Holy Sous Vide, Batman!! A Duke student’s underground restaurant is the focus of a New York Times Magazine article to be published this Sunday. Bryan Zupon has a love of cutting edge cuisine. He comes from a privileged background, but rather than just going to all the top restaurants, he immerses himself in them. He’s so caught up in contemporary, hyper-modern cuisine (think Wylie Dufresene and Grant Achatz), that he opened his own underground restaurant, serving some of the most creative food in the Southeast, let alone the Triangle. Where did he serve it? In his college apartment, of course. Needless to say, this kid has serious chops, and now that the Times has “discovered” him, I seriously wonder whether he’s actually going to law school after all.
Anyhow, I had a fun meal at Zupon’s Z-Kitchen a year ago, and I offer the photos after the break as evidence of what this young man is capable of doing. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Varmint 
As I was driving my 13-year old son to his soccer game in Charlotte yesterday, we passed a truck filled with hogs. My boy examined the truck, looked at me, and said, “Mmmm, pork.” I then began to tell him where those pigs were headed, and more significantly, where they likely came from. I explained to him that the pigs led a life in which they didn’t run around, were confined to a 6 square foot space of concrete floor, where the pigs’ feces are pumped to huge lagoons, fouling the air for miles around. I told him that this process makes the pork that he eats reasonably affordable, but at the expense of any semblance of humane treatment. I thought that he needed to know these things. He didn’t really respond, but he gazed at me with a perplexed look, and then said, “That’s not right.”
