The New York Times has a fascinating article today about the human sense of smell. A researcher quoted in the piece offers this little at-home experiment.

Get yourself a bag of gourmet jelly beans (I splurge on the sugar pellets in bulk at Metropolitan Market) and taste each flavor. Then hold your nose and give the beans another pass. What happens? No nose means no taste except a bit of sweetness, right? It's no coincidence that wine experts wax on about a bottle's smell. It's intimately intwined with taste. (Although I've never been able to pick up on the tobacco or leather undertones that some wine critics cite. Maybe my sinuses need a good shot of wasabi.)

More from the article:

Olfaction is an ancient sense, the key by which our earliest forebears learned to approach or slink off. Yet the right aroma can evoke such vivid, whole body sensations that we feel life’s permanent newness, the grounding of now.

Anyone care for a madeleine?

That last line is the one that resonated for me. I get a whiff of basil, and I float back to the first summer I spent living away from home as a young adult. I was interning at a newspaper in Springfield, Ill., and had been gifted a little pot of basil for my apartment balcony. It was the first time I'd been fully in charge of feeding and caring for myself, and my first homemade tomato sauce with shards of hand-torn basil was transporting.

I'm sure I have a thousand more sense memories if I sat down to parse it. But I want to hear from you guys. What smell sends you back?

I'm giving up eating bananas.

I just read “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World.” As author Dan Koeppel unpeels events, the history of commercial bananas is uglier than factory-farmed veal: rain forests destroyed, people subjugated, governments controlled, a species of food slowly poisoned by the very businessmen who made billions of dollars while making bananas the most-loved fruit on earth. Call it bananafest destiny.

I’ll review Koeppel’s fascinating book in Sunday’s SoundLife section. Meanwhile, if you’re like me and are chewing on what to do with those last three bananas that are turning black in my fruit bowl, I’ve got a suggestion:

When life hands you doomed fruit, make black banana cake.

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Beer and food maven Lucy Saunders will be at The Pike Pub in Seattle on Tuesday, signing copies of her new book, The Best of American Beer and Food.

Saunders has studied America's beer and food culture for the past 20 years. She has chronicled the craft brewing movement as a food columnistweb editor (beercook.com and grillingwithbeer.com) and author (Cooking with Beer, 1996 and Grilling with Beer, 2006).

Here are the details: 5 p.m.-8p.m., Tuesday. The Pike Pub, 1415 1st Ave. Seattle. 206-622-6044.

Click below to read Saunders' take on pubs and food around the Puget Sound area.

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Recent high profile disputes between restaurateurs and their critics are the exception, not the rule. Blogs and community Web sites dilute the power of a critic and offer an opportunity for restaurateurs to start a dialog.

Oh, yeah: Ed's Diner is mentioned in this article, from Restaurants and Institutions magazine. Here's a contextual excerpt:

While the relationship between chefs and restaurant reviewers has never been an easy one, one could draw the conclusion that animosity between the two groups is reaching fever pitch. This is probably not the case, though. As Mimi Sheraton explains in a February column on Slate.com, restaurateurs and critics—who can be the most felicitous of allies when the praise is positive—long have sparred over negative reviews. Today, however, with the proliferation of Web sites such as Yelp.com, Chowhound.com and Citysearch.com as well as personal blogs, a critic’s word is rarely the only one read. Just as too many chefs spoil the soup, too many critics diffuse the criticism.

And these paragraphs, which, respectively, give a Tacoma chef and a Tacoma critic the penultimate and final words:

For Chef Gordon Naccarato, the desire to set restaurant misconceptions straight led him to post comments on Ed’s Diner, a blog started by Tacoma, Wash. -based The News Tribune’s restaurant critic, Ed Murrieta. “I noticed that several contributors to the blog were saying crazy things about other people’s restaurants. I felt compelled to give the other side of the story,” says Naccarato, who owns Pacific Grill in Tacoma.

In past posts, he has explained why restaurants mark up wines and he has defended competitor restaurants from negative comments posted on the blog. Now Naccarato admits that he checks the blog frequently, even receiving gentle ribbing from fellow contributors who tell him that he needs to spend more time in his kitchen.

According to Murrieta, this was an unintentional, though welcome, result of the blog. “Gordon has become one of the regular posters on the blog. He’s even championed other chefs in town. That’s what I think has been a remarkable outcome. He is signing his name. He is offering his advice and experience. He’s not out there ranting and raving,” Murrieta says. For Murrieta, Naccarato and other contributors also ground him in another way. “The word community– it always has bothered me. Now I’m almost flipped the other way. It’s hard to work without it.”

