As the smoke cleared in Northern California and communities began to clean up Friday, restaurant operators dug in to support what will likely be a long recovery.

The fires in Sonoma and Napa counties were mostly contained on Friday with help from a light rain. The death toll totaled 42 since the blazes first broke out on Oct. 8, and roughly 100,000 people have been evacuated. 

State insurance officials estimated insured losses at more than $1 billion, though that number was expected to climb as victims filed claims. More than 8,000 buildings were destroyed in the wine country area north of San Francisco, and an estimated 600 commercial property loss claims were filed as of Friday. 

Among those losses will be restaurants, such as Willi’s Wine Bar in Santa Rosa, Calif., which was razed by the fire that swept through that community.

But even restaurants that weren’t touched by flames have been grappling with what is likely to be a lingering impact of the fires.

Many restaurant workers live in the effected north county area and commute in to San Francisco, for example, and some restaurants had to close to allow their workers to deal with evacuations and losses.

Officials were only beginning to allow some evacuees to return home. Inspectors needed to clear residences for lingering environmental hazards and inspection of appliances.

The fires hurt some restaurants farmland in the area. Heavy smoke throughout the Bay area also kept diners at home, and kept tourists away during what is typically high season for wine country.

And restaurant operators said the disaster has taken an emotional toll.

“It’s not only people who can’t come to work, but morally they’re just beaten down from seeing their loved ones lose their homes,” said Shah Bahreyni, managing partner of Boca Tavern and Boca Pizzeria in Novato, Calif., which is near the hard-hit area of Santa Rosa.

Among his staff, Bahreyni said his bartender’s grandmother lost her home, and his general manager and executive chef were evacuated from their homes in the middle of the night.

“It’s like a war zone here,” he said. “It’s like someone dropped an atomic bomb.”

Bahreyni said his restaurants, however, have been busy, in part because so many other eateries were closed. Boca Tavern hosted free meals for fire fighters and made sandwiches for evacuation centers.

Across the region, fundraising and relief efforts kicked into high gear across the Bay area, with restaurant operators committed to feeding those in need for the long term, said Gwyneth Borden, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association. 

“I think people in the industry are committed to doing it as long as there are shelters and enough need,” said Borden.

 A group dubbed SF Fights Fire in San Francisco has served more than 12,000 meals to firefighters and evacuees at Salvation Army and other relief centers across three counties.

The effort was spearheaded by Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski of the restaurants State Bird Provisions and The Progress, along with Traci Des Jardins of Jardiniere; Sam Mogannam of Bi-Rite Family of Businesses; Matt Cohen of Off the Grid; Ravi Kapur of Liholiho Yacht Club; and Craig Stoll of Delfina.

The Golden Gate Restaurant Association is also organizing ChefsGiving Week from Nov. 13 to 19 with the goal of raising at least $1 million for those in need of housing throughout wine country.

Chaired by chef Dominique Crenn of Atelier Crenn in San Francisco, fundraising efforts will include a gala scheduled for Nov.19 in San Francisco’s Ferry Building, featuring food and wine from throughout the region.

Borden said she’s hoping restaurants across the country will participate in the ChefsGiving effort, even if donating a portion of proceeds from menu items that week before Thanksgiving.

“As we know, the rebuild is going to take years,” she said.

The fundraising effort will support a North Bay fire relief fund called Tipping Point, but also Restaurants Care, an extension of the California Restaurant Association’s Education Foundation, which provides emergency grants of $500 to $1,500 to restaurant industry workers specifically.

Separately, another nonprofit is also targeting restaurant workers: Golden Rule Charity, based in Southern California, raises funds to support those in hospitality nationally, said Judy Walker, founder.

Golden Rule offers both crisis funding, like medical or disaster relief, but also “joy funding,” like helping a dishwasher buy his daughter’s prom dress, said Walker. The restaurant Michael’s on Naples in Long Beach, Calif., is planning a fundraiser for the group on Nov. 14 to support those impacted by the fires.

“Restaurants and chefs are often the first people asked to help in any circumstance, particularly with disaster relief,” she said. “But there isn’t much to help them support their own.”

On social media, restaurant operators hit on common themes: They’re open for business, grateful for first responders and volunteers and embracing their fire-tattered communities with fundraising efforts. 

In San Francisco, Finn Town pledged to devote 40-percent of wine sales over four Wednesdays to the family of Matthew Parlato, a Sonoma County sheriffs deputy who lost his home in the fires that ravaged Santa Rosa. Parlato is the brother of the restaurant’s director of operations Katrina Parlato.

Canela Bistro & Wine Bar in San Francisco collected food donations for MercyChefs, a team that fed evacuees as well as emergency crews.

The foodservice management company Epicurean Group provided an estimated 7,000 meals to fire fighters and evacuees at the Marin Center, and later the Golden Gate Baptist Seminary and the Red Cross.

The high-end restaurant Hakkasan said it would donate 15 percent of proceeds from three menu items through Nov. 26 To Redwood Credit Union North Bay Fire Relief and Farmer’s Guild.

Meanwhile, the Firehouse Subs chain, which has a long history of supporting firefighters through its Firehouse Subs Public Safety Foundation, set aside $10,000 for California first responders from a fund that started after Oregon suffered from a massive fire earlier this year.

Contact Lisa Jennings at lisa.jennings@penton.com

Follow her on Twitter: @livetodineout

People have been frying up dough as a sweet treat for, well, almost as long as there have been people.

Nearly every culture has a version, from Greek loukoumades and French beignets to Native American fry bread and American funnel cake. While today this simple, indulgent treat is most often associated with festivals, fairs or carnivals, fried dough has of late secured a spot — and a following — on many restaurant menus.

At Ousia, a Greek and Mediterranean restaurant in New York City, one might expect to find on the dessert menu loukoumades, Greek donuts soaked in honey syrup and dusted with cinnamon and walnuts.

Instead, chef Vasiliki Vourliotaki is serving Donut Pikilia, a square-shaped hybrid of an American yeast doughnut and traditional Greek ingredients for the fillings and glazes. Recent flavors have included mastica — a spice exclusively grown in Chios, Greece — with pistachio and a mastica chocolate mousse and candied pecans.

“Our doughnuts are different because of the diverse fillings and toppings we use that are a Greek-American fusion,” said general manager Johnny Livanos. “We love meshing Greek flavor and ingredients with more common styles of food.” 

And Ousia’s customers love to eat them: Donut Pikilias is one of the most popular dishes on the dessert menu.

Also taking inspiration from a classic is pastry chef Stacey Needham of Red Star Tavern in Portland, Ore. Needham recently added to her fall menu Cinnamon Sugar Donuts, inspired by the Pennsylvania Dutch community where her grandmother lives. Needham’s version features doughnuts fried to a sweet-spiced crust, served warm with a teacup of butterscotch pudding and a layer of apple butter.

“The dessert all stemmed from apple butter. It is something that my grandma and I made together when I was little, and I knew I wanted to make it a part of a fall dessert,” Needham said. “The doughnut was actually the last, but equally essential component. I wanted a cinnamon-sugar, pillow-y doughnut as the vessel for the other two flavors.”

Barton G, which has locations in Los Angeles and Miami, is also serving a fried dough dessert with Pennsylvania Dutch roots. Carnival Fun Cakes features classic funnel cake, which was brought to America by German immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, served with dipping sauces such as chocolate, strawberry-lemon and salted caramel, fresh whipped cream and topped with powdered sugar.

Building on funnel cake’s later history as carnival fare, the Carnival Fun Cakes are served in a game box that lets customers take turns shooting a rotating line of ducks with a toy gun while they eat. 

“It’s all about the experience, bringing out the kid in all of us and celebrating those great childhood memories. Summer carnivals, Fourth of July street fairs. Great smells, even better tastes,” said founder and owner Barton G. Weiss. “Why not celebrate the summer all year long?”

The dessert menu at Graffiato, chef Mike Isabella's Italian-inspired restaurant in Washington, D.C., features what else but zeppole, the deep-fried Italian dough balls, tossed in powered sugar and served with a side of Bavarian cream.

“Zeppole are a New Jersey pizzeria staple traditionally made with leftover dough scraps, fried and coated with a lot of powdered sugar and sometimes cinnamon,” said Terry Natas, chef de cuisine of Graffiato. “Here at Graffiato, we do not use pizza dough scraps, but rather make a specific dough that fries up nice and fluffy, topped powdered sugar. We put another twist on the dessert with Bavarian cream and fresh fruit on the side.”

The fluffy fried dough is consistently a best-selling dish.

