While there have been a number of pioneers and inventors who have revolutionized the spirits industry, too often the women who have made spirits history are excluded, or the importance of their contributions are diminished. In this post, we would like to highlight the brilliance and ingenuity of the many women who have led to the vibrant spirits culture that we now live in.
Mary Hebraea
The first alchemist
Without the work of Mary Hebraea in the 1st Century, the world may never have experienced the spirit at all. Hebraea, an alchemist, is often credited with having invented the first alembic still, which is a still wherein vapor is carried through a tube from a heated vessel into a cooling vessel where it recondenses into liquid. This distillation method is, in principle, the very foundation of the spirits industry. Anyone who loves a stiff drink owes much to Hebraea’s invention.
Helen Cumming
Pioneer in distaff distillation
Helen Cumming was not an inventor, but she was a fierce fighter for the love of spirits during an era when the high taxes on their production were illicitly avoided. In the 1800s Cumming worked the stills at Cardow Farm, owned by her and her husband John. Cumming was known for craftily avoiding the excise men who had come to cut the couple’s profits: she would bake bread to cover the yeasty smell of fermentation, often inviting the tax collectors in for tea and scones, and even invented a flag-based signalling system to alert fellow distilleries of the presence of government officials.
Queen Victoria
Her Majesty of Scotch Whisky
Queen Victoria, who reigned for the last 63 years of the 19th Century, was notoriously fond of Scotch whiskey. Her passion for it, as well as her popularizing the now common Scotch & soda mixed drink, led to the decline of Cognac as the most popular spirit and the rise of the whiskey-dominated market we see today. Without her support, the Scotch industry would undoubtedly be much more marginal than it is now. In addition, Queen Victoria serves as the icon of Bombay Sapphire due to her leadership at the time of its distillery’s first formulation.
Pauline Morton Sabine
The Society Queen Who Dethroned Prohibition
Though it might seem strange to include a fierce backer of Prohibition on this list, Pauline Morton Sabin switched sides when she realized how ineffective actually-existing Prohibition really was: after supporting heavy restrictions on alcohol in public, politicians would frequently toast with alcoholic beverages behind closed doors. Bootleggers and other nefarious business dealings troubled her, as well. Resigning from the Republican National Committee, she founded the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform which served a vital role in the eventual repeal of Prohibition. Without her change of heart we might still live in a dry country.
Gertrude ‘Cleo’ Lythgoe
Queen of Rum Row
Gertrude Lythgoe is one of the most famous bootleggers of the Prohibition era. Upon the announcement of Prohibition, Lythgoe moved from her New York home to the Bahamas where she dominated in a male-driven industry. She was renowned for her intellect and beauty, but also for her fierce actions: when men believed they could disrespect her, she would haul them to her office and make clear that they could desist or take a bullet. Primarily a smuggler of whiskey, she was once charged with importing over 1,000 cases into New Orleans but managed to secure her acquittal.
Rita Cowen
The mother of Japanese whisky
Rita Cowan is the woman who is single-handedly responsible for the entire Japanese whiskey trade. She met her future husband, Masataka Taketsuru, while studying at Glasgow University and he asked her for her help and knowledge in producing Scotch-style whiskey in his native Japan. The two were married in 1920 and moved to Japan shortly thereafter. Their venture was a huge success, and Cowan is now often referred to as the “mother of Japanese whiskey.”
To all these women who have made spirits history and to those who have yet to make their mark, cheers to you!
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DiningOut, along with excited foodies from the Denver/Boulder area, has been eagerly tracking Via Perla’s path to opening for months and they just got their hands on a key piece of the puzzle: Via Perla’s menu.
Now open, the third concept from The Walnut Restaurant Group, famous for Brasserie Ten Ten and The Mediterranean, you can ogle the descriptions of dishes in advance. In addition to a weekly-changing family-style dinner served on Sundays, here are some dishes from the opening menu of Via Perla.
