stuff4restaurants

It is a fun idea, but somehow I don’t think you will be able to purchase a pair of these in the very near future.

I have had so many requests for these two posts I have decided to post them again for new reader.

The first is a link to my FREE eBook about Advertising.

simply click on the pic below to download the pdf file.

The second is an optical illusion.

Some will say she is spinning anticlockwise, others clockwise and some will see her spinning both ways.

What do you see?

(no it’s not some sort of trickery in the file)

If you enjoy either of these items please send a link to your friends.

COLUMBIA, SC (WIS) - A Midlands woman claims her hair caught fire on an illegal sushi restaurant candle.

The woman asked officials why there isn’t a law against open flames in restaurants.

However, there is a law. The restaurant was just breaking it. It’s a restaurant that prides itself on the “intimate dining experience” with dinner by candlelight, but one of those candles made for an extremely bad experience for Elizabeth Moore.

Read Full Details HERE

This is a must read horror story for any restaurant that promotes intimate candle lit dining.

To graphically shoe the effects of beach pollution…

Satchi and Satchi collected trash from various beaches, packaged it to look like seafood and displayed it at local farmers’ markets. These pics are from a print run of posters for those who didn’t attend the market.

Yet another product that the world has been sitting on the edge of their seats waiting on…

This is the sort of creative problem solving that banishes global warming and starving children into oblivion.

WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT THIS STUFF?

It would probably make a good logo embellished “giveaway”

I just can’t wait for the version that manufactures the cookies, surely this is not beyond our creative genius.

Now here is a fantastic win, win, win, win, promotion…

I won’t try and explain all the intricacies and benefits of this clever promotion you should visit their site and explore it for yourself.

HERE’S THE LINK TO INNOCENT DRINKS

Very basically, this clever U.K. marketer of drinks gets people to knit hats for their drink bottles which they display on the shelves of major grocery chains, they then donate money to help keep aged people warm during the savage U.K. winter.

It is THE best use of “Word of Mouth” marketing leverage I have ever seen.

Thanks to Ken Burgin of ProfitableHospitality.com for this link.

This week, the world’s top chefs and critics met in London for the S.Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants Award and, for the fourth time and third consecutive year, awarded the number one slot to El Bulli. It’s an amazing achievement by any standards but perhaps not much of a surprise. In the 21 years since Ferran Adrià became head chef at the restaurant in Roses on the Costa Brava, his rise to success has run parallel with the explosion in fine dining and the attendant phenomenon of gastro-tourism. In the past two decades, a golden age for the restaurant business, Adrià has become the single most significant player in the culinary world.
The story of Adrià’s rise is well documented. As a teenager he worked as a dishwasher in hotel kitchens and began learning traditional Spanish cuisine. At the age of 19, while drafted for military service, he became a cook and was quickly placed on the personal staff of a high-ranking officer.
At 22 he became a line cook at the already successful El Bulli restaurant, citing as his major motivation the desire to meet the girls who hung out at the nearby beach. Within 18 months he was head chef. The style of cooking Adrià pioneered, along with chefs such as Heston Blumenthal in the UK and Pierre Gagnaire in France, has been termed “molecular gastronomy” though Adrià himself doesn’t recognise the title. As he says: “People write that I began molecular cooking but if you ask them no one can define what it is.” Instead, he refers to his style, if pressed, as “avant garde” or “deconstructivist”.
El Bulli is studied by legions of fans and would-be diners around the world. It is closed for six months of each year while Adrià works on the next menu in his laboratory. The restaurant is permanently booked up and currently turns down three-quarters of a million requests for tables every year. At the moment, according to the foodie websites where such things are endlessly discussed, the best way to get a table is to book 10 days’ holiday in Barcelona, phone each morning to ensure you’re on the cancellations list, keep your mobile switched on and be prepared to drop everything. There are lists of other, merely brilliant, restaurants where you can console yourself while waiting for the call.

To add to the palpable sense of panic among the gastro-pilgrims, there is the persistent, tantalising rumour that he’s going to shut the whole place down. “We know about the rumours,” Adrià says, “and we’re not going to close El Bulli.” There is a deft pause before he continues: “But every single day we must face the challenge to reinvent the model through which we express ourselves. In the end, the important thing is what we say. Perhaps the model may change.
But his real coup has been much more significant is that he has become the figurehead of a global rebellion against the culinary power of France. Previously, brilliant young chefs all over the world were always testing themselves against classical French cuisine. Suddenly the world’s best food was not about 400 years of French tradition but ingredients, technique and creativity.
At the conclusion of his long acceptance speech at the awards last night, Adrià invited his compatriot Spanish chefs onto the stage at the Freemasons Hall in London to celebrate the fact that their country had more chefs in the top 10 than any other - even France. It’s no wonder chefs love Adrià. His personality validates them as artists, his stature puts reviewers and critics in their place, his technique opens new possibilities and his non-Frenchness gives chefs of every nationality an equal chance to succeed. Adrià has become a standard around which innovating chefs could cluster, giving restaurant cooking a new direction.

