hotels articles

JANUARY

* Baja Whale Watch Aboard Sea Lion–January 14-21, 2006

* Antarctica & South Georgia Aboard Polar Star

* Wolves & Wildlife of Yellowstone–January 23-January 29, 2006

* The Galapagos Islands & Machu Picchu-January 23-February 4, 2006

* Tahiti & Marquesas Aboard Spirit of Oceanus–January 27-February 6, 2006

FEBRUARY

* New Zealand Aboard Spirit of Oceanus–February 15-27, 2006

* Southeast Asia Unveiled

MARCH

* Total Solar Eclipse over Egypt Aboard Sunboat II–March 14-30, 2006

* Africa Mr Safari by Private Plane

* Peoples of the Pacific Rim by Private Jet–March 29-April 20, 2006

APRIL

* Southern Africa aboard Rovos Rail–April 5-20, 2006

* Japan Aboard Spirit of Oceanus–April 9-23, 2006

* Mysteries of the Azores Aboard Polar Star

* Red Sea Voyage Aboard Le Ponant–April 21 - May 6, 2006

* Madagascar & Seychelles Aboard Hanseatic

MAY

* Journey Through the Trans-Caucasus: Georgia, Armenia & Azerbaijan–May 27-June 14, 2006

* The Crimean Express: Russia, Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine By Private Rail–May 31-June 18, 2006

* Southwest Chinas Minority Peoples: Xishuanbana to Shangri-la

* Alsace: Cruising the Rhine River by Luxury Private Barge

* Cruising the Dalmatian Coast Aboard MY Monet

JUNE

* The Golden Ring of Russia Aboard Kazan–June 7-20, 2006

* Ethnology & Cultural Traditions of Siberia, Mongolia & Tuva–June 8-27, 2006

* Family Galapagos Aboard Santa Cruz–June 18-27, 2006

* Family China–June 27-July 8, 2006

* Family Greece Aboard Panorama–June 27 - July 8, 2006

* Alaska Aboard Seabird

* Bridging East and West: A World Leader Symposium in the Baltic–June 29-July 10, 2006

* Safari Sketching for Families in Tanzania

JULY

* Spitsbergen & the Russian White Sea Aboard Hanseatic–July 25 - August 18, 2006

AUGUST

* Trans-Siberian Express: Russia by Private Train From Moscow to Vladivostok–August 7-24 2006

* Native American Cultures of the Pacific Northwest

* Lost Cities of Central Asia: Archaeology in Uzbekistan & Turkmenistan–August 31-September 15, 2006

SEPTEMBER

* Earth Orbit 2006: Red Carpet Seminar on Planetary Science & Space Travel dates pending Russian launch

* China & the Yangtze River Aboard President

* The Black Sea Aboard Le Levant–September 14-25, 2006

* Cruising the Mighty Mekong Through Vietnam & Cambodia September 24-October 10, 2006

* The Way of Chinese Philosophers, Monks, and Poets

* Cultural & Archaeological Treasures of Bulgaria

OCTOBER

* The Silk Road by Private Train: From Beijing to Moscow–October 3-24, 2006

* Antiquities of the Eastern Mediterranean Aboard Le Levant–October 6-20, 2006

* Melanesia: Featuring Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu Aboard Clipper Odyssey–October 18-November 2. 2006

* Festivals of India Aboard Palace on Wheels Featuring the Pushkar Camel Fair-October 19-November 4, 2006

* Egypt & Jordan by Private Plane October 20-November 6, 2006

* Great Trade Routes by Private Jet-October 30-November 16, 2006

* Polar Bear Watch on Canada’s Hudson Bay-October 31 - November 5, 2006

NOVEMBER

* Archeology of Libya a Day of the Dead Celebration in Oaxaca

DECEMBER

* Family Antarctica Aboard Polar Star

* Family Costa Rica

Danny Glover, Alfre Woodard and other American entertainers recently headed to South Africa to urge Blacks there to participate in that country’s first fully democratic national election.

