The celebrity burger craze may be finally sizzling in Boston. Last Sunday, Ernie Tremblay, owner of the Sylvan Street Grilles and Sidney and Hampton restaurants on the North Shore, mentioned that he had just been to Las Vegas. The only lines were at the burger joints, he said. 

Burgers and Vegas are an old story — where else is there a McDonald’s that’s as fancy as a casino? But after Daniel Boulud and other top-flight chefs filled buns with top choice meat, foie gras, short ribs, truffles and anything else they can think of, burgers became the rage.

Boston’s burger count is ticking up, with new outlets all over Cambridge and other suburbs. Soon the Met Club & Bar will open a branch on Newbury Street. There’s rumor out there that a certain nationally-known celebrity chef might be scouting a burger location in Boston. Stay tuned!

Anthony Susi

Last Monday, Anthony Susi of Sage and Dante deMagistris of Restaurant Dante and the soon-to-open Il Casale taught a cooking class together for an Elderhostel

Dante deMagistris

Days of Discovery program I led called “Cooking with Friends.” The two were great at demonstrating how to make caponata and salmon,  and a hearty Bolognese sauce with homemade tagliatelle. Then 20 participants got to eat it all, plus a delicate orange panna cotta.  The food was delicious and the chefs were so much fun, bantering back and forth, exchanging kitchen stories, and insider tales of how a restaurant works. After lunch, there were lots of questions.

One of the participants asked them whether chefs ever ate junk food, and what was their secret vice. Susi, who grew up in the North End with his mother cooking every day, revealed that the closest he comes to junk food is picking up a Vietnamese sandwich, a bahn mi, in Chinatown on the way into work. DeMagistris,who learned under his Italian grandmother, is fond of the burritos dished out at Villa Mexico, part of Grampy’s Gulf (yes, a gas station) on Beacon Hill. Wonder what other chefs fall for when they’re in a rush?

There are two more “Cooking with Friends” days, April 1 and April 7. The latter is full but there are a few spaces left for April 1. See www.elderyofdiscoveryhostel.org/dayofdiscovery

The ground has shifted under our feet. Any restaurateur who doesn’t recognize this and act fast may be left with empty dining rooms– and eventually a Closed sign on the door. Last Sunday, I spoke at a Massachusetts Restaurant Association seminar at the  New England Foodservice and Lodging Expo. After Charles Perkins of the Boston Restaurant Group, who is not only a restaurant realtor but an expert on how the business runs, laid out some pretty grim statistics, I tried to reassure the nervous-looking participants.

I don’t think Americans are going to give up their restaurant habit, honed over more than a decade when dining out became our entertainment. But the era of “chef as god” is probably going to take a backseat to the front of the house. In other words, service rules. Either you make the customer feel special and well-cared for, or he or she is going elsewhere.

Steve diFillippo, owner of three Davio’s and Avila, echoed that sentiment on a panel the next day.  DiFillippo, no slouch in the art of wooing diners, said: “We  heart every customer that comes in.”  That’s the mantra for 2009. Less attitude, more love.

What a difference a day — or at least a few months — makes! Last August, Restaurant Week elicited the usual amount of scorn. “We won’t be doing Restaurant Week,” one new restaurant owner told me. “It doesn’t pay.” Well, this time around he –and almost everyone else –  got on the bandwagon, too fearful of seeing so much as one potential customer going elsewhere. As Babak Bina of the new Bina Osteria, Bin 26, and Lala Rokh told me recently: “The first time, Bin 26 didn’t do it, and we sat around wondering where all the customers were.”

Some things about RW persist: Waiters still complain about low tips — and according to a report sometimes still treat diners disdainfully during  RW. Diners still complain that the offerings are cut-rate. And owners still hope that they can create loyalty –or at least interest in coming back — from those venturing out to eat — some for the first time in months.

Bina Osteria in downtown Boston

The RW menu at Bina Osteria, near the Ritz on the Common, is tailored to the price, $33.09 for three courses (lunch is $20.09). If you have a hankering for the signature quail in hay or a steak dish, which along with a few others have supplemental charges, you could quickly find yourself out of the bargain league. Still, a calamari salad brightened with oranges, a creamy, rich pasta e fagioli, and poached pears made a delicious feast, well worth the money.

Restaurant Week was borne out of the doldrums, first as a New York City travel promotion in summer 1994. Since then, the concept has spread, adding cities, seasons, extra weeks, months, even weekends. Who knows? Maybe our future holds perpetual Restaurant Week.

Wednesday the Boston Globe’s restaurant critic Devra First reviewed Sensing, the Guy Martin restaurant in the Fairmont Battery Wharf Hotel. Her view was mixed, some good dishes, some not. But in her criticisms — the restaurant garnered only two stars despite the fact that the chef had been trumpeted as bringing Parisian haute cuisine to Boston — she didn’t mention an odd and yet crucial detail.

I’ve not eaten at Sensing, but have stopped by for a glass of wine. (Well, we did eat a few mediocre vegetable chips). But I did get a chance to look at the menu. I’m not commenting on what was offered.  However, why was the menu presented on  pieces of white paper glued (imprecisely) to the cardboard menu cover? The impression was very transitory — “We’re not going to be around long enough to print something more substantial? ” Many restaurants have day sheets — what’s fresh and great that day — but this didn’t look like this. Just cheap and cheesy. When you’re charging  $42 for lamb, a cheap-looking menu treatment won’t sell.

President Obama announced yesterday that the disgraceful failures in food processing safety must come to an end. It’s about time. When you can’t trust peanut butter not to have salmonella, when sending downer cattle right into the meat supply is deemed acceptable, when giant food processors are policed by private auditors with ties to the corporations, when even lettuce is suspect, we have a problem that can’t be papered over with partisan rumblings about too much government interference in business.