Antipasti
Olive Fritte
Fried, anchovy-stuffed green olives
Ricotta
Housemade ricotta with lemon zest, thyme, Paniole 2015, and grilled ciabatta
Crudo
Hamachi, pickled radishes, red grapefruit, Calabrian chiles, and pink peppercorns
Polpette
Pork-veal meatballs, tomato sugo, basil pesto, currants, and pinoli
Carciofi alla Giudia
Roman-style fried artichokes, garlic, fonduta, and anchovy-focaccia crumbs
Zuppa e Insalata
Cacciucco
Tuscan seafood stew with seasonal fish, clams, and green olive tapenade, served with grilled ciabatta
Cavolo alla Griglia
Grilled Savoy cabbage, toasted hazelnuts, piave, garlic fonduta, brown butter, and balsamico
For the Primi and Secondi dishes that Via Perla will be offering, see the full article on DiningOut→
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Now that it’s almost spring and the weather is getting warmer, it’s the perfect time to travel. Don’t worry though, going on your next vacation doesn’t have to mean breaking the bank. There are ways to travel on a budget and still have a great time. That’s why we’re sharing the tips to make your dream vacation happen without emptying your bank account.
Do a lot of research on your travel destination
Google the places you’re interested in going to and find which sounds the best and most affordable.
Check out AAA for information on destinations and accommodations.
When you choose a location, buy a used guidebook – it might have some good tips in it!
Join as many loyalty programs as possible to get discounts on hotels and accommodations.
Ask friends who have traveled to the same location for their thoughts.
Find ways to save on your accommodations
Check with your credit card company to see if you have rewards or discounts on hotels.
If you are traveling to a well-known city, stay outside the city limits. It’ll be cheaper, and you’ll get a more culture-rich experience.
If you are traveling with more than one person, consider splitting the cost of a two-room suite rather than two separate hotel rooms.
Look for hotels that include free breakfast. Even if it just a bagel and some fruit, it is one less meal that you have to pay for during the day and you can even snag stuff to-go (shhh!).
Look accommodations with kitchens. This way you can save money by cooking some of your own meals, but still experience the cuisine by using local products.
Pack some of your favorite on-the-go snacks that travel easily. This way you won’t splurge on something expensive because you’re starving.
If there’s a to-die-for, but pricey restaurant, go for lunch rather than dinner. You will get a lot of the same service, but the food will be cheaper.
Find the best deals on events and must-see sites
Connect with locals who are happy to show you around for free instead of booking expensive tour guides.
Once you get to your destination, go to the welcome or tourist centers to gather more information, and maybe discounts, on events and sightseeing.
Walk instead of paying for transportation. Not only will you get more exercise, but you can see a lot more locations and save money!
When done right, traveling does not have to cost a lot. With a little extra preparation and some deal hunting, you can get away without breaking the bank. So, start planning your next vacation asap, use these tips to save money, and get some of that R and R that you deserve!
The endless hours between lunch and dinner are painful enough as it is—made even worse when you’re traveling and away from your kitchen. Whether you’re actually hungry or just need something to munch on to pass the time, tap into the food-oriented brains of some top chefs for their best snacking practices.
Don’t pack lightly
For everything from road trips to air travel, Fung Tu’s Jonathan Wu packs his go-to breakfast sandwich: a toasted poppy seed bagel with a fried egg, avocado and pimentos.
Stella Barra chef Jeff Mahin brings individual nut butter-honey packets, citing the protein and sugar combo as the perfect pick-me-up. But remember that if you’re airport bound, you’ll have to keep liquids to a minimum, which is why he also brings snack packs of trail mix. What else will you find in his carry-on? Dried meat. “I have a soft spot for beef jerky.”
Try the DIY lifestyle
Granola bars are generally delicious, and there’s no beating the convenience, but boxes of granola bars can get expensive. So, be like Mahin and make your own. He purées a mixture of soaked oats, almond milk, almond butter, raisins, cinnamon and vanilla, then boils it before letting it set in a baking dish.
