Review: Gramercy Tavern, New York City

The muffin

Why do upscale restaurants feel the need to send you home with something for breakfast? The last time we were at Jean-Georges in New York, it was the most delicate little brioche. Once it was a tiny package of house made granola.

This past week at New York's Gramercy Tavern, it was a cinnamon-sugar muffin. Not that I needed to wreck the perfectly healthy meal with that muffin the next morning. Wait, what actually happened is worse. The Restaurant Dieter's Spouse left his muffin on the counter, so I ate both. I couldn't throw it away.

The folks at Gramercy apparently couldn't leave it at the plate of petit four that ended the meal -- tiny cheese cake cups, macarons and deep rich chocolates.

This panna cotta arrived before dessert

And two courses before that, they'd served something new: the pre-desert desert. It was a tiny ramekin with a panna cotta, a dusting of granola and a single blackberry. Then came the low fat sorbet PLUS a plate of the regular ice cream, courtesy of the house, since the waiter worried that I was struggling over which sounded better.

(An important aside here: I do not announce myself as a restaurant reviewer and writer until I leave my business card at the end of the meal, although I do bring a tiny notepad and take photographs of my food. The surprise dessert is the first time I've wondered if the house suspected a reviewer was in their midst.)

All told, our three-course prix fixe menu wound up with eight items being brought to the table, starting with a goat cheese puff amuse-bouche that simply oozed cheese and fat. (Yes, it was wonderful.)

A dieter who watched intake more carefully than I could do rather well here. Three of the six entrees on the dinner menu were fish. The Restaurant Dieter's Spouse had a fillet of halibut with fava beans, sun gold tomatoes and an herb vinaigrette. It was cooked so perfectly he felt compelled to ask if it had been prepared sous-vide. It wasn't.

My starter was delicate ruby red shrimp with a salsa verde atop polenta. What really made the dish were slivers of tart, pickled ramp and the barely cooked bed of collard greens between the shrimp and the polenta. By just tasting a bit of the polenta, it qualified as diet food.

Sea bass with marinated cucumber and yogurt sauce

The highlight of the meal was a delicate pan-roasted sea bass that rested on a salad of cool marinated cucumber and a yogurt sauce flecked with mint and cilantro. The yogurt sauce was so creamy and rich that I suspected cream or buttermilk, but the server said it was just plain yogurt.

The sorbets -- plum, peach and blueberry -- were deep concentrations of the fruit. They were tart enough that one suspects little to no sugar was added.

With New York sweltering in record heat this past week, the sorbets and the sea bass combined for a meal a dieter could only dream of.

Review: Dim Sum Go Go, New York City

Dim Sum: What exactly do we have here?

Is there such a thing as forensic nutritional analysis? You know, someone you could call in, like the people on CSI, who could begin to look at the evidence and determine if a crime was committed?

It would save dieters from fumbling with their calorie count books or smartphone apps before trying to order something new and unfamiliar. Like the folks on CSI, they'd swoop in afterward and determine if a mere citation or an indictment is needed.

The Restaurant Dieter and the TRD Spouse needed "CSI Chinatown" after a stroll by New York's City Hall left us looking for lunch and in Chinatown. It was Sunday. Well why not try one of the great dim sum places we've been reading about?

We landed at Dim Sum Go Go, decidedly less glitzy than the name suggests. It's a single small room not much bigger than our New York apartment. It's overseen by a phalanx of old Chinese men wired with earphones and cords like they were Secret Service agents. After one of them seated us, I thought we might be in for an episode of CSI Chinatown after all.

Once seated we were given a printed menu and a pencil to make our own choices sushi-style. Maybe that's why it's Dim Sum Go Go -- because unlike most dim sum places, no carts full of food come come. It is fast, though, perhaps because of the high-tech communication system.

With the exception of an order of spring rolls and mango shrimp for the TRD Spouse, we stuck to the stuff on the menu listed as steamed or baked. Other than that, we had no point of reference on how to order healthily. My Weight Watchers smartphone app doesn't have a listing for beef balls with bean curd skin.

Bamboo steamers or plates arrived in no particular order. Some flat rice rolls with parsley and scallions evoked a slippery wet burito with...parsley and scallions. They went mostly uneaten.

The standouts were the pork buns -- one in a snow white steamed dough that looked like a scoop of ice cream; the other in a baked and brown little egg bun. According to one website, a steamed pork bun is 150 calories and 2.9 grams of fat but has 26.7 grams of carbohydrates. Thanks to the carbs, that's about 4 Weight Watchers points each from my daily allotment of 37.

I must have had at least two of those and two similarly prepared steamed chicken buns. And I'm pretty sure I had a couple of the shrimp dumplings at 58 calories, 3.8 grams of fat each. And let's see, I had a couple of the stuffed mushrooms at....well, I can't find a website that gives me a value for those. Neither for those steamed rice rolls that we mostly left, although I think I ate one of each.

And did I taste the TRD Spouse's mango shrimp and a half a spring roll? I think so. Maybe it was a whole spring roll? I'm not sure how to count the chicken and sticky rice in lotus leaf. It didn't seem like nice lean chicken breast meat, but you never know.

No officer, I'm not changing my story! I just can't remember exactly what happened. I don't remember if the little spoonful of the coconut cake that's missing was mine. The food came so fast and it was all so confusing. And there were these men wearing radios and rushing around.

Then -- yes, that's it! -- I blacked out and when I awoke, the diet was dead. I swear to God that's what happened.

What do you mean I have the right to remain silent?

Review: Peacefood Cafe and Le Relais de Venise, New York City

TRD Spouse goes his own way for lunch in NYC -- steak frites at Le Relais de Venise

Even after 16 happy years of marriage, some couples find they have no other choice but to go their own ways. It happened to us.  No lawyers needed, though.

So The Restaurant Dieter wound up at Peacefood Cafe on Manhattan's Upper West Side and TRD Spouse at Le Relais de Venise in Midtown. The names alone should be sufficient to capture the irreconcilable divide, but the details are too amusing not to be chewed over again.

