Passed on to me by a friend…I found this pretty funny! 

The 10 Most Annoying Restaurant Trends

Written by: Zagat

 Some restaurant trends are easy to embrace: lower prices, bigger portions, free refills, you get the idea. But other, more recent trends are bordering on the absurd. In fact, some of them are just downright annoying. Here’s a list of some of the most irritating restaurant trends – developed with some suggestions from our 30 Under 30 honorees – that have us shouting: “Dear God, make it stop!”

1. Communal Tables

Like Communism itself, communal tables are a great idea…in theory. But let’s face it, even Karl Marx couldn’t endure this much sharing. Sure, they’re great for the single diner who’s looking to make “friends,” but for the most part, if you start talking to the person next to you at a communal table, you’re probably interrupting a date or butting your nosy self into someone else’s business. If the restaurant has even an ounce of cachet, you’re most likely shoved up against the next table anyway – in which case you should still MYOB.

2. “The Civil War” Look

A hallmark of the “Brooklyn aesthetic,” more and more restaurants nationwide are being decked out in rickety furniture that looks like it got ganked from the home of a Civil War reenactor. Note to restaurants: wall-mounted wagon wheels and photos of dead bearded dudes don’t make the food taste any better. Live in the now!

Note to restaurants: The Civil War is over

3. Chalkboard Menus

We kind of got over reading off a chalkboard in say…pre-school? After a long day of staring at a computer screen, the last thing we’re trying to do is have to squint at a barely legible menu scribbled on a wall halfway across the room. Are restaurants doing this to make the prices appear fuzzier?

4. Mustachioed Bartenders

We’re not knocking all facial hair, but we don’t need Wyatt Earp mixing up our martini. The suspenders, the fedoras, the mustaches…nuh-uh. The more pretentious the whiskers, the more we just want to get wasted on Malibu bay breezes and be done with it.  

5. “Gourmet punch”

There’s nothing like a $45 bowl of Earl Grey–spiked punch served in dainty crystal teacups to get the party started. Last time we checked, we weren’t attending a turn-of-the-century high school prom. Can we get a real drink, please?

6. Iceless Table Water

Whatever happened to ice? Just a quick note to restaurants: not everyone is an ice-hating European or a germaphobe who thinks all ice is contaminated. All of a sudden, it’s as if liking ice in your water makes you a T.G.I. Friday’s–going rube. What gives, man?

7. Pop-Up Restaurants

Pop-ups are to real restaurants what hot, emotionally unavailable men on motorcycles are to love-starved 38-year-old single women – a pointless tease. The allure of pop-ups is clearly their impermanence, but are they merely a way of dodging failure? Some brilliant person thought to himself: “Most new restaurants fail within the first months of opening, so, hey, why not just open one for only that long?” Note to that dude: um, no. The odds of anybody making a profit during such a short run are slim, and what’s worse, fans of the eatery will have to say buh-bye to it the second they get hooked. Le sigh. Pop-ups are a lose-lose for everyone.

8. “Comfort-Food” Menus

We’re all for indulging in comfort food when the moment strikes, but lately it seems like an alarming number of major chefs are opening eateries that serve nothing more than overpriced, overly gussied-up versions of dishes you could have learned watching Paula Deen. Eighteen dollars for some mediocre mac ’n’ cheese, $26 for a breaded pork chop, $22 for fried chicken. Can chefs please go back to being chefs?

9. Sliders

Putting the word “slider” on your menu has been known to cause instantaneous food boners among middle-aged ex–frat boys. “Dude, they’ve got sliders on the menu…hook those up, brah!” And lately it seems like almost any meat item is being “slider-ized.” Crisped-up kernels of pork belly packed between two bready buns is no doubt delicious, but it’s definitely not a “slider.”

10. Bread Baskets You Have to Pay For

Restaurants that charge for bread are as irritating as airlines that charge for a bag of peanuts. We don’t care how many wheat-scything artisanal bakers it took to make it, there’s no way bread should cost as much as your appetizer.

