Young & Hungry » New York http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry D.C. Restaurants and Food Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:00:04 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.2 Changing Tables: Arlington Rooftop Bar and Grill Now Open, Another Matchbox on the Way http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2010/12/08/changing-tables-arlington-rooftop-bar-and-grill-now-open-another-matchbox-on-the-way/ http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2010/12/08/changing-tables-arlington-rooftop-bar-and-grill-now-open-another-matchbox-on-the-way/#comments Wed, 08 Dec 2010 19:05:25 +0000 Andrew George http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/?p=30627

The latest in restaurant openings, closings, and highly unstable target dates.

Coming Soon:

Openings:

Closings:

Photo by Arlington Rooftop Bar and Grill

]]> http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2010/12/08/changing-tables-arlington-rooftop-bar-and-grill-now-open-another-matchbox-on-the-way/feed/ 2 Changing Tables: Sweetgreen Opens Today in Ballston http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2010/12/02/changing-tables-sweetgreen-opens-today-in-ballston/ http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2010/12/02/changing-tables-sweetgreen-opens-today-in-ballston/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 17:10:04 +0000 Andrew George http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/?p=29993

The latest in restaurant openings, closings, and highly unstable target dates.

Coming Soon:

Openings:

Closings:

Photo by Tom (andertho) via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

]]> http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2010/12/02/changing-tables-sweetgreen-opens-today-in-ballston/feed/ 4 N.Y. Times: Our Tap Water Could Harm Us. L.A. Times: Collect Rain Water http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2009/12/17/n-y-times-our-tap-water-could-harm-us-l-a-times-collect-rain-water/ http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2009/12/17/n-y-times-our-tap-water-could-harm-us-l-a-times-collect-rain-water/#comments Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:36:12 +0000 Tim Carman http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/?p=14331 drinking_fountain_opt

You'll have to forgive me this morning if I sound a little punch drunk. I just got done reading a pair of stories about municipal water supplies while downing a glass of Takoma Park's finest. I'm feeling a little light headed. I'm not sure it's because of the articles or the tap water.

The Times (East Coast version) has just published an investigation into how our perfectly legal drinking water can still make us sick. The Times (West Coast version) tells us about Los Angeles' alternative to the municipal tap: rain water collection. Both stories are worth a read.

The New York Times' investigation, of course, will grab most of the headlines today. In it, Charles Duhigg reports some scary damn stuff:

The 35-year-old federal law regulating tap water is so out of date that the water Americans drink can pose what scientists say are serious health risks — and still be legal.

Only 91 contaminants are regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act, yet more than 60,000 chemicals are used within the United States, according to Environmental Protection Agency estimates. Government and independent scientists have scrutinized thousands of those chemicals in recent decades, and identified hundreds associated with a risk of cancer and other diseases at small concentrations in drinking water, according to an analysis of government records by The New York Times.

But not one chemical has been added to the list of those regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act since 2000.

Other recent studies have found that even some chemicals regulated by that law pose risks at much smaller concentrations than previously known. However, many of the act’s standards for those chemicals have not been updated since the 1980s, and some remain essentially unchanged since the law was passed in 1974.

All told, more than 62 million Americans have been exposed since 2004 to drinking water that did not meet at least one commonly used government health guideline intended to help protect people from cancer or serious disease, according to an analysis by The Times of more than 19 million drinking-water test results from the District of Columbia and the 45 states that made data available.

The Times later notes that, despite all the scientific wavering on whether polluted water actually causes human health problems, several studies have shown that "millions of Americans become sick each year from drinking contaminated water, with maladies from upset stomachs to cancer and birth defects."

Then the paper throws some seriously cold (and contaminated) water on the faces of residents in several cities:

Communities where the drinking water has contained chemicals that are associated with health risks include Scottsdale, Ariz.; El Paso, Tex., and Reno, Nev. Test results analyzed by The Times show their drinking water has contained arsenic at concentrations that have been associated with cancer. But that contamination did not violate the Safe Drinking Water Act.

In Millville, N.J., Pleasantville, N.J., and Edmond, Okla., drinking water has contained traces of uranium, which can cause kidney damage. Those concentrations also did not violate the law. (Contaminant records for each of the 47,500 water systems that provided data are at nytimes.com/contaminants.)

“If it doesn’t violate the law, I don’t really pay much attention to it,” said Stephen Sorrell, executive director of Emerald Coast Utilities Authority, which serves Pensacola, Fla. Data show that his system has delivered water containing multiple chemicals at concentrations that research indicates are associated with health risks. The system has not violated the Safe Drinking Water Act during the last half-decade.

The full story goes on to depict environmental scientists and crusading politians who have their careers threatened by businesses and even the military for wanting to clean up our water. Lobbyists get involved, too, and the public's tap water suffers as a result. It's not democracy's finest hour. 

