Danceable solution

So can you have a dance piece premised on what we eat and how it defines us? If you happen to be in london this may holiday weekend you might consider going to see "...the gifted and respected.." (Evening Standard), Shobana Jeyasingh Dance company perform Just Add Water at the Linbury Studio. A full dance piece exploring how cultural differences can be influenced by our obsession with food and cooking. A kind of gastro gymastics which sets out to find out "is cross cultural eating the greatest success story of our time?" Food fights, food prejudices, food fads and food fusions all waiting to be danced off. But will it rise or will it curdle? - bit like that remark Elvis Costello once made "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."

and here's a LINK to their promo trailer on YouTube

location location location

Imagine. The Plaza or Algonquin in NYC, The Peninsula in HongKong, Raffles in Singapore, The George Cinq in Poris France, All very desirable all very exclusive. Now add the Hilton Ordos ....thats in aaahhh Inner Mongolia, home of Genghis Khan. Passing trade? a weekend break? You might have your work cut out there for PR & marketing. Selling discounted rooms to commuting Yaks i suppose, but as Marco Pierre White remarked recently "...a recession is the most obvious time to open a restaurant" and other mavericks like Alan Sugan and Michael O'Leary would agree with such an outlook The firm that won the open competition to design the hotel is VMX, based in Amsderdam and behind it all an Irish architect, Don Murphy.

Well done to our corkers!

Congrats to the two 4th-year Culinary Arts students Mark Jennings and Anne-Marie Fitzgerald, who have won the final of the 2009 Bolton Trust student enterprise competition for their innovative idea for a home wine tastings service. They bested 40 other proposals with this brilliant and timely leisure business concept. Congrats also to Bernard Smith for once again mentoring a team onto the winners' podium.

Next stop for this super crew ought to be the Dragons' den, where there surely would be a unanimous vote of - I'm in!

The book, the library and the serial killer

the latest issue of Gastronomica has recently arrived in the library. As entertaining as always it includes an interesting little article on the inside back page about a book A History of Gastronomy by Jay Jacobs. The book once lived in the Libray collection at Revere St. High School in Richfield Ohio and back in those days before all this computer fandangalry patrons had to sign books out. On 14th Oct 1978 it was taken out by one Jeffrey Dahmer If you've forgetton that notorious name he was responsible not just for killing possibly as many as 17 people, but also eating parts of them as well. Oct 1978 was just 4 months after it's believed he had killed and eaten for the 1st time. We dont currently have a copy of A History of Gastronomy in the library but we'll see if it's still available.

Socca to me

Now that we are all poor again, it might be a good time for us foodies to look at cheap, tasty and traditional food. Nothing I have seen recently hits the spot better than a snack I had recently in Nice. This was socca, a crispy pancake made of chickpea flour and olive oil. A portion of socca filled me for my lunch, and in that far-from-cheap city, it set me back 2.50 Euro!

This is exactly the sort of thing we need to develop here in place of having to choose between exorbitant and fattening panini or filled baguettes on one hand, or lifeless hang sangwiches on the other. How about asking Trevor Sargent to run a competition to develop the Irish answer to socca?

Here is a link to the Wikipedia description of socca, which seems to be as good as any:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socca