New Orleans-style Petit Beignets are on the menu at Moderne Barn, an American restaurant with global influences in Armonk, N.Y. Created by executive chef Ethan Kostbar, the Petit Beignets are fried, one-inch dough balls served with powdered sugar and housemade strawberry preserves, caramel sauce and dark chocolate sauce. 

“Traditional Petit Beignet are larger, triangle shaped fried dough. At Moderne Barn, we make them into round, bite-sized pieces with three different dipping sauces so they can be better shared,” Kostbar said. “I thought this dessert was the perfect addition to our menu that would appeal to all diners.” 

“Modernist Cuisine” helped transform the way chefs think about cooking. The six-volume culinary encyclopedia, published in 2011, was the product of years of work by Nathan Myhrvold and his team, who sought the very best ways to cook just about everything.

For example, it turns out that the best way to make a hamburger is to cook it sous-vide, dunk it in liquid nitrogen to freeze it, and then quickly fry it to brown the outside while reheating the center, making a perfectly cooked burger from edge to edge.

The books, funded by Myhrvold’s fortune from his time as a Microsoft executive, were the culmination of a movement to use modern science to make food taste better, debunking myths like the one that boiling green vegetables in salted water helps them retain their color better than boiling them in unsalted water.

Myhrvold and his team are at it again with the Nov. 7 release of “Modernist Bread.” The five-volume opus was more than four years in the making and, like its predecessor, sheds new light on the best techniques and debunks various myths.

“A lot of the stuff that we really wanted to work on was things that didn’t seem to really have any scientific purpose, that were really based more on tradition than anything else,” said Francisco Migoya, co-author of the book and head chef of the Modernist Cuisine Cooking Lab.

One of the biggest myths is the magic of sourdough starters.

“There’s always this story of how special this starter or that starter is,” he said, noting that families treasure the combinations of yeast, water, flour and bacteria, and pass them down, sometimes from generation to generation.

The problem with that?

“Yeast is one of the most adaptable organisms on the planet,” Migoya said.

That means it will adapt to its surroundings and change based on its environment. So if you have a 100-year-old starter from Italy and have been nurturing it for the past 50 years in New York, “it’s a given that whatever ecosystem was part of that bacterial mix initially is completely different if it’s been in New York for 50 years,” he said. The only way to keep it the same would be to keep it in the same environment and feed it the same flour at the same time every day.

Also, people keep the starter in the refrigerator to maintain it, but if they don’t feed it, it will die in five days, refrigerated or not. You can tell it’s dead if a film of water forms on the surface. When people take a starter out of the refrigerator and feed it, they think they’ve brought it back to life.

“In fact, you’re starting from zero again,” Migoya said. “It’s the emotional attachment more than anything.”

Other things that don’t help starters are raisins or yogurt, which some people like to add to them.

“In reality, the yeast that live on raisins like to live on raisins, not what’s in flour,” he said. And while yogurt, like wheat flour, has lactic acid, it’s a different kind of lactic acid.

In fact, Migoya said anyone can make a starter by mixing equal amounts of flour and water at a temperature between 85-88 degrees Fahrenheit in a clean, unsterile, jar, putting a lid on it and keeping it at around 70 degrees for three to five days. Then, just keep feeding it flour at the same time every day.

Beyond debunking myths, “Modernist Bread” also found solutions to vexing problems such as how to keep toppings from falling off bagels or other bread, and how to keep sensitive toppings from burning, such as the onion and garlic on everything bagels.

Rather than topping bagels with sesame seeds or poppy seeds before baking them, the “Modernist Bread” team bakes them naked, cools them and dips them in a slurry of a modified tapioca starch called Ultra-Tex 3. It forms a thin film on the bread that allows bakers to dip them in whatever they want — even heavier items like walnut pieces or sunflower seeds — and finish them in the oven for five minutes to evaporate the slurry and “glue” the toppings in place.

“One of my favorite ones is shichimi togarashi with nori,” Migoya said.

Another benefit of the new encyclopedia, Migoya said, is that it keeps in mind not just professional bakers and home cooks, but chefs at hotels and country clubs who don’t generally have special bread ovens. Instead, they bake in Combi or convection ovens that he said use fans to force hot air onto bread, which can set the crusts too quickly and prevent them from expanding.

The new volumes give advice on how to mitigate that, such as giving the bread bursts of steam every few minutes to keep the crust from hardening too soon.

“We made an effort to write the book for a group of bakers that have always been neglected,” Migoya said.

Contact Bret Thorn at bret.thorn@penton.com

Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary

As fast as the foodservice industry is changing, predicting trends can be a tough venture, but restaurant industry consultancy Andrew Freeman & Company is looking ahead to 2018 with its annual presentation of trends.

“Change is here to stay, and this year’s top trends reflect the industry’s acceptance of this state,” the company said.

“Successful hotels and restaurants are turning creativity into innovation and adapting faster than ever. And there’s a lot of change to deal with — economic, political and social factors as well as significant cultural shifts in the way people use restaurants and hotels.”

AF&Co. is holding two webinars on the subject in mid-November Nov. 14 and Thursday, Nov. 16.

Here is an early look.

Contact Bret Thorn at bret.thorn@penton.com

Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary

Calamansi, kumquat and yuzu are foreign fruits to many American diners. But these and other Asian citrus may soon become more familiar as chefs who love their unique, and sometimes complex, flavors are adding them to cocktails, entrées and desserts. 

“There’s more citrus options other than lemons and limes,” said Nandini Khaund, “spirit guide” at Cindy’s Rooftop Restaurant in Chicago. “The options are endless.”

At Cindy’s, Khaund opts for calamansi — a green-skinned fruit known as the Philippine lime — to make the Golden Lime mocktail, which also includes honey, fresh tarragon and soda. The light, refreshing beverage is easily transformed into a cocktail with the addition of Ron Zacapa and Cruzan Black Strap rums.

At Three Degrees in Portland, Ore., lead bartender Joe Davis shakes up a Cilantro Cocktail with tequila, agave, “nitro-muddled” cilantro (frozen with liquid nitrogen to preserve its bright color and flavor) and yuzu, a lemon-like Japanese fruit. 

“It’s so easy to reach for lemon or lime when creating tequila cocktails, but that gets boring and can limit the resulting cocktail,” Davis said. “[Yuzu] is really versatile as an ingredient. It adds a whole new layer of complexity to the sour family of cocktails and is also great as a highball with soda water for a non-alcoholic drink.” 

At Rice & Gold in New York City, chef and partner Dale Talde showcases a plethora of Asian citrus in a dish that’s simply called Citrus Fruits. Pomelo — a large Southeast Asian fruit similar to a less bitter grapefruit — clementine and Meyer lemon are served over cardamom labneh with calamansi and yuzu granité. 

“This dish went on a few weeks ago, when I went to the local fruit stands and saw pomelos and other citrus that was in season,” said Talde, who is the son of Filipino immigrants. “I felt inspired to create a dish that was nostalgic.” 

Kumquats — small, oval-shaped citrus with sweet, edible skin — are the preferred citrus of Chris Starkus, executive chef at Urban Farmer in Denver, who said it represents good luck in many Asian countries. 

Starkus likes to use this wintertime fruit when he changes the steakhouse’s menu at the end of summer. For example, on his menu in mid-October was a black cod entrée garnished with kumquats and delicata squash, tossed with Marcona almonds and an herb purée. It will remain on the menu until spring arrives.

In December, chef Gregory Gourdet of Departure, a Pan-Asian restaurant and lounge in Portland, Ore., will offer his annual holiday Peking duck with kumquats. An alternative take on classic holiday meats, such as turkey or pork, the duck is cured, blanched in honey and Chinese wine, and served with a housemade plum sauce, kumquats, scallions, hoisin and cucumbers. Following tradition with Peking duck, Gourdet serves the dish with thin pancakes to wrap the duck and accoutrements. 

Also serving duck with kumquats is chef Nick Leahy of Saltyard, a small-plates restaurant in Atlanta. When the sweet-and-sour fruit is in season, Leahy likes to pickle it and serve it with duck.

At the Korean-inspired, family-style restaurant Atoboy in New York City, chef and partner Junghyun Park prefers to serve kumquats with shellfish. For a clam entrée, steamed and shelled littlenecks are placed in a white kimchi juice and mixed with Korean pear and kumquat, sprinkled with puffed buckwheat, and drizzled with lemon oil and micro sea grass. 

“I like that [kumquat] combines the best that citrus fruits have to offer — sweet, acidic, tart — which are always key in elevating and balancing out a dish,” Park said. “I also think it's quite fun that it's a citrus fruit that you can consume whole, including the skin.”

