GadlingTV’s Travel Talk – Thailand Part 1: The First 48 Hours

by Stephen Greenwood on

Gadling TV’s Travel Talk, episode 31 – Click above to watch video after the jump

Travel Talk is back! After our fall hiatus we are excited to bring you our greatest adventure yet: Thailand.

From the vibrant heart of Bangkok to the remote countryside, we traveled by foot, car, boat, motorbike, ox cart and elephant to savor the the splendor of ancient temples, the energy of the muay thai ring, the serenity of rural life, and every single spicy bite of Thai cuisine. We’ll be bringing it all to you in the coming weeks as part of our special 12-part feature: Travel Talk Thailand.

In this first episode, we start off our odyssey at full throttle: going a full 48 hours on nothing but jet engine addled sleep as we travel from LAX to BKK, settle into thai life, prepare for our dinner with the Prime Minister and get our first full dose of Bangkok nightlife.

If you have any questions or comments about Travel Talk, you can email us at talk AT gadling DOT com.


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Hosts: Stephen Greenwood & Aaron Murphy-Crews
Special guest: Joom!
Produced, Edited, and Directed by: Stephen Greenwood & Aaron Murphy-Crews
Special thanks: Tourism Authority of Thailand, Thai Air, Conrad Bangkok

Travel Talk took Thailand by storm on invitation from the Tourism Authority of Thailand. No editorial content was guaranteed and Aaron & Stephen were free to openly share all adventures that they embarked upon.

Killer B: Why You Should Ignore the New Letter Grading System for New York Restaurants

by David Farley on
A specter is haunting New York restaurants. An eight-by-ten placard sporting a big letter–A, B, or C–has put the fear in the hearts of chefs and restaurateurs around the city. As reported by Gadling last summer, letter grades issued by the Department of Health have begun appearing in restaurant windows, announcing to passersby and potential diners the hygiene grade the restaurant scored on its last inspection.

Good idea, right? The New York Times reported last week that nearly 60 percent of the city’s 24,000 restaurants have an “A” grade. But what of those eating establishments that have a lowly “B” or “C” grade? The Department of Health imported the idea from Los Angeles, where I grew up. You steered clear of restaurants with a B or lower, assuming that the kitchens must be dens of filth, crawling with unsavory creatures. And so I was all in favor of the letter grades following me from the West Coast. That is, until I started doing a bit of research and realized that a “B” grade in a restaurants wasn’t as frightening as it appears. You should ignore the new letter grading system for New York restaurants. Here’s why.

Let’s rewind three years to February 2007. That’s when someone captured on video a bevy of rats making themselves at home in a KFC in Greenwich Village. The copious amount of press it attracted forced the DOH’s hand and they began clamping down, popping into restaurants with more frequency. Two and a half years later they decided on the Los Angeles-style letter grades.

The overall point of the letter grades is transparency. Previously, in New York you had to log on to the Department of Health’s website if you wanted to find out what a restaurant’s score was at the last inspection.


Now that violations will result in a big fat scarlet letter affixed to the front of the restaurant, chefs aren’t taking any chances. In fact, they’re being too safe. Many are freezing ingredients when they didn’t before, for example, as well as making other compromises to their approach to ingredients that the wouldn’t have done before.

“The problem,” Steve Crane, the owner of Greenwich Village Italian restaurant Po, told me, “is that the DOH can go around until they find a violation.” Case in point: Po received a “B” when the inspector noticed the hose attached to the espresso machine was dripping water into a bucket, not into an actual drain. Surely, a violation. But surely not one that’s going to compromise the cleanliness of the food. Yet when potential diners see a “B” stuck to the window, they may think the worst.

That’s the concern of Andrew Rigie, director of the New York State Restaurant Association, who says that he’s concerned the grades can be misleading. “Either a restaurant is safe to serve food or they’re not. A or F. In no way is the restaurant industry trying to mislead the public. But we don’t want to turn people away because they see a B or C. When, in actuality, a B or C is safe, according to the DOH, to eat at.”

All that said, the New York State Restaurant Association, which was initially opposed to the letter grades, has told restaurants to keep mum about their criticisms of the letter grades in the spirit of diplomacy. Which maybe explains why several chefs and restaurateurs told me how much they hated the letter grades, but wouldn’t go on the record to voice their complaints.

