There’s been a ton of renos and rebuilds at the Madison Square shopping centre near Polo Park lately. No exception, the Liquor Mart has undergone a face-lift and is now one of the swankest in the fleet.
Bistro to bar, greasy spoon to haute cuisine, every restaurant has a way of doing things that they’ve made part of the experience.
Some of these practices I like, others I hate. The other night my server poured me wine directly from the bottle. Like. But he drained it to the last drop and dumped a bunch of sediment in my glass. Hate.
I told him about the sediment, and he argued that some wines naturally had sediment. Granted, but it shouldn’t make its way to the customer’s glass. And it was a restaurant that should know better.
Arguing with the customer. Hate. He redeemed the situation by offering to adjust the bill. Like.
There are hundreds of dining room dos and don’ts. What bugs you about dining out in Winnipeg? Where do we excel in our hospitality? Here’s a few to get you started:
Mise Bistro's new location at 842 Corydon
Sophisticated interpretations of Canadian regional cuisine are still the cornerstone of Mise Bistro, but in their new location they’ve taken it to all new heights.
Season 5 of Bravo’s award winning reality show Top Chef premiered this week.
Seventeen hopefuls attempt to take Manhattan, home turf for the show’s tough-love judge Tom Colicchio.
The first two contestants to get chopped went to the same culinary school together! Yikes. What does that say!?
If one hour of drama isn’t enough to satisfy your appetite for action, check out Tom Colicchio’s blog for the inside scoop on each episode.
Rumour has it that guest judge regular Ted Allen won’t be appearing this season, taking time instead to focus on season 2 of his show Food Detectives.
Top Chef Season 5 runs on Food Network Canada Wednesday nights, 10 ET.
Legend has it that a group of Dutch exporters and French vintners thought to maximize shipping (and profit) by distilling their wines. At the final destination they would reconstitute the product, approximating the original.
They were mistaken. Shipped in oak barrels, the wine’s flavour was irrevocably altered.
However, they had quite by accident discovered a new spirit. Deriving its name from the Dutch word brandewijn, or burnt wine, it was immortalized as brandy.
Today, two French regions are considered the unequivocal masters of this spirit—Cognac and the slightly lesser known Armagnac.
Of the two, Cognac remains king but connoisseurs contend that Armagnac is a superior quaff.
Eager to learn what all the fuss was about, I headed for the MLCC flagship store at Grant Park…and disappointment.
Food Network’s plug for Gordon Ramsey’s latest show totally suckered me. I actually asked the question, what does the f-word stand for? Could he be that audacious…that transparent to name his show after his favourite expletive?
“In case you’re wondering what the f-word stands for,” he says later in the promo, “it’s food, of course!”
Gaaaah! Of course. You got me Gordon Ramsey.
The show hinges on the premise that Ramsey is going to re-introduce Brits to good food, cooked from scratch. His approach…getting women back in the kitchen.
I’ll ignore the obvious diatribe on how incredibly sexist that sounds. But a crusade to bring wholesome food to the people? Can you say school dinners knock off?
But that’s where any similarity ends.
I was thrilled to see FreeRice.com featured in my latest issue of Food & Wine magazine. An online trivia game with a social conscience, I’d discovered the site about a year ago as it was just growing in popularity.
When you arrive at FreeRice.com, you’re presented with a word and four possible definitions. Questions get increasingly harder as you play. But the game automatically adjusts to your level based on how well you do. The game’s creator says this keeps you at edge of your skills, where learning takes place.
Besides increasing your word power, there’s an added bonus to playing…and here comes the free rice part. For each correct answer you give, the website’s creators donate 20 grains of rice to help reduce hunger in lesser developed countires.
How’s that work, you wonder?
Clay Oven