gfron1

We have a new Szechuan restaurant in St. Louis and its really good. Like I've now gone three days in a row good. Previously the best I've had in the US was Chengdu Taste in Vegas (also in LA), which beat anything I had in Chinatown San Francisco. This new place isn't as good as those, but its good. But the strange thing is that I've asked for a pot of hot tea each time and they say they don't have it. There's a definite language barrier, but they do know what I'm asking for because they apologize and offer me a cold canned tea instead. But their explanation isn't understandable. Three different servers, two different managers have explained it to seven different guests at my tables and there is no understanding it. So I'm wondering if it is possible that tea is not normally served with meals. That seems incredible odd to me since I always get a pot of tea at all regions of Chinese restaurants, but maybe its a thing. For the record they have only been open two months and easily 1/3 of their menu items are whited out already, and there were new white outs between each of my visits so they clearly have some basic restaurant organizational skills to improve upon. Anyway, just curious...

I've recently been seeing great prices on flights into our 2nd tier airport across the river. Its actually closer to the hotel than Lambert International. The airport is called MidAmerica St. Louis (BLV) and is serviced by Allegient Airlines. You would save oodles of time on security and baggage. Here are some of their non-stop destinations: Sandford/Orlando SFB Tampa St Pete PIE Vegas LAS Ft. Myers PGD Destin VPS Jacksonville JAX Myrtle Beach MYR Ft. Lauderdale FLL Phoenix/Mesa AZA And if you're coming into Lambert, remember to check out Southwest and Frontier, both of which have directs and don't always come up on searches.

That's a beautiful idea, but a bit too much for this. All guests will be given an amenity gift/parting gift. I'm still toying with what the gift will be, my intention is to have it be something that can be enjoyed the morning after - maybe an individual quiche, or breakfast bread or something similar. But finding the box will play a role in the decision of the food since I'll have less options on the boxes than I will the food. Being a tasting menu each course will be described verbally at the time it is presented, and so they won't get their menu til the end, and I want them to have the menu in the box to invite memories or conversation the morning after.

Yep, bullshit article. I use locally milled flours that are actually higher content. I do a three-way blend of my local farmers' soft white, hard red and Heartland Mills AP. Cold ingredients with a very light hand. In fact I don't touch my biscuits at all - all pastry cutters (to shape) and forks (to mix). I use shit butter and nothing special cream. All three restaurant reviewers in town raved about our biscuits and customer response was no different. White Lilly...GTFOH!

BTW, today being Black Friday, both of my furniture vendors are having sales and we're going to save even more money. Now we'll just have to store all that furniture for 6 weeks.

That's in an interesting idea too...will look into those. I had missed this earlier. If the price is right then this could work well. For all of you who mentioned the size of the print, there's 8x5"x11" of reading space....very readable. And yes I know in the DIY printer example above there won't be that much space but we're not talking about cramming 12 courses of ingredients onto a 2" square. My eyesight is horrible and getting worse every year so I'm very sensitive to that in all of my design elements.

I remember that episode clearly. Absolutely!

Those cocktail glasses are for our cocktails. Our wine glasses will have stems. Not fussy balloon stems, but stems.

Those are the only two that I've used. The picture showed me the stemmed which I've never seen before. These are for cocktails only not wine. Wine will be a totally different set. (And as I said, these aren't available so they won't be our cocktail either)