Like Mahin, chef Brian Landry of New Orleans restaurant Borgne is a fan of beef jerky on road trips, specifically, the kind that’s homemade by one of his sous chefs.
Miss Lily’s executive chef Adam Schop makes a mean Chex mix, using pick-a-pepper sauce over Worcestershire for a Jamaican twist.
Find your inner junkie
Rule number one of vacation: travel calories don’t count. Schop says when he’s on the road, he craves Samoas, the classic Girl Scout cookie. And though nowadays Wu travels with KIND bars and other granola snacks, that wasn’t always the case.
“As a kid when traveling with just my Dad, we had many ‘breakfasts’ on trains consisting solely of pizza-flavored Combos!”
Mahin totes around snack-size packets of Nutella, a trick that “makes it easier to justify than eating an entire regular-size jar.”
Landry feels the same way, saying his guilty pleasure is a quality bar of chocolate. “Preferably with almonds or sea salt.”
Embrace the surroundings
While it’s tempting to try and bring all your favorite snacks from home, traveling is the perfect time to try new foods.
Though Landry always tries gulf seafood (“I love seeing what people in other parts of the country are doing with the product caught right at my back door”), he also likes to try different flavored potato chips like jamon, crab and octopus.
“I try my best to eat like the locals,” Wu says. That’s how he discovered—and fell in love with—Sino-Indian food while traveling in India.
Mahin agrees: “I like finding honest food in cities.” The roadside shack could end up being a hidden gem—maybe even your next travel destination itself.
Dining Out, a print and web-based publication that delivers the latest culinary world news and our new media partner (yay!), recently published a great article about rising technology in the restaurant industry. Here are a few of the highlights…
Wine list goes digital: Wine-centric restaurants are switching from printed wine lists to the digital variety, usually hosted on an iPad or tablet of some sort. Since the first occurrence in Atlanta restaurant Bones back in 2010, many have followed suit because digital wine lists not only allow customers to access more information, but also make it easier for the restaurant to make content changes.
Checks delivered straight to your smartphone: Reservation companies like OpenTable, which work from a central point-of-sales system in each restaurant, now allow servers to push checks through the same system directly to the customer’s app.
Servers replaced by digital ordering interface: Chain restaurants are introducing tableside terminals and tablets for ordering, which similar to the digital wine list, gives restaurants flexibility with their menus as well as an easy way for customers to redeem promotions. The trade-off is the lack of hospitality, a main part of the restaurant experience that many believe will be missed if this trend goes mainstream.
Waitlist apps that shorten wait time: Apps like Waitlist Me and NoWait are making it more convenient for customers to wait for tables. While some just provide text message alerts that allow customers to go off site during the wait, others are completely remote, providing the ability to put your name on the list from home.
Digitized taphouses let you pour your own: Cutting down on labor costs and giving customers a unique experience, taphouses like Denver’s First Draft lets guests pour their own craft beer and wine by swiping a magnetic card for every round. Unlike the digital ordering interfaces mentioned above, First Draft is keeping hospitality at a premium with Beer Ambassadors to help customers choose from their 40+ beer and wine options. If you’re interested in joining their team, check out First Draft’s open jobs on Sirvo.
Read the full article for a closer look at technology in the restaurant world.
“Oh man, last night’s service… we were so weeded! Food’s dying on the pass. The rail is jammed up with dupes. The salamander stopped working. My porter no-showed. I really thought we might go down.”
If you’ve never worked in a restaurant, this little snippet might as well be written in Sanskrit. Like all occupations, the professional kitchen has developed its own vernacular—one that is at once clever, efficient, and sometimes a little crude. While each kitchen will have its own unique patois, the basics are the same.
Here’s your guide to common kitchen slang:
ON THE LINE
The “line” is the kitchen space where the cooking is done, often set up in a horizontal line. Being “on the line” means you are a “line cook”—an essential foot soldier in any functioning restaurant.