People are snacking more these days, and they’re also eating more seafood. The convergence of these two trends is resulting in a snack-culture sea change.

According to Datassential’s 2017 MenuTrends Keynote Report: Seafood, nearly 90 percent of consumers said they have snacked on seafood, such as popcorn shrimp, sushi or calamari.  

While popcorn shrimp is the most popular seafood snack, chefs are dishing out more inventive seafood nibbles.

“If seafood is growing and snacking is growing, why not aim for the intersection?” said Datassential analyst Kyle Chamberlain.

For example, Smickles, a new pickles-meets-smelt starter, are on the menu at Shaker & Spear in Seattle. Chef Carolynn Spence’s unique snack is made by holding both smelts and pickles in dill pickle brine, drying them and coating them in a flour mix, frying them and serving them with tartar sauce and lemon wedges.

Pickles meet smelts in the Smickles at Shaker and Spear in Seattle. Photo: Shaker and Spear.

“Smickles are a fun little treat,” Spence said. “They are perfect to share with the table and are extra fun because you can’t tell if you’re going to eat a smelt or a pickle spear since they’re both roughly the same size.”

Also making a seafood snack mashup is the culinary team at Pokeatery in San Mateo and Castro Valley, Calif., which recently added Pokecado Toast to its menu. A combination of two of-the-moment trends — avocado toast and poke (Hawaiian raw fish salad) — Pokecado Toast is made by topping locally sourced artisan bread with an array of handcrafted spreads, including sesame miso, spicy mayonnaise, wasabi aïoli, fresh avocado, baby arugula and poke.

“Customers like our Pokecado Toast because it's healthy and filling, while still being packed with flavor,” said Pokeatery co-founder Joann Chung. “They also like that it can be customized and just picked up with their hands and eaten in big bites.”

Meanwhile, at Camperdown Elm in Brooklyn, N.Y., executive chef and partner Brad Willits is offering SMAK as a snack. The pâté is made with smoked mackerel, amberjack and kingfish, and served with housemade squid-ink crackers and sesame seed. The item is inspired by a popular smoked fish snack Willits grew up eating in South Florida, where local fisherman make it with bycatch.

“I grew up eating the pâté as a snack with Captain's Wafers and hot sauce,” Willits said. “I just elevated the cracker a bit and lightened the dish.

Diners can order some SMAK (smoked mackerel, amerberjack, and kingfish) with squid ink crackers at Camperdown Elm in Brooklyn. Photo: Camperdown Elm.

SMAK is part of a selection of items under the “snack” section of Camperdown Elm’s menu, half of which include seafood.

“When you come here, our snack section makes people feel like this is where you should start your meal,” Willits said.

Charred Skate Fin, a kind of seafood jerky made by char-grilling skate fin is served with a hawaij (a Yemeni spice mix) curry dip at Bessou in New York City.

“Dried seafood is beloved in Japan, and skate jerky, or ‘eihire,’ is especially popular as a drinking snack,” said owner Maiko Kyogoku. “We update this dish by giving it extra char and making a special curry aïoli with hawaij.”

Also on Bessou’s menu is ebi shinjeo, or shrimp fritters. The poppable, fried shrimp balls are served with kabocha purée and chive oil.

At Sushirrito, a Japanese and Latin American concept with eight locations in San Francisco and New York City, executive chef and co-founder Ty Mahler is serving Lava Nachos: Brown rice chips are topped with spicy tuna, melted pepper Jack cheese, avocado, green onions, toasted nori seaweed strips and housemade Sriracha aïoli.

“It's the perfect dish when it comes to balancing flavor, texture, quantity and price,” Mahler said. “It’s great for sharing, combining everything that people go crazy for. Who doesn’t love spicy tuna, nachos, cheese and guacamole?”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday published guidance for its frequently delayed rules requiring restaurants and grocery stores to put calorie counts on their menus next May.

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb also reiterated his intent to not delay the rules any longer. The rules were originally set to be enforceable in 2015 and have twice been delayed, including once just days before they were to go into effect.

“I’m fully committed to implementing these provisions on the timetable we’ve already announced,” Gottlieb wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “But I’m equally committed to making sure we implement these provisions in a way that is practical, efficient and sustainable.”

The guidance is designed to outline how companies can comply with the regulations that require companies serving “restaurant type food” to post calorie counts on menus and menu boards. The rule covers everything, from movie theater popcorn to a dry-aged porterhouse steak at a chain like The Capital Grille to self-serve beverages bought at a gas station.

“We are pleased that the Food and Drug Administration took into account the comments from our industry in their menu labeling supplemental guidance document," said Cicely Simpson, executive vice president of public affairs at the National Restaurant Association.

"We will continue to work with the FDA to successfully implement federal menu labeling by May 2018.”

The guidance “reflects our commitment to establishing a practical and sustainable framework for implementing the new menu labeling provisions,” Gottlieb wrote.

“Over the next several months, we will continue to partner with restaurants and similar retail food establishments through each step in the implementation process,” he added.

The rules are aimed at restaurants with 20 or more locations. But they also target other places that serve “restaurant type food” that is eaten onsite or soon thereafter.

As such, grocery stores with hot food bars or salad bars must post calorie counts. Prepared foods ordered from menus at grocery stores, such as sandwiches or soups, must include calorie counts alongside those menus.

The rules also impact take-out pizza, popcorn purchased at a movie theater or muffins bought at coffee shops as well as alcoholic beverages that are part of a restaurant’s normal menu.

The rules were included in the Affordable Care Act in 2010 as states began making their own menu labeling regulations. The rules come amid growing concern about obesity and how restaurant food may contribute to that problem.

Consumers get about a third of their calories from food away from home, according to the FDA. That’s up from 18 percent in the 1970s.

“Information about the foods we get in restaurants and in take-out meals isn’t consistently available,” Gottlieb said. “Often we’re left without good insight into how many calories we’re consuming away from our homes or what type of nutrition we may receive.”

The rule was originally set to be in place in 2015 and then was delayed until 2017. The regulation was delayed again in May, just days before it was to take effect.

In a statement in August, Gottlieb assured advocates and industry groups that there would be no further delay in the rule’s enforcement. The Center for Science in the Public Interest and National Consumers League had sued the government after the latest delay. They put that suit on hold following the FDA’s commitment to not delay the rules any further.

One of the industry concerns Gottlieb mentioned in his newest statement comes from pizza delivery companies worried about the varied toppings and large number of potential combinations.

In such cases, companies could provide a base amount of calories for pizza and then post calories next to the toppings.

Another concern came from grocers with self-service buffets or beverage station. Gottlieb in his statement said that those companies could post calories next to each individual item. Or, he said, they could have a single sign posting “visible while consumers are making their selection.”

Gottlieb also noted that billboards, coupons and other marketing materials do not meet the FDA’s definition of a menu, and therefore do not have to include calorie counts.

Contact Jonathan Maze at jonathan.maze@penton.com

Follow him on Twitter at @jonathanmaze

Update: Nov. 7, 2017 This story has been updated with comment from the NRA.

Tom Colicchio on Wednesday posted an essay on the online site Medium offering his take in the ongoing discussion about eradicating sexual harassment from the restaurant industry.

A familiar face on television, Colicchio is also owner of the New York-based Crafted Hospitality restaurant group, which operates the signature concept Craft, as well as the recently opened Temple Court, Riverpark and Heritage Steak. Separately, he also operates the sandwich chain ‘Wichcraft.

As a chef, Colicchio has spent time in some of New York’s top kitchens, including Gramercy Tavern.

The recent ‘revelations’ of rampant harassment in the restaurant industry weren’t exactly a shocker to the women working in it. Or the men, for that matter.

This isn’t just a matter of a few bad eggs and ​we all know it.

For every John Besh splashed across Page Six, we can assume hundreds, if not thousands more, with kitchens just like the ones his female employees described. Something’s broken here. It’s time that chefs and restaurant owners candidly acknowledge the larger culture that hatched all these crummy eggs, and have some hard conversations amongst ourselves that are long overdue.

Let’s start with this: Assessing a woman as a body, rather than as a person with a mind, character, and talent, denies the full measure of her humanity. It’s wrong and it demeans us all.

Real men don’t need to be told this.

They shouldn’t need to be told that the high stakes of elite kitchens don’t justify the ugly machismo that runs through so many of them.

