Can you believe it’s been nearly three months since the 2009 CRFA Show? Nope, me neither.
As part of my nostalgia-tripping, I found this vid on YouTube, featuring the team from BartenderOne, who helped keep things hopping on the Cocktail Stage along with the legendary Dale DeGroff:
On BartenderOne’s main page I also came across a video posted just today, featuring a pretty neat contest in addition to some kick-glass flair moves. Here’s that video (if you have any difficulties getting it to play, just click on the “view on HD” icon that should pop-up in the lower right portion of the screen):
It’s rare that I post recipes here — in fact, I think I’ve only done it once before — but this one so neatly taps into the momentary cultural zeitgeist that I couldn’t resist.
As Simon Marchmont might put it, if you haven’t heard of Ferran Adrià, you don’t deserve food.
But to prove that I don’t want you to go hungry, here’s a chance for you to get up to speed on the chef widely regarded as the world’s best. Observer food writer Jay Rayner was one of the lucky 8,000 — or is it 7,000? — able to score a reservation at Adrià’s legendary restaurant El Bulli, and he wrote about his experiences here.
For a more savory experience, though, I recommend you check out the video (clocks in at around 15 minutes). Strongly recommend it, actually.
One note: Adrià appears rather brusque and distracted during this interview, but I’m willing to chalk it up to the challenges of working with/through a translator. I know it was tough for me when Le Monde sent a media writer to interview me about the inspiration behind my latest press release.
The sadness I felt when the BBC removed most the video links on the Posh Nosh website was matched only by the delight I felt when a friend found them on YouTube and forwarded the links to me.
Without further ado, let me present The Hon. Simon and Minty Marchmont, proprietors of the Quill and Tassel:
Minty’s descriptions of her food prep process are too varied and “exasperating” to list here, but I do encourage you to watch the video. With a dictionary, if needed.
The best quotes, though, fall to Simon, and include:
Bread is like us … it wants to breathe.
and
We’d never vacuum pack a fennel … that’d be murder.
Twenty years ago, if you wanted to know what your competitors were up to, you’d hire a private investigator or plant a spy — serious, dangerous, not-so-legal stuff! Twenty years from now, we’ll probably all share the same hive mind and the very concept of competition will be obsolete.
But in the meantime, the now time, if you’re looking for an easy and 100% free way to monitor what your competition is up to, check out Google Alerts.
Google Alerts isn’t a new service — curiously, it’s been wearing that beta tag for a couple of years now — but its power and effectiveness continues to grow.
With Google Alerts, you select a key word or words, identify what kind of alerts you’d like to receive (news alerts, blog mentions, video clips, etc.), indicate how often you’d like to receive the alerts (daily, for example), enter your email address and in a couple of clicks you’ll be receiving that information delivered directly to your email inbox. New hires, new locations, new products, new PR challenges — you can track everything with Google Alerts.
The sign-up process is delightfully intuitive, but if you’d like to see the process from start to finish, check out the short video included at the end of this post — it does a good job of walking you through each of the the steps.
A few things to remember that aren’t explicitly mentioned in the video:
You do not need to sign up for a Google account, or have a Gmail address in order to use Google Alerts (though you will need an account if you wish to manage your alerts). All you need to get started is an active email address.
The key words (aka: search terms) you use will determine what kind of results you receive. If you want alerts on “labour shortage” be sure to put those words side-by-side and in quotation marks (that indicates that you’d like to do a search on the phrase “labour shortage” Without the quotation marks, you could receive alerts about a shortage of doctors leading to problems in the delivery room.
You can also use Google Alerts to check up on yourself! It’s a good idea to set up an alert using your own business name so that you can track what others are saying about you, too.
Google’s full FAQ on Google Alerts is another great resource if you’re looking for more love before you leap.
Newsbite 