Smoothie Operator
A new YouTube video introduces Jamba Juice’s newest product: the Cheeseburger Chill. The spot introducing the drink made from hamburgers is part Mad magazine parody, part lame attempt at hoax, as if the maker couldn’t decide which to go for.
One thing is certain though: Jamba Juice would like you to believe that drinking a smoothie made of a hamburger is the equivalent of ordering a smoothie from McDonald’s. Both are gross, but then so is Jamba Juice. So rather than point out the differences between its sugary fruit drinks and McDonald’s equally-sugary-but-cheaper fruit drinks, Jamba Juice takes a cheap shot. Now we’d never advocate anyone purchase anything from McDonald’s, not even a smoothie, but still, this desperate cloying attempt to be viral is avoiding the fact that Jamba Juice makes some unhealthy products itself (and swaddles them in the all-natural cloak). Take for example the “smoothie” with more sugar than two pints of Ben and Jerry’s Butter Pecan ice cream.
The best part of the video, beside watching a burger blended into smoothie turn into something that resembles Jamba Juice’s Moo-Powered Chocolate Smoothie, is how well the spot lampoons the absurdly smug suburbanite vibe of the smoothie shops themselves. That and the hip-hop break at the end of the video.
‘At the Bottom of this Mine Lies One Hell of a Man’
Sausage king and country music star Jimmy Dean passed away on Sunday. He was 81.
“Through the dust and the smoke of this man-made hell walked a giant of a man that the miner’s knew well.” –Jimmy Dean, “Big Bad John”
The Steak Smell-Spewing Billboard
Do you live near Mooresville, N.C.? Have you seen (or more precisely smelled) the billboard that emits the smell of “cooking steak?” If so you need to let us know right now what this monstrosity smells like.
It can’t be good, can it?
We are all well aware of the role that the senses play in advertising, with shopping environments beginning to resemble nothing so much as they do a casino. But this roadside billboard on River Highway created by Charlotte-based ScentAir for Bloom grocery stores takes the cake … er, rancid filet. Fragrance oil is blown by high-powered fans during prime commute times of 7 – 10 a.m. and 4 – 7 p.m.
We’ve a few problems with this. OK, more than a few. But for starters, do people really want to smell cooking steak making their hungover ways to work at 7 a.m.? Second, can drivers and passengers in the cars screaming by on the highway really get the full effect (the answer, we suppose, is hopefully not — though it seems likely that those stopping for gas will smell it and probably pick up a Slim Jim meat stylus in the convenience store).
Which brings us to another problem: Does artificial meat smell make anyone want to do anything besides throw up? Let us know.
Grain vs. Grass Burger Bash
There’s much misinformation about grain- vs. grass-fed beef. Lately we’ve even been faced with the startling and confusing “vegetarian-fed” beef of Steak Shoppe. Which makes one think that Steak Shoppe has a zombie army of cannibalistic steers somewhere, gnashing their sharp canines and incisors and advancing in a threatening wave. OK, so fine, that story has been told before, except with mutton:
The point, dear reader, is that an awful lot of people know so little about where the meat they tear into around barbecues each weekend comes from that they just cling to catchphrases and buzz words to guide them. Dickson’s and the Eat Meaty crew have come to their rescue. And in doing so, they answer the eternal question: What are you grilling this weekend?
Dickson’s is offering a special that says basically, in the words of Sy Syms, an educated consumer is their best customer. And in this thinking the Chelsea Market-based meat shop offers its grand special for the uniformed and indecisive. In a battle for the ages it’s the Grass-Finished vs. Grain-Finished Burger Bash.
For $70 you get to take the Pepsi Challenge this weekend with enough fresh ground beef to make 20-30 burgers. The bash includes:
- 5lbs of dry aged Grass-Fed Ground Beef from Herondale Farm (in 2.5# packages)
- 5lbs of dry aged Pasture Raised, Grain Finished Ground Beef Wrighteous Organics (in 2.5# packages)
Not only do you get the beef, but you get a whole bunch of knowledge about your food and information about the small-scale suppliers Dickson’s uses. They’re out to change the bad name that grain-fed beef has gotten since being associated with factory farming and agribusiness. The biggest issue here are the farming practices, use of hormones and antibiotics and how the animals are cared for.
