Food News

09/20.04

101 Cookbooks I attended my first traditional Indian wedding celebration last weekend when my friend Sejal got married here in San Francisco. I was spellbound from the minute we arrived at the Raas Garba on Friday evening. The Rass Garba is a casual pre-wedding celebration to honor the bride and groom where the guests spend the night dancing to traditional Rass and Garba music, eating potluck style, and enjoying each others company. Heidi Swanson, Sept. 14, 2004

No Osso Buco For You! "If you don't like it, there's the door. Pay your bill and go. And don't come back," says Alex Salmassi, the owner of Portofino Ristorante Italiano, pointing to the exit. I seem to have a knack for getting myself thrown out of restaurants...This time, the fracas is over a plate of osso buco. Instead of the usual marrow bone enveloped by tender veal, I was served two small rounds of meat surrounding four skinny bones. So I asked the waiter if this was osso buco, or if he had brought me another dish by mistake. And I also asked him what kind of rice they used in the risotto, because it looked weird. Robb Walsh, The Houston Press, Sept 16, 2004

Scoot Over Starbucks A Colombian uprising is scheduled to kick off this week in Washington amid a clattering of coffee cups and trays of Latin-fusion hors d'oeuvres. Diplomats and policy wonks will be able to get their picture taken with the leader of this urbane revolution, a capitalist Che Guevara literally rolling out the red carpet for his U.S. invasion. This glitzy cafe opening seems an odd counterpoint to the poncho-clad Juan Valdez and his trusty mule Conchita, but the advertising icon needs all the fanfare he can muster for his daunting new mission: to make Colombian coffee hip enough for the Starbucks generation to start caring about his hills of beans. Time Magazine via The Columbian Embassy, Sept. 18, 2004

Free Wine On The Way Out As Michael Mondavi's golden parachute deploys over the Napa Valley, the former president of Robert Mondavi Corp. can gaze down at cash, baseball and a cellar full of his favorite wines. Mondavi resigned from the landmark California wine company as vice chairman this week. His severance agreement includes more than $1.5 million in cash, the right to buy the winery's six season tickets to San Francisco Giant games at fair market value and as many as 50 cases of wine... Roger Vincent, LA Times, Sept. 18, 2004

Evacuating in high style Last Tuesday night, as Ivan swirled northward and my voicemail collected stories of friends driving six hours to go distances that would normally take 30 minutes, I stood on the street outside my house talking to my neighbors. I was hungry, and food, it had just occurred to me, was, with businesses shutting down as their customers fled town, not going to be easy to find. One of my neighbors assured me that Verti Mart, where he'd just purchased some jambalaya, was still going strong... Brett Anderson, NOLA, Sept. 21, 2004