Shanxi International Noodle Cultural Festival

by Gadling Staff on

Each week, Gadling is taking a look at our favorite festivals around the world. From music festivals to cultural showcases to the just plain bizarre, we hope to inspire you to do some festival exploring of your own. Come back each Wednesday for our picks or find them all HERE.

It isn’t known if Marco Polo stole the secrets of noodle making from China when he traveled the Silk Road, but in Taiyuan, Shanxi, China, during the first week of September of every year, it no longer matters. Chinese noodle makers have been plying their trade for 2,700 years, and at the Shanxi International Noodle Cultural Festival they show off their skills and invite noodle chefs from around the world to do the same.

Besides the wonderful food, noodle chefs in Shanxi are great performers as well. The best noodle restaurants in Taiyuan are willing to give anyone that spends enough money a show, but the first week of September is when they truly shine.

Want to learn more about China’s most delicious noodle festival? Keep reading below.

The Noodle Festival, as the locals call it, is held in restaurants all over the city, as well as along the streets in the city’s center. But most of the focus is on Yingze Park, the huge park in the middle of the city where vendors line the paths giving noodle demonstrations, or on Shi Ping Jie (Food Street), a cramped and colorful alley full of restaurants hawking noodles and other local fare.

Perhaps the best part of the Shanxi Noodle festival is trying the region’s special noodle dishes. Shanxi’s most famous noodle specialty, Dao Xiao Mian (Knife Shaved Noodles) has a very unique history. It is said that during the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368), people were not allowed to own knives. Ten families would share control of a single knife, and if someone wanted to use it they had to wait their turn. One hungry father, tired of waiting for his dinner, grabbed a thin piece of iron and just started shaving away. Shanxi cooks have been using that method ever since.

Yingze Hotel, one of the better hotels in the city, is located directly between the park and the street that the festival is focused on and enjoys the reputation of having a wonderful noodle restaurant attached as well. Taiyuan has a number of ancient parks and temples, so there are plenty places to visit while waiting for the noodles to digest.

Think you know Chinese food? Think again. Shanxi’s unique noodle festival will surprise and delight food-lovers everywhere. This year’s festival will be held September 10-12.

SkyMall Monday: Edge Baking Pan vs. Giant Cupcake Pan

by Mike Barish on

Here at SkyMall Monday, we love to eat. We’ll eat hot dogs, pizza or any other foods that SkyMall wants to shove down our gullets. But after those healthy meals, we like to indulge in the sweet stuff. From cakes to crepes, brownies to blondies and ice cream to crème caramel, we just want dessert. However, when it comes to SkyMall, two devices have long battled for sugary supremacy. Now, however, we will settle that dessert debate once and for all. This week, SkyMall Monday pits the Edge Baking Pan against the Giant Cupcake Pan. It’s the Battle of the Desserts and your votes in our poll will settle once and for all which device is SkyMall’s greatest contribution to the confectionery universe.Our first competitor weighs in at $39.95. The Edge Baking Pan is for the brownie lovers who enjoy the firm, crisp edges of a well-baked brownie. What you lose in gooey middles you gain in chewy, overcooked edges. Brownies not your thing? The product description shows you how versatile the Edge Baking Pan truly is:

You’ll also love the results with quick breads, cobblers and lasagna because they bake evenly, no burnt edges or gooey centers.

Zig-zagging lasagna that’s crispy and not gooey? Sign me up. I mean, who wants moist lasagna? Dried out pasta and burnt cheese are how they make it back in the old country. Or at least that’s what Sophia told me.

Or next competitor is looking lean and mean at $29.95. The Giant Cupcake Pan takes all the fun of a cupcake – the fact that it’s a small, personal cake that you enjoy by yourself – and blows it up to a big, communal cake that you share with others. It’s everything you want in a cupcake when you don’t want a cupcake but want a cake instead but also want a cupcake. Confused? Read the product description, moron:

This whimsical cake will be the hit of the party!

The USDA recommends that you get 300 grams of whimsy everyday. The Giant Cupcake Pan provides you with that recommended daily allowance. It may also make you diabetic.

So, what say you, lovers of SkyMall? Vote for your favorite SkyMall dessert device below. I may just have to test the winner to see if victory does, in fact, taste sweet.

