July 2010 – Food Woolf

Service 101: When Gratuity is Included

If a diner is unhappy with service at a restaurant they can voice their concern to the management or leave less tip for their waiter. As I mentioned recently about a recent poll on CNN’s food blog, Eatocracy.com, 49 percent of the people polled said they have left nothing for waiters, while another 34 percent said they have left a very low tip–as little as just a penny–to show their dissatisfaction with service. The amount of a tip, many respondents explained, gives financial reward to waiters for good work and punishes the bad ones.

But what happens when a restaurant eliminates the tipping structure out of their business model entirely? Does service improve or get worse?

Jay Porter, the owner of The Linkery in San Diego, says that his front of house staff and kitchen workers’ performance improved once his restaurant stopped accepting tips. The small neighborhood restaurant began its “no tipping” system in 2004 when they instituted a flat 18 percent “table service fee” on the final check for diners who eat at the restaurant.

“No other profession has the customer adjusting your pay scale according to performance,” says Porter. “That’s just not a circumstance when people do their best work.” Porter says this unique payment model brings his restaurant in line with other American industries. “It’s good for our staff to be seen as professionals, just like every other profession in America. No other profession other than the restaurant industry has people evaluating your work and basing payment on that.”

Continue Reading When Service IS Included »

July 21

Strawberry Rhubarb Compote with Pistachios

Some words carry flavor. Speak aloud the familiar syllables of coffee, chocolate or toast, and the brain fires memories of taste. Flash: a steaming cup of Sumatra, soft and gently acidic washes over your tongue. Your first taste of waxy chocolate Easter bunny as it melted in your mouth. Fresh baked bread, made golden from the heat of a toaster, on a cold winter day.

When I speak the words strawberry and rhubarb, I am given a crystalline remembrance with my grandmother. It’s a summer’s day in the 1980’s. I’m in my Grandmother’s tiny kitchen and staring at a pie she’s placed atop her ancient, four-legged cast iron stove to cool.

“It’s strawberry rhubarb pie,” she tells me. She slices into the golden pie crust and it falls away to expose a pink heart of strawberries and softened rhubarb. I take a bite—it’s the first time I’ve ever tasted these two flavors together—and I am struck by the sweet, earthy flavors of strawberry and tart-like-a-lemon rhubarb. The flavors are complex, almost too adult for me, were it not for all the enticing sugar.

“This is rhubarb?” I say to her, knowing the look of the plant from hours of playing make-believe in our family garden. The stalks of the plant resemble celery and the rough green canopy of leaves grow high enough to make a perfect hiding place for me—a child of five or six–from the sun.

I enjoy another bite of memory and it’s gone.

Though my interest was piqued to recreate Grammie’s strawberry rhubarb pie in my own kitchen, my desire for simplicity got the best of me. Rather than make a crisp (I’m always looking for ways around making a pie crust from scratch), I settled on modifying a recipe for a rhubarb and pistachio compote my friend Louisa Shafia created for her cookbook, Lucid Food.

Continue for an easy, no-bake Strawberry Rhubarb Recipe »

July 14January 4

Service 101: Service Not Included

One thing is for sure, if you’ve ever paid a restaurant tab you have are more than likely to have a strong opinion about tipping. Maybe you always tip 20% of the total bill. Maybe you think a 15% tip is sign enough that you’ve gotten good service. Or maybe you consider tipping a kind of frosting on the cake. Poll a random group of diners on their thoughts about tipping and within seconds you’ll feel the temperature rise as ardent responses come hurling back at you. No matter what you think about tipping, just about everyone has an opinion about what constitutes a good or bad tip.

I’m always amazed at how downright heated discussions become when the topics of service, tipping, and restaurant policies are brought up. People who have never worked in the restaurant business, lifetime servers, part time waiters, and frequent diners all seem to have strong views on the subject. For someone like myself–a restaurant professional who has worked in the industry for decades–I definitely come at this subject from an insider’s point of view. Not only do I write about service, I also read quite a bit about the subject. What surprises me the most is the ardent online chatter (nay, SCREAMING) about restaurant service.

