Airline Food ≠ 5 Star Dining

If you are a frequent flier and like to indulge in an occasional tasty meal on the flight, maybe you should reconsider. The USA Today posted this article yesterday talking about how disgusting some major airline caterers are, including Sky Chefs and Gourmet Gate.

In the FDA's findings (from over 6 months ago), they found numerous instances of improper food handling and unsafe/unsanitary conditions. A few questions come to mind:

Whole Foods Hits the Streets

The Wall Street Journal just wrote an interesting piece about how a bay area Whole Foods is trying to start a line of local products from Street-Food Vendors in the area. Anyone familiar with the San Francisco food culture knows how popular and accomplished the vendors are out here, so it's great to see Whole Foods embracing local food. There is some debate to weather local food vendors would have a hard time meeting Whole Foods food standards (or lack there of), but over all this is exciting news for foodies.

Be Classy, Eat This!

Grab your tux and pretend to be classy for an hour, because DFB can only mean one thing, Duck Fat Burger at the freaking Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco.

Expect More from your Ice Cream

There's a line... I hate lines. Two questions come to mind. Why would I wait in a line when there are so many amazing options around me (including Dynamo Donuts)? And how good is the ice cream here that people are waiting to stand in this line? Hmm... If there's one thing I've learned during my short time in San Francisco, it's that the people know good food, so I got in line at Humphry Slocombe.

Okay, so the line wasn't too bad, it only took about 10-15 minutes. And it was well worth it. Actually it was worth it just to see the crazy innovative flavors. Thai Chile lime sorbet, peanut butter curry, golden beet saffron - definitely no ordinary ice cream joint. The worst part about this place is having to narrow it down to 1, 2 even 3 flavors. But after careful consideration (and a few free tastes) I did: Peanut butter curry and chocolate smoked salt. One would be my wacky flavor and one my safe flavor.

How to Make A Good Restaurant Website

Chow recently wrote a good post pointing out the most annoying restaurant website design flaws. And we agree. Restaurant websites are notoriously terrible for a variety of reasons. Chow points out a few:

• Flash intro pages
• No prices listed
• Automatic music played

Rather than just pointing out what sucks though, menuvore wants to help restaurants understand what they could and should be doing.

Bay to Breakers - Where's the Food?

If you were wondering why the hoards of naked old men were running rampant in San Francisco yesterday, it's because it was Bay to Breakers. Being new to the city, we had to get our first glimpse at this event, so we grabbed our wine in a can and headed down to the park.

What an unbelievable scene. Thousands of people stormed the streets, in all kinds of questionable, but hilarious, costumes. We saw old naked men, a zombie with a brain dangling in front of her face, a group of shuttle cocks and a lot of old naked men. As the masses stumbled through the park, one question kept popping up, where's the food?

Tea with Tyson Great. Earl Grey SUCKS.

We tweeted about this yesterday, but its so great it really deserved its own blog post. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, Mike Tyson sits down for tea with Reese Waters and reveals to the world that he hates Cannoli's and Early Grey tea. Not quite controversial as threatening to eat Lennox Lewis' children or biting off Evander Holyfield's ear, but entertaining all the same. We can only prey this is part of an ongoing series.

Burma Superstar Review: Burma Never Tasted So Good

When I first got to San Francisco, everyone kept telling me that Burma Superstar was the place to go. Before I stepped foot inside the restaurant I even saw people wearing Burma Superstar t-shirts. When I finally got around to going, the line wrapped around the block. As I quickly found, all this hype was well-deserved. The service, the food, the cultural experience were all amazing and Burma Superstar remains one of my favorite dining experiences in San Francisco.

Entrepreneurs Flood San Jose for Startup Weekend

Nic and I (the menuvore guys) have been working to get ourselves involved in the startup community, so we headed down to San Jose to attend 'Startup Weekend'. In short,  you pitch an idea, try to form a team and then work your ass off for 2 days in an attempt to have the product up and running by Sunday night to demo for a panel of well known startup judges. 

With that being said, here is what I learned from this event.

World's 50 Best Restaurants - And Why I don't Care

San Pellegrino's list of the 50 best restaurants in the world were just announced. And the winner is... who cares?

Okay, lists are fun, everyone likes them. And it's inherently cool to compare the best in the world at anything. With that being said, the 50 best restaurants in the world is a stupid list.

You Know You're In San Francisco...

When frickin' Johnny Rockets serves "naturally raised" beef.

