Posts Tagged ‘restaurants’
“…my age is as a lusty winter, / Frosty, but kindly…”*…
Aging is tough; Catherine Hiller offers a guide…
For some people, being old just comes naturally. They’ve acted old for years, and they know just what to do. They are the lucky ones—the “old souls,” if you will. For many others, being old just seems weird. They think, Really? How did I get here? What do I wear? How do I navigate this new geography?
This guide is expressly written for those who are bewildered by the face in the mirror and somehow think that 70 qualifies as middle-aged. These people need gentle guidance so that they, too, can enjoy the special perks of being old, beyond the senior discounts. This guide aims to help newcomers fit in with their cohort and enjoy their well-earned privileges.
At 79, I know something about old age, and I’ve compiled the following guidelines hoping they will empower you to enjoy your entitlements…
Read on for such useful tips as…
… Your health is vital to you, so it must be important to others as well. People want to hear about your ailments, even the minor ones, as well as all the cures you’ve ever tried. Your every test result is intriguing to your family and friends, so you should discuss the details. Oddly, the health problems of others are of little interest to you, unless they mirror your own…
… Everything really was better when you were young. Your mind tells you that every generation feels this way (including the Athenians in the Golden Age, 400 years BC), but your heart tells you that this time, you are actually right! You came of age in the Summer of Love, which lasted about a decade. There was joy in the air, and a sense of personal and social freedom. Humankind would progress. Everything would be better! Be sure to talk to your children and grandchildren constantly about what it was like when you were young, and how very much worse things are today.
Embrace your inner curmudgeon! You have every right to be cranky, because many things are difficult, and the news is always appalling. At this point, you’ve had many disappointments, and likely some physical problems as well. There’s no need to mute your general displeasure. Being old is the time to express it fully, forcefully and funnily. (At least you assume your tirades are amusing.)…
… Your clothing choices will be determined entirely by comfort. In this, you and other old people are in the fashion vanguard. Remember the “little old ladies in tennis shoes”? Well, who wears sneakers now? Only everyone, all the time! Celebrate your preference for flowing clothes in neutral colors. Turns out some of you have been “coastal grandmothers” long before it was a thing. For years you’ve been wearing pants with elastic waistbands or drawstrings, predating and predicting pandemic dressing, when everyone wore sweatpants. Turns out old people are the true fashionistas!…
More pearls at: “How to Be Old,” from @oldstermag.bsky.social.
* Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene 3
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As we muse on maturity, we might note that today is National Buffet Day, an annual celebration of an occasion for the senescent to practice most of the advice Hiller gives in the piece featured above.
“I’ve run more risk eating my way across the country than in all my driving”*…
On the occasion of his retirement from his weekly column, a dean of British culinary criticism, Jay Rayner (the Observer‘s/Guardian‘s Happy Eater), observes that, while much has changed in the food world, there are a few truths that still hold…
I have been writing this column for 15 years. That means there have been 180 of them, filled with wisdom, insight, whimsy, prejudice, contradiction and sometimes just outrageous stupidity, all of it interrogating the way we cook and eat now. As this is my last of these columns I thought, as a service, I should summarise the key points. Are you ready? Good. Let’s go.
Individual foods are not pharmaceuticals; just eat a balanced diet. There is nothing you can eat or drink that will detoxify you; that’s what your liver and kidneys are for. No healthy person needs to wear a glucose spike monitor; it’s a fad indulged by the worried well. As is the cobblers of being interested in “wellness”, because nobody is interested in “illness”. People have morals but food doesn’t, so don’t describe dishes as “dirty”. And stop it with the whole “clean eating” thing. It’s annoying and vacuous.
Fat is where the flavour is and salt is the difference between eating in black and white and eating in Technicolor, even if your cardiologist would disagree. Brown foods and messy foods are the best foods, and picnics are a nightmare. Buffets are where good taste goes to die. Most dishes can be improved with the addition of bacon. The kitchen knives in holiday rentals are always terrible; take your own. Hyper-expensive foods are never about deliciousness; they are about status. Don’t bother with them. Bechamel sauce is easy to make; just follow the damn recipe.
Often, good food takes a while to cook and sometimes it requires skill; all those cookbooks with words like “simple” and “express” in the title may not be your friend. If we’re going to slaughter animals for our dinner, we have a responsibility to eat as much of that animal as we can, including the inner wobbly bits. Some of the best foods carry with them the faint whiff of death. Making chutney at home from your allotment glut is a lovely hobby, but you really don’t have to share what you’ve made with your neighbours.
