It'll be a weekend without alcohol at 21 Commerce.

It's going to be a dry weekend at 21 Commerce and The Loft Live in downtown Tacoma. The martini bar-restaurant and nightclub's liquor license is suspended today through Monday.

"We got spanked," a guy sweeping up outside martini 21 Çommerce said this morning.

A bunch of orange suspension notices are taped the venue's Commerce Street, 21st Street and Pacific Avenue windows.

According to the State Liquor Control Board, 21 Commerce served booze to an under-age patron on Feb. 22.

The penalty: no alcohol sales for four days, from 10 a.m. today until 10 a.m. Tuesday.

The last time 21 Commerce got caught selling booze to an under-age patron, on April 13, 2007, it paid a $375 fine.

The 2007 violation was a result of a compliance check by the Tacoma Police Department and the state Local Control Board using investigative operatives between ages 18 and 20. The Liquor Control Board says door security personnel allowed one of its under-age undercover operatives into 21 Commerce/The Loft after checking that person’s identification. Then, the Liquor Control Board says, a bartender sold liquor to that under-age, undercover operative.

February’s violation occurred after an under-age undercover operative gained admission to 21 Commerce/The Loft without being asked for identification, according to the Liquor Control Board’s report.

The Tacoma Police Department says it’s served The Loft with a chronic noise violation after patrol officers responded to the location for more than 35 calls for service since January. The calls have been for fights and large crowds.

Bartenders beware: Customers must be at least 21 years old to drink 21 Commerce cocktails.

Fish House Cafe's deep-fried catfish sandwich -- great, even without tomatoes.

I usually order Fish House Cafe's fried catfish sandwich with cheese. Yesterday, I forgot to order the cheese. Something else was different: Fish House eighty-six'd the tomatoes.

Blame it on the tainted tomato tornado that's affecting only a small percentage of the nation's tomatoes but is sweeping across America, with many restaurants pulling fresh tomatoes off their menus. (At Steamers at Titlow Beach today, fresh tomatoes graced my fish taco. When I inquired, the cook said to have no worries: "Our tomatoes are good.")

At any rate, Fish House's fried catfish sandwich is terrific with or without tomatoes. It's $5. Be sure to order the crunchier corn-meal breading. You get two big and juicy filets, tartar sauce, lettuce and (conditions permitting) tomatoes, on a soft sesame bun. The contrasting stack goes like this: soft, crunchy, tender, soft. Add a slice of unmelted American cheese if you enjoy the processed texture in the middle. I do.

Speaking of tomatoes, I spoke with two lady farmers at the Proctor farmers market Saturday. Both said their tomatoes are running late, thanks to the gloomy June weather.

Another red fruit, however, is said to be on track. A farmer from Puyallup's Sidhu Farms told me Saturday that he'll have strawberries this week.

Fish House Cafe: 1814 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Tacoma; 253-383-7144

Ranch House BBQ pitmaster Amy Anderson is feeling the heat in her new location.

It sounded a bit like a fairy tale ending to a bad dream: Ranch House BBQ was demolished by mudslide in December. Then Olympia's Governor Hotel gave the restaurant's owners six months free rent and three months free utilities. Now the fairy tale is fracturing. The News Tribune's sister paper The Olympian reports:

Since moving in January after its Kennedy Creek Road location was destroyed by flooding, the business has had to adjust to new customers and competition from other downtown restaurants, co-owner Melanie Tapia said.

The result has been a 25 percent year-over-year drop in first-quarter sales; a staff reduction of six employees, leaving the restaurant with about 20; and mounting expenses as the restaurant invests in its new location while making mortgage and insurance payments on its old 5.2-acre site west of Olympia, Tapia said. Those payments are about $5,000 per month, she said.

"It's lost something," Tapia said about Ranch House, which has existed for about four years. "We're just another restaurant downtown."

Tapia said she has considered closing the restaurant, which she co-owns with Amy Anderson.

Tapia said Ranch House plans to rebuild at its previous site. She said the business has been approved for a low- interest loan of 4 percent from the U.S. Small Business Administration, although she's not sure whether it will receive the full amount needed to rebuild. She estimates that rebuilding will cost $750,000.

