The Worst Restaurant in Santa Barbara

This is a link to reviews for the KFC on Milpas. So is this. The all-caps entirely en espanol response to a complaint that nobody spoke English there is my favorite.

Pest Control

Do you find managers strolling down the line to eat your sliced bread and melted butter while they tell you up-close-and-personal how they'd like you to cook their customized dinner? Do you find yourself crashing into servers in the kitchen, nearly ramming them face-first into the grill with the force of impact, just because they didn't register on kitchen-sonar (no BEHIND YOU, ATRAS, or even a courtesy MEOW)? Do you often catch a server with a few straight out of the fryer fries in his/her mouth, smiling at you all guiltily, before scuttling back into the dark dining room from whence it came?

Your kitchen may be infested with WAITSTAFF

A few quick facts about waitstaff

1. Waitstaff are attracted to food and liquids. Open containers of things like chips, sauces, soups or bread can become an orgy of aprons and shiny black shoes in a matter of minutes, which may take hours or days to dissipate. Unattended containers of red bull or vodka can bring about a swarm that may take weeks to abate, even once the liquids are removed or contained. A waitperson can maintain its territory for up to 24 hours from one lone french fry.
2. All waitstaff live in colonies, consisting of a resume-reading queen (house manager), short lived cocktail waitresses, and workers (sterile bussers). The waitstaff you see foraging in your pantry station are commonly bartenders.
3. Waitstaff that find food communicate to other waitstaff by releasing a chemical message in the form of overpriced cologne and pore-extruded furtive cocktails as they crawl back to their tables.
4. As a group, waitstaff have a wide food range that is not limited to fresh, palatable food intended for human consumption. Very commonly they can be found swarming around dishroom bus bins finishing half-eaten artichokes or cheese plates, even martinis.

How can you control your waitstaff infestation?

1. Waitstaff must be denied access to your kitchen at any conceivable cost. If your kitchen is enclosed, keep doors closed. If your kitchen is open, other measures must be taken.
2. Use a waitstaff-repellent. Waitstaff are more thin-skinned than the average back-of-house worker and cannot tolerate strong odors (feed your biggest, ugliest dishwasher a steady diet of fiber and red meat and park them at entrances) or squeam-inducing foods. Butchering suckling pigs or whole fish in visible areas, or even the sight of mayonnaise with some waitstaff, should do the trick.
3. Immediately discard excess fries, un-slice-able ends of cheese, meats or bread, and small chunks of fruit after plating. These will attract waitstaff.
4. Never allow waitstaff "free" substitutions etc. Every un-ticketed cup of soup, free modification reading (for example) NO FRIES SUB PORK CHOP, or sample of artisan cheese gives waitstaff an open invitation into your kitchen.
5. You must show no pity if waitstaff resort to 'begging'. This can include batting of eyelashes, goofy grins or outright pleading. Waitstaff will not starve or die if denied access to kitchen foods. They can survive for days on a stray piece of bread dipped in a begging-procured sauce, and for weeks even without their heads, much like roaches. In addition, waitstaff are surprisingly self-sufficient, capable of ordering/paying for food, or even purchasing and microwaving their own at their nests outside the confines of the restaurant. Pity only extends a future invitation into the kitchen.

In summary, waitstaff play a vital role in the restaurant ecosystem. Occasionally they remove plates from the window or clear decaying napkins or silverware from restaurant tables, as well as harvesting cash from customers. However, they must be controlled and constant vigilance is needed to prevent an unwanted and dangerous infestation.

What is a Foodie?

Ugh, "foodie". I hate that word, even just linguistically. I don't like that it's a noun instead of a bizarre little adjective. I don't like that it ends in "-ie" instead of "-y" (how arbitrary!). I don't like this combination of my 2 least favorite vowels, because it's also found in a bunch of my other least favorite words ("boobies", "poopy", "duty", ugh)... I also associate those vowels with like, childish baby words because they're easy to pronounce in ugly words for retards and children alike. I don't like that this is the word they chose to describe a trend of people that I'm not particularly fond of, save that I like the word about as much as the trend. Before I get into my 'vs' list, what is a "foodie" to me?

Well, what is a "foodie", anyway? Basically (literally "basically"), they are "aficionados", they're people who are up on news and trends in food and drink. They are usually "amateurs", in that I have yet to meet a person who professionally produces food or drink that I (or they, themselves) would identify as a "foodie". They are usually quite passionate about boning up on things like the differences between Iberico and Parma ham, Pinot Noir and Merlot, and expensive vs less expensive brands of butter.

From there, they become more obnoxious. The most identifiable example of "foodies" on a kick is what happened after the movie Sideways came out. Merlot sales dropped because the douche in the movie kept blathering about how Pinot Noir is always better than Merlot. Is this true, across the board? Probably not. Did it influence a bunch of "foodies" in their purchasing and parlor-chatting practices? Yes, it did. Are there lots of other more subtle examples of this across food and drink? Yes. Remember the pomegranate craze a few years ago? Superfruits? Any mildly exotic fruit suddenly had amazing magical health-restoring properties and (obviously!) tasted way better than any garden variety fruit. The pomegranate flavor they were jamming into teabags, sauces and (high in vitamin C [ascorbic acid!]) candies just tasted like red. Pomegranate is not that stellar a flavor! Pomegranates are fun to eat, but I'll take strawberry or lemon in a dressing or a snack before it any day.

Kobe Beef. Yes, wagyu cow husbandry is quirky and admirable. Yes kobe steaks and burgers are fantastic. Should you ask the chef at a restaurant if all of their beef is kobe and then look really bummed when it isn't? No!