So, no, kids, grass-fed beef isn’t necessarily “green” or better and grain-fed isn’t necessarily evil. There are taste differences to be sure, and, after you fire up the grill this weekend and sample each type of burger you’ll know the differences for yourself and can decide which you prefer. Or you can just keep getting both.
And watch out for the killer sheep.
Burger War To End All Burger Wars Brewing in Sag Harbor
As we head into mid-June there is a bloody burger battle to end all ground meat wars brewing in Sag Harbor.
Bay Burger must be marshaling its strength to take on the invaders from the west.
First, opening as soon as this weekend is La Maison, a new French bistro resurrecting the former JLX space, which lay criminally fallow all season last summer. It’s in a great location at the end of Main St. right on the bay, and the interior, which the team from Trata who have taken over the place barely touched, is one of the few things that Ed “Jean Luc” Kleefield ever got right. Currently planned for lunch only is their American Imperial Kobe Burger, which may seem like a battleship facing a dingy when it faces off with Bay Burger, but we’ve yet to see this monster.
And coming in from further west is chef Laurent Touroundel who has been doing the chef’s equivalent of house hunting in the Hamptons. His LT Burger in the Harbor is slated to open in late June of early July. It’s a big month for former Jean Luc places, as LT takes over the space formerly housing JL’s Mumbo Gumbo monstrosity and more recently, his Grappa. It’ll be nice to have a genuine Frenchman in the space. Touroundel has split from his BLT Restaurant Group to work on side projects, so this will not be a BLT Burger, but a separate and independent burger boite from LT.
Anthony Bourdain: Parody of a Meat Puppet
Anthony Bourdain’s fear — well, not so much a fear as something he feels has probably come to pass — is becoming the Tony Bourdain wind-up meat puppet: pull the string and watch him say something sarcastic/nasty/witty/biting/endearingly outlandish.
When he appeared at Barnes & Noble in Manhattan’s Union Square Tuesday to celebrate the release of his latest tome of put downs, musings, humor and rage, “Medium Raw,” fittingly, Bourdain read a passage about his waning anger, introducing the reading by saying when he started writing he thought this would be his warm and fuzzy book. His rage has dissipated, and he’s worried about becoming “a long-running lounge act, the exasperatedly enraged food guy. ‘Rachel Ray? What’s up with that?’ (Cue snare drum here.) To a great extent that’s already happened.” To wit, on one occasion he received a fruit basket from Ray.
But obviously Bourdain didn’t write a gentle light-hearted book that gives blow jobs to all his past targets. No, there is one old foe he still has genuine contempt for, and that foe comes in many guises, from Jonathan Safran Foer to Sire Paul McCartney. “Okay,” he read, “I am genuinely angry — still — at vegetarians. That’s not shtick.”
But it is shtick to a degree, albeit shtick backed up by pages upon pages of lucid explanation. And the crowd — the massive seething crowd — ate it up. They filled the entire top floor of the Barnes & Noble, panting, yelling, frothing at the mouth and swooning over Mr. Bourdain: a TV food personality who made his name lambasting TV food personalities. Of course, to the cult of Bourdain he is much more than that. More than the guy who founded meat palace Les Halles, the closest thing New York has to a classic Parisian bistro. More than an acerbic curmudgeon. More than a chef without an apron. More than a former addict. More than a New York Times best selling author, who in addition to writing the memoirs he’s known for, is also pioneering a new genre of fiction: the food crime mystery. More than a cartoon amalgam of angry man parts. More than a raised eyebrow and a smirk. More than the sum of self-satisfaction and self-loathing.
And they love him for it. All of it. He’s got groupies galore. You half expected them to start flinging bras and panties on the stage. In fact, some are so amorous that his martial-arts trained wife has learned to lean in and tell them things like “Back off or I’ll smash your fucking face,” Bourdain writes in his book.
The staff at B&N gamely tried to keep the crowd in check, though it seemed a Sisyphean task, and during the Q&A they assembled two or three separate lines of people eager to get their books signed. The lines snaked around the room in Medusa tangles. Many of the assembled masses seemed more anxious to get the book signed than actually listening to its author speak. For example, three young ladies, even as they pushed and shoved their way onto a book-signing line, seemed incapable of shutting the fuck up for three seconds so that they or anyone around them could hear the answers to the questions asked of the illustrious author whose bones they kept talking about jumping.