  I think he’s spent some time in the Twin Cities…

SOMM Documentary Trailer 1 from Forgotten Man Films on Vimeo.

No kidding, it’s one of my most Frequently Asked Questions…

What do YOU think about Minnesota Wines?

Here, I review a whole line up from a winery located just one hour west of the Twin Cities, Crow River Winery.

Complete with food pairings, I share with you a line up of eight wines, detailed with tasting notes to boot! 

Check it out…In HD

I teach a number of great Twin Cities Food and Wine classes across the board, but really our Vines to Reefs Series at Cooks of Crocus Hill is always a ton of fun!  Chef Mike, culinary director for Cooks, and I team up to teach a full five course menu paired to all things seafood, explaining that it is not always the color of your protein that dictates the wine you choose, but the cooking technique. 

Step outside the box with your pairings with this fun culinary/libation combo!

If you happened to miss last nite’s class, here’s a quick 4-1-1 on the dishes and the wines paired to each course.  Chef Mike explains the combination of flavors, as I shoot you the best tips for pairing to all things ‘reef’ to vino. 

The best part…5 out of the 6 wines we showed here are all under $20!!

See what food/wine combos take the cake…In HD

A to Z Pinot Gris ~ Oregon  $12
Chamisal ‘Stainless’ Chardonnay ~ Edna Valley, CA  $12
Poggio Morino Morellino di Scansano ~ Tuscany, Italy  $15
Vega Rioja Tempranillo ~ Rioja, Spain  $12
Michel Picard Sancerre ~ Loire, France  $25
Toad Hollow Risque ~ Limoux, France  $15

Call 952.473.8846 to register today!

Why You’ll Be Drinking Moscato This Year

Anyone who claims to be able to see into the future is often forecasting the past. (Isn’t that how history manages to repeat itself?) Since this holds true as much for wine journalists as anyone else, I’ll make my own backward-facing prediction: The hottest wine of 2012 will be Moscato. Just like it was in 2011. How could it be otherwise? Sales of Moscato grew by a mind-boggling 78% in 2011, according to a recent Nielsen survey, and major producers like Gallo and Trinchero (aka Sutter Home) are still searching the world for yet more Moscato to add to store shelves.

 Gerald Weisel, proprietor of Weimax Wines, a shop in Burlingame, Calif., recently told me he had it “on good authority” that Gallo, the wine behemoth, had purchased “all the available bulk Moscato” in Northern Italy. Stephanie Gallo, the company’s vice president of marketing, would neither confirm nor deny the assertion, though she did tell me that her family’s company had been “pretty aggressive” in its efforts to find enough supply to meet the Moscato demand, and that included sourcing fruit from Italy.

While the Moscato grape is grown all over the world (i.e., Chile, Argentina, Australia, California, Spain and Italy) and goes by a variety of names and clones (from the fine Moscato Bianco to the plebeian Muscat of Alexandria) the Piedmontese version, Moscato d’Asti—a sweet, soft, low-alcohol, lightly sparkling (frizzante) wine with delicate notes of peach and apricot—is probably the most famous. And yet, Italian Moscato is just a footnote to the much larger Moscato story that’s unfolding in the U.S.

The story began just a few years ago, when Gallo introduced its first Moscato under the Barefoot Cellars label in 2008. With residual sugar over 6% (dry table wine is well under 1%) and an alcohol level close to 9% (four or five percentage points lower than most wines), it was an instant hit—Barefoot is the largest Moscato brand in the U.S. today. Three other Gallo Moscatos soon followed, all priced between $5 and $9 a bottle. And according to Ms. Gallo, her family’s company would introduce even more Moscato if it could find enough fruit. Some Gallo Moscatos are blended with inexpensive grapes like French Colombard, presumably to keep production up and prices down.

“One analyst says he’s never seen anything like the Moscato craze in more than 10 years of analyzing wine trends.”