The Los Angeles Times opinion piece doesn't really offer a solution to our potable water problem, but it does offer hope about another looming public crisis: lack of water period. Molly Selvin, a professor at Southwestern Law School, writes about her experiences with L.A.'s rain-water collection program. It's sounds like the kind of model program other cities should adopt.

Consider Selvin's words:

I can't control what happens at this week's meeting in Copenhagen, where world leaders, activists and politicians are debating steps to slow climate change. And at home, a new poll from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press charts a sharp decline in the number of Americans who believe that human activity has caused global temperatures to rise — and even that the Earth is warming. In Congress, serious discussion of emissions caps, fewer coal-fired plants and more power from solar and wind — among the obvious policy steps — is stalled amid screeching over "socialized" medicine, illegal immigrants and whether the president should have bowed to another head of state.

But to me, the small things I can do matter.

Add my 55 gallons, refilled a few times each winter, to what my neighbors are collecting and it starts to add up. The city estimates that the first 600 barrels could save 600,000 gallons of water annually. Put a barrel at each of the city's 800,000 residential parcels and demand for tap water could drop by about 800 million gallons. 

 Photo by Darwin Bell via Flickr Creative Commons, Attribution License

]]> http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2009/12/17/n-y-times-our-tap-water-could-harm-us-l-a-times-collect-rain-water/feed/ 3 The Ongoing Dilemma on Whether to Eat Foie Gras http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2009/06/10/the-ongoing-dilemma-on-whether-to-eat-foie-gras/ http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2009/06/10/the-ongoing-dilemma-on-whether-to-eat-foie-gras/#comments Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:06:46 +0000 Tim Carman http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/?p=7091 foie gras protest

The foie gras brûlée on Tony Conte's menu last week at The Oval Room was too tempting to pass up, no matter how many imaginary animal-welfare protesters I had dancing in my head. I say that even though the appetizer that landed on my table wasn't custard-based at all. It was, in fact, a small cap of foie gras terrine perched on a round of toasted brioche and served with Meyer lemon and lavender.

As a final touch, Conte's team had sprinkled Sugar in the Raw on top of the fatty liver and caramelized it, hence the brûlée descriptor. The starter was pure, unfiltered sensuousness — rich, smooth, crunchy, crackly, sweet, and tart. It was also suffused with the undeniable aroma of guilt.

Most of us who love engorged livers (but hate the methods to produce them) are already familiar with the animal welfare protestors who have been successful at getting politicians to heed their call — at least for a little while. But today, I read an op-ed piece in the New York Times that looks at foie gras production from yet another unflattering perspective: the exploited farmworker.

Writes Bob Herbert from the Times:

...I've been looking at the plight of the underpaid, overworked and often gruesomely exploited farmworkers who feed and otherwise care for the ducks. Their lives are hard.

Each feeder, for example, is responsible for feeding 200 to 300 (or more) ducks – individually – three times a day. The feeder holds a duck between his or her knees, inserts a tube down the duck's throat, and uses a motorized funnel to force the feed into the bird. Then on to the next duck, hour after hour, day after day, week after week.

The routine is brutal and not very sanitary. Each feeding takes about four hours and once the birds are assigned a feeder, no one else can be substituted during the 22-day force-feeding period that leads up to the slaughter. Substituting a feeder would upset the ducks, according to the owners of Hudson Valley Foie Gras, which operates the farm.

Not only do the feeders get no days off during that long stretch, and no overtime for any of the long hours, but they get very little time even to sleep each day. The feeding schedule for the ducks must be rigidly observed.

When I asked one of the owners, Izzy Yanay, about the lack of a day of rest, he said of the workers: "This notion that they need to rest is completely futile. They don't like to rest. They want to work seven days."

Covering this story has been like stepping back in time. Farmworkers in New York do not have the same legal rights and protections that other workers have, and the state's multibillion-dollar agriculture industry has taken full advantage of that. The workers have no right to a day off or overtime pay. They don't get any paid vacation or sick days. When I asked one worker if he knew of anyone who had a retirement plan, he laughed and laughed.

Hudson Valley, it should be noted, is one of the largest producers of foie gras in the country.

But there is hope for farmworkers, if not the animals. The Farmworker Fair Practices Act, which grants workers collective bargaining rights and unemployment benefits (among other rights), was passed on Monday night by the New York State Assembly. But now the bill heads to the state Senate, which suddenly and surprisingly came under Republican control on Monday. The bill's fate is now uncertain.

