This week, we revisit stories that ran in this section during the previous year.
From toasted ant eggs in Mexico to single motherhood
March 27: “Restaurants Exposed: chef Anthony Bourdain; waitress Debra Ginsberg”
Last spring, we asked New York City chef Anthony Bourdain and San Diego-area waitress Debra Ginsberg what really happens behind the scenes at restaurants.
The salty Bourdain had struck best-seller gold with “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures from the Culinary Underbelly.” In it, he warned of the perils of Sunday brunch and fish on Mondays (not fresh) and led readers through the colorful subculture of his fellow hard-living cooks and chefs.
On the other coast, Ginsberg had smaller but still-respectable sales with her own insider’s look at restaurant life, “Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress.” Since our story last March, both writers have finished their next books.
The executive chef at Manhattan’s Brasserie Les Halles, Bourdain translated his “Kitchen Confidential” success into book and TV contracts that gave him license to indulge a fantasy.
Film crew in tow, Bourdain put in nine months of gastronomic high adventure, traveling the globe in search of the perfect meal, and eating everything from toasted ant eggs in Mexico to poisonous blowfish in Japan, along with the occasional white tablecloth feasts.
Now he has hit the publicity circuit with his newly released book, “A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal.” A 22-episode television show by the same name debuts on the Food Network Jan. 8.
In Southern California, Debra Ginsberg followed her restaurant memoir with a book to be published next summer, “Raising Blaze: Bringing Up an Extraordinary Son in an Ordinary World.”
A single mother, Ginsberg did battle for years with public school officials and doctors who wanted to label her son or medicate him in ways she believed would be harmful. “Raising Blaze” chronicles that experience.
— Marja Mills
If they can make chess movies, why not Scrabble?
Aug. 27: “Memoirs of a Tile Head: Inside the weird, obsessive world of competitive Scrabble-
The quirky life of competitive Scrabble is as far from glamorous as it gets. Hollywood has come calling anyway.
Last summer, we asked Stefan Fatsis to explain the mentality and special lingo of competitive Scrabble players, whose obsession drives them to spend long hours memorizing unusual words and studying probabilities.
A sports reporter for the Wall Street Journal and a nationally ranked “tile head” himself, Fatsis recently had published his guide to that nerdy subculture. Now the paperback version of “Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players” is due out in July.
This fall, Fatsis sold the movie rights to Curtis Hanson, director of “L.A. Confidential” and “The Wonder Boys.”
Asked whom he would like to play his character, the intense, dark-haired Fatsis suggested John Cusack. “If it gets made,” Fatsis said.
There are no guarantees, in Hollywood or in Scrabble.
— M.M.
Copius amounts of bottled power
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July 3: “Tonics for our times: Today’s `power’ drinks, full of promises, try to satisfy our nation’s `therapeutic ethos'”
Americans are so exhausted and overscheduled that they have been imbibing prodigious quantities of energy drinks (often with added caffeine) and functional drinks (usually with added vitamins, minerals and herbals), beverages with names such as Red Bull or Whoop Ass or any one of their ilk.
In fact, in 2000, $135 million wholesale dollars of the stuff was sold, doubling 1999’s sales of $65 million, according to Beverage Marketing Corp., a New York-based research and consulting firm. Back in July, Beverage Marketing’s Gary Hemphill predicted “a sizable increase this year. It will exceed $200 million.”
How right he was. “We did some preliminary numbers in the last couple weeks and it will come in at about $275 million wholesale dollars for the energy drink market [for 2001], with Red Bull remaining the biggest seller,” said Hemphill.
— Judy Hevrdejs
Banchet cruises, Le Francais tops
March 7: “Will French Dining Ever Be the Same?”
Jean Banchet, the motorcycle-riding Frenchman who opened the legendary Le Francais in 1973, took his final bow at the Wheeling eatery in early March, handing over his toque and the keys to the front door to Chef Don Yamauchi and restaurateur Phil Mott.
For his retirement, the 60-year-chef told the Tribune he was looking forward to cruising the country’s open roads astride one of his much-loved Harleys. That he has done. Big time. He clocked hours on the road with a trip through San Francisco, the Napa Valley, Los Angeles and the Southwest, according to Banchet’s wife Doris.
(Did she go along? “I rode them when I was 20. I don’t have to do them now,” she laughs, of her husband’s passion for two-wheeled transportation.) There have also been trips to France and New York.
At the moment, Banchet is in the kitchens of friend/Chef Georges Perrier at Philadelphia’s renowned Le Bec-Fin. When Banchet is in town, Yamauchi says, “he stops in two or three times a day” to chat with the team. He need not worry about Yamauchi and Mott. They are doing a fine job of carrying on Banchet’s legacy at Le Francais, earning Tribune restaurant critic Phil Vettel’s top, 4-star honors in a June 2001 review.
— J.H.
Clothes make the woman?
Feb. 21: “Dressed for Success”
Asked to weigh in on whether Jennifer Lopez’s Grammy 2000 choice of an ethereal green Donatella Versace creation helped make her a “media star” and not just Puffy’s ex, fashion gurus concurred it was the dress plus J. Lo’s assets that earned her face time in media around the world.
Not one to miss a golden opportunity in front of the cameras, Lopez showed up at the March 2001 Oscars in a pale gray couture frock that prompted audience titters and swift camera work. Since then, she also has become Mrs. Cris Judd, launched a clothing line for women, met the Queen (as in Elizabeth), sang for the nation on NBC then warbled for U.S. troops in Germany.
Also promised: A tune or two for the troops via MTV, a clothing line for pre-teens (no comment) and, following on the $60 mil-plus success of “The Wedding Planner,” two more movies in 2002.
P.S. Sean “Puffy” Combs renamed himself P. Diddy.
— J.H.
Seniors behind bars doing OK
April 25: “Lifers: Meet Chicago’s oldest zoological residents, overlooked in our obsession with youth”
While visitors and the media are more interested in the births, or other new arrivals, in our Chicagoland zoos and aquarium, the senior residents at these institutions generally have gone unnoticed despite decades of faithful service.
Update: The folks at Brookfield Zoo tossed a birthday party last July for Cookie the Cockatoo, who has been on hand since the suburban zoo opened in 1934 and, at last word, the bird remains in good health. The same is true at the Lincoln Park Zoo for R-1, a six-foot, African Dwarf crocodile who has been a resident there since 1940. Shortly after our story appeared, R-1 did move from a temporary, small room where he was being kept during remodeling of the Regenstein Small Mammal-Reptile House and now is enjoying the roomier confines of new, public exhibit space. Meanwhile, Granddad the Australian Lung Fish, who has been at the Shedd Aquarium since it opened in 1933–and is the oldest of any creature in a Chicago zoo or aquarium–continues to mostly snooze away in good health in his tank.
— Mike Conklin