Tips on How to Photograph Your Food

Taking photos of your food has been getting a lot of attention recently. Some people love it, some people (chefs) hate it. Regardless of where you stand, the fact is that more people have cameras thanks to smart phones and there seems to be a genuine interest in keeping track of and sharing what we eat. The NY times dining & wine section has been all over this trend and recently offered up some tips on how to take good food photos. His suggestions are more for those that have a serious camera and time to make the food look a certain way, but I think his points still hold true for those with a camera phone. Here are two that I think help:

Take a Picture, It will Last Longer

About a week ago, we launched a 'My Food' tab in our user's profile on menuvore, that displays pictures of everything the user has eaten/reviewed. You can also see what other Menuvores (what we call our users) are eating/reviewing by going to their profile and clicking on their 'My Food' tab. We thought this would be a cool way for people to see what they and their friends have eaten.

Well, the New York Times agrees with us. Today, it posted this article, talking about the increasingly popular trend of taking pictures of what you eat.

Get on Board the Tacolicious Train

I'd heard about Tacolicious before. They're at the Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market on Thursday, they're always doing cool special guest chef tacos there, and they're constantly being talked about on Twitter, including a recent tweet by @davkyl, which I enjoyed, "If Beretta f***** a Mexican taco cart in Ensenada, you would have Tacolicious. That place can hang even by the SoCal-Mexican-food standard." Not sure what most of that means, but couldn't have said it any better.

Should We Know What We Eat?

One of the less discussed aspects of Obama's new health care bill is that it now requires chain restaurants (and vending machines) to disclose information about calories directly on the menu.

Buried deep in the health care bill, section 4205 calls for mandatory nutrition labeling of menu items at chains with more than 20 restaurants. While it’s not necessarily the most groundbreaking change, it represents a wider shift by lawmakers not only to provide better health care but also to help prevent disease in the first place. (The bill also includes $15 billion for other preventative health programs over the next decade.)

Read more

While cities like New York and Philadelphia have already tested the waters in this sort of legislation, a nation-wide mandate should set a new precedent for transparency in what you eat.

One of our goals here at menuvore is to give people more information about what they eat, whether it be "Does it taste good?" or "Is it good for you?". We think that the more information you have, the better your eating experience will be.

The details on implementation are still a little fuzzy, but for now we are optimistic and will watching to see how it unfolds.

Do you want to know how many calories you are eating when you go out? Let us know!

Good News for the Irish

Just in time for St. Patrick's day, another John Campbell's Irish Bakery has opened up (yesterday) in Pacific Heights/Cow Hollow (San Francisco). In case you're not familiar, the other one is on Geary Blvd. in Outer Richmond and boasts some of the tastiest Irish breads/desserts around.

A few items that are particularly tasty are the Irish Raisin Soda Bread, chocolate cherry bread and snowballs. What is a snowball? Remember this:

It's more or less a classy, tastier version of these. Didn't know these were in the Irish repertoire, but they are frickin good.

Congrats to John Campbell's on a well deserved second store.

4th Annual Bacon Eating Contest in Boston!

No bacon is not good for you, but it is hilarious, delicious, and now even hip. Atwoods Tavern in Boston Massachusetts is having their 4th annual Bacon Eating Contest. I haven't been able to find the specifics on the competition, but can assume it will involve eating eating mass quantities of bacon strips. You can find more information at the Atwoods Tavern website and follow them on twitter at @atwoodstavern for updates.

So bring your bacon tie, your bacon wallet, your bacon bra and get ready to POUND some PORK. Since this is a civilized competition you might want to leave your bacon gun at home.

San Francisco Underground Market

San Francisco is known for their Farmer's Markets, but for to the casual cook, chef, or farmer the barrier to entry is often too steep to participate. In order to sell at a farmer's market in the state of California, you to prepare your food in a commercial kitchen. Unless that is your market is "underground". A couple of local foodies started the SF Underground Market. A farmer's market where amateurs sell food and goods they prepared in the confines of their own home. Debuing in December, the market has been a huge success. They have been growing each month with the most recent market on March 6th offering almost 50 tables.

I was pretty excited to read about this and will even considering participating.

You can read more about it on their website.

Welcome!

Welcome everyone to the Menuvore blog. Those new to Menuvore, please take a minute to watch our video and see what Menuvore is all about. The site is officially live at menuvore.com so please check it out. Here we will be blogging about updates to the site, talking to people about the site (so give us your feedback!), and just discussing food-related topics in general. We would love to hear from you. If you have any comments, questions, complaints, or thoughts to share, you can reach us through this blog, email us at menuvore@gmail.com, or @ reply us at twitter.com/menuvore.

Happy eating to all.

Nic and Chapin of menuvore.

Welcome To Menuvore!