Freelancer015

Agreed. I've the Town House blog on my reading list for some time now, and the food certainly looks amazing. The chefs are John Shields and Karen Urie-- he was a sous chef at Alinea and she was the pastry chef at Charlie Trotter's. So Shields at Town House, Curtis Duffy at Avenues, Alex Stupak at WD50... what are other former Alinea chefs doing? kind of fun to play "where are they now"

I think the F&W award guidelines includes chefs who have been in charge of a kitchen for less than 5 years.

anyone have updates on Ko? the last I read was the Feb 12 NY Magazine article saying they were hoping to open in 2 weeks...

I work for an upscale fine dining restaurant that recently introduced an entirely new menu, after bringing in a new chef. The menu is more creative than before, more seasonally focused, and the new chef prepares everything fresh from scratch and spends a lot of time working with purveyors to source quality ingredients (unlike the former chef who took a lot of shortcuts). I also should add that our average price per cover has stayed the same. What perplexes me is that while most of our diners have seemed pleased and excited about the new menu, others have been very vocal about how they miss the old menu and have even posted unkind reviews about the restaurant on certain online forums. This is usually a slow time of year anyway, but business has definitely been slower than usual over the past few weeks. I'm guessing it will just take some time for the new stuff to "catch on"... but are there other things we should be doing to help ease the transition? I'm curious to know if others have had similar experiences... any advice is much appreciated!

Just to clarify- I tried mine both ways. The first batch without Pam. When those all stuck, I tried Pam on the next batch. I think maybe I will try a different recipe in case that could have been the problem... The recipe I used was Devil's Food Cake from the Martha Stewart Baking Handbook.

So last week I decided to make lots of cupcakes for a work event, and I purchased some silicone baking cups at Crate and Barrel. (I only have 2 muffin pans, but 2 ovens so I figured the silicone cups would let me bake more at a time, with the added bonus of not having to mess with the paper things.) Well, it was a disaster. The cupcakes stuck. Had a horrible time getting them out of the cups, even after I tried spraying some of them with Pam first. Has anyone else had a similar experience? I'm wondering if I should just try to return them, or is there any chance that these things need to be "seasoned" somehow and will work better after more uses?