Valley Performing Arts Center

Jacques Pepin

Recently Jacques Pépin, the acclaimed French chef, veteran of PBS cooking shows, friend of Julia, author of many brilliant cookbooks, Dean of of Special Programs at the French Culinary Institute in New York City and general culinary living legend, took the stage at Cal State Northridge's Valley Performing Arts Center to give what turned out to be a cooking demo.

Pépin's sous chef for the evening was his daughter Claudine, herself a veteran of cooking shows with her father, and for almost two hours the pair showed the surprisingly small audience how to properly cut up vegetables and fruit and truss a chicken. The demo was as much a comedy show, with knives, as it was a tutorial in classic cooking techniques. And to say it was a joy to watch is a vast understatement, rather like saying that Pépin once made snacks for Charles de Gaulle. Which of course he did.

More »

Travel Channel

On a recent episode of his podcast "Go Fork Yourself," Andrew Zimmern -- host of the Bizarre Foods series -- reveals his list of Los Angeles restaurant picks in something less sensational than we've come to expect from the Travel Channel guide to unfamiliar foods around the world. In fact, it's so staid that it's practically Gayot, which in turn makes it a bit, well, bizarre.

Among his top picks, Zimmern names Gjelina, Providence, The Hungry Cat and, for "pan Asian food," Father's Office (maybe he meant Lukshon).

More »

B. Rodell

Nigella Lawson with her new cookbook, Nigellissima

As always, Nigella Lawson has a lot of balls in the air. Her new show The Taste with Anthony Bourdain, Ludo Lefebvre and Brian Malarky, has turned out to be quite a hit. At the same time, she's just released her 9th cookbook, Nigellissima, which celebrates the flavors of Italy. We sat down with her on Valentine's Day in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont to chat about cooking, cookbooks, television and typeface.

More »

Twitter/Bryan Mytko

Screenshot of tweet

Yesterday, a New York programmer launched a mock online menu of Guy Fieri American Bar + Kitchen, complete with spoof appetizers, entrees and sides. Quite a few sites found Bryan Mytko's roast funny, albeit with the occasional voice of protest. Since this initial wave, Gawker has picked up on a tip that the online menu may not be all Mytko's handiwork.

More »

Wikimedia Commons

Ferran Adria

According to the AP, Ferran Adria's legendary -- and shuttered -- restaurant elBulli will be reopening, maybe as soon as next fall. But don't start stuffing your suitcases with Euros yet: Adria told the AP that he's not sure as to the location, or the time, or the duration -- although it seems to be for about a month -- or even who will get tickets reservations to the show. Because the restaurant isn't reopening exactly as a restaurant but as a rehearsal set on which to train the actors playing the chefs in an upcoming movie about Adria and elBulli.

It's also possible that Adria might not even reopen the real elBulli, now used as a school, but might choose to have the famed restaurant rebuilt elsewhere -- like, say, on a Hollywood studio lot. Awesome. Who needs to fly to Spain when we can drive over to Paramount or Sony to eat tapioca of Iberian ham or razor-clam sushi with ginger spray.

More »

ABC

The Taste. Photo courtesy of ABC

Well, kids, The Taste premiered last night on ABC with much fanfare. We sat, we watched, we followed the (trending!) tweets and we're here to recap. Just in case your DVR didn't work, or you just want to relive it all in print.

The premise -- as previously mentioned -- is a mash-up of The Voice and Top Chef. For two hours, contestants were shown making a single-bite dish that was blindly tasted by the four judges. The judges -- Bourdain, Lefebvre, Nigella Lawson and Brian Malarkey -- then tried to figure out what they had just eaten and if that bite merited landing the cook a spot on their individual teams. The teams will be mentored by the judges, but the tastings will continue to be held blindly. This means a mentor may end up sending home his own mentee. And that means there's lots of room for drama and crushed egos. Oh, and we should mention the prize for this throw-down is $100,000 and a shiny new car. Oooooh-eee.

More »

ABC

The Taste

When a chef sees something he likes, he inevitably wants to make it, but better and with his own twist. Perhaps that was the rationale behind culinary luminaries like L.A. favorite Ludo Lefebvre and Anthony Bourdain of Travel Channel fame, hitching their wagons to The Taste, a new reality competition cooking show on ABC that debuts tomorrow night at 8 p.m. PST.

Maybe the judges -- Bourdain, Lefebvre, Nigella Lawson and Brian Malarkey -- were all ready to show the world how a real cooking show should go down. We can imagine Bourdain thinking that. Since all of them had turns on the gold standards for the genre, Top Chef and Top Chef Masters, now it's their turn to amuse America and marvel at or spit out dishes they have to eat blindly. In this day and age there is simply no better way to build a brand.

More »

Isabella Vosmikova/Bravo

Cosentino

We don't know Chris Cosentino, but we have tasted his brains risotto -- the warm, cinnamon-scented webs, the rice, the tender little chunks of chicken thighs studding the bowl. We have had his marrow salad and his tripe. The Top Chef Masters champ -- San Francisco's dark prince of "the nasty bits" -- can cook, no doubt. A dinner at Incanto makes you drunk.

Marrow goo runs through your veins like lava in slow motion. Voices sound fuzzy and distant. Your polenta legs buckle and sway. However, in addition to allowing Cosentino's creations to do battle with the inside of your stomach, you may now wear them on the outside as well. Yes, that's right -- Cosentino is hawking offal-themed apparel.

More »

ABC/RICK ROWELL

Mentors/Judges on The Taste: Brian Malarky, Ludo Lefebvre, Nigella Lawson and Anthony Bourdain, looking ever-so-unconcerned about what you think of him

Anthony Bourdain describes himself as an "enthusiast," though strangely, as we watch him globetrot across our televisions eating some of the world's most exotic and delicious foods, living a life many would trade their first born for, his demeanor is rarely all that enthusiastic. Known well for his ascerbic nature, "this doesn't suck" is one of his most commonly doled out compliments. Yet surprisingly, at a press luncheon held at the massive Disney compound in Burbank last Friday for ABC's The Taste, he seemed almost giddy.

The Taste is yet another culinary competition show premiering later this month, and Bourdain serves as both an executive producer and on-screen personality. It pits accomplished chefs against home cooks in a blind taste test battle for which he, Nigella Lawson, Ludo Lefebvre and Brian Malarky are judges as well as mentors for their team of cooks. They don't know who's made what dish, and they don't know who they're sending home. It's something like American Idol and The Voice combined, but with food.

In other words, a bit hokey sounding, and frankly, when we first heard of it, we were surprised Bourdain was involved at all.

More »

Courtesy The Daily Meal

L-R: Jose Andres (chef-restaurateur), Bernardo Hernandez (director of product management, Google), Indra Nooyi (chairman and CEO, Pepsi), Ben Silbermann (co-founder and CEO, Pinterest), Michelle Obama (First Lady).

For the third year running, The Daily Meal has released a list of the 50 most powerful people in food, the people, as they say, "decide what and how you eat, whether you realize it or not." And while the list has its fair share of celebrity chefs -- the Wolfgang Pucks, the Anthony Bourdains -- there are also a lot of folks on the list that wield their power from a less visible vantage point.

More »