Heston hits London

So the rumours are true. Heston Blumenthal is opening in London early next year, 2010. He is opening at the Mandarin Oriental. the restaurant is a biggy, 140 seater. The chef has been a busy boy, what with numerous books, TV deals etc. Just hope he doesn't spread himself too thinly.

Opening Coming

Tomorrowsfood has just learned that Nuno Mendes, ex Head Chef of Bacchus in Hoxton London, is opening his own restaurant in early 2010. It's to be called Viajante. Currently he is running a supper club at his apartment, trying out new dishes and ideas for the new restaurants' menu.

Only one table, so it's a hot ticket.

Great Deli in West Wales

Eventually got around to trying out Ultracomida delicatessen in Narberth, West Wales. They specialise in Spanish and French produce with a little Welsh along the way. If you are ever in the area you should check it out.
They were in The Independent on Sunday's list of the Top 50 deli's in the UK.
www.ultracomida.com

Not Happening in 2009

I read with interest 10 Food Trends a certain food critic doesn't want to see in 2009.
They are- Dessert only restaurants, Foams, Nutritional information on menus, Steak restaurants, Waiterless restaurants, Super Size Me wine by the glass, Unbookable restaurants, The World's Most Expensive Anything, Big Name Chefs Consulting on restaurants for big companies. Late-Night cookie home delivery. Oh yes New York's Insomnia Cookies are coming to the UK in 2009.

TomorrowsFood says Beware!!

Also if you want to know what you should be doing in 2009, just get in touch. We would love to hear from you.

Fat Burning Lemonade

Here at TomorrowsFood, we won't lead you astray with wacky ideas like Fat Burning Lemonade. However we will continue to inform you and remind you how important it in to innovate even in uncertain times. Read the report below from The NY Times.

1) Fat Burning Lemonade: The Master Cleanse seems to be back and more popular than ever and not just because of holiday gluttony. The desire to "cleanse" and/or "detox" is becoming more common even among those not necessarily looking to lose weight. Essentially a packaged version of the diet, Fat Burning Lemonade is an instant drink mix that's supposed to convert fat into energy. But unlike the cleanse that made lemonade such a hot diet product, practitioners of this diet can also eat actual food.

2) A recent article in the New York Times gives some insight into how companies take their eye off the ball and slow down their innovation. In this piece Micheline Maynard argues that the Chrysler automotive company decided to listen more to the accountants than the staff who were tasked to drive the company into the future:
G.M.’s biggest failing, reflected in a clear pattern over recent decades, has been its inability to strike a balance between those inside the company who pushed for innovation ahead of the curve, and the finance executives who worried more about returns on investment.
The two views were rarely in sync — in effect, fighting over the steering wheel that controlled G.M.’s direction — and the internal battles distracted G.M. from spotting shifts in the marketplace.
Time and again over the last 30 years, G.M. has spent billions of dollars on innovative ideas like its Saturn small-car company in the 1980s and the EV1 electric vehicle in the 1990s, only to then deprive those projects of further financing because money was needed elsewhere or because they were not delivering enough profit.
…For those willing to gamble and to follow through on their bets — like Chrysler did with minivans, like Toyota did with Prius and as Honda has done with its focus on fuel efficiency even when gas was cheap — the payoff in sales and reputation can be enormous.
But G.M., despite its tradition of fostering innovation, has often been impatient for profits to emerge.
At G.M., Innovation Often Suffers for Profits - NYTimes.com

Told you so.

