Some Food and Beverage Blogs

Take a look at the following food and beverage blogs:

One of my favorites, Kate Hopkins has a food and beverage blog at Accidental Hedonist. In 2004, Kate launched the "Food Blog Awards".

Food and beverage blogs are touted at many websites.

FOODBlog has a comprehensive list of blogs and other food and beverage resources, including coffee links, wine blogs, other drink blogs, Chicago food resources, food blog meta-sites, food forums, food podcasts, food industry links, other food-related sites, non-food related but food named blogs, and (this is quite handy to weed out the blogs) dormant food blogs. Globe correspondent Ethan Gilsdorf points to many of the leading food blogs in his January 12, 2005 article, Food bloggers chronicle their delicious obsessions. Forbes has a list of "Best Food Blogs" by Breckinridge Ely while a Guardian article by Vicky Frost serves us up with The world on your plate, "a taste of the best of the blogs". There are also many articles online on gastronomy.

Here is a small selection of food and beverage blogs on the web.

Chez Pim is the blog of Pim Techamuanvivit, which has been hailed for its restaurant reviews and also contains things like a recent series of postings on the wine harvest in Burgundy by a Burgundian wine maker.

Heidi Swanson, a cookbook collector out of San Francisco, goes into the world of 101 Cookbooks.

Clotilde Dusoulier has a very popular blog in English, Chocolate & Zucchini. Her new book Chocolate & Zucchini: Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen is set to launch soon and can be pre-ordered at Amazon. Vicky Frost at the Guardian lauds Dusoulier's blog for "great photography and inspiring recipes".

Andy Hayler's Food Site contains "notes on restaurants around the world".

Meg Hourihan was cofounder of Pyra, the company behind Blogger before it was purchased by Google. Megnut is Meg Hourihan's site about food.

Amy Sherman's blog Cooking with Amy hails out of San Francisco and focuses on "original food writing providing recipes, restaurant and product reviews, contests, essays and insight into culinary news."

Adam Roberts serves to us the Amateur Gourmet, a blog made instantly famous by CNN, which featured his photo essay on the Janet Jackson breast cupcake.

For those who speak French, Pascale Weeks has a "cuisine best-seller" at C'est moi qui l'ai fait [It is I who made it] - but not available in English.

An interesting site, not a blog but more of a message board "for those who live to eat" is the food and drink community at Chowhound.com.

Happy Halloween 2006 : Our Pumpkin Cat for Food and Cat Lovers Everywhere

Happy Halloween 2006
Our Pumpkin Cat for Food and Cat Lovers Everywhere

HAPPY HALLOWEEN 2006.
Few things in life provide as much joy as food and cats.

For the Gourmet Blogger - 2006 Nominations for The James Beard Awards

We were looking at Epicurious, a nice site for the gourmet, and discovered they also have an editor's blog, which pointed us to the 2006 nominations for the James Beard Awards for culinary professionals. Take a look.

Creme Brulee Recipe

Trish Wilson, The Countess, has the gourmet posting of the year today, October 2, 2005, because it is a recipe for creme brulee, one of my favorite desserts.
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German Top Restaurant "Waldhotel Sonnora"

German Top Restaurant "Waldhotel Sonnora"

Today we visited the charming restaurant and hotel "Waldhotel Sonnora"
just outside the small village of Dreis, Germany. Dreis is near the medium-sized town of Wittlich, in the greater Moselle Valley vacation area, not far from the city of Trier, but also accessible to gourmets from the Rhine and Main River Valley metropolitan areas such as Frankfurt, Mainz, Wiesbaden, Koblenz, Bonn and Köln.

In fact, of course, people come from far and wide to dine exceptionally at the Waldhotel Sonnora. Indeed, many guests who come principally to dine, also overnight at the hotel. Sonnora is not only a highly acclaimed gourmet restaurant, but in past years has unanimously been ranked by the major gourmet guides to be among the best five restaurants in Germany. Do not expect to dine here without a reservation. Sonnora Chef Helmut Thieltges has a tremendous reputation in gourmet circles and was for example Gault-Millau "Chef of the Year" in 1997. The expert gourmets continue to sing his praises in 2004.

See for example also the report The Best of Germany where Thieltges is quoted as saying, "We don't just serve dishes - rather, culinary masterpieces". The reporter, who had eaten there - agreed.

We unexpectedly encountered the Thieltges Sr. today and had some wonderful conversations about the history of the hotel and the restaurant. Particularly interesting were the stories about the origin of the name Sonnora and the architecture of the recent renovation of the hotel. It was a delightful meeting on a delightful spring-like day.

To obtain more information on restaurant ratings in Germany, one should consult, e.g., the 2004 Red Michelin Guide, which rates restaurants in Germany based on reports issued by the guide's testers.