Glover, whose acting credits include The Color Purple and all three Lethal Weapon flicks, and Woodard, who starred in Passion Fish and Grand Canyon, were accompanied by actresses Angela Bassett and Alexandra Paul, and actor Delroy Lindo. Their interest in the election was sparked while filming the upcoming flick Bopha, the story of a Black South African township police officer and his family.

Their eight-day tour was aimed at educating South Africa’s 18 million Blacks–most of whom have never voted–and getting them to register for the April 27 election.

Glover said the notoriety of actors may help to ease the future voters’ fears in a way that politicians and other activists cannot.

In 2002, the geographic knowledge of college-age students in the North was highlighted in a survey sponsored by the National Geographic Society. Students in the U.S. ranked second to last among those surveyed on questions assessing basic knowledge of world geography. That many young adults got “the facts” wrong about particular places was clearly demonstrated by the survey results. What is less clear, but equally worth engaging, is what young adults glean about the rest of the world, in lieu of factual knowledge. For example, to what extent is the vacuum of concrete knowledge about the South Pacific filled by stereotyped visions of a magical, mythical paradise beyond the ambit of modernity? This article provides an analysis of data compiled from surveys administered to 149 students enrolled in a general education area course on the South Pacific at a Midwestern public university. The data suggest that most students bring a received wisdom on the South Pacific to the course in the absence of substantive information, confirming that this lack of factual knowledge has not been devoid of any content but, rather, harnesses both specific notions of a tropical paradise and generic notions of native “others” created by popular media.

In the North, “globalization” and references to the world as a “global village” have become the catchwords and catch phrases of the times. Yet, the results of a National Geographic-Roper 2002 Global Geographic Literacy Survey designed to determine the level of general knowledge about world geography among young people (ages 18 through 24) in nine countries (1) suggest that the language of globalization neither necessarily reflects, nor has generated, an interest in young adults in the North to discover the world beyond their national boundaries. The survey questions sought to measure such basic geographic knowledge as the ability to identify continents, regions, countries and other geographic markers, including oceans, on a map, as well as general familiarity with a number of facts of historical and contemporary political relevance on the global scene. Of particular concern to the National Geographic Society, which sponsored the survey, was the performance of the lowest ranking countries, including the United States. Young adults in the U.S. answered an average of 23 out of 56 questions correctly, ranking 8th overall, with Mexico in last place. While reportedly “young people in Canada and Great Britain fared almost as poorly as those in the U.S.” (”Survey results,” 2002, p. l), the performance of Mexico and the U.S., particularly in comparison with the highest scoring countries of Sweden and Germany, was attributed to relatively lesser levels of international travel, a largely monolingual population, and insufficient emphasis upon, and valuation of, geography in school curricular in the two countries (”Survey Reveals Geographic Illiteracy”, 2002).

The survey performance of U.S. young adults impelled the National Geographic Society to mobilize a panel of representatives in education and mass media to spearhead proposals for policies that would promote greater levels of knowledge of, and interest in world geography. Of course, the concerns of geographers go beyond the need to generate an interest in their chosen field. At a minimum, the wider implication of what the National Geographic society defines as “geographic illiteracy” is a population that lacks identification or any sense of connection with, and appreciation for, a wider world that exists beyond their immediate environs.

The authors of this article both teach undergraduate courses at a Midwestern public university in the U.S., regularly instructing students that fit into the demographic profile of those surveyed by the National Geographic Society. One author is an anthropologist and the other a comparative sociologist/criminologist and so both have experience teaching courses imbued with international content. Both have also conducted social science research in the South Pacific and Africa while their years of research experience inform the courses they teach. Thus, they have been in the position to gauge the type of geographic knowledge and interest that young adults bring to a course designed to facilitate students’ discovery of a world well beyond the borders of the Midwestern U.S.