%Poll-46963%

Check out all of the previous SkyMall Monday posts HERE.

Travel Trends: Airlines spending less on food in 2010, but are healthier options around the corner?

by Gadling Staff on

Given the harsh economic conditions in the airline industry and the hyper-competitive market, it’s not surprising to find that the top US airlines have cut back the average amount of money spent on passenger meals.

According to the US Government’s Department of Transportation, from a high of almost $6 per person in 1991, to an average cost of $3.58 per passenger in 2009, the costs per person for food expenses has decreased by roughly $2.60. (NOTE: the chart above shows a forecasted figure of only $3.07 per passenger in 2010 — which would be an all-time low.)

Of course, not all airlines are created equal. Some pay a little more per passenger for food, like Alaska Air, while others invest next to nothing (we’re looking at you, Southwest). However, while not all carriers are the same, they all face the same challenge – how to manage food and service costs while at the same time giving customers what they want.

In the last few years, some carriers have been actively trying to change their airline food service while others are touting a low cost, no-frills approach; this partially explains the wide divide among carriers and the periods where spending increases.

What’s next for airline food?
Gregg Rapp, from Menu Technologies, has over twenty-five years of experience working with Casinos, the Cruise Ship Industry, and various restaurants. Rapp says:

How we present menus and healthy foods to kids from a marketing perspective can influence how our kids perceive healthy foods. Many of the airlines list their menus in the sky magazine. They could do much with the descriptions and placement to make this more appealing to kids and adults, including using the web to create characters and branding for the value of eating healthy.

Rapp recommends reading Mindless Eating from Cornell University’s Dr. Brian Wansink as an excellent way to understand how we pick up our cues on what to eat. Wansink is a Stanford Ph.D. and the director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab and has spent a lifetime studying hidden cues that determine how much and why people eat.

Vanessa Horwell, the Chief Visibility Officer at TravelInk’d, a PR and communications firm for the travel industry, tells us:

There are some huge developments taking place in airline food. In traditional airline foodservice, there is what is known as ‘junking’. This is the wasted food from the plane which actually costs more to dispose of than the cost of the meal itself and is a significant cost/overhead burden.

As carriers look ways to reduce costs, they are looking to technology for tighter controls on inventory, and targeting their offerings to what passengers actually want. Horwell continues:

Airlines are trying to deliver higher quality foods, and trying to shun the image of nondescript foods packaged in plastic containers. There is a lot of innovation through partnering with the restaurant industry and carriers teaming up with restaurant chains and chefs to “co-brand” their menus. This in turn has great appeal to a traveling public that is already familiar with a food or restaurant brand and can expect quality and consistency; an example is Air Canada where they serve Quiznos. It is a familiar brand and there is consistency across their network. Customers can now order their food vouchers directly in the booking path with their flight, and savvy airlines will be marketing their “celebrity chef” branded content at that time to encourage customers to book and order food ahead of time.

Airline food gets healthier, salads leading the way
Recently, Tom Douramakos, chief executive of GuestLogix, a company based in Toronto that makes the hand-held devices and software used by most North American carriers for in-flight sales, said carriers generated a net profit of only 5 or 10 cents on a $10 sale of in-flight food.

Douramakos’s Executive VP of Global Sales Brett Proud, tells Gadling, “Hand-held devices and software are making a huge difference with airline costs and customer service in the airline food industry.”

GuestLogix first started in 2006 by working with American Airlines. They used 3000 hand-held devices to use as a cash register on board, while also using the software behind the scenes to help the airlines provision the right products for each specific flight as a response to a changing trend. Since then, they have developed long term contracts with many of the domestic, European and Asian carriers.

Proud says, “About 8 or 9 years ago, services such as food, baggage, and even drinks were included in the price of a ticket, but in the last decade or so, the model has changed and the service package has become unbundled. Things like food, entertainment, and baggage are being billed separately.”

For the carriers that offer them, the top-selling item on board, is always some type of salad.

Those carriers in the top 10th of their service group are making roughly $.70 – .90 more per passenger

Currently, the Benchmarked Food product mix is about 42% fresh food items and 58% snacks, with a trend moving towards the healthier items.

