In South Norwalk, I highly recommend Match and its eclectic menu (Mediterranean-Asian fusion?), especially its abundant seafood offerings. I also advise starting your evening off at nearby Papaya Thai (not a bad restaurant either) and its five-seat tiki bar hidden in the back rather than having to elbow your way through Match’s mob scene of a bar. Reservations definitely suggested.

For whatever reason, I resisted going to Zinc in New Haven but when finally dragged there by Mrs. Kuhl, I was hooked by the inventiveness of the vaguely Asian menu incorporating New England produce: Vermont cheeses, Maine scallops, Connecticut vegetables and sausages. Also, the bar and its nightly specials demonstrate the value of a professional bartender (*cough, cough*) in elevating a certain reprobate’s beer-and-rum-soaked palate.

Also recommended: Lalibela in New Haven. Whenever friends and I plan to go for Ethiopian, someone has to ask, Are they still open? Yes, even though they refuse to believe in the Internet, Lalibela is as open and delicious as ever. Last time I checked.

It’s instructive that in Fairfield, the ritziest and most well-established French restaurant, La Colline Verte, went bust while the year-old bistro Cafe Lola thrives. I believe the biggest roadblock to greater acceptance of French cuisine is its association with expense (let me stress: not its association with fine dining, but its deserved perception of costliness). Cafe Lola is proof French food can be neither pretentious nor an anniversaries-birthdays-and-Mother’s-Day-only experience. The hot chocolate is real (not cocoa) and the chef (actually Belgian) puts a fried egg on my steak. That’s enough to get me in the door right there.

A study of New York City’s pioneering law on posting calories in restaurant chains suggests that when it comes to deciding what to order, people’s stomachs are more powerful than their brains.

April Matos, 24, bought a Happy Meal at a McDonald’s for her 3-year-old son, Amari, and a Snack Wrap for herself. “Life is short,” she said. “I started eating everything now I’m pregnant.”

The study, by several professors at New York University and Yale, tracked customers at four fast-food chains — McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken — in poor neighborhoods of New York City where there are high rates of obesity.

It found that about half the customers noticed the calorie counts, which were prominently posted on menu boards. About 28 percent of those who noticed them said the information had influenced their ordering, and 9 out of 10 of those said they had made healthier choices as a result.

But when the researchers checked receipts afterward, they found that people had, in fact, ordered slightly more calories than the typical customer had before the labeling law went into effect, in July 2008.

All this makes the stand of the upscale (and very good) Houston’s chain against New York City’s menu-labeling requirements all the more excellent.

More from the NYT here. When I interviewed the fantastic Brian Wansink, a professor, author, and former USDA official, for Reason.com earlier this year, he noted that menu-labeling laws and other such meddling have

“…either been ineffective or disturbingly counterproductive,” he says. “All the data we’ve seen about menu labeling doesn’t show a consistent answer at all.

“Trying to change capitalism is a lot of work,” he adds, “and it won’t work.”

Indeed it won’t. Hear that, Ezra? Hear that, Mr. Brownell?

Curious me asked the woman behind the wheel what they are up to and then appeared a white man in a red turban, who explained that they were moved by Obama, got excited about doing a non-profit and ended up running an Indian restaurant on wheels. There are many non-sequitors in that explanation, but it is okay as the Indian food they serve up is incredibly great.

They provide three options: the taste ($3), the two things ($6) and three things ($9). I opted for the two things and got spinach with cheese and chicken tikka masala. A generous portion of basmati rice came with it.

I was blown away by the quality of the food. I love Indian and this was among the best that I have tasted. If you see this truck, run it down and eat dinner.

One of the dinner specials at Todd English’s Kingfish was a pound of shrimp boiled with Old Bay, red potatoes, a half cob of corn, and a ham steak. The shrimp were served with everything except the heads so I sat there and methodically cleaned them, which brought me to this dilemma of decorum: is it gross to de-vein your shrimp at the table? The legs and tails have to go, obviously, but should you then just pop them in, predigested zooplankton and all?

Meanwhile Coastal Living catalogs their favorite seafood dives. Gotta catch ‘em all!

A kid’s hamburger. What else? Ba-dum-bum.

Via NRN.

More from the Dept. of Eating Strange Beasties:

A rare quail from the Philippines was photographed for the first time before being sold as food at a poultry market, experts say.

Found only on the island of Luzon, Worcester’s buttonquail was known solely through drawings based on dated museum specimens collected several decades ago.

Scientists had suspected the species—listed as “data deficient” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s 2008 Red List—was extinct….However, the buttonquail is from a “notoriously cryptic and unobtrusive family of birds,” according to the nonprofit Birdlife International, so the species may survive undetected in other regions.

He did not add: “Also, they are delicious with a little cumin, so I sort of understand why you’d want to eat the last one.”

The whole thing is reminiscent of the pretty great/terrible 1990 Marlon Brando/Matthew Broderick movie The Freshman, which features a club of the ’80s ultra-wealthy organized around consuming the final specimens of endangered animals while wearing velvet mini dresses and black tie.