Perhaps there is little wonder in the finding that young adults polled by the National Geographic Society, particularly those in the lower performing countries, tended to have less geographic knowledge about places physically distant from their own countries. Yet, physical proximity alone, or a lack thereof, cannot explain differences in the degree of factual knowledge that young adults have about particular places, particularly knowledge that is readily available from an atlas or other media. That many young adults get “the facts” wrong about particular places is clearly demonstrated by the survey results. What is less clear from the survey is what young adults glean about the rest of the world in place of those facts. For clearly, such lack of knowledge is not completely devoid of content. Power imbalances continue to define international relations on every level, notwithstanding discussions of the equalizing effects wrought by globalization. Hence, those in the wealthier industrialized nations, or North, remain in the position to dismiss, or perpetuate entrenched stereotypical notions of, the people and places of the “developing world,” or the South, in lieu of substantive knowledge while those in the South are enjoined to not only learn about and orientate themselves toward the nations of the North, but to regard them as their measuring rod for “development.” The implications that follow from these imbalances include notions in the North that there is little to be gained in amassing facts about strange and irrelevant places. Moreover, the survey cannot discern nor explain the persistence with which the lack of factual knowledge about “other” places is mediated by the patterned images or “othering” so often invested in representations of different regions throughout the South. And so we have “Darkest Africa” as well as Orientalism. And as Said (1978) demonstrated in identifying how Orientalism constructed the Middle East as a consummate “other” in Western thought, fascination with particular places derives from varied motivations with corresponding representational imagery assigned to specific regions. Meanwhile, much of the discourse on the Middle East in media discussions on the “war on terror” is filtered through with Orientalist themes. In short, the National Geographic Survey and similar surveys intended to measure basic geographic literacy alone simply cannot, nor are intended to, tap into the ways that a lack of concrete knowledge about people and places is, itself, culturally and politically constructed. In this article, we will show how the absence of substantive knowledge about the South Pacific by no means represents an empty slate in the minds of young adults. To the contrary, these college respondents’ notions of particular places could be considered a litmus for the ways that entrenched stereotypes, transmitted through various media, about people and places become the received wisdom of the society.

If you’re looking for unusual plants, you’ll want to visit Cottage Gardens of Petaluma this month. Everything in the nursery is on sale, just in time for fall planting.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Set on a terraced hillside, the nursery specializes in out-of-the-ordinary finds–including Mediterranean. Australian, and South African varieties that thrive in climates similar to Northern California’s.

“Rather than try to be all things to all people, we pick specialized groups of plants and do those well,” co-owner Daria Morrill says. Some of Morrill’s less common favorites, available in limited quantities during the sale, include Erica verticillata, an evergreen shrub from South Africa with feathery green leaves and mauve flowers in summer; and Lepechinia hastata, a dramatic 6- by 6-foot perennial from Mexico, with long, arrow-shaped leaves and mauve summer flowers.

But if you’re looking for some tried-and-true fall bloomers, you’ll find those too. Morrill’s favorites include Anemone japonica, asters, Helianthus angustifolius, and sedum ‘Autumn Joy’.

While Hispanic flavors and foods may have mainstream appeal, the Hispanic demographic is powerful and growing. The group is the largest minority in the U.S. and is expected to account for 24% of the country by 2050. Present-day Hispanics hold a sizable degree of purchasing power (see sidebar “La Energia”), estimated at $700 billion by Hispanic Business magazine (Santa Barbara, Calif.). As such, it may be surprising to some that many categories have yet to tap the potential of this group.

Jim Corcoran, vice president of the National Confectioners Association (Vienna, Va.), believes, “There is no bigger opportunity for confectionery manufacturers today (than the Hispanic population),” and certain manufacturers are responding. While Atkinson Candy Co. (Lufkin, Texas) and Pop Rocks Inc. (Falls Church, Va.) have made tentative moves into Hispanic candies, Hershey Foods Corp. (Hershey, Pa.) has introduced a line of sweets targeting the demographic. “With over 40 million Hispanics influencing all areas of American culture–from food to music to fashion–and with purchasing power of $630 billion, the U.S. Hispanic market represents a tremendous growth opportunity,” explains Thomas K. Hernquist, senior vice president and chief marketing officer with Hershey.

