Not officially, of course.  But servers at restaurants often labor under more rules than a slaughterhouse worker. Well, definitely more than a slaughterhouse worker actually follows.

I mention this because of Bruce Buschel’s latest post on his delightful Start-Up Chronicle blog for The New York Times. (If you haven’t read his posts yet on starting up a seafood restaurant, do yourself the favor, particularly this self-deprecating masterstroke.) In his latest post, Buschel lists 50 of the 100 things that restaurant staffers should never do. It’s a tough list, and I’m not offended by it for one simple reason: He’s the boss. He can make his employees do whatever he wants.

Some of the don’ts on Buschel’s list:

7. Do not announce your name. No jokes, no flirting, no cuteness.

36. Never reek from perfume or cigarettes. People want to smell the food and beverage.

45. Do not curse, no matter how young or hip the guests.

I hope diners don’t assume that this list fits all restaurants for all occasions. Because it doesn’t. Personally, if the waitress at my local diner doesn’t reek of last night’s bender, call me “honey,” tell me her boss is a cocksucker, act like I’m her BFF, and then ignore me for the next 30 minutes, I’ll feel like I haven’t visited a real diner.

Photo courtesy of the Seattle Municipal Archives, via Flickr Creative Commons, Attribution License

I mean no disrespect to the Lager Heads, who had great coverage today of a beer vs. wine competition — I’ve levied plenty of jokes at wine myself. But NYT’s Eric Asimov wrote a wonderful call to sanity today on his blog The Pour, “A Plea for Peaceful Coexistence” (likely in response to the same event the Lager Heads covered). The crux:

The irony is that great beer and great wine are on the same team. The enemy of beer is not wine and the enemy of wine is not beer, just as the enemy of bread is not fruit and vice versa. But the enemy of good beer and good wine, and good food in general, is bad beer, bad wine and, yes, bad food.

This is exactly the kind of clear, sober (ahem) thinking that informs my philosophy about what beers to review, and how. The enemy of good beer is bad beer, and by far the largest propagators of bad beer are macrobreweries like Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors. Hell, they’re the largest propagators of any type of beer — macros make up 96% of the market.

Cheers to Asimov for addressing this topic in a large, mainstream publication. But a wag of a finger for tasting 10 stouts and not including a single entrant from Bell’s or Founders, which are both available in New York and, among widely distributed microbreweries, two of the country’s most dominant stout brewers. Eric, can you help me out here?

Photo by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Well, sort of. At about the 1:56 mark in this segment on restaurant critics and anonymity, CNN captures a screen shot of your beloved Young & Hungry blog. I’m still trying to figure out whether CNN used Young & Hungry because we are a marvel of search-engine optimization or because they were trying to suggest that Y&H was cheap and tawdry — for merely writing about Sam Sifton’s new gig at the Times and rounding-up what others thought about it as well.

Or maybe we just look good on camera.

Suck it, Gawker!

Controversy over Esquire’s selection for Chef of the Year. The passing of Ben Ali. The New York Times‘ investigation into commercial ground beef. All of these have been major subjects on the blog this week.

And yet: The most-read item this week beat out Select 55 by a mere five clicks.

1. Barton Seaver to Be Named Esquire’s Chef of the Year, Controversy Ensues
2. Budweiser Launches Select 55, Light Beer Arms Race Gets Absurd
3. Ben Ali’s Son: “We’re All OK.”
4. The Times’ Shattering Expose of Ground Beef: Where Does It Leave Burger Lovers?
5. Despite Founder’s Death, It Was Business As Usual at Ben’s
   

If you ever doubted the fame of Ben Ali and the tiny chili stand he started in 1958, all you have to do is look at the news coverage detailing his death yesterday. News outlets across the country either ran the AP story or wrote short, tribute-oriented pieces of their own.

Here are a few of them:

• The New York Times‘ Diners Journal: “There is perhaps no better way to end a punk-rock evening in Washington, D.C., than with a brisk walk up from the 9:30 Club to the bright lights of Ben’s Chili Bowl, home of the chili-laden half-smoke sausage, for a snack.”

