Sommelier Chris Hoel is bidding adieu to his native St. Louis. An e-mail I got from him this morning says he’s accepted a job at The French Laundry, the preeminent chef Thomas Keller’s Yountville, California restaurant. Hoel is/was one of only two advanced sommeliers (certified by the Court of Masters Sommeliers) in St. Louis. I chronicled his attempt to become a master sommelier in last year’s cover story, “The Wine Master.”
All this week Gut Check is celebrating the end of 2007 with the first annual Year-End Bonanza! I'm counting down my ten favorite dishes of the year -- and the absolute, no holds barred worst. We're revealing the nominees for the inaugural Gut Check Thing of the Year award. And of course there's plenty of the usual Gut Check goodness.
If you've never visited the RFT food blog -- or you haven't stopped by in a while -- now is the perfect time to get caught up.
As Unreal muddles through our tryptophan coma (or not) in the stilliness that inevitably follows Thanksgiving dinner (aside from some stertoriousness around the football game), we will make sure to stumble to our computer to indulge in a few rounds of FreeRice, the most addictive Internet word game ever devised.
In the past few minutes, we have learned that a zax is a roofing hatchet, a boscage is a thicket and gnar means to growl. We plan to start using these words in casual conversation as soon as possible. (And didja see how we used stilly? And stertorious?)
The best part about FreeRice is that for every answer you get right, the United Nations will donate ten grains of rice to hungry people around the world. It doesn’t sound like much, but grains of rice multiply very quickly into a veritable spate and will help abrogate world hunger.
This weekend you can attend the Taste of St. Louis downtown. At Gut Check you can get a taste of St. Louis every single day. What were this week's flavors?
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We told Ron Popeil where he could stick his rotisserie chicken.
Malcolm Gay investigates Chinese exile mystery novelist -- and St. Louis County resident -- Qiu Xiaolong.
Advocates for the disabled tell Kathleen McLaughlin why the Missouri Department of Transportation needs to be reprimanded.
Unreal chats with Miss Nursing Home '07, two soapbox racers and remembers the colossal King Kong Brody.
Does Ian get fired up about El Scorcho's Tex-Mex fare?
Ruth's Classic Cosmo gives Kristie McClanahan the giggles.
Malcolm Gay answers a question on everyone's mind while choking down Domino's Pizza New Oreo Dessert Pizza in Keep It Down.
R.E.M. producer Mitch Easter talks to Annie Zaleski about his first album since 1989.
In b-sides, Black Sabbath vocalist answers Andrew Miller’s questions about Heaven and Hell, and Dan Leroy takes a look at Fiddy’s and Kanye’s strategically marketed albums.
In Homespun, Christian Schaeffer doesn’t think mold will grow on Chiaband's debut album Cornucopius Musicus.
Paul Friswold checks out Boesman and Lena at the Edison Theatre, and Dennis Brown does the same for Echo Theatre's Hedda Gabler.
Who among us has not harbored the occasional romantic and/or sexual yearning for a teacher? Teachers have power. Power is sexy. More to the point, some teachers are attractive -- hot, even. They didn't include that red-pepper rating on RateMyProfessors.com for nothing.
This is not to say that the recent Hardee's and Carl's Jr. TV ad for the Patty Melt Thickburger could be mistaken for a tribute to the noble profession of teaching. In the ad, a group of teenage boys, inspired by the sight of their hot blond teacher's backside, begin rapping a parody of Sir Mix-A-Lot's immortal "BabyGotBack":
"In anatomy class, you got a butt-minus...I like flat buns, flaaat buns!"
Overcome, the teacher begins to dance and writhe atop her desk, whereupon men age 18 to 34, the ad's target audience, presumably say to themselves, "Gee, I could really go for a patty melt right now."
"I can't see how anyone could look at it not see a parody of a 'Hot for Teacher' video from the Eighties," says Hardee's Jeff Mochal, PR manager for the St. Louis-based company.
Maybe members of the Tennessee Education Association aren't fans of Van Halen, either. Soon after a few of them caught the ad during a break in an airing of a Tennessee Titans game, they began to protest and demand that the ad be taken off the air.
