Medellitin

I think it is safe to say that my niche is turning out to be foodnerdery.  Which is why I am ashamed that I missed the New York Public Library's initial announcement about the friggin' awesome What's On The Menu? project.   What's on the Menu? is a crowdsourcing project chartered to take their incredible menu collection and transcribe it.   Before you think that no one would contribute to this, allow me to say that you are a cynical jerkward, aaaaannnnd... as of July 8th, 2011, there are over 430,000 menu items transcribed. Miss Frank E. Buttolph American Menu Collection, 1851-1930 The NYPL menu collection has about 40,000 menus dating back to the turn of the century.  Approximately 25% of the menu collection is available online , but only searchable by high level meta data about the restaurant, not the menu data itself.  The first stage of the project is to take the menus that are already available digitally and have folks like you and me input what's o...

It is pretty awesome that the NYPL continues to bring in chefs like Ferran Adria, Dan Barber, and now, David Chang and Rene Redzepi.  For my readers who are not whores to the culinary world, you should know that Rene Redzepi is the executive chef of Copenhagen's Noma.  Noma recently displaced El Bulli on San Pellegrino's Best 50 restaurants, ending Ferran Adria's half-decade run as the king of the hill.  You now know exactly what I knew prior to attending this event. Given that I now have exactly one hour and twenty minutes worth of listening to him speak, I think we can all agree that I can now speak with great authority on who he is.  After all, I am a blogger. Rene Redzepi was the test tube baby of Ferran Adria's innovation, Thomas Keller's execution and specks of Dan Barber's vision and raconteurism.  I'll save you a google search raconteurism... not a word. As far as raconteurism goes, a great thread that I would put here if I were a more talented ...