More from Indexed...she actually has a book too...

Got my first taste of Tilth the other night and Big Maria didn't disappoint. Hines is a former Food & Wine Ten Best New Chefs in America and 2008 James Beard Award finalist. Tilth was also recently named one of the NY Times top ten restaurants in the country. So basically, she's doing all right for herself. I felt like I did all right as well, sneaking in without reservations and sitting at the 'bar' trying not to annoy the waitstaff. I immediately panic ordered the penn cove mussels with scallion, smoked chicken and paprika - they were amazing and confirmed my desire to go on an all mollusk diet. Next was the hangar steak with potato gratin, fennel and a little line of chopped picholine olives. Um, yes. No stopping now, we went for the braised pork cheeks with rhubard confit, spring garlic and farro and backed it up with seared albacore with sea beans, quinoa and morrels. Put it in the books, another sick Seattle restaurant. 

Jessica Hagy's brilliant blog is worth a daily read:

The Favorite Web Site Awards site is amazing. But I have no idea what is going on in this Mentos Kiss Fight game... 

Insane round up of prison themed restaurants. Let me know when you're ready for Alcatraz ER...



"While I was there, an unsuspecting birthday girl on another table was thrown the over the knee of a maniacal doctor, who prodded her arse with a giant syringe while she squealed.”

But you are the man for stepping up and admitting it. Stephanie Izard edged out Richard Blais in a somewhat lackluster Top Chef Finale last Wednesday that was buzzing more for Richard's mea culpa at judge's table than the cooking. Richard just didn't bring it in the final round - his best meal of the last challenge (standard four course progression seafood-poultry-meat-dessert) being his dessert of banana "scallops" with bacon ice cream. His fatal flaw was not crisping his pork belly enough and Stephanie's consistency was enough to overcome. Lisa, despite wowing everyone with her tomka (can tomka soup really be impressive) had no chance of being Top Chef - she seems like an awful person. But Stephanie earned it and her lamb medallions with mushrooms, olives and braised pistachios looked outrageous. Ted Allen blogs about Richard's let down and Big Tom give his pennies as well. Not shockingly, the humble, bording on self-doubting, Stephanie was surprised to win.

Rumor has it the next Top Chef is in Seattle...and yes, I'm hiring a Coppola to direct my audition video...

They've made a special jacket for dudes who can't talk to women. I guess Mystery wasn't getting it done for them...

The James Beard winners were announced this week and Sea-town had some solid representation. The JBAs are basically the Oscars of the culinary world and once you get one you are o-fishal. See all the winners here, but for Northwest Chef of the Year, my heroes E-Stowell and J-Will were beat out by Holly Smith of Cafe Jaunita.  Other Seattle connections included Tom Douglas being nominated, but losing to Joe Bastianich and Big Mario of Babbo for Outstanding Restaurateur and Canlis being edged out for Best Service by Terra in St. Helena, CA.

Plus, Food & Wine's Best New Chefs issue just dropped and Ethan Stowell was named one of their top ten. Seattle Tall Poppy has more on the food baller here.

I hope kobe doesn’t do it to me to night again. Yeah, his skills are re-dic but I loved the super astute observations on Kobe’s dereliction of teammate duties in game two from Curt Schilling’s blog:

5) Kobe. This one stunned me a little bit. Who doesn’t know Kobe Bryant right? I only know what I have heard, starting awhile back with the entire Shaq debacle. I don’t really have an opinion one way or the other on or about him other than to know that people feel he might be one of the 4-5 greatest players to ever lace it up. What I do know is what I got to see up close and hear, was unexpected. From the first tip until about 4 minutes left in the game I saw and heard this guy bitch at his teammates. Every TO he came to the bench pissed, and a few of them he went to other guys and yelled about something they weren’t doing, or something they did wrong. No dialog about “hey let’s go, let’s get after it” or whatever. He spent the better part of 3.5 quarters pissed off and ranting at the non-execution or lack of, of his team. Then when they made what almost was a historic run in the 4th, during a TO, he got down on the floor and basically said ‘Let’s f’ing go, right now, right here” or something to that affect.

I am not making this observation in a good or bad way, I have no idea how the guys in the NBA play or do things like this, but I thought it was a fascinating bit of insight for me to watch someone in another sport who is in the position of a team leader and how he interacted with his team and teammates. Watching the other 11 guys, every time out it was high fives and “Hey nice work, let’s get after it” or something to that affect. He walked off the floor, obligatory skin contact on the high five, and sat on the bench stone faced or pissed off, the whole game. Just weird to see another sport and how it all works. I would assume that’s his style and how he plays and what works for him because when I saw the leader board for scoring in the post season his name sat up top at 31+ a game, can’t argue with that. But as a fan I was watching the whole thing, Kobe, his teammates and then the after effects of conversations. He’d yell at someone, make a point, or send a message, turn and walk away, and more than once the person on the other end would roll eyes or give a ‘whatever dude’ look.