"The ad makes the classroom look like a joke," says Cheryl Umberger, a communications consultant at the TEA. "The teacher is not taken seriously, nor are the students. Teachers do not get up on their desks the way the supposed teacher does in the ad. The way she's portrayed makes it difficult, especially for young teachers, to establish the appropriate discipline and class behavior with high school students."
Mochal says the ad was never meant to cause any trouble. "I Like Flat Buns," sans teacher, first aired as a radio spot four months ago and proved so popular -- Mochal actually fielded requests for a ringtone -- that the company decided to create the TV version, which hit the airwaves August 28. Really, what better way is there to harness the back-to-school spirit and illustrate flat buns at the same time? The ads were scheduled to air only after 10 p.m., by which time most earnest young scholars should be finishing up their homework and heading off to bed.
Nonetheless, the controversy sizzled. More groups, most notably the American Family Association, began posting the YouTube clip on their Web sites and urging their members to write to their local TV stations and CKE Restaurants, Hardee's and Carl's Jr.'s California-based parent company, in protest. The media picked up the story, and last week impressionable schoolchildren could watch it on Good Morning America.
"The media showed it ten times more than we did," says Mochal. "It must have increased the ad value 100 times."
It is hard to say at this point, however, how much it boosted patty-melt sales.
CKE was puzzled by the violence of the reaction, Mochal says, but as the ad was not meant to shock or offend (unlike the one with Paris Hilton), the company retooled the commercial and cut out the teacher.
Alas, St. Louis television viewers will be spared those poorly rapping white kids. The ad went off the air last weekend. Hardee's has already moved on to its next promotion, the Hawaiian Chicken Sandwich. Sensitive Hawaiians take note: the new commercials debut October 1.
Also in this week's issue: Malcolm dreams of anchovies in sauce gribiche, while Kristie enjoys a glass of Penfolds Thomas Hyland Shiraz at a curiously quiet mall.
Here's the headline I put on the blog entry I just posted about the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's and Federal Trade Commission's responses to complaints from Monsanto that U.S. milk producers are "misleading" the citizenry about the Creve Coeur-based chemical company's product Posilac, a.k.a. rBST, a.k.a. recombinant bovine somatotropin, a.k.a. bovine growth hormone:
Back in April, I wrote a pair of posts, one detailing Monsanto's complaints to the FDA and FTC, the other contrasting Melcer's story for the P-D with stories published by other news outlets.
Well, here we go again.
I'm not going to go over all the old ground. Let me just point you to the only other story about the denouement that's appeared so far, written by Associated Press writer Sam Hananel. That story was published in various newspapers around the nation under this headline:
Earlier this year Monsanto petitioned the two federal agencies to bitch-slap milk producers who have made "deceptive" claims that say or imply dastardly things about Posilac, a.k.a. rBST, a.k.a. recombinant bovine somatotropin, a.k.a. bovine growth hormone.
In an April 4 press release, Monsanto had bemoaned how "certain milk labels and promotions that differentiate milk based on farmer use of POSILAC bovine somatotropin (bST) are misleading to consumers and do not meet the standards set by laws and regulations for either the Federal Trade Commission or the Food and Drug Administration."
I wrote about the chemical company's wadded knickers here and here.
Monsanto's complaints fell into three categories. The first two were relatively straightforward:
• Some producers were labeling their product with claims like "No Hormones" or "No Hormones Added." Such assertions, Monsanto's attorneys pointed out, are patently false, because 1) all milk contains naturally occurring hormones, and 2) the vast majority of milk sold in this country is augmented with vitamin D, which is itself a hormone.
• Other labels said things like "rBST-free," "No Artificial Hormones" and "Does Not Contain Artificial Growth Hormones." Because rBST is administered to cows and not added to milk, no milk can be said to "contain" rBST.
It was the third category of alleged violations that rammed Monsanto's stout ship of argument up against the pointy shoals of common sense. To wit:
Also in this week's issue: Malcom tries to keep down smoked catfish, while Kristie wonders whether hot sake will soothe the pain of pulled wisdom teeth.