• DCist has a round-up of local politico comments: “Ben Ali was a man who invested his life in a small business that weathered many storms and became the soul of a neighborhood and the pride of our city,” commented Mayor Adrian Fenty.
• Loose Lips recalls Ben’s long history with politicians: “But for all the politicking going on inside, the restaurant itself has never been a political establishment.”
• The Post offers up historical pictures, reader memories, and a new video: “We’ll miss you, Ben Ali. The man who 51 years ago put chili on a hot dog [and] gave Washington a food identify that stuck.”
• Grub Street New York: “Here’s hoping a memorial sprouts up at Ben Ali Way, the alley next to Ben’s where pretty much everyone in the world was lined up during Inauguration Day.”
• DC Metblog: “Its casual atmosphere and unforgettable chili half-smokes have been a favorite of visiting entertainers, DC luminaries, and everyone else in the city for more than fifty years.”

The New York Times‘ investigation of the commercial beef industry has consumed much of Y&H’s attention this week. First, I solicited a couple of burger men to give their opinions on the differences between commercial ground beef and gourmet ground beef. Then, I asked those with a less-vested interest in the subject— readers, in other words — for their thoughts.

Y’all had some good thoughts, like Jamie’s:

Ug, here we go again, a bunch of idiots who never cared where their food came from are now shocked by this article and will swear off burgers for about a month or so until all the media news dies down. Nevermind that they won’t look into chicken or pork, which is raised in equally deplorable ways. Then they’ll forget about it. I give it two months until the same people are eating at McDonalds/KFC/Burger King/Taco Bell again.

Stories like these aren’t shocking to anyone that’s read Michael Pollan’s Omnivoire’s Dilemna or has seen the movie Food, Inc.

Outbreaks of e.coli will continue until there is a serious movement by the people to switch to organic foods. The USDA, which has no power to stop the industrial food chain from poisoning America, is not a solution. The real solution is for everyone to educate themselves on exactly where their food came from and to switch to organic produce and pasture raised meats, exclusively. This is the only way to change this cycle of poison.

In fact, if everyone started doing just that, we also wouldn’t need a healthcare reform, because we wouldn’t have such a high rate of cancer and diseases. What we put in our bodies fuels our bodies, which is why my husband and I have been eating organic for two years now and switched to pastured meat exclusively this past winter…and we are never going back.

Joel had even more to say on the matter:

Simply put, I don’t trust the Department of Agriculture inspection regime to keep me safe. So I take up the slack by reducing my meat intake to sources I trust, because I think that’s part of being a responsible consumer.

The regulatory regime is inadequate, and a cursory look at its history makes that plain. The present set of safeguards is largely unchanged since the Progressive Era, when outrage sparked by Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” gave us federal regulation of the food supply. But there haven’t been any major revisions to the regime since then. As a result, USDA inspections have evolved to benefit the corporation, not the consumer, and for some time they have failed to provide the basic safeguards that make me trust the commercial meat supply.

But I’ll still eat meat, though less frequently than I might like. Partly, that’s a health issue related to the high fat content of red meat. But partly that’s because the red meat I trust is expensive: I can’t find it at my local supermarket or the corner Five Guys.

I basically trust high-profile restaurants, such as Ray’s The Classics or The Capital Grille (or Peter Luger’s), which have reputations to protect and a significant interest in ensuring that the meat they serve is of the highest quality. For the high-end outfits, serving tainted beef is virtually unthinkable: their own inspection process is rigorous. I haven’t made the trip to Ray’s Hell Burger…

But to my mind, with even the good fast-food outlets, such as Five Guys or In-N-Out, the sheer size of the operation makes me uncomfortable trusting my health and welfare to their supervisors. And McDonald’s might as well not exist for me. It’s been years since I had one of their burgers, though I admit a weakness for their french fries.

When I want to make patties at home, I don’t trust the local supermarket (or even Whole Paycheck). Even a high-end operation like Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods relies essentially on the USDA inspection process when purchasing meat from a wholesaler. So for cuts of meat or ground beef, I see two options:

One is the kosher or halal butcher. The dietary restrictions in Jewish and Muslim law mitigate against some of the more horrifying practices that USDA winks at. But it’s far from perfect: the size of the market for the product introduces incentives to cut corners.

The other options is to trust a few local farms, such as Hedgeapple Farm in Buckeystown, MD, because of their high degree of transparency. With a local operation, I can visit the farm, the slaughterhouse, the packaging facility, knowing that even their ground beef comes from a limited number of herds, and that like a high-end restaurant, they live and die by their reputation.