Quinoa salad with a side of baked tempeh

I've previously written about our household culinary divide. It heightens every time we get off the plane at LaGuardia. I want to stop at the Fairway on Broadway to stock up on fruit. He hopes it's not too late to get a chocolate eclair up the street at Beard Papa. Yesterday's lunch was 16 years of marriage, played out in a single meal.

TRD: Peacefood is a neighborhood joint, one of two where the stroller-pushing lefties who inhabit this stretch of the Upper West Side can get their fix of kale soup while the children eat chicken-nugget-ish baked soy with fresh herbed vegan mayo. Everything about it is clean, from the wide open windows and whitewashed walls to the menu that proclaims "eat differently" at this "vegan kitchen and bakery." Even the waitstaff is clean, in a sort of skinny, scruffy hipster way. Would you like an organic cotton hoodie with your tempeh avocado sandwich?

TRD Spouse:  A few weeks ago my boss was staying on the Upper East Side of New York and asked for some dining recommendations.  I suggested Le Relais de Venise, which is also called "L'Entrecote," the French word for what Americans call a rib-eye.  He had a delicious meal and returned to the office with a receipt offering 20 percent off lunch, which he left on my desk.  How could I let it go to waste?

99 degrees and no takers for sidewalk dining.

The LRDV at  590 Lexington Ave (52nd St.) is New York outpost of a small chain of French bistros that started in Paris and expanded to two locations in London and the Big Apple.   There are a few outside tables along Lex (unused in this weekend's miserable heat).  Indoors one finds black-and-white tile floors, dark wood wait stations, bright lights reflected in large mirrors, lots of flowers, a bar with bottles of wine lined up for service, comfy booths and chairs in different colors, and table tops covered with plasticky-basketweave paper covers over linen clothes, with bright yellow napkins on top.  The wait staff (all women) is dressed in crisp black-and-white uniforms (not really French maid -- more French waitress).  In other words, walk in the door and it just says "Bonjour!"

TRD: Lunch offerings are on a single menu with salads, soups, vegetable bowls, sandwiches, panini, pizzas and sides. In the evening there's an expanded list of specials. Like all such restaurants, it can be a mistake to confuse vegan or vegetarian with low fat and low calories. A look at the bakery window proves that: there's no shortage of calories in the mile-high lemon vanilla layer cake or the coconut cream pie. And onions do not get caramelized with out some fat. But there are so many choices that celebrate the ingredients rather than fat and sugar. It's easy to choose something that tastes light, healthy and virtuous.

TRD Spouse:  LRDV does one thing -- steak frites -- and it does it marvelously.  The "menu" announces what you'll be having for lunch front and center:


"Today, trimmed Entrecote Steak "Porte Maillot" with its famous sauce French Fries and Green salad with walnuts....$24.95"


To get started, you tell the waiter how you'd like your steak done -- I told her "medium" and she scribbled an "M" on my table.  The salad arrives right away -- lightly dressed with a zingy mustard vinaigrette and crumbled walnuts on top.

One marker of being on vacation, even a short weekend one, is wine with lunch.  I ordered a glass of '09 Pierre Amadieu, a tasty Cotes-du-Rhone, from the short list of French wines.  A second one followed.

The steak arrives with a green, tarragon-y sauce over the perfectly-prepared steak.  The frites are golden, crispy, chewy, duck-fat bathed beauties.

Now comes the LRDV magic.  As you're about to clean your plate, sopping up the last of the sauce with the very last frites, the server comes by and offers...seconds!  Just a morsel or two more of steak and another small pile of frites.  Oh, heaven.

Seconds!

TRD: Peacefood's wonderful selection of baked items and desserts beckoned, so lunch had to be light enough to accommodate a little dessert afterward. Protein is always a concern when I eat vegetarian, so I went for the fluffy quinoa salad with white beans and baby greens and asked for a side of baked tempeh. The idea was to add the latter, marinated only in tamari, to the salad. I nursed a $3 iced peppermint tea -- $3? Even in New York? -- and waited. One might expect the quinoa mounded atop the greens, but it arrived mixed. The creamy mustard lime vinaigrette was extremely subtle -- none of the headline ingredients poked through. Instead, it served as a canvas from which all the component ingredients could stand out: crunchy raw corn kernels, peppery arugula, sweet red onion, red pepper, creamy avocado and finally, the nutty quinoa itself. It was wonderful. The only unfortunate note was the lack of beans. When I pointed that out, the server offered to get more of something else to bulk up the protein -- avocado or more quinoa. Because of the mixed in tempeh (5 grams of protein per ounce) I let it go.

Peacefood cookie with carrot and chocolate chip

I was sorely tempted by a generous slice of the lemon vanilla cake -- all the slices are generous -- but in food-happy New York, with one meal for the day yet to go, I opted to conserve instead. A cookie with chocolate chips, coconut, pecans and carrot sufficed. It was chewy and rich, but not overly sweet. I'd call it a cookie for an adult.

TRDSpouse:  I have one hard-and-fast rule when dining out:  If profiteroles are on the menu, I'm ordering them.  And so I did, along with a cup of cafe Americain.

And they were delicious but, sadly, no second helping on dessert.

One quirk at LRDV is they don't offer heat-ups on coffee.  Sayeth the server: "We don't do refills.  If you'd like another one, I can bring it to you."  And so she did.  For $3.25.

TRD: As with any restaurant meal, the nutritional information can be difficult to assess. The vegetables in the salad are all negligible; except the corn (perhaps 1/4 to 1/2 cup), they're all zero points on Weight Watchers. The salad was dressed so lightly that at most, it would be two tablespoons of a full-fat dressing. Four ounces of baked tempeh are about 220 calories and 12 grams of fat. The cookie was modest sized, not the fashionable monster size that is more accurately at least six. For Weight Watchers points, I counted the corn at 1/2 cup and wound up at 15 points. Not bad for lunch in the big city.