Mark Lindquist, Tacoma drug prosecutor and author.

“The King of Methlehem,” a novel by Tacoma drug prosecutor Mark Lindquist, is set in and around Tacoma. While the book’s tweeker antagonist doesn’t have much need for food, Lindquist’s detective hero knows his dining and drinking spots.

I scanned the book at tweeker speed. Here are references to local restaurants, including one whole chapter set in Le-Le, where a News Tribune reporter sips bubble tea in the corner.

Since the book’s main tweeker goes by the name Howard Schultz, it’s fitting that Starbucks references litter the book.

For more about Mark Lindquist and “The King of Methlehem,” read a profile of the prosecutor/author by my colleague Debbie Caffazo in Monday’s News Tribune.

Starbucks pp. 2, 47, 96, 195, 199, 217

Sizzler in Puyallup, p. 7

Syren, p. 22

Fujiya, p. 22

Sea Grill, p. 22

Cutter’s Point Coffee, p. 29

The Swiss, pp. 88, 176

Johnny’s Dock, p. 126

Blue Olive, p. 126

Shakebrah, p. 164

The Parkway Tavern, p. 164

West End Pub and Grill, p. 164

The Spar, p. 165

Bertolino's Coffee Bar, p. 169

21 Commerc e, p. 176

Kickstand Café, p. 200

Le-Le, pp. 211-217 (“Everybody Comes to Le-Le’s” chapter)

Here are a couple of almost-Tacoma references:

On page 31, a character pulls a chocolate and almond candy from her purse. But it’s Almond Joy, not Tacoma’s Almond Roca.

On page 101, Lindquist references MSM – but it’s the dietary supplement for horses that’s used to cut methamphetamine, not the Sixth Avenue deli.

Journalist Hunter S. Thompson paid his final tab two years ago today, in his kitchen. Here's a quasi-local remembrance, thanks to South Sound chef Gordon Naccarato, who recalls feasting his eyes upon Thompson's addled acrobatics in his own Aspen restaurant years ago:

To my horror I saw a male customer doing somersaults -- one after the other -- throughout the dining room.
Even more amazing than that -- I noticed my manager standing in the dining room, watching and doing nothing.

I ran up to him and asked, "What in the hell is going on?"

He casually replied, "Relax, it's just Hunter."

I would like to think he was overjoyed at the potato pancake & caviar he had been eating ... but I think it most likely due to some other injested substance, besides the copious amounts of champagne and booze he fueled up on...

To say the guy had an appetite for life is an understatement, but whenever he came in to eat I was always impressed that he knew his way around a menu. I would never have guessed that he'd be the type to enjoy fine caviar and champagne...

But, of course, Thompson was the type to enjoy everything. Man cannot live by Gonzo alone. David McCumber, the managing editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, was Hunter’s friend and editor. McCumber was my editor, too. McCumber e-mailed me his memory of Hunter S. Thompson, foodie:

He always ridiculed what he called the "white wine and pesto crowd" but that doesn't mean he didn't love to eat. He used to order everything on a room service menu, just to see if they were on their game.

Rest, and eat, in Gonzo.

I cleaned out my files and found something I thought I'd lost. I wrote it at Fumy's Teriyaki in Sacramento. Fumy had the softest hands of any man I'd known who worked with his hands. Fumy always asked, "Gravy on the rice?" One day Fumy's granddaughter was in the restaurant ...

The pride of my cookbook collection.

It's packing days at Casa Murrieta. Asbestos removal for the downstairs remodel starts Monday. My office -- computer, guitar, shotgun, books, Oly keg -- is going into storage.

I packed 74 food books this morning -- cookbooks, wine books, baking books, cake decorating books and one that contains nothing but recipes for dog treats. All the out-dated Zagat guides? They make great kindling.

Some, like "Larousse Gastronomique," I've packed and unpacked from Santa Barbara to Sacramento to San Francisco to Tacoma. Others, like Danny Meyer's "Setting the Table," are publishers' gimmes I thought I'd read and write about but never got around to.

The giants are represented: Julia, Martha, Fannie, Beard, Kerr.

Except for my coveted first edition of "A Treasury of Great Recipes" by Vincent Price and his wife, Mary, I'd trade them all for compact discs faster than you can turn to page 262 of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." I rarely crack half of the books I own.

Which leads me to a simmering question: Why do we hang onto unread cookbooks?

An Ed's Diner patron asked a You Plate Special question about food-related reading.

Another patron recommended Jim Harrison's "The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand."