Bourdain entertained questions genially and at length, though the unruly crowd tended to shout things at the stage that weren’t really questions, but more like demands for recitations. Yelling “HOW TO GRILL A STEAK” at the top of your lungs from the back of a bookstore (mind you from a distance of at least 100 yards) at Anthony Bourdain is along the lines of screaming “PLAY FREEBIRD” at a Skynyrd concert at a county fair in Des Moines.
To his credit Bourdain just laughed and mused “Is that a question?” Though later on when someone asked (politely and with the aid of a microphone) how Bourdain makes a hamburger he dutifully obliged. (The answer, in a nutshell: one leg at a time.)
When Bourdain was asked about the true identity of Ruth Bordain, a Twitter mashup of somebody’s idea of a cross between him and Ruth Reichl, Bourdain said he’s got some idea of who he or she might be — some suspects — but that he thinks it’s hilarious and he hopes the tweeter, who has been going strong since March and has more than 8,000 followers, goes on forever.
“I’ve been a parody of myself for so long, it’s good to have an official parody,” Bourdain quipped.
He joked that he could end up with some sort of two part William Shatner career, where he spends the second half making fun of the first half.
During the grueling book-signing portion of the even-tempered Bourdain remained affable tapping his cowboy boots along to the Stones “Exile on Main Street” (which played through twice in its entirety). He played the rogue at times, as the bookstore staff went through the motions of hiding-but-not-hiding the Brooklyn Lager they filled his mug with (which explains the smile). He seemed like nothing so much as a politician, shaking hands, smiling for all the pictures, and, yes, even cooing at and kissing babies.
Sign. Smile. Repeat. This is what becomes a man who maybe was driven by some demons once. Who drank snorted, sniffed and smoked his way into a caricature. Who now has eased into himself and is a aging gracefully.
“It’s Sandra Lee’s world. It’s Rachel [Ray's] world. Me? You? We’re just living in it,” Bourdain writes in the new book. It’s a good line, but he’s wrong. It’s Tony’s world. Sandra and Rachel? Well, they’re renting with an option to buy.
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Secret Place
“Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to confining, killing, and eating it?” –JSF
“I am going to write poem
about Jonathan Safran Foer,” he declared.
“I’m not going to like it,” she said,
then laughed in spite of herself, because
he’d made a reference to a part of JSF’s anatomy.
But she wasn’t actually laughing at that.
She had thought of something silly and domestic she had done earlier, like maybe she had picked up the wrong toothbrush or tried to use her flatiron before plugging it in.
But the Safran Foer poem did not amuse her,
how he started slowly at first,
putting French string beans up there,
but the limp ones tended to bend and break apart.
Then he got more bold,
experimenting at first with sugar snap peas then carrots,
before moving on to cucumbers.
Boldness grabbed hold, and he worked an entire zucchini in,
and clenching it, he eyed the summer squash, lustily.
“When I accepted my New York Public Library Young Lion, I had three turnips and a large leek secreted away,” JSF confessed. Then he added, “There on the steps beside Bryant Park, those leafy vestiges poked out and tickled my skin.”
But he never felt satisfied,
always left wanting more,
insatiable, hungry,
empty.
The Rusty Knot’s Pretzel Dog Lives!
You’d never have guessed it from the kitchen pedigree at the Rusty Knot — owned by a consortium including Bloomfield and Batali with a menu originally created by Jaoquin Baca (who has also haunted the grills at Momofuku, Wilfie & Nell and The Brooklyn Star) — but its premier menu item is so simple even the Zaro’s in the bowels of Grand Central terminal can’t fuck it up. Yes, we refer, of course, to the lowly (or exalted, depending on your point of view) pretzel dog.
Senior Platty Pants once referred to it as the ultimate drunk food.
It has been a stalwart of the Knot’s menu since it opened. Sure, the sublime bacon and liver sandwich has come and gone (unceremoniously ripped from the menu when Baco left) and come (to cheers all around) and gone again (with the new Mexican menu by recent arrival Sue Torres). But through it all the pretzel dog has never wavered.