TRD Spouse:  A crispy, zingy salad, a perfectly prepared steak and frites-of-the-Gods, a couple glasses of a spicy, fresh red, a plate of pastry, ice cream, and chocolate sauce with hot coffee -- the perfect lunch.  I wandered out of Le Relais de Venise, $60 poorer (including the 20% off coupon), but fully sated and ready for an afternoon of shopping for glasses at Warby Parker, a nap and then an 8 p.m. show.  Ahhhhh...

Then, this morning, a 5 mile run through Central Park.

We're Eating Less Fried Seafood

A new report out says that total seafood consumption at restaurants is down, largely because of the recession. But the best news is that fried seafood is an increasingly smaller share of the overall number.

This is great news for folks who eat out and watch their weight.

The Restaurant Dieter belongs to a generation that knew fish primarily through religion. As Catholics, Friday meant fish, and fish meant something fried or something preformed into a narrow rectangle and baked. Both, of course, with lots of fatty tartar sauce. One had to kill that fishy flavor.

In fact, in the heavily Catholic suburbs of Detroit, "fish fry Friday" was a regular fundraising event for nonprofits and charities. The housewives of the '50s and '60s loved being able to meet Friday's sacred menu without having to splatter up the entire kitchen, praise God.

I don't think I had a piece of fish that wasn't fried until I was at least 16.

In the last decade, restaurants have discovered other ways to prepare fish, some great, some awful. The world needs no more overly seasoned, too salty blackened fish portions. Cooks have given this invention of Chef Paul Prudhomme a...well, a black eye.

The best preparations are simple: an acid, a touch of fruity olive oil, a couple seasonings or fresh herbs. For this to work, of course, the fish must be fresh and have a good flavor on its own. For many lower and mid-tier restaurants, where food waste is a cost issue, having fish that fresh is an issue.

But as the data shows, the tide is turning. Reliable and fresh preparations can easily be found at chains such as The Oceanaire and Legal Seafood. A recent blog post that mentioned Red Lobster called out its Lighthouse menu of fresh choices.

For fish, hardly any restaurants compare with Eric Ripert's Le Bernardin in New York City. It's been nearly four years, but the tasting menu was a parade of courses that were flavorful and totally OK for a beginning Weight Watchers memeber.

On a slightly more modest scale, two wonderful Greek fish restaurants have shown how good Greek cooking can be without high-fat dishes such as pastitsio. Both have incredible displays of fresh fish from which to choose and great flexibility in the preparation. Plus, the menus are studded with plentiful vegetable offerings as well. They are Kyma in Atlanta, part of the Buckhead Life Restaurant Group and Estiatorio Milos in New York City.

Does this mean that fried seafood is out for me? Hardly. The Restaurant Dieter's Spouse is fond of saying he'd eat a sweat sock if it was deep friend, and sometimes I get sucked in. Hey, it's my culture.

Restaurant Calorie Counts: Way Off

Are you more likely to get bad nutritional information at a McDonald's or an Applebees?

The latter, says a Tufts University research study. Fast food restaurants automate the kitchen to the point that portions are more precise. It's the sit-down restaurant where the cook in the kitchen has more latitude to make the food as it suits him or her.

The researchers tested 269 foods. Nearly 20 percent were off by more than 100 calories, and not in the customer's favor.

For Vegetables, Craft and Cafe Fiorello Among New York's Best

With a bazillion great restaurants in New York from which to choose, Craft and Cafe Fiorello are two of my favorites. Both manage to give vegetables equal billing to meat, fish, poultry and pasta. The last time I visited Craft, even fruit had a starring role.

But at too many restaurants, fruits and vegetables are nearly reduced to garnishes. That's a shame, given some research reported this week in the New York Times on the close connection between eating fruits, vegetables and whole grains and maintaining healthy weight.

There's further scientific evidence that eating MORE of these foods -- rather than eating less of something else -- helps keep the weight off. And by the way, this is based on a study of 120,877 men and women who were followed for 12-20 years. It wasn't a few lab rats.

"There are good foods and bad foods, and the advice should be to eat the good foods more and the bad foods less," Dr. Frank B. Hu, one of the study's authors, told Personal Health columnist Jane Brody. "The notion that it's OK to eat everything in moderation is just an excuse to eat whatever you want."

That endorses the program change Weight Watchers launched in November. For the first time, nearly all fruits were free, meaning they counted as zero in Weight Watchers system of assigning point values to various foods. When a member at my meeting asked if that wasn't giving us a loaded gun, the meeting leader responded: "I've never heard of anybody getting fat from eating too many bananas."

Craft is from chef-owner Tom Colicchio, who is also a judge on Bravo TV's Top Chef television show. Craft won the industry's Oscar -- the James Beard Award -- as best new restaurant nationwide in 2002.

Hardly any high-end restaurant offers the array of vegetables that craft does. There are 20 on the current menu, only four of which are starchy potatoes. And four of those 20 are exquisitely prepared mushrooms, including the heavenly hen of the woods that is seldom seen. On my last visit, the desert menu offered a mix-and-match that allowed a diner to pair a slice of pound cake with a choice of sorbet or ice cream and a wide variety of vegetables. It isn't on the current dessert menu, but there is a summer fruit option featuring blueberries, apricots, peaches and bing cherries.

Cafe Fiorello is less well known, but it's just blocks from our place on Manhattan's Upper West Side and across from Lincoln Center. It has a menu with all the standard Italian items, but what draws me there is the antipasti bar. It has a prominent place in the front of the restaurant. It's chest high and ringed with bar stools. The food is beautifully displayed on white platters of various sizes and heights. Before a show, I like to duck in and grab a stool for a light dinner.

The offerings change daily, but might include a lentil salad, fried or gratineed cauliflower, broccoli rabe, brussels sprouts, braised fennel, cipollini onions, fat grilled asparagus spears, a whole-wheat couscous salad, roasted beets and a caponata. Four about $20, you can choose four items and even have them brought to a table if your companion wants to order from the regular menu. The Restaurant Dieter Spouse can get his veal marsala, and I can get my vegetables.