A somewhat forced day off for me so here's a good opportunity to share a bit more of what's happening and where things stand. The building is well underway with its construction. The landlord's internal contractor should be done any day now with the "white box" work (utility rough in, dry wall, patch the floor and some walls, HVAC complete). My contractors will go in as early as next week. They're just waiting on the final permit sign-offs. Unlike a traditional project, our white box and build out blurr both in labor and cost. A good example is the bathroom. White box normally gives you a finished bath with fixtures, but we knew we were going to upgrade the toilet and sink so the contractor stopped at rough in, and gave us a credit to be spent on the build out. My contractor and I have selected mid-tier fixtures which cost a bit more, but will definitely offer a stronger message to the guest about our quality. I've also been spending inordinate amounts of time on flatware, glasses and a few more dishes. The flatware was decided and will be purchased next week (unless my vendor has a Black Friday deal I can't refuse). I haven't settled on my glasses yet but gave my vendors the glasses i want, but aren't available for them to find something that I'll like just as much. At home we love our Denby Oyster tumblers. Unfortunately they are no longer available. I like them for three reasons. First, they drink really well, meaning the way liquid pours over the lip into your mouth. Second, they have a heavy bottom making them very upright steady. And lastly, they feel great in your hand between the weight and the shape. You may recall that I have custom dishes being made from artist Alice Ballard and her meditation bowls, and those were chosen because I want people to feel the dish in their hand and have that be a part of the experience. Same goes with glassware. I've also been shopping insurance...boy howdy its a lot more expensive than it was for my operation in New Mexico...like $8k v. $2.5k per year! Yikes! A lot of the budget variance I just ignore or absorb into my projections, but that one I had to update in my cash flow statement. I've picked Resy.com as my reservation system, and Square as my POS. Square is an iffy choice. I could probably get slightly better prices elsewhere, and possibly more robust OS elsewhere, but they are based in St. Louis and just rolled out a new restaurant POS system, so they gave me a decent deal, and they are only month-to-month, with no contract, so if I don't like it I can move on to someone else. These are not the sexy decisions, but necessary. In an economy with 3% unemployment, even with our high profile, it has not been easy finding my Beverage Manager (the only position I am currently recruiting for). There are just very few people out there with the skill set I'm looking for. If they're good, they're in a good job. But we've had some strong leads and the opportunity to mentor a less experienced person into the role. What I need is a big personality, a huge curiosity and desire to create everything from scratch, and they need a great palate for cocktails. I can handle the beer and wine if needed, but cocktails are not my strength. We've spent a lot of time on furniture as well. This is an area where I've had to tone down my dreams. Commercial furniture is expensive and we have a reasonable but reserved budget on all of our furniture. We've also added an area to the floor plan that required un-budgeted furniture...more on that in a moment. For dining room chairs we selected the Article Chanel armchair. Our bar stool is the Industry West Circuit barstool. Our tables and bars are being custom made. We ended up with this awkward space in the bar that we were going to put some two-top tables, but I told the designer that I wanted a place for post-dinner optional experiences. My thought is that most guests will be coming for an anniversary or birthday celebration, so if I could create a romantic little nook where a couple could relax after dinner with a few treats and a bottle of champagne, that would be a great use of space. I then looked for high back love seats and fell in love with this one: But at around $5k a piece and design considerations we stepped into Knoll Rockwell high back love seat. This is more appropriate for our overall feel and at half the price of the Boss. No need to tell me if you hate any of this stuff because the ship has left the dock. I am very happy with all the design choices (note that all of these are stock photos and don't have our fabric selections), and we're even a touch below budget! So that's where things stand. There's a whole bunch of financial stories to share but I'll save those for another day. ETA: Current construction timeline has us opening the end of January.

"On?" In. When have you ever known me to not do goofy stuff like that

Great lead. They're sending me samples that they think will work. I want to print my nightly menu, so, small runs changing about nightly.

Hmm. Well I don't like those answers very much I need larger quantities and the ability to print on the fly. Food safety is not an issue for this application. Size is fine if they come in around 2" cube. And to Lisa's concern about damaging the printer, yes, it needs to be no thicker than card stock so my color laser can handle it. I'll check out quiet's lead. I'll also check with my local paper packaging distributor.

That's the kind of thing I'm looking for. I don't need very big...I'll check my drugstore but if you happen to see one in yours I'd appreciate a pic or a brand name.

What I really want is a Chinese take out box that hasn't been folded that I can run through my laser printer as card stock. I suppose any box or cube would work. Has anyone seen such a thing that is a square or rectangular shape that a printer would accept?