RUNNING THE PASS
The “pass” is the long, flat surface where dishes are plated and picked up by service staff. The chef or high-level cook who “runs the pass” each night is in charge of letting the cooks know what they will be cooking as orders come in. They are in control of the watching the order tickets, monitoring the speed and rhythm of the coursing, and making sure each dish looks good before it goes out to the customer.
5 OUT
Coordination is essential for any busy kitchen where there are multiple cooks in charge of different dishes, components, and garnishes for every plate. When a cook yells “5 out” or “3 out on sirloin,” it signals to the other cooks that they will be ready to plate in said amount of time.
SOIGNE
Mostly used by wannabe fine-dining douchebags, soigne (pronounced “SWAN-YAY”) means “elegant” in French. It’s used to describe an exceptionally sexy dish, or when you really nailed a plating presentation.
A LA MINUTE
A la minute is French for “in the minute,” and it refers to making a dish right then, from scratch. Instead of making a big batch of risotto during prep time and reheating portions of it hours later, a dish made “a la minute” is cooked from start to finish only when an order for it comes in.
MISE
Short for mise en place (French for “everything in its place”), this term refers to all of the prepped items and ingredients a cook will need for his specific station, for one night of service. E.g., Chef: “Did you get all of your mise done?” Cook: “I just need to slice shallots for the vin(aigrette), chef, then I’m ready.”
kitchenlingo_atala
12-TOP/4-TOP/DEUCE
A “12 Top” refers to a table with 12 diners. A “4 top” has four diners. A “deuce” just two.
NO SHOW
A “no-show” is a kitchen employee who doesn’t show up to work. No-shows are undeniable assholes.
ON DECK/ON ORDER
As tickets shoot out from the kitchen printer, the cook running the pass will let the cooks know what they have “on deck”—for example, “4 steak, 2 quail, 1 blue, on order”—so the cooks can mentally prepare and start setting up what they will be cooking throughout a diner’s meal.
FIRE
When a chef calls out “fire” or “pick-up,” a cook will start cooking that particular dish (e.g., “FIRE! 6 broco, 3 polenta side, 1 lamb”) “Order fire” means to immediately start cooking a certain dish because there is only one course on the ticket, much to the annoyance of the kitchen (because it forces them to restructure the entire pick-up). “Pick-up” can also be used as a noun, as in “I had to re-do my entire pick-up because some jabroni order-fired a porterhouse.”
RUN THE DISH When a dish of plated food that is ready to go out to the dining room, cooks will “run the dish.” Servers ask, “Can you run?”, when they are waiting to ferry the food out of the kitchen.
DYING ON THE PASS
Hot food that is ready to be run that has been sitting on the pass for an inordinate amount of time getting cold and losing its soigne character because waitstaff are either too slammed or too lazy to pick it up.
86’D
When the kitchen runs out of a dish, it’s “86’d.” Dishes can also be 86’d if the chef is unhappy with the preparation and temporarily wants it off the menu. Patrons can be 86’d, too.
One of the earliest documented usages of this term was at the bar Chumley’s in downtown Manhattan during Prohibition. The bar had an entrance on Pamela Court and an exit at 86 Bedford Street. Police would call ahead to warn the bartenders of a possible raid, telling them to “86” their customers out of the 86 exit door.
WEEDED / IN THE SHIT / IN THE WEEDS
Used when a cook is really fucking busy, overwhelmed by tickets, and frantically trying to cook and plate his dishes.
THE RAIL / THE BOARD
This refers to the metal contraption that holds all of the tickets the kitchen is working on. Once a ticket is printed, it’s stuck to “the rail” or “the board.” “Clearing the board” means the kitchen has just worked through a large set of tickets.
CHECK YOUR PLATES!
Every open kitchen where the cooks can actually see patrons will have a term that signals that an attractive man or woman is in the dining room. It might also be “Ace!” or “Yellowtail!” or whatever the kitchen comes up with.
