Kimball (pictured) is the fellow who wrote a wrongheaded and nakedly self-serving New York Times op-ed about how much internet recipes suck, and how the web's terrible food writing basically killed Gourmet magazine. Where can you turn for quality recipes? Cook's Illustrated, naturally.

Now that the op-ed has drummed up controversy, Kimball is trying to stage a fight, between himself and "the WIKI [sic]:"

The current rage is the WIKI [sic] recipe notion... I am willing to put my money, and my reputation, where my big mouth is. I offer a challenge to any supporter of the WIKI or similar concept to jump in and go head to head with our test kitchen.

Well, of course Kimball wants to cook off against something from a Wiki. Cooking is a chemical process, and tinkering with what is fundamentally a science experiment via the Wiki's trademark mass, open editing process is... well, it's a recipe for disaster, as Kimball surely knows.

Far more interesting would be to see Kimball square off against a reasonably popular food blogger. Here is just a brief sampling of some of the free online material I gathered in five minutes from various food blogs I track from home in the San Francisco Bay Area:

• A restaurant pastry chef's recipe for Madeira Cake.
  
• A restaurant sous chef's recipe for jams, pickled vegetables and cooked vegetables.
  
• A farmer's recipe for canning your own tomatoes.
  
• An urban farmer's guide to when the fruits and veggies grown in the backyards of my actual town are at their peak ripeness.
  
• A restaurant cook's guide to frying an egg "Spanish-style in olive oil... my new favorite way to devour these culinary jewels." See also his "Least popular recipe ever."

Of course, acknowledging that this stuff even exists would slightly undermine Kimball's point that the internet is an eater's idiocracy in need of rescue by his fine magazine (which, side note, I subscribe to, being a proud media omnivore). But at least it would make for an interesting cook off rather than the contrived burning of a culinary straw man.

(Pic by Laurie Chipps)

Why doesn't Yelp just show how a restaurant's inflated ratings compare to its competitors' inflated ratings, thus negating the surplus of stars? VentureBeat's Kim-Mai Cutler asked, and Yelp answered: "Virtually identical ratings mean people have to dive into reviews to understand what's different, said Vince Sollitto, who heads communications for the San Francisco-based company." Translation: Confusion means more traffic means more advertising dough.

Which is too bad for hard-core Yelpers used to being pampered by gladhanding restaurateurs: Once owners figure out how easy it is to get five stars, the free drinks and food are over.

(Graphic via Yelp blog)

Puck, the ultimate hustler of high-end food, sought to do business with the ultimate internet land grabber, an outfit trying to lock up top-level domains like ".wine," ".nyc" and ".basketball." A case filed by the latter group in U.S. District Court in Seattle, alleging breach of contract, tortious interference and fraud, makes it clear the relationship quickly soured.

Three parties are suing Puck and his wife: Minds and Machines LLC, of California; Level Domain Holdings Ltd. of the Virgin Islands and entrepreneur Fred Krueger. The plaintiffs reached an agreement with Wolfgang Puck to co-develop the ".food" domain, but subsequently had a falling out over whether Puck and his wife were entitled to compensation for other top-level-domains developed by the parties, and whether Puck subsequently breached the agreement by yanking back rights to his name.

It could take months or years to sort out exactly what went wrong here. But it's easy to see how this case will embarrass Wolfgang and, especially, his wife Gelila.

Here's Puck insisting on giving less to charity:

The suit repeatedly depicts Gelila derailing domain name deals by enticing the plaintiffs into alternate negotiations than never panned out. One involved Vogue publisher Condé Nast:

Gelila had two children with Puck, two decades her senior and already a father, before marrying him two summers ago. A Harper's Bazaar profile depicted Gelila stepping into a J. Mendel dress, Jimmy Choo shoes and Swarovski crystal necklace ahead of a dinner party. She told the magazine she found labels "vulgar."

Odd, then, that she was positively eager to jump into the internet labeling business, judging from the court papers. In fact, she thought internet labels would give make her the next Bill Gates and the next Al Gore:

The suit also accused her of chasing off potential clients:

As we keep repeating, internet geeks and Hollywood glitterati should meet only under tightly-controlled circumstances.

Now this offer, originally blogged by San Francisco PR man Jared Rivera, doesn't say you have to write a positive review on Yelp. Just any old review, of this restaurant. But if you didn't enjoy your meal, a 20 percent discount on the next one isn't going to motivate you to do anything, including writing a Yelp review. Those who do write up a review will be inclined to add extra star-age, since they'll be presenting the review directly to restaurant staff. It all adds to an easy way for the restaurant — in this case, Mel's, an unremarkable 1950s style diner — to juice their online ratings.

This sort of red-carpet treatment is baked into Yelp's business model; the San Francisco company regularly invites its favored users to "Yelp Elite" events where they are wined and dined at a restaurant's expense. A flood of positive reviews often follows.