We need more restaurants like these, because guess which common restaurant food contributed to weight gain? The ubiquitous French fry. Increased consumption of this food alone was linked to average weight gain of 3.4 pounds a year in each four-year period of the study.

Seen them on any restaurant menus lately?

Restaurant Industry Wants to Talk to Our Kids Without Restriction: OK or Not?

Well isn't this convenient?

Last week Wednesday, in a big ballyhooed news conference, the National Restaurant Association announced a new program called "Kids Live Well," intended to highlight meals and items that are healthier for kids. A meal (entree, side, beverage) earning the distinction would have less than than 770 mg of sodium and less than 600 calories, no more than 35% from fat.

Then on Thursday -- just one day later and certainly more quietly -- the association issued public comments calling for the withdrawal of proposed federal guidelines on marketing products to children under 17. The reason: "the principles could eliminate the marketing of healthful options to kids and adolescents."

Can the timing be any more transparent? Dear regulators: We just introduced this great program;  you no doubt have heard about it from all the media coverage. If you push these guidelines on us, we won't be able to tell kids all about this healthy food we want to serve them.

Uh right. I can see the companies all calling their ad agencies now and telling them to put a hold on the television commercials touting the grilled chicken entree with apple slices and skim milk.

Come on, get real. Marketing unhealthy items to children was a concern with cigarettes, and given the rise in obese children and Type 2 Diabetes, some restrictions on marketing to children are necessary.

Review: El Pollo Loco, Atlanta

It's so easy to catch a fast food restaurant at the worst possible moment. The floor has a spill. Several of the tables are littered with trays and discarded food. The ice tea dispenser is empty. They run out of the item you order -- after you pay the tab. They're understaffed, but the folks behind the counter seem to be re-enacting "Night of the Living Dead." A line is forming, no food comes up from the kitchen promptly and the manager, shirt partially untucked, is fiddling with the screen as if launching the last space shuttle.

Welcome to El Pollo Loco, a restaurant chain that is at least trying to make a difference when it comes to eating out healthy. Unfortunately, it  wasn't just the chicken that was crazy; this patron was as well.

The El Pollo bowl

Lunch at the restaurant seemed like a good idea, given that El Pollo Loco was among the 19 chains last week that agreed to participate in a new child nutritional program touted by the National Restaurant Association. Called "Kids Live Well," it aims to brand restaurants and items with a "seal of approval" that hope to make it easier to chose healthy food.

The visit, unfortunately, demonstrated the biggest problem with the program thus far: The 19 chains have the program at 15,000 locations nationwide. The El Pollo Loco I chose on Buford Highway in Atlanta is not among the participating restaurants. So the program's happy logo was nowhere to be found.

But El Pollo got the nod anyway. It was 2p.m., and I was crazy hungry. Plus, the chain also participates in other programs with Healthy Dining, the consulting company involved in the NRA initiative. The nutritional information posted just inside the door featured many items with Healthy Dining's approval.

I decided to get the chicken tortilla soup, minus the tortilla strips, and the Original Pollo Bowl. The soup clocked in at 140 calories, 5 grams of fat and 840 mg of sodium. Because it never arrived, I saved those calories easily enough.

The  Pollo Bowl was listed at 610 calories, 10 grams fat, and 1,750 mg of sodium (way too much), although I asked the kitchen to skip the cheese and rice in the bowl. That might have been a mistake because by the time I waited for my refund on the soup, the bowl was a lukewarm soupy mixture of beans, onions, pico de gallo and chicken chunks, garnished with chopped cilantro. Blah.

Barbecue black beans and steamed vegetables

Still feeling hungry, I went back for a side of fresh vegetables and the barbecue black beans. The former didn't exactly have the texture of great veggies, just pulled from the steamer. But they did have some texture and, at a fast food restaurant, something of a miracle. It's hard to knock them.

The black beans were 200 calories, 3 grams fat and 520 of sodium. The typically rich, earthly flavor of black beans was buried beneath a blanket of sickly sweet barbecue sauce. It seemed more like the kind of sugary baked beans one brings to the church picnic. No wonder. With 16 grams of sugar, that half-cup of black beans had more sugar than the 14 grams in an Oreo cookie.

It's tempting to grade on good intentions -- a fast food chain with steamed vegetables deserves some credit. But between the food, the experience and the sodium content, one can't honestly declare this visit to El Pollo Loco a winner.

If It's Shiny, It's Nearly Always Fat

The food in chain restaurant commercials is seductive. It is sun-soaked, or at least artificially lighted within an inch of its life to look so. It's wet, dripping with the water of vegetables freshly picked and washed.

And it is shiny. It glistens in that faux sunlight like the screen of a brand new iPad, just loosened from its pristine white box.  The mouth waters. And all that sheen adds up to...fat.

Whether it's butter or the cheapest canola oil available, restaurant food often arrives at the table with a veneer of fat. Often it's more than a mere veneer. A piece of fish can easily have a whole tablespoon of fat clinging to it on all sides. With olive oil, that's 119 calories and 14 grams of fat.

There's even a thin sheen when you've asked for it to be grilled without fat, picked up from residue on the grill itself.

On Weight Watchers, this presents a question: How to account for an undetermined amount of shine. A Weight Watchers leader told me she follows a simple rule: 1 point if its a thin sheen and 2 if it looks properly shellacked. In my loss of 50 pounds, I followed this rule scrupulously.

At a Mexican restaurant, for example, chicken or shrimp fajitas, especially if eaten with higher-fiber corn tortillas, are a good option. But they often arrive at the table sizzling in the grease. I've taken to telling the server: "Please ask the kitchen to take it out of whatever it's marinating in, run it under some water and then throw it on the grill." Try it sometime. The waiter may pretend to be confused, like you're speaking in Chinese or something, and it may well come out dripping anyway. But you can always send it back, and I have. The resulting dish doesn't suffer in flavor in the least.

