tidbits

Festival Started!

June 21, 2008 | Uncategorized

The Prague Food Festival kicked off its second year with its opening party Thursday night on Slovansky Island, where the Zofin is located. The weather was beautiful, and it looked like everyone
was enjoying going from stand to stand tasting the delicious array of culinary dishes prepared by some of the countries best restaurants. You can see here a couple of photos from that night.

Unlike last year, the weather has held up so far, and we have already had two great, rainless days! Keep your fingers crossed for Sunday!

The Festival has been written up a couple of times in the English press, so I thought I’d put up those links. On the Radio Praha website, there are a couple of quotes from the organizer of the festival, Pavel Maurer, and from Prague’s Michelin-winning chef, Andrea Accordi. There is also a nice informative article from Dave Faries in the Prague Post here..

No Comments »

Dolce Vita- ‘Flavor Tripping’

May 29, 2008 | Uncategorized

How about a life where goat cheese tastes like cheesecake, vinegar like apple juice, or an oyster like bubble gum? Would you even want that? Perhaps you might want to take a Willy Wonka-like pill just for an evening of culinary tripping where any food which normally is sour tastes sweet.

Well, in today’s Dining & Wine section of the New York Times, ‘A Tiny Fruit That Tricks the Tongue‘ describes that just such events are turning up called ‘flavor tripping parties’, but the pill is actually a West African berry, which has a cult following and goes by the name ‘the miracle fruit’.

They also have a short video showing all the fun guests have on such a flavor trip:

Riding a Flavor Trip

1 Comment »

Cheat Sheets for Food: Eat Sheets

May 28, 2008 | Uncategorized

Conde Nast, one of the most well-known publishers of magazines Vogue, Bon Appetit, Gourmet, Vanity Fair,Wired, New Yorker , has introduced some quick and fun food guides in their online finance magazine Portfolio.

The guides can either be read online or be downloaded as a one-page PDF file, hence their name, and they contain some great tips on how to make the right food selection as well as interesting facts. For example, in their truffle guide they tell you that the heavier the truffle, the fresher it will be because it hasn’t lost it’s moisture yet.

These Eat Sheets will let you know the answer to such questions as: does age matter with cheese?, does size matter with oysters?, what is the best way that game should be prepared?, and what does marbling tell you about the quality of your steak?

Below you can find links to the eight Eat Sheets which have been published so far:

Eat Sheet: Steak

Eat Sheet: Cheese

Eat Sheet: Oysters

Eat Sheet: Chocolate

Eat Sheet: Truffles

Eat Sheet: Chilis

Eat Sheet: Game

Eat Sheet: Tea

1 Comment »

Pivo Festival

May 24, 2008 | Uncategorized

Cannot let another day go by without mentioning the Czech Repbulic’s first Czech Beer Festival, touted as the ‘largest gastronomic event in the Czech Republic’, which kicked off yesterday at the Prague Fairgrounds. What’s great is that the festival actually features only Czech beers and it appears that some interesting brews from around the country should be represented.

Evan Rail, resident beer expert and author of Good Beer Guide: Prague and the Czech Republic has a great blog at the Prague Monitor and discusses in his last post what beers to expect and what he recommends.

Give it a look and you’ll know not only which good brews to try, but where they’re at here:

30 Great Brews: The Czech Beer Festival Beer List

No Comments »

Beyond Sushi

May 23, 2008 | Uncategorized

With Tokyo now the center of the foodie world, after Michelin granted the city more stars than London, Paris and New York combined last year, it’s good to see the aritcle “Tokyo Food, Fishy Business” in this week’s Economist online.

Of course the writer begins in one of the famous, Michelin-awarded suhiyas, Sushi Mizutani, but then delightfully goes on to discuss just exactly what an izakaya is, and, every gurman’s secret fascination in Tokoyo–their high-tech toilets. In particular, the Toto Neorest complete with a description of all the functions and a photo.

A fun and informative must-read for foodies wanting an insider’s guide to Tokoyo.

No Comments »