Bill Simmons backs him up:

2. The Kobe anecdotes are so damning you have to read them to fully grasp the significance. All I can say is I sat close to the court for Games 1 and 2 and can confirm everything -- the glares, the yelling, the extended staring, the poisonous body language and everything else. If this had been pickup hoops, some of Kobe's teammates would have intentionally thrown a game just to get back to the sidelines, then done the "No, I'm running with these four guys" routine when he came over to ask if they wanted "Next" with him.

3. It has been hysterical to watch the city of Los Angeles rush to Kobe's defense by ripping Schilling -- as evidenced by this T.J. Simers column Wednesday -- instead of coming to grips with the fact the last five months of hunky-dory, "Good Ship Lollipop" Lakers stories was Hollywood's biggest B.S. story of the year other than everyone in the Writer's Guild pretending they liked how the strike turned out. Kobe is a wonderful basketball player. We all concede this point. Just don't keep trying to sell us on the fact he's a good teammate. We have a decade's worth of evidence that says otherwise. When the going gets tough, he goes into "me mode" and it's way too late for him to change. Sorry.

UPDATED: Celts won (amazing) and Sports Guy did a brilliant running diary of the most exciting finals game in the last 10 years.  

The Kobe-MJ thing ... done. Over. Jordan never would have let that happen in the Finals. Ever. Under any circumstances. Nobody is ever allowed to bring this up again.

That's right. Food ballers. What is a food baller? They own restaurants. They're chefs in great kitchens. They run underground dining experiences. They host addictive TV Shows. We all know the easy ones...Mario, Bobby, Tony, Danny, Nobu, Giada and Marco. And then there are the other heavies...Thomas Keller, Wyle Dufresne, Jody Williams, Joel Robuchon, Traci Des Jardins and Paul Kahan to name a few. Seattle has some as well...Tom Douglass, John Sundstrom, Joseba Jimenez de Jimenez, Holly Smith, Matt Jenke and Thierry Rautureau among others.
 
Plain and simple, food ballers are the chefs, restaurateurs, food writers, movers and shakers of the swelling dining industry. We are on pace to spend over $558 billion dollars on food this year in America alone. TV and the movies are great...be entertained for a few hours, maybe even discuss it a day or two after. But nothing compares to the interactive experience of dining out. The decor, the ambiance, the service, the smells, the flavors...when it all comes together, like it did at Joule, Wolf, Steelhead, Boom Noodle and Carmelita's, it's pretty f-ing money.

Any other food ballers people like out there?

After I made Wilk endure the meat fest at Boom Noodle, we indulged his fake healthiness and tried out Carmelita's, a heralded vegetarian restaurant on Phinney Ave. Noted meat eater Spragyue (nearly a finished a Big New Yorker at a super bowl party in 2000), accompanied and actually left satisfied. We shared the pan-seared ricotta cakes (pretty good), sunny pie pizza with goat cheese, grapes, rosemary, pine nuts and a sunny side up egg (fine), potato gruyere gratin with swiss chard, leak cream and fennel raddish salad (more please) and baked roman style gnocchi with lemon cream rapini, pearl onion pine nuts and blueberry sauce (yessir). Would do it again with another anti-meat person.

Most amazing yet. At the 2004 Red Sox World Championship parade, Manny invites the crowd back to his house for free drinks:

I know. Total shocker. I figured it was anywhere in AZ for sure...you have to be fit to even step foot in Scottsdale. San Francisco and Seattle came in 1 and 2:

To rank big metropolitan areas, health and fitness experts analyzed government data from the 15 most populous cities in the country and Indianapolis, where the sports-medicine group is headquartered. They took into consideration a number of health indicators, including the percentage of people who exercise regularly, maintain a healthy weight, eat the recommended daily servings of fruits and vegetables, have access to health care, have health insurance and don't smoke. They also looked at the environment, including the availability of parks, walking/bike trails and public transportation.

It's probably the boylemia that's making the difference.  Las Vegas and Arlington are the fattest cities in the country. Do we implement a fat tax on the offending food purveyors or the overeaters? Megan McArdle sites a study claiming eating out only increases your daily calorie intake by 24 calories:

It certainly casts doubt on the effectiveness of labelling, or a "fat tax". I'm not against putting calorie counts on fast food; I just don't think it will do any good. Peoples' calorie consumption is dictated by their appetite. Which makes sense, if you think about it; it only takes a swing of ten calories a day (about five tic-tacs) to gain or lose a pound over the course of a year. If our appetites weren't doing a surprisingly good job of regulating our weight, we'd all be bone thin or morbidly obese.