There was a stretch in the late ’90s at Gramercy Tavern when all the senior chefs in my kitchen were women. Night after brutal night, we faced the same pressured ballet of high heat, eighty sixed salmon and tickets spitting out of the printer at a clip too fast to meet. The only difference was the quiet; the smack talk was gone. These chefs were tightly focused, competing against themselves, not each other.

I recall a group of French chefs were visiting at the time who had a good sneer over the male-to-female ratio in the kitchen. I also recall they shut up pretty quickly once they saw the food.

My kitchen is hardly perfect. I’ve let my temper run high and driven the pressure up. I’ve brushed off the leering, without acknowledging its underlying hostility. I once called a journalist a “rumor-mongering b — -h” for printing gossip that hurt my staff, a gendered slur that I regret.

But I count myself lucky: I had a father who wouldn’t allow disrespect of my mother, and that lesson sunk in more fully during my formative years than the casual misogyny I saw everywhere else.

It made it an easy choice to turn away the high-paying bachelor parties that wanted to rent out the PDR and bring in a stripper, which isn’t an environment my servers signed on for.

It made it a no-brainer to fire the creep of a staffer who snapped pictures of his female co-workers in their changing room without their consent.

And it makes it easy for me to see that it’s time for men in the restaurant industry to say to each other: Enough.

Enough; because deep down men know that sexist shit-talk is just a lazy substitute for real wit.

They know that work is not sexy time.

They know that if they have to insist it was consensual, it probably wasn’t.

They know that women really don’t want to hear about their boners (and that they shouldn’t say boner because they’re not 15.)

I imagine leaders in our industry will now come rushing forward with talk about how women should feel safe and valued in our restaurants. But is it any wonder that dick culture persists in professional kitchens when most of the women are gone from the back of the house by the time they hit their 30s? When the ones who remain are paid, on average, 28 percent less than their male counterparts?

Men vastly outnumber women as chefs in top kitchens, but not, as legend has it, because only ‘real men’ can stand the heat.

We need to do more than pay lip service to fixing this. It’s not enough for us to ask, “How can we behave differently around our women employees and coworkers?”

Instead we should be asking “What barriers to their success do I owe it to them to remove?”

Those of us with our own kitchens should be asking “What have I been able to take for granted on my way to the top that women often can’t, and how can I help fix that?”

It’s time we reimagine the family-averse work week that tells young cooks being a “real” chef is incompatible with being a parent. That tradeoff is a Faustian bargain, and its own form of harassment.

And while we’re at it, let’s scrap those beloved myths about brawn, blood, and blind sacrifice that chefs and their acolytes use to justify exploitative work conditions. Sure, we all sweated and scrapped and worked damn hard to get where we are, but most of us did it without the added torment of sexual harassment. Enough.

A generation ago, American chefs were the young upstarts, bucking old-world conventions and forging a new path. We were the ones to watch.

Is this the end of that era? Is this what passing the baton looks like? Or do we have a second act in us, one in which we excite eaters more than ever because we’re empowering a new generation of talent?

Can we finally redefine, in our collective minds’ eye, what the race, gender or sexual identity of a top chef might be, and take the steps to make that happen?

Chefs are a tough bunch; canny, creative and quick on our feet. That’s why I’m betting our industry can shrug off its leering lizard skin and get this right. I’m betting that we’re smart and confident enough to level the playing field and create real opportunity, or at least learn how it’s done from the new crop of women (and men) running their own kickass kitchens humanely and winning awards, while parenting young kids.

I’m betting we can reinvent our industry as a place where people of all genders feel safe and prepare to lead.

Some aging bros may give us flack for it. But only until they see the food.

Contact Bret Thorn at bret.thorn@penton.com

Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary

Snacking may very well be the greatest Modern American pastime. Snacks accounted for 19 percent of all foodservice occasions in 2016, according to research and analysis by The Coca-Cola Co. That company’s senior manager for national foodservice strategy, Christine Kortschak, said snacking is “a $56 billion sales opportunity” in restaurants and retail foodservice combined.

And unlike breakfast, lunch and dinner dayparts, where traffic is fairly stagnant, snacking is growing by 7 percent, she said.

And that’s just between-meal and late-night snacks (about half of which occur between lunch and dinner, according to Coca-Cola).

Increasingly, traditional meals are really snacking occasions, too, said Nicky Kruse, strategist for San Francisco-based restaurant consulting firm The Culinary Edge.

“It’s interesting that the movement is away from three meals and toward food that can be enjoyed in good company,” she said, adding that that’s particularly true with Millennial diners.

“There’s not a set, ‘Oh, you’ve got to eat your breakfast, lunch and dinner at these times’,” she said. Instead, modern notions of health include listening to your body, eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full.

And even if you are eating during a traditional meal period, what you’re ordering might be different, with groups of friends ordering multiple items to share.

That’s the service model at Acorn in Denver, where everything on the menu is intended to be shared.

“It seems like everyone wants to eat like that anymore,” said Bryan Dayton, Acorn’s beverage director and owner of Acorn.

He said Acorn’s older sister, Oak at Fourteenth in Boulder, used to have a more traditional menu, but customers were more interested in shared appetizer plates, and they ended up splitting entrées to share, too.

Although at lunch, customers might have their own soup or sandwich, “at dinner it’s all shared, and it’s been like that since day one.”

Dayton and chef-partner Steve Redzikowski opened Acorn four years ago thinking it would be easier than traditional coursed-out service, but in fact they go through about 20 percent more plates than normal, meaning more work for the kitchen, “but those are good problems,” he said. 

Popular items range from lighter dishes — such as kale & apple salad with candied almond, grana Padano, togarashi and lemon vinaigrette; and hamachi with carrot, radish, wakame, cilantro and orange ponzu — to heartier items such as Florida rock shrimp & grits with creole sofrito, white wine and Tabasco; and tomato braised meatballs with grits, stracciatella and basil.

Camperdown Elm, a new restaurant in Brooklyn with a more traditional menu, nonetheless has a four-item “snacks” section for food that’s quick to prepare and serve and that guests can order with a cocktail while deciding what to have for actual dinner — sort of like high-end chips and salsa.

“It’s something fast to get on the table, so when people are ordering they can say ‘send me some oysters and some cucumbers and some muffins,” chef Brad Willits said.

“Some tables order all the snacks and then they’ll go into their dinner.”

Those snacks currently include oysters on the half shell with a kiwi mignonette; grilled cucumbers topped salmon roe, dill, shiso, horseradish and smoked buttermilk; mackerel pâté with sesame seeds on squid ink colored rice crackers; and fried English muffin nuggets with house-made, cultured butter.

“They’re something small that has a ton of flavor that you don’t necessarily need a lot of,” Willits said. “It’s a perfect way to start a meal, almost like an amuse-bouche.”

Although snackable foods do well even during regular meals, Kortschak of Coke sees more opportunity in snacks between meals, especially since busy restaurants can reach peak capacity during lunch and dinner, unable to serve more customers than they already have.

Also, although sharing is all well and good, the single largest snacking occasion is adults eating alone in the afternoon, followed by adults eating alone in the evening, according to Coke. 

John Mooney, chef of Bidwell in Washington, D.C., has done well attracting customers all day long, with plenty of items for customers to grab and go on their own.

It helps, of course, that Bidwell is attached to Union Market, which brings foot traffic all day long, but Mooney has worked with that situation by offering portable items, like thick-crust pizza cut into squares for easy portability, as well as quick-eating food like oysters on the half shell, fried oysters and fried deviled eggs coated in flour, egg wash and finely ground panko bread crumbs and served with buttermilk ranch dressing.

He also offers a sausage plate that changes every other day, with meats smoked onsite.

“You can see and smell the smoker. That helps stimulate things,” he said.

Fogo de Chão has gone directly after the between-meal crowd with its Bar Fogo menu. 

First introduced in 2014, the menu is now available at all 38 United States locations of the churrascaria chain, whose newer locations have larger and more attractive bars intended to draw customers who don’t want to commit to the normal all-you-can-eat meat-fest that is the normal Fogo experience, and that starts at $48.

Between 4:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, Fogo de Chão guests can get $4 snacks such as Parmesan polenta fries, hearts of palm and spinach dip, beef rib sliders or chicken sliders. Other items such as empanadas, garlic shrimp and grilled tenderloin skewers can be had for between $7 and $15, paired with $4 beers, $6 wines and $8 cocktails.

“We’ve had a very good response from our guests,” Fogo de Chão CEO Larry Johnson said, and although the chain doesn’t break out sales from the bar compared to sales in the dining room, he said beverage sales have gone up since the program was introduced.

