Wrapped in a pita

Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times - Reem sells more than 5,000 sandwiches a day for about $1 apiece, drawing crowds from all social strata every day

Customers waited for a shawarma sandwich at the Reem shawarma stand in Amman, Jordan.

If you were to slow everything down, this is what you would see: scoop of sauce, pinch of onions, scoop of tomatoes, shovel in some meat, roll it all up in a pita.


But who has time to slow down? The crowds are always pressed up against the gate — in the searing heat of a Jordan summer day or the desert chill of a cold winter night — outside Reem, a hole-in-the wall takeout place with a reputation for the best beef and lamb shawarma sandwiches in the Middle East.


Shawarma is marinated meat grilled on an upright skewer, then shaved off in bits and rolled in a pita. It looks like a Greek gyro.


Behind the counter, Alaa Abdel Fattah flies through ingredients, rocking at the waist, with the focus and precision of an athlete. He assembles sandwiches in a blur. Four seconds each. “You get used to it,” he says, pausing for a moment to wipe sweat from his brow. And then back at it because the crowds never let up.

I like my gyro. The place in Hewlett makes a really good one, hearty, with an immense serving of lettuce, some clerey, a couple of slices of tomato and a few of red onion included. I get a side of yogurt on the side, and am good to go.

Jordanians acknowledge that shawarma was originally imported, probably from Turkey, maybe from Greece, but it has clearly become a local food, having been adapted to native tastes and customs.

Reem has buzz.

It was founded in 1976 by Ahmed Ali Bani Hammad, who had worked as a cook in Lebanon, which is known for the best, freshest cuisine in the region. He returned home and opened his own shop. It is narrow, just wide enough for a cashier, two upright gas ovens to cook the meat, and an assembly of eight young men who cook, cut and serve nonstop.


Little has changed since he opened the place, except that now his sons, Sammer and Khalid, run the business. They drive around the city in a Porsche Cayenne and dress in expensive leather jackets.


“You make good money with shawarma?”


“Yes we do,” said Sammer Bani Hammad, the eldest son, laughing. He inherited the most important family responsibility when his father died five years ago.

5,000 bucks a day is very good money, anywhere.

Reem goes through more than 1,000 pounds of meat a day.

Mexico's Taste for Ketchup

Mexicans eat more ketchup by sales value than consumers in all but eight other countries. Many of them slather the thick red sauce on chicken, pasta and eggs—even pizza.

At the start of 2007, U.S. ketchup giant H.J. Heinz Co. held less than 1% of the Mexican ketchup market. In fact, Mexico was such a low priority that Heinz had fewer than 10 salespeople in the country, which is nearly three times as large as Texas. Tuesday, when Heinz releases quarterly earnings, its executives plan to boast that Heinz now accounts for 12% of the ketchup poured in Mexico, where a spokesman says the company now has 150 ketchup sales and marketing employees.

Mexicans love sweet food, and as the middle class grows, they seek out foods that represent that sort of progress: Mexico is one of Coca-Cola's biggest markets.

Though Heinz doesn't break out its ketchup sales in Mexico, the entire Mexican market for ketchup is a tiny fraction of the company's total annual sales of around $10 billion. Still, Heinz is excited about Mexico because the company's combined retail and food-service sales of ketchup there are growing at an annual rate of 25%, and Mr. Johnson said he expects that growth rate to continue for the next five years. By contrast, Heinz's overall sales, excluding the impact of currency translation, grew 5.5% during the fiscal year ended April 29, 2009.

In April 2005, Heinz's Latin American management bought a small manufacturer in Guadalajara that supplied its own ketchup, mustard and hot sauces to restaurant chains. Among its clients were Mexican outlets of Domino's Pizza Inc., Burger King Holdings Inc. and Yum Brands Inc.'s KFC brand.

Soon, Heinz began to see how popular ketchup was with Mexicans. Janet Aceves, a 28-year-old office worker is a case in point. At a Domino's one day last week, Ms. Aceves poured Heinz ketchup all over her cheese pizza before taking a big bite. The pizza sauce didn't provide enough zing for her taste buds, she said, adding, "It needs more."

I can not imagine putting ketchup on pizza; that's what powdered garlic and red pepper flakers are for, but, that's me.