Ranch House's free rent runs out in July.

"I'm open to negotiating (rent) and supporting them as best we can, but I just can't continue to operate it for free," Governor Hotel general manager Sandra Miller said.

One customer told The Olympian that customers might miss the down-home feeling of the old location.

Renton's Dave Maulding makes his own biodiesel. He's been the victim of biodiesel bandits who've sucked his grease drum dry.

Today’s New York Times reports that an Arlington pizza parlor is considering putting its used grease under video surveillance. Call it deterrence against biodiesel bandits.

“Fryer grease has become gold,” said a co-owner of Olympia Pizza and Pasta Restaurant, whose 50-gallon grease barrels have been sucked by siphoners at least a half dozen times since last summer.

Here’s the kicker to our food-crazed, oil-crazed times, in which it's hip to make fuel from used french fry grease:

“And just over a year ago, I had to pay someone to take it away," the Arlington pizzaman said.

Restaurants' processed fryer grease is big business. As the Times notes, so-called yellow grease is traded on the booming commodities market.

Its value has increased in recent months to historic highs, driven by the even higher prices of gas and ethanol, making it an ever more popular form of biodiesel to fuel cars and trucks.

In 2000, yellow grease was trading for 7.6 cents per pound. On Thursday, its price was about 33 cents a pound, or almost $2.50 a gallon. (That would make the 2,500-gallon haul in the Burger King case worth more than $6,000.)

Dave Maulding of Renton home-brews his own biodiesel. He pays restaurants for their used grease. He’s been the victim of biodiesel bandits.

“I recently ran short because somebody broke into my drum and sucked my drum dry,” Maudling told me in April.

So I’ve got some greasy questions for South Sound restaurant people:

Have you been the victim of biodiesel bandits? Who picks up your used grease? Do they pay you? How much? Also: What safeguards do you have against biodiesel bandits? Is your used grease safe from theft?

For those of you who obtain used grease legally, here’s a cool thing that’s going on next week: learn to home-brew your own biodiesel. The cost is $60 per person or $100 for couples. Here’s the PR:

A hands-on workshop to learn all the basics to make your own high quality fuel for about $1 per gallon. In this workshop you will do titrations, make small batches of biodiesel with different oils, and learn the tricks to make quality biodiesel every time. We will also operate a small-scale “Appleseed” reactor during class. This system will be compared with the automated BioPro system which the instructor uses to facilitate fuel-making for a Bring-Your-Own-Oil type coop. The class will also cover topics, such as chemistry of the reaction, quality control, vehicle compatibility, cold weather issues, methanol recovery, disposal of wastes, and how to run a successful co-op.

If you can’t make it to the workshop, a bunch of biodiesel groupies will meet at Paddy Coyne’s Irish Pub about 4 p.m. on June 8 to talk about biodiesel issues.

The folks trying to organize a Tacoma chapter of the Chefs Collaborative -- a group that helps chefs and farmers network -- sent me two reminders today. The RSVP deadline is today at 5 p.m. And Kelli Estrella won't be bringing her award-winning cheeses. Read the update.

While rising rice prices make many people unhappy, Scoring bags of rice is something to smile about these days.

Rising prices and limited availability of rice are affecting South Sound restaurants.

Cash and Carry, a wholesale warehouse store where many restaurants purchase bulk ingredients like rice, starting limiting rice purchases to two 50-pound bags per customer this week.

“We’re allocating rice right now – the same as Costco and everyone around me has been doing” Randy Drake, manager of the warehouse store on Tacoma Mall Boulevard. “We’re lucky if you can get it. I had 50 bags this morning and they were sold out in 10 minutes.”

Drake said the price of Cash and Carry’s 50-pound bags of long-grain California rice has risen to $18 from $15 in three weeks.

In August 2007, Galanga Thai restaurant in downtown Tacoma paid $19 per 50-pound bag of Thai Jasmine rice from King’s Oriental Foods, a Seattle distributor, owner Ted Kenney said. The same bag rose to $23 on March $27, $26 on April 3 and $30 on April 10.

“The rising prices have caused my wife to shop around some, hoping to find a better price,” Kenney said. “Today we are getting an order. We don’t know what the price will be.”

