Author: John Curtas

Food For Thought-Bad Manners

On this week’s Food For Thought-heard on Nevada Public Radio (www.knpr.org)- we address the “free dessert” dodge that restaurants use to (try to) placate a customer when something goes really wrong with a meal. I don’t know about you, but I’d consider a piece of twisted metal in my gnocchi a definite buzz kill….worthy of more reparation than a lousy piece of cheesecake.

BTW: the offending restaurant was B&B Ristorante (Molto Mario’s place) in the Venetian.

Click here to hear this week’s commentary on KNPR-Nevada Public Radio.

Click here to hear my past review of B&B Ristorante on KNPR-Nevada Public Radio.

Wine Rant

Christopher Hitchens is the eminently readable, perennially pissed-off and pickled political columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate.  He is also a wine buff.  This British ex-pat has gored more oxes than the Kagashima Prefecture (e.g. calling Henry Kissinger  a criminal who ought to be indicted for war crimes), and is no stranger to controversy.  We therefore thought he was too preoccupied with weightier matters (e.g. Israeli-Palestinian relations, Iran-Iraqi issues, George W.’s mental malaprops, etc.) to concern himself with something as mundane as the service of wine.

But, as you will see from the link below, waiters who continously pour wine without permission or request are as offensive to him as Mahmed Ahmadinejad at a jihadist pep rally.

Click here to read Hitchen’s wine rant.

He was a great chef, as chefs go, and as chefs go, he went.

Chefs generally have the attention span of a housefly.  They are the most peripatetic of creatures-ADD acolytes whose capacity for providing gastronomic pleasure is inversely proportional to their low threshold for boredom.  Thus have two prominent local chefs-Christophe Ithurrize (Marche Bacchus) and Jean-David Groff Daudet (Pamplemousse)- moved on, after less than a year at those venues-proving once again the accuracy of that aphorism and those observations.  Details of both partings are sketchy and will be provided as they become available.  In the meantime, we wish them well.  Wherever they land will be lucky to get them.