Heinz's Mexico team scored a coup in mid-2006 by winning the contract to supply Domino's. Although the ketchup would be distributed in Domino's-branded packets, Mr. Pocaterra said the contract introduced millions of Mexican consumers to the taste of Heinz, which is a bit sweeter in Mexico than the company's U.S. ketchup formulation.

Sodas are sweeter in Mexico, too, than in the US (and that is incredible).

Rock-Star Chefs

This amazes me. My own infatuation with food shows has ended, and I am even getting tired of Bourdain, a thought which three years ago would have been heresy. Nonetheless, I still watch Bourdain and Zimmern. But this is incredible.



Live performance is a booming business for celebrity chefs, who themselves are a thriving niche of the entertainment world, straddling television, publishing and retail and generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

It never occurred to me that there are concerts where the performers cook food.

Fans see live performances as a way to cement relationships that are already fairly intense: Many celebrity chefs are on television several times a day and connect to their audiences through their Web sites, blogs, books and branded food products. For some fans, the live events are primarily a chance to see up close a personality they've watched on TV for years. Most of the cooking demonstrations don't even offer audience members a taste of the food.

No food? Seems akin to going to a Springsteen concert and not hearing music.

Lisa Hechesky, a 36-year-old library associate in Nitro, W.Va., has spent more than $1,000 on hotel stays and tickets to see chef Alton Brown perform six times. Mr. Brown is the host of the Food Network's food-science show, "Good Eats," and the commentator on "Iron Chef America." Each August for the past three years, Ms. Hechesky has gone to the Gaylord Opryland Hotel & Convention Center in Nashville, Tenn., and paid about $300 for a package that includes a night's stay in the hotel and a cooking demonstration by Mr. Brown. At the most recent show, Mr. Brown demonstrated how to make a smoker out of a box, and made smoked trout.

Alton Brown? I turn the sound down when he comments.

In the coming months, chefs Jacques Pepin, Eric Ripert and Mr. Bourdain, along with Food Network personalities such as Emeril Lagasse, will perform in a three-act "Celebrity Chefs Series" in Miami. The show was developed by the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, a venue that typically books performances by the Miami City Ballet and shows like "The Color Purple." Tickets cost $25 to $200, which buys a reception with the chefs and a taste of food made with their recipes but prepared by Johnson & Wales University culinary students and an instructor. The chefs' fees range from $35,000 to $50,000 per appearance, says the center's executive vice president, Scott Shiller.

The chefs don't cook? Springsteen having another singer do his songs?


Jacques Pepin, with Sissy Biggers, at the American Express Cook-Off in Aspen, Colo., last summer.












Ms. Deen is among the biggest stars on the live performing circuit. Deeana Healy, of Monte Sereno, Calif., paid about $2,000 last year to go on "Paula Cookin' at Sea," a cruise to Alaska organized by Greenville, S.C., travel agency CruiseOne. Ms. Healy's special wristband allowed her into areas of the ship where Ms. Deen attended cocktail parties, spoke on stage and signed cookbooks. Ms. Deen did little cooking during a demonstration, handing off the work to an assistant, Ms. Healy says, but adds that she didn't mind because she was there for Ms. Deen's personality, not a cooking course.

Ms. Deen says she often hands off the cooking to her husband or someone else on the stage so she can focus on having fun with the audience. "They can turn on the TV at least three times a day and watch me cook," she says.

Since getting to know Ms. Deen and her family on the cruise, "my heart aches when I watch [Ms. Deen's] show," Ms. Healy says. "I feel like I'm watching family."

Family? Ridiculous. Someone has a big, empty hole in her life.

Gina and Patrick Neely at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel & Convention Center in Nashville.



Mr. Fieri's tour will start Nov. 17 in Lowell, Mass., and end a month later in Las Vegas. Average tickets will cost $35 to $40, though $250 buys a seat on stage and tastes of the food Mr. Fieri cooks. Ms. Bernstein says the agency is working with other celebrity chef clients to find time for them to go on tour.

Last week, as Mr. Fieri gave a cooking demonstration at the Turning Stone Casino in Verona, N.Y., a fan threw a bra onto the stage. "I looked around and saw that the crowd went wild and I thought, 'Wow. This is rock 'n' roll,' " Mr. Fieri says.

The Gyro’s History Unfolds

CARVED Gyros with tzatziki at the Kronos Foods factory in Chicago.