To appeal to the group, aside from a multi-year marketing agreement with Latina entertainer Thalia Sodi, Hershey has developed a line of products tailored to Hispanic tastes. Expanding its Jolly Rancher line, La Dulceria Thalia features Frutas Enchiladas Spicy Fruit & Chili Lollipops in three flavors: lime, mango and tamarind. La Dulceria Thalia Hershey’s Kisses are made with white chocolate and filled with dulce de leche, while the Cajeta Elegancita Candy Bar consists of wafer sticks layered with cajeta-flavored creme and drizzled with milk chocolate.

C What I Mean

The emerging Hispanic influence also is being felt in c-stores, and new products are taking the authenticity seriously. For Lettieri’s Inc.’s (Shakopee, Minn.) line of Buenos Amigos empanadas, “We had food experts take a look at it and try to mimic some of the authentic recipes out there currently,” explains David Poplau, the company’s director of marketing and sales support. “We did a focus group this past summer, which was a half-dozen panels of c-store customers, and it is amazing how sophisticated that customer is. They are demanding that authenticity, rather than a quasi-Mexican type food.” Such adventurous gringos are the primary target for Nueva Cocina Foods Inc. (Miami), though the company hopes to attract second- and third-generation Hispanics as well, assures company president Celeste De Armas. “In many ways, Latin food is where Italian foods were 30 years ago,” she believes, “where everybody knew Italian: spaghetti, lasagna and pizza. It was almost a staple, but the last 30 years has seen a jump from just the basics to the richness of the cuisine and all the variety. With Latin cuisine, we are at the tip of development or maturation of the cuisine in the U.S. and getting much more sophisticated. It will take a little time, but it will be there.”

Cindy Ayers, vice president with Campbell’s Kitchen (Campbell Soup Co., Camden, N.J.) shares a similar forecast. “As a basic cuisine becomes more popular in more mainstream venues, chefs at higher-end foodservice operations begin to ‘deconstruct’ that cuisine, looking for ways to leverage the growing interest of their patrons, while retaining their own uniqueness and creativity. For example, once salsa and tacos and enchiladas were firmly ensconced on America’s tables, high-end chefs were using ingredients like chipotle chilies and huitlacoche mushrooms, and menuing dishes from Oaxaca and Veracruz … but it does take time for these very authentic foods and ingredients to move from restaurant menus to supermarket shelves.”

Keep It Real

Whether due to increased travel or more-adventuresome palates, consumers are looking for an authentically ethnic food experience and realize that foreign cuisines are far from homogenous. Chinese food suffices no longer: now, the consumer wants Cantonese, Hunan or Szechwan varieties and, instead of Americanized Italian, the consumer is seeking Sardinian, Ligurian, Bolognese or Tuscan cuisines, which have prompted several recent introductions.

Companies also would be well-advised to draw inspiration from elsewhere in the region, considering the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet. Various studies have boasted of the cuisine’s ability to help lower the risk of heart disease and cancer, decrease cholesterol and increase life expectancy. The foods of Greece and southern Italy have been of interest to researchers, as these locales have a particularly low incidence of chronic diseases and high life-expectancy rates.

The positive health benefits of the Mediterranean diet were not lost on Campbell Away From Home, the foodservice division of Campbell Soup, when looking to expand its award-winning V8 line of soups, chilis and entrees. Amy Galgon, associate marketing manager with Campbell Away From Home, recalls. “In developing the new soups, we leveraged the creativity of our culinary resources, which led us to explore beyond the expected Italian and French into Greek and other Mediterranean cuisines. The Greek Minestrone variety features ingredients consistent with those recommended in the Mediterranean diet–tomatoes, orzo pasta, red lentils and olive oil, and it fits very well into the nutritional profile of the V8 product line.”

