Tess

I'll be in Las Vegas next month; hope they will still be filming. Surely it will be possible to hear gossip. I am guessing that sometimes they avoid doing too many things to showcase the city, because those things would be more apt to create spoilers. When they filmed in Chicago we would always hear about where they had been seen. Usually it was stuff that didn't help you figure out much. Edited to add: New York Times catches up with some former contestants: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/nyregion...?pagewanted=all I've been following Blais on Twitter. (And Grant Achatz.)

Wait until you get the midnight munchies, poke the centers out and eat them. That's what I do. Love the creative ideas. Don't forget sushi earrings! They're so much better made with real sushi.

Ditto. Fried sushi rolls sound kind of interesting to me, but don't eat these ones. Not worth it.

Your pictures remind me of Potawatomi Inn, where I stayed for a seminar last year. The food screamed "Indiana." They had wonderful homemade soup.

That would be hideous. How many calories a customer is taking in is none of the server's business! The server "can't understand" why you wouldn't want to save calories? She needs to be keeping her mind on the job, not on the customer's waistline. If I thought a server was doing that to me I would respond: "Do you think I'm fat?" and see what he or she said. Back to the original post: If you want to avoid weird intrusive server behavior, not going to chain restaurants is a good way to start. ← Did you see that I wrote that he, as the customer, is right? I'm just saying that it could have been the manifestation of a subconscious thought on her part...not malicious although not acceptable in a service occupation either. With regard to your comment that implies that this happens more often at a chain restaurant, could you explain that further? Maybe you are generalizing that chain restaurants hire/tolerate rude servers more than non-chain restaurants? It is my impression that the restaurants who train servers to do things like squat next to your table to take your order, and otherwise "personalize" service, tend to be corporate chains.

That would be hideous. How many calories a customer is taking in is none of the server's business! The server "can't understand" why you wouldn't want to save calories? She needs to be keeping her mind on the job, not on the customer's waistline. If I thought a server was doing that to me I would respond: "Do you think I'm fat?" and see what he or she said. Back to the original post: If you want to avoid weird intrusive server behavior, not going to chain restaurants is a good way to start.

Is the Ozerski piece the short humorous one you linked to? Yeah, I read that. And the transcript from 60 Minutes. Was the NY Post piece linked in this thread? If so, I missed it. Anyway, I sure did find your 4-point summary of what "people" are saying a caricature. I think that if you aim to make as strong a statement as AW does, there is something actually wrong if you don't garner strong rebuttals.

Really? It is bad manners to respond to someone who takes a strong line of argument in public? Rhetorically speaking, it is the easiest thing in the world to point to a "backlash," write up a caricature of the supposed backlashers' points, and pronounce them excessive. Sure, nobody is as bad as some people say they are. You're right-- as far as that goes.

What's unusual about this situation, to me, is that the owner has posted someone's email to a third site. As far as I can tell, that person had no idea he would do that. (Admittedly, I find the whole story kind of hard to follow.)

Isn't the posting here a violation of the author's copyright?

That's not the impression I got from your original posting and noting the title you chose. I tried to follow the rest of your story as it unfolded, but it's still not that clear to me. I agree with Food Tutor, it seems very odd to post this person's writings here-- after declining to post them to your own site, or for any reason, really. The restaurant owner didn't handle the situation very well, as it appears, but it looks to me like she got a crummy review from someone who was ill suited to review her restaurant, and then the double whammy of having her remarks (however ill-framed) posted here without her permission. I am sure that is not normal netiquette.

I'm afraid I don't understand why being married to Salman Rushdie would imply that one has bad taste. Is he known for having especially bad taste? At any rate, I think it's a great commercial. Makes me hungry for a good burger with bacon and gooey stuff all over it. ← Thank you for your comment about Rushdie. I wondered if I was the only one who found that comment baffling in the extreme. Yes, I would like to know whether Rushdie is famed for bad taste in burgers or if the "bad taste" comment refers to something else entirely. ← I've heard several people comment that Rushdie was not (physically) attractive enough to be married to her and immediately thought the poster was referring to that, IOW that she has poor taste in men and hence in burgers. It's a silly idea, though-- everyone knows couples where one person is better looking than the other.

In my experience with customer service of various kinds, a small percentage of people are really irrational and really vocal. When I've worked in retail, I've had people literally yell at me for not carrying some item that I did in fact carry. I could wave the item in front of their face and they would switch to yelling about something else without skipping a beat. I'm sure they kept on telling their friends we didn't carry Thing A even after they'd seen it. I would hope most people they complain to would consider the source; unfortunately, some of these people sound fairly reasonable if you don't know that what they are saying is just wrong. People would come in and tell me some story about something another employee did, which would sound believable if I didn't know it was totally out of character for that person. Sometimes you find out that one of those people is dealing with something really awful that is making them irrationally angry. One of my friends, after losing a loved one spent a lot of time calling places trying to get people fired-- that's how she put it. In fact that's how I started dealing with those types of customers: imagining that something terrible must have befallen them to make them act that way and trying to feel sorry for them. I don't think these people are the same as the poor tippers though. The poor tippers are cheap, or "don't believe" in tipping (like it's Bigfoot) or grew up in the Depression. A select few have a real grievance.

Are we watching the same Top Chef? The one I'm watching features such challenges as making meals out of convenience-store food. They have also developed dishes for TGI Friday's or one of those places. Anyway if she was really presenting herself as a "gourmand" in my understanding of the word, a thick greasy burger would be perfect.

Rona, I love reading about your trips with your mother. It's very much like the kind of stuff I did with my Mom and now do with my sisters. Very food and market centric and often with some component of going back in time. Thanks so much for posting!

