Free Best Food Writing 2010 by Holly Hughes Page B

its ability to connect supporters. Zagat, by contrast, still conjures up images of the lonely traveler, that burgundy guide tucked into his back pocket, searching for a good place to sup before masturbating himself to sleep.
    Caught in a Binder: Like newspapers and magazines, Zagat is dependent on print, where presumably the company still earns most of its revenues, despite the fact that its most timely and user-friendly information (menus, maps, and recent reviews) is found online. Zagat withholds survey ratings from its free Web pages in hopes that you’ll plunk down $24.95 a year to find out what the voting public, in whatever numbers, thought of places like Makoto over a year ago. It’s a hopeless online business plan, but it’s probably a better deal than the $14.95 you pay for the actual paperback guide.

EL BULLI GETS BESTED
    By Carla Capalbo From zesterdaily.com

What does the title World’s Best Restaurant really mean? Capalbo, one of several seasoned journalists on the staff of this intriguing new food news site, roots out the back story on the changing of the guard.
    W hen superstar chef Ferran Adria’s restaurant, El Bulli, was dethroned after four years at the top of the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants classification on April 26 in London, the invited audience of professional foodies gasped. The annual award is based on the votes of an 806-strong international jury of food critics, chefs, restaurateurs and food enthusiasts called the Academy. This year the prize-giving was held in the magnificent medieval Guildhall in the city’s historic center.
    The upset was caused by a spare 42-seat restaurant in a warehouse on the docks of Copenhagen run by Rene Redzepi, a 32-year-old chef whose idea of a spring salad includes beech leaves, axel berry shoots, pine shoots and unripe white strawberries in a dressing made from grill-charred cucumber skins.
    The cuisine at Redzepi’s Noma focuses on a continuously researched range of Scandinavian foods. “As soon as they named Ferran as No. 2 in the countdown, I knew the winner had to be Noma,” said Alessandro Porcelli, a longtime collaborator with Redzepi on the concept of Nordic cuisine.
    “That sends a really strong message that high gastronomy is going in a new direction, toward place-specific, seasonal ingredients, including wild and forgotten ones, cooked in more natural yet highly creative ways.”
    “This will be a great inspiration for cooks all over the world to look for interesting ingredients in their own backyards and use them in new ways. It’s no longer all about technique and technology,” Porcelli added.
     
    THE NEWS OF NOMA’S VICTORY spread like wildfire via the Internet, Twitter and the traditional press. Within 24 hours, the restaurant received a staggering 140,000 requests for dining reservations, more than enough to fill the 45-seater at lunch and dinner for six years. As Redzepi took the stage to get his award, he and four of his sous chefs donned white T-shirts with a photograph of a smiling black man printed on them. “This is a team prize, the result of seven years of working together,” Redzepi said. “It’s a testament to what you can do working with people you love, with whom you can develop yourself,” he added, before explaining the T-shirts pictured their dishwasher, Ali, who had been refused a 24-hour visa to be at the award show.
    Adria, who is closing El Bulli at the end of next year, gave an emotional speech as he accepted Restaurant Magazine’s prize for Chef of the Decade. “El Bulli will never be a restaurant again, so it won’t be able to get a prize as one again,” he said, as the audience rose to its feet to applaud him. “But this prize is in my heart, and my career is linked to this prize.”
     
    NOW IN ITS NINTH EDITION, the World’s 50 Best classification has been steadily gaining importance. “For the most ambitious chefs, this list has become the key to who’s who in the food world,”