When a friend called to recommend that I read FAST FOOD NATION, she warned that I would find it virtually impossible to work in the industry again. She was right. Author Eric Schlosser presents an in-depth account of the companies and people who make double cheeseburgers possible. However, readers beware. After reading FAST FOOD NATION, you will never again be able to pull through a drive through with casual oblivion to what you eat or who servers you.

While Schlosser presents an excellent account of the stresses of working in fast food from the slaughter houses to the back line assembly, the one thing he fails to emphasize is the stresses on the managers of fast food. In Hardee’s, for example, restaurant managers only get their salary if they work fifty hour weeks. Since managers are required to wear headsets while on duty, that means fifty hours of the drive through dinging in one’s ears, even while serving customers at the front counter. Since fast food also makes up its labor out of management, that also means that the restaurant manager is either bagging food or working the drive through in addition to the rest of her responsibilities. Indeed, one manager and one cook (a total of only two employees) can run the entire restaurant for ten hours a day. Nevertheless, Schlosser does mention a pizza manager who makes $22,000 a year for a fifty-hour week. That’s about the average pay scale, including bonuses, for restaurant managers (not general managers).

Perhaps the most traumatic accounts of the fast food industry do not lie, however, in the endless drudgery of drive through, but in the slaughterhouses across the Midwest. As independent ranching practices give way to major corporations, the displaced lives seldom find voice. Schlosser does an excellent job of combining the facts with the faces that makes this tragedy real. From men who have given their lives or their health out of company loyalty or the need to feed their families, to the women who have sharpen their carving knives while preparing the family dinner, each account springs vividly from the pages.

FAST FOOD NATION is a must read for everyone. With the mobile lifestyle most of us have adapted, eliminating fast food from one’s diet would be virtually impossible. However, if consumers are going to continue to eat those delicious cheeseburgers and calorie defying meals, then they should be aware of what they consume and at what cost. Knowledge is power, and the necessary changes that must come to this industry will only occur if we educate ourselves and make the appropriate demands for ourselves as consumers. Extremely well written, well presented, and impossible to put down, FAST FOOD NATION comes very highly recommended.

Food safety used to be just that — handling and preparing food free of germs and other contaminants and having people trained to embrace the highest standards of hygiene and cleanliness serve it.

But when anthrax was sent through the mail just a few weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, killing five random people and exposing the soft underbelly of the nation’s food supplies to bioterrorism, restaurants added to their food safety procedures an appendage called food security.

The deliberate tampering of food with the intent to kill, injure or wreak economic havoc is light-years different from the accidental or natural contamination of food. Preventing those two occurences was front-of-mind for several restaurant food safety experts who participated in an annual food safety discussion during the recent National Restaurant Association Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show in Chicago.

Presented by Nation’s Restaurant News and sponsored by Colgate-Palmolive Co., the Food Safety Roundtable included Mike Starnes, vice president of food safety, quality assurance and brand standards for Denny’s Inc., Spartanburg, S.C.; Brad Lutz, vice president of people and learning for Dallas-based Romacorp Inc., parent company of Tony Roma’s barbecue chain; Tom Gribben, director of research and development, Columbus, Ohio-based Damon’s International Inc.; Adam Ashcraft, food safety adviser, Colgate-Palmolive Co., New York; Chet England, senior director and chief food safety officer for Miami-based Burger King Corp.; Greg Hernandez, vice president of food services and purchasing, Ruby Restaurant Group, the Newport Beach, Calif.-based parent of the 25-unit Ruby’s Diner chain; and Aftan Romanczak, director of research and development and purchasing for Steak-Out Franchising Inc., Norcross, Ga.

Milford Prewitt, national reports editor for NRN, moderated the panel.

NRN: Burger King’s Chet England gave an impressive overview of Burger King’s food security protocols at the National Food Safety Summit in March. Chet, could you get us started with a little recap?