Tipping should be abolished. It’s wrong that restaurant staff should be dependent on the mood of the customer for the size of their wage. They should be paid properly. It works in Japan, France and Australia. It can work in the UK. All new restaurants should employ someone over 50 to check whether the print on the menu is big enough to be read, the lighting bright enough for it to be read by and the seats comfortable enough for a lengthy meal. If a waiter has to explain the “concept” behind a menu there is something wrong with the menu.
By all means serve small sharing plates, but make sure the table is big enough for all the dishes that are going to arrive, and they come out in an order that makes sense. The kind of wines that natural-wine fans adore smell of uncleaned pig’s bottom and are horrible. Waiters should always write down orders. Eating alone in a restaurant is dinner with someone you love and a delicious opportunity for people watching. Great food can be found in the scuzziest of places. Gravy stains down your shirt are not a source of embarrassment; they are a badge of honour. Expensive restaurants are wasted on the people who can afford them. And food should always, always, be served on plates. Not on slates. Not on garden trowels. Not on planks. On plates…
Words to eat by: “This is my final OFM column. Here’s what I’ve learned about buffets, ‘clean eating,’ and what not to serve food on” from @jayrayner1.bsky.social in @theguardian.com.
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As we dine out, we might recall that it was on this date in 1989 that Jack Dietz (son of “Watermelon King” Bob Dietz) set the still-standing world’s record for watermelon seed spitting– 66 feet 11 inches. Contests are held throughout the U.S. each year in an attempt to best Jack.
A young competitor (source)
“Tell it like it is”*…
Most fast food chains court children. Mr. Delicious targeted depressed adults. Jake Rossen reports…
It’s not often that a mascot for a fast-food franchise will detail the discomfort prompted by hemorrhoid surgery in a national television advertisement. But Mr. Delicious rarely played by the rules.
Mr. Delicious was the cartoon spokesman for Rax, a chain of roast beef eateries that grew popular in the 1980s. But by 1992, sales were dwindling—so the company recruited “Mr. D” to liven up their brand identity. Middle-aged and burdened by a difficult marriage, the character was an anti-Ronald McDonald.
“Mr. Delicious just had some rather delicate surgery,” he announced in one spot for value meals priced in round numbers. “If there’s no change, he doesn’t have to squirm so much to put it back in his pocket, does he? He just grabs his combo and drives ever so slowly over the speed bump.”
In other spots, Mr. Delicious would refer to his aversion to children, a midlife crisis involving inappropriately aged women, and heading to Rax to nurse a hangover.
Rax thought the irreverent Mr. Delicious was a solution to their ailing sales numbers. They were greatly mistaken…
Read on for the instructive– and very amusing– tale, along with more arresting examples of the spots (including an account of his trip to Bora Bora with two female “friends”): “The Tortured Soul of Mr. Delicious, Fast Food’s Most Bizarre Mascot,” from @mental_floss.
And watch the promotional video that introduced Mr. Delicious:
More on Mr. D at “Mr. Delicious: The Fast Food Mascot Who Had A Mid-Life Crisis” (source of the image at the top).
* R&B singer Roy Milton in 1954 (canonizing a phrase in use since the 1940s in Black speech)
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As we brood over branding, we might that it was on this date in 1879 that saccharin (AKA saccharine, benzosulfimide, or E954), an nutrition-free artificial sweetener, was discovered by Constantine Fahlberg and Ira Remsen at Johns Hopkins University. 500 times sweeter than sucrose, it can have a bitter or metallic aftertaste, especially at high concentrations.
Commercialized from soon after its discovery, saccharin took off during the sugar shortages of World War I. It was (and to some extent still is) used as a stand-alone sugar substitute (e.g., “Sweet’n Low), to sweeten products like drinks, candies, baked goods, tobacco products, excipients, and for masking the bitter taste of some medicines.
The FDA required warning labels from 1977 to 2000 on products using saccharin because it was a suspected carcinogen. After additional research, the FDA repealed the warning labels and declared saccharin safe for consumption.
“The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000″*…
And that change is coming for China… Even as trade tension tighten between China and the U.S., foreign investment in China drops, and talk of decoupling grows (see, e.g., here and here), one sector of American business is doubling down on the Chinese market…
There’s been no shortage of tough news for China’s economy as some of the world’s biggest brands consider or take action to shift manufacturing to friendlier shores at a time of unease about security controls, protectionism and wobbly relations between Beijing and Washington.