THE SALAMANDER / ROBOCOP / SIZZLE / COMBI Kitchen equipment names often get abbreviated or nick-named.
“salamander” is a high-temperature broiler
“robocop” is a food processor
“sizzle” is a flat, metal broiler plate
“combi” is an oven with a combination of heating functions
“fishspat” is a flat-angled metal spatula good for cooking fish
“spider” is a wire skimmer
“chinacap” is a cone-shaped colander
“low-boy” is a waist-high refrigerator
There’s a million of them…
VIPS / PPX / NPR “Very Important Person,” “Persone Txtrodinaire,” and “Nice People Get Rewarded” written on a ticket signals to all staff that their work should be top-notch for these diners. It can be industry, celebrities, friends, or family—they all get hooked up.
CUPCAKING
Mostly for bartenders, “cupcaking” is used when a barkeep is spending noticeably too much time and attention on an attractive patron sitting at the bar.
FLASH
If a piece of protein is slightly undercooked, a cook will “flash it” in the oven for a minute or two to raise the temperature.
SANCHO When a cook sneezes, a co-worker will announce “SANCHO.” This is in the Mexican tradition of pointing out that someone named “SANCHO” or “SANCHA” is in your house banging your wife or boyfriend while you are at work. It’s a funny dig. The proper response is, “No mames guey! I’m not worried about Sancho.”
SHORT
To be missing a component of a dish or an ingredient, as in, “Dammit, I’m one meatball short!”
DUPE Short for “duplicate.” When tickets are printed in the kitchen, they are usually printed on two- or three-ply color-coded paper which signify courses. This allows the person running the pass to keep track of and discard layers as courses leave the kitchen, as in, “Gimme that dupe, I gotta cross off the apps.”
BUKKAKE
Does your dish have a swipe of yogurt, a squiggle of cream, or a splash of creme fraiche on it? That’s “bukkake.”
⅛ PAN, ⅙ PAN, ⅓ PAN, HOTEL
The standardized, stackable metal pans that cooks use to braise meat, carry vegetables, and roast things in are called “hotel pans,” which can be deep or shallow. There are many pans of different sizes and shapes that relate in volume to the hotel pan: three ⅓ pans can fit into a hotel, six ⅙ pans make up one hotel, eight ⅛ pans, etc.
BEHIND / ATRAS
In the fast-paced ballet of cramped kitchen spaces, cooks let their co-workers know they are moving behind them so there are no unnecessary collisions. When carrying knives, heavy hotel pans, and pots of burning liquid, the usual call is, “HOT BEHIND!” Atrás is Spanish for “behind.”
LEFT-HANDED SPATULA / BACON STRETCHER
These items do not exist. But tell a green cook to grab a “left-handed spatula” for you and watch the frantic search begin. Hilarious!
GETTING A PUSH
During service, work on the line usually comes in waves. When the tickets start printing faster and the restaurant is getting busier, the kitchen is “getting a push.”
CROPDUSTING
Cropdusting is farting, intentionally or accidentally, while moving down the line. Also works for wait staff, as in, “Goddamn table 17 is the fucking worst! When I drop their check I’m going to try and cropdust them.”
BURN THE ICE Disposing of the ice in the ice machine under your mise, or at the bar by pouring hot water over it.
SOS
Sauce on the side.
ALL DAY
This refers to the total amount of dishes a cook is cooking in one specific pick-up. It works as a clarification system between the chef and cook. The cook might say, “Chef, how many linguine am I working?!” or “Can you give me an all-day, Chef.” The chef would reply, “You’ve got 4 linguine, 3 spaghetti, 2 cappelletti, and 2 kids pastas, all day”
WAXING A TABLE
Giving a table VIP treatment.
‘Kitchen slang strengthens workplace solidarity, confuses the uninitiated, and is often peppered with a shocking amount of expletives.’
