Anthony Bourdain explains why, even after touring 80 countries, his favorite destination will always be Japan: Over the course of 15 years and four travel shows, Anthony Bourdain has toured 80 countries, delving into their histories and eating as much of their food as possible. If you ask him, as Business Insider did earlier this year, what his favorite destination is, he will immediately tell you it’s Japan.
Why is airline food so bad: So, you just peeled back the plastic off a freshly-delivered tray right off your airplane’s trolley cart and the mess looking back at you is a grim one. The fault may not lie with the chef, though, but in the plane’s design. The very nature of air travel, as well as how the plane is built and how it adjusts to high altitudes, make food preparation fundamentally more difficult.
TV chef Michel Roux Jr paid kitchen staff below minimum wage: Michelin-starred TV chef Michel Roux Jr has been paying some kitchen staff at his Mayfair restaurant less than the minimum wage, the Guardian can reveal, while charging over £60 for one starter. Earnings at Le Gavroche, named this month as London’s “top gastronomic experience”, have been as low as £5.50 an hour – well below the £7.20 “national living wage” introduced in April – according to information provided by chefs who have worked there. Their working days sometimes exceed 14 hours.
Michel Roux Jr’s failure to pay chefs minimum wage ‘not acceptable’: Michel Roux Jr’s failure to pay chefs the minimum wage at his Mayfair restaurant has been attacked as “simply not acceptable” by an industry body led by rival celebrity chef Raymond Blanc. The revelation that Le Gavroche had paid some chefs as little as £5.50 per hour was “a massive own goal” for an industry struggling to attract and retain quality employees, according to the Sustainable Restaurant Association.
Great Books: The Top 25 Must-Read Food Memoirs of All Time: The food memoir is a dicey proposition for a writer: It takes real courage to sit down and decide that your individual eating experience is interesting enough for other people to care about. Will any readers care that you spent a week in Paris devouring caviar for breakfast? Or that a journey to the South Pacific resulted in personal discovery through street food? The job is easier said than done, but when written well, a food memoir can touch on universal feelings of growth, understanding, and self-awareness. (Plus, you have to make the food sound really delicious.) As publishers gear up to release a new crop of memoirs this fall — keep an eye out for Anya Von Bremzen’s month-old Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (already generating a great deal of buzz), Paul Liebrandt’s To the Bone, and even a small memoir portion of René Redzepi’s multivolume A Work in Progress— Grub Street decided it was time to look back and assemble a list of the all-time best food memoirs.
Roy Richards: The wine merchant’s tale: David Gleave, head of Liberty Wines, is one of the most successful men in the UK wine trade. But for him it is Roy Richards who is a “model wine merchant, with unrivalled knowledge of his specialist subjects and great integrity. There are few, if any, competitors or colleagues,” he adds, “for whom I have more respect.” Richards has just retired from working out four years at Berry Bros & Rudd, the 300-year-old St James’s wine merchant to whom his company Richards Walford became the single biggest supplier. Since neither Richards nor his business partner Mark Walford had successors interested in this hugely powerful but rarely publicised company, Berry’s made the acquisition itself.
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