So I was a little dubious recently when I stopped for another Whole Paycheck salad and saw on the salad bar a bottle of shiny brown liquid that purported to be no-fat balsamic dressing. Such items don't have to carry nutritional labeling, so one has to take it on faith. The ingredients were water, balsamic vinegar, tamari, Dijon mustard, nutritional yeast, onion powder, rosemary, thyme and garlic.

Nutritional yeast carries a small amount of fat, which may account for the shine, but very little. Lacking oil, it didn't spread through the salad the way an oily dressing does. It didn't have the silky flavor of a first-class balsamic dressing, but on the other hand, it was fine.

Chalk one up for nutritional yeast. Anyone have a recipe to replicate this dressing at home?

 

Another Weight Watchers Weigh-In, Another Disappointment

In the two weeks leading up to my monthly weigh-in as Lifetime Weight Watchers member:

Ten days of traveling. A week at a 1,500-square-foot cottage with in-laws and no fewer than five children under 11 at any one time. Cocktail hour on the dock with cheeses, dips, chips. Time for The Restaurant Dieter's Spouse to poke around in the cottage kitchen with fresh strawberries, whipped cream, flour and shortening. A trip to Portland, Ore., and dinner at a prix fixe restaurant with a set menu. A visit to Portland's famed temple to fat-and-sugar. A week at work with lunch meetings catered in. Early morning meetings that bumped my daily gym routine.

The outlook for a successful weigh-in was dire. The results weren't exactly dire, up 1.2 pounds to 203.8. But damn, do they have to come the week before I see my doctor for my annual physical? She's a little slip of a thing and will make me feel like a criminal. I wonder how much I can lose before Thursday?

Child Restaurant Initiative: Tell Them What You Think

Some of the folks behind the National Restaurant Association's new initiative to promote healthier meals for kids at chain restaurants are asking for your feedback.

Called "Kids Live Well," it's basically a "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval." It requires that all participating restaurants offer at least one meal (consisting of entree, side and beverage) for less than 600 calories, fewer than 35 percent from fat, and less than 770 mg of sodium.

My take: a worthy idea, but maddening that so many notable names in the industry that push unhealthy food (on adults and kids) are missing. Only 19 chains with 15,000 outlets nationwide are taking part. Organizers are hopeful more will.

If you leave your comments here, be sure to name names. Maybe a little public shaming will persuade McDonald's to jump in.

Baskin-Robbins: Baby Size for Dieters

Baskin-Robbins announced a new ice cream cone product that follows the smaller serving trend, according to Nation's Restaurant News.

Called Baskin-Robbins Mini Cones, they range from 35 to 100 calories, depending on the flavor selected. They're offered in customizable packs of 16 cones or pre-made using Mint Chocolate Chip, Very Berry Strawberry, Gold Medal Ribbon and Rainbow Sherbet.

Progress, I'd say.

No New Oatmeal for Us at McDonald's

New Zealand is a swell place, but a tad far away for this new McDonald's product. Perhaps it'd be a better choice than the existing oatmeal offering, which reviewers in the past have knocked.

Kids Healthy Eating Initiative Falls Short

The National Restaurant Association kicked off a new initiative Wednesday to help parents choose wisely for their kids, but boy does it fall short.

McDonald's, for one, isn't participating.

Called "Kids Live Well," it's basically a "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" for menu items. It requires that all the participating restaurants offer at least one meal (consisting of entree, side and beverage) for less than 600 calories, less than 35% fat and less than 770 mg of sodium.

It's a worthy effort, but a truly small one: Just 19 chains with a mere 15,000 locations nationwide are participating at this point. Notable by their absence are brands such as McDonald's, Taco Bell and a ton of others. Just compare it to a list of the chains doing business in the United States. It's a scandal who's sitting this one out, considering how much unhealthy food they peddle to both adults and children.

The announcement expressed hope that other chains would join the effort. No kidding. If they don't, the hundreds of laggards deserve our ire.

Review: Beast, Portland, Ore.

Spinach and sweet onion soup with lobster cream

Bravo's series of Top Chef shows has showcased several chefs who've subsequently turned up on the "must" list for The Restaurant Dieter and the TRD Spouse. On a Top Chef Masters, Anita Lo of Annisa performed so consistently week-to-week that, though she did not win, we sought out her exceptional New York restaurant. Annisa's grapefruit "soup"dessert is unmatched in my hall of fame.

This past season brought us Naomi Pomeroy of Portland's Beast. She was among the youngest of competitors, disdained the formality of the chef's jacket, consistently performed well and captivated us. Though she did not win, her French toast in an episode in which the chefs had to cook for contestants from the television show, "The Biggest Loser," looked great.

On a recent visit to Beast, we found her much as she appeared on television. Her reddish brown hair was pulled back conservatively, but she sported trademark dangly earrings and a lacy black blouse over a black tank. At the bottom of her skinny jeans were chef's clogs, tapping to the '80s music as she and her team set up for the latest of her two seatings.

Charcuterie plate

Mesquite grilled ribeye

Beast can accommodate 24 seats at two communal tables. We reserved for the 8:45 p.m. seating. Because there's no place to wait outside, we had a drink at a restaurant down the street. It apparently happens frequently, according to our waiter. We joked that the other restaurant should call itself "Pre-Fix" and offer starters to complement Pomeroy's weekly changing menu.

Eating at Beast is an act of faith. A diner gets what Pomeroy puts on on her six-course menu. And if there's any doubt, there's a note at the bottom that says, "substitutions politely declined." She wants to cook her food, and you can like it or not. No effort is made to accommodate a dieter.

That raises questions about why The Restaurant Dieter would eat there in the first place. The answer takes the form of a couple of simple questions: What could be learned by eating at the same few restaurants with healthy fare over and over again? And what incentive would restaurateurs have to improve if they received no feedback from dieters?

