A Restaurant With No Leftovers

Garbage is inevitable in the restaurant and bar business. Kitchen employees toss onion skins and meat fat into the wastebasket almost instinctively. Once-used plastic wrap and slips guarding the linens find their way into black bags for trash-day pickup. Plastic bags are ordered by the bundle and then often discarded after customers use them to…

New Year, New Recipes

Good morning. Happy new year. How’s the cabeza? Today’s reading is from Kingsley Amis’s “Lucky Jim,” the true Gospel of hangover literature: Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection.…

Alinea Had a Hand in This Coffee Liqueur

Rhine Hall is a fruit brandy distiller in Fulton Market district of Chicago. The company, the outgrowth of a backyard hobby, now makes more than a dozen brandies and similar products. About a year ago, it teamed up with Alinea, the Michelin three-star restaurant in Chicago, to create a coffee liqueur. Made from handpicked beans…