Does that mean I have to drive out to Frederick for filets, sirloins, ribeyes, and ground beef? Yes. Do I think it’s worth it? Absolutely.

This isn’t the forum to sound off on my view of the effectiveness of federal regulatory regimes, but the bottom line is that as consumers, we have an obligation to make educated choices about how we allocate our purchasing power. If you’re into social justice, it’s an extension of your voting power to empower organizations that you think do good in the world. If you’re a free marketeer, it’s the acquisition of more perfect information that improves consumer choice and makes the market more efficient.

Either way, trusting the packaged beef at the supermarket is a gamble.

Danielle decided to get personal in her response:

In response to your question about if I’ve sworn off burgers after reading the article in Sunday’s New York Times, this article only confirms why I swore off all meat almost eight years ago, a few months after reading Fast Food Nation. I hope Mark Bucher isn’t so naive to think that this is just cheap meat at fast food restaurants (the unfortunate woman’s burger was from a grocery store, if I recall correctly) that’s tainted and that “gourmet” meat is safe. Unless these upscale burger joints are buying big chunks of cows’ flesh and doing the grinding themselves, how can they know what’s in that patty?

Which gets to a point that has been working my nerves for some time: You are even worse than the Post when it comes to mentioning vegetarian options in your column. Even people who eat meat want a vegetarian meal once in a while. Or if a vegetarian (or vegan) is with a group of meat-eaters, it’s nice to know if there are options.

I hope more people consider eating less meat or giving it up, as this is not just in a few slaughterhouses, but in ALL slaughterhouses, for all types of meat, not just hamburgers. And as Rory Friedman declared in Skinny Bitch, government agencies don’t give a shit about your health.

Dan Simons, with Founding Farmers, and Agraria Farmers & Fishers, wanted us to know that his operations are scrap-free:

Thank you for highlighting the NYT article, and for giving a forum for Mark Bucher’s response. I thought the article was excellent; it seemed to find the right balance between details, facts, and interest and I’m hopeful a lot of people will really absorb the information. I also enjoyed Mark Bucher’s perspective, because it shows that when restaurateurs are true professionals, they aren’t scared to talk to the media and explain what they do and how they do it. We feel the same way about the two restaurants we run in DC, Founding Farmers, and Agraria Farmers & Fishers. I’ll spare you all the details, but similar to Mark Bucher, we know the true source of our beef, and we grind it ourselves in-house daily, so we have complete control over the process. No scraps, nor ammonia, to be found in our operation!

I do think the public should be hugely concerned with the food supply from “restaurants” that treat food like a Wal-Mart plastic product, and just want the cheapest, fastest food. That might be OK for plastics and matchbox cars, but with food, it is really not such a great idea…and I suppose, in order to not offend matchbox cars, that even for manufacturing, “fastest and cheapest” ain’t actually producing very good results. If health is partly a function of what we eat, and if the quality of what we eat matters, then I think our restaurants’ stance on True Food & Drink is a huge point of difference vs. much of the competition for dining dollar.

And finally, Jenny just thought the whole situation was old news:

There’s nothing new about what’s in the Times article except the solid trail of evidence connected to a particularly moving human interest story published in a major paper.

We’ve been receiving the CSPI’s Nutrition Action newsletter for years, and as a result, when Giant Foods stopped selling “ground chuck,” we started buying chuck steak and grinding it with our KitchenAid. That way we can have rare hamburgers without worry.

It’s not just E Coli we are worried about. It’s just gross what’s allowed in “ground beef.”

In the wake of the Times‘ investigation of the ground-beef industry — and its section on how quickly slaughterhouses must break down carcases — Y&H offers up this video on the proper way to butcher a side of beef. Obviously this is an apples-and-oranges comparison. Slaughterhouses must remove hides, organs, and intestines; butcher Tom Mylan is merely breaking down a side of beef.

But forgive me. I’m feeling nostalgic. This video comes from Gourmet, which just got its pink slip yesterday from Condé Nast.

 Michael Landrum, the man who put the meat into the Ray’s mini-empire, has never been shy about telling the world about the superiority of his beef.  The New York Times‘ investigation of the commercial ground-beef industry gave him another chance to do more of the same.

