If you’ve ever felt like you need to send off flares and sparklers in order to get a drink from the bar, bartender and bar culture author Rosie Schaap has some advice on things that will work to get served faster. [More]
food
How Large Should A Large Pizza Be?
By 10.6.11
There is no national or international governing body that keeps track of how big a pizza is supposed to be. This is probably just as well, but Todd was still disappointed when he ordered a “Large” pizza from Pizza Hut and received a 13″ diameter pie that left his party of three hungry. [More]
Higher Education Charging High Prices For Food On Campus
By 10.5.11
It’s not just drug stores that have boosted prices for grocery items, but also campus dining options at universities. Reader Bryan Carroll wrote an article about them for his school newspaper at Stonybrook University, The Statesman. On average, he found the food items from the campus commissary were a whopping 42 percent higher than local grocery stores. [More]
How Buying Grocery Items At A Drug Store Can Be A Bad Deal
By 10.5.11
Drug stores have been adding more and more food items to their shelves lately, but is it a good deal to get your mac and cheese from the same place you get your Advil? ConsumerWorld did a mystery shopping investigation to find out, and the results will give you a headache. [More]
Peel A Head Of Garlic In 10 Seconds
By 9.30.11
Peeling garlic can be a pain in the tuchus but here’s a method for peeling a whole head of garlic in less than 10 seconds. Really! [More]
Heinz Rolling Out "Dip And Squeeze" Ketchup Packets
By 9.19.11
If you’ve ever cursed the gods for making ketchup packets both awkward and filled with too little ketchup, Heinz has heard your cry. They’ve started to roll out to a broader audience the “dip and squeeze” ketchup packets that have three times more ketchup and serves as both a dipping tray and a squeeze packet. I tried one this weekend. [More]
How To Spot An Awful Restaurant In Seconds
By 9.16.11
The worst time to realize you’ve chosen a bad restaurant is after you’ve placed your drink order. You’re locked in to a financial commitment, so it’s tough to justify uprooting and heading somewhere else. If you’re careful to spot the signs of a bad dining establishment before you sit down, you won’t find yourself in that predicament. [More]
Tweets Get Chipotle To Change Menus To Show Pinto Beans Cooked With Bacon
By 8.17.11
Both a diehard Chipotle fan and a person who doesn’t eat pork, Seth Porges was surprised to discover recently that the pinto beans he’d been eating for years from there are actually cooked with a little bit of bacon. Within two hours of emailing top execs and tweeting about it, he received a personal phonecall from Steve Ells, CEO of Chipotle. [More]
Triple Double Oreo Hits Shelves, Crushes Them
By 8.17.11
The new Triple Double Oreo is now on the market, bringing one layer of vanilla and one layer of chocolate creme sandwiched between three cookie layers straight to your face. [More]
Baguette ATM Hits Paris Streets
By 8.16.11
A new vending machine just hit the streets of Paris dispensing freshly baked baguettes. [More]
Orville Redenbacher Uses New Fancy Bowl To Disguise Shrink Ray Effects
By 8.9.11
Looks like old Orville Redenbacher has been working on his sleight of hand technique. He wants you to focus on how his kettle corn popcorn is in a new easier to use “pop up bowl,” and ignore how it’s been downsized to 2.9 oz per bag from 3.3 oz. Worse, writers tipster Derek, the popcorn doesn’t pop as well. [More]
If You Must Photograph Your Food, At Least Do It Right
By 8.8.11
Before you shoot pictures of whatever meal you’re about to devour, with plans to immediately upload it to the social networkverse, first make sure that what’s sitting in front of you is truly amazing and worthy of documentation. Once you pass that test, treat your captive audience right by making sure you’re using proper technique. [More]
Restaurant Apologizes For Mistake With Free Chocolate Cake For New Mother
By 8.3.11
A little bit of kindness will get you far. A little bit of chocolate cake will get you even farther, as one restaurant manager, a husband, and his wife who had just given birth found out. [More]
Florida Department Of Citrus Sends List Of Facts About Orange Juice
By 8.2.11
The Florida Department of Citrus sent over a few paragraphs of information in response to my post, “The Flavor Of Your OJ Is A Chemically-Induced Mirage” from last week. [More]
What If Food Labels Looked Like This?
By 8.1.11
Maybe the real reason Americans are so fat is because our food labels are so ugly. If they were easier on the eye to read, maybe more people would read them and make better eating choices. That was the idea in mind behind a recent design contest at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Journalism aiming to give the standard government-mandated food label a much-needed makeover. The winning entry uses colored boxes for each ingredient that are sized in proportion to how much of each is inside the package. [More]
The Flavor Of Your OJ Is A Chemically-Induced Mirage
By 7.29.11
There’s a dirty secret in your glass of orange juice. Even though it says “not from concentrate,” it probably sat in a large vat for up to year with all the oxygen removed from it. This allows it to be preserved and dispensed all year-round. Taking out all the O2 also gets rid of all the flavor. So the juice makers have to add the flavors back in using preformulated recipes full of chemicals called “flavor packs.” Mmm, delicious, fresh-squeezed ethyl-butyrate! [More]
There's Arsenic In The Apple Juice
By 7.21.11
With all the things on your mind, the last thing you need to worry about is whether the apple juice you finally convinced your kid to drink has arsenic in it. But an independent lab test of several different brands of apple juice, sponsored by Food & Water Watch and Empire State Consumer Project found a sample of Mott’s Apple Juice contained 55 parts per billion of arsenic, exceeding the EPA tolerance level of 10 parts per billion. The FDA does not have a set tolerance level for juice. [More]
Quiznos Risks Defaulting
By 7.21.11
“Torpedoing.” “Toasted.” The food that Quiznos is having trouble selling is full of metaphors for how its business is going. Crunched by the recession, its own policies towards franchise owners, competitors adding toasters, and an “everyday value” strategy that ran counter to its position as a purveyor of premium sandwiches, Quiznos is on the edge of violating its loan terms and could go into default. [More]