In a 2006 speech, he said: “One day people will come to my restaurant not for nourishment, but for an experience,” a statement that seemed to open a whole new territory, beyond food, into which creative chefs can expand. And creativity, never commercialism, is what, he says, drives him. “It is impossible to combine the goal of making money with making people happy with what we do,” he says. And yet nor does he care about making everybody happy. “In the end, what is important is what you have inside yourself, what you believe - not the opinion of 10 million.”

Because he’s Spanish, because of his creativity and his iconoclasm, Adrià is often placed in the tradition of Gaudí, Dali or Picasso. These might be useful comparisons but, like many creative people recognised in their own lifetimes, Adrià has also come to represent something more: his importance reaches far beyond the food he can create and the diners he can please by serving it.

As he held aloft his award on Monday night and gave his thanks and dedications, it seemed that, like a film star whose presence somehow transcends his performances, he has become an icon, representing how the whole of the “fine dining” world see themselves.

Yet with his creativity and cheerful disregard for convention he could at any moment turn his back on the whole of the industry, and it would only increase their regard for him. And might he? Could the most important chef in generations succeed in deconstructing himself out of running a restaurant?

“But, of course,” he answers, smiling, “El Bulli is not a restaurant. We don’t make any money. The books, the hotel, the other businesses, they make money. But it would not be possible to make money and continue to do what we do at El Bulli. We want to experiment, to please people, but we would never change something we do because of what people say. Is that a restaurant?”

Now this is exactly what we have all been waiting for… Meat Flavored Drinks.

O.K., excuse me, I don’t get it, am I missing something here? has there been some mamouth shift in customer taste (sic) that I slept through?

For those of you who just can not wait to purchase heres a link to their site http://dinnerinabottle.com

Personally, I will stick with my sickly sweet cup of instant coffee.

I like to think I have a healthy sense of humor that often strays over to the black side from time to time, but this really does go right to the edge.

Apparently, some clever artisan of sweets/chocolate thought it would be a really good idea to use their obviously highly developed skills to fashion their chocolates into tiny babies. So they did…

I can’t imagine popping one of these into the outstretched palm of an eager young child (maybe that was the idea, to turn kids off chocolate for life).

Maybe, they would make a suitably macabre promotional device for the “Right to Lifers”

What do you think?

Here is a great example of how you can burn your message into a potential customers memory in a very powerful way.

These clever advertisers have put the right message in the right place at the right time, and their potential customers will remember the unique benefits of their particular product because the message is cleverly located, dramatic and humorous.

Have you ever wanted to see what your food will look like before you order?

The manufacturers claim, a two-dimensional menu picture just won’t cut it, so TEC Japan has created the Tobidasu Menu (pop-up menu) to embed into restaurant tables.

Now customers can browse the digital menu by touch and interact with menu items in 3D.

No word from TEC as to when/if the system will be available in restaurants, but it’s consistent with an overall industry push to get more and more touchscreen terminals and other technology into restaurants.

Oh Dear, whatever would we do without these earth shatteringly new leaps in human development.

Now, if you have a few spare moments maybe… we could just apply a little thought to feeding the worlds hungry, curing Malaria and global warming.

More details Here…

Yeah I know… I could/should wish for world peace, an end to hunger and the exploitation of our planet.

But I too have needs … and this would be my humble way of contributing to the exploiting of children forced to harvest the Cocoa beans … yeah right!

Would it be too much to ask for a little something for myself? say a Faberge egg… After all, it would last a whole lot longer, and wouldn’t result in zits or migraines… at least, until the credit card bills arrived.

Oh dear!, I think this is going to one of “THOSE” posts.

John Cricket at Business Opportunities and Ideas blog , showed incredible bad taste, by showing and telling his readers about “Dick Hats ”

If the pics and name don’t give you an idea what this is all about visit John’s site and the euphemistically named “Chocolate Party Hats” site for all the lurid, chocolate tongue in cheek, stuff about what I’m sure will be one of the most asked for Easter treats.

I thought you might like to share this with your drinks crew, and maybe, any other lovers of wine and good humor. (I guess that covers everyone, right?)