Here is my list of "you know you're a foodie if" qualifiers:

• You have ever asked a professional cook, with stars in your eyes, "what do cooks eat when they cook at home?" We eat canned beans and cereal, and some of us drink. We are boring people.
• The mention of things like "Meyer lemon", "farmer's market", "artisan" anything or "sus vide" causes you to exclaim whichever aforementioned term like a namedropping socialite.
• You ask your waiter if their truffle fries use white or black truffle
• You own at least one bottle of +$30 ee-vee-oh-oh
• Oh, better yet, you absolutely hate Rachel Ray.
• You have attempted to make your own cheese at home.
• You have a favorite hole in the wall restaurant you've been to once or twice that you endlessly sing the praises of, and secretly hope it doesn't get popular, because you feel like you have a secret. Same thing with indie kids and bands.
• You absolutely love your local fish market. Oh, you would never buy fish elsewhere.
• I don't even want to think of what I'd write here about coffee. Oh, I hate hearing n00bs talk about coffee.

By me, "foodies" are inexperienced people with money to burn who feign authority. Over who? People who just eat and enjoy what's in front of them?
I mean, love food; food is amazing stuff, but how can you be pretentious about it? And if you are a foodie, don't take it out on the local culinary school; some of us are trying to get stuff done here. And do us all a favor and quit denying that you totally got your high horse from Food Network, we know the song and dance.

Cauliflower

I am currently obsessed with cauliflower. Growing up, it was one of three or four standard vegetables that we just always had in the house (along with lettuce, carrots, and broccoli). My mom would steam it and we'd have it as a side dish with dino nuggets, topped with squeeze parkay and sometimes melted velveeta or kraft singles (anyone who cringes at processed food is waving red flags). When I moved out for college etc I almost never touched cauliflower again. I didn't hate it, I just didn't give a shit about that seemingly boring stupid vegetable.

For the record, I was wrong. I don't remember

where, but some day this past year somebody made me cook some cauliflower and I noticed that crap is delicious. Every vegetable has its own unique flavor, but I feel like with many it is pretty subtle, and usually masked by this overwhelming taste of generic vegetableness. Asparagus, broccoli, spinach, artichokes and romaine spring to mind; they all have unique properties, but to somebody who can't be bothered to really get into vegetables, all they taste like is 'green'. Cauliflower is NOT like that. It has this wonderful sulfur-y egg-reminiscent warmth to it, and I'm currently completely out of my mind in love with it.

Ways to Ruin Cauliflower

1. OVERCOOKING: turns into a pile of rotten-eggs watery mush. Ugh.
2. NOT COOKING IT: eat it raw if you personally like that, but don't open a restaurant catering to "health nuts" or vegetarians and put raw cauliflower on a salad and expect it to do anything other than be a crunchy irritation. It doesn't taste lovely unless it's cooked. Just blanch it or something, Jesus.
3. SERVING MASSIVE FLORETS AS A SIDE: I ordered a ribeye at a restaurant recently, and their side dish veg was one massive piece of steamed cauliflower, one massive piece of steamed broccoli, maybe some carrots; I don't remember. While looking pretty cool on the plate, it ws just kind of overwhelming as a side. And unimaginative! And so much stem! It was odd to me.

Cool Things to do with Cauliflower

1. PICKLING IT: I'm currently lacto-fermenting a bowl of some in the kitchen. I chopped it really really fine, salted it, weighed it down with a pitcher full of water until the moisture in the cauliflower was leached out, and in another week or so I'll have awesome sauerkraut style cauliflower. Rad.
2. PICKLING IT ANOTHER WAY: Alton Brown had a pickling episode where he made curried cauliflower pickles. I've been meaning to try it out.
3. SPEAKING OF CURRY: Those Indians have it figured out. Aloo Gobi is probably my new favorite food.
4. SPEAKING OF MIXING IT WITH POTATOES: If you're trying to cut calories or carbohydrates, you can replace some or even all of your mashed potatoes with cauliflower. Steam it, mash it, season it. Is it the same as mashed potatoes? Nah, it's not as dense or potato-y, but give it a try; shit's dank. Mix in some cheese or nutritional yeast, some paprika or something, you're good to go.
5. STEAKS: I know I was hating on huge florets as a side dish, but this blog cut the entire head of cauliflower into cross-section 'steaks', sus-vide-ed it (a slow, temperature controlled baste in its own juices, basically) with curry and served it as an entree. Rad.
6. AT MY RESTAURANT: my chef has infused and strained cauliflower into cream to use in gratins, and made cauliflower purees to use as plate garnishes, just to add little nagging hints of brassican deliciousness.

You like math? Cauliflower has fractals or some shit; just look at it:

It also has a lot of fiber and vitamin C, if you're tired of getting those from artificial sources.

So...

I spend a lot of time on the internet. A lot, and I figured I could use some of that time, even just a little, recording my thoughts on all the stuff I look up. A lot of it is food; I spent like an hour reading about the regional differences in Mexican cooking. Or I'll read about lactic fermentation vs vinegar pickling. Or I'll just drool over menus from Noma or Per Se or even my own restaurant. I'll write real or fictional restaurant reviews. Sometimes I just look at pictures of cats. Here's my new blog, and here's a list of things it may entail:

• menus
• what made a recent restaurant visit crappy/wonderful
• why i hate a certain ingredients
• my awesome job
• pickles and ferments
• exotic produce/ways to treat that produce
• nutrition
• trends in nutrition and menus
• cats