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.

“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”

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.