By managing wastes and improving forecasting, airlines can afford to offer better quality, which is right in line with the feedback customers are giving them — they don’t want peanuts or cookies, they want a reasonably-priced healthy salad, a fresh sandwich or cheese and cracker platter.

Of the current GXI airlines, the top 10th Percentile Product Mix is 15% fresh food and 85% snacks.

The impetus to change can be seen in the last pie chart, indicating that of the 15% of the current top 10th percentile product mix, fresh food sales make up 85% of total revenues.

Today, globally, against all on-board revenues, junking costs are running 2% to 7%, making a great case for better provisioning, better in-flight cost management (where attendants can reduce prices later in the day to keep product moving), and offering the right mix of products, preferably pre-ordered that customers want.

This airline travel trend may show an increase in cost but also an increase in quality, service and more healthy options.

Data Sources:

CNN, Michelle Obama Obesity Campaign, 2/9/2010
GuestLogix
In Flight Food Tries to be Tasty“
Menu Technologies
Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Form 41 Financials

See more Travel Trends.

Treme and the “Magic” Food of New Orleans

by David Farley on

The new HBO show Treme is getting a lot of attention. Not just because it is produced by David Simon, who brought us The Wire, which some TV critics (both professional and aspirants) have deemed the best TV show, ever; not just because America has a fascination with New Orleans, the closest city in the country that feels like the amusement parks we have come to confuse with reality; and not just because Americans like funny fat guys (John Goodman is one of the stars). But to a lesser extent because of the food references and food controversies that have snuck into the show.

In the first episode, which takes place in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a chef runs out of dessert to serve and pulls out from her purse a pre-packaged Hubig’s pie. She hands it to her colleague and says to “dress it up.”

Of course, locals were quick to point out that Hubig’s pies weren’t available at that point in the city’s deluged post-apocalyptic environment. David Simon wrote an open letter to the city’s “fact-grounded literalists” that the pie was, in fact, a “Magic Pie,” a metaphor, likening it to the hocus pocus of materializing bread and fish in the New Testament.

It all got me thinking about the last time I was in New Orleans. It was Spring 2005, just a few months before the hurricane would hit, and my first (and only) time in the Big Easy. I didn’t want to stumble through the French Quarter holding a toxic, barely-drinkable concoction inside a plastic toy-like cup; I didn’t want any colorful beads; I didn’t even want anyone to show me their breasts. That is, unless they were chicken breasts. I came to eat. And in Biblical proportions. New Orleans, of course, is as famous for its debauchery, both in drink, merriment and in food. In fact, the cuisine here is so rich and artery hardening, restaurants should start replacing the after-dinner mint with a Lipitor.

Since it was our first time, my wife and I hit all the famous places: we split a catcher’s-mitt-sized meat-crammed muffuletta (olive salad, capicola, salami, mortadella, emmenntaler, and provolone all stuffed between two pieces of bread) at Central Grocery; we dined on staggeringly heart-stalling fare like Huitres a la Foch (fried oysters on toast buttered with foie gras and smothered in a rich Colbert sauce) at Antoine’s; we even trekked way out to Uptown to a place called Cooter Brown’s Tavern where we consumed dozens of raw oysters and tried to use the word “shuck” as frequently as possible.

And while I generally liked what I was eating, I hadn’t had a mouth-watering religious experience I’d hoped for. Maybe we hadn’t been going to the right places, I wondered. So on the morning of our final day, I read an article in the newspaper that the legendary restaurant Uglesich’s was finally going to turn off its burners for good. And despite balking a couple times at shuttering in the past, this time was for real.

Opened in 1924 by Croatian émigré Sam Uglesich, the Garden District restaurant soon built up a reputation for holier-than-though local fare like fried soft shell crab, fresh shrimp, plump oysters, and po’ boy sandwiches. Locals favored it for the fresh ingredients, not frozen seafood like some of the more famous guidebook-friendly restaurants had started using. Lines snaking around the corner were customary.

So, I wasn’t surprised when we walked up and saw the line going out the door. But when I walked around the corner, I was disheartened to see it went around another corner, deep into the parking lot. Jessie and I had four hours to get a bus to the airport so we figured we’d just spend our last remaining time waiting to eat. We got in line and after a few minutes, drinks began arriving. Strong, boozy cocktails. I met Steve, in line behind us, a computer programmer from San Jose. And Jerry, a local who had been coming here for years. Soon enough we were toasting. It didn’t even matter that the minute hand on my watch was moving much faster than the line.