So on that basis: We had an awfully good meal that I can't begin to tally nutritionally. Nor would I try. At more than $200 for a couple plus tip -- one of us had the wine pairings -- this is not something one does every day. And an occasional splurge seems warranted if one eats sensibly most of the time.

The first course was a cold, spinach and sweet onion soup with a velvety cream base, a dollop of lobster cream and some sake-cured steelhead roe. It was hard to decide whether to stir all the lobster cream into the soup, or hold it in reserve as a splendid finish.

A chartcuterie plate followed with a single bite of several items. The highlights were a well-seasoned steak tartare on toast with a delicate quail's egg. The foie-gras bon-bon might just as well have been a creamy milk chocolate; it was that good. This from a diner who typically does not like foie-gras.

The main of mesquite-grilled, grass fed Carmen Ranch ribeye sat in a sauce that was too heavily salted, with a bread salad and green beans. It wasn't inedible, but overbearing. And given the addictive properties of salty food, a potential deal breaker.

Shaved kohlrabi salad with salmon

Tayberry and golden raspberry trifle

A salad of thinly-shaved kholrabi, lovage-cured salmon and a preserved lemon salsa verde was the most creative I've seen in some time. It left me wanting more, though it there was a tad too much  oil on the plate. Chastened by the "no substitutes" rule, I did not request any changes. But I imagine that the kitchen might have been willing to put the oil on the side. Next time, I'll test that.

Courses five and six were a perfectly ordinary cheese tasting and a tayberry and golden raspberry trifle with a rich malt ice cream. In a world where restaurants have abandoned cakes (other than chocolate), it was a welcome relief. The yellow cake was dense and rich, with a nice moist crumb, but light. It was a small enough portion that even a dieter could feel pretty good.

If you behave yourself most of the time and consider Beast an occasional treat, you have my full permission to go.

Healthy Restaurant News Links

Why don't I feel good about these National Restaurant Association comments on the Food and Drug Administration's proposed rules for nutritional labeling? It smacks of watering the rules down -- particularly the NRA's comments about flexibility and about using a "reasonable basis" standard for the labeling instead of the standard used on packaged foods. There are so many computer programs that make it very easy to plug in a dish's components and obtain detailed nutritional information. I do it every time I create a recipe using Weight Watchers' members only recipe builder. The industry can do it, too, I say.

This one is no surprise, right? The growth of chains such as Pinkberry and Yoforia left Cold Stone, with is huge high-fat portions, vulnerable.

Nation's Restaurant News reports on the trend of more fruit on restaurant menus.

Thank You: I'm Catching On

Just a short note to thank my readers. It's something I never got to do as a professional journalist, so I want to do it here.

Last week all the metrics that measure the success of a web enterprise really took off. Page views and unique visitors tripled. Twitter followers are growing likewise.

I've been passionate about this subject for a long time. I'm enjoying this launch. I hope to continue to earn your attention, trust and time.

More Scientific Evidence on Why Restaurant Food is Addictive

When the server delivers a plate of honey-chipolte-barbecue chicken fingers to the table, we fully intend to save half that gigantic portion to take home.

But despite the best of intentions to ask for a box, suddenly it's gone. What happened to that willpower? Why do we fail so often?

The New York Times features new research that again points out the addictive powers of fatty foods. The bodies of rats released a "marijuana-like" chemical immediately when they ingested fatty foods.

The research is just the latest to note the connection.  In his excellent book, "The End of Overeating," Former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr. David A. Kessler writes about the addictive powers of salty-fatty-sugary foods purposely engineered by the restaurant industry. The industry wants us to be satisfied and understands that the combination created foods that are hyper-palatable.

Kessler doesn't let us off the hook entirely. There are ways to conquer addiction -- just as there are with other substances. Still, it's good to know: It's not that we're morally weak or something. Folks who want to eat healthy are up against two powerful foes: their own biology and an industry bent on making us want to keep coming back for more.

Will the Restaurant Industry Really Get Serious?

Tomorrow morning, the National Restaurant Association is holding a news conference to announce a new national children's menu initiative that claims to "provide parents and children with healthful menu options when eating out."

A public relations release says that the news conference will highlight "how restaurants are helping parents by making the healthful choice the easy choice."

Note the use of the word "are." So this is happening already and the news conference is just to draw attention? Is this just a Kumbaya public relations moment for the industry -- instead of an announcement of new solutions? Or a labeling effort to make it easier to see what few items on a chain restaurant's menu are healthy?

Whatever restaurants are doing it is clearly not enough. One look at the statistics tells you that. Something dramatic needs to happen.

I take some comfort in who's joining NRA CEO Dawn Sweeney to make the announcement: Rob Bisceglie, executive director of Action for Healthy Kids and Anita Jones-Mueller, founder of Healthy Dining.

The first group is a non-profit with a record of advocacy. Its board of directors is largely composed of health and school officials. One assumes they are unlikely to front for an initiative that didn't offer something substantive.

I'm less sure about the latter company, but not ready to knock it. Healthy Dining's goals appear to mirror my own -- nudging restaurants to offer healthier fare and celebrating them when they do.

However, it's worth knowing that while I receive no compensation from the restaurant industry, Healthy Dining does. Its corporate website says it functions as a sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for menu items. I'm sure Healthy Dining would make the argument that it is working on the same issues -- but from the inside, and it would be unfair to fault that. However, the site allows a zip code search for the healthy menu items near you. But a search for my zip code turned up McDonald's, Captain D's Seafood, Longhorn Steakhouse and a bunch of other chains that -- while they have some healthy menu items -- still make the bulk of their money peddling unhealthy food.

And because I raised the topic:

For the record, The Restaurant Dieter is a guy pursuing a passion and receives no compensation. Any ads you see on my site are randomly placed there by Google Ads. Perhaps they'll generate revenue some day. But if that day comes, please know that I will not be involved in selling or placing any advertising. I'll also have no contact with any advertisers that could affect my judgment.

Speaking of judging, let's not. Let's see what tomorrow holds.