B-Simmons has been going off a bit. He wrote an interesting piece on Kevin Garnett and asking the question of whether clutchness is something you're born with or something you develop if you get the reps. He also churned out an amazing ramblings with thoughts on topics from John Mayer to American Idol. Unfortunately, his last article made me want to take Robitusson kamikaze's. Despite his Celtic pride, he says the finals are over and the f-ing Lakers are inevitable.

Re: Garnett...

During the last few minutes of Game 6 of Boston's second-round series with Cleveland, poor Kevin Garnett looked like Forrest Gump right after Jenny pulled her top down in her dorm room. On one play, the ball swung to KG at the foul line; no Cav was within 10 feet of him. Strangely, he panicked, thinking about shooting an open J before realizing, Wait, I'm seven feet tall, that would be dumb, and barreling toward the basket to rush a clumsy jump hook. For a former MVP who makes $22 million a year, it was an astoundingly incompetent sequence.

A few choice ramblings...

Look, I don't care if it's a movie, and I don't care if it happened 22 years ago, there's no way Cruise and Edwards take a game off Rossovich and Kilmer, much less the entire volleyball match. It's not happening.

All right, I'll ask: How come it took three seconds to euthanize Eight Belles, but the WNBA is starting Year 12?

If this were the 1700s, the Olsen twins would have been mistaken for witches and killed by now.

F-ing Lakers...

Unlike the Boston fans, the Lakers' faithful fully expected to win and you could feel it throughout the game, even in the second quarter when L.A. trailed by 17 and the fans patiently waited for their team to make a run. When the comeback finally came, nobody was surprised. When Kobe took over the game in the fourth quarter and dipped into MJ's patented "Not Only Am I Going To Beat You, I'm Going To Rip Your Hearts Out 'Temple of Doom Style'" territory, nobody was surprised. It's a likable, entertaining, reliable team with a transcendent player in his prime, and any time you have that combination in place, you're going to win the title. You just are.

WTF? How in the world is Lisa still on this show? She's won one challenge this year...for making bacon. So what if Spike clowned guest judge Rick Tramanto for having frozen scallops in his walk-in (which he says was a mistake) and texted in his main course? Lisa made peanut butter mashed potatoes (gross) and puts on a pouty face whenever someone questions her dish (which is pretty much every episode). At least she's getting ripped apart in national newspapers. Big Tom posted a nice recap on his blog about last night's episode, but I'm still bitter. F-it, go Richard!

Men's Health has some pretty nice lists, including 20 Worst Foods, 20 Saltiest Foods and Restaurant Industry Secrets. The latest, 20 Unhealthiest Drinks in America, has some doozies and surpises:

19. Worst "Healthy" Drink: Glaceau VitaminWater (20 oz bottle) 130 calories / 33 g sugar

Vitamins and water might sound like the ultimate nutritional tag team, but what the label doesn't say is that a bottle of this stuff carries nearly as much sugar and calories as a can of Coke. Makes sense, though, since this so-called functional beverage is produced by our often-sugar-crazy friends at The Coca-Cola Company.

This looks light...

3. Worst Smoothie: Jamba Juice Peanut Butter Moo'd Power Smoothie (30 oz) 1,170 calories / 169 g sugars
 
Jamba Juice calls it a smoothie; we call it a milkshake, with more sugar than an entire bag of chocolate chips. (Note: We're pretty sure this is the drink Hollywood actors rely on when looking to put on 20 pounds for the role as a heavy!)

I like this site for obsessing about nutrional content. It's great for manorexics and boylemiacs.

Ten optical illusions in two minutes...

Casuelita's, Belltown. There's not a lot of Caribbean or East Indian in Seattle, but this is a solid spot if you want to get into it. A nice cocktail menu features several of their 50 different rums. For food, we started with Jamaican Patties (turnover filled with spicy beef), Plaintain Tostones served pepper sauce, St. Croix Prawns (rolled in coconut, served with sweet passion fruit sauce), Conch Fritters and Jerk Chicken. Then polished off Down Home Curry Goat and Tamal Azteca (grilled portabellos, yellow squash, spinach layered with garlic, ricotta, corn tortillas & zesty tomato rouille). This could have been considered an overload dinner.

Manny high fiving a fan mid-play. Gotta watch until the end to see the dugout reaction...

A package of these guys showed up in Philadephia. "The specimens were some of the largest of their kind, and some of the largest I've ever seen, averaging five to six inches in diameter," John Plummer, an agency agriculture specialist, said in a statement Wednesday.