furlinedteacup

Recent Food Reads

Food news from around the web...

• The Philadelphia Daily News had a nice profile on Ruth Reichl this week.
• NotMartha blogged on some tempting holiday treat tools from the latest Williams-Sonoma catalog (3-D Reindeer gingerbread cookies. Seriously.)
• Last week I read about McDonalds courting soccer moms by upscaling all their interiors. This week, there was an interesting article about their food lab for developing regional menu items -- they must have hired a new PR firm or something. It would be really cool if McDonalds implemented some of the regional Asian food in SF, but I doubt they'll see the potential in doing so.
• The Slow Food event in Turin -- some day, I'm going to this.
• My local paper also gave a medium-warm review for PJ's Oysterbed -- one of my least favorite restaurants in the City. Seriously -- I love NOLA cuisine and was not impressed with the food, its prices, or the service. It appears the reviewer was not either, yet it's not a negative review. Very confusing.
• The Sunday and Thursday smaller farmers markets at the Ferry Building are ending, says the Chronicle, due to lack of participation/attendance. I went a few times to the Thursday evening market, but would rarely find something that called out to be taken home for dinner; you just need more options to tempt you.

Foodies go from famine to feast with more food portals than you can keep up with

I was so excited when CHOW, my favorite food magazine ever, found new life as a marvelous website (that coincidentally features the fabulous design skills of my foodie friend Olivia). But work and life keep me so busy I don't get over there as often as I would like to read and be inspired to cook new things.

And now yahoo! has jumped into the foodie fray, launching http://food.yahoo.com/ this week. It aggregates content from a variety of other sources (like Rachel Ray, Food and Wine, and Martha Stewart), including some food bloggers.

I can' really quite get a handle on how I'd use the site yet -- there's just so much stuff crammed into the homepages/landing pages. And you have to navigate carefully to avoid searching an advertiser's website rather than one of the food.yahoo tools.

I tried out the "dining guide" and was not impressed. How can a normal person wade through 8989  results? They tell you to click through for reviews on yahoo local...but if you can't click to sort by some sort of criteria, you're really not giong to be able to find a restaurant, are you? If it was a small town with 10 restaurants the dump of search results might work, but for a major city like San Francisco, this is nowhere near being a dining guide.

I looked around for some time to try to find an "about us" type of page, to see what the mission of this new mini portal is, exactly. But I never found one. I did find a page full of foodie blogger posts tho, so that at least gave me some non-repurposed content to look at.

My best guess is they were aiming to create a one-stop reference/resource for foodies, but it doesn't quite hit the mark with me.