place to “defending democracy”: It seemed to me that food was somehow less important than it had been BT“Before Trump.” Since this is a food column, after all, we could also say “before the chickens came home to roost,” acknowledging that the founders actually established a faux-democracy, which allows the system to be rigged to the point where even a statement like “all white men are created equal” is a joke; and how that, in turn, left a large enough number of voters apathetic and/or frustrated enough to make room for a disrupter … [Read more...]