As NBC New York rightly points out, it remains the lone holdover from the old menu to stave off the “disappointment-fueled riots that would likely ensue.”
A waitress at the dive paid tribute to the dog, telling a customer, “I’d quit if they took off,” but the she added wryly, “I don’t want to deal with that.”
The one thing is off the menu though is the vaunted dog and Busch draft special. For just a 5-spot any Joe could walk in off the street, get himself a so-salty-it-hurts dog with mustard and a cool Busch draft to quench his thirst. “The Special” is no longer listed on the menu, however, if you ask for it, they still give it to you.
We have ways of dealing with the Veto Vegetarian
Chef Erik Blauberg is the restaurant fixer. Like the Wolf in Pulp Fiction, he comes in (right into the kitchen — “I’m not in an office all day. I’m in the trenches,” he told the Daily News in 2008) when things fall apart. For a restaurant, that means empty tables.
Blauberg, who was formerly the executive chef at Manhattan’s 21 Club, has one strategy (besides “streamlining” the staff, which would shock no one) that might surprise: veganism. He adds vegan and vegetarian items to a menu based on the assumption that there are so-so-called Veto Vegetarians out there. When a vegetarian is eating out with us carnivores, goes the theory, the group will not eat at a restaurant that doesn’t offer meatless, (and, yes, even vegan options), costing the restaurant the business of the entire party.
Blauberg tells Plate magazine, in the June edition, about two long-running New York City restaurants he was recently charged with resuscitating. “If you put a vegan item on the menu,” Blauberg told Plate, “It will outsell a regular item.”
Now, while we’re not quite sure we’d follow that as a universal truth, Blauberg reports that at one of the restaurants, “We launched the new menu, and the first night we sold 60 or 70 vegan options.”
And at the other buckling boite, Blauberg advised putting a vegan burger on the menu to complement the Kobe burger. “Most of the time the vegan burger outsells the Kobe burger,” Blauberg says. “They sell 100 to 150 vegan burgers a night. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Of course, one reason might be that his vegan burger has a menu price of $15. Now, we’re not sure what the Kobe burger costs at the place because restaurants who call in Blauberg don’t exactly advertise that they needed the Wolf, but rest assured it probably ain’t $15 bucks. We have Side Dish investigating and will report back when we uncover this mystery omnivore’s delight.
And for the record: Give us a nice ground chuck and we are fine.
A Red-Meat Worthy Cocktail
Sure, you can have your Cabernet Sauvignon, your Bordeaux, your Zinfandel. But why not mix it up and pair that prime cut with a big, bold, bloody martini?
To celebrate the release of their book Flying Pans: Two Chefs One World, Ron Oliver and Bernard Guillas, from San Diego’s famed Marine Room, recently hosted a twelve course dinner at Café Bouloud on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Surprisingly, the Frenchman decided to scratch the wine and instead pair each dish with cocktails so complex they kept up with with the meal in terms of covering the flavor spectrum between sweet, spicy and just simply surprising.
The rock lobster salad, for example, served in a pool of cool orange sauce (tangerine and carrots) was paired with a rum (vanilla and spiced), coconut milk and passion fruit mojito (“a faux-ito rather,” said the table’s resident cocktail expert who insisted on swirling and sniffing every drink as though it were a glass of wine) and garnished with a “swizzle” of sugarcane. The formal dining room at Boulud, however, hardly did the tropical drink justice.
But the obvious climax of the meal was clearly the filet mignon, towards the end of the menu. After the plates of apricot ginger-glazed Tasmanian steelhead had been scraped clean and cleared, it was finally time for the main attraction. “This is what I’ve been waiting for,” said one eager carnivore.
The cocktail came first and was the color and texture of blood. The Hendrick’s based Grain of Paradise Hibiscus martini (you guessed it, faux-tini) includes peppercorns, oregano and hibiscus flowers and is garnished with a sprig of oregano and a pickled onion. This is no fruity beverage for your average dainty faux-tini-sipper. This is a red-meat cocktail. One young lady described it as “medicinal” and immediately sent it back in disgust.