Landrum responded to three of the four questions posed by Y&H in the wake of the investigation. I asked Landrum — and BGR’s Mark Bucher before him — to try to alleviate public fears by explaining the differences between commercial ground beef and their ground beef.

Y&H: What was your overall impression of the Times‘ piece and what do you think it will mean for ground beef and burger sales in the future?

Landrum: Didn’t see the piece, so I can’t comment on question 1. 

 Y&H: How can you alleviate the fears of diners who worry now that ground beef will be contaminated with E. coli?

Landrum: I will say that consumers, if they have any health or safety concerns, should avoid all commercially produced ground beef and all processed beef products that come from centralized packing plants. The beef that goes into commercially ground beef is basically scraps off the floor or otherwise inedible and unusable parts and cuts of meat, regardless of how it is labeled — e.g. 100% Angus, 100% Sirloin, 100% Chuck, etc. This goes for all fast food chains, including the small local ones, which receive their burgers pre-pattied or their beef pre-ground. The grounds for fear, overall, are very real.

Y&H: Where do you source your beef and do you grind the meat yourself or have it ground for you?

Landrum: We use only whole muscle cuts which undergo no processing at the plant from farm-raised steer. Additionally, we hand trim all of the external surfaces from these whole muscle cuts to our exacting standards for not only safety, but for quality and taste as well. Not only do we grind in-house, we grind in small batches with complete washing and sterilization of the equipment between batches to eliminate risk. These batches are then tagged and kept separate one from the other with no carryover between batches to insure total quality control.

Y&H: Will you continue to offer rare, medium-rare and other hamburgers that do not reach the USDA-recommended temperature of 160 degrees?

Landrum: That being the case, we are completely confident in being able to continue to serve burgers prepared to order to the desired degree of doneness with no qualms or worries whatsoever. In fact, I eat 3-4 rare/medium rare burgers myself each week and regularly sample raw beef direct from the grinder throughout the day.

Rumors had been circulating for weeks about pending cutbacks at either Gourmet or Bon Appetit, but Condé Nast’s decision today to ax editor Ruth Reichl’s print baby sent shock waves through the food community (even if Gourmet’s book publishing and TV operations will continue, as will the Web site).

In his business story for the Los Angeles Times, Russ Parsons contacted included a quote from Reichl for a comment about the closure.  “Like everyone else, I found out this morning,” she told Parsons’ colleague, S. Irene Virbila, the paper’s restaurant critic. “I can’t talk about it now, it’s too raw. I’ve got to pack up my office.”

On her Twitter feed, Reichl added: “Thank you all SO much for this outpouring of support. It means a lot. Sorry not to be posting now, but I’m packing. We’re all stunned, sad.”

Others are equally stunned about the sudden demise of the 68-year-old magazine. More comments after the jump.

Howard Kurtz on his chat today: “I hate to see any publication go out of business, and I know Gourmet has a big following. But Conde Nast is cutting back big time — only the New Yorker seems to be spared this round of budget cuts, reported as around 25 percent — and so it’s just axed three of its magazines.”

Ed Levine at Serious Eats was grief-stricken in a blog post today:  “The news hit anyone with a love for great writing and seriously delicious food hard. Really hard. For many of us Gourmet symbolized much of what we love about food journalism: terrific writing, careful editing, and beautiful photos. In recent years Gourmet editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl has also added food politics and harder food news reporting into the magazine’s editorial mix, which was much appreciated by me, at least.”

The New York Times‘ Media Decoder found Condé Nast’s decision a little shocking: “Condé Nast tends to hold tight to its prestigious titles, making the Gourmet closing all the more startling. In an interview in February, even Paul Jowdy, publisher of the in-house rival Bon Appétit, said that such a closing was unlikely. (To be fair to Mr. Jowdy, the economy has plummeted, and Condé Nast has been hit particularly hard since then. Its magazines have lost more than 8,000 ad pages, excluding its bridal titles, so far this year.)”