Fogo de Chão is also attracting new customers as well as getting increased frequency from customers who would ordinarily only visit two or three times a year — who are willing to come in for 45 minutes to an hour and spend $20 even when they don’t want to commit to the full Fogo experience.

Ten-unit steakhouse chain Smith & Wollensky has done well with a snack that highlights the brand’s beef expertise: a Cup O’ Beef Bacon.

“It’s like my little child, the beef bacon,” said national executive chef Matt King, who researched “beef bacon” products on the market that were either too much like jerky or brisket. “So then I thought, well, now I have to do it.”

He cures beef plates — essentially belly — for 10 days with a mixture of Turbinado sugar, pink curing salt, kosher salt, coriander and black pepper. Then he rinses it and smokes it over apple wood for about eight hours. He slices it, pan-fries the slices, pats them dry and serves about eight of them standing up in a Mason jar with buttermilk blue cheese dressing that plays the dual role of being a nice dip, and also reinforcing the fact that customers are eating beef by evoking the traditional combination of steak and blue cheese. 

“It’s a really unique flavor,” he said, noting that it starts smoky and salty like bacon, but finishes with the steak flavor that uniquely comes with beef fat.

He said the beef bacon is often offered at tables as a shared appetizer or side dish, “and we certainly sell quite a few as bar snacks.”

He said that, at $15, “it hits that sweet spot of a price point that a couple of people can get it and snack on.”

“Sometimes you have to come up with something that’s different, something that makes you unique. That’s the fun of being a chef.”

Contact Bret Thorn at bret.thorn@penton.com

Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary

Dee Lincoln, who co-founded the Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steak House brand and left that company in 2010, on Friday will debut a new fine-dining restaurant in Frisco, Texas. 

The 8,000-square-foot Dee Lincoln Prime will open as one of more than a dozen food offerings at the Dallas Cowboys’ new headquarters complex, The Star. Other Star dining options include Cane Rosso, City Works Eatery & Pour House, Cow Tipping Creamery, Mi Cocina, Neighborhood Services, Raising Cane’s, Tri Tip Grill and Tupelo Honey Southern Kitchen & Bar. 

The upscale steakhouse is headed by executive chef T.J. Lengnick, formerly of Pappas Bros. Steakhouse, Stephan Pyles, Jasper’s and Shinsei in the Dallas area. 

Dee Lincoln Prime also features a sushi bar, headed by Mark Tungcmittrong, who is the co-owner of Bambu and Sushi Rock. Tungcmittrong will oversee a reservations-only six-seat omakase bar within the larger bar area. His more conventional sushi is also on the menu throughout the restaurant. 

The dinner-only restaurant also features a wall of tequilas, known as the “tequila library,” and temperature-controlled wine storage room that features 2,100 bottles.

The restaurant’s dining room and patio accommodate 200 guests, the bar 22 and three private dining rooms offer a total of 90 additional seats.

Contact Ron Ruggless at Ronald.Ruggless@Penton.com

Follow him on Twitter: @RonRuggless

Nils Norén, a veteran of Marcus Samuelsson’s restaurants, has signed on as culinary director of Megu, a modern fine-dining Japanese concept based in New York City.

Megu used to have two New York locations, the first having opened in 2004. Both closed in 2014, and the following year restaurateur Jon Bakhshi purchased the global rights to the name. He now operates five locations in New York, Moscow, New Delhi, Doha, Qatar and Gstaad, Switzerland.

Originally from Sweden, Norén started at Aquavit restaurant in New York in 1998, working under Samuelsson until the latter chef left the company and Norén became executive chef. In 2006 he became vice president of culinary and pastry arts at The French Culinary Institute (now the International Culinary Center), a culinary school in New York City. He then reunited with Samuelsson and helped open more than 20 restaurants globally before going off on his own as a consultant in 2015. 

“We’re trying to revitalize the brand and the concept,” Nils said of Megu.

“I think it’s interesting, being a non-Japanese coming in to cook allows for a different view on it,” said Norén, who is a member of the Gohan Society, which fosters appreciation of Japanese culinary heritage in the U.S.

“Even though I appreciate the tradition of Japanese cuisine, I’m not bound by those traditions, which allows me to do a different take on it.” 

So, he’s adding a Swedish-Japanese mashup side dish to the menu: He’s using a Japanese sweet potato to make a Swedish Hasselback potato — a trendy preparation for which the potato is sliced thinly, but not completely, vertically, so the slices are all attached but exposed to allow more of the surface area to be exposed to butter, with which it’s brushed before baking.

Norén, who once worked at the Hasselbacken hotel in Stockholm, where the dish was developed, bakes the sweet potatoes with miso butter and finishes them with shichimi togarashi, so the flavors are Japanese but the technique is Western. 

He’s also working on a duck dish for which the breast is cured with kombu seaweed and then is seared and served with mazumen, or “dry ramen” served with sauce instead of broth. The sauce is duck reduction with foie gras and pickled mustard greens.

Norén noted that Japanese and Swedish cuisines have several elements in common, including a love for fish and pickles.

“The Japanese obviously eat a lot of fresh fish, but also a lot of cured fish,” he said, noting that Japanese mackerel with salt and vinegar is not unlike Swedish pickled herring.

Norén is overseeing the five chefs de cuisine at the existing locations, including David Rashty, the chef in New York, who was a student of Norén’s at the ICC. He said he and the chefs were working on redefining the cuisine and “the culinary philosophy behind it.”

“We’ll also start expanding our steak program,” he said, including sourcing more local steak in New York, as well as using the A5 wagyu beef from Japan that is a Megu trademark.

He also will be working with the chefs to source products locally and adapt to the cultures in each market, adding more vegetables in line with prevailing trends, and reworking the restaurants’ beverage programs.

“I think we can have a lot of fun there, whether we just Japanese whiskey, sake or shochu, and applying the same principles as we would on the food, where you could mix in Western technique to create something new.”

For dessert, he plans to add a cheesecake in the style of that dessert used on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, for which egg whites are folded in, “so it becomes almost this soufflé, cotton-like cheesecake. It’s delicious, and so much lighter,” he said.

Norén also said several new locations were likely to open in the coming year but they weren’t ready to provide details.

Contact Bret Thorn at bret.thorn@penton.com

Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary

Dec. 1, 2017 Correction: This story has been updated with the correct spelling of Jon Bakhshi's name.

Restaurant operators could be allowed to expand tip pools to include more back-of-the-house workers under a new rule proposed by the U.S. Department of Labor on Monday.

To be published Tuesday in the Federal Register and subject to a 30-day public comment period, the proposed rule would clarify the Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA, to allow tip pools in some cases to include back-of-the-house workers that have long been prohibited from sharing in tips, including line cooks and dishwashers. 

The proposed rule, however, would only apply to employers who pay a full minimum wage and do not take a tip credit. A number of states in the West do not allow a tip credit, for example, including California, Oregon, Washington and Nevada.

The goal is to help decrease the wage disparities between tipped and non-tipped workers, the labor department said.

When servers are paid the full minimum wage plus tips, they can earn dramatically more than kitchen workers who are not allowed to share in tips, even though — the labor department argues — non-tipped workers like line cooks and dishwashers arguably contribute to the overall guest experience.

Worker advocates, however, argue that employers should address that disparity by paying back-of-the-house workers more, not by relying on servers to subsidize a lower-wage model by sharing gratuities.

“Today the Trump Administration once again sided with businesses and corporations over workers, proposing a rule that constitutes a wholesale attack on restaurant workers and the meager federal protections they have for their pay,” said Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, in a statement on the proposed rule change Monday.

“Tips belong to the workers who have earned them — period. But today the Trump labor department has proposed a pathway for employers to keep tips for themselves.”

Owens added that the public cannot make informed comments on the proposed rule without a legally required economic analysis that will provide an estimate on how much it will cost restaurant workers and how much it will benefit restaurant chains.

At the heart of the issue, however, is an ongoing debate about whether employers can control or divert tips when the tip credit is not used.

Courts have had conflicting opinions on the issue resulting in much confusion for employers — along with costly litigation.

In recent years, tip credit lawsuits led to settlements and verdicts ranging from $5 million to $19.1 million, according to attorneys with Fisher Phillips.

In the past, federal law said employers could not use the tip credit unless all tips were retained by the tipped employee. An exception, however, allowed employers to divert tips to a valid tip pool. But it didn’t make clear how that exception applied to employers that don’t use the tip credit.

In 2011, the labor department under the Obama administration promulgated a new regulation saying employers could not control or divert tips, regardless of whether they used the tip credit.

That rule essentially limited tip pools to workers who “customarily and regularly” receive tips. As a result, those who fall outside the traditional path of service were not allowed to participate in tip pools.

