Jerry West: He shoots, he grills!

It took basketball legend Jerry West a while to warm up to food. Raised as one of five children in a West Virginia mining family, his idea of a good dinner was one where he got to the food before any of his brothers. Even after he joined the NBA, he said he was slow to discover restaurants. He couldn’t afford them, he said. In the early 1960s, when he started, salaries were so low players had to work summer jobs.

“I couldn’t afford to go to restaurants, because I didn’t have any money,” he said. “Professional basketball wasn’t quite as glamorous in those days as it is now.”

Now, seemingly much to his surprise, West is getting into the restaurant business … in a way. He’s lending his name and a bunch of memorabilia to a steakhouse being opened by the Greenbrier resort back in his home state. The goal is to have the as-yet unnamed restaurant up and running this fall.

“I certainly wasn’t looking for a job,” said the 71-year-old West. But when his old friend Jim Justice asked him to help out after he bought the struggling property this spring, West pitched in. He has a vacation home on the Greenbrier property and lives there three months out of the year, when he’s not at home in Bel-Air. “So I figured, what the hell, I’ll do it.”

For non-basketball fans, West is a icon in his sport, literally. An all-NBA selection in 14 years of the 15 years, he played for the Los Angeles Lakers and was named to the league's 50th anniversary All-Star team. A silhouette image of him driving to the basket is the center of the NBA logo (in fact, that’s his nickname: “The Logo”). After retiring as a player, he became general manager and built both the "Showtime" Lakers that featured Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, as well as the Shaquille O'Neal-Kobe Bryant team that won three straight titles in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Of course, you shouldn’t expect West to be manning the broiler at his new place. His role will mostly be stopping by and shaking hands when he’s on the property. But as a lover of steakhouses, he has some definite opinions about what he wants his place to be. As part of his research for the project, he hosted a couple of visitors from the resort on a weekend tour of several Los Angeles restaurants: steakhouses Cut, Boa (where he liked the meat) and Mastro’s (where he liked the sides) as well as his old favorite Dan Tana’s (“I’m practically a piece of the furniture there,” he said.)

A great steakhouse, West said, has to have three components. “The first thing and most important is you have to have great meat. And I think the ambience is so important. Then there’s the service, the feeling of congeniality. I love Dan Tana’s and I’d love to have that kind of clubby feeling, but maybe with a little more elegance.”

West is also a compulsive collector of wine, mostly first-growths and Wine Spectator- and Robert Parker-approved reds. He keeps fully stocked cellars at his homes both here and at the Greenbrier. “I’m crazy about it,” he said. “I’ve got more wines than I’ve got sense.”

--Russ Parsons

$10,000 to Twitter about wine? It's a 'Really Goode Job'

 

In a sign of the cyber-crazed times, Sonoma County winery Murphy-Goode is on a nationwide hunt for someone to fill its “Really Goode Job.” The successful applicant will earn $10,000 a month to Tweet and use other social media skills to generate buzz about its reds and whites. Read more here.

Above: Applicant No. 678, Richard Standifer of Miami Beach, hopes to score extra points by drinking wine from a Vikings helmet. (Murphy-Goode's David Ready is from Minnesota, home of the NFL's Vikings.)

Photo credit: YouTube

Bacon: Well fry me up an iPhone app

Finally, an iPhone app that fries bacon! 

Virtually, that is. 

IPhone lovers, meet Pocket Bacon.

Click on the Pocket Bacon icon, and you'll hear the sound of sizzling bacon as your screen transforms into a virtual skillet, strips of bacon frying away.

Click once on the screen and voila: More bacon appears. Use your fingers to move the bacon around to make room for more strips. Then double-click on a strip and it disappears, those sizzling sounds momentarily replaced by the sounds of someone munching away.

Thoroughly enthralled, I just about drained half the phone battery before I realized the app did more....

An "oh-so-indispensible" toolbar pops up if you click the skillet surface on the bottom right of the screen. The options? Click on a newspaper icon to get some of the latest Internet bacon news. Or click on the locater icon to have your phone search for nearby bacon-serving establishments. 

Yet another icon allows you to shop for bacon-related products online. And you can find bacon recipes using the file icon. Finally, select the settings icon to change the "frying" surface as you cook up your bacon. (Griddle not your thing? Find your favorite skillet -- choose from old, giant or scratched -- or go for the micro cooker to shake things up a little.)