Review: Voodoo Doughnuts, Portland, Ore.



The carnage from Voodoo Doughnuts

Being a food tourist is a dangerous business. It inevitably leads to poor judgment. That's how one winds up eating a thousand calorie slice of pizza in Chicago, or a greasy cone of fish and chips in London, or a Philly cheesesteak in...Philly.

That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

Why else would a writer/blogger called The Restaurant Dieter wind up at the most talked about Portland food establishment?  Voodoo Doughnuts. This joint features a doughnut topped with maple frosting and two slices of bacon.

There is no hope of diet here, unless you count that it has vegan offerings. But diet as in low fat, low sugar? Hardly. That you can special order a coffin full of Voodoo's specialities seems apt.

Somewhere out there are Voodoo's victims, including a few folks in line that were wearing "early stroke," "early heart attack" signs as surely as their XXXL T-shirts.

But who are we to talk? The Restaurant Dieter, the TRD Spouse, his brother and sister-in-law dropped by the Voodoo Doughnuts too to get a snack before heading to the Portland Rose Gardens.

So we were just going to get a taste. You know, one little indulgence.

But standing in line for 20 minutes scanning the huge menu is an exercise in thwarted desire. So by the time we reached the counter, our order required a box. We had to have a couple of the maple bacon, of course; there were four of us after all. The cake doughnuts coated in frosting and topped with mini M&Ms looked good. The chocolate cake ones with chocolate frosting and Cocoa Puffs ("Triple Chocolate Penetration") had to be ordered, if only for the conversation value. And who could resist the peach fritter with cream cheese frosting?

Once outside, we ate in a blind fury. Ten minutes later, we surveyed the nearly empty box and canceled the Rose Gardens. We had to get back to the hotel before the sugar buzz became a sugar coma.

Oh, did I mention that the TRD Spouse and his brother were in Portland for a triathlon? And that at the race the next day, the only available food for sale to the public was...Voodoo Doughnuts?

Review: Andina, Portland, Ore.

Ceviche of passion fruit, green mango and prawns

"Everything," replied the server, who was, shall we say, on the large side?

He'd been asked "What's good, low fat, light and healthy?" This was The Restaurant Dieter's first experience with Peruvian food. The TRD Spouse had wanted to explore boho Portland's Pearl District, a gentrifying warehouse area that now sports modern furniture emporiums, $30 Woolrich T-shirts and even a place that specializes in outfitting all your sheepskin needs.

Beets, pickled vegetables and salsa verde

We'd found Andina on Yelp searching for "vegetarian," which it most certainly was not. And given the server's response and build, confidence waned.

But a lunchtime visit turned out to be a pleasant surprise. Everything was not light, low fat and healthy or vegetarian, but there were more than enough good choices.

A ceviche -- cebiche on Andina's menu -- is always a safe bet. Being able to choose from four, including a catch of the day that rotates, seemed a miracle. The green mango with passion fruit and prawns ceviche also featured some red onion and, in a lovely twist, a small corn cob, barely cooked if at all, and a chunk of sweet potato. Mixing the kernels and sweet potato chunks into the rest of the mixture added a depth to the sweet-and-hot passion fruit broth and a crunch. Although listed as a small plate, it's really enough to classify as a main in any country other than the United States.

The gnomes; piquillo peppers

An extensive list of 28 plates suitable for tasting and sharing could be ordered in three sizes: $9.50, $18 and $34. Light options included salads, tar tare, smoked fish, mussels. The grilled asparagus was nicely charred and smoky with a good kick of salt. We could have ordered the kitchen to go a light on the olive oil to make it even healthier. Two gnomes -- actually piquillo peppers stuffed with cheese, quinoa and bits of Serrano ham -- also turned out to be pretty light.

A plate of roasted red and golden beets, served with tart pickled vegetables and a mint-and-jalapeno salsa verde was the freshest take on a beet salad I've seen in years. Again, it might have been wise to ask the kitchen to go light on the olive oil.

Chicken kabobs

Given the oil quotient up to that point, I'm not sure why we misstepped by ordering the marinated chicken kabobs, served with a spicy salsa de rocoto. The word "marinated" should have been the hint. It almost always means that the dish has waded all day in a pool of fat before coming to the table.

The kabobs had a shiny oily sheen that overpowered the chicken and the salsa and almost always has to be counted as a teaspoon or two of oil. When I can remember to do so, and when I have the courage to challenge the kitchen, I'm likely to request: "Can you please ask the chef to take it out of the marinade and run it under some water before throwing it on the grill?"

In fact, lunch would have been perfect had I only remembered to tell the kitchen: Go light on the oil.

Hotel Breakfast Math: It Never Adds Up In Your Favor

This was $18 plus tax and tip? You're kidding.

Eating breakfast on the road is an exercise in what a long-ago presidential candidate once called "fuzzy math." No matter how you try to assemble a healthy breakfast, it's 20 bucks. And because Americans are value conscious, we want to get our $20 worth.

As much as I've traveled, I'm still naive enough to see if I can assemble my normal breakfast from the menu for a tab that's smaller than the buffet. Oatmeal ($8), fruit ($6), tea ($3), one egg and four egg whites (not even listed). So that's at least $17 before the eggs and the buffet is....$18.

Which means facing the buffet, which invariably holds, in ranked order of danger: made-to-order omelets loaded with meats and cheeses, fried potatoes, bagels the size of your foot with full-fat cream cheese, French toast, pancakes or waffles in a pool of butter and syrup, bacon, sausage -- what the heck, both if possible.

I'm going to copy this blog post to the Marriott Hotels & Resorts, which operates the hotel in Portland, Ore., where we're staying, in the hope that someone will respond to this question: Why are realistic a la carte prices on the menu out of the question at hotels?

I suspect an honest answer would be: "High margins on breakfasts allow us to keep the room rates down, which is what you're thinking about instead of breakfast when you book. And given that most visitors will eat lunch and dinner elsewhere, it's the only place a hotel can score a few bucks."