This year, however, the Tenth and Eleventh Circuit Courts came to different conclusions about employer control of tips, saying employers can control tips if they don’t take the tip credit.

But because the ruling differed from earlier court opinions, the National Restaurant Association’s Restaurant Law Center earlier this year asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the issue. It’s too early to say whether that may be judged unnecessary if the labor department changes the rule.

Angelo Amador, the Restaurant Law Center’s executive director, applauded the labor department’s decision to revisit tip regulations.

“We look forward to submitting comments from the restaurant industry on the new rulemaking,” he said in a statement Monday.

Meanwhile, worker advocacy group Restaurants Opportunities Centers, or ROC, said chapters across the country would be delivering letters to the U.S. labor department in opposition to the proposed rule.

“This rule, backed by the National Restaurant Association, is just another attempt to keep workers’ wages low and let customer tips make up the difference,” said Saru Jayaraman, ROC president.

 “The real barrier to fair wages and working conditions is the subminimum wage system, in which tipped restaurant workers make as little as $2.13 [an hour] at the federal level. Establishing One Fair Wage for all workers, tipped or untipped, should be the priority for America’s 12 million restaurant workers.”

Attorney Ted Boehm of Fisher Phillips in Atlanta said the new rules, if made final, could be good for employers.

“The 2011 regulation has caused a lot of litigation, so resolving this difference between various circuit courts will be a good thing,” he said.

Contact Lisa Jennings at lisa.jennings@penton.com 

Follow her on Twitter: @livetodineout

In 2018, American kids will be eating a wider range of foods and grown-ups will be swapping out carbs for vegetables and eating heritage breeds of meat with uncommon herbs, according to chefs polled by the National Restaurant Association.

In its annual What’s Hot survey, the NRA asks members of the American Culinary Federation to rank a long list of items as either a “hot trend,” “yesterday’s news” or “perennial favorites.”

New cuts of meat ranked in first place, same as last year, followed by house-made condiments, which leapt five places to second. Street-food-inspired dishes, ethnic-inspired breakfast items and sustainable seafood rounded out the top five. They all scored in the top six last year, with ethnic-inspired breakfast jumping up two spots to fourth. 

Healthful kids’ meals fell three places to sixth, but gourmet items in kids’ meals moved up two spots to 18th and ethnic-inspired kids’ dishes joined the top 20 trends for the first time at 16th place. 

Other newcomers are vegetable carb substitutes (think riced cauliflower and parsnip purée), uncommon herbs (thank the New Nordic movement for this, with ingredients such as yarrow and stinging nettle), Peruvian cuisine, heritage breed meats, Thai rolled ice cream (ice cream base poured on a super-chilled “anti-griddle,” frozen and rolled into a tight cylinder), doughnuts with nontraditional filling and ethnic condiments (such as Sriracha, gochujang and chimichurri). 

Doughnuts with nontraditional filling is the fastest-growing trend: More chefs voted for it this year compared to last year than any other trend. 

It was followed by ethnic-inspired kids’ dishes, farm/estate-branded items, heritage-breed meats and Peruvian cuisine. 

Conversely, the items whose trendiness is cooling off fastest are artisan cheese, heirloom fruit & vegetables, house-made charcuterie and house-made/artisan ice cream. 

In terms of nonalcoholic beverages, the hottest trend was house-made or artisanal soft drinks. Of the 700 chefs surveyed, 56 percent said it was hot. 

Next came cold-brew coffee, gourmet lemonade and locally roasted/house-roasted coffee, all of which got 55 percent of votes. 

They were followed by specialty tea (hot and iced), mocktails and kombucha. 

Topping trends in alcohol beverages are culinary cocktails — such as those containing savory ingredients, fresh ingredients or herbal infusions. 

They were followed by locally produced spirits, wine and beer, and then craft or artisan spirits, on-site barrel-aged drinks, regional signature cocktails and food-beer pairings.

The full report can be found here.

Contact Bret thorn at bret.thorn@penton.com

Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary

Which food trends from the past year will stand the test of time in 2018? Look back at trends that were hot on restaurant menus last year and are well positioned to grow in the coming year. 

Filipino cuisine

Long called the next big thing, Filipino cuisine, with its balance of sweet, salty and acidic flavors, finally hit the mainstream in 2017.

Among the new generation of Filipino-American chefs who have helped popularize the cuisine is Dale Talde. Talde is a Filipino-American “Top Chef” alum and the man behind the Talde restaurants in Brooklyn, N.Y., Jersey City, N.J., and Miami Beach, Fla., as well as Massoni in New York City and Atlantic Social in Brooklyn. He has been increasingly and unapologetically serving the foods and flavors he grew up eating.

“I’m finding my flavors, my power, my point of view,” Talde said last year. “Now I’m more serious about what I do. I care. Now you’re seeing that on a plate.”

Also helping to push Filipino food forward were the chefs that opened Filipino-focused restaurants in 2017, including Perla in Philadelphia by chef Lou Boquila, a native of the Philippines, and Bad Saint in Washington, D.C., by Filipino-American chef Tom Cunanan. 

Additionally, with more consumers following vegan or gluten-free diets, Filipino cuisine’s general lack of dairy and gluten is another reason it’s likely to continue to grow.

Pickled everything 

Pickles grew by double digits on restaurant menus in 2017, according to Datassential, in part due to chefs who are passionate about applying the age-old preservation method to just about any vegetable or fruit.

Chef Troy Guard, chef and owner of Denver-based TAG Restaurant Group, is so into pickles that he created an entire pickling bar at his newest concept, Mister Tuna. The restaurant’s pickling wall showcases rows of housemade jars of pickled vegetables and fruits, from cucumbers and kohlrabi to lemons and rhubarb. Guard also offers pickled items on many of the menus at his seven other concepts.

Other restaurants plied pickles at the bar last year, concocting cocktails made with pickling juice. Among them were Sable Kitchen & Bar in Chicago, which served the Traveler’s Terrace, a riff on the Perfect Manhattan that includes pickling juice in the recipe. Nick & Toni’s in East Hampton, N.Y., which offered an array of pickled items on its DIY Bloody Mary cocktail board.

Fried pickles also took hold on restaurant menus, making a major contribution to the growth of pickles on menus. For example, American Whiskey in New York City offers a starter of fried cornichons with (f)ranch dressing (a buttermilk dressing with tarragon, dill and chervil), and Dallas-based Super Chix pairs fried pickles with select sandwiches. Sports-themed restaurants, including chains such as Chili’s, Texas Roadhouse and Buffalo Wild Wings, have also been serving up the fried pickles. 

Great (whole) grains

Now that most consumers know, can pronounce and even love quinoa, they’re craving more. Last year, chefs gave them more dishes with quinoa, as well as with less familiar grains, such as amaranth, barley and farro.

The popularity of quinoa in salads and sides at California-based chain Sharky’s Woodfired Mexican Grill last year prompted the more than 20-unit chain to add to its menu a Roasted Veggie Bowl, made with organic baby greens, organic quinoa, organic black beans and roasted organic vegetables with a walnut-cilantro pesto. Guests’ growing interest in quinoa also inspired the chain to begin exploring other whole grains, including farro, tuxedo barley and black rice, to add to other dishes.

Ancient grains are a natural fit for chef Mike Isabella's Greek restaurants Kapnos, Kapnos Kouzina and Kapnos Taverna located in and around the Washington, D.C. An ancient grain salad is paired with many a dish, including spit-roasted lamb and whole lamb shoulder. 

Bruce Bromberg, co-owner of Blue Ribbon Restaurants, said he likes the versatility of whole grains, and apparently so do customers at his Blue Ribbon Federal Grill, which opened last spring in New York City’s Financial District. Among the restaurant’s best-selling dishes last year was Grilled Shrimp and Farro Salad, with Florida white shrimp, farro, poblano peppers, grilled corn and pomegranates, dressed with lime-cumin dressing and served atop mint labneh.

Sourcing fish sustainably can be a difficult challenge for restaurant operators, but some chefs are going beyond that. They’re not just using seafood caught responsibly from healthy fisheries, or farmed fish raised without damaging the environment. They are working to cut down on the populations of invasive species by feeding them to their customers.

That’s what’s happening with the wild blue catfish of the Chesapeake Bay area.

These large fish indigenous to the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio river basins were introduced as sports fish to the James, Rappahannock and York rivers in Virginia — all tributaries of Chesapeake Bay — in the 1970s and ’80s, according to the Chesapeake Bay Program, an organization formed in 1983 to help restore the environment of the area.