Mr. Tomaras opened Kronos in 1975 and sold it to a private equity firm in 1994. But he returned to the plant, on a dead-end industrial road in Chicago’s southwest side, to explain how gyros are made. It’s a show and tell that is not for the squeamish.

It is a mystery meat.



PRE-PITA Chris Tomaras, the founder of Kronos Foods, with uncooked gyro cones.








The question is: Who is the Henry Ford of the gyro? It turns out there are a handful of contenders, all of whom know one another and have been friendly competitors for decades. They include George Apostolou, who says he served the first gyros in the United States, in the Parkview Restaurant in Chicago, in 1965, and nine years later opened a 3,000-square-foot manufacturing plant, Central Gyros Wholesale.

another contender, Andre Papantoniou, a founder and the president of Olympia Food Industries, says the gyro plant was actually the brainchild of the improbably named John Garlic.

This initially sounds like a joke, but Mr. Papantoniou swears that during the rotisserie-making phase of Mr. Parthenis’s career, one John Garlic showed up in Chicago in search of a partner in a gyro plant he’d started in Milwaukee.

It’s true, Mr. Parthenis said in a second call, though he remembers little about his former partner, except that the guy looked like a hippie. Who Mr. Garlic was and why he made gyros are questions that Mr. Parthenis can’t answer: “He was like a phantom. He came out of nowhere.”

There is little about John Garlic in news archives, aside from a 1978 story in The Milwaukee Sentinel, in which a John J. Garlic discusses his plans to keep trained dolphins in a former municipal pool he’d bought in the city and wanted to turn into a restaurant with a kind of Sea World sideshow.

Unfortunately, Mr. Garlic is no longer around to discuss matters; he died of kidney failure in 1994. But his wife, Margaret Garlic, can provide answers.

So, who was John Garlic?

“He was this big guy,” she said, “like 6 foot 2 inches tall, dark curly hair, couple hundred pounds. A former Marine. A super intelligent, super entertaining man. My brother used to say, ‘When John Garlic enters a room, you know you’re going to have fun.’ ”

And he was Greek?

“No, no,” she said. “He was Jewish.”

YOu can't make this stuff up.

A Chili Sauce to Crow About

BY THE BARREL OR BOTTLE David Tran's sriracha sauce in a market in San Gabriel, Calif.

Its own website? Of course.












David Tran, foreground above, with his son, William, at the Huy Fong Foods warehouse in Rosemead, Calif.

Jamie Oliver recibe a su hija en pleno G-20

El Pais has this picture of the new father, and a caption:

Jamie Oliver recibe a su hija en pleno G-20

Jamie Oliver receives new daughter during G-20 summit. [Receives?]

El famoso chef británico Jamie Oliver, que estuvo a cargo el miércoles de la cena de bienvenida del G-20, esperaba, para ese día, el nacimiento de su tercera hija. Sin embargo, al parecer la pequeña se apiadó del trabajo de su padre y nació dos días después, la mañana del viernes en Londres. La bebé ha sido bautizada como Petal Blossom Rainbow y ha nacido en el London's Portland Hospital. El chef y su mujer, Jools Oliver, ya tienen otras dos niñas: Poppy Honey, de siete años y Daisy Boo, de cinco.

Healthful Eating

A VEGGIE IN EVERY POT Michelle Obama serving at Miriam’s Kitchen in Washington








The television cameras were rolling, the journalists were scribbling and the first lady, Michelle Obama, was standing in a soup kitchen rhapsodizing about steamed broccoli. And homemade mushroom risotto. And freshly baked apple-carrot muffins.

Bush 41 didn't like broccoli.

Mrs. Obama was praising the menu last week at Miriam’s Kitchen, a nonprofit drop-in center serving this city’s homeless. And she seized the moment to urge Americans to provide fresh, unprocessed and locally grown foods to their families and to the neediest in their communities.

CARROTS, TOO Michelle Obama and the White House chef, Cristeta Comerford.








The secret to that creamless creamed spinach? Sautéed spinach, olive oil and shallots are whipped into a purée that is light and delicious, according to Cristeta Comerford, the White House executive chef.

In addition to speeches, Mrs. Obama is also spreading the word through interviews with celebrity and parents’ magazines.

In the March 9 issue of People magazine, for instance, the first lady described her early morning workouts with the president and bared her famously toned arms on the cover. And in the November issue of Parents magazine, she and her husband described their decision to ditch juice boxes and processed foods.