Smaller producers like California-based Cameron Hughes have also had difficulties getting Moscato. When Mr. Hughes received a request for Moscato from a big retailer two years ago, he searched all over the world for suitable fruit. As soon as he found something acceptable, “the price would shoot through the roof,” though the quality was often middling at best. Mr. Hughes finally bought finished wine from a small Moscato producer in Italy and, priced at $13 a bottle, it quickly sold out.

The producer of Yellow Tail, Casella Wines of Australia, waited until last year to introduce its Moscato, in part because it didn’t have enough quality fruit but also because it miscalculated the Moscato appeal, according to Tom Steffanci, president of W.J. Deutsch & Sons, Yellow Tail’s New York-based importer. “The humble answer is that we should have seen it sooner,” Mr. Steffanci said.

How much did he figure the delay had cost? “I’d say if you missed a year, you probably missed selling a million cases of Moscato,” said Mr. Steffanci. The company is clearly making up for lost time: It sold 330,000 cases of Yellow Tail Moscato in just eight months last year and expects to more than double that number in 2012.

Who’s buying all this Moscato? According to producers and retailers, the audience is diverse—from middle-age Midwesterners to rap stars like Drake, who penned a paean to Moscato in his song “Do It Now.”

The biggest audience for Moscato is the “Millennial” generation between 21 and 30 years of age, according to Ms. Gallo. These drinkers “found their own way” to the wine, she added, noting that while Gallo did extensive in-store sampling, there was no formal Moscato ad campaign—”but we have a Facebook page.”

Bob Torkelson, president and chief operating officer of Napa-based Trinchero Estates, where White Zinfandel first appeared under the Sutter Home label, doesn’t see Moscato as White Zin’s successor, though his company produces plenty of both (four million cases of White Zinfandel and about three million cases of Moscato, some sourced from Chile, he says). “The Moscato movement feels more like the wine-cooler movement to me,” said Mr. Torkelson.

That didn’t sound particularly auspicious. The wine-cooler era was short, and I have yet to hear anyone wax nostalgic over Bartles & Jaymes. I asked Danny Brager, a vice president on Nielsen’s alcohol research team, for his view of the phenomenon.

Mr. Brager said he’d never seen anything like the Moscato craze in more than 10 years of analyzing wine trends. Nothing else came close, he said, except perhaps the peak of the post-”Sideways” period (2005), when Pinot Noir grew 66%. But Pinot Noir’s percentage growth quickly fell to the low 20s, Mr. Brager added, and the growth in sales is only 11% now.

I drank plenty of Pinot Noir both pre- and post-”Sideways,” but I can’t say I’ve done much to move the Moscato numbers. I don’t drink much Moscato, save an occasional bottle from small Piedmontese producers like Saracco and La Spinetta, whose low-alcohol, lightly sparkling, peach-inflected wines are among my favorite ways to end a meal.

I decided to broaden my horizons and purchased some 25 Moscatos ranging in price from $5 to $30 a bottle. They included big names like Beringer, Mondavi, Yellow Tail and Gallo, as well as smaller labels like Michele Chiarlo and Elio Perrone. And I invited some friends from different demographics (including middle-age Midwesterners, millennials and one rap fan) to taste along.

We found a lot of unbearably sweet offerings—wines that would put a diabetic into immediate peril—and some wines that tasted like canned pineapple or worse (Teal Lake). But there were also some delightfully sweet and off-dry wines that were lovely dessert wines or aperitifs. They were also incredibly reasonably priced—only one cost more than $14 a bottle and one of our favorites, the lightly sweet 2010 Beringer Moscato, cost a mere $6. Well-chilled, it would be a great aperitif on a summer day, said one friend.

Our favorites, perhaps predictably, came from Italy and included frizzante wines from Perrone, Marcarini, Mosca and Cameron Hughes. They had the bright, lively acidity, creamy texture and aromas of flowers and peaches that make Moscato such a beguiling and seductive drink.

As to the future of Moscato, it seems pretty well assured, at least for the short term. Mr. Torkelson, despite his rather dour wine-cooler analogy, had an optimistic, if rather corporate, view: “Right now there are probably a million people sitting around conference tables trying to figure out how to get a piece of the Moscato market.”