St. Louis Food Blog

There was a time when gooey butter cake was a delicacy unknown outside the St. Louis metropolitan area, sort of like Provel or toasted ravioli. But now it has been exposed in The New York Times. Will our lives ever be the same???

flickr.com/photos/playfullibrarian

​In this week's "A Good Appetite" column, writer Melissa Clark describes how she cheats and bribes her way to acquiring the very last piece of gooey butter cake at a Brooklyn farmers' market.

Via Eater comes this trailer for a new Travel Channel animated series called Anthony Bourdain's Alternate Universe. Quoting Eater: "...assuming this isn't a hoax, it's only going to be online, as a six-part animated web series to debut sometime in 2010."

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Posted without comment.

​The New York Times reports that magazine publisher Condé Nast will shutter Gourmet magazine after almost 70 years:

The magazine has suffered a severe decline in ad pages, but the cut still comes as a shock. There was speculation that Condé Nast would close one of its food titles -- Gourmet or Bon Appétit -- but most bets were on the latter. Gourmet has a richer history than Bon Appétit, and its editor Ruth Reichl is powerful in the food world.

No word yet on whether Bon Appétit will subsume some of Gourmet's writers. That would seem logical, but the intricate rivalries of magazines that share a publisher never fail to confound me. I imagine the great Ruth Reichl will land on her feet, however.

Update: From the internal Condé Nast memo, via Gawker:

Gourmet magazine will cease monthly publication, but we will remain committed to the brand, retaining Gourmet's book publishing and television programming, and Gourmet recipes on Epicurious.com. We will concentrate our publishing activities in the epicurean category on Bon Appétit.

Brilliant viral marketing campaign? Surreal drug trip? Allegory on racial integration? All of the above? We report (via Ad Freak), you decide:



The second episode, after the jump...

​The new issue of Bon Appétit magazine, which arrived in my mailbox this weekend and is the annual "restaurant issue," includes two mentions of St. Louis. Details after the jump...

​As you are probably aware, Julie & Julia, the Nora Ephron film, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, inspired by the lives of super-chef Julia Child and the blogger she inspired, Julie Powell, opens in St. Louis this weekend. Robert Wilonsky reviewed Julie & Julia for Riverfront Times and our sister papers in the Village Voice Media chain.

Here is Wilonsky's opening paragraph:

It was the best of movies. It was the worst of movies. Which is to say: There's half of a great movie in Julie & Julia -- but since Meryl Streep has already starred in one titled Julia (Fred Zinnemann's penultimate feature in 1977), perhaps it was merely necessary to tack on the "Julie" half to distinguish Nora Ephron's butter-basted effort from its Lillian Hellman's mayonnaise-covered predecessor. (Sorry. So sorry.) If nothing else, that tortured introduction reveals which half is the great half -- the one featuring Streep as Julia Child, but of course, and not the Smithsonian-enshrined, encased-in-amber, forever-in-reruns Julia Child, either, but the toweringly lean and tremendously lustful Julia Child, new to France in the late 1940s and ready to devour everything in sight, even her husband, Paul (Stanley Tucci).

foodincmovie.com

The line outside the Tivoli Theatre Wednesday night was nearly as long as the line for free burritos when the Delmar Loop Chipotle opened last year, except instead of hungry students, it was comprised (or, rather, also comprised) of earnest liberals, all clutching in their sweaty hands vouchers from the Landmark Theatres Film Club inviting them to a free screening of the new documentary Food, Inc.

A man on a girl's bike rode up to the brick wall beside the parking lot, stared entranced at the crowd and breathed, "Jackpot!"

In his sweaty hands, he clutched a pile of manila folders stuffed with cardboard and held together with rubber bands. All of which mean one thing to habitues of the Loop: Petition. In this case, to preserve Missouri's secret ballot.

(To his credit, at least he did not say, "Hey, do you have a minute for the secret ballot?")

But he also didn't get very far down the line before the Tivoli flung its doors open and let the crowd into the air-conditioning.

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Schlosser

Food, Inc., the new exposé -documentary about the food industry, doesn't open at the Tivoli until June 26, but it's already generated a fair amount of controversy in St. Louis.

Co-produced by Eric Schlosser of Fast Food Nation fame and starring Schlosser and Michael Pollan of The Omnivore's Dilemma super-fame, Food, Inc. demonizes the "highly mechanized underbelly" of commercially-produced food. Monsanto, the west county-based agricultural company, emerges as one of its chief villains.

In response, Monsanto has added a new page to its website defending itself and denouncing the film for its various inaccuracies.

You didn't think Gut Check would let a week pass without noting another award nomination for my colleague Kristen Hinman, did you?

Hinman's "The Pope of Pork" has been nominated for the 2009 Association of Food Journalists Awards Competition in the category "Best Newspaper Food Feature (Circulation 250,000 and Under)." Winners will be announced this October.

Just last week Hinman was nominated in the "Food Writing" category of the Association of Alternatively Newsweeklies' 2009 AltWeekly Awards. And at the beginning of this month, Hinman won a James Beard Award, her second, for "The Pope of Pork."

Here at Gut Check, we strongly advocate the enjoyment of food. But we find there's a lot of pleasure to be had in looking at really gross food and going, Ewwww. Secretly, we're all just third-graders at heart. (I mean, just look at Throwback of the House.)

And so I was really, really happy to discover the blog the museum of awful food. Zombie Chicken, Braised Puppy with Assorted Greens, Fried Guinea Pig. With recipes! And some pictures! And amazing, STL Today-worthy comments on the post about fried guinea pig!

Alas, the museum of awful food lasted a scant seven entries back in the spring of 2006.