Rice is the backbone of many Asian cuisines. Many entrees are served on rice, and rice generally accompanies entrees as a side dish. Café Hawaii in Parkland specializes in plate lunches, built around “two good scoops of rice,” said owner Edgar Taranada. Taranada said he serves 300 pounds of rice per week.

“I’ve got a lot of problems getting it,” said Taranada, who buys rice at Cash and Carry. “I knew three or four weeks ago that we’d get to this point. Now it’s to the point where you have to be [at the store] at 7 a.m. or you’re not going to get rice.”

Taranada wondered what he’s going to do “because Hawaiians love rice, Samoans love rice, Polynesians love rice. If it gets worse than this, I’m going to have to jack my prices up.”

Taranada joked about a more drastic plan.

“It’s getting to the point where I’m going to have to make substitutes,” he said. “I’m going to have to ask customers of they want mashed potatoes or dinner rolls instead of rice.”

Peter Choe, owner of Chin’s Teriyaki in downtown Tacoma, said he goes through one 50-pound bag of short-grain California rice per day. He said he might consider raising his prices but draws the line at reducing portion sizes. Purchased for lunch Thursday, a $5.99 chicken teriyaki entrée came with 8 ounces of meat and 13 ounces of rice.

“No, no, no – same portion,” Choe said. “We don’t want to raise problems.”

“For Asian people, you have to have rice. It’s the same as potatoes and bread for white people,” said Jennifer Chang, chef/owner of Hong Sheng Fung Chinese restaurant on South Tacoma Way.

Chang serves a mix of short-grain California rice and long-grain Thai Jasmine rice. She said she’s switching from long-grain Thai Jasmine rice ($32.50 for 50 pounds) to California-grown long-grain rice ($19.95 for 50 pounds).

“If I charge for a little small cup, people will get mad at me,” Chang said. “But it’s expensive. I might have to start charging.”

Indochine Asian Dining Lounge in downtown Tacoma charges $1.50 for a small side order of rice. Co-owner Russell Brunton said the cost of the restaurant’s long-grain Thai Jasmine rice has doubled to $40 from $20 in recent months.

“I got a call yesterday from somebody really angry that we charge for rice,” Brunton said. “I think that’s pretty unfair because is rice is something that there is value to and there is a cost to us to store it and cook it.”

Waste is another cost factor. While Taranada said 80 percent of Café Hawaii’s customers eat all of their rice, other restaurants say uneaten rice creates a sticky situation.

“There’s quite a bit of waste,” Brunton said. “People consider white rice a cheap ingredient.”

Kenney said it’s “difficult to predict how much rice people are going to eat. We try to tailor it. If it’s a table of what looks like light eaters, we’re not going to bring out as much as if it was for a table of four big guys.”

Rising prices, Kenney said, require tighter controls.

“Not ‘over-ricing’ customers, resulting in thrown-away rice, is definitely something we talk to our servers about,” Kenny said. “After reviewing these prices, I think we’ll have to mention it again tonight. Our dog can only eat so much (left-over) rice.”

A scene from the Washington Restaurant Association's 2002 trade show.

In response to some industry issues, I asked restaurateurs to tell me what they get from their membership in the Washington Restaurant Association. Here are three replies:

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What's in store for restaurants in 2008?

The latest issue of the Washington Restaurant Association's trade journal lists trends that are likely to affect restaurants in 2008. The list is full of platitudes -- "let's start considering some commonsense solutions to help solve this problem," WRA president Anthony Anton writes in regard to nutrition and obesity -- and virtually devoid of actionable solutions.

I've got a few ideas, so I'll share them here. Whatever appears in italics is from the WRA's Anton; all other opinions are mine. Feel free to chime in. We are all restaurant customers, and as you know from another platitude, the customer is always right.

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ED'S NOTE: Today's guest blogger is rivitman, a Tacoma cook and frank patron at Ed's Diner. Regarding a story about kitchen health hazards (and more), I give rivitman the keys to Ed's Diner today. His opinions are uniquely his. They originally appeared in the comments of other posts. They're something to chew on.

UPDTED I've asked Anthony Anton, president of the Washington Restaurant Association, to offer his organization's perspective (or rebuttal) to rivitman. I'll post his response here if and when he replies. -- Ed Murrieta.