ENGLAND, BURGER KING: Well, as many of you know, we’ve had some management changes, and our former management came to us from the airline industry. Our CEO and various other executives were senior management at Northwest Airlines. And I think one of the things that the airline industry, for all of its other issues, one of the things that it does understand, especially post 9/11, is security.

I’m a microbiologist. I’ve dealt with food safety for my entire career, but I’ve never dealt with the threat and the issue of food security that now comes before us.

So one of the first things I did was assemble a team - a multifunctional team of all of the stakeholders around the company — to look at this threat and see what it meant to our business.

Operations people, purchasing people, people from supply management, legal, etc., all came together, and after intense discussion on this issue, we determined there were four areas we needed to focus on.

[First,] the supply chain, to make sure that we are getting secure products moving through our chain, and that’s no small challenge with a company that does over $3 billion of procurement a year. We needed to protect our operations — no small challenge when you’re working with 12,000 restaurants in 58 countries, many in unstable parts of the world. We needed to protect our corporate offices, because back then, before 9/11, we had two offices and were in the process of moving from one to the other. Finally, there was the information infrastructure. This has always been an issue with any major corporation, but we had to pay even greater attention.

We realized none of us were experts in any of this, so we turned to a fairly major law firm operating in the United States with a security division in security consulting. They were extremely knowledgeable in counterterrorism. Antiterrorism, I learned, is different from counterterrorism, and they gave us a lot of excellent guidance.

Our task was to harden what they call in the intelligence field a “soft target,” like hotels, offices and retail outlets.

NRN: Can you tell us some specific things you did on the unit level?

ENGLAND, BURGER KING: Obviously, I’m a bit leery about talking in great detail about something that’s going to get published. We recognized there were limits to what we could do when you are in the business of inviting people into your business. But I would encourage anyone to limit access to the back-of-the-house.

In the front-of-the-house, we looked at employee screening, and that is a monster. But more important, we dealt with things that are accessible to consumers, like self-service drinks or condiment systems.

HERNANDEZ, RUBY’S: The back-of-the-house was a big issue for us, too. One of the things that we were doing is trying to assess who was coming into the buildings, whether it’s delivery people, drivers of trucks and so on.

And one of the alarming things that we realize is, other than the armored-car people, we have really no way to know exactly that the person who’s delivering our produce or our bread is really the right person.

In a town like L.A., where restaurant experiences tend to be remembered more far who ate the meal (and with whom) than for such details as what was eaten, it Is easy to forget that the city is home to plenty of establishments worthy of ink in their own right. Just consider Michael’s, the Santa Monica restaurant credited with the birth of California cuisine, and one that is still, 23 years after opening its doors, giving countless happy diners the chance to experience the culinary equivalent of that famous Southern California sunshine each day, on both sides of the country (the restaurant opened a New York City satellite in 1989). With that in mind, I spent 48 hours in L.A., sampling the cooking at six carefully selected establishments., and ignoring the distractions presented by the not-so-occasional celebrity sighting, all in the name of coming up with a handful of breakout meal moments.

“Let’s start with something old Hollywood,” I suggested to my partner as we began our two-day culinary tour. I didn’t need to say more-within minutes we were pulling up before the red-carpeted portico of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Longtime fans of the establishment may still bemoan management’s decision to refurbish the place seven years ago but even these quibblers seem to be in agreement that for Mildred Pierce-era glamour nothing beats the hotel’s Fountain Coffee Shop. On the morning of our visit the tiny space was already packed, but we spied two open seats at the kidney-shaped counter and lunged. Maybe it was a Pavlovian response to the sight of the room’s conic banana leaf wallpaper, or maybe it was the smell of waffles in the air, but I was suddenly ravenous. in true Hollywood tradition, everything in the Fountain room is cinematic in its perfection–the bowls of berries behind the counter are plump and vivid, the pink linens set out before us perfectly pressed–and it’s a camera-ready quality that exten ds to the cooking as well. No sad, brownish omelettes here–ours (mine flecked with chunks of smoked salmon, Alfredo’s with steamed vegetables) were sunny yellow mounds sparkling with just the right amount of butter. Similarly, bacon was lean, crisp and flat as collar stays, while hash browns, awaiting their turn alongside the griddle, were impeccable, browned-to-golden-perfection patties. But breakfasts greatest moment came at the end of the meal, in the form of the restaurant’s famous pecan waffle-an airy confection dotted with ground pecans and accompanied by small jars of warm maple syrup. Suddenly, L.A. was the capital of breakfast.