RIP.

Forgive me if Gut Check sounds like a broken record, but my colleague Kristen Hinman continues to pick up award nominations for her grand-slam feature story, "The Pope of Pork." Hinman's profile of hog farmer Russ Kremer is one of three finalists in the "Food Writing" category of the 2009 AltWeekly Awards, sponsored by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. Her competition includes Rachel Hutton of City Pages (Minneapolis-St. Paul) and Pulitzer-winner Jonathan Gold of L.A. Weekly, both sister papers of the RFT. The winners will be announced on June 26.

Earlier this month, Hinman took home a James Beard Award -- her second -- in the category "Newspaper Feature without Recipes" for "The Pope of Pork."

A bit of a change-up today. Instead of a commercial, a Web site: Subservient Chicken, a brilliant Burger King viral-marketing campaign from 2004 for its TenderCrisp chicken sandwich. Since BK wants you to "have it your way," the site allows you to order a man in a chicken suit to do, well, just about anything. The site is still live and still ridiculously stupid fun.

www.subservientchicken.com

A relatively innocuous version of this ad runs on basic TV. This is not that version.

My wife and I saw this a few weeks ago and figured it would be pulled quickly. Instead, I've seen it several times in the last couple of days alone.

Riverfront Times staff writer Kristen Hinman last night won the James Beard Foundation Award in the category "Newspaper Feature without Recipes" for her article "The Pope of Pork." The article profiles Missouri hog farmer Russ Kremer and the Ozark Mountain Pork Cooperative.

This is Hinman's second award from the James Beard Foundation. In 2006, she won for her article "Something Fishy," a look at the burgeoning market for Missouri caviar.

Congrats, Kristen!

Craft brewers.

And they are the subject of a sudsy documentary, Beer Wars, playing only one night -- TONIGHT -- in movie theaters across the country.

Made by a woman who's allergic to alcohol (egads!), the documentary focuses on micro-brewers Rhonda Kallman of New Century Brewing and Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Brewery and Distillery, and their "battle" to make it in a multinational marketplace dominated by Miller, Coors and our very own company we suddenly love to hate, InBev Anheuser-Busch.

So, will we see any locals in the flick?

An official Gut Check tip of the cap to my counterpart at St. Louis Magazine, Dave Lowry, who has registered his displeasure with a certain aspect of my El Borracho review.

Slow Food St. Louis co-leader Bill Burge informs me that the organization, in partnership with Magnolia Pictures and Participant Media, is hosting a screening of the documentary Food, Inc. at the Tivoli on Tuesday, April 14, at 7 p.m.

From the official Food, Inc. site:

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that's been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA.

There are 130 free tickets available for the screening on a first-come, first-serve basis. To learn more about the event, visit the Slow Food St. Louis Web site. You can RSVP for the event at this Web site.

A small shoutout for local favorite Ted Drewes Frozen Custard in the May issue of Bon Appétit magazine. As part of its travel issue, the magazine offers a list of what to buy, what to eat and what to drink in each of the 50 states. A Ted Drewes chocolate concrete is Missouri's "what to drink" selection.

If you're wondering, the "what to eat" selection for Missouri is a grilled Berkshire pork rib eye at Smithville's acclaimed Justus Drugstore, while black walnuts from Stockton's Hammons Products Co. are the "what to buy" choice.

Riverfront Times staff writer Kristen Hinman is one of three finalists in the "Newspaper Feature without Recipes" category of the 2009 James Beard Foundation Awards. Hinman is nominated for "The Pope of Pork," her profile of Missouri hog farmer Russ Kremer and the Ozark Mountain Pork Cooperative.

The James Beard Foundation will name its winners in the media categories on Sunday, May 3. Congrats to Kristen!

After something like a hiatus -- let's call it a fallow period -- Bill Burge is once again posting regularly at his food blog STL Bites. I've gotten to know Bill a little bit over the past couple of years, and if there's a more passionate and knowledgeable observer of our city's food scene, I haven't met him or her.

On the off chance that you're a regular reader of this blog but not his, you need to head over there right now and read what he has to say. You might not agree with him -- hell, you might want to punch his lights out -- but if he's talking about it, there's a good chance the city's best chefs are, too.

diningwithdre.mlblogs.com

First up was the hominy stew with beef, and if anyone knows Mexican food, they know that this is a staple in many dishes. It came with a clear broth with onions and "native seasonings," they say, with big chunks of beef and fat hominy. Now that's a soup. It might be my new favorite soup of all-time or at least a close second to menudo. This soup alone was worth the trip here, so who cares about the main food I ordered?

We need to talk one of the Cardinals into blogging for Gut Check.

chairmanstef.blogspot.com

Gerard Craft (alone, right) cooks for Napa Valley winemakers.

Via Eater, Funny or Die takes on those annoying Pizza Hut ads where diners/cooks are shocked to learn that they are eating Pizza Hut pasta. (I guess the captions are NSFW, if you worry about NSFW captions.)

This ends badly.

Man v. Food host Adam Richman visits St. Louis spots Crown Candy Kitchen, Iron Barley and Pappy's Smokehouse.

8:57 p.m.: We'll be live in just a few minutes. Unless LOST runs late.

9:05 p.m.: Uh... LOST ran 5 minutes late. Apparently, I missed Iron Barley. D'oh. Sorry, Tom Coghill. I did live blog your Food Network appearance.

9:09 p.m.: We don't actually have "St. Louis barbecue," Adam. We have a great bbq joint that happens to be in St. Louis.

9:11 p.m.: This guy is freakin' annoying. Do we get to see more of Mike Emerson than the '86ing the ribs scene?