Sample dialogue:

Clark Kellogg (Broderick): But it’s an endangered species!
Carmine Sabatini (Brando): Not any more. It’s in New Jersey, it’s fine.

Rent it today, and enjoy the next best thing to roasted endangered buttonquail.

Thus I was pleased to see the Washington City Paper’s Tim Carman has a nice piece up today on the place of diners in tough economic times. Right off the bat, Carman nails why anyone worth knowing loves a diner:

There’s something about sitting in a diner, sipping coal-black coffee and shoveling down a syrupy stack of silver-dollar pancakes, that makes you want to spill your guts for hours.

Carman points out that though diners aren’t totally recession-proof, they are (like McDonald’s) capable of and experienced at weathering the financial storm.

If you’re the owner of a restaurant in a recession,” says [American City Diner's Jeffrey] Gildenhorn, “you want to own a diner.”

My favorite diner of all time–my favorite place of all time, ahead of, say, the Duomo in Florence, or Fenway Park–was the old Post Office Diner in Beverly, Mass., where I grew up. I’d go every Sunday morning, without fail, with my grandmother.

Best eggs, toast, home fries, and coffee–which I started drinking at age six–ever. Some Sundays, I’d make my parents take me back for a lunch of lightly salted tuna on a top-split hot dog bun, fries, and a coffee frappe.

I have vehemently hated the French (all of them) since the local Franco-American Club–the landowner–evicted the P.O.D. to make room for parking.

After French people ruined my childhood, I’d have to settle on the Agawam Diner in Rowley, Mass., or the Portside Diner (in nearby Danvers, where my parents now live).

Anyone else have a favorite diner? (Hint: if you are worth talking to, the answer is “yes.”) Where’s it at?

… the “foreign” kebab [...] is being kicked out of Italian cities as it becomes the target of a campaign against ethnic food, backed by the centre-right Government of Silvio Berlusconi.

The drive to make Italians eat Italian, which was described by the Left and leading chefs as gastronomic racism, began in the town of Lucca this week, where the council banned any new ethnic food outlets from opening within the ancient city walls.

Yesterday it spread to Lombardy and its regional capital, Milan, which is also run by the centre Right. The antiimmigrant Northern League party brought in the restrictions “to protect local specialities from the growing popularity of ethnic cuisines”.

Luca Zaia, the Minister of Agriculture and a member of the Northern League from the Veneto region, applauded the authorities in Lucca and Milan for cracking down on nonItalian food. “We stand for tradition and the safeguarding of our culture,” he said.

Mr Zaia said that those ethnic restaurants allowed to operate “whether they serve kebabs, sushi or Chinese food” should “stop importing container loads of meat and fish from who knows where” and use only Italian ingredients.

Asked if he had ever eaten a kebab, Mr Zaia said: “No – and I defy anyone to prove the contrary. I prefer the dishes of my native Veneto. I even refuse to eat pineapple.”

Yes, one would hate to see a culture enriched by centuries of being a Mediterranean trading center sullied by foreign influences. And as always, there’s slightly more to the story than simple xenophobia:

Davide Boni, a councillor in Milan for the Northern League, which also opposes the building of mosques in Italian cities, said that kebab shop owners were prepared to work long hours, which was unfair competition.

Italian cuisine as we know it today incorporated influences from around the world, including spices from Asia and produce from the Americas. In the interest of authenticity, perhaps Mr. Zaia should encourage the Roman diet that persisted in Italy until it was transformed by new 16th century imports. Here, from On Food and Cooking, is a description of garum, the fish sauce that played an essential culinary role from ancient times until just a few hundred years ago:

According to the Roman natural historian Pliny, “garum consists of the guts of fish and other parts that would otherwise be considered refuse, so that garum is really the liquor from putrefaction.” Despite its origins and no doubt powerful aroma, Pliny noted that “scarcely any other liquid except perfume has become more highly valued,” [...] Garum was made by salting the fish innards, letting the mixture ferment in the sun for several months until the flesh had mostly fallen apart, and then straining the brown liquid. It was used as an ingredient in cooked dishes and as a sauce at the table, sometimes mixed with wine or vinegar [...] Some form of garum is called for in nearly every savory recipe in the late Roman collection attributed to Apicius.

Fish sauce can be very tasty and is used frequently in Asian cooking. Yet somehow I don’t see Italians giving up their pastas and spices for a return to salted fish guts, nor should they. Cuisines improve when the cross with other cultures and incorporate their ingredients and techniques, and Italians develop a richer culture when they can eat pasta and kebabs. Banning “foreign” cooking would lead only to stagnation and illusory purity.

Blowfish testicles prepared by an unauthorized chef sickened seven diners in northern Japan and three remained hospitalized Tuesday after eating the poisonous delicacy.

[...]

[Police official Yoshihito] Iwase said the seven men ordered sashimi and grilled blowfish testicles at the restaurant Monday night.

Shortly after, they developed limb paralysis and breathing trouble and started to lose consciousness — typical signs of blowfish poisoning — and were rushed to a hospital for treatment, Iwase said.

More here. Homer Simpson suffers the same fate below.

via videosift.com