A few hours later, we’d moved up in line, but barely enough to even see the door. It was a decisive moment. It was the time we would have to leave to catch the bus to the airport. But as I watched pot-bellied diners stumble out of the restaurant, deeply satisfying post-prandial looks on their faces, I decided we should take the chance. When we finally got inside, it was pure havoc: kitchen workers scrambling around, orders being screamed out, and diners furiously consuming saucy dishes at the formica-topped tables. And then suddenly ancient Anthony Uglesich, the patriarch of the family restaurant, who’s grey and balding and built like a beer can, was staring at me, pen and paper in hand, awaiting our order.

By the time our food came, we had minutes to jump in a cab and plead with the driver to break speeding laws. Sitting with our new friends, Bob and Jerry, the tabletop was crammed with something that looked like a shrimp version of Monty Python’s famous Spam skit: There was the Asian-inspired Volcano Shrimp, Shrimp Uggie, the Asian-Creole voodoo shrimp, spicy Angry Shrimp, crab meat-stuffed shrimp, something called Paul’s Fantasy (trout topped with, you guessed it, shrimp) and, finally, crawfish-laced etouffee. Jessie and I, with an eye on the clock, piled the food in our mouth.

We did make our flight. Barely. The last passengers to board. On the plane I had a few hours of idle time to think about what I’d just eaten-each dish had a bold, rich flavor and was clearly the best meal of the long weekend-I wondered why the food was so satisfying. Was it really that good? Or was it the “magic” of travel-to borrow the food phrase form David Simon-that made the food taste better? Was it enhanced by the experience of travel, which tends to allows us to exoticise and fetishize even the most mundane things, activities, and experiences in the place we’re visiting?

I’ll never know. Uglesich’s really did close for good after that weekend. And, four months later, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, which would have certainly inspired the Uglesich family it was time to hang up the apron and move on to more idle, less magical things.

David Farley is author of An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town.

The 8 weirdest foods Andrew Zimmern has eaten (video)

by Gadling Staff on

Bald-headed and brazen, Andrew Zimmern takes culinary risk-taking to new heights on his Travel Channel show, Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern. Zimmern has traveled the streets of Nicaragua to the state fairs of Minnesota to find the craziest edibles on earth. We cringe when we see him chowing down on iguana eggs, reindeer pizza and pig stomach tacos — but he does it with such zeal that we keep tuning in. With the show’s fourth season premiering on April 26, it’s a great time to revisit some of Andrew’s strangest meals. Put down that sandwich and check out these eight clips below.

Squirrel Brains
When Zimmern visited Appalachia, he knew he was in for some down-home oddities. But at a restaurant as fancy as Ember in Snowshoe, West Virginia, the ultimate comfort food is chicken-fried squirrel.

Live Soup
In South Korea, Zimmern digs into a soup that wiggles until the last second. Talk about fresh!

Cow Urine
That’s right, cow urine. This short and, well, not-so-sweet clip shows Zimmern knocking back a glass of the stuff in Goa.

Spleen Sandwich
When you think Italian, you think spaghetti and meatballs — but probably not Spleen. But in Sicily, Zimmern sprinkles his spleen sandwich with cheese.

Baby Piglet
This clip from a Los Angeles restaurant might make you go vegetarian. Zimmern raves about the taste, but all we can see is a whole cooked piglet on the table.

Fish Eye
No cooking necessary when Zimmern visits Samoa. Just tear the fish’s eye from the socket, and enjoy.

Shark Meat
In Iceland, taking a bite out of Jaws is nothing new. Zimmern says the meat “smells like ammonia,” but tastes “sweet” and “nutty.”

Mystery Meat
Sometimes, the fear of the unknown can be worse than eating the strangest dish. Despite the “putrid, foul stench” Zimmern notes while eating “K’Lia” in Morocco, he still suffers through.

Looking for more Andrew Zimmern and Bizarre Foods on Gadling? Check out interviews with Andrew HERE and HERE.

Related:
* 8 great bug-eating videos from around the world
* 10 great Anthony Bourdain “No Reservations” clips