Time Out Chicago turns sappy over the news:  “Bear with me while I get sappy: Gourmet has had a bigger impact on my life than any other magazine has or will. It was always in my house growing up, but I didn’t start reading it until I was 22. I was working in a newsroom in New York at the time, living in a dark studio apartment in the basement of a building in the not-yet-hipster Fort Greene, and Gourmet was the only luxury I could afford. Once an issue was released I would carry it in my bag until the next issue was out; by that time, it was tattered and torn and crinkled. (It wasn’t stained with food, though—I hardly had a kitchen to cook in.)”

Texas cookbook author and restaurant critic Robb Walsh reminisces about stories he contributed to Gourmet:  “For Gourmet’s Latino food issue, I wrote about taco trucks all over the country and the immigrants who run them — hardly a story I expected to see in glossy Gourmet. Several years ago, the magazine ran my feature about an African-American cowboy cook named Mama Sugar and the Juneteenth celebration she holds at her trailer home and horse farm in Frisco. The story was turned down by other food magazines. It was the first Juneteenth story Gourmet ever ran. But in truth, it was the black-and-white photography by O. Rufus Lovett that made the story.”

Image by cbertel via Flickr Creative Commons, Attribution License

Following the New York Times‘ investigation of the ground-beef industry, and the failed safety systems designed to protect the public from its worst practices, Y&H contacted a number of prominent burger operators to get their take on the situation.

It was a chance for them to refute any information, argue that the safety of gourmet ground beef is better than commercial ground beef, and generally try to calm a nervous public, if possible.

First up to respond: Mark Bucher, founder and co-owner of BGR: The Burger Joint. He e-mailed answers to four questions. (Responses edited for punctuation.)

Y&H: What was your overall impression of the Times‘ piece and what do you think it will mean for ground beef and burger sales in the future?

Bucher: I thought it was extremely well-researched. This certainly wasn’t the first time we’ve seen this happen in the world. Most of it occurs in fast food restaurants, where they struggle each day to produce a burger that can make them a profit at a .99 cent price point. In my opinion, the entire bulk ground beef issue is one borne by a slow economy and chain restaurants forcing suppliers to “reduce costs,” because they need the financial model to work for a return on their restaurants. I don’t think it will have any impact on the sale of ground beef. Humans love to eat beef; eating a succulent, juicy hamburger is one of the great joys of life.

Y&H: How can you alleviate the fears of diners who worry now that ground beef will be contaminated with E. coli?

Bucher: Truth is, my ground beef is an artisinal product. We don’t use any trimmings in our burgers. In the beef world, we use whole muscles, which are ground for us in very small batches each day. As part of our supply agreement, our supplier (which is not a big conglomerate) has our beef constantly tested. Our supplier also happens to prepare cuts of beef for the U.S. military, where food-borne illness can cripple a strike force, and the highest-end steakhouses on the planet. The utmost care and precision is used in evaluating our raw material. Good, fresh, high-quality ground beef is safe to eat in a raw state. We only use the most expensive cuts of beef. This is completely an issue of trimmings and using questionable areas of beef when suppliers are forced to keep the costs down by their customers. I always tell anyone [who] asks, Go to your butcher and have them grind up a brisket for you. It’s the best form of ground beef.

Y&H: Where do you source your beef and do you grind the meat yourself or have it ground for you?

Bucher: We source only Prime Beef, which is the top 2% of all beef produced in the U.S. Our beef comes from corn-fed Midwestern farms. The beef is transported to Baltimore for processing at a very small 3rd generation family-owned facility (that actually processes Kosher beef), so their standards are much higher than the USDA’s. Our processor only produces burgers for us and for no one else. It’s an artisinal process, from start to finish. We test our beef very frequently for bacteria strains.  As recently as last week, we tested our product as part of our normal quality control, and it came back completely 100% perfect.

Y&H: Will you continue to offer rare, medium-rare and other hamburgers that do not reach the USDA-recommended temperature of 160 degrees?

Bucher: Yes, our beef is safe to eat, and our burgers are “gorgeous” at medium-rare. I have no issues or questions about the safety of our ground beef. I am 1000% confident of the source, the muscles used, and the processing techniques.

An extra:  A lot of this is caused by the consumer. High quality costs a bit more. In tough economic times, people and restaurant companies often source for cheaper food alternatives. We hear it all the time: [It's] “not as cheap as___________.” We rest at night knowing that our products are the highest quality available handled in precise care by people [who] are vested in our success and truly care.