Recently, CNN’s new food blog, Eatocracy, polled their readers on their view on tipping. Practically overnight, 45,000 opinionated readers responded with votes and lengthy ALL-CAP rants discussing exactly why they thought it was right or downright wrong to leave no tip if bad service is rendered by the waiter.

49% of voters said they left servers no tip after receiving bad service

29% left a low tip for bad service

15% said they would never leave nothing, and would never leave anything less than 15%

5% said they left a penny, just to prove a point

to Find Out Why Tipping Isn’t Optional »

July 10

Bourbon-Soaked Cherries

All good things come to those who wait. Parents, farmers, bread bakers, and economists know this. And in the past couple of years, bartenders across the country have learned that the old adage applies when it comes to making flavored spirits. Take a great tasting fruit like a cultivated cherry, add a favorite liquor, and in just a few weeks you’ll have something completely new.

Cherries, or Prunus avium, are a stone fruit that are high in anthocyanins, the red pigment that gives the berries their color. In recent lab tests, anthocyanins have been shown to reduce pain and inflammation and reduce cholesterol and triglycerides. That’s good news to cherry lovers, who are currently gobbling up all forms of cherries–as a snack, featured dessert filling–during their last few weeks of the season. Right now, trees from Michigan, California, Oregon, and Washington State are heavy with rosy pink, blood red, and sunrise yellow cherries.

Thanks to the juicy fruits of Bing, Brooks, Rainier, and Tulare, it’s a wonderful time of the year to eat and, in my case, make cocktails.

Health benefits aside, cherries are a great flavoring agent in many cocktails (think Maraschino Liqueur, Amarena soaked cherries, etc.). Last year, my wonderful friends Todd and Diane from White on Rice introduced me to the idea of using cherries to enhance the flavors of a favorite liquor. Their gift of cherries soaked in Luxardo (a sweet cherry liqueur made from Marasca cherries and ground up cherry pits) blew my mind. The cherry-infused cherry liquor became a favorite featured cocktail ingredient and the center point of an obsession with the classic cocktail, the Aviation (Gin, Luxardo, and Lemon). Ever since then, I’ve been patiently waiting for cherry season to begin so I could try my hand at making my own cherry-infused spirit.

Continue for a Recipe for Bourbon Infused with Cherries »

July 1

Food Styling and Food Photography Tips

I love food. I love to eat it and dream up new ways to engage with all its different ingredients. I enjoy playing with my food, photographing it, telling stories about it. Clearly food is much more than a source of nutrition and sustenance. For me–and many more people like me–food is art.

My food obsession has reached an all time height, thanks to the accumulation of decades working in restaurants and writing this blog. Because of my heightened interest in food photography (and incessant questions about how he does what he does), my friend Matt Armendariz generously offered to allow me to sit in on his recent Food Styling and Food Photography class with the ladies of Food Fanatics at his studio in Long Beach.

Between jokes and colorful industry gossip, Denise Vivaldo and Cindie Flannagan offered students a handful of tricks learned over the years (nay, decades) they’ve been working in the food styling business. Vivaldo and Flannagan gave students insights into making food ready for camera and how to think about food styling as a career.

Food Styling Tips from the Pros

Use non-edible (but not poisonous!) items to prop things up.
Just because you use a cosmetic sponge to prop up a piece of meat before you shoot it, doesn’t mean you can’t eat the meat. Take the picture, remove the sponge, and dive in! The ladies at Food Fanatics suggest that if you don’t have a lot of an ingredient (say pasta or rice) you can fake a false bottom with wet paper towels to give a bowl or plate additional height.

food styling tools 2 — Frozen syrup and cosmetic sponges help maintain a food shot for longer.

Continue for more Food Styling and Food Photography tips »