So next time you’re in New York and the restaurant you had your heart set on has a big fat “B” displayed in the window, it’s not as eyebrow-raising as it might seem. It’s not because there were rats running around the front room; it’s more like the trash can in the corner of the kitchen didn’t have a cover or the espresso machine wasn’t dripping into a proper drain.

Scotland asks U.S. to lift haggis ban

by Sean McLachlan on

The Scottish government has invited a delegation from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to Scotland in a bid to lift the ban on haggis imports.

In an interview with the BBC, Scotland’s Rural Affairs Secretary Richard Lochhead said he wants to show the officials that haggis is made in a safe and sanitary manner.

Earlier this year we reported that the ban on haggis was being lifted. This ban was put in place on UK meat products in 1989 thanks to the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a.k.a. mad cow disease. The ban on UK meat was indeed lifted, but our report on haggis turned out to be premature, because in ensuing years the U.S. government had added a ban on imports of food containing sheep lungs, a key ingredient in traditional haggis.

Now the Scots are trying to get that last hurdle out of the way. Mr. Lochhead says the U.S. market for haggis could be huge. Think how many expat Scots, Scottish-Americans, and wannabe Scots there are in the good old U S of A. Just the number of people trying it once out of curiosity could add up to millions of dollars in sales.

He believes that if U.S. agriculture officials saw the high standards of food processing in Scotland, they’d give sheep lungs a break and allow them for human consumption.

Personally, I don’t like haggis, but that’s just me. I think that the more ethnic foods are available to the consumer, the better.

[Photo courtesy user Kaishu via Wikimedia Commons]

Bluefin tuna sells for $400,000, a record times two

by Jon Bowermaster on

For a variety of reasons –primarily overfishing and hoarding — I’ve been predicting for the past couple years that within the next decade we will see a bluefin tuna sold in Japan for $500,000, even $1 million.

Looks like we won’t have to wait that long.

At the annual first-day of the new year sale at Tokyo’s monstrous Tsukiji Central Fish Market a new record for a single fish was set: $396,000 for a 754 pound bluefin.

The fish, caught off the Japanese island of Hokkaido has no special ju-ju. It won’t taste any better than any of the other 538 bluefin sold at the market on the same day, at one of its two daily morning auctions. The record price equates to $527 per pound of meat.

It is special only because it was the first sold in 2011. The first day the market is open in the New Year is known as the “celebratory market.” In a nation that lives for seafood – the Japanese consume 80 percent of the Atlantic and Bluefins caught each year – being first clearly counts for a lot.

A pair of restaurant owners from Tokyo and Hong Kong bought this big fish. They are trusting that their biggest clients and strangers alike will wait in long lines outside their stylish Tokyo sushi bar or one of several Hong Kong-based chain sushi restaurants for a taste of the first-of-the-year-fish and be willing to be upwards of $100 per bite for the chance.
“What a relief I was able to buy this fish,” Ricky Cheng, owner of the Itamae Sushi chain, part of Hong Kong’s Taste of Japan group, told reporters gathered at the market for the spectacle. “We wanted to get it for good luck, even if we lose money.” His partner in the purchase owns a high-end sushi bar in Tokyo’s high-end Ginza district.

Ironically the World Wildlife Fund has been pressuring the chain to stop serving all bluefin at Cheng’s restaurants and demanding it not participate in the “symbolic bidding.”

Several coordinated governmental efforts were made in 2010 to slow the catch of bluefin. They largely failed, leaving the big, speedy fish closer to extinction, in large part due to Japan’s voracious appetite and keen lobbying skills.

Watching all this activity from the sidelines is the Mitsubishi Company, which controls an estimated forty percent of all sales of bluefin in Japan. Some is put on the market, some it goes straight into giant freezers. The company is counting on the day when bluefin will no longer be available in the wild and the only stocks remaining will be frozen.

That’s when I predict we’ll see the $1 million bluefin.

Photo of the day – Lunch in Serbia

by Meg Nesterov on


One of the best parts of traveling is indulging in a few vices. The “hey, I’m on vacation!” attitude enables you to order dessert, have a glass of wine with lunch, and not worry about the calories you’re taking in, especially as you figure you’ll burn them off walking around museums or hiking the countryside. This photo by Flickr user eolone in Serbia shows some of the best travel food groups: the sausage group, the fried group, even the “hey, I’m in Europe!” tobacco group. Just switch out the water for a beer and you’d have the perfect guilt-free (for now) vacation meal.

Enjoy any food vices on your last trip? Take a photo for our Gadling Flickr group and it could be our next Photo of the Day!