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Diacetyl is a chemical additive found in butter-flavorings for products like PAM cooking spray, popcorn topping and the stuff that fry cooks probably pour on the grill when you order eggs at your local diner.

A story in today's Seattle P-I says diacetyl vapor could pose a significant risk to professional cooks who use and are exposed to large amounts of these butter substitutes. Diacetyl vapor, when inhaled, has been linked to a rare, sometimes fatal respiratory disease called bronchiolitis obliterans.

Then the story asks, "Where are the sick cooks?"

Then it says:

One problem in determining the extent of the problem, according to union health officers, is that kitchen workers often are underinsured or uninsured and frequently conceal health problems because they don't want to anger their employers. The pressures on the line cook or the line chef are significant and the turnover rate is high, making occupational disease hard to identify.

Dr. Allen Parmet, a Kansas City occupational medicine physician who first identified the disease among popcorn plant workers, calls it "the healthy worker effect."

"People work until they're too sick to continue work, and they come in with their cough, because they can't breathe, and they think it's because they were smoking while they were cooking," Parmet said. "They have no reason to suspect they're being made sick because of the products they're using."

Now I ask: Fry cooks, line cooks, food-service distributors, what's your experience with diacetyl?

Restaurant owners: Please tell me whether you buy this stuff. Why do you buy it? Why do you expose your employees to it?

Diners: Gimme an "Ewwwwwwwwww" ...

Driving around, I see of signs of "coming soon" that seem to take forever to come together. I also see a lot of signs of "come and gone."

Did you ever wonder what happened to that restaurant that abruptly closed? What about that one that never opened? What's going on inside that one that's taking forever?

When I worked as a fixer-cum-gofer for Restaurant Ray, I had a 20-point list tacked to a wall in my office. It listed a bunch of things that needed to happen in order to start a restaurant. The first dozen or more tasks involved permits, red tape and contractors.

So here's what I'm after today: I want stories from restaurateurs, bar owners, soup kitchen magicians, five-star pizza pushers, anyone who's opened a place, closed a place, canceled plans for a place, or is working hard, hungry and happily on places to eat and drink in the South Sound.

What's the funniest, most frustrating or most rewarding moment or experience in opening (or closing) an establishment?

What hurdles arose when the name you chose for your new eatery/drinkery turned out to be spoken for?

State liquor law says you must brew beer in your new place. How micro will microbrewery be?

Did you scupper a bistro in the 'burbs because the grease trap that the county required would have eaten too much of your budget?

What did you do when you inherited 18 pounds of deep-fried chicken grease from the previous tenant?

Why is your French bistro still without signage on the building?

Inquiring diners want to know. I wouldn't mind knowing.

Restaurant folk, your blog is ready. May I start you with a link to Ed's Diner comment section?

Everyone should read about what's going on at Heads Up Brewing, a microbrewery/brew-on-premises/beer geek clubhouse in Silverdale, in the words of ale conner Ted Farmer. Click below.

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It's fitting, morbidly so, that this study was reported in the journal Obesity. It names culprits of corpulence: restaurants and customers.

"Many chefs serve portions of food that are two to four times the size recommended in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans," said a Clemson University food scientist who co-authored the study. "But they're driven in large part by customer expectations."

Of course. Who's going to order 3 ounces of strip steak and 2 ounces of pasta, as the USDA recommends for each of these foods?

Nearly half of 300 chefs surveyed said they serve 12 ounces of meat. Nearly a third serve 6 ounces of pasta; about 20 percent served 18 ounces or more of pasta.

Seventy-six percent of chefs surveyed "felt they were indeed serving regular-sized portions."

Fifty-eight percent said it was the customers' responsibility to regulate their consumption.

Competition was cited as a driving factor for more, more, more.

Interestingly, chefs over age 50 said they were more likely to serve smaller portions.

I'll say this about restaurant nutrition:

At culinary school, the one week devoted to nutrition was the week that the majority of my classmates played hookey, mentally and physically. My culinary school notebook is stuffed with 1,000 sheets of paper. I counted up my notes from nutrition week: nine pages. I have 25 pages on danish alone.