Current Events

PA Wine Excellence Winners Meet the Producers Spring Slow Supper

HARRISBURG, PA – Slow Food Harrisburg is pleased to announce  its spring Meet the Producers  Slow Supper featuring Pinnacle Ridge.  This dinner will be held at 6:00p.m. on May 1 at the Wildwood Conference Center, HACC.  Pinnacle Ridge produced four of the top ten winners in the 2009 Pennsylvania Wine Excellence competition judged by the Pennsylvania Wine Society.  One of those wines, the Veritas, was the best wine of the judging. We will serve all four wines, including the award winner at the dinner.  Wine maker Brad Knapp will be on hand to talk about his wines.  HACC Culinary Arts Instructors Chefs Switzenberg, Miles and Finch, as well as the students, are assembling a delicious and creative menu designed to complement the wines.

Tickets are $65 to $75 and are available at Brown Paper  Tickets

Good Life

We’ve been eating lunch on Saturdays at The Good Life Cafe in Carlisle, the one and only local farm restaurant. It may be the only one in Pennsylvania.

David Ison and Ruth Busko feature organic produce from Spiral Path, dairy products from Keswick Creamery, Three Maples in Millersburg and Trickling Springs Creamery, grass-fed beef from …

Opening a restaurant?

What’s the best place in Pennsylvania to open a restaurant?

That’s easy, State College. The relatively high percentage of income that goes to eating out in State College pushes its Restaurant Growth Index to 156, way over the national average.

“The RGI figure for each of the 363 metro areas provided here is calculated to a national average of 100,” says Tom Spencer of Claritas, “which means the higher the RGI over 100, the more opportunity there is. We worked out those numbers by looking at how much money people spend at restaurants as a percentage of their income; then we compared that to national averages.”

Right behind State College in the RGI ranking is …

Service

“New York chef David Pasternack recently told me good service (S+) is basically ‘hello, goodbye, and thank you’ (HGTY). A simple principle but one that is often forgotten, or even, at trendy restaurants, willfully overlooked.”

That’s Sara Dickerman on the new Phoebe Damrosch book, “Service Included,” and she has a good and simple guide to judging service at almost any restaurant.
The link’s on the jump, and it’s a good piece, but let me take a moment here to say that as a customer, nothing makes me happier than someone who says “Thank you” when I pay the bill. I don’t care if it’s Mangia Qui or Simply Turkey, I don’t want Have A Nice Day or Good Weekend, or Here You Go or anything but Thank You. Probably it’s just me, but that works.

Woo-Hoo. Inspections. Maybe.

According to sort-of informed sources, the Governor’s Office has wrangled 15 municipalities into the state’s Restaurant Inspection Database, and Harrisburg is one of them.

Here, if you want to read it, is almost the entire …

Goodbye, Skewers

It was great while it lasted, a sweet and quiet room with good food and excellent soup. At first, Middle Eastern food on Second Street was a novelty, but after Skewers opened two more kebab places came along quickly.

Now Javid Mohmand is headed in a different direction.

“Skewers is going to go away,” he told me yesterday.

Javid isn’t closing the place because of the competition — he just wants to do Indian food, even though he’s Afghan. So he’s going to shut down, remodel, hire two chefs and reopen as …

Yes Yes, it’s No-No-Nonna’s!

Everyone from Jersey Mike to some dude called 717boy on PennLive is going off about the new Nonna’s in Midtown.

Here’s 717boy:

“Up to this point i never felt strongly enough about any place in particular to post about, but Nonna’s is a breath of fresh air not only in midtown …

Slow food

If you read Sue’s story on eating local, you might be wondering: How do I join the Slow Food movement?

It’s easy!

Go to www.slowfoodusa.org and read the page, then click to join. Where it asks for Convivia (yes, a bit precious), put Harrisburg. The Harrisburg chapter isn’t quite together yet, but Curtis Vreeland of Shipoke is assembling a crack team of organizers and it’s all coming together very s-l-o-w-l-y. Appropriate, huh?

Anyway, I queried Slow Food and even though Hbg isn’t listed, it’s okay.

The first dinner will be …

Food rights

Across the country,  governments at all levels are looking at food and feeling legislative.

Should we ban trans-fats? What about raw milk?  Foie gras? How did school lunches come to be so bad for kids? What do we really want and need from food labels?

There’s a lot to talk about (and listen to) thanks to Justice Talking. It’s a public policy radio show produced by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, a think tank at the University of Pennsylvania.

Foodie tours

Every week, Seth Kugel writes about different ways to spend a weekend in New York. Last Sunday, he wrote about the new foodie tours he’d tested.

“What seemed doomed to be the lamest of the five, the Original Greenwich Village Food Tasting and Cultural Walking Tour run by Foods of New York, turned out to be the most entertaining. Michael Karp, one of several guides for these daily excursions, has lived in the Village for 22 years, and it shows.