The Filet Mignon Tierra Y Mar was served in a puddle of chile cocoa sauce and accompanied with a crab-stuffed squash blossom and maple boniato, a tropical sweet potato. The plump round piece of beef was charred black and the steak knife practically melted into it revealine a dark red inside. The table was quiet except for the occasional “mmm, so tender” and contented grunt.
Zucchini flowers were pushed aside as an extravagant afterthought. “Can you even eat that?” someone asked, poking it suspiciously (and stupidly).
Make your own Grain of Paradise Hibiscus Faux-tini:
- 2 cups dried hibiscus flowers
- 1 teaspoon grain of paradise black peppercorns
- 1 1/2 cups water
- 3/4 cup granulated sugar
- 1 tablespoon oregano leaves
- 2 cups Hendrick’s gin (do not bother making this if you don’t have Hendrick’s)
- 12 pickled onions
- 4 sprigs oregano
Combine hibiscus flowers, peppercorns, water and sugar in small saucepan over medium heat. Simmer slowly 15 minutes. Remove from heat. Add oregano leaves. Cover. Steep 20 minutes Strain through fine sieve. Refrigerate until well chilled. Combine 1 cup hibiscus syrup with gin in mixing bowl. Stir well. Transfer half of mixture to martini shaker. Add 12 ice cubes. Shake 15 seconds. Strain into 2 frosted martini glasses. Sker 3 onions onto each oregano sprig for garnish.
Mets fans came to eat pork and kick ass, and they are all out of pork
The Shea faithful have more reason to be giddy than they have had in a long, long time. So long in fact, that Shea faithful is the most appropriate moniker for the bleacher-dwelling denizens of Bailout Field. And Thursday night in Flushing, owing to a two-hour rain delay and an impending-sweep euphoria that even thunder claps and pouring rain could not dampen, fans proceeded to eat the complex out of house and home.
The Shake Shack-theme park behind center field filled with soggy fans, who stuck it out for the eventual 9:05 p.m. watching highlight reels from the 1969 and ‘73 seasons on the Diamond Vision (including one very surreal image of Tom Seaver shaking hands with Richard Nixon).
And up in steerage, the so-called “Promenade” deck where tickets can be had for the pittance of $25 bucks, the stadium throws the masses a bone, sort of literally in the form of a second Blue Smoke behind home plate (with another in the aforementioned theme park behind Center Field). This is also where Brooklyn Pilsner, easily the best beer to be had in the stadium, is available on tap. The specialty of the casa, though, is pulled pork. And by 7th inning the only smoked meat left in the park was the Phillies players. Blue Smoke reported that it was all out of pork, and Big Pelf dominated to such an extent that we predict that he will become the first Met to toss a no-hitter.
The sweep of the Phillies in which the Mets staff did not allow a run was the first such sweep by the Amazins in more than 40 years (the ‘69 world champs were the last to do it). Who can blame the Mets fans for celebrating their run? In the last week their team has made the Yankees and Phillies look as hapless as those rivals have a tendency to make the Mets look. So they left their stadium delirious, singing, chanting, jeering Philly fans, and quite full of pork.
Get Your Obnoxious Buzzwords Straight, Steak Shoppe
Tomorrow night, the East Village restaurant that tried (and evidently failed) to provide New Yorkers with a Permanent Brunch is trading in one silly gimmick for another and being reincarnated as Steak Shoppe, where all of the meat, from filet mignon to a hamburger topped with pineapple barbecue sauce, will be culled from 100% vegetarian-fed or exclusively grass-fed cattle. Steak Shoppe should be a little more careful when throwing around their buzzwords since vegetarian-fed means essentially nothing. Most assembly-line cattle are fed a mix of corn and grain (both non-meat). “Grass fed” implies free range, but they have not committed to this one, so who knows (maybe they are thrown buckets from the lawnmower’s discharge).
Moving on, we come across a new ethical sustainable locally-sourced Heritage-bred buzzworthy phrase we haven’t seen before: Steak Shoppe’s beef is “vintage.” Which sounds great, if you are shopping for a Halston, but a rib-eye? What is it, old beef? According to Steak Shoppe, it “comes from a consortium of family-owned ranches committed to raising natural beef to a higher level of purity. This beef is humanely raised and contains no added hormones, steroids or antibiotics.”
And you thought it was annoying enough that they had to use an olde thymey spelling with two ps and an e.
