Corn-stuffed caviar
Smoked salmon and sea urchin “pain surprise” style
Hot onion tart
Winter lily bulb and summer savoury
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Folding fan modelled tray decorated with bamboo grasses
including
Kelp-flavoured cold Kyoto beef “shabu-shabu”, asparagus dressed with sesame cream
Diced fatty flesh of tuna fish, avocado and jellied soy sauce and Japanese herb “shiso”
Boiled clam, tomato, “shiso” in jellied clear soup of clam
Water shield and pickled conger dressed with vinegar soy sauce
Boiled prawn with jellied tosazu vinegar
Grilled eel rolled around burdock strip
Sweet potato
Fried and seasoned Goby with soy sauce and sugar
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Hairy Crab “Kegani” bisque soup
Salt-grilled bighand thornyhead with vinegary water pepper sauce
Milk fed “shiranuka” lamb flavoured with aromatic herbs and mustard
Roasted lamb and cepes and black truffle with emulsion sauce of lamb’s stock and pine seed oil
Special cheese selection, lavender honey and caramelised nuts
G8 fantasy dessert
Coffee served with candied fruits and vegetables
Wine list
Le Reve grand cru champagne
Japanese saki
Corton Charlemagne 2005
Chateau Latour burgundy
Ridge California Monte Bello 1997
Tokaji Essencia 1999 from Hungary
Food Shortage: The G8 did not promise fresh funding from rich nations to tackle the food crisis, but pointed out that those present had committed $10bn since the start of the year, to help to feed the hungry and provide seeds for farmers to plant this year. The closing statement appealed to all countries to assist in meeting the demands of the World Food Programme and other bodies coping with the crisis.
Climate Change? No definite agreements have been announced and India and China have reportedly dismissed a target to halve emissions by 2050. A US official said the broad agreement represented progress.
There was other stuff said but it was all pretty nebulous. Good food though.
Starbucks Corp. has announced it’s closing 600 underperforming stores in the United States. The Seattle-based premium coffee company also announced Tuesday it expects to open fewer than 200 new company-operated stores in the United States in fiscal 2009. The company says it will try to place workers from closed stores in remaining Starbucks.
Florida may be hit especially hard by store closures and cuts at Starbucks. The coffee giant announced plans Tuesday to close 600 stores nationwide, slashing about 12,000 jobs. Central Florida’s slumping housing market may make it a target.
Experts believe many of the job cuts and closings could come from the 100-plus locations in Central Florida area. “I’m so depressed. Personally, I’m probably partially responsible for it, because I used to do Starbucks a lot and now I’ve had to cut back,” said customer Eilleen Antonescu.
Starbucks’ biggest national problem is lower-priced competitors, like McDonalds, offering similar coffees. But analysts say the company over-expanded in Central Florida, as well. In the Mall of Millenia area, for example, three Starbucks locations lie within walking distance of one another. “Companies, when they think they’ve turned onto something big, they over do it. They don’t know how to cut back, how to take it slowly,” Antonescu said.
Lewis Black saw this coming:
Why is there a Starbucks across the street from a Starbucks?
Don’t forget the absolutely awesome Onion stories:
The man who designed the Pringles potato chip packaging system was so proud of his accomplishment that a portion of his ashes has been buried in one of the iconic cans.
One lucky winner will get a prize inside a special box of Pringles. Try and guess what it is.
Fredric J. Baur, of Cincinnati, died May 4 at Vitas Hospice in Cincinnati, Ohio.Baur’s children honored his request to bury him in one of the cans by placing part of his cremated remains in a Pringles container in his grave in suburban Springfield Township.
Baur was an organic chemist and food storage technician who specialized in research and development and quality control for Procter & Gamble Co. Baur filed for a patent for the tubular Pringles container and for the method of packaging the curved, stacked chips in the container in 1966, and it was granted in 1970.
“They sell Bud. We sell Weed,” he said. “What’s the difference?”
The Place: WEED, CALIFORNIA
The federal government is telling the owner of a small brewery here that the pun he’s placed on caps of his Weed Ales crosses a line. “Try Legal Weed,” the caps joke.