Europe's restaurant-guide bible has blasted the overuse of chemical additives in German restaurant fare and has threatened to lower the ratings of top chefs if they use too many additives in doing "molecular gastronomy".
The editor-in-chief of Gault Millau's German edition, Manfred Kohnke, launched his attack before his magazine chose Germany's "Chef of the Year".
The 69-year-old critic, who is known as Germany's "food pope", also called for food-additive labeling requirements to be extended to restaurant menus.
The additives in question are mainly gelling and thickening agents, which used to be limited to the food industry.
In molecular cuisine, these additives are used to stabilize airy foams, convert vegetables into a less perishable jelly or paste and form caviar-like bubbles from juices or oil.
"It's a shot across the bows," Kohnke says of his warning. "The chefs now have time until the next examination period. Then we'll mete out punishment to them."
Feared for his harsh criticism, Kohnke made an example of French chef Jean-Claude Bourgueil several years ago by downgrading him for using the flavor enhancer glutamate in his Dusseldorf restaurant.
Kohnke does not object to creative cooking and the invention of new dishes, but to the uncritical and excessive application of molecular gastronomy techniques.
One additive that Kohnke rejects is transglutaminase, a food adhesive used in the food industry to reconstitute pieces of ham into pressed ham.
German chef Joachim Wissler, who works in Bergisch Gladbach, near Cologne, uses it to stick overly thin trout filets on top of each other.
The use of artificial fragrance sprays is also a questionable practice, he says, adding, "Even in top restaurants they try to make dishes more seductive with artificial truffle fragrance."
It is strange how much money is earned with cheap chemicals when star chefs promote them, Kohnke remarks, adding: "And it's even stranger that the food industry now wants to steer them away from using chemicals in food or at least claims it does, but chefs are reaching for them greedily."
Kohnke says it is almost tragic that many chefs in Germany use additives because it is trendy, but do not improve the taste of their dishes as if the "future salvation lay in molecular cuisine".

From A US Blogger RE Ferran Adria

TomorrowsFood was interested to read this recently........ENJOY

Give Us a Break With Ferran Adria Already!
Posted: 27 Oct 2008 10:02 AM CDT

Jay Rayner, Britain’s most famous restaurant critic, wrote a rapturous panegyric to Spanish superchef Ferran Adria last week, but for some reason it’s only making it around to the New York blogs today, and is being conveyed without the slightest bit of skepticism. Rayner, in both video and literary formats, describes his 17-year path to getting a seat at the legendary temple of molecular gastronomy that is Adria’s restaurant, El Bulli; he then submits to a slavish colloquium with the great man that resembles a beardless catechumen sitting at the feet of a stern abbot. The whole thing made me want to throw up, and confirms a feeling I’ve had for a very long time. I am sick of Ferran Adria and don’t want to hear about him any more. Here are the reasons.
1. Nobody has even eaten this guy’s food! If you took all the foodies, gastronauts, bloggers, and fellow-travelers who kvell over this guy’s genius meals, and asked them if they had ever tasted one, not one in a hundred would say yes. As Rayner points out, there are 8000 seats available for two million requests; how many of those are going to be Williamsburg-based bloggers who work at low-rent design shops during the day? None.
2. More to the point, nobody who goes around praising this guy has any experience of or love for the style of food which he represents. Nathan Myrvhold, the Microsoft billionaire and molecular gastronomy whiz, spends a lot of his time eating out at Alinea and Moto and wd-50, so if he wants to tell me he knows all about that style and Adria is the messianic figure he’s made out to be, fine. But don’t eat one meal a year at wd-50 and present yourself as a devotee of pipette cooking and the joys of spheroids. Because I just don’t buy it. You’d rather eat spaghetti. I know it, and you know it.
3. Adria is an incredibly imperious, self-important figure; that pisses me off. It would be one thing if he were earnestly promoting his kind of cooking, but all he does is complain that people don’t understand it, and blah blah blah. His favorite complaint seems to be that it’s overly associated with science. Then he goes around talking about how he figured out a new way to extract the flavor of dirt, or use liquid nitrogen to make olive oil into a gas!
4. Adria worship runs down the achievements of real chefs. I often wonder why so many chefs worship this guy. Don’t you think they could make amazing things if they could take six months off every year to putter around the kitchen? Or if they could sit you down and serve you seventy courses of exactly what they felt like, knowing that you were going to explode with fulsome ecstasy, whether it was good or not? And who’s to say if it even is good? If you haven’t eat at El Bulli, you can’t really say this guy is for real. I’ve never eaten his food. And as King Osric says of Thulsa Doom in Conan The Barbarian, “for years I’ve chafed under this demigod!” When you read The Feedbag in the coming years, expect to hear about Marco Canora, Gavin Kaysen, even Wylie Dufresne: chefs who cook food I can actually eat, and who have to produce every day to stay in business. That’s what a real chef is. Jay Rayner can have his precious seat at El Bulli.
social scientists, educators, food safety activists, grinning figurines, insect-faced anesthesiologists, consumer advocates, evil clowns, and unearthly, disembodied voices are said to be looking into the matter.