About the only major drawback was that it made me crave the real thing....  Otherwise, way to go, PocketBacon! You've made my list of "1,001 things to do with bacon."

-- Noelle Carter

Pictures courtesy of PocketBacon.com.

Submit your #filmfoodeating titles to Twitter

Who doesn't like a snack or two while watching a flick? Well, the Twittersphere has taken it one step further. Folks are reworking movie titles to mention some yummy treats. (Like porn, but chances are they're more PG). Here are some of our favorites. Tweet back yours or leave your answers in the comments section.

@ChieferMadness The Empire Strikes Baklava

@lesault The Frying Game

@mmechevrolet The Unbearable Lightness Of Beaten Egg White

@Hedonia Oyster's Eleven; There Will Be Blood Sausage; The Unbearable Rightness of Eating

@mzlizzle Transfatamerica

@mrs_recipe You, Me and Slurpee

Click here for Twitter's list of food-movie titles.

-- Whitney Friedlander

Photo: "The Empire Strikes Back." Credit: Lucasfilm Ltd.

Nothing says 'call me' like a beef jerky business card

 

File this under "Now we've seen everything":

Beef jerky business cards.

I tripped over this at TechCrunch. If you're not familiar with TechCrunch, consider checking it out. Its Twitter feed @techcrunch is highly addictive even if you think you don't care about all thing techie.

Consider it your Twip of the day. Follow 'em -- and then tell me if I am wrong.

-- Rene Lynch

Join us on Twitter @LATimesFood

Photo credit: Jason Kincaid

Getting to the bottom of a glass of Champagne

Let’s say you’re one of those rare wine lovers who can resist the many charms of Champagne long enough to wonder about it; like, what is Champagne, the place, like? What goes into making it? Who goes to the trouble of making it? What are they after? Why does it taste the way it does? And most important, how do they get all those bubbles into the bottle? 

The answer to many of these questions can be found on a fine new website called Champagneguide.net, authored by winewriter Peter Liem. (I must disclose that Liem and I both serve as correspondents for Wine & Spirits Magazine.) Three years ago, Liem decided to move to Champagne, becoming one of the only wine writers writing in English to do so currently. He settled in the village of Dizy, in a small flat nestled among vines and growers. Since then, by his own account, he has been "making a nuisance" of himself in the cellars and salons of the region, interviewing winemakers, tasting wines, taking meticulous notes and drawing very contemplative conclusions about the wines, the villages and the overarching style a given house aims for. The result is one of the more fastidious, comprehensive and useful tools in English you may ever have at your disposal for getting at the mysteries of what is otherwise a very mysterious region.

While still under construction, and under constant revision (of a possible 5,000, there are only about 100 handpicked Champagne houses profiled here, so Liem’s "updates" may never be finished), there is already an impressive amount of information on the site, usefully arranged. In most cases, the history of the domaine is explored, as well as an objective assessment of its desired style, what is found in a typical blend, which villages and vineyards it may come from, and how many vintages of the base wine – the still wine used to create the sparkling wine – you’ll find included in the non-vintage blend.

Extensive, detailed tasting notes of all current wines accompany the profiles – more than 600 in all – and they are routinely thrilling. “Its powerful depth is buttressed by firm acidity,” he writes about Tarlant’s Cuvee Louis Extra Brut, “and an intensely chalky minerality that persists throughout the finish, feeling vivid and almost forceful in its tenacity.” Liem’s notes break down the region’s wines with an effortless precision that just may make your next sip of bubbly something to ponder.