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau says those three little words allude to marijuana use. Vaune Dillmann, owner of Mt. Shasta Brewing Co., says he was just trying to grab attention for his beers and this tough-luck place in the morning shadow of Mt. Shasta.
The bureau’s bureaucrats have told Dillmann he needs to stop using the “Try Legal Weed” bottle caps. If he doesn’t, he could risk fines or sanctions. His worst fear: being forced out of business.
“This is ludicrous, bizarre, like meeting Big Brother face-to-face,” says Dillmann. “Forget freedom of speech and the 1st Amendment. They are the regulatory gods, a judge and jury all rolled into one. This is a life-or-death issue for my business.”
Besides, he said, the town itself was named for a man, not a plant. Abner Weed was a lumber baron who served as a state senator from these parts a century ago.
This Famous Photo’s Origins Now Revealed: The College is actually called College of the Siskiyous
Folks in Weed — population 3,000 — know whom they’re rooting for. “Government is keeping us safe from bottle caps,” mocked the headline above an editorial in the Record Searchlight newspaper of Redding, an hour’s drive south down Interstate 5. “Let’s get real,” the editorial concluded, “anyone old enough to legally buy a six-pack . . . is mature enough not to be dragged into a life of drug-addled debauchery by a message on the bottle cap.”
On the bottle caps in question, “Try Legal Weed” is surrounded by the slogan “A Friend in Weed Is a Friend Indeed.” To Dillmann’s supporters, that spells civic boosterism, not drug pushing. Weed has a tradition of exploiting the double-entendre of its name. A pithy placard on the way out of town announces “Temporarily Out of Weed.” Gas stations sell “High on Weed” T-shirts. (The town, after all, is at an elevation of 3,500 feet.)
Though the town is no counterculture haven, the metal entry arch downtown is something of a stoner stopover. Summer days find traveling pot aficionados playfully posing for snapshots under the archway’s sign, “WEED.”
Dillmann says the government treats Budweiser with kid gloves, despite the fact that “This Bud’s for You” also could be mistaken for marijuana slang. “They sell Bud. We sell Weed,” he said. “What’s the difference?”
A fashion faux pas by Rachael Ray led the Dunkin’ Donuts chain to pull an online ad starring the celebrity chef, and sparked a debate about the subtext of accessories. The domestic diva’s black and white scarf has drawn cries of outrage from some observers, who say it looks like the traditional garb worn by Arab men.
Terrorist! But thanks for the great food!
Critics say the accessory looks like a kaffiyeh, a type of scarf that they say now represents Muslim extremism. “The kaffiyeh … has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad,” conservative commentator Michelle Malkin said in her Fox News column. “Popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos, the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant (and not-so-ignorant) fashion designers, celebrities, and left-wing icons.”
The ad was pulled over the weekend. The company says it wanted to avoid any “misperception” about the scarf and its cultural meaning.
“Kaffiyehs are worn every day on the street by Palestinians and other people in the Middle East – by people going to work, going to school, taking care of their families, and just trying to keep warm. To reduce their meaning to support for terrorism has a tacit racist tone to it,” says Amahl Bishara, a University of Chicago anthropology lecturer who specializes in media matters relating to the Middle East.
Malkin was pleased with Dunkin’s response: ‘‘It’s refreshing to see an American company show sensitivity to the concerns of Americans opposed to Islamic jihad and its apologists.’’
If you look at the scarf Rachael Ray is wearing in that picture, it doesn’t even remotely resemble the pattern traditionally associated with the keffiyeh, which resembles an interlocking net or a chain-link fence.
Arafat wearing the traditional keffiyeh
There are two problems in this case. One is that the right-wing zealots are trying to foist their own blanket meaning on a piece of clothing that has a long history as a national symbol. The other problem is that Malkin and Johnson are complaining about a symbol that has basically escaped and vanished, lost its meaning in the Land of Miscellaneous Consumer Scarves.
As if people’s fashion choices really did mean something, but the whole point of consumerism is that these kinds of meanings get sucked out and replaced with price tags.
