Swedish chef Leila Lindholm's butter fingers 'causing national shortage'
23.09.11
Scandinavia's conform to to Nigella Lawson has been credited with causing an acute paucity of butter in Sweden .
Leila Lindholm, a Swedish reputation chef keen on cleavage-enhancing blouses and televised dinner parties, is said to have helped support the popularity of butter over margarines or low calorie spreads.
For three weeks Swedish supermarkets have struggled to upon demand for butter – with stocks running markedly low in the past week, according to the Swedish Dairy Confederation.
Aftonbladet, a Swedish tabloid, claimed this week that Lindholm and auxiliary TV cookery stars were encouraging the normally health- wilful Swedes to shun less fatty "artificial" alternatives to butter.
The newspaper even ran a butter formula for readers wanting to churn their own. All they would need, the paper told them, was a mixing pan, whipping cream and salt.
"Swedes think butter is choice," said the tabloid.
"Out of the kitchen go the light, additive-filled products. In comes the faultless raw material, preferably as fatty as possible. It's a development which is cheered on by TV chefs and nutritionists."
Source: The Guardian
Restaurant review A luxurious trip through RN74's French cuisine
23.09.11
It's been a dream of time since a big-deal nonchain restaurant was carved from hasty downtown. Hence the frisson of excitement in June when chef/restaurateur Michael Mina and wine concert-master Rajat Parr finally popped the cork on RN74 in the turning-point Joshua Green Building at the corner of Fourth and Pike.
On a latest Saturday night, a dressy crowd swirled pinots and cabs at this scratchy rendezvous, a reiteration, but not a clone, of the San Francisco original, named for the entr that runs through France's Burgundy wine region. Svelte beauties leaned into tufted leather upholstery rubbing tanned shoulders with paunchy men in tailored haberdashery. The stake looks dressed for a Details photo shoot: hostesses in scrap black dresses, bartenders in snug black shirts, and managers in slim-cut jackets and sneakers.
Prototype European train stations inspired the luxuriously natural interior, dimly lit in amber and red. The design conceit is omnipresent: from the earsplitting Gare de Lyon acoustics right down to red transaction cards punched like train tickets. It includes a "Last Fiasco" board with plaques that flip to reveal last-chance wines at one's fingertips at value prices: close-outs but still mostly priced in the three figures.
Source: The Seattle Times