-- Patrick Comiskey

ChampagneGuide.net is available by subscription for $89 a year, about the cost of a fine bottle of vintage Champagne. A sample page can be found here:

http://www.champagneguide.net/home/sample_content

Photo credit: Erik Unger / Chicago Tribune

 

Bacon bits: Bacon lance, BLT Night at Dakota, comfort food from CBS

Bacon abounds -- I'm slapping these four on my list of 1,001 things to do with bacon:

• Bacon thermal lance: Maybe you've seen it: Boing Boing Video recently did a video of Popular Science columnist Theodore Gray turning bacon (OK, well, prosciutto, which he calls "Italian for 'expensive bacon' ") into an edible thermal lance he uses to cut metal. The video, "Bacon: The Other White Heat," is pretty amazing and gives me a whole new respect for my favorite food. Gray also includes a vegetarian version of the lance toward the end of the video ... kinda gives me a whole new respect for cucumbers too.
• BLT Night at Dakota: Starting next Tuesday, Dakota will hold a weekly BLT Night. They'll feature special artisinal bacon, and you can choose from house creations including a classic BLT, BLT salad, sliders, burgers, a lardon pizza and pasta carbonara. Or go bacon crazy and build your own BLT with your choice of bacon and toppings. Menu selections start at $11.00. Mmm...
• Bacon and beef meatloaf: Former ballerina and current executive chef at NIOS Restaurant in New York, Patricia Williams did a recent segment for CBS' "The Early Show" on spring comfort food as part of the Saturday "Chef on a Shoestring" series. She includes a recipe for bacon and beef meatloaf. It doesn't scream "spring" for me, but it sure sounds comforting....
• Reality star piglets tout bacon festival: Yahoo News reports that Piggy, Lilli, Pauli and Fredi are having their private lives followed as part of a marketing ploy by the town of Helfenbert, Austria, to promote its third Speck (German for bacon) Spectacle. Follow their adventures -- and read their intimate Web diaries (?) on pigbrother.at. 

For more bacon-inspired bliss, go to the rest of my list after the jump -- and please leave a comment if you have suggestions!

-- Noelle Carter

Yelp: Yet another 'secret algorithm' wending its way through our daily lives

The Times' David Lazarus takes a look at the workings of Yelp, the review site that some restaurant owners say is unusually aggressive in trying to get businesses to pay hundreds of dollars in monthly "sponsorship" fees to improve their ranking in search results and to move their most positive review to the top of the page.

My feeling is that Yelp offers an impressive service for both consumers and merchants, but the site could do a better job on the transparency front.

How many users, for example, know what it means when a company is identified as a "Yelp sponsor"? How many people know that a business has to pay to have a "favorite review" topping the list?

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said there's a secret algorithm at work, resulting in occasionally scattershot placement of reviews rather than, say, chronological order.

Read more here.

Photo of Yelp founders Russel Simmons, left, and Jeremy Stoppelman outside the company's San Francisco offices in 2006. Credit: Los Angeles Times.

The Post Punk Kitchen: It's a vegan riot

In an era in which so many are going vegan, vegetarian, turning to organic produce and locally grown food, what could be more useful than an online kitchen to provide you with fun, healthy, rockin' recipes that are all vegan?

In the Post Punk Kitchen, friendly cooks lead you through easy recipes such as pumpkin waffles for breakfast, lentil soup with grilled pineapple for lunch or Ethiopian tomato lentil stew for dinner.

Then there's the stuff that will really blow you away, such as the chocolate bomb pudding cake.

We took a little time to chat with Isa Moskowitz, the Brooklyn-born creator of the Post Punk Kitchen. Here's what she had to say about her cooking and the website:

iPhone grocery list app caters to the unorganized

I’ve had this little program called Grocery IQ installed on my iPhone for months and finally got around to using it a couple of weeks ago.

Now, I kind of love putting my shopping list together. Type the first few letters, and the program completes the word and adds it to your list in the appropriate “aisle.” For example, if I type "cilantro," I choose “bunch” and the entry automatically goes into the “fruits and vegetables” aisle.

If I need canned tomatoes, I can specify San Marzano and place it in my favorites listing so that each time I go shopping I can add it to the list, if needed, with the tap of a finger. Yogurt? I can specify a quart of whole-milk yogurt from Straus Family Creamery and, again, save it to my favorites.

You can write in your brand names, move the aisles around or eliminate them and -- very handy is this feature -- e-mail your list to someone else in the family who can do the shopping for you.

Using Grocery IQ at the farmers market and at the grocery store, I find that I forget fewer things I meant to buy because my list is so organized. And I love checking off each item so it goes gray and fades into the background.

Grocery IQ, $.99 at the Apps Store section of iTunes.

-- S. Irene Virbila

Image: Screenshot of Grocery IQ from my iPhone.