Some restaurants have also taken to targeting heavy users of foursquare, an iPhone application that lets you "check-in" to a particular location. Become enough of a regular, and foursquare will crown you "mayor" of that spot. The app is only five months old, but already the owner of Lure and Chinatown Brasserie in downtown New York is buttering up Lure "mayor" Scott Kidder with off-the-menu dishes. "Beyond bullshit" was how Eater.com co-founder Lockhart Steele reacted to this VIP treatment on Twitter. (Disclaimer: Kidder handles my paychecks; Steele used to oversee Gawker.com.)

Of course, restaurants have always kowtowed to opinion shapers. Esquire critic John Mariani is among those known for accepting free meals from restaurants that end up in his magazine; even critics who pay their own way can benefit from lavish chef attention when they do not visit anonymously. But old-school favor trading was at least subtle, visible mainly to media critics and industry insiders — the proverbial making of the sausage was no more in the diner's face than the literal.

Catering to the large and growing corps of Web VIPs is, by necessity, a more explicit affair. This transparency can be unappetizing, especially when it looks desperate, as on the receipt above. But it does send a useful signal to diners about the priorities of the people from whom they buy food and service. And at a time when diners increasingly do want to know how their sausage is made, they might as well also learn something about the manufacture of restaurant buzz. Of both the organic and synthetic sort.

[via Michael Bauer, San Francisco Chronicle]

(Top pic: A Yelp Elite event in San Francisco, via Yelp on Flickr)

The upshot of this unfortunate decision — clams are nothing like oysters — was something of a "500 Server Error" for her reality-show team. They weren't "feeling lucky," if you know what we mean.

Mistry, the short-haired, fauxhawked cook in the above video except, is back at Google's "Charlie's Cafe" at the Mountain View headquarters, Peter Kafka reports in All Things D. Reps for Google's catering firm tell Kafka she's "recovering" from the rattling Top Chef taping. But for all its recent cutbacks, including on food, the last thing Google needs is a public rebuke to its much-vaunted culinary excellence. Might we suggest a grudge match involving another tech company, say, Facebook? They've totally got a cafeteria!

UPDATE: As NBC Bay Area notes, Mistry's been hamming it up on her Twitter feed. Or "clamming" it up, rather:

(Clip via Hulu)

Old line, non-Twittering food vendors hate seeing these usurpers on their turf. Cue the death threats. The operator of the Twittering cart "Schnitzel and Things" told Midtown Lunch about a bad scene in Madison Square Park the other day: "We got harassed by 4 different dudes as soon as we showed up... I called the cops on them for harassment. Then they brought their own cop... Once they started to threaten our lives, we got a bit aggressive." Twitter gangs can't be far behind. What's the point of microblogging if you can't use it to call for backup?

(Schnitzel truck pic by @JoseSPiano)

Powell's movie is part blogger story and part Julia Child biopic; Meryl Streep plays Child, the famous home-cooking guru.

Now in preview screenings, Julie and Julia is already being savaged in food blogger circles. Chef, cookbook author and food blogger Virginia Willis' slam set the tone. While professing "no malice," it took Powell to task for daring to question Child's recipe, once:

One day she made a comment implying a recipe being wrong for roast chicken. I honestly don't remember what it was, but it struck me as being so disrespectful, completely without deference to Julia Child, that I stopped. What the hell did she know about food? Had she even heard of poulet au Bresse? Didn't go back.

Actually, the term Willis was looking for was poulet de Bresse, but we shouldn't interrupt a master bravely defending Child against a disrespectful (gasp!) acolyte:

People who happen to eat and are able to type are now our new food experts... Good grief, people who don't know how to begin to roast a ding dang chicken without following a recipe can be our new, ahem, food experts.

The bitter anger of a lone chef-writer? Hardly; other food bloggers quickly agreed. "Thank you, Virginia for... bravely expressing your frustrations," wrote one. Another: "Great post." Another: "A very well written article about something which, despite being an amateur food blogger myself, does frustrate me to no end." One blogger, after watching only a trailer, said Child "deserves more than being the other half to a Nora Ephron-penned romcom about a 'lowly cubicle worker' who blogs and struggles and cries and gets a book deal." Oh, plus also, Child thought Powell was a mere stunt artist! A clown, really! What a gleeful thing, to be able to report.

Powell, you see, has made enemies of her obsessive online peers. What infuriated them most was a 2005 New York Times op-ed decrying the "insidious... snobbery of the organic movement" — an all-out assault on the Church of Alice Waters. The reaction was furious: "today's stupidest piece of information;" "gratuitous... a coarse reductionist version of the... organic movement;" "[a] shockingly incoherent thing;" "ill-informed... erroneous." Or this, after Powell panned raw foodism in the Times: "Julie Powell... needs to stop huffing dust from the crypt of Erma Bombeck."

The prevailing "Slow Food" ideology of the culinary world is that the process of nourishment should be devolved — from massive centralized farms and feedlots and factories to local growers and aritsans and ultimately home gardens; from nutritionists and other food scientists to cultural and family traditions. And ultimately, we're supposed to replace slapdash restaurants with careful preparation in small, individual kitchens.