Michelin in 2004 grants its top rating of - three stars - to only five restaurants in Germany. These are:

Residenz Heinz Winkler, Aschau - Chef, Heinz Winkler
Schwarzwaldstube, Baiersbronn - Chef, Harald Wohlfahrt
Dieter Müller, Bergisch Gladbach - Chef, Dieter Müller
Im Schiffchen, Düsseldorf - Chef, Jean-Claude Bourgueil
Waldhotel Sonnora, Wittlich/Dreis (near the Moselle) - Chef, Helmut Thieltges

To show how difficult it is to get three stars from Michelin, one should note that the Michelin Guide grants two stars - the next highest rating - to ONLY thirteen restaurants in Germany in 2004. These are:

Bareiss Restaurant, Baiersbronn - Chef, Claus-Peter Lumpp
Vendôme, Bergisch-Gladbach - Chef, Joachim Wissler
La Table, Dortmund - Chef, Thomas Bühner
Hummerstübchen, Düsseldorf - Chef, Peter Nöthel
Residence, Essen - Chef, Berthold Bühler
Zur Traube, Grevenbroich - Chef, Dieter L. Kaufmann
Tantris, München - Chef, Hans Haas
Steinheuer Restaurant Zur Alten Post, Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler - Chef, Hans Stefan Steinheuer
Gourmet-Restaurant Schloss Berg, Perl/Moselle - Chef, Christian Bau
Karl-Rudolf Obauer, Salzburg/Werfen - Chefs, Karl & Rudolf Obauer
Speisemeisterei, Stuttgart - Chef, Martin Öxle
Hirschen, Sulzburg - Chef, Hans-Paul Steiner
Kastell, Wernberg-Köblitz - Chef, Christian Jürgens

176 restaurants in Germany received one star from Michelin.

See also the ranking of restaurants in Germany by major lists, including not only Michelin, but also Gault-Millau, Varta, Aral Schlemmer Atlas, and Der Feinschmecker.

King's Teagarden - Berlin - World's Best Tea Shop ?

King's Teagarden - Berlin - World's Best Tea Shop ?
(website pages in English and German - order in English by e-mail)

Is it possible that King's Teagarden on Kurfürstendamm in Berlin is the world's best tea shop?
Many of the unique mixes of tea are named after famous composers....
so it is no accident that classical music delights the shopping customer during his or her sojourn in the shop.

We were there just this weekend and found Werner F.J. Schmitt and his tea shop to be highly recommendable.

Check out the online shop at
Tee in Berlin von King's Teagarden - Tee und Teezubehoer - Gruener und Schwarzer Tee aus Ceylon, China, Indien und anderen Ländern.
(website pages in English and German - order in English by e-mail)

The address in Berlin is

King's Teagarden Teehandelsgesellschaft mbH
Teefachgeschäft - Tearoom
Kurfürstendamm 217 - 10719 Berlin
Tel.: 030 - 883 70 59
Fax: 030 - 322 31 92
Email: info@kingsteagarden.de

Johann Lafer - Germany's Most Famous TV Chef

At the site Relais & Chateaux - Johann Lafer's Stromburg - Golf one can read in English about Johann Lafer, Germany's most famous television cook, previous holder of two stars from Michelin, voted German Cook of the Year in 1997 by Gault Millau, whose hotel and restaurant (Le Val D'Or, 19 of 20 points from Gault Millau) are so popular that reservations must be made far in advance if you want to sample his culinary arts. His cookbooks - by last count, 42 of them - are also quite well-known and read in Germany, although I am not aware of any English translations. You can find one Lafer recipe in English here.

To avoid confusion, please note that Johann Lafer's "Stromburg" Hotel is located in the German town of "Stromberg" and that Stromberg in turn has its own Stromberg Golf Hotel, which is not the same as the "Stromburg". German Berg means mountain and Burg means castle, i.e. "Strom's castle on Strom's mountain." The rooms at Lafer's Stromburg Hotel are named after famous chefs and cookbook authors. Click here (German language website) to see that Lafer himself is in good company among his cooking peers.

My interest in the Lafer gourmet experience derives from the fact that his castle and restaurant are located in the same village which is home to the Stromberg Golf Club to which I belong, and we even have Lafer's castle in our golf club crest of arms as a symbol of the village.

Lafer offers a special gourmet experience which he calls "Heli Gourmet", a gourmet experience combined with helicopter travel. The HELI in "Heli Gourmet" means helicopter. For example, there is one "picknick" program where the guest and the entire gourmet experience (the guest, the food, table, chairs, service, even the cook) are coptered to a destination of the guest's choosing, e.g. a special place in natural open surroundings, and the meal is then served to the selected few guests at the outdoor site. The gourmet experience can also be combined with attendance at special events such as sporting competitions or Formula 1 racing.

There is no question that Lafer adds a bit of celebrity aura to Stromburg AND Stromberg, not to speak of the fact that the wine selection and cooking in his restaurant are rated as exceptional. Recently, Lafer has been traveling around Europe giving cooking programs on TV from his points of destination, which has only increased his already enormously popular standing as a cooking showmaster on the media scene.

Tenth Annual Masters of Food and Wine

The very popular Sally's Place for food, beverage and travel has an article by Steve Pitcher entitled Tenth Annual Masters of Food and Wine, which took place in Carmel, California earlier this year and about which Pitcher states: "The Masters is today unquestionably the finest forum for the culinary arts and epicurean pleasures to be found on the planet.".

The participants do indeed read like the who is who of cooking and so I was happy to read about the presence of a Johann Lafer from Germany at the last Masters. More on Lafer in the next posting.

Baking and Cooking and Eating and Drinking

The word gourmet has a dictionary definition meaning
a "connoisseur" of fine food or drink
or a person having "discriminating taste" in food and wine.

We at GourmetPundit do in fact live in a world-class wine-growing region in the Moselle River Valley in Germany.

The Moselle is however known more for its fabulous white German wines than for its culinary arts. Nevertheless, several of Germany's top cooks and restaurants are quite near to us.

But eating establishments are only one part of our interest.

GourmetPundit will cover the entire spectrum of food and drink, baking and cooking, recipes, tips, beverage-making, and many related topics dealing with nourishment and nutrition. After all, there are few things dearer to the heart of man - and woman - than sustenance in its wondrously varied forms.