With few natural predators in the Chesapeake area, the population of the fish has exploded, making for great fun for sports fisherman who regularly catch specimens of 20 pounds or more. It’s less fun for local, delicious species such as shad and blue crab, which the blue catfish eat in large numbers. 

How to put blue catfish on the menu

“But the fact that they eat good food means they taste really good,” said Bruce Mattel, senior associate dean for culinary arts at The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., who has been using them to teach his students about fish butchery and cooking for the past couple of years.

“They sauté up really beautifully,” Mattel said. “They’re lean and have appeal because they’re mild and somewhat sweet tasting, and pretty firm for a catfish.”

Since these Chesapeake fish come from brackish water or salt water rather than fresh water, Mattel said they don’t have the grassy or muddy flavor that the more common channel catfish, which are fairly common in rivers and lakes throughout North America, have. He said even catfish that are farmed in the southeast can have a muddy flavor if they’re not super-fresh.  

Blue catfish also are fairly easy to fabricate, he added. “They don’t have scales, they’re easy to skin and pretty easy to fillet.”

He cautioned, however, that it’s a fish that you want to cook as a fillet rather on the bone, since the bones are rather strong tasting and oily. Additionally, the skin, being “kind of rubbery,” isn’t great eating.

The strong-flavored bones also aren’t great for stock unless you have a specific purpose in mind.

Being a wild product, Blue catfish can be pretty inconsistent in size, said Jason Alley, chef and owner of Comfort, Pasture and Flora restaurants in Richmond, Va.

“So there’s some portioning involved,” said Alley. Still, he buys boneless, skinless fillets of them, so the labor cost is quite low.

That item is on the menu at Comfort every night, breaded in a mixture of cornmeal and flour, deep-fried and served with tartar sauce, “the way that God intended,” Alley said.

The restaurant currently buys the fillets for around $5 a pound — comparable to farmed catfish and half the price of other wild-caught filleted fish, he said — and he charges $17 for an 8-ounce portion with two sides, “so it’s a good margin for us,” Alley said.

Alley was raised catching channel catfish growing up in southwestern Virginia, and he said he prefers the blue catfish.

“It’s so much sweeter,” he said.

Although the muscle fibers are similar to channel cats, the ones he gets from the Rappahannock River near Chesapeake Bay, where the river bottom is sandy, are firm — mushiness can be a problem with farm-raised catfish, he said — and devoid of muddy, sulfurous flavors. He said his customers compare the fish to flounder.

Besides the flavor difference, using wild blue catfish allows Alley to tell the story that a growing number of his customers are interested in: cleaning up the Chesapeake by cutting down on an invasive species. The fish have really just become readily available in the past two years because most places weren’t set up for that type of processing.

Indeed, blue catfish is fairly new to the culinary scene, but its popularity is growing rapidy according to Gavin Gibbons, vice president for communications at the National Fisheries Institute, a trade body for the commercial fishing industry.

“Its seen an astronomical jump in popularity, certainly in the last five years,” Gibbons said, at least anecdotally — the NFI only records consumption numbers for the top 10 seafood species.

“From a sourcing perspective, it has a terrific story in the Chesapeake region, and it’s also affordable, and it’s a good menu addition because it tastes good, so it’s really a triple-threat fish,” he said. 

Potential marketing problem on blue catfish

Blue catfish isn’t an easy sell in the western United States, said Andrew Gruel, founder of 10-unit Slapfish, based in Huntington Beach, Calif.

Using sustainably sourced seafood is part of Slapfish’s mission, and Gruel buys it at a premium from the conservation-focused supplier Sea to Table.

“It’s an interesting story,” Gruel said. “It kind of has a sexy spin to it. Eating the hell out of this species to save another species is interesting.”

And he agrees that it tastes good.

“It eats differently than a classic channel catfish,” he said. “Because it’s a cleaner flavor we don’t need to fancy it up. It’s just a great, simple taco fish. … But it’s hard to sell because people hear ‘catfish’ and think of a different species than what it is.”

Also, calling it “blue” is a marketing challenge. “People immediately go to blue Gatorade or blue gumballs.”

He said if he offers it in tacos, po’ boy sandwiches or po’ boy burritos people will eat it, but given a choice, his customers don’t choose catfish.

“It really sells when it’s part of a dish,’ he said.

More challenges

But a reclassification of government oversight of catfish could radically alter supply, NFI’s Gibbons said.

Fish processing is normally regulated by the Food & Drug Administration, but lobbying from the farmed catfish industry has resulted in transferring that authority to the Department of Agriculture, which is responsible for domestic livestock such as beef, pork, lamb and poultry. 

Gibbons said the USDA is set up to oversee animals whose processing can be much more accurately predicted than wild fish. The department require onsite inspectors paid for by the processors. If the inspectors aren’t there, the fish can’t be processed.

But with blue catfish or other wild fish, you don’t know when the fish will be arriving or how many there will be, “So the regulatory hurdles associated with processing the fish when it comes in, and making sure it’s fresh and prepared for delivery or cold storage is a timing game,” Gibbons said. “USDA has never had to play that role before, and so they don’t. They tell you you’re going to have an inspector at this time, for this long, and that’s it.”

Gibbons said the catfish farming industry’s lobbying was aimed at a different kind of catfish, Vietnamese pangasius, to help prevent importation of the fish.

“Collateral damage from that may be the blue catfish,” he said: Since other fish, being under the FDA’s jurisdiction, don’t require a USDA inspector, fish processors might decide that catfish aren’t worth the trouble.

Enforcement of the new regulations were slated for September 2017. So far, NRN hasn’t found evidence of any supply chain shortages.

Contact Bret Thorn at bret.thorn@penton.com 

Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary

Pacific Coast residents have a longstanding holiday tradition of eating Dungeness crab, named after Dungeness Bay in Washington State, where the first commercial fishing for the species took place.

Although the tasty custom is said to date back to the mid-1800s, today dishes featuring Dungeness and other short-season crab species can be found on celebratory menus on both coasts, and just about everywhere in between.

"Crab is a special occasion food, not something you eat every day,” said Mark Richardson, executive chef at Dudley's on Short in Lexington, Ky. “It's rich and celebratory and perfect for ringing in the new year and indulging a bit."

On New Year’s Eve, diners at Dudley’s can indulge in Richardson’s chilled crab and avocado salad with mâche, pink grapefruit and chives, among other menu items.

Those ringing in the new year at Red Star Tavern in Portland, Ore., can whet their appetite for the celebratory meal with a Dungeness crab piadina. For this amuse-bouche, executive chef Dolan Lane uses a wood-fired oven to make mini dough rounds and tops them with a citrusy Dungeness crab salad and a dollop of mascarpone and caviar.

Although he’s from Boston and works in New York City, Christopher Stam, executive chef at DB Bistro Moderne by Daniel Boulud, admits he loves Dungeness crab. However, when it comes to the DB Bistro menu, he prefers to source local crabs that have a similar flavor profile to Dungeness, such as Jonah, which is native to the East Coast, from Newfoundland to Florida, instead of shipping West Coast varieties across the country.

“I do love Dungeness crab,” Stam said. “Jonah crab is like our version of that.”

For the past few weeks, Stam has been featuring an occasional special of squid-ink spaghettini with sautéed Jonah crab, sautéed rock shrimp, roasted tomato ragù and Calabrian chile oil.

Starting next week, he’ll also serve peekytoe crab crostini made with the East Coast crab meat dressed with shallot and lemon, served on a roasted garlic crostini with a whole-grain mustard mousseline and topped with shishito peppers and a dollop of Kaluga caviar.

Dungeness crab will also appear on the New Year’s Eve menu at Pazzo Ristorante in Portland, Ore., in the form of a Dungeness crab bisque drizzled with truffle cream and basil oil. And the newly opened Four Saints, a rooftop restaurant at the Kimpton Hotel in Palm Springs, Calif., will serve an appetizer of Dungeness crab, avocado, snap peas, grapefruit and poppy seeds. 

This holiday season, some restaurants are menuing another equally indulgent crab species: Alaska King crab, the large cold-water crustacean prized for its long and meaty legs.

At Steak 48 in Chicago, the newest location of the Houston-based fine-dining steakhouse, is offering a number of such crab dishes, including King crab and avocado stack, a sculpted dish of Alaskan King crab, avocado and crispy wontons; Alaskan King crab and rock shrimp mac & cheese, made with Provel, parmesan and Tillamook cheddar cheeses; and a whole King crab cluster, served with the shell split and with drawn butter on the side.