In a perfect world, food manufacturers of all types would have such pride in their products that inspection wouldn’t be necessary. Not this world, where profit outdoes conscience and care. I say: “Bring on the inspectors.” (And as much as possible, know exactly where your food comes from — local, small producers, and food you can put a face to.)

Risotto has become ubiquitous on restaurant menus, but, believe me, that doesn’t always mean it’s good. I’ve had my share of mushy, overcooked, undercooked, oversauced versions. Usually, though, I’d attribute the success of the dish to the cook, not the Carnaroli (the variety of rice used in risotti) used.

However, I’m won over by a beautiful product . Acquerello rice is grown in Piedmont by two brothers dedicated not only to growing excellent, organic rice but to preserving the land’s ecology. Dragonflies, tadpoles, herons and other water birds help keep down mosquitos and weeds; a special year-long cool storage and an old system of polishing the rice preserve the quality of the rice; production is kept low and very controlled. So is distribution.

In Boston, Barbara Lynch has used Acquerello rice at No. 9 Park, and it’s sold at Salumeria Italiana in the North End.

The result is exceptional risotto — each grain retains its shape while absorbing the flavor of the sauce. Risotto takes a little time to make. This rice, sold vacuum-packed,  makes the time worthwhile.

Organic and excellent

RISOTTO WITH CELERY AND SAGE

Serves 4

3 cups chicken broth

1-2 cups hot water

1 tablespoon olive oil

1/3 cup chopped onion

1 clove garlic, chopped fine

1 1/2 cups Acquerello rice

3/4 cups celery leaves, chopped

1 cup celery ribs, chopped

4 leaves sage, chopped

1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon black pepper

Heat the chicken stock in a small saucepan to simmering. Heat the olive oil in a medium saucepan with a heavy bottom. Add the onion and garlic and saute for 3 minutes until onion is translucent. Add rice and stir to coat. Stir in celery leaves. Reduce heat to medium-low. Begin adding hot stock, first one cup, then stir. Add more stock, 1/2 cup at a time, stirring and simmering until liquid is absorbed. When stock is gone, add chopped celery and sage leaves. Stir, and begin to add water 1/2 cup at a time. After about 2o minutes, taste risotto to see if grains are soft. Add more water, if they are still hard, 1/2 cup at a time. Cooking time should be about 25 minutes. Don’t overcook, grains of rice should stay intact. Risotto will continue cooking for a few minutes after the heat is turned off.

This recipe is adapted from Marcella Hazan’s “More Classic Italian Cooking”

Earlier this year, the European Parliament voted to tighten rules on the use of 22 pesticides, eventually banning them over the next 10 years. The pesticides were deemed harmful to human health and reproduction, and especially harmful to honeybees. We all know the stories in the last few years of the terrible decline in honeybees, used to pollinated blueberries and other crops. There had to be a reason, and the Europeans think they know why.

These are stricter guidelines than those in the US. Some British lawmakers criticized the action, saying that it would hike food prices (International Herald Tribune, Jan. 13, 2009). But, it doesn’t take a radical mind to know that our natural world is out of whack when millions of honeybees drop dead.

I know how hard farming is. I grew up in Kansas, in the thick of it: gloomy times when the rains didn’t come, or the skies poured, or the grasshoppers feasted on the wheat, or rust infected the milo (feed grain). Pesticides seemed like an incredible boon to farmers, a way to even the odds. But when my mother tells me that all her flowers died the day after the cropdusters swept over the nearby field, or a neighbor wonders if the pesticide-laden clothes her daughter-in-law washed contributed to her death of cancer, you’ve got to wonder whether progress was a bargain with the devil.

Tomorrow: Italian organic rice growers let dragonflies and minnows help make beautiful risotto. And I tell you how to cook it.

Tim's fantastic bacon

March is a cruel month, right before that cruelest month. Grocery stores are full of all the out-of-season, purchased-from-somewhere-else strawberries, asparagus, green beans. It’s so hard to resist them, and love those root vegetables when something green is what you crave. I’ve been trying to follow a mildly cocina povere or cocina pobre –  whatever language you cook in — using very little meat and lots of roots and dark greens. Sometimes it works beautifully — say with fantastic home-cured bacon from my friend Charlotte’s husband, Tim, which I used to flavor a salad of dark green lentils and walnuts. The bacon is so powerfully evocative of bacon I ate when I was young that just a few shavings give the lentils a smoky goodness.  My son loves BLTs, and this bacon would be perfect. Not that it’s going to last until tomato season. Maybe next will be a satisfying minestrone with just a touch of bacon. Or seared scallops with bacon. Or… What do you like with great bacon?

Some restaurant spaces are doomed.  The little restaurant tucked into the side of Louis Boston appears to be one of them. Its latest rendition  by Marc Orfaly had the life of a mayfly, a span so brief that the operating hours, not to mention the name, never really got settled. 

The space had previously been Boston Public, after being Restaurant L. Before that it was Cafe Louis, with and then without the Al Forno owners’ involvement. And then a long time ago it was Cafe Louis with Michael Schlow as its rising star. (The place was something before that, but I forget.)

The restaurant changed looks as many times as it did chefs and names, but it always seemed awkward — odd in a clothing store that is the ultimate in chic. Except for Schlow, the chefs — each one of them a star in other settings — never found their groove.

It’s time to let it go. I have an idea: Newbury Street could use a really good bakery/cafe. Why not invite Flour to set up shop? Lots of traffic, coffee,  reasonably-priced lunch, irresistible goodies to take home along with the fashion. Hey, Debi, call Joanne. Make a deal.