1:45 P.M., LUNCH: JOAN’S ON THIRD

8350 W. Third St., 323-655-2285

When an L.A.-based friend (and gourmand of longstanding) tipped me that he often orders lunch from a tiny place that reminded him of the early years of that NYC uber-market Dean & DeLuca, it was all I needed to hear. What he didn’t tell me is that, with just a small number of marble-topped cafe tables inside (and a handful out), anything but takeout during the busy lunchtime crunch requires as much negotiation as driving down Sunset on a Saturday night. Being New Yorkers, this proved less daunting than choosing what to eat–there’s a lot to tempt you here. Offerings at Joan’s change daily, with sandwiches listed on a blackboard in the center of the room, and salads and baked goods announced by their presence in the cases or atop the long marble counter. I chose a sandwich of Venetian coppa, provolone and olive paste, piled with greens on crunchy French bread. Along with a small side serving of curried chickpea salad, it was everything my friend had promised. After hemming and hawing, Alfredo opted for a Chine se chicken salad, somewhat less waistline-conscious (read tastier) thanks to the presence of fried chicken slices and crunchy Chinese noodles. After, there was the temptation presented by mountains of homemade desserts; but still feeling the effects of the morning’s earlier excess, we opted for a small bag of Joan’s own perfect peanut brittle and called it a day. . . until dinner.

10:30 P.M., DINNER: MASTRO’S STEAKHOUSE

246 N. Canon Dr., 310-888-8782

In this time of raw food fascination, word that one of L.A.’s hottest new restaurants was a steakhouse from the old school was something I had to check out for myself. After a short drive and a few wrong turns we pulled up in front of Mastro’s glass awning, handed our car keys over to the valet and walked inside. Given the buildup, anything less than Russell Crowe sitting at the bar would have been a disappointment. I was disappointed. A quick scan of the front room revealed a fairly unimpressive-looking crowd. What’s more, the power-generated sounds of live music from the upstairs dining room and a decor that had all the allure of a Maurice Valency showroom hardly matched my image of where young Hollywood was spending its Friday nights. At Alfredo’s urging we were shown to a table at the quieter downstairs dining room, ready to chalk the evening up to a mistake. My roomy and upholstered seat was promising, however, as were the oversized menus–details that seemed in keeping with the ‘fat cat’ tradition of Am erican steakhouses. The menu options sounded enticing, too; so enticing, in fact, that I turned to our waiter for help. “The Kansas City Strip,” he told me without hesitation. Our starters–the iceberg wedge with fresh creamy blue cheese dressing for Alfredo, a chopped salad dotted with pimento, radicchio and fresh hearts of palm for me–were impressive, as were the king crab legs Alfredo selected. And the steak? Our waiter had not steered me wrong–the generous cut (it could have fed two) was perfectly prepared, with a well-seasoned outer crust and cool, red center. Having found our rhythm, we stepped up to the plate for dessert, ordering slices of pecan and key lime pie, two giant servings that were confoundingly airy, despite ample amounts of butter and sugar. I loosened my belt a notch and congratulated myself on a job well done.

On Saturday, April 2, Brewery Ommegang and The Depot Restaurant of Oneonta will present the latest in the brewery’s 2005 “Great Beer Deserves Great Food” series. The event includes free brewery tours and beer tastings, along with a complimentary lunch.

During the opening remarks at a recent meeting of the St. Louis chapter of The Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), the following question was put to the audience.