Count Adidas, Apple and Samsung among those looking elsewhere.
But as a tumultuous 2023 for the Chinese economy comes to a close, there has been at least one bright spot for Beijing when it comes to foreign investment: American fast-food chains have decided a market of 1.4 billion people is simply too delicious to pass up.
KFC China’s parent company opened its 10,000th restaurant in China this month and aims to have stores within reach of half of China’s population by 2026. McDonald’s is planning to open 3,500 new stores in China over the next four years. And Starbucks invested $220 million in a manufacturing and distribution facility in eastern China, its biggest project outside the U.S.
This is surely not what Chinese President Xi Jinping had in mind as he made the case to American CEOs about the upside of China’s “super-large market” last month while he was in San Francisco for a summit of world leaders. The investments in fast food and other consumer goods, while Washington is curbing exports of computer chips and other advanced technology, don’t fit into China’s own blueprint for modernizing its economy…
Unlike manufacturing plants, fast-food franchises are relatively easy to set up and break down and don’t have to worry about IP security/theft. So, even as trade policy hardens and manufacturing/tech companies lean away, “American fast-food companies find China’s 1.4 billion population too delicious to resist,” from @BusinessInsider.
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As we supersize that, we might spare a thought for Fred Turner; he died on this date in 2013. One of the first employees hired by McDonald’s entrepreneur Ray Kroc, Turner rose quickly through the ranks, and succeeded Kroc as CEO in 1977.
Turner founded Hamburger University in 1961 and was a co-founder of Ronald McDonald House Charities.
“Every pizza is a personal pizza if you try hard and believe in yourself”*…
The fateful experiment happened in 1962. Sam Panopoulos, a restaurant owner, was not afraid of taking chances. He had left Greece at the age of 20 to start a new life in Canada and went on to run a successful restaurant in downtown Chatham, Ontario. He was also known for his mischievous sense of humour. His fateful culinary creation combined both elements of his personality. While he was making a pizza, he cracked open a can of sliced pineapple – and did the unthinkable.
Sixty years on, the Hawaiian pizza, a standard mozzarella-and-tomato base topped with pineapple and ham or bacon, has become a contender for the most controversial dish ever made. Unlike other joyfully divisive foods (Marmite, anyone?) it’s not enough simply to love or hate it. In an era defined by a propensity for polarisation, the debate over the merits (or failings) of pineapple on pizza has become a global pastime. Profiles on dating apps tease potential matches with the prospect of a food fight. “Do you like pineapple on pizza?” is simultaneously an icebreaker and a dealbreaker. Public figures have taken sides: Paris Hilton loves it; Gordon Ramsay is very angry about it.
The pineapple-pizza debate has become so pervasive that in 2019 the American government launched “The War on Pineapple”, a public-information campaign that illustrated how people can be manipulated through online posts about divisive issues [see here]. Why does the Hawaiian pizza provoke such strong opinions? Panopoulos added pineapple, he said, only “for the fun of it”. When the controversy over his creation went viral in 2017 he emerged from retirement to wring his hands. “What’s going on with everybody?” he asked…
A thorough examination of how pineapple broke the internet– Will Coldwell (@will_coldwell) explains why Hawaiian pizza is the polarizing issue of our times.
* Bill Murray
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As we keep it simple, we might recall that it was on the date in 1985 that the McDonald’s #1 Store Museum opened in Des Plaines, Illinois. A replica of the former McDonald’s restaurant there, opened by Ray Kroc in April 1955, the company usually refers to it as The Original McDonald’s, although it is not the first McDonald’s restaurant but the ninth: the first was opened by Richard and Maurice McDonald in San Bernardino, California in 1940, and the oldest McDonald’s still in operation is the third one built, in Downey, California, which opened in 1953.
Still, the Des Plaines restaurant marked the beginning of future CEO Kroc’s involvement with the firm. It was the first opened under the aegis of his franchising company McDonald’s Systems, Inc., which became McDonald’s Corporation after Kroc purchased the McDonald brothers’ stake in the firm.
But lest the corporation seem sentimental, the museum was completely demolished as of January 2019. A new, modern McDonald’s was built across the street– at which there are a half-dozen glass-enclosed exhibits arrayed around the tables. These include red and white tiles from the original restaurant, and string ties worn by employees from the 1950s to the early 1970s.
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