I agree, and I'd love to see some way of incorporating past performance into the judging, but I don't see that happening. But at the very least I wish that they had changed their editing so that he was not perceived as quite so weak. They did their best to knock Stefan down in the last two episodes, and to bring Carla up, but they just coasted on Hosea. Like others have suggested, though, maybe that was all they had to work with; seems a shame, though. ← I wish there was less of that kind of editing, actually. Highlight the personal drama, sure, but please don't shape how the competition seems to be going so much. Toby Young makes a comment in his blog about one facet of cumulative performance in judging: http://www.bravotv.com/top-chef/blogs/toby...fense-of-stefan I feel that on Project Runway (once in the same family of Bravo shows) and maybe on Top Chef too, people have occasionally skated through based on previous performance well before the finals. Maybe also based on dramatic value to the show. At one point, as I recall, PR acknowledged that producers were allowed to intervene in a tie. I think it's just so hard to judge while sitting at home. In this case, Young thought Hosea and Stefan were tied and that Stefan should have won based on cumulative performance. (The reason why I feel more certain about cumulative performance factoring into PR eliminations is-- besides what Young says in his blog about his understanding of the Top Chef rules-- that the judges on PR talk more about what profile of each contestant is emerging. Are they too repetitive, do they take criticism into account, etc. And not just like they're observing something but like it is weighing into their decisions.) Edited for spelling.

The statement Bayless released explaining his decision was worded in such a way as to suggest (to me) that he decided to put the money in the foundation after the backlash happened. I don't wish Bayless any ill, but that endorsement was a real mistake IMO. Colicchio's explanation that the ad wasn't meant as a direct dig at Achatz sounds plausible enough to me. I still think it's weird to endorse such a crap product. He could at least have endorsed Coke Zero. Although, I seem to recall Achatz saying in an interview that he used to drink a lot of Diet Coke.

I would love it if someone comes up with something. For pork katsu the place used to be Takkatsu in Arlington Heights, but it closed. You can get OK noodles at a lot of places, but if there is one that people rave about, I've missed it.

I know several people that don't drink in the sense of consuming significant alcohol, but cook with wine and have tasted plenty of wine. In some cases they used to drink, in others they never tolerated alcohol well or whatever. No idea what the case is with Carla but hey, she won in New Orleans!

Which other part? There were so many, it's difficult to understand to which part you are referring. I thought the part with Augusto's family was rather painful to watch--I could feel the discomfort through my computer screen. But I did like watching Augusto's uncle cook. ← Oh, I'm sorry. I meant the comments AB made about Augusto which seemed disparaging, suggesting that Augusto was not doing the job AB expected on the show or did not have the personality he expected. I can't paraphrase them that well; it was so weird to me-- sounded so weirdly personal-- that I kind of questioned whether I was really hearing it. This was right when the segment with Augusto began. I thought Augusto appeared like a lot of AB's other local guides, not especially used to being on TV but (aside from not being as familiar with the area as most) not a negative presence at all. I'm going to have to watch this again.

I was perplexed by the focus on Augusto. Did AB express some kind of disappointment with him-- like he turned out to be too laid back or something? I thought it was a good idea to use a runner-up from that fan contest, and the stuff with his family was great but I didn't get that other part.

This sounds an awful lot like a conversation among teachers. You do something that's a labor of love, you work long hours and then have to listen to people comment knowingly about how you get "summers off." There's no exact equivalent of shorting on tips, but you do have people who believe you are their personal servant. They figure they pay tuition or, if it's a public school, they pay your salary in taxes, so they can waste as much of your time as they want. The whole thing leads to a similar feeling of being underpaid and underappreciated by people who don't know what the job really involves. I guess it's a reality of economics: we need people doing these jobs, but are only willing to pay X amount for them, and somehow they are always filled. Anyway, I don't think we're ever going to educate the public, at least not enough to solve the problem of poor tipping. It's always going to be a problem with some percentage of people. It does seem like it should get better with the phenomena of Food Network and celebrity chefs, but I don't really trust that kind of thing.

Exactly! If things conctinue as they are now, I can afford to dine out. I will make sure to show my face at favored local establishments. That would be one of the last things to go. Dining at restaurants just as a substitute for cooking in was one of the very first things to go, however.

We're talking U.S. here, right? I think that with people from other countries, you just have to suck it up. If you get huge numbers of customers in that situation, you will have to weigh the benefits of adding a service charge and stating such on the menu. I do think asking if the service was OK is fine. If a customer hears that question repeatedly, they may begin to put two and two together and realize their tips are sending a different message than they intend. That said, there is nothing more tiresome than someone who thinks it's their job to "educate" their customers about the realities of their business. I owned a retail business with someone who acted that way and god was it a crashing bore. It probably annoyed me more because I got it all day, but I saw customers rolling their eyes too. And it really doesn't work. You're repeating yourself over and over, but to different customers. No lesson is going to sink in that way.

From a customer's point of view: I think you can ask if the service was OK, as they are leaving. Sometimes people have forgotten to leave a tip or done the math wrong. I have been in parties where someone said they were leaving a tip and didn't, or left a truly lousy one. And, there are those individuals who will take money from a stack left on the table by their own party, either because they misunderstood the math of how the tab was divided, didn't agree with the tip, or because they are really that dishonest. Our group was once confronted by a server; one member, who had taken the money off the table, ponied up quickly but in a way that suggested to me that this is something she habitually does. Horrible thing to find out about that person but I'm still glad we were asked. Don't mention about the tip. If someone doesn't get what you are driving at, it was likely not one of those types of screw up.