The book, published in 2001, collects Harrison's food essays and columns, many of which I read in their original publications in the '90s.

Harrison comes up again today, in a New York Times story.

Sure, the guy over-indulged with Jack Nicholson and went fork-to-fork with Orson Welles, but that's not why Harrison's worth reading. Here's why Harrison's worth reading:

Mr. Harrison, a self-described "food bully," has very particular ideas about cooking. He thinks rosemary should be banned. He has no use for huge restaurant-style ranges: "Why should I spend $7,000 for a stove when I could spend $7,000 on food?" And he doesn’t believe that game, birds especially, should be tarted up with elaborate sauces. "As the French say, game birds taste best at the point of the gun," he said.

... Then he declared: "Food is a great literary theme. Food in eternity, food and sex, food and lust. Food is a part of the whole of life. Food is not separate.”

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"Mmm! Now that's tartare!" El Gaucho's steak tartare. TNT photo by Russ Carmack.

My story today about raw meat ravers steak tartare and beef carpaccio prompts me to share a passage from a book that's been bouncing between my desk and the back seat of my car.

The book is "How I Learned to Cook," a collection of 40 essays by chefs on their (mis)adventures in getting where they got.

Chef essayists include Tamara Murphy of Seattle's Brasa and Seattle-reared Mario Batali.

Here's Anthony Bourdain on the lesson he learned "when I found myself feeding steak tartare to a regional 'gourmet' host on yet another morning news-and-banter show."

I thought steak tartare was a shrewd idea. I wouldn't have to rely on the studo for any cooking equipment. I'd bring my own plates, my own locally (and easily) acquired ingredients. I had a metal ring and a knife and a spatula in my kit. I figured I'd chop the steak by hand -- impressing with my fast, furious and precise knifework. I'd quickly fold in the mustard, capers, choped cornichons and shallots, swirl in the egg yolk and neatly shape the result in the metal ring. A few pre-toasted croutons would make it easy for my host to take an on-camera taste. "Mmm! Now that's tartare!" Retire to the hotel to the sound of deafening kudos...

Didn't happen. Apparently the practice of eating raw meat had not penetrated this far into America's interior. News of mad cow disease had reached the state, however, because the host looked on in terror as I forced the uncooked egg and beef concoction into the metal ring, the idea dawning on her that yes ... yes ... she would be required to eat this thing absolutely raw. The word Ewww! actually escaped from her lips as she tenuously reached for a meat-smeared crouton. ... She took the tinest nibble, fighting the urge to gag -- her head swimming with images of spongiform bacteria riddling her brain, turning it into swiss cheese. When the segment was over and she'd spit the tiny taste out into a trash bin, she fixed me with a look of such pure loathing that it haunted my dreams.

Here's a nagging nut graf from a New York Times story about discrimination in restaurants.

In an industry that relies largely on immigrants, just how difficult is it for workers who don’t speak English as a first language to get ahead? And at what point does hiring someone to achieve a certain look or style in a restaurant turn into racism?

The Times' story Wednesday coincided with a blog post by Michael Bauer, the restaurant critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, who asked: Do San Francisco restaurants discriminate?

Although I'm Caucasian, I've experienced similar discrimination, too. One time I took an African American friend to a restaurant with several dining rooms, and noticed that we were seated in the only room with other black diners. ... I'm not sure how much of where people are seated is actually some subtle form of discrimination (too old, too gay, too fat, too dark) or just an oblivious insensitivity to what the diner might be feeling.

There's no local connection (or insinuation) to South Sound restaurants, except that one of the authors of the Times' story used to work for the News Tribune.

Restaurant trends start in big cities like New York and San Francisco. I hope these are two examples of trends that don't hit our neck of the woods.

An Ed’s Diner reader writes: “…with all these chefs here you could ask them to publish favorite recipes or discuss cooking techniques?”

I’ll let Todd Wilbur start. Wilbur is a self-taught chef and author of “Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 2,” which deconstructs “amazing clones of famous dishes from America’s favorite restaurant chains.”

Here’s Wilbur’s recipe for Original Roadhouse Grill’s 32-ounce Roadhouse Rita, chosen because the Oregon-based casual saloon chain known for jumbo drinks and barbecued meats just opened in Federal Way, its first location in Washington. Future openings are planned for Lacey and Everett.

I’ll spare us all Applebee’s Tequila Lime Chicken with Mexi-ranch sauce.

In the meantime, what recipes do you want from local chefs? Charlie McManus’ pumpkin ravioli? The Matador’s nachos? Place your requests and I’ll see what they’ll share.

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