Photo by tifotter via Flickr Creative Commons

]]> http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2009/06/10/the-ongoing-dilemma-on-whether-to-eat-foie-gras/feed/ 2 Anthony Bourdain, Dashing and Irreverent http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2009/06/04/anthony-bourdain-dashing-and-irreverent/ http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2009/06/04/anthony-bourdain-dashing-and-irreverent/#comments Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:04:39 +0000 Justin Moyer http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/?p=6841

Everyone's favorite ruggedly-handsome, confident, opinionated, ever-so-slightly condescending former junkie/chef has published a bucket list. I won't spoil the photo essay by duplicating the list here, but Anthony Bourdain's "13 Places to Eat Before You Die" includes restaurants on three continents: one in London, two in Spain, one in Napa Valley, one in Singapore, one in Seattle, one in Tokyo, one in Chicago, one in Kansas City, and four in New York City (that's almost 25% of the list in good olde NYC – it always was a hell of a town!). So, if one trusts Bourdain's palate (and who wouldn't trust this charming bastard?), that means that you don't really need to visit South America, Africa, or Australia before you die, which is a relief, because two of those continents specialize in water-borne diseases, and the third boasts of its famous kangaroos which, as far as I'm concerned, are really just enormous rats.

]]> http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2009/06/04/anthony-bourdain-dashing-and-irreverent/feed/ 1 Chefs with Dicks v. Chefs Without http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2009/06/03/chefs-with-dicks-v-chefs-without/ http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2009/06/03/chefs-with-dicks-v-chefs-without/#comments Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:39:43 +0000 Justin Moyer http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/?p=6807 As Arnold Schwarzenegger memorably learned in Ivan Reitman's Kindergarten Cop (1990), "Boys have and penis, [but] girls have a vagina." Throughout human history, various thinkers (including Jews, Christians, Muslims, the Founding Fathers, Sigmund Freud, the Rolling Stones, Valerie Solanas, Susan Sontag, and Dr. Dre) have gone to great lengths to differentiate between penis-havers (men) and vagina-havers (women) in their ideologies and art. Would one expect the kitchen to be any different?

To further unravel the mysterious role gender plays in food preparation, New York's Astor Center is hosting a roundtable discussion featuring Food & Wine's editor-in-chief, a James Beard outstanding chef, and other members of the Big Apple's foodie cognoscenti. A heady discussion of perceived truths about the ways "the fellaz" handle open flames, ingredients, recipes, plating, customer service, heat lamps, deep fryers, and cutting boards differently than "the ladeez" will follow a blind taste-test in which panel members will attempt to guess the gender of participating chefs by tasting their gustatory creations. Sound fun? It only costs $35, or much less than four tickets to see Terminator: Salvation. Since one female local chef was recently referred to as "bitchy" by a commenter on this blog when everyone knows that the vast majority of male chefs in this world are not held accountable for being egomaniacal, overbearing assholes, I think that we would all benefit from said discussion – were we in New York on June 8th with $35 to spare, and had we not already seen Terminator: Salvation.

]]> http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2009/06/03/chefs-with-dicks-v-chefs-without/feed/ 0 The Postmodern Condition/This Blog Revealed as a Sham http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2009/06/02/the-postmodern-conditionthis-blog-revealed-as-a-sham/ http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2009/06/02/the-postmodern-conditionthis-blog-revealed-as-a-sham/#comments Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:59:20 +0000 Justin Moyer http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/?p=6758 The Atlantic reports that 70% of complaints about restaurants relate not to food, but service. 70%! This number astounds because:

1. more Americans can agree that waiters suck than can agree who should be President, whether abortion should be legal, and whether Night at the Museum 2: Escape from the Smithsonian is a good movie. Which means...sorry waiters, I guess you must really, in general, suck! I suppose more Americans can agree that God exists, but I'm not sure why.

2. my longstanding perception that the employees of Soul Vegetarian on Georgia Avenue don't like me because I'm white (though I suppose, they may not like me because they perceive I am an asshole, though, in general, I must take the position that I am not an asshole) is not influenced by the (in my opinion) mediocre quality of their food. In fact, I may find Soul Veg's food mediocre simply because I perceive that its staff does not like me! In addition, I may find Harmony Cafe's food mediocre not because it is mediocre, but because I always feel bad for the one woman who has waited tables there every day, alone, for as long as I can remember, which is at least 10 years, and probably longer. Maybe if Harmony Cafe had a larger staff and this poor woman had some goddamned help for once, I might, in fact, perceive that Harmony is the best Chinese restaurant on the East Coast! Though I doubt it, as Harmony is mediocre (at best).

3. If 70% of the waaa-waaa-waaa about this-or-that restaurant isn't food related, but service related, that means that presentation isn't 50% of the meal (as a boss of mine once told me), but 70% of the meal, aka the majority. In other words, our senses are easily influenced or, as Ebenezer Scrooge explained in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, "a little thing affects them." In other, other words, the whole concept of a palate is a sham perpetrated by the sensuality industry, aka the Food Network, Food and Wine Magazine, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, the food sections of all surviving American newspaper, the producers of the 2000 film Chocolat, my favorite big grrl Paula Dean, New Yorkers generally, high end grocers (aka Whole Foods), the "foodie" contigent of our society, all of our mothers, and this blog.

]]> http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2009/06/02/the-postmodern-conditionthis-blog-revealed-as-a-sham/feed/ 5