While those dishes are always on the menu, Steak 48 corporate executive chef Marc Lupino said they really stand out during the holiday.

“[The King crab cluster] is a festive dish that will blow guests away and can be put in the center of the table for everyone to share and enjoy,” he said. “[The crab and shrimp mac & cheese] dish is a great holiday splurge for the flavors and the calories.”

Los Angeles chef and restaurateur Roy Choi is planning his first restaurant concept in Las Vegas, scheduled to open at the Park MGM, a transformed version of the Monte Carlo, later this year.

The still unnamed restaurant was described in a press release as being a “multifaceted and multisensory” experience that celebrates L.A.’s Koreatown neighborhood.

“This restaurant will be full of soul and culture that is influenced by the energy of Koreatown in Los Angeles, my hometown,” Choi said in a statement. “We are building this place to celebrate the fans and families that have supported us, and to welcome new friends around the world to the culture, personalities and amazing food experiences born on the streets of L.A.”

Promising “stinky delicious smells and lots of double dipping,” Choi on Facebook posted that the restaurant will have “all the food, culture, DJs, hip hop, life and fun of L.A., and try and find a way to blend that with everything that makes Vegas great.”

The hotel is being redeveloped by Sydell Group and MGM Resorts International, and it will include about 2,700 rooms, more than a dozen restaurants, a 5,300-seat theater, and a casino and spa. It is also the planned location for the Eataly market coming to Las Vegas, as well as a NoMad Hotel, which could mean restaurants by Daniel Humm and Will Guidara.

Humm and Guidera's New York-based Make It Nice hospitality group is a partner with Sydell in the NoMad Hotel in New York and Los Angeles. Make It Nice is parent to the restaurant Eleven Madison Park, as well as the restaurant NoMad, in New York and soon Los Angeles, and NoMad Bar, as well as the fast-casual concept Made Nice.

In the Facebook post, Choi hinted that “our good friends at the NoMad will be there too.”

Sydell is also a partner in the Line Hotel in Los Angeles’s Koreatown, which is home to Choi’s restaurants Commissary, the Pot lobby bar and the fusion bakery CaFé.

“Roy Choi and Sydell Group transformed Koreatown with new experiences that area had never before seen. It’s very exciting to get that dream team back together to create an unforgettable experience at Park MGM,” said Ari Kastrati, MGM Resort’s senior vice president of food and beverage, in a statement. 

Choi is also expanding the Locol quick-service concept he operates with chef and restaurant operator Daniel Patterson.

Locol is scheduled to open next week in a Whole Foods Market in San Jose, Calif. Choi has partnered with Whole Foods previously in other markets by opening his Chego concept in Los Angeles and a Kogi taco location at a store in El Segundo, Calif.

Both the original Locol location in Los Angeles’s Watts neighborhood and the second unit in Oakland, Calif., closed for a few weeks over the holiday season for a revamp.

The concept’s website indicates that the holiday break ended Monday, but it’s not clear when the units will reopen.

Contact Lisa Jennings at lisa.jennings@knect365.com

Follow her on Twitter: @livetodineout

Los Angeles chef and restaurateur Roy Choi started 2018 with a bang, announcing plans for a new concept in Las Vegas for the first time and a new line of sauces and seasonings at Williams Sonoma.

But even bigger news for Choi this year is about his quick-service concept Locol, which he opened in partnership with San Francisco-based chef and restaurateur Daniel Patterson. The concept is a closely watched experiment of sorts, designed to bring affordable and more-healthful fast-food — and good jobs — to underserved lower-income neighborhoods.

Next week, the third location for Locol will debut at a Whole Foods Market in San Jose, Calif. And the existing locations in Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood and West Oakland, Calif., will reopen after about a month of being closed through the holidays.

Both stores got a refresh during the break and Choi said the team has streamlined the menu to focus on burgers and “foldies,” a taco/sandwich hybrid.

“We wanted to align all three outlets,” he said. “We kind of grew organically and they became their own thing. We wanted to become one holistic company, so all the menus will reflect each other. We wanted to go back to our core, which was being a burger stand.” 

The break was also a time for Choi and his team to think about how to help Locol blossom in 2018. 

“In the first two years, our goal was to figure the model out, to make it sustainable and to have it grow,” he said. The goal was to grow just like any other chain, but in a way that provides “not only profitability, but spiritual profitability. To enrich people’s lives.”

The concept is “very, very close” to profitability, he added.

“We’ve created a really great brand and we’ve created a really deep impact and relationship with the communities, so really the profitability comes from growing within the community and finding new ways to create revenue,” he said.

Choi is working on using technology to create a “pay it forward” model that would allow supporters to buy meals for others.

“There are a lot of ways people want to support Locol, but they can’t make it to one of the stores,” he said. “We’re looking at ways of using technology to figure out how people could buy meals for young kids or families when you’re sitting in your office.”

Catering is also an opportunity, he said. Choi, who is famous as a food truck pioneer with his Kogi BBQ brand, operates two Locol trucks in Los Angeles and a catering van in Oakland.

“Our truck has done really well in the past year, so we’re figuring out how to get out in the community more and get our team more jobs,” he said. “Some people can’t get to Locol because they’re at work. Now we can go to their work. So we created a bridge.”

Choi also sees potential in the partnership with Whole Foods. 

“Now we can start using more organic ingredients, and we can expose our brand to an audience at Whole Foods Markets that really care. And so maybe that can go both ways,” he said. “Maybe we can give insight to where Whole Foods could start opening in neighborhoods where Locol is at. That’s really the long game for us.”

Choi said his conversations with Whole Foods in Northern California indicate that “one of their goals is to evolve beyond just being a big box market in affluent areas.” 

“They’re dipping their toe and reaching their hand out as much as we are to them, saying ‘Come in our store, we know your mission, we believe in your mission,’” he said. “And, if it works out, we can open in more of their stores, or maybe by getting to know us and our community and workers and our mission, maybe they see a window open where they might be able to open in Watts or Compton or East Palo Alto and West Baltimore and South Chicago.” 

Choi said he thought, in the beginning, Locol would be further along by now.

“We thought it would be more traditional, that we’d have five or six, and then we would franchise out, and those would mushroom into 15 or 25 by year five,” he said. “But what we’ve learned, and what we’ve lived, in the last couple years is that you grow in different ways. A tree sometimes grows in different ways, depending on the environment.”

Choi said it’s important for people to understand the challenges people face in communities like Watts, West Oakland and East San Jose.

“There aren’t many jobs. It’s the love and beauty of the people that keeps the dream alive, but the reality hasn’t changed much around us” he said.

“We’re just a small hamburger shop. We’re trying to grow like any restaurant is trying to grow, but there are a lot of things stacked against us,” he added. “You could easily be writing the story after Year One where we didn’t make it. But we’re going into Year Three, and I’m really proud of that.” 

Contact Lisa Jennings at lisa.jennings@KNect365.com

Follow her on Twitter: @livetodineout

Daniel Boulud, who has long been a champion of fine dining in America, has been named to the MenuMasters Hall of Fame. He will be honored at this year’s Nation’s Restaurant News MenuMasters gala, sponsored by Ventura Foods.

Inductees into the hall of fame have spent their careers promoting culinary excellence in American foodservice. Past winners have included Jacques Pépin, Wolfgang Puck, Paul Prudhomme, Tom Colicchio and José Andrés.

“I’m so glad to be inducting Daniel Boulud into the MenuMasters Hall of Fame. He has not only developed and run great restaurants in his own right, but has fostered the development of other chefs as well. He is also working to nurture a new generation of chefs through his support of Bocuse d’Or USA,” Nation’s Restaurant News senior food beverage editor Bret Thorn said.  

Born near the culinary mecca of Lyon, France, Boulud trained under the great chefs of that city before he moved to the United States. He has lived in New York City since 1982, first gaining acclaim as executive chef of Le Cirque before opening his own flagship, restaurant Daniel, in 1993. That restaurant was inducted into the Nation’s Restaurant News Fine Dining Hall of Fame in 1998 and he was named NRN’s Fine Dining Legend in 2012.

He also has won multiple James Beard Foundation awards, including Outstanding Chef, Outstanding Restaurateur and, in 2011, Chef of the Year.

He was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by the French government in 2006.

Boulud is currently the chef and owner of 14 restaurants around the world — ranging from Michelin-starred fine-dining restaurants to, to elegant taverns to sausage-and-burger eateries — and is the author of nine cookbooks.

He is chairman of the Ment’or BKB Foundation, which recruits and trains competitors for Team USA in the biennial Bocuse d’Or culinary competition.