“For your 50th wedding anniversary, you will be given a once-in-a-lifetime dinner honoring you and your spouse. You are asked to choose who will prepare the meal: a team of America’s greatest chefs or a team of America’s best food scientists?”

In a room of over 100 professional product developers and food scientists, you could have heard a pin drop. Of course, it was only a rhetorical question beginning the presentation, but it brought to mind an age-old debate. Is a food item best developed in a food science lab? Or, perhaps it is best created in a traditional culinary kitchen? What are the advantages of each, and what are the disadvantages? This month, Prepared Foods talked with some of America’s most prominent food developers to ask their opinion on this hot food topic.

“The test kitchen provides the initial arena for creativity. It is from this place that the passionate chef can flex his creative muscle. From here come original, wonderful new ideas. Then, a foodservice item must go to the lab for development and scale-up. All the many technical issues must be worked out. This could never be accomplished in a true culinary kitchen. From there, a final product must go back to the kitchen, for operational validation. Of course, it must be delicious, beautiful and priced correctly. But at the end of the day, it has to work in a real kitchen situation.

“In our restaurant, The Mist Grill, we created a fabulous menu item, Cherry Bombs. These consist of ripe plum tomatoes filled with gourmet cheeses, chorizo sausage and corn. They are covered in a won ton wrapper and deep fried. They are served on a bed of corn puree with a burning herb twig inserted into them. Real fire. They really do look like a firecracker, with a fuse burning. We decided to commercialize the item and offer it to foodservice customers. Of course, many changes had to be made, and many issues had to be overcome. To be addressed, these issues required a fully equipped lab but, in the end, we succeeded. And the product even went back to our chef’s kitchen to be validated in a real restaurant environment.

“Our past successes in developing great foodservice products modeled on successful new restaurant menu items prove you truly need both a chef’s kitchen and a food lab. But, the chef’s kitchen comes first and last.”

“The ideal situation is to have a team consisting of food scientists, process engineers, nutritionists, sensory scientists, packaging scientists and research chefs, as well as fundamental scientists such as protein chemists, rheologists, microbiologists and, of course, flavor chemists. This is not to say that wonder ful retail products have not been created in a kitchen setting.

“There are advantages and disadvantages to both kitchens and labs. Simply stated, the facility should fit the type of product that is being developed. If the product is for foodservice, then a professional kitchen facility is necessary to ensure the food and package is suitable for storage, handling, preparation and serving in the foodservice environment.

“The product development team will need the capabilities of food science laboratories to ensure that quality and safety parameters are identified and measured. A pilot plant facility is critical to work out the difficulties of scale-up for production.

“The culinary kitchen does augment product development and allow ‘culinarians’ to test the robustness of the product in a home cooking environment.

“Sophisticated equipment such as a GC-MS, along with a pilot facility to mimic production reaction, extraction, blending and/or drying operations are necessary. Precise analytical instruments are compulsory to measure critical parameters for the flavor specification (such as refractive index, specific gravity, moisture, acidity, salt, etc.).

“Specialized skills and equipment are vital to identifying the critical points of the process for scale-up, not only for the flavor industry but to ensure the safety of any final product. The critical control points could include monitoring the process time, essential temperatures (storage as well as processing or shipping), moisture, metal detection, foreign object control and sanitation validation–all of which require the support of a laboratory and accurately calibrated equipment. This level of sophisticated new product development would be impossible and simply could not be done using a chef’s kitchen alone.”

“Food technologists and engineers often do not have the same culinary skills or artistic expertise as the chef. Yet, food design labs have the same objective as a test kitchen: To prepare and present a food product that delivers satisfaction to the consumer every time. To do it in a safe and wholesome way, and to do it at prices consumers are willing to pay. However, for the food scientist, it is a much more serious-minded task. The product must be finished in such a way that it can be distributed locally, across the state or nationally at volumes that would cause local restaurant kitchens to implode. There are very real problems faced by technologists that are best dealt with by a lab: