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Rising food costs invokes creativity in restaurants
Leave a CommentJanet Podolak of The News-Herald, Willoughby, the OhioMcClatchy-Tribune Regional News wrote an about the reactions restaurateurs take in order to cope with the constantly rising prices of food.
The rising costs of flours, eggs and produce are hitting independent restaurateurs. Additionally, they are faced with empty tables as dining out is the first thing people cut from their budget when costs of living (such as gas prices high as $4 per gallon and more) raise tremendously.
Charging extra for bread, condiments and carry-out containers might be a solution, yet there are much more, although, some involve some change of habits.
Such as long forgotten or never utilised cost-conscious methods of using ingredients and produces like using broccoli stems for soups or grating them into slaws. Janet Podolak interviewed Randal Johnson, owner-chef at Molinari’s in Mentor, who said that “when he realized that the brine in pickles has vinegar and sugar in it, he used it in his tartar sauce. Delighted diners soon were commenting on the great taste.”
Others chose to discontinue seafood bars or reinventing themselves. Action is taken by joining trade associations and becoming well-connect with the restaurant community to find solutions together, or creating cooperatives in buying produce or ingredients.
Often by customers recognized “too big portions” get finally reduced to appropriate portions (vs. stacking up guest’s refrigerators with to go boxes of leftover food.)
Some owners created backyard gardens and grow vegetable: Fennel, Napa cabbage, Swiss chard, cucumbers, tomatoes.
Podolak writes about Chef Nick Kustala of Lure Bistro in Willoughby who said: “A flat of tomatoes costs me $18, and one plant produces 20 tomatoes. It helps us keep our prices down.”
Furthermore, he says in Podolak’s interview that “he urges diners to support independent restaurants, instead of chains, when they eat out.”
Kustala concludes: “Chains are great and Wal-Mart is great too, but all that money goes to China. It’s better to keep money in the area and keep our jobs here. You can feed yourself and the economy at the same time.”
Seattle welcomes Lufthansa
Excerpt from article at http://www.europeanweekly.net/pages/features/fea_travel23.htm
“On March 30, many came to witness the inaugural flight of Lufthansa Airlines under a water canon salute. Guests were treated to a gate reception, followed by a performance by the Seattle Children’s Chorus and a press conference.
Among the crowd to celebrate the remarkable event were Tay Yoshitani, CEO of the Port of Seattle, soon-to-be-knighted by the king of Spain Lieutenant Governor Brad Owen, Port of Seattle Commission President John Creighton, and Honorary Consul of Germany, Petra Walker, to name a few.
“More than 50,000 travel between Seattle and Frankfurt every year,” a beaming Creighton said. “Germany is the 3rd largest European travel market.” Creighton also said that the new service will certainly attract leisure travelers but particularly businesses.
Only last year in June, Air France began daily non-stop service between Seattle and Paris, adding to the already existing non-stop flights to other European destinations, such as Copenhagen via SAS, Amsterdam via Northwest Airlines, and London via British Airways. ”
Seattle Food Blogger’s Night out at Quinn’s Pub
Invited! Yes, I was invited to a Seattle Food Blogger’s Dinner! I would meet people who enjoy and know about food. Who care about what they eat. Who get creative with ingredients. Who can describe that experience in words and pictures, and share it with everybody in their blog.
In hotel school - far back in Germany – I learned everything from chemistry of food to meat and veggie parts to preparation techniques to the art of menu creation. That was followed by “real life” with tons of veggies to peel and cut (at 5am outside on frosty winter mornings) and sweating on the stove for hooouuurrrs. No, I didn’t lose my idealism for food when working as a chef, and I really love to write – but it never ever occurred to me to write about food…
And now I met this amazing group of bloggers, who write about food, their culinary adventures and restaurants they visited: local, national and international ones!
I experienced one for me completely different approach to food, a combination of art and practicability mixed with one of the best spices: Love.
Nowadays, where people get upset that a fresh made product has no year long shelf life, where chickens come “from the supermarket” (vs. a happy country farm) and Safeway promotes with ”Food and Drug”, these bloggers are an inspiration for life, our everyday needs and desires for food and the joy you can have with it. Explore that!
Ronald Holden
Cornichon
Michael Natkin
Herbivoracious
Candace Dempsey
Italian Woman At The Table
Jay Friedman
Writer for Seattlest
Rachel Bell (blogger’s fan)
From the radio show: Stick a fork in it
Naomi Bishop
The Gastrognome
Keren Brown
Savvy Savorer
also mirrored over at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as the Frantic Foodie
Thank you, Keren! Thank you for organizing this amazing event. I look forward to see you all again!
Katrin
CULTURAL CORNER – Northwest Linguist Fall 2007
http://www.notisnet.org/notis/nn/notisnew.html
By Laura A. Wideburg
Halloween has come and gone by the time you read
this, but what a confusing name for a holiday. Actually,
the words holiday and Halloween are related! Halloween
comes from All Hallow’s Evening (the night before All
Saint’s Day, November 1st), and even when I was a child,
the holiday was spelled with an apostrophe, Hallowe’en,
to indicate the missing letters from evening. Hallow and
Holy are two different permutations of the same root
word. We see this in words like bury and burrow as well.
Some medieval English dialects pronounced the sound
“ee” (as in holy and bury), while other dialects pronounced
the sound “oh” (as in hallow and burrow). With
time, the words began to differentiate in meaning. Hallow
ceased to be used to mean “holy” and now only makes
an appearance in calques (a linguistic term meaning a
word that is frozen in an older usage), for instance in the
phrase from the Lord’s Prayer “hallowed be Thy name”
and the name for the holiday that is Halloween, while
holy became the word commonly used to refer to the
sacred. Hallow, meaning “saint,” is now a dead usage, and
has been replaced by the word saint(e) imported from
the Norman French. The word holiday is a contraction of
holy day, which in the Medieval world meant a day free
from work to celebrate its religious significance. Meanwhile,
bury and burrow both retained the meaning “dig
in the earth,” but the first word now relates to how
people dig in order to lay their loved ones to rest, while
the second now relates to animals digging in order to
make a home for themselves in the earth.
DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF CULTURES – Part 3
14. The representants of a given culture have the duty to respect the laws of the citizens of the country which have been decided democratically and to respect the Rights of Man.
15. As long as these cultures respect the democratic laws of the citizens and the Rights of Man, their rights to exist cannot be infringed.
16. The mission of the Declaration of the Rights of Cultures is to give the fundamental basis and reference to allow the cultures of the world to know each other.
17. Cultures are alive. They grow and change and keep recreating themselves. It is a crime against them to want to freeze them or to want to stop them from transforming themselves.
18. We solemnly declare that all the cultures of the world have the right to a representation similar to the right of nations, which expresses itself in the United Nations organization. This representation of cultures will be done in an organization named the United Cultures, and this organization will slowly replace the United Nations.
19. We solemnly declare that no globalization of the world is peacefully possible without a deep respect for the Rights of Cultures.
Book source: 7 Secrets of Marketing in a Multi-Cultural World by G. Clotaire Rapaille
visit his website: http://www.rapailleinstitute.com/
DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF CULTURES – Part 2
8. All the human beings of this planet have the inalienable rights to access all the other cultures of this planet.
9. Cultures are not right or wrong, good or bad; they are different. This diversity is what constitutes the richness of the cultural patrimony of the human species.
10. The cultures of the world can only live, grow and flourish in a system of complete separation of powers (i.e. the political, military, religious, legal, and executive branches must be separated from the culture power.) No culture is the exclusive property of a nation or a political, economical, mediatical or military power.
11. As a consequence, the national representatives cannot present themselves as the exclusive representants of a given culture.
12. The political power is temporary. The cultural reality is timeless.
13. Each culture has the right to communicate its constitutive elements, its principles and beliefs, to the rest of the world but does not have the right to impose them.
Book source: 7 Secrets of Marketing in a Multi-Cultural World by G. Clotaire Rapaille
DECLATATION OF THE RIGHTS OF CULTURES – Part 1
presented by G.Clotaire Rapaille, and signed on January 1, 2000, in Paris.
1. All the cultures of world have rights similar to the Rights of Man.
2. Their first right is the right to exist.
3. The cultures of the world represent a universal patrimony. They belong to all the inhabitants of this planet. They are their creations.
4. We declare that it is a crime against humanity to deprive a member of a given culture of access to his culture or of any other culture of the world.
5. It is also a crime against humanity to repress or destroy (even partially) a culture.
6. The Rights of Cultures are limited by the respect of all other cultures in the same way that the Rights of Man are limited by the respect of the same rights for the other inhabitants of this planet (men and women).
7. Every culture has the right to have all the different elements of the culture respected, including (but not limited to) its beliefs, customs, religions, philosophies, language, education systems, art in its different forms (music, poetry, dance, cooking, folklore, and clothing).
Book source: 7 Secrets of Marketing in a Multi-Cultural World by G. Clotaire Rapaille
Prague – The Multilingual City
A visit in Prague is not only a cultural sensation but also a multilingual one. City guides, brochures, restaurant menus, store signs and advertisements, they all are in at least two languages: Czech and English. 50% of all were additionally in German, 20% in French, Spanish, Italian and Russian language!
Multilingual menu in a restaurant window
A bit about Prague
The city on the Vltava River has been a center of European culture since the 14th century. From 1333 to 1774 many generations extended the Hradcany Castle. In the course of centuries a small city consisting of buildings and squares was created on the Hradcany Hill, crowned by the Gothic Cathedral of St. Vitus and the Romanesque St. George’s Church.
More than two hundred palaces in Prague’s Old Town bear witness to the attraction that the royal court once held. Walks along the Old Town, the spacious Wenceslas and Charles Square and the Old and New Town Hall stand for bourgeois traditions in this age-old commercial center. The Clementine Quarter is a completely preserved Baroque complex. Yet it is not only Prague’s secular buildings but also its numerous, often ancient, churches that draw thousands of tourists each year.
Cultural Customization
The Cultural Customization Scorecard™
Our research indicates that international websites that are customized to their target countries’ language, culture, customs, and business practices produce higher levels of browsing comfort, better usability and interactivity, a more favorable attitude to the site, and increased “purchase intention” at the site.
Common Sense Advisory has launched a joint assessment project with Nitish Singh and Arun Pereira, authors of The Culturally Customized Web Site (Elsevier 2005). For a limited time, qualifying companies can receive a detailed FREE cultural diagnosis of one of their international websites, in the form of “The Cultural Customization Scorecard.” In return we request your participation in a short survey dealing with trends in website globalization and localization. Click here to take the survey.
Background
The basis for cultural customization of websites is a theoretically-sound, empirically-validated framework built on five unique cultural values that account for similarities and differences across global cultures. The authors’ research studies indicate that attitude towards websites, interactivity and usability of websites, as well as purchase intentions at websites are enhanced when sites are congruent with the target customers’ cultural predispositions.
The cultural customization framework is drawn from established research and is based on five unique values: Individualism-Collectivism, Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Masculinity-Femininity, and Low-High Context.
The Scorecard
Past research has rated and ranked various countries on the above described cultural values; the authors’ research has identified 36 web features relevant for these cultural value. Thus, for an existing website targeted to a specific country/culture, they can quantify (in the form of a “scorecard”) the extent of cultural customization of that site .
read more at http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/news/cultural_scorecard.php#