I can answer that roundabout by saying my greatest fear is coming off as a gimmick. Yes, i want to educate, but I'm only using the knowledge to give me a spark on my menu design. For example, turns out because of the German Euro immigrant influence I found all sorts of kruellers/doughnuts in the cookbooks. So that would be fun for me to always have a krueller on every tasting menu - both sweet and savory. I'd like to be able to talk about why that is, but certainly not claim it as an authentic Ozark experience. I agree on all of this and I am trying to dig into older sources. I want to know what enslaved people contributed and was it more rooted in their African cuisine or previous ownership's cuisine. I want to know what indigenous people at before resettlement. And of course, the intricacies among the Euro-immigrants. A good example is you mentioned corn bread. Yes, but styles seem to have strong difference. I'm still teasing this out but pone seems more common in Northern AR and Souther MO than elsewhere. My process is to keep digging to find the first reference to pone either as a term or possibly just a description of the technique.

Remember I am trying to define Ozark cuisine, and differentiate it from other identifiable cuisines. So boundaries are not a limiting factor so much as concentration of ideas. Seeing what surrounding communities did and didn't do is important to the process.

Just back from a research trip into the Ozarks. We drove into the Fayetteville area to go to the University's library. On the way I placed my order with Osage Clayworks for custom crocks and jugs. The next day we got to the library where I had arranged a private handling of their rare book collection. They have a special Ozark Heritage collection which includes all sorts of old cookbooks. This one is actually crap but still kinda fun in a mans-plaining sort of way. This one is much cooler. The old one I viewed was 1904, and in all about 20 books. More details later. \ (I'm sure there's a way to flip this image but I can't figure it out.)

I know I keep my room colder than most here, but I fill, scrape, 3 seconds of rapping and dump. Perfectly thin and consistent shell every time. In my old kitchen I was working in a much too warm space and yes I had to let it sit for up to a minute.

One thing I always strive for is to not replace an item, but to find a recipe or technique that achieves the same goal without a substitute. For example, Americans are so gluten-free focused right now that many are doing substitutes for their cake flours. I prefer to make daquoise which doesn't include flour (some do, I know). So my only feedback is to explore this idea a bit and you might find some interesting ideas from around the globe. An example is I started making the traditional Indian chickpea breakfast bread for one of my lunch items and people loved it...and it happened to be gluten free.

No insurance issues. If I recall the conversation correctly she attended without concern last year, and so would be fine this year. For anyone whose young person has not attended before I'm going to say high school and up. Just remember (anyone who hasn't brought a young person before), this is a commercial workspace with dangerous equipment, and it gets very hectic, so if the younger person is mature enough to stay focused on the task at hand, and they are high school aged, i welcome them.

Right, I think making sure we're using the term espresso correctly is important. In the coffee shop world there are distinct formulas (google them), and I can tell you from experience that the key factors are: grind, volume of ground, tamping strength, water flow/pressure and water volume. If you aren't controlling those you aren't really making espresso. Here's my explanatory story. I hate coffee, but last year I opened a daytime cafe with espresso. We had a fancy espresso machine. Because I was now doing 5 am shifts I started drinking copious amounts of espresso. Always bitter, always nasty, always supporting my hating of coffee. I switched our beans to Ethiopian and backed the roast way off (technically it was the development phase), two things that should have helped with bitterness. But still I kept drinking nasty coffee (customers really loved the changes). I can't remember why but I brought my roasting mentor in for a coffee checkup, and he watched as I pushed the "chef shot" button which pulled a quad shot, and he noted that I used about 40% too many grounds. So I dialed back on the grounds and used the 2 oz button (1 oz is standard but I don't know any coffee shop that doesn't do a 2 oz draw). And guess what...I like my coffee now! Second thought, at home i do Aeropress (I promise I really do hate coffee despite how much I drink), and most believe that Aeropress makes coffee less acidic and less bitter. My advice regardless of what you are technically making is to try less grounds, less water and steep a bit less. Think Americano for your final drink - top off your espresso with hot water to get the desired volume. Give that a try and see what happens.

that's what I'm aiming to do.

A case of fruitcake craving...but only one loaf. Crazy expensive.

Looks like this was a small intimate workshop. What, maybe a dozen attendees?