A couple of weeks ago, a new sheriff rode into town: Eric Flack, WAVE 3 Troubleshooter. Mr. Flack spent most of an afternoon (at least!) gathering the information for a regular expose of the seedy underbelly of local food truck sanitation practices. The shocking footage was shot at multiple locations including a three-tub wash station at a temporarily-licensed mobile vendor – not an actual food truck with a permanent annual certification. Again, this was not a food truck; it was a guy with a two-week temporary permit, a travel trailer and a canopy tent.
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Tag Archives: Marsha Lynch – Industry Standard
Treat your servers well
In my previous column, I wrote about the bizzaro owners of Amy’s Baking Company in Scottsdale, Ariz. — a couple so weirdly paranoid and self-absorbed, so invested in their own bad behavior, they have totally skewed the spectrum of guest abuse forever. And then I was introduced via the Internet to the creature that is Taylor Chapman.
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Zen and the art of oh-no-they-didn’t
Last week, I read with interest multiple media accounts of the saga of Amy’s Baking Company, a restaurant in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Amy’s is the latest of a long list of ailing restaurants to throw itself into the arms of the producers of “Kitchen Nightmares.” “KN” stars ubiquitous Chef Gordon Ramsay, who famously swoops in to tell you what you’re doing wrong. Nearly every episode follows the same formula; Ramsay is disgusted by your cooking, disgusted by your slovenly ways, and put off by your dated décor.
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First Saturday in May
Derby again already? I feel like I’m still recovering from last year.
Since my column is usually published the last Wednesday of each month, I’ve written a few Derby week columns over the last five-plus years. I started out aiming to reread them this morning, thinking, “Well, I don’t want to repeat myself.”
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A stone in the ocean
A list of “50 Things They Never Told You About Being a Chef” is going around on Facebook. Naturally, I clicked. Why wouldn’t I? I enjoyed the list. Clearly it was written by a cook who’d paid some dues. There were obvious things included, like: “You will not cook gourmet dinners at home. You’ll be too tired, and too fed up of cooking.” As I type, there are three sorts of greens and a half-pound of salt pork in the fridge awaiting my attention. Gourmet dinners? How about any dinner at all?
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The Great Horsemeat Scandal of 2013
Oh. Ugh. Burger King acknowledged a few weeks ago that some of its burgers sold in Britain and Ireland had unfortunately included a percentage of horsemeat. Some patties sold at British supermarket chain Tesco included up to 29-percent horsemeat. Worst of all, some crappy frozen lasagna included ground horsemeat, as well. If you’re a Kentucky-American, do you feel a certain sense of outrage and disgust?
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All the good headlines are taken
When the announcement came that Lynn’s Paradise Cafe had closed, I considered writing a column headlined “(Lynn’s) Paradise Lost,” but before my monthly column’s week rolled around, there was already an article titled “Paradise lost” – in this very paper.
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Happy New Year, foodies!
Nearly two years ago in this column I made a “Louisville food industry wish” for the new year, calling for relaxed rules and clarity in food-truck regulations for Metro Louisville. And while we’re not 100 percent where we need to be, I commend Mayor Greg Fischer and his crew for enabling our local food-truck explosion. Well done. We now have a Louisville Food Truck Association, headed up by the ever-entrepreneurial Leah Stewart of Louisville Dessert Truck and Louisville Candy Buffet.
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Dear (Papa) John
Back in August, you told some of your shareholders that you’d need to increase the price of your pizza about 11 to 14 cents to “shallow out” the cost increases the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) would burden your business with. And when the cost of business increases, ultimately prices go up, right? I can’t argue with that; although some people tried to — notably Forbes magazine, which published an article with a lot of fancy math that basically boiled down to this: The price increase you proposed would likely result in revenue for the company totaling far, far above the $5-$8 million cost increase you estimated you would be trying to offset.
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Smashing pumpkinsMarsha Lynch – Industry Standard,
Like most everyone else who lives in temperate climes, I enjoy the changing of the seasons. The beauty of a snow-covered hillside. That first warm day of spring when you leave the coat at home. When I was a child, I couldn’t wait for the week the pool opened.
But fall, I am putting you on notice. A season so pretentious it sometimes uses an alternate name (oh, we’re “autumn” today, are we?), so vain it paints itself in gaudy colors, so filled with political campaign signs and so chock-full of pre-holiday madness you can’t seem to catch your breath. And on top of all that, a season so rife with squashes and root vegetables that I’ll probably have to buy a new vegetable peeler.
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