Advocates for healthy food and living want the Obamas to do even more. Ms. Reichl would like the White House kitchen to issue regular news releases that describe what the first couple and their daughters are eating. (Then parents across the country could tell their children, “You know, Malia and Sasha were eating salad yesterday. ...”)

The fresh food lobby at work.

Is a New Food Policy on Obama’s List?

Parents want better public-school lunches. Consumer groups are dreaming of a new, stronger food safety system. Nutrition reformers want prisoners to be fed less soy. And a farmer in Maine is asking the president-elect to plow under an acre of White House lawn for an organic vegetable garden.

Although Mr. Obama has proposed changes in the nation’s farm and rural policies and emphasizes the connection between diet and health, there is nothing to indicate he has a special interest in a radical makeover of the way food is grown and sold.

Some want him to appoint a chef who cooks with local ingredients; some want their guy in Agriculture. Get in line.

As for Michelle Obama, she has said in interviews that she tries to buy organic food and watches the amount of high-fructose corn syrup in her family’s diet. And, as she confided on “The View” on ABC, “We’re bacon people.”

Pig is good.

Food advocates aren’t the only ones whose hopes for the new administration received a quick kick to the curb. A coalition of more than 140 environmental groups and scientists sent letters supporting one candidate to lead the Department of the Interior. Mr. Obama chose someone else. Multiply that by every special interest and it becomes clear that just because changing the food system is the first priority for some, it isn’t so for everyone. The pragmatists among the food reformers understand.

Some complain that Tom Vilsack is just another shill for Monsanto and corporate agribusiness. He ain't a radical, for sure, but seems to have a little different outlook on things. Yes, he was Iowa governor, likes corn-based ethanol. But, let's be realistic.

“This president is taking over when the economy is the worst it has been in our lifetime and we are in the middle of wars,” said Ann Cooper, the chef who transformed the school food program for the Berkeley Unified School District in California and is about to do the same in Boulder, Colo. “I think it’s somewhere between naïve and fairy tale to think his No. 1 focus is going to be on food.”

Precisely.

Still, she has her own little wish, which is that the new president will move responsibility for school food programs to the Department of Education or the Department of Health and Human Services from the Department of Agriculture. That way, the focus might shift away from the commodity foods that are the backbone of most school lunches and toward menus tailored to the health and development of children.

Now, that makes a lot of sense, and is practical.

A chef who cooks local and organic food and picks some of it from a presidential garden could change things faster than any cabinet appointment, Ms. Reichl said. “It’s like the hat manufacturers being furious because J. F. K. didn’t wear a hat, and suddenly everyone in America stopped wearing hats,” she said. “It’s that simple.”

That also makes sense.

Steve Brodner -To advocates who have watched calls for changes in food policy gather political and popular momentum, Barack Obama looks like their kind of president.

For sustainability: Paul Willis, right, and his Iowa neighbor David Murphy have favorite candidates for top jobs in the Department of Agriculture.

Thai Leader Ordered to Resign Over TV Show

You can't make this stuff up; it'd sound absurd (which it is) and incredible (which it isn't: it's true).

BANGKOK — A Thai court ordered Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej to resign Tuesday after finding that he had violated the country’s Constitution by accepting payment for appearing on two cooking shows while in office.

His People Power Party said that it would name Mr. Samak to succeed himself in the job, a move that seemed to defy the spirit of the court ruling and to ensure that Thailand’s political crisis would continue.

Let the Meals Begin: Finding Beijing in Flushing

Just around 9.30 this morning I went to downtown Flushing, and got breakfast before going into Macy's to shop for new shirts (got four). I bought a dozen steamed pork buns from a little railroad store (literally under the LIRR tracks); 4 for $1.25, or 3.75 for the dozen. I also went to the corner shop on 41st and Main, and bought this concoction I first ate last week: a little dollop of pork meat (they also have beef and shrimp) put on a flat metal plate, a mixture of what seems flour is poured, and the entire thing is put inside an oven for a minute or so; it is then sliced, and put in a styrofoam container, soy sauce added. A buck fifty. Delicious. Also got an iced coffee from a Korean bakery shop. (That flour might be potato flour.)

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times. Putting toppings on shaved ice sold at a food court inside Flushing Mall.