The irony is that here we have in Julie Powell the ultimate manifestation of these principles, an amateur who dived fearlessly into home preparations, devolving not only food but, via her blog, media as well, taking both cooking and communication into her own hands. And yet the foodie priesthood seems on the verge of ex-communicating her over these very traits. Sorry, guys, but Julie Powell is literally the embodiment of an organic movement. Buy some Milk Duds (TM), splash some fake butter on your Popcorn, pop open a Diet Coke (TM) and enjoy the film.

How like a Californian to seize on a trend early: Wall Street and Detroit are getting bailouts. Why not me and my cause, the likes of Waters are now thinking. What's next? A yoga jobs package? A transcendental meditation trust fund?

Waters doesn't even bother to hide her opportunism:

This new era of government bailouts and widespread concern over wasteful spending offers an opportunity to take a hard look at the National School Lunch Program. Launched in 1946 as a public safety net, it has turned out to be a poor investment. It should be redesigned to make our children healthier.

Quite political of her to use the arrival of a bailout-happy new administration to reheat an old dish. Waters has been fighting since 1997 to scrap the existing $9 billion school-lunch program and replace it with a $27 billion-plus plan to feed the nation's schoolchildren with locally grown, pesticide-free fare. That's how the public schools of Berkeley, Calif., do it, in a program Waters spearheaded.

But come on. California's salubrious climate produces more than half of the nation's fruits, nuts, and vegetables. It is easy, amidst this bounty, to contemplate feeding children from the local cornucopia.

It's not a bad idea to put better fare in front of kids. Indeed, with childhood obesity rampant, it's a national imperative. And Waters couldn't ask for a better foodie-in-chief: Obama got elected despite pundits' concerns about his habit of eating arugula.

But is the best way to sell this program to demand that the nations' school cafeterias reshape themselves in Berkeley's image? Anyone who's tried to get kids to eat something new knows that small doses are best. By demanding an instant revolution — rather like the vegan vigilantes of NYU — Waters might as well be sending her proposal straight to the D.C. compost heap. At least one hopes so. Because the privileged and sanctimonious foodies of California hardly need a bailout.

"So have you seen that nine-minute video of the guy fucking a giant Cheeto that's made out of a bunch of little Cheetos?"

"OMG, yes! What was that all about?"

"I don't know. The internet is weird."

Yeah, we don't get it either. But to be fair, he's not really fucking the Cheeto so much as he's making sweet, sweet love to it. It's kind of romantic, actually. Even if it is completely and totally out-of-this-world insane.

. . .

· I LOVE YOU CHEETOS (YouTube, via uniquedaily.com)

• Veronica Belmont of Jason Calacanis's Mahalo Daily is here with a crew of three or four people — and that's before her Engadget support team shows up. Jason, I thought the point of Internet video was that you didn't need a big support staff.
• There are the usual event staples of fish and pasta, but then there is a lone waitress walking around with delicious lamb chops. Every time she walks by I hear a quiet chorus from the surrounding press flacks: "Ooh, are those lamb chops?"
• A remote-controlled rolling robotic beer cooler. True, this is a gadget but it combines laziness, beer, and completely uselessness; three tried and true geek pastimes.

And [another] Coke-friendly fridge during the visit:

Googlers snickered at the announcement, some searching for old Pepsi schwag to wear. Also, where did Google hide all the Pepsi drinks? Is there a server room somewhere loaded with cans of Mountain Dew?

• Today's "Reason that San Francisco is cooler than San Jose" is a warning to vegetarians: In Silicon Valley, waiters forcibly stuff meat down your throat. [Metroactive]
• Apparently everyone who didn't know about the Adobe/Microsoft fight over the PDF format has their heads in the sand. Yeah, they're all probably worrying about obscure news this week, like the US killing the world's leading terrorist. [Planet PDF]
• Thanks again, SloshCon sponsors! To everyone else: If you want to give people money to drink, please sponsor the Gnomedex parties coming up in July. [Ponzarelli]
• Is the Glam.com blog network scamming its writers? (Ha, name a blog network that isn't.) A tipster says, "Apparently their $11m in funding doesn't cover paying out a few cents to their partners." [Celebitchy]
• Songwriter Billy Bragg takes his music off Myspace, saying the site's terms and conditions let Rupert Murdoch's media empire re-use all posted music without paying a cent in royalties. One wonders if News Corp would ever get away with acting on that clause, but either way, YAY FOR LEAVING MYSPACE. [Register]
• Pictured: Best. Caption. Ever. The Register snarks at Dell for throwing Wall Street Journal editor Don Clark...a birthday party. [Register]

The award-winning editorial team behind CHOW magazine is unbelievably talented and experienced and we are extraordinarily lucky to have them join us in our mission to create a world class food property.

Yeah. "A world class food property." By CNET. I'm as confused as you are.

CNET Chows Down [Motley Fool]