I can only think of one hotel stay where the breakfast gouge didn't happen. Dallas' Aloft hotel had no restaurant at all, just a food shop where cold items such as yogurt, cereal, muffins and bagels, danish, whole fruit could be purchased. A grill offered egg sandwiches on an English muffin with the usual meat and cheese fixings. The choices were limited, but on the other hand, breakfast was less than $6 a day.

Other options can be found, but they're a pain.  Sometimes it's possible to walk to a Starbucks, or there may be a diner in the area. But that means more bother than riding down on the elevator, so the $20 hotel buffet is what you're stuck with.

Unless you want to fall victim to that "well I paid for it" rationalization that invites overeating, one simply has to accept that traveling and eating breakfast usually means wasting money and fending off temptation.

Today I limited myself to a vegetable and egg white omelet, an English muffin with 3/4 ounce of peanut butter and pineapple and cantaloupe.  I figure it was about 1/2 cup of egg whites, for about 55 calories about a teaspoon of oil (despite my plea for none -- 40 calories and5 grams of fat), plus 3/4 ounce of peanut butter or 2 tablespoons for 190 calories and 16 grams of fat. On my Weight Watchers points, both the fruit and vegetables or free, so they don't count.

I wasted a ton of money, obviously, but carried out a banana for a post workout boost. And I showed good judgment, given what the rest of the day holds:  tonight is dinner at Beast, a Portland restaurant whose chef was recently featured on the Bravo TV show, Top Chef Masters, with foodie TRD spouse's equally foodie brother and wife. The place has no menu from which to choose. The menu, all six courses, is what there is to eat, like it or not.

Should be interesting.

Review: Floataway Cafe, Atlanta, Ga.

Heirloom tomato salad with a dollop of tomato sorbet



Growing up, we knew Summer was on for real when the tomato salad turned up on the menu. It had no recipe to speak of, only an insistence on seasonal ingredients: ripe tomatoes, cucumber, red onion, fresh basil. The tomates had to be homegrown, deep and red and oozing juice.

The juice was a key ingredient, for it had no dressing  -- just a few tablespoons of water and some olive oil. A few aggressive stirs of the mixture produced a juice ideal for the crusty Italian bread that was the only unseasonal ingredient in this dish.

It was a peasant food before peasant food was haute. The older generation would be shocked to discover this humble dish, slightly upscaled, as a $12 starter on the menu at The Floataway Cafe. In this case, the upscaling took the form of a savory tomato sorbet, distilled from those very same juices. But everything else was the same, down to the little portion cups of olive oil and tomato water, as I had requested that the dressing be served on the side. Its only flaw was a slight bitterness to the whole basil leaves. Next time, use a chiffonade.

This was diet food that did not taste so. It was as rich and delicately flavorful as remembered from my childhood. Perhaps the only difference was that I made do with a single piece of crusty bread to soak up the juice, not the half loaf I might have eaten.

Both I and my spouse chose this as starters. Our friend had beau-soleil oysters, itself a light and lowfat choice. That the meal ended in an orgy of dessert was a testament to what makes Floataway Cafe (est: 1998) an enduring presence on Atlanta's upscale restaurant scene. Everything is executed perfectly.

Floataway is from the stable of restaurants owned by Anne Quatrano and Clifford Harrison, who got their celebrated start in 1993 with Atlanta's Bacchanalia.
The menu, which changes daily, is diet friendly. And if it is not, then the service at least is. When my companion asked if he could substitute the braised summerland farm greens for the pommes frites, our server responded brightly, "of course." They arrived bathed in a fat of some kind, which turned them from diet to decadent. Had my companion asked for them steamed with a tad of butter on the side, I have no doubt the kitchen would have obliged.

Summer succotash

Besides the tomato salad, diet-friendly starters included a montauk bluefin tuna crudo with chilis and preserved orange and marinated roasted beets with housemade strained yogurt and avocado.

For my main, I chose the whole roasted loup de mer, served stuffed with lemon and fennel and served with a small salad of arugula. This was a fish dish that celebrated, rather than buried, the fish. A Georgia mountain trout with ratatouille looked like another good choice. My spouse had the roasted organic chicken, which might have worked for a dieter -- save that it was sitting on top of a mound of the most buttery mashed potatoes I've ever tasted.

The fresh summer succotash side was a medley of fresh limas, corn, green beans, zuchini and peppers. The green beans actually had some bite left to them. This side, too, was bathed in a buttery fat, but given the healthy nature of the rest of the meal, I let it slide.

The dessert menu had the requisite mondo-chocolate cake of some kind, a vanilla cheesecake, a toffee cake and a warm peach upside down cake. The lightest thing on the menu appeared to be the popsicle plate. Our companion went for a blueberry brown butter tart, which paired wonderfully with a lemon buttermilk sorbet. I tasted just enough to appreciate the taste, but minimize any diet damage.

My bite of cinnamon ice cream

The Restaurant Dieter Spouse went for a trio of gelati -- chocolate, vanilla and cinnamon. They came as three tiny scoops, so I had half of the cinnamon and felt pretty virtuous. It was creamy and intense, every bit as good as the Williams-Sonoma heavy cream cinnamon my spouse made during our fattest years.

Oh, and that disasterous orgy I mentioned? My spouse and companion decided they needed to taste the toffee cake with vanila gelato. I took a bite enough with just enough of the dark, rich, molten toffee to know it was dangerous and that I needed something to break the fall.

A sip of Floataway's rich French press coffee was the antidote. Like nearly everything at Floataway, it was perfect.

Healthy Restaurant News Links

For the dieting restaurant patrons among us:

• KFC relaunches its grilled chicken sandwich, according to Nation's Restaurant News. If the nutritional information on the website is up-to-date, it's pretty good, although typically high in sodium.
•  Sometimes the good guys do win, says NRN. The president of Tossed salad chain wins honors.
• Customers at fast food chains talk thin, but eat fat, says Consumer Reports.