Best Part of ‘Lost’ Finale? The Barbecue Sauce Commercial
Now, people, we don’t much like the show Lost, and scratch our heads and make the excuse that we have to leave to continue marinating a skirt steak or something whenever someone tries to expound on the virtues of the show to us. But today, we realize that you are probably feeling a little dazed, a little angry — like a woman who has just learned that her husband has a whole second family with an albino pygmy wife in Cincinnati or something. But we digress.
We’ve always kind of felt that JJ Abrams’ goal was just to mess with as many people’s heads as possible. That there were no “answers” to be had in his psuedo-mystic-spiritual-sci-fi-adventure mindfuck. And whether the whole thing was all just one character’s dream or all of the characters were dead and in purgatory or if Abrams just wanted to be super-cute and claim it’s not purgatory because that would be Judeo-Christian mythology and the show’s great spiritualism is something else so they were in a purgatory-like place, but not “Pugatory,” well, reader, we just don’t care.
But there is one thing we do care about. Pork. And barbecuing it. Wait, that is two things.
Regardless, as much as we would never allow Kraft barbecue sauce within a distance roughly outlined by a legal restraining order of any meat we had supervision over preparing, we were tickled by Target’s Lost-themed ad of a boar running through the jungle on the island advertising said sauce. And we can’t help but concur with the commenter on New York’s Vulture who said, “At least the ads had closure.”
Navy Beach’s Champagne-Worthy Burger
We are looking forward to the flesh on display this summer at Mountauk newcomer Navy Beach. We refer, of course, to its burger, which is building buzz in early previews. Franklin Ferguson, the spot’s GM and a partner, tells us the burger was actually cause for consternation. “The burger!” he told as the place was finishing up previews. “I don’t know what to do with the burger. It’s so good. We spent more time on that than any other menu item — on all the other menu items combined. It’s a debate between my partner, myself and the chef every time we sit down. Finally we just put on two burgers.”
One burger on the preview menu, the Navy Burger, is a blend of chuck, short rib and brisket from Cromer’s done in-house, and has all the fixins, topped with Cabot cheddar and a bacon marmalade of the chef’s creation. “When you put everything together you can do it with a beer; you can do it with champagne. Because of the salty and the sweetness in the marmalade it works with champagne,” says Ferguson, who has a sommelier background. The second burger, the Traditional was dropped after previews, after everyone seemed to like the Navy so much (and order it more).
Price has been a sticking point with all the haute burgers these days, and Ferguson says the team tried to strike a balance. He knows all too well that sticker shock can lead to buyer’s remorse. “We didn’t know what to do with the price point: some people are doing like a $10 burger that’s a patty and some processed cheese. Other places are doing like an $18 burger, which is sometimes piss-poor and you’re like ‘This is a $20 burger?‘”
The all-out Navy Burger comes in at $15, and meatball sliders on the bar menu are $9.
Double Down, Meet Your Vegan Counterpart: The Handwich
The Williamsburg punk rock fast food-style vegan restaurant Food Swings has done it again. In response/protest/challenge to or, as they claim, mockery, of KFC’s infamous Double Down sandwich, the meatless hipster-haven has created the “Handwich:” Two faux chicken patties breaded with cornflakes and special seasoning, fried with daiya and tofutti cheese, faux bacon, lettuce, tomato, red onion and a sweet mustard dijonaise. Says Food Swings “we add veggies because they’re manly too!”
Because ones manhood obviously has everything to do with eating meat. Or faux meat, as the case may be.
Food Swings’ mission is not to make healthy food. Instead it provides a much needed fix for native midwesteners who moved to Brooklyn, bought skinny jeans, rejected the Middle American gluttony of their parents and yet still crave a Big Mac.
“We are not immune to the pull of tasty foods and we want to be able to eat them too, but without any harm coming to animals,” Swings told Green Planet. “So we go out of our way to create vegan versions of foods people say they wouldn’t be able to ‘live without’ if they went vegan; well, now they don’t HAVE to live without them!”
To that end, the chef who invented the Handwich should really be thanking KFC for the inspiration. And while most people are not attempting to eat ten of them, some of these crazy, manly vegans “like it so much, they eat one and come back to the counter and order one to go, too!”