SEATED at a rickety table, saltshaker poised above a bowl of delicate chicken-and-ginseng soup, the young Taiwanese woman considered a question: why not use soy sauce?
“Soy sauce is so American,” she said finally. “It makes everything taste the same.”

Agreed. What you taste ius soy sauce, not the food. Ditto for putting salt on food.

Everything tastes different in Flushing, Queens, the best neighborhood in New York for tasting the true and dazzling flavors of China.

The number of stores is amazing. Traffic is awful, and the streets are crowded, too. (Yuk, yuk. Truly, both the streets and sidewalks are jam-packed.

“From the 1970s until recently, the Taiwanese dominated Flushing, along with Koreans,” he said. “Now it is people from all over mainland China.” Fujian, on the southeast coast, is still the primary source of immigrants to New York, he said, but many who arrive from there actually have roots in the north, center and west of China.

He being Pyong Gap Min, sociology professor at Queens College.

South Korea: Outcry Over Beef Imports

Street protests continued over government plans to resume beef imports from the United States. The police estimated that 65,000 people rallied in central Seoul on Friday night, after about 25,000 people staged a candlelight demonstration the previous evening. American beef was banned by South Korea for most of the past four and a half years over fears of mad cow disease. The government had said it would begin allowing imports this week, but then delayed the resumption. Organizers said protests would continue all weekend.

Living in Flushing amidst a Korean plurality, perhaps even a majority of denizes of my immediate neighborhood, I just don't get it: Koreans eat a lot of beef, and it's US beef, so seeing protest in Korea against US beef is confusing.

Chinese food

Found picture in ElUniversal.com.mx with this caption: El menú en las calles chinas En Beijing hay numerosos puestos de comida que venden productos exóticos como caballitos y estrellas de mar, gusanos de seda, víboras, escarabajos y escorpiones.

Menu on Chinese streets: There are numerous food place in Beijing that sell exotic products such as sea horses, starfish, silk worms, vipers, beetles and scorpions.
Oy.

Sunday Morning, Yucatán

Food, instead of politics, for a change.

The Yucatán, which feels as Caribbean as it does Mexican, is to Mexico as Alsace is to France, as Sicily is to Italy, as Hawaii is to the United States: formally a part of the union, but culturally quite distinct, and with a well-preserved sense of identity.

My friends were already there, munching on tacos, and we joined them, ordering a bit of everything: a kind of salad of nopales (cactus leaves); an incredible mix of poblanos, potatoes and corn; a similar dish with chorizo; some warm mushrooms; a straightforward but quite tasty picadillo, ground meat with carrots and potatoes; and the seasonal romeritos, made from a plant that resembles rosemary but tastes like nettles. All were served on corn tortillas, which Sabrina brushed with lard before browning on the comal.

Fast good, German style

It is innovation. Germany has surely never produced anything quite as weird as the automated restaurant. ... at the 's Baggers restaurant in Nuremberg, you don't need waiters to order food. Customers use touch-screen TVs to browse the menu and choose their meal. You can even use the computers to send e-mails and text messages while you wait for the food to be cooked. But all this may not appeal to those who like traditional waiter service.

Replacing waiters with helter-skelters and computers is fun for the customers. It also makes financial sense for the restaurant.

A plate of food whizzes down from the kitchen

"You can save labour costs," explains restaurant spokesperson Kyra Mueller-Siecheneder.

"You don't need the waiters to run to the customers, take the orders, run to the kitchen and back to the guests."

The restaurant has not completely done away with the human touch. There are still some staff on hand to explain to rather bemused customers how to use the technology.

Frothing Over a Starbucks in Little Colombia

A piece of local interest. What does the arrival of a Starbucks in Jackson Heights mean? Does it portend something? I know JH some; at times I go for street food vendors. And to catch the 7 train to Manhattan.

Little Colombia. Colombian food isn't very good; too much starch and meat, not much spice. And I say this as a Colombian-born man. Yes, it can be good, but overall, not my favorite. One good thing is Colombian coffee. Café con leche, without sugar, for me.

A line did catch my attention: Tara Darrow, a Starbucks spokeswoman, said the company, in choosing where to open branches, does not base the decision on “incomes or types of people there,” but rather, “We choose based on where we know people will welcome us and where we can be part of